“I can handle that,” I said.

THE night before, LuEllen, in her moment of intimacy, had told me why she might quit stealing. This night, with the lights dimmed, I had a couple of fingers hooked inside the front elastic band of her underpants, and we were going through some kind of juvenile what-does-this-feel-like routine, when I absolutely geeked out.

I’m not a geek. I’m an ex-wrestler and an artist. But I gotta admit, I was easing her underpants down and the words just burped out of me: “Jesus Christ, it won’t work.”

“Won’t work?” LuEllen pushed up on her elbows, confused, with a certain tone in her voice.

“Not that, dumb-ass,” I said. It must have been churning around in the back of my brain. “This data search stuff won’t work. They’ve got a fundamental problem. It won’t work.”

She yawned and asked, reluctantly, I thought, “Why not?”

“Suppose they get every database in the country hooked together and they start looking for patterns. Going through all the data, looking for terrorists, looking for criminals. Okay, got that?”

“Um.” Her interest was under control.

I kept talking; like I said, geeking out. “Okay. Suppose this data-mining method has amazing capabilities. If it’s ninety-five percent accurate-which is way, way more than anything I can even imagine-one person in twenty would still get past them. A false negative.”

“So it’s got holes.” She was a little more interested.

“More than that. It’ll also point a finger at one person in twenty who is absolutely innocent. If you ran it against, say, the population of the U.S., that’s…” I did some figuring. “That’s fifteen million false positives. Fifteen million people who you think might be guilty of something, but who are absolutely innocent. Victims of random error. Unless you take a closer look-surveillance, wiretaps, that sort of thing-there’s no way to tell them apart from the real positives you get. No way at all.”

“Fifteen million?”

“That’s it. At ninety-five percent accuracy. Nothing is that accurate. I don’t think anything ever will be. There’s just too much fuzz and bad information in the system. How in the hell do you do hard surveillance on fifteen million people?”

“So it won’t work.”

“Nope.” I flopped flat on my back. “Nothing they can do to make it work-not that they won’t try. And they gotta have people smart enough to know it.”

“Then why are they doing it?”

“Funding, probably. Jesus. This whole goddamn data-mining thing is another five-hundred-dollar hammer.” I reached over and patted her on the leg. I was so pleased.

After a moment of silence, she said, “You’re such a fuckin’ romantic that sometimes I can’t stand it.”

Chapter Thirteen

LuELLEN HAD BEEN AWAKE half the night, occasionally poking me to ask, “Are you still awake?” and then following with a disturbing question. Like “What are our chances?” and “Why do you think Carp cracked Bobby’s computer?” and “Would Bobby really put the decryption codes on the same computer?”

“Our problem is,” I groaned late in the night, “is that we really didn’t know Bobby. We thought his security was almost perfect, but some low-rent federal technician figures out a way to get to him.”

She pushed herself up on her elbows and was looking down at me in the dark. Somehow, she still had nice-smelling breath. “We know they’re looking for us. Looking for you and me, I mean. Personally.”

“They have been since the satellite heist,” I said. “I never gave a shit before. We were covered.”

“So what’s going to happen?” she asked.

“Well, in the next three minutes, I’m going back to sleep. Unless you stick a finger in my ribs again. Christ, I almost pulled a muscle.”

“Why do you think Carp cracked Bobby’s computer?”

“Because I haven’t seen anything, anywhere, about the Norwalk virus. That’s the biggest thing he’s done so far, and I can’t find any trace of it in the DDC files.”

WHEN we finally got up the next morning, LuEllen insisted that we get out the tarot cards. I dug out the card box and did a spread called the Celtic Cross, which I like because it combines simplicity and flexibility. The Hanged Man came up again, but this time, as the basis of the problem rather than the outcome. The outcome spot was taken by a card from the minor arcana, the King of Cups, in the reversed position.

“Is that bad?” she asked. She became very quiet and focused when I was doing a reading.

“It’s ambiguous, just like the readings with the Hanged Man,” I said, as I rewrapped the deck in the silk rag. “It can mean treachery, but that doesn’t tell us a hell of a lot. Everything in this deal is treacherous.”

“So are we stuck?”

“I think… I may have a really bad idea. Either that, or I’m a genius.”

She looked at me skeptically. “What idea?”

“Remember when I went to see Rosalind Welsh? That moved some people around. I’m thinking… what if we go after Senator Krause? Face to face. Figure out where he lives, hit him sometime when he’s alone, or maybe with only another guy or his wife.”

A few minutes earlier, she’d run down the hall to get a bottle of orange juice, and now she stood drinking it, draining it, looking at me. She licked the last of the juice off her upper lip, and she said, “That sounds like a last resort.”

“We don’t have that many resorts left. And this DDC business scares the shit out of me. I can’t believe that they’re running a test on public officials-somebody in there is goofy. It’s already out of control.”

“So let’s keep it as a last resort and figure out a couple of other resorts that we can go to first.”

One thing we did, right away, was drive over to our wi-fi site and go online looking for Lemon. He wasn’t around-Bobby had always been around, but then, Bobby was crippled-so we left a message telling him that Carp had killed two people, and that we were going to have to give up his name.

Carp is undergoing psychotic collapse, may kill more people. We will wait until we hear from you.

We had breakfast, and then went back online. Lemon had strayed, but not far. He was there when we went back:

Don’t give up Carp name yet. Must get laptop. Can’t let feds get laptop. If they get laptop, we could be done. I have been doing research on Carp and find he has girlfriend Mary Griggs lives in Arlington. Suggest check before giving up name. Also searching possibility that he has been in contact with old employer. Nothing yet. Check Arlington and get back.

– Lemon

He appended a note with Griggs’s address and phone number.

“Man, this Lemon guy has to understand that we’re not cops,” LuEllen said. “We can’t kick down the door and bust somebody.”

“He might not understand that,” I said. “Half of these guys live on video games and never get out of their folks’ basement.”

“Carp got out.”

“Yeah. But he’s nuts. I think Lemon’s right: we ought to see if we can spot him. He can’t carry the laptop everywhere. If we can spot him, and we see him going out with Griggs, we can hit the apartment, or hit the car, grab the laptop, and call the feds in.”

“I don’t know,” she said moodily. She shifted around in the car seat, looking over her shoulder. She was spooked by all the DDC stuff. “The whole feel of the thing is changing.”

“Want out?”

“I want to see what you’re gonna do. But this time, we take the gun.”

I DIALED Griggs’s number. That seemed like an easy enough first step. The phone rang and I handed it to LuEllen, who listened for what seemed like a long time, and then said, “Hi, is, uh, Terry there?”

She asked with the voice women use when an unknown male answers the telephone of a female friend, a voice that seems to ask, rapist? lover? plumber? Then she listened for a moment and said, “Gee, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I did, I’m just silly.”