Riz said, “Miles6, Sarah4, spelled exactly as they sound with the numeral following. We thought they’d be easy to remember. You type in either password, and we’re piggy-backed with you as you go in.”

“It’s like uncoiling a ball of string as you walk through a maze,” Foreman said, lifting his head again and meeting eyes with her. He didn’t want her giving them that string to follow. He wanted her doing this his way. Message received.

Liz found herself in a staring contest with Danny.

Matthews broke in. “You need your rest. We’re done here.”

Not long thereafter, everyone left the house. She and Lou rounded up the coffee mugs.

“So?” he asked.

“Ugh,” she said.

Lou put on some music-plaintive jazz-and gently steered her by the elbow to a dead space in the room that offered no clear line of sight through a window, despite all the shades being drawn. He whispered, and it caused her shivers.

“I can’t imagine what you’re going through. They mean well, for what it’s worth.”

“Not much,” she said.

“Is it possible, what they said about tracking you inside the bank servers?”

“Oh, yes,” she replied. “If key tracking is present, then every time I touch a key they’ll follow it.”

He considered this for a long moment. “Then whatever you do, you mustn’t enter those passwords they gave you. You mustn’t turn on the key tracking.”

“They don’t know David,” she said, immediately regretting the intimacy that implied on her part.

He glanced up into her eyes. She saw disguised hurt.

She explained, “He’s far too sophisticated a programmer to leave any of this up to human error. Yes, anyone using the AS/400 would have to log on to do so, and to move the money out will require routing information and an account number, and it’s possible, though not certain, that account data will have to be manually input. But would he allow a key-tracking program to run? Absolutely not. My value to him is that I can get past the physical security to reach the AS/400 and I have a password that will allow access into it. But do you think he would allow their software to record whatever account numbers are input? He’s smarter than that, Lou. Even if I type one of those passwords, David will have already thought of a way to defeat it. Trust me, they’re not in his league, Lou.” She added, “I don’t mean for that to be hurtful.”

“It’s good information,” he said, though his voice cracked, belying his true emotions.

“Danny gave me this look,” she said. “He’s still expecting me to transfer this money where he says to transfer it.”

“It’s not Danny I’m worried about. It’s the idea that whoever gives you an account number risks your remembering it. By phone, by note, it doesn’t matter how it’s delivered-it’s your recalling it later they can’t afford.”

“They are typically enormously long strings,” she said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Lou returned. “You’re a banker. They can’t rule out that you have a head for such numbers. And if you memorize the destination account, the money can then be traced and found, right?”

She nodded, understanding immediately the subtext and why her husband was reluctant to say it aloud. “If I’m around to repeat it,” she said.

Lou did not look at her, nor did he speak directly to her comment. Instead, he backed away and mumbled something about needing a cup of tea.

This, she realized, had been his fear all along.

“Are we going to talk about this plan of yours?” she asked, the two of them eating ham sandwiches at the kitchen table. Lou had stayed at the house following the meeting, something she hadn’t expected but found comforting. At first she’d thought him exhausted and in need of the rest, but she amended that opinion as he then spent two hours working over a yellow legal pad.

He said, “It’s occurred to everyone that you’d be at extreme risk. We know for a fact that my guys will expect me to insist you use a stand-in. I will demand it, of course. I have already. They will never, in a million years, believe I would arrange for you to double-cross them.”

“So they’ll expect an undercover woman to play my part, and we’ll go along with that.”

“We’ll go along with it on the surface. Anything else would be out of character.”

“So it’s kind of a race,” she said.

“If we play it right, that’s exactly what it comes down to, yes. The real Liz beats the fake Liz to the AS/400s.”

“And we accomplish that, how?” she added.

“We beat them off the starting line. We deliver the unexpected-something they didn’t plan for. It’s not easy to fool the fooler. Not when they have as many as a dozen undercover officers watching our every move. But I know their training. I know the contingencies they plan for. Our bigger concern is Svengrad. He lost Hayes and the software; he lost everything. He knows that you are needed to accomplish this. It’s inevitable that he comes after you. Remember that none of the people here this afternoon, except LaMoia, knows I have Hayes locked away.”

“Gaynes does,” she said, playing devil’s advocate and immediately regretting it, for she saw the consternation it caused.

“She wasn’t here for the meeting, and she’s on our side anyway.”

She wasn’t sure why she corrected him this way, as she so often did. To gain the upper hand? To show him who the clearer thinker was? To be noticed? In the short term it felt good to correct him, but within a few seconds she typically wanted to crawl and hide, knowing her timing was terrible. She apologized to him, saying, “I do that all the time and I’m not sure why.”

Lou winced, stung perhaps by her sincerity. “We’re going to make it through this.”

“You think?”

“Taking him into custody humanized him for me.” There was no asking about whom he was speaking. He went on for a moment, talking himself out of any feelings of superiority that his abducting Hayes accounted for, discrediting any moral supremacy-that he worked the side of good and David the side of evil. He was telling her that he’d overcome some hurdle, and she was listening.

She wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t risk his career by pulling a sting on his own people, but in many ways it seemed too late for that. If the tape was released, his career and his family would suffer; but if he were caught tricking his own people, he might lose his pension as well. With her actions she had put him squarely into unworkable options, and now she forced him to look for some way out. She told him as much, expressing her remorse as sincerely as possible. She said, “I don’t think this kind of thing can be undone using legal pads.”

“You’d be surprised. Legal pads come in very handy.”

“We’re going to joke about this?”

“What choice do we have?”

“A woman is going to take my place out there. You realize the danger we put her in?” she asked, allowing her real anger to surface now. “Never mind all the secret codes that I can use to leave crumbs for your people to follow. What about her? What codes is she going to use when these people-very nasty people according to you and yours-realize they’ve got the wrong Liz Boldt?”

Lou held up the pad of legal paper. She saw inked handwriting and boxes and arrows-a complicated diagram resulting from a conflicted mind. He said, “The best defense is a good offense.”

“You can’t be oblique right now. I’m not up to it.”

“It never gets that far.”

“Never gets how far?”

“Your surrogate. I agree. We can’t let that happen.”

“You can stop it?”

“Timing,” he said.

“But they’re ready right now. They’ve got some stand-in ready around the clock to take my place. That’s what they said, right? Did I miss something?”

“They’re expecting you to receive a call. Everything hinges on them listening in to our land line and both our mobiles. You get the call and a clock starts. A substitution is planned-here at the house, if possible; in the field, if not.”