The Devil's Code

take warning, and not mess with the bulldog of federal law enforcement.
    I was lying on the couch, reading the St. Paul paper, the Cat sitting next to my head, when somebodyknocked at the door. I opened it, and LuEllen was standing there. She was wearing jeans and cowboy boots under a waist-length coat that looked suspiciously like mink.
    “We cool?” she asked.
    “We cool,” I said. “Come in.”
    She came in, and we had a cup of coffee, sitting at my kitchen window looking out over the Mississippi. The river was locked in ice, and down on the streets, we could see people in heavy parkas puffing up and down the hill. Twelve below zero, the weather service said: a splendid day to stay inside and paint.
    We had a lot to talk about. About the relative quality of our safety, about Jack and Lane. About whether the government might come creeping around. About the collapse of AmMath, and the disappearance of Corbeil.
    “The government’s out of it,” I said. “At least for a good long while.”
    I told her how the Net would occasionally be saturated with the cryptic message, “Bobby, call your Uncle.”
    “Does he?”
    “I don’t know. I leave that to him,” I said.
    “You think he’s going to die?”
    “That’s what he says. But not for a while.”
    We were silent for a moment, then she said, “The devil card—it was like the tarot said.”
    “In hindsight, I suppose.”
    “Don’t be skeptical with me, Kidd. You’re getting messages from somewhere, and I think maybe you oughta stop it.”
    “Right. Messages,” I said. She was so serious about it, I had to laugh. Superstitious claptrap.
    T he Texas newspapers reported that a man carrying Corbeil’s passport had crossed into Mexico shortly after his Waco ranch house burned down—a ranch purchased under a phony name, the papers said, and which was now cordoned off by the FBI. Corbeil hadn’t been found yet, but there were hints that he might be in Southeast Asia.
    LuEllen was worried that he might somehow come back on us.
    “Not to worry,” I said.
    She didn’t ask.
    L uEllen stayed over. Clancy, the computer lady who had been designing the America’s Cup boat, had found somebody else to design it with, and my feet had, in fact, been cold all winter. So LuEllen was welcome.
    But as I lay beside her that night, awake, listening to her easy breathing, I felt the finger of darkness pressing on me again. It had come any number of times in the past two months, usually just before sleep: the ghost of St. John Corbeil.
    I was the only one who’d ever know, but the passport that crossed into Mexico was the same one that Green, Lane, LuEllen, and I had passed around a diner table after the raid on Corbeil’s apartment. The man who’dcarried it was a friend of Bobby’s, reliable, and who, for a price, was willing to check the passport through Mexican passport control, without asking why. He’d burned it in a bathroom of the California Royal Motel in Matamoros; and that is the last, I hope, that we’d hear of St. John Corbeil.
    C orbeil himself was buried under a foot of sandy Texas soil, in a hastily scratched-out grave, a few miles northwest of Waco, Texas.
    At night, lying in bed, I sometimes felt his loneliness out there.
    Maybe, I thought, as I turned over and touched the woman’s back, LuEllen could make him go away . . .
    Maybe.

author’s note
    T hose of you who are regular readers of John Sandford novels will be familiar with the tough and sometimes downright nasty Minneapolis police detective Lucas Davenport, the featured character in the Prey series of thriller novels. Davenport was not my first thriller anti-hero, however. My first was the protagonist of this book, the hacker/artist Kidd (who has also appeared, credited and uncredited, in a couple of Prey novels). Because of the way the book market works, Kidd was retired when Davenport started selling well—but over the years, as I traveled around on book tours, there was always somebody ready to ask when I’d bring back Kidd. One of the most persistent of the Kidd fans was my son, Ros, who knows a few things about computers himself. Finally, I told Ros that if he’d block outthe novel, come up with some concepts and character possibilities, then help me brainstorm my way through it, I’d try to write it. He did, and I did, and this is it. I hope you enjoyed it.
     
    John Camp (John Sandford)
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