The Devil's Code

There are plenty of people working around the U.S. intelligence community who would be willing to kill if ordered to—I’d known some of them—but the fact is, nobody will give the order. American intelligence, in my experience, doesn’t kill people.
    So Corbeil was almost certainly out in the dark by himself, and if he was, then it was impossible that many people knew about it. Not more than three or four, I’d bet. The danger of what they were doing, and the penalties, were just too great to let too many people in on the secret.
    A t four o’clock in the morning, the dish hadn’t moved. Bobby wouldn’t have sent me back unless he really needed the information from the transmissions; and down below, the house that probably acted as the control center for the dish array was sitting dark and apparently empty.
    LuEllen would have given me a ton of shit for even thinking about it, but a few minutes after four o’clock in the morning, I began scouting the house. First, I stripped the recording package off the dish and stuffed it in the backpack; then, using the needle-beam, I changed batteries in the night-vision glasses and checked to make sure they were still working.
    I followed the gully as far to the north as I could, duckwalking the last fifty yards, staying below the horizon so I wouldn’t be seen from the house. I listened and, for a while, worried. And then, working from the northeast corner of the house, I began closing in. Watched the windows for movement, for light, for anything. Stopped often, and long, to listen, but heard nothing but my heart and the occasional passing car.
    At five o’clock, I was fifty yards from the house and facing the decision. Go in, or stay put. We needed any docs that might be inside: we needed anything we could find. Nothing moved. Nothing even breathed.
    I crossed the last fifty yards quickly: now I was so close, with enough ambient light from the yard lights, that if anyone were looking right at me, they’d see me, even without night-vision glasses. The base of thehouse was landscaped with a variety of broad-leafed cactus—Spanish bayonet, I thought, so named for good reason—and I pushed through them with care. Overhead, a balcony. Too far overhead. But the house was a log cabin, and I could put one foot on a window frame, then step up two feet or more on a log, and then, doing a quick step-up, catch the edge of the balcony.
    And it went like that: I made the step, I did the pull up, and boosted myself over the edge of the balcony. There were four rustic chairs on the balcony, and a sliding glass door that led into the house. I waited, listened; tried to feel vibration, but felt nothing. Got the flash out of the backpack, and looked at the door. As far as I could see, it wasn’t alarmed, but I would have to assume that the house was. So: inside, five minutes max. If the call went out instantly, it would be purely bad luck to have security arrive in five minutes . . . unless there was another man in the bunkhouse.
    I sat thinking about it.
    I looked through the window with the needle-beam again. Took a deep breath, used the butt of the flashlight to crush the glass near the door handle, flipped the lock, and went in.
    There was no time. I turned on the needle flash and followed it through the top floor: bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, moving as quickly and quietly as I could. I suspected an intrusion alarm was already dialing out.
    With three bedrooms and two bathrooms already down, I almost didn’t push the fourth door. But I did, and behind the fourth door I found the control room,such as it was: a computer, what looked like a ham radio setup—is there still such a thing as ham radio?—and a couple of notebooks, all stuffed into a windowless cubicle that was more like a closet than a room.
    I turned the computer on, looked at my watch. Almost a minute gone since I entered. I would be out in five. The computer was a standard IBM-compatible running the last generation Windows, but it was probably running nothing more complicated than a time-of-day and switch program, which would orient the receivers and turn them on and off. So Windows was a logical program; what drove me crazy was the time it took to load. As I shifted from foot to foot, waiting, I pulled the notebooks off the shelf and flipped them open.
    They were empty. Well, not empty—they were filled with blank paper.
    Oh, shit.
    I’d been suckered. Pulled into a small room with