Awful thought. They weren’t all Kirbys, were they?

BABE TUCK SAID, “You agreed to what” “Well, we didn’t exactly agree,” Doug said, seated across the pockmarked old wooden desk Babe had brought with him from his foreign correspondent days. “Andy just suggested, if we could find a target from inside our own corporation, then, if something went wrong, we could all claim it was never going to be a real robbery anyway.”

“But we want a real robbery,” Babe pointed out. “That’s the whole idea. Reality on the edge.”

“I think they’re a little insecure,” Doug said. “They’re not used to doing a burglary with cameras pointed at them.”

“You told them we’d cover their asses? Halo their heads? Alter their voices?”

“They know all that,” Doug agreed. “It’s just, I think, it’s just all a little too strange. They want some kind of reassurance.”

“An escape hatch,” Babe suggested.

“Exactly.”

“I can under stand that,” Babe said. “There’ve been times when I wouldn’t have minded an escape hatch myself.”

“So in theory,” Doug said, “it’s not an idea we’d reject out of hand.”

“A little strange to steal from yourself,” Babe said, and shrugged. “But I suppose the network could stand it. Might even be something salutary in it.”

Politely, Doug said, “Salutary?”

“See our own vulnerabilities from the outside,” Babe explained. “Find out where we need to shore up our defenses. So they’ve picked some underbelly of ours, have they?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What?”

Doug seemed reluctant to speak, and then he said, “Sir, before that, let me—”

“You’re calling me sir a lot,” Babe said, not as though he liked it.

“Am I?” Doug could be seen to replay his mental tape. “Oh, yeah, I guess I am. I guess I’m nervous.”

“About what, Doug?”

“First, si—Babe, let me say we agreed at the beginning, if anything ever made them uncomfortable, they didn’t have to do it.”

“Of course.”

“They now say it’s this target, or they’re not gonna be comfortable.”

“Then,” Babe said, “you’d really better tell me the target.”

“The storage facility on Varick Street.”

“The—Varick Street?”

“They say they wanted a place in that neighborhood to make the filming easier,” Doug explained. “There’s a Chase bank on the corner—”

“Of course there is.”

“They say they considered doing that,” Doug said, “but they’d have to do it in the daytime, and there’s too much tunnel traffic out front, and they’d never get away. So they decided to go with the storage facility in our building.”

“On Varick Street.”

“It’s called Knickerbocker Storage.”

“I know what it’s called,” Babe said.

“They say the losses will be covered by insurance, and that’s true, so that should make it even easier for us to say yes.”

“Doug, Doug, Doug.”

Doug said, “I know. Babe, I thought about this, and thought about it, and we’ve got a double problem here.”

“How so?”

“If we say yes,” Doug said, “we’re exposing ourselves in ways we can’t even be sure of. But if we say no, if we scrub the whole operation, Babe, what do we tell them is our reason?”

“We don’t want to do it,” Babe said. “We don’t have to give reasons.”

“Babe,” Doug said, “these are professional burglars. They can smell profit around corners. If we say no, not that place, you can hit anywhere else in our whole corporate structure, but you can’t do anything to Varick Street, they’re going to wonder why.”

“Let them wonder.”

“Babe,” Doug said, “I live in an apartment in a new high-tech building. My door has a hotel-type card instead of a key.” He took it from his shirt pocket to show it. “We’ve got doormen, closed-circuit TV. Those guys have taken to dropping by my apartment.”

“They have?”

“They just walk in, don’t ask me how. They don’t raise a sweat, and they don’t leave a mark.”

Babe frowned over this. “What you’re saying is, if we say no to the specific after we already said yes to the general, they’re going to be curious.”

“And they have a capacity to satisfy their curiosity.”

Babe nodded. “So, do you want to give them the go-ahead?”

“I don’t know what I want,” Doug said. “Either we give them the green light and hope for the best, or we find some reason to say no, some reason that doesn’t have them wandering around Varick Street just to see what’s what.”

“And you don’t have that reason.”

“No, sir.”

Babe made a face. “There’s that sir again. You know, Doug, any reason we give them is going to make them curious. And if they walk off the series, if they’re out of our lives, there’s no motivation for them to not move in to Varick Street and try to find out just what we were keeping to ourselves.”

Doug said, “That’s why I wanted to come directly to you first thing this morning.”

“Thanks,” Babe said, with some ironic emphasis. Brooding across his office, past the tattered and bloodstained and smoke-smeared mementos of a long life reporting from the edge, he said, “If we say yes, then it’s only Knickerbocker Storage they’d be after? Only the—what is it—third floor?”

“Well, the first floor, too,” Doug told him. “They’ll need to steal some vehicles to put the stolen goods into.”

“Oh, of course,” Babe said. “Silly of me not to think of that. But if we said yes, could you keep them to just those two floors?”

“I think so,” Doug said. “I’m pretty sure I could.”

“Not by telling them, ‘Don’t think of a blue elephant.’”

“No, no, I know better than that. I wouldn’t even mention the second floor.” Doug leaned forward, pretended to consult a clipboard, and said, “Now, for our camera crews, you’re gonna need footage on the third floor, and footage on the first floor, and footage out front, coming and going. That’s really all you need.”

“Good,” Babe said.

Putting the imaginary clipboard onto his lap, Doug leaned back and said, “You know, there might be a kind of silver lining in all this.”

“Shoot it to me at once,” Babe said.

“Inside the company,” Doug said, “there are rumors and questions sometimes, you know that.”

“Of course,” Babe said. “That’s true in any large organization.”

“Some of those rumors have centered on Varick Street.”

“Which is very bad,” Babe said, “We really don’t want people wondering about Varick Street. I’ve wished there was a way to get everybody to think about something el se.”

“Well, if we pull off The Gang’s All Here,” Doug said, “and stage a robbery in that same building, nobody will believe for a minute there’s anything else going on in Varick Street.”

Babe, for the first time in the conversation, smiled. “If we could bring that off,” he said, and shrugged. “Well, we’d have to bring it off.”

“Scary,” Doug said.

“Scary we eat for breakfast,” Babe told him. Suddenly decisive, he said, “Green-light it.”

“Thanks, Babe.”

Doug got to his feet, the imaginary clipboard falling to the floor, and Babe said, “Oh, by the way.”

“Yes?”

Babe shook his head. “I don’t like that title.”