"I'll tell you, Mr. Corbeil, this whole incident scared the shit out of me. I'm still scared and Les is just as nervous as I am." Hart glanced at the silent man, looking for support, and got a nod

"That's why we've been so careful setting it up," Corbeil said. "They'd need evidence to put us in jail, and there's no physical evidence of anything. If I tell Tom Woods to push the destruct button, everything is gone. Not even we could get it back."

"That's well and good, but there's still Lane Ward," Hart said. "If she does have something, or if Morrison set up some kind of dead-man's drop."

"So we need to go out and look at her house."

"That's dangerous," Hart objected.

"You didn't have any trouble getting into Morrison's place out there. Or here, either."

"That was different. He was supposed to be out of town, and we knew he was dead, so nobody would be coming around to visit. With Ward, we don't know the neighborhood, we don't even know what we'd be looking for. It might be on a disk, on a hard drive, it might be stashed online somewhere. It might not exist."

"But if it does, and if it were sent on to the FBI, we'd be in desperate trouble," Corbeil said. "It's worth the risk. If the worst happened, and you were caught, we might explain it as a security matter. Something that we were terribly worried about: something that you did on your own to keep the nation's secrets from falling into unfriendly hands. If you did go to jail for a whilewhat would you get for an unsuccessful burglary, six months?if that did happen, there would be a magnificent bonus at the end of the time."

"How much?" Hart asked bluntly.

"Say, two million a year, prorated for lesser amounts of time," Corbeil said.

Hart looked at Benson, then turned back to Corbeil. "So we look at her house. Actually, there's an opportunity coming up."

Corbeil's eyebrows went up, and when Hart explained, Corbeil smiled with pleasure. "I so like working with you, William," he said.

Benson spoke up for the first time. "You know what I don't like, Mr. Corbeil? I think we're really okay with this Morrison character, and his sister. I don't think he sent anything. We caught on too quick, and he was relying on Lighter to take care of the problem. But what I see."

Corbeil was made impatient by the preface: "Yes?"

"I'm worried about Woods. Ever since Morrison was killed, he's been walking around with this doggy face. I think he knows something happened. They used to hang out a little."

Corbeil nodded, and said, "All right, Les. That's a legitimate concern. You know Tom Woods is a friend of mine, an old confidant who came over with me from the factory. And a mathematical genius, to boot."

"I know that, sir, but."

Corbeil raised one hand: "If he becomes a problem, I will take care of it. I promise. But we already have two deaths that are too closely connected. A third one, if it becomes necessary to remove Lane Ward, would almost certainly draw attention. If Tom Woods had died in the interim. Well."

Hart said, "Unless Tom was the architect of it all."

Corbeil said, "You took the thought right out of my head, William. We can perhaps begin to prepare some documents. So: you travel to San Francisco."

Hart nodded. "Tomorrow. We'll call back. After we see what we've got, we can make a call on the Ward chick. Take her out or leave her."

Corbeil said, "Mmm," and smiled.

The plane touched down in San Francisco a little after three in the morning, taking a turn out to sea, then landing across the stem of highway lights between the ocean and the bay. When we touched down, a tight wire in my spine suddenly relaxed. Whatever happened now, we could fake it. In Dallas, where the cops could look at us, where they could see the burns, we were in trouble.

A purely selfish reaction: because Lane hurt. I'd found some Solarcaine in a drugstore, and she'd smeared it on the burns, and she'd taken a half-dozen ibuprofen, though we weren't sure they'd help much. That was about the best we could do before we left for the airport.

At the check-in counter, Lane hung back, the shy Little Woman in a long-sleeved blouse, head down, while I handled the tickets. On the plane, she sat on the aisle, and got up twice to go to the bathroom, to lather on more of the Solarcaine.

"You okay?" I asked after the second trip.

"I'll make it," she said through her teeth.

"The ibuprofen."

"Didn't help much," she said. "I hope I don't scar."

"It doesn't look that bad," I said. "I."

She held up the bottom side of her arm, and showed me a half-dozen blisters the size of quarters.

"I'm afraid to lance them, 'cause of infection," she said.

"Ah, Jesus."

Halfway through the flight, I half-stood and looked around. The woman in the seat in front of Lane was asleep, her mouth hanging open. There was nobody behind us, and the guy across the aisle had spread across two seats, and had his head propped uncomfortably against a window shade.

"You know," I said quietly, "The police know we left Dallas this evening and the house burned down before we left. They're gonna want to talk to you."

"Oh, boy. You're right."

"You're gonna have to lie a little," I said.

"I'm gonna have to lie a lot," she said.

"You can pull it off if you think about it," I said. "You've gotta be surprised and you've gotta be pissed. It's their faultthe cops' faultthat the place burned down. You told them that something was going on, that your brother had been murdered. You gotta yell at them."

"Not yell. But I'll be mad. I am mad," she said. "Somebody did murder him."

"You gotta insist that you go back to Dallas, and you have to demand to look at the hard drives on the computers. That might keep them from having a local cop come around to talk to you. There's no reason for them to suspect that you were burned in the fire, there's no reason for them to think that they have to see you right away. And you do have to stay here for the funeral."

"So it depends on how long it takes the burns to heal," she said.

"Yes. But you can't stall them: you just have to be busy. You have to leave them with the impression that you're pissed off and you're gonna be back in their faces as soon as you have the time."

She thought about it for a minute, then said, "I can do that."

"Cops aren't dummies. Not most of them, anyway."

"Maybe he won't be the same guy I talked to last time. I mean, I talked to a different cop the first time. That'd make it easier."

"Whoever it is, you've got to be careful, and you've got to be real. Cops got built-in bullshit detectors," I said.

At San Francisco, we picked up her car from a satellite lot and drove south to Palo Alto, went straight to her house, dumped the luggage: "Emergency room," I said.

"I've got a doctor I see."

"Emergency room is right now, and it's anonymous, and it may stop the pain," I said.

She didn't argue.

We even managed to get a little sleep that night.

At ten o'clock in the morning, after five hours in bed, I heard somebody knocking around in the house. I rolled off the bedI'd crashed in her spare roomand pulled on my jeans and T-shirt. She was in the kitchen, making coffee. "How is it?"

"Hurts," she said. She'd gotten cleaned up, as best she could, but said that water hurt the burns. She was wearing loose khaki pants with a long-sleeved cotton peasant shirt, and again I could sense just a dab of the flowery French scent. She smelled terrific, and looked terrific in the peasant blouse, if you didn't know that she was dressed to hide new burns.

Her face was all right; the burn there resembled a bad sunburn, and would heal soon enough. Her arms were the worst of it. The doc had lanced the blisters the night before, to relieve the pressure, but they were filling again.