"Can you trace the out lines?"

"Nope. The lines go into an indicated junction box along with lines from some other rooms, and then they all go down to the first floor."

"Either to a security service or over to the reception area in the clubhouse. Or both."

"Clubhouse would get a quicker response," I said.

"Yeah, but if you wanted a little more weight, some pros with guns, it might go out."

The Radisson sat on a hill on the west side of the highway; it took a while to find the driveway in, but we got it sorted out eventually and went up to Lane's room. Green answered the door. He was wearing a golf shirt and loose, pleated, tan slacks and had his hand in his pocket. He took it out when he saw us. "There you are."

Lane was lying on a bed, watching a movie on HBO. LuEllen, who'd come in behind me, looked past me and said, "Emma. I didn't know that was on."

She went over and dropped on the bed next to Lane.

"I think we're gonna go into this Corbeil guy's apartment," I said to Green and Lane. "We've got some."

"Shhh," Lane said. "They're gonna kiss. This only takes a minute." Emma and her friend were standing under a spreading oak. Lane and LuEllen were totally focused.

"I think we gotta."

"Shut up, shut up, just one minute." LuEllen held a finger up.

I went over to look: "Christ, that woman's got a long neck."

"They all did back then," Lane said.

"This wasn't made back then, this was made."

"SHUT THE FUCK UP," LuEllen said.

I looked at Green, who shrugged, and we went over to a corner of the room, sat down, and shut up.

After Emma and her friend were married, and the movie ran down what happened to everyone else, Lane sighed and turned off the TV. "God, I love that movie."

"So do I," LuEllen said. "But you know what? I don't think they did a very good job with Frank. They needed to make him more attractive in the beginning and worse in the end, and show why Emma was attracted to Yum."

"I didn't think he was very attractive at all," Lane said. "I don't see how he could possibly compete with."

"Could we talk about what we're doing?" I asked.

"I think that would be good," Green said, "Since we're in these guys' hometown."

We brought them up to date on what we'd done, without providing any details that might be used against us in a court. We would have to trust them at some point, though, and I said, "We're seriously considering going into Corbeil's apartment. He has a T-1 phone line, and we think he probably uses it for rapid access into the company computers. There's a good chance that I can tap into his computer line, and that'll give us a door into their mainframe."

Lane said, "We've been looking at the photo you sent us, and I can't see anything in it. If we knew who the people were."

"It's a blank wall," I said. "Jack must have gotten something out of the computers that went with the photographs. That's what we need to find."

"I really, mmm, I had some problems back home and if I got caught going into a place, I could be looking at a long time," Green said. He sounded apologetic.

"You couldn't go in anyway," I said. "It's not an area where a black guy can wander around. We could use a couple of eyes, though."

"We could do that," Green said. "Do we know anything about the place?"

"We came up with these," I said, touching the drawings. "I've seen a couple of things in them; everybody ought to take a look, and see if we can spot anything else."

We did that, spreading the drawings around on the beds like pages from The New York Times on a Sunday afternoon. LuEllen said, eventually, "Look at this." She was pointing at a blank box.

"It's a blank box," Green said.

"It's a safe."

"Yeah?"

"Bet your ass it is," she said. "Let me look at the drawings for that wall. and for the opposite wall. Where are the materials specs, anyway?"

After a while, Lane and LuEllen went out for Cokes, and Green and I continued to look at the blueprints.

"You're pretty good at this," Green said after a while. It sounded like a statement, but there was a question inside of it.

"I've done it for a whilenot exactly this, but related stuff."

"I know a little bit about Longstreet," he said. I looked up at him: Longstreet was supposed to fade away into the pasta political seizure of a small town in the Mississippi delta, engineered with several tastefully chosen burglaries and a few bad moments at the dog pound, to say nothing of the weeks of hospitalization and physical rehab that followed.

"I wish people would forget about all of that," I said, finally.

"Most of them are forgetting, but not everybody," Green said. "What I'm saying is, my friends tell me that I should go all the way with you. That it's important."

"I'm not sure how important it is outside our little group," I said. "I wouldn't want you to be misled."

"Not too worried about that," he said. He stood up, stretched, looked out the sliding glass doors toward the golf course. "What I'm worried about is, I'm getting bored. Hard to stay sharp when you're bored, stuck in hotel rooms."

"Do you play golf?"

"Does a chicken have lips?"

"Why don't you take LuEllen out for a round? She's getting antsy herself. I'll read though these drawings for a while longer, keep an eye on Lane."

"Okay." He chewed on a lip for a minute, then said, "Think Lane has a little thing for you."

"Yeah?"

"A little thing," he said.

"I thought, maybe, you guys have been hanging around for a week or so."

He shook his head: "I'm not from the right social-educational strata."

"She's a bigot?"

"No, no. Never that. She's got a Ph.D. and I never quite went back for my GED, if you know what I mean. She's got this thing about. diplomas. Degrees."

"Huh. Don't know what to tell you," I said. And I didn't.

We spent some more time looking at the architect's drawings and when LuEllen got back, I said, "We go in through the garage. I can get us up to Corbeil's floor, but after that, I've got no guarantees. If we want to make it a quiet entry, I don't know. You'd need some lock picks or something. I don't think we could use an auto-pick. There are three other apartments up there."

"How are you going to get us up? If we don't know how long we're gonna be up, I don't think it'd be a good idea to take the elevator apart."

I explained it, and she said, "That means we need more scouting trips. And some more gear."

"I was thinking we'd go in Saturday night," I said. "That article that Bobby found said he was a big social guy. Saturday night in Dallas?"

"About ten o'clock?"

"If it's possible at all," I said.

"I wish I could get a look at his door," she said.

For each of the next three days, Green and LuEllen played thirty-six holes of golf on the Radisson course, while Lane and I hung out, sometimes together, sometimes separately. I got a lot of drawing done, and she was online with her business in Palo Alto.

LuEllen, it turned out, was a near-scratch golfer. "I'm damn good," Green said one night, "But she's better. I think if she was a little younger, and worked on it, she could probably go on the women's tour."

"Can't putt," LuEllen said.

"You could if you had a little patience," he said. "You never look." And they'd go off on a long, twisted argument about puttingor chipping or pitching or whateverthat would leave Lane and me nodding off.

The nights were more interesting. LuEllen and I scouted Corbeil's apartment from the golf course, with Green and Lane circling the course, listening to a police scanner, looking for cops. We'd bought Motorola walkie-talkies, apparently used by huntersthey were in camouflage colorsso they could call us instantly if anything came up. We'd found a better place to enter the golf course, where two uneven pieces of fence came together at a corner, next to a sidewalk. From one direction, you couldn't see us at all; from another, it looked like we'd turned the corner. From the third and fourth, you could see us plainly, but traffic was light enough that we could wait for holes.