hand he held his gun, a long-barreled revolver, maybe an old Colt or Smith-a six-shooter anyway, like a relic of the Wild West.
“ Dios mio… Dios mio…”
Emilio had ceased crying. It was Mr. Sanchez who was sobbing now.
C.J. almost called out to him, identifying herself again as the police, but if he panicked he might turn and fire, and she would be trapped in the doorway, unable to shoot back without endangering the baby.
She had to get the gun away from him.
The distance between herself and Sanchez was six feet. She could reach him in three short steps and snatch the gun.
Dangerous, but facing danger was what they paid her for, right?
C.J. moved forward, still bent low. She dragged her feet in a cautious slide-step, maintaining her balance, textbook high-risk-felony procedure.
One step. Two.
The revolver almost within reach.
Emilio screamed.
The baby had seen her coming, and his cry alerted Ramon Sanchez, who spun, rising, the revolver blurring toward her, and on pure instinct C.J. reached out with her free hand and grabbed it by the cylinder.
A revolver couldn’t fire if the cylinder was prevented from turning.
That was the theory, at least. The reality was that some revolvers-the ones that were old, damaged, defective-might fire anyway.
Past the gray shape of the gun she saw Ramon’s eyes, inflamed with weeping, big with rage.
“ Policia,” C.J. snapped. “ Suelte la arma.” Drop the weapon.
She could shoot him now. She could fire past Emilio, wrapped in Ramon’s left arm like a small pink shield- fire into the man’s abdomen or groin.
But if she did, he would try to fire back, if only in a reflex action. And his gun was pointed at her face from inches away, close enough for her to smell the lubricant on the muzzle.
An old gun, Maria Sanchez had said. A piece of junk, from the look of it. The kind that might fire even if the cylinder was immobilized.
She repeated the command taught to all recruits at the police academy. “ Suelte la arma.” Even though Sanchez spoke English, it was a fair bet that he was more fluent in Spanish.
He must have understood her, but he still didn’t comply.
She and Sanchez watched each other over the barrel of his gun. C.J. waited for him to pull the trigger. Waited to find out what kind of luck she had.
But he didn’t try to shoot. Slowly he relaxed his grip on the revolver and let her take it from him.
“ Dios mio,” he said again in a hoarse, defeated voice.
She snugged the gun inside her belt. “Put the baby down,” she ordered, “Put him down. All right, raise your hands. Now on your knees. Your knees! Lie on your stomach. Hands out, away from your body. It’s okay, Mr. Sanchez. It’s okay.”
She had her knee planted in the small of his back, and she was cuffing him while he lay in the felony-prone position. She didn’t relax until the second handcuff clicked shut.
She searched him for other weapons, found none. When she was certain he posed no threat, she bolstered her Beretta. Outside, Brasco was yelling something through the door. He’d heard her shouting inside.
“I’m all right,” C.J. called back as she stood up.
Emilio was crying. She took a moment to comfort the child and to stop herself from shaking.
Close call. For a moment there, staring into that gun and those red eyes, she’d felt she was facing her old enemy once more-facing him, maybe, for the last time.
But she’d been wrong. Ramon Sanchez was not the boogeyman.
The boogeyman, she knew, would have pulled the trigger.
5
Noah Rawls liked his job, even if half the time he was filling out paperwork, and most of his remaining hours were spent manually reviewing log files provided by the owners of violated computer systems. He liked the thrill of the chase-not the Hollywood chase of screaming sirens and weaving traffic, but the subtler game of hunting crackers and phreakers and code-thieves, sniffing out IP addresses, defeating firewalls, beating online criminals at their own sport.
He was a hacker-tracker, or more accurately a member of the computer crime squad in the FBI’s Baltimore field office. Some field offices had full-fledged Computer Intrusion teams of seven to ten agents, but here in Baltimore it was just Rawls and his partner, Ned Brand. They shared a small office with a view of an industrial park adjacent to Interstate 695, a view that rarely engaged their attention, since most of the time their windows were draped shut to prevent glare on the monitors. The monitors were, in fact, the only windows that mattered to either of them-the twenty-one-inch CRT screens that opened on another world.
“Hey, Ned,” Rawls muttered. “Take a look at this.”
Brand did not look up from his monitor. “I’m busy.” His fingers clacked on his keyboard with the monotony of falling rain.
“Are you? Sorry. Say, you want me to get you that chamber pot? I think Baltimore PD’s still got it in evidence.”
This obtained the desired reaction-the squeal of the casters on Brand’s office chair as he pushed away from his desk. “Okay, okay. Don’t go comparing me to Tomlinson, damn it.”
Rawls only smiled. Eddie Tomlinson was a phone-code thief who, in a remarkable feat of endurance captured by an FBI trap-and-trace, had remained online, typing continuously, for seventy-two hours straight. When his home was raided, he was found hunched over his keyboard, seated in a chair with a hole cut in the seat and an overflowing chamber pot underneath. Empty beverage bottles and discarded snack food wrappers littered the floor. Tomlinson put up no resistance to arrest, but it was observed that his fingers continued to go through the motions of typing even as he was led away in handcuffs.
Rawls had suggested the chamber pot option to Brand on several previous occasions, and it never failed to rouse him from his chair. There was something in Tomlinson’s dogged determination to continue entering code string after code string, for days on end, that came a little too close to the reality of the agents’ own lives.
“Whassup, bro?” Brand asked, leaning over Rawls’s shoulder. Adopting an urban black patois was one of Brand’s quirks, which he exercised even though he was not black and had been brought up as far from the mean streets as possible, in the very affluent, very white enclave of Stamford, Connecticut.
Rawls, on the other hand, was black, and moreover was a product of the urban hell of East St. Louis, rescued from a hopeless future by the nuns at the local parochial school, who had taught him self-discipline, the only lesson that really mattered. They had also taught him grammar. Rawls would never say whassup. Such an undignified expression was beneath him.
“This is what’s up,” Rawls said. He tapped his monitor, which displayed a dialogue box requesting authentication information-user name and password. The user name Rawls had typed was Bluebeard. The password line was blank.
“Bluebeard?” Brand asked.
“I’m pretty sure that’s the user ID, but I don’t have the password.”
“You lost me, buddy. Where’d the name Bluebeard come from?”
Rawls pulled a sheet of paper out of his printer and showed it to Brand. “This arrived in my Inbox a few minutes ago.”
The printout was the text of an e-mail message.
Agent Rawlz,
Something phunny going on. Do you like to watch? Say you’re Bluebeard. You have to phind the key.
A Web site’s URL had been listed below-a “www” prefix followed by several crude slang terms for the
