I said, 'If you need to buy special equipment—'
'Oh, no. Not really.'
'We already got everything we need.'
'Doesn't take much. Halfway decent laptop, a modem, an acoustic coupler—'
'Whole package won't run more than twelve hundred dollars.'
'Unless you went crazy and bought a high-priced laptop, but you don't have to.'
'The one we use cost seven-fifty, and it's got everything you need.'
'So you could do it?'
They exchanged glances, then looked at me. Jimmy Hong said,
'Sure, we could do it.'
'Be interesting, actually.'
'Have to pull an all-nighter.'
'Can't be tonight, either.'
'No, tonight's out. How soon would it have to be?'
'Well—'
'Tomorrow's Sunday. Sunday night all right with you, Matt?'
'It's fine with me.'
'You, Mr. King?'
'Works for me, Mr. Hong.'
'TJ? You figuring to be there?'
'Tomorrow night?' It was the first he'd said anything since introducing me to the Kongs. 'Lessee, tomorrow night. What did I have planned for tomorrow night? Was that the press reception at Gracie Mansion or was I supposed to have dinner with Henry Kissinger at Windows on the World?' He mimed paging through a date book, then looked up bright-eyed. 'What do you know? I be free.'
Jimmy Hong said, 'There'll be some expenses, Matt. We'll need a hotel room.'
'I have a room.'
'You mean where you live?' They grinned at each other, amused at my naivete. 'No, what you want is someplace anonymous. See, we're going to be deep inside NYNEX—'
'Crawling around inside the belly of the beast, you could say—'
'— and we might leave footprints.'
'Or fingerprints, if you prefer.'
'Even voiceprints, speaking metaphorically, of course.'
'So you don't want to do this from a phone that could be traced to anybody. What you want to do is rent a hotel room under a false name and pay cash for it.'
'A reasonably decent one.'
'It doesn't have to be ritzy.'
'Just so it has direct-dial phones.'
'Which most of them do nowadays. And push-button, it should be push-button.'
'Not the old rotary dial.'
'Well, that's easy enough,' I said. 'Is that what you usually do?
Rent a hotel room?'
They exchanged glances again.
'Because if there's a hotel you prefer—'
David said, 'The thing is, Matt, when we want to hack we don't generally have a hundred or a hundred and fifty bucks to spend on a decent hotel room.'
'Or even seventy-five dollars for a crummy hotel room.'
'Or fifty for a disgusting hotel room. So what we'll do—'
'We find a bank of pay phones where there's not much traffic, like in the Grand Central waiting room over by the commuter lines—'
'— because there's not many commuter trains leaving in the middle of the night—'
'— or in an office building, anything like that.'
'Or one time we sort of let ourselves into an office—'
'Which was stupid, man, and I never want to do that again.'
