Firebreak

'No, no, it's nothing like that.' Lloyd shook his head, irritated at himself, then gathered himself for the effort to explain things in a rational way. 'It's a hacker,' he said. 'It's some hacker out there, he came into my file, I'm not sure why, unless one of your names triggered it.'

Parker said, 'Names? You have a file with our names in it?'

'Yes, that's what I'm saying. I should know better than to keep records, my God, it was my own records brought me down last time, as much as my running around acting out.'

Parker said, 'What is in this file, besides our names?'

'Well, nothing any more,' Lloyd assured him. 'As soon as I realized what had happened, I eliminated those files completely, they don't exist, they never existed.'

'Except they did.'

'Yes.'

'And somebody read them. What did they find?'

'Names, addresses, phone numbers, places of meetings. Not, thank God,' Lloyd said, with a shaky smile, 'the subject of the meetings. Nothing about Marino, not his name or the hunting lodge or how I plan to cut into his systems or any of that, that's all on a secure disk completely separate from the computer. But us, everything about us.'

Parker looked at Elkins. 'How long has this genius been flashing my name and address and phone number around?'

Elkins shrugged. 'Maybe three days before we first called you. We had things to set up, our old partners to talk to.'

So Charov had not been a coincidence. In the old days, Brock had owned a music shop, was a technician, an expert with recording technology. Had he expanded into computers? It seemed a lot of music people had. And all of a sudden he'd found Parker, after all these years, and it had taken three days to get Charov on the case.

Parker looked at Lloyd, who could see he'd somehow made even more trouble than he'd thought. Parker waited, and Lloyd said, 'If there's anything I can do ...'

'This . .. data of yours, it's definitely gone?'

'Yes, oh, yes, definitely.'

'The guy who came in and got it,' Parker said. 'Can you follow him home?'

'No, I don't think so,' Lloyd said. 'Apparently, he got everything he wanted the first time through.'

'Yeah, he did,' Parker said, and said to the others, 'I told you I had this other thing to take care of, and it wasn't connected to you people, but now I think maybe it is connected.'

'Because of Larry?' Wiss asked. He seemed very disappointed in his protege.

'And his files, yeah.'

'I'm really sorry,' Lloyd said. 'Old habits just die hard.'

'Some things die easier,' Parker told him, and said to the others, 'Around the time you called me, a hit man came to visit. A pro out of Russia, with a cover at a liquor importer in New Jersey. I took care of that, but because of being with you people I haven't been able to deal with the people who hired him. I just found out this morning who they are, and I know they got somebody else watching my house right now, waiting for me to come back.'

'Stupid, stupid, stupid,' Lloyd said to himself.

Wiss said, 'We should take a hand. If we brought this guy on you—'

'It's the timing,' Elkins said to Wiss. 'Sure we brought this guy on him.'

'That's what I'm saying,' Wiss agreed. 'What we got to do is take a hand, make Parker whole again. We want him thinking about our little deal, not some guy with a hard-on watching the house.'

Again Lloyd said, 'If there's anything I—'

'I'm pretty sure there is,' Parker told him. 'What's at the house right now is a tiny camera, like the size of a wine cork, over the front door frame, with a wire hanging down, so when the door opens it broadcasts the view of the room. That way, they know it's me, or they know it's the cleaning woman, or they know whoever it is and what to do. This is a house on a lake with most of the houses closed for the winter, so the base could be anywhere around there. I thought I didn't have time to deal with it until I was done with you people, but now I think we got to deal with this problem first.'

Elkins said, 'To get that distraction out of your mind, I agree.'

'Not just that,' Parker said. 'One of the two guys behind this is a fella named Matt Rosenstein that's a heavy heister himself, or used to be. Him and the other guy, Brock, they've got to have some money on them right now, to be throwing it around the way they are, but I know Rosenstein, and he likes to go where money is and take it for himself. That was what our trouble was in the old days. Your boy Lloyd here says he put everything except my blood type in his computer, but didn't put anything about Marino's gold toilets or his stashed art gallery, and maybe he didn't. But just to be on the safe side,' Parker said, 'I'd like to make sure in my own mind, when I go back to that hunting lodge, Matt Rosenstein and Paul Brock aren't gonna be there to say hello.'

PART TWO

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