Firebreak

Wiss said, 'You took another crack at him.'

'This time I did it right,' Larry assured them. 'This time, Brad does not get rehabilitated.'

'Keep a low profile while you're here,' Elkins advised him. 'We'll bring your meals in to you. After the job, we'll line you up with a plastic surgeon.'

'That would be good,' Larry agreed. 'I can change everything else about myself on the Net, but not my face. But let me go set up my stuff, start listening to those people. We're gonna do the job soon, right?'

'Whenever Parker gets here,' Elkins said.

'I can hardly wait.'

Larry went off to his own room, and Elkins turned his worried frown toward Wiss, saying, 'Just how crazy is he?'

'I'm not sure,' Wiss said. He didn't want to admit he was on Larry's side. He said, 'I think maybe a little less crazy than before. Maybe he can concentrate better now.'

'Just so he concentrates on staying out of sight,' Elkins said.

Larry did, for about an hour, and then he knocked on the connecting door between his room and Wiss's. Wiss and Elkins were in there playing gin rummy. Elkins went on looking at the cards while Wiss got up and went over to open the door.

Larry was not grinning now. He said, 'Trouble.'

Wiss said, 'You were seen?'

'Not trouble with me,' Larry said, coming into the room. 'There's a lot of e-mail traffic from the lodge, and phone traffic, and shortwave radio.'

Elkins put his cards down. 'Shortwave?'

'There's federal cops up there,' Larry told him. 'I think a lot of them.'

Elkins dropped his cards and got to his feet. 'What the hell for?'

'They're looking for our paintings,' Larry said.

PART FOUR

1

Parker changed planes at O'Hare, called Wiss from there to pick him up later in Great Falls, and then walked toward his next terminal. Abruptly he stopped, in the pedestrian traffic, to look in at an open-faced snack bar beside the corridor. On a television set behind the bar was a picture of Larry Lloyd.

Parker stepped closer, but he couldn't hear what was being said behind that picture. It was a mug shot, a few years old, head-on to the camera, with the usual look of a mug shot; urgent, but defeated. Then it was replaced by a picture of a burning apartment house.

Farther along the corridor was a newsstand. There was nothing about Lloyd in the New York Times or USA Today, but an extensive piece in the Boston Globe. Parker bought it, and read about Lloyd on the next plane.

It was the emotional thing again. The guy who'd

screwed Lloyd had got an early release, and that tipped him over the edge. But all the way over this time; no more playing computer games, pretending to be here when you're there. There was no way to cover these tracks.

What would Lloyd do? Parker didn't think he was the suicidal type, he was too self-righteous for that. He couldn't leave the country, and he had no history as a lamster. There was already a reward posted, from somebody called George Carew, the brother-in-law that Lloyd's enemy and victim had been released to. It was only five thousand so far, but Carew was rich, and would up the ante if he had to, though he probably wouldn't have to.

Where would Lloyd turn? To somebody he'd known on the inside? Almost any one of them would trade him in for five thousand without thinking twice.

What did that mean for the heist? Could they get in without Lloyd running interference on the computer? If they had to just smash in, noisy and direct, that wouldn't be any good, because it would leave them with just the one exit, back down the private road to the state highway. They couldn't repeat Elkins' and Wiss's stunt of going up over the mountain into Canada, because this time the law would know about that route.

When Parker got off the plane in Great Falls, he was thinking the job was dead and the best thing for Wiss and Elkins to do was whack their former partners to keep from getting sold. Wiss waited for him outside, turning away as soon as he saw Parker, headed off for the short-term parking, but he didn't walk like a man with a sudden new set of troubles. Following, Parker wondered if maybe Wiss didn't know about Lloyd yet.

But he did. When Parker joined him in the car, a rental Taurus, he said, 'You heard about Lloyd?'

Wiss grinned. 'I sure did. From Larry himself.'

'He came here?'

'He was already here when you called. I didn't want to say anything on the phone.'

'What's the story?'