Part 7 (2/2)

”Milval Hines,” he replied, even more evenly.

Okay, well, that didn't go anywhere.

I shut my yap. I'd done too much talking anyhow. Mostly when people prattle on, it's a sign of nervousness. I'd been far too chatty for my own good. Plus, I reminded myself, this was Hines's show. He'd tell me at his leisure what he wanted me to know. I could decide at mine what to believe.

Silence took its toll. Mirplo was the first to get fidgety. He plucked a fake apple from the bowl and rolled it back and forth on the tabletop between his hands. Claire Scovil looked at her nails with studied disinterest. Allie and Hines again exchanged looks. I couldn't tell from the exchange which of them had the power to change the talk/don't talk signal from red to green, but it's not uncommon in the grift for a team's real authority to rest with someone who looks like a lackey. I'd played that role many times myself: the n.u.m.b.n.u.t.s in the background who's really pulling the strings. I knew from adversarial experience that undercover law often worked the same way. Therefore, this could very possibly be her show, not his.

Hines spoke. ”I'm with a federal fraud task force.” Was there a hitch in his I'm I'm, like it wanted to come out we're we're, but caught itself in time? Or was I once again oversolving the problem? Hard to tell.

”But that's not your day job,” I said.

”Normally I'm FBI.”

”Fibbie,” I said. ”Okay, well, everyone's got to earn a living.” I looked at Allie and Mirplo. ”Any other fibbers here?” They didn't respond, and once again I chided myself for talking too much. Like the sign says, ”It's better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you're a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

Mouth shut, ears peeled, I finally got this gist: that Detective Scovil had followed the trail of some Aussie cyberperp to L.A., where said trail had then gone cold. In concert with the fibbies, and operating under the old takes-a-thief-to-catch-a-thief paradigm, she hoped to have me warm it up again.

”In exchange,” said Hines, ”we're prepared to forgive your ... transgressions up till now.”

”Which transgressions are those? The ones you entrapped me into?”

With a thin smile, Hines got up from the table and went into the bedroom for a moment. When he returned, he had a manila folder. This he slapped like a summons on the table before me. I opened it and skimmed its contents.

Wow.

Holy s.h.i.+t.

There, in pleonastic detail, was a greatest hits version of every significant scam I'd run in the past five years. Anything that had had the slightest internet vector-and what didn't these days?-had apparently been cracked like a coconut and stored in some devious database somewhere. Plus bank records, onsh.o.r.e and offsh.o.r.e transactions, and bogus doc.u.mentation of every stripe. A whole d.a.m.n d.a.m.ning (and highly indictable) paper trail wending back through Radar's sordid adventures on what some call the wrong side of the law.

Want to know how I felt? Violated, that's how.

But I didn't let that show. Instead I just whistled a respectful low whistle. ”I have to admit,” I said, ”I didn't think you fibbies had it in you.”

”It's easy when you have one of those,” said Hines, indicating the device still jacked into my computer. ”You'd be surprised what this baby can do.” I would be surprised. It looked not much different from a normal data stick.

”Why all the hanky-panky?” I asked. ”Why didn't you just call me into your field office or whatever, and make your pitch?”

”As you said, you had to be vetted. People in your line of work talk a good game. They can't always back up their claims.”

I turned to Allie. ”And you trying to pull the plug?”

”For my benefit,” said Claire. ”To see how much bottle you had.”

”Enough?” I asked.

She nodded. ”You seem to have the requisite stick-to-itiveness.”

”Do you talk like that at home? Do you compliment your boyfriend on his stick-to-itiveness?” I was pinging her again, on a more personal level. I didn't get much of a hit, just a hint of rising color at her collarbone, but it was enough to know two things-no boyfriend, and she felt the lack.

As for the rest of it, truth to tell, I had no idea. They could be who they said they were, or this could be just the next level of noise. Frankly, I was getting tired of shoveling such smoke. I needed some tangible facts.

Time to ping the whole joint.

I closed the file and placed both hands on the cover. ”Look,” I said, ”this is crackerjack work, really. When I think of all the hours of research, the wiretaps, the pa.s.swords axed, well, it just puts me in awe of my mighty tax dollars at work. Either that or it's not tax dollars. For all I know, you're all on the razzle and just head and shoulders better at it than me.” I looked at Vic. ”Except you, Mirplo. I'm guessing that you've been played like I've been played.” To Allie and Hines I said, ”As for you two, you've fed me nothing but horses.h.i.+t since the moment we met. Can you forgive me for not wanting to swallow some more?” Next I addressed the notional Aussie. ”You I don't know,” I said. ”But I'm gonna go with 'guilty by a.s.sociation.' You look nice, though. Bet you look great in a wet T-s.h.i.+rt.” I don't know why I said that. It was unnecessarily provocative. But something about the woman just rankled me, and I couldn't resist rankling back. I was rewarded with a look sour enough to curdle milk.

I stood up. Grabbed my computer. Popped out their peripheral and dropped it in the bowl of wax fruit. ”Now then: If you've got uniformed Jakes downstairs waiting to arrest me, so be it. I've been busted before. It's not the end of the world. But I have a feeling there are no waiting Jakes, just like I've got a feeling there's no Australian High Tech Crime Centre, or federal fraud task force, and the closest you, Hines, have been to the FBI is a true-crime show you saw on the Discovery channel once. This is all just bogus bogosity, and I am out of here.”

I can play ball with cops. I can. But you have to know it's cops you're dealing with, and there was just no way I could trust any answer I got from this crew. It was like Mirplo swearing by the authenticity of his Photoshop fakes. How are you going to believe the guy with the manifest reason to lie? So I forced their hand. I had to. If they did have Jakes downstairs, it would at least verify their bona fides, and then we could do business. If they were just a bunch of big lying liars, I figured they'd be so stunned by my declarative exit that I could get in the wind before they had a chance to react. I knew I'd be putting some things behind me, notably one lame friends.h.i.+p and one abortive love affair (and the Merlin Game, but that's just money). Plus also I'd have to vacate L.A., which was a shame, but unavoidable. Part of successfully cutting your losses is knowing when to cut and run. Which you do without ego and without stopping to measure anyone's d.i.c.ks. Considering how well they'd played me so far, I had to tip my hat to their superior skill-a hat I intended to tip from the safe distant bunker of anonymity.

Okay, I was wrong about one thing.

The cops weren't waiting downstairs.

They were right outside the door.

the grifter of oz.

T he Jakes hustled me back inside. They did it right, too: professionally, and with respect. No att.i.tude or guns, just, ”We're going to need you to step back into the room, sir.” This is how you like your cops to behave. Just because you're doing your job and they're doing theirs, there's no reason for everyone to get all hostile with each other. For the many times I've been busted, I've always admired the Jakes who had the common courtesy to treat me like a human being. All the same, though, I could see the steel in these two. I could tell I was only one gratuitous ”Bite me” away from being facedown on the carpet with a knee in my back. he Jakes hustled me back inside. They did it right, too: professionally, and with respect. No att.i.tude or guns, just, ”We're going to need you to step back into the room, sir.” This is how you like your cops to behave. Just because you're doing your job and they're doing theirs, there's no reason for everyone to get all hostile with each other. For the many times I've been busted, I've always admired the Jakes who had the common courtesy to treat me like a human being. All the same, though, I could see the steel in these two. I could tell I was only one gratuitous ”Bite me” away from being facedown on the carpet with a knee in my back.

More to the point, I could tell they were the real deal. Not fabricats, not even rent-a-cops. You can argue chicken and egg about cop att.i.tude-does their hard-a.s.s nature inform their career choice, or do they osmose it on the job?-but either way, true cop mojo is impossible to fake. Grifters can't do it, except in circ.u.mstances like the after-party snuke, where you don't have to be particularly convincing, just snarky and loud, less true cop than cop cartoon. I'm saying: See a man in officer kit, you can tell whether it's a uniform or a costume. While I couldn't completely discount the possibility of above-the-rim role playing, I felt I could trust that these Jakes were were Jakes. On the present s.h.i.+fting sands of bafflegab, that wasn't much, but at least it was something. Jakes. On the present s.h.i.+fting sands of bafflegab, that wasn't much, but at least it was something.

In any case, a moment later, I found myself right back in the chair I'd vacated a moment before. While Hines walked the cops to the door, I picked up a wax apple and feinted it at Mirplo's head. He flinched.

Hines came back and sat down. He leafed through my file, then set it aside. ”So far,” he said in measured tones, ”nothing has happened that can't unhappen. But I need to know you're on board.”

I sighed-a real sigh this time. ”Appreciate my position,” I said. ”If you're who you say you are, then of course I'm happy to help the cause of international law and order, homeland security, save the whales, what have you. Not to mention my personal pa.s.sionate cause of staying before bars. But if you're not who you say you are, then I'm just a chump who's getting rechumped. How'm I supposed to know which?”

”The officers didn't convince you?”

”They convinced me a little,” I granted. ”But you need to convince me a lot.”

Hines and Scovil took their time and did it right: a thorough and plausible job of introducing me to the Grifter of Oz and the threat he posed. If they were to be believed, he was quite an extraordinary dude.

If they were to be believed.

William Yuan was born in Sydney of Chinese parents at roughly the same time I was born wherever of whomever. Like me, Yuan was a young achiever who got admitted to, and kicked out of, college at a precociously early age. Also like me, he found it pleasing to work on the fringes of legitimacy. He made much of the internet heyday by launching websites that had great commercial promise-though no particular basis in fact-and then gulling private-equity guys into hefty buys. Really, who wouldn't take a flier on , once they learned of Billy Yuan's revolutionary new technique for scanning satellite photos of Earth to locate previously hidden mineral deposits? Gold! Silver! Rhodium! Too good to be true?

Of course!

Any knowledgeable grifter would have instantly recognized the scam as an updated version of dowsing or water witching. But the PE guys weren't that knowledgeable, and Yuan made a killing. Only, he tried to sell his vaporware to the government, and that bought him eighteen months in Mount Gambier, Australia's first privately run prison. By the time he finished his bid, he was consulting to prison management on how to make much more money by selling prisons they had no intent to build. Really, the kid had a cat's knack for landing on his feet.

And what was he up to now? Why did he beat cheeks out of Australia, and why was Australia going to such lengths to hunt him down? Here the story starts to get a little murky. In gist, Yuan had been caught sniffing around the software of the Reserve Bank of Australia. Or not caught, exactly: detected; surprised in the act of the hack. But apparently in pinging him, the authorities had pinged themselves as well. Yuan shut down his operation and hopped the first Qantas out of town.

”Our concern,” said Scovil, ”is that Yuan has found a way to compromise the bank's security and will, at a later time, attempt penetration.”

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