Read Online Repairman Jack [08]-Crisscross by F. Paul Wilson - Free Book Online

wanting to be called by another name and—"
    "Ah. That means he was getting into the top half of the FL situation."
    "F—?"
    "Fusion Ladder."
    "Yeah, well, look. I think I'm going to have to go inside and I'd like to ask you a few questions about the organization first."
    "What's in it for me?"
    He'd figured it would come down to this.
    "I'll feed you whatever I find inside. And if you want to know something specific, I'll do my best to run it down for you."
    She didn't answer right away, but he could hear her puffing away on a cigarette.
    Finally, "What's your name?"
    Jack glanced at the business card: "John Robertson."
    He'd met Robertson years ago and had not only saved his card, but printed out a few copies of his own with a business card program.
    "You licensed?"
    "Of course."
    Well, the real John Robertson was. Sort of. He was dead now but Jack kept renewing his state private investigator's license.
    "You'd better be, because I'm going to check on that. Show up here at noon. If you're legit, I'll tell the front desk to let you come up."
    "Great. Thanks a—"
    "You licensed to carry?"
    He wasn't sure if the real Robertson was. "Why do you want to know?"
    "Just fair warning: Leave the artillery home or else you're gonna have to answer a lot of questions when you set off the metal detector."
    "Okay. Sure. Thanks."
    Metal detector? Did newspapers now use metal detectors?

2

    It was almost ten A.M. when Jack arrived at Russell Tuit's apartment. Jack had looked him up a few years ago—before his conviction—and had made the mistake of pronouncing his name Too -it. "Tweet," Russ had told him. "As in Tweety Bird."
    "Hey, Jack," he said as he opened his door. Jack had called earlier, so Russ was expecting him. But apparently he wasn't expecting how Jack would be dressed. "Wow. Look at you. You didn't have to get all spiffed up for me."
    Jack wore a blue blazer over gray slacks, a blue oxford shirt, and a striped tie—all for his meeting with Jamie Grant.
    "Oh, hell! I didn't? You mean I could've worn jeans? Damn!"
    Russ laughed. "Come on in."
    His tiny two-room, third-floor apartment overlooked Second Avenue in the East Nineties. His five-story building looked like a converted tenement, wrought-iron fire escape and all. Even though the Tex-Mex bar and grill next door had yet to open for the day, his front room was redolent of grilled meat and mesquite smoke. Rumbling traffic from the street below provided sub-woofer Muzak.
    Russ himself was the quintessential computer geek: a pear-shaped guy in his early thirties, big head, short bed-head red hair, and a blackhead-studded forehead; he wore an i-pipe T-shirt, baggy jeans, and ratty flip-flops. Looked like he'd been designed by Gary Larson.
    Jack glanced around the barely furnished front room and noticed a laptop on the desk in the far corner. He hadn't asked during their brief and intentionally oblique phone conversation, but he'd been sure Russ would have some sort of computer.
    Jack nodded to it. "You're not worried your parole officer will drop by and see that?"
    " No problem. My parole says I'm not to go online or consort with other hackers. But not to have a computer at all—that'd be cruel and unusual, man."
    "Staying offline… knowing you, how're you going to survive twenty-five years of that?"
    Russ had been caught hacking into a number of bank computers and coding them to transfer a fraction of a cent of each international transaction to his Swiss account. He'd been sitting back, collecting well into six figures a year until someone got wise and sicced the Treasury Department's FinCEN unit on him. His lawyer pled him down to two years of soft time in a fed pen but the judge imposed a quarter-century ban on going online.
    He offered a sickly grin. "Only twenty-two-point-three-seven-six years to go." The grin brightened. "But you've heard of cyber cafes, haven't you?"
    "Yeah. You're not afraid they'll catch you?"
    "I'm pretty sure they're monitoring my lines, but