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connected to your own company some
     way, it might give us an inside track on things.”
    “A mole, like,” Dortmunder said.
    “And the other thing,” Andy went on, “if the cops suddenly showed up to bust us, we could all just laugh and say it was all
     in fun, we were never gonna lift anything anyway.”
    “An insurance policy,” Dortmunder said.
    Fairkeep looked doubtful. “Take something from Get Real? There isn’t anything at Get Real. We want you to aim a little higher
     than office supplies.”
    “We weren’t,” Andy said, “thinking of Get Real.”
    “Oh, you mean Monopole,” Fairkeep said, sounding surprised that Andy would know about that. “Our big bosses?”
    “Well, not your
big
bosses,” Andy told him, taking a folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. Opening it, consulting it, he said, “What we
     got from Google is, Get Real is a subsidiary of Monopole Broadcasting, doing commercial TV and cable and Internet broadcasting
     and production and export. Sounds pretty good.”
    “Yes,” Fairkeep said. “But Monopole isn’t—”
    “Now, Monopole,” Andy said, frowning at his list, “is sixty percent owned by Intimate Communications, and that’s owned eighty
     percent by Trans-Global Universal Industries, and that’s owned seventy percent by something called SomniTech.”
    “My God,” Fairkeep said, sounding faint. “I never worked it out like that.”
    “Now, all of these are East Coast companies,” Andy said. “Among them, they’re in oil, communications, munitions, real estate,
     aircraft engines, and chemistry labs.”
    Fairkeep shook his head. “Makes you feel small, doesn’t it?”
    Dortmunder said, “Doug, somebody in that mob has to have some cash.”
    Fairkeep blinked at him. “Cash?”
    “Doug,” Andy said, “we can’t resell an aircraft engine.”
    “But there is no cash,” Fairkeep told him. “Per diem for the crew on the road, that’s all.”
    “Think about it, Doug,” Dortmunder urged. “Somewhere in all those companies, all those businesses, and a lot of them are overseas,
     somewhere in all that there’s got to be someplace with cash.”
    Shaking his head in absolute assurance, Fairkeep said, “No, there isn’t. I have never seen cash in—” And then he kind of stuttered,
     as though he’d just had one of those mini-power outages that makes you reset all your clocks. In a second, less than a second,
     power was restored, but Fairkeep continued the sentence in a different place. “—Anywhere. It just isn’t done. Even Europe,
     Asia, all those transactions are wire transfers.”
    Dortmunder had seen that little blip, and he was sure Andy had, too. He said, “Well, Doug, will you at least think about it?”
    “Oh, sure,” Fairkeep said.
    “Good.” Getting to his feet, because the explanation for the power outage would not be found in this room, not today, Dortmunder
     said, “We’ll be in touch.”
    Surprised, Fairkeep said, “Is that it?”
    “For today. We’ll get back in touch when we fill out the roster.”
    “Oh, the five men, you mean,” Fairkeep said. “But you don’t even know what the robbery is yet, so you don’t know if you’ll
     need all five.”
    Rising from the sofa, Andy said, “Here’s a rule for you, Doug. Never go in with fewer crew than you need.”

8
    J UDSON B LINT WAS TIRED of opening envelopes. Oh, sure, every envelope he opened was another check, twenty percent of which would go directly into
     his own pocket, the easiest money he could ever hope to find, and slitting open envelopes with a very good letter opener was
     not exactly hard labor, but still. Here he was, at a desk in a seventh-floor office in the Avalon State Bank Tower in midtown
     Manhattan, slitting open envelope after envelope, scanning into the computer the return addresses, keeping track of the check
     totals, and even though he knew very well what he was actually doing was mail fraud—in fact, three different mail frauds,
     as