The Devil's Code Page 10

  “Then how did all of those names come up all of a sudden? Mine and Bobby’s and Jack’s and omeomi and the others,” I asked. “We are linked. If you look at it from the right direction, we are a conspiracy, because a lot of us sure as shit have conspired with each other . . .”

  “I don’t know; I don’t know why Firewall came up. I don’t know how it ties in. But it seems to. There’s something out there, and it’s not totally made up. Something is happening. And Jack is dead and Lighter is dead . . .”

  “But it might just be coincidence . . .”

  “How could it possibly be?” She ticked it off on her fingers. “Jack is connected with Clipper II and AmMath and Firewall. Firewall kills Lighter who is connected with Clipper II and AmMath.”

  “But we can’t find a single person who is really connected with Firewall,” I said. “Not a single one.”

  Green asked, “Did Jack know Lighter?”

  I shook my head. “Not as far as we know.”

  “Might be something to check.”

  I turned to LuEllen, who’d kept her mouth shut during the argument. “What do you think?”

  “Three choices,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Look at AmMath. Keeping digging at Firewall. Get the fuck out.”

  Lane wanted to go after AmMath because of her brother. Green didn’t much care; his job was to take care of Lane, which he would do one way or the other. LuEllen was edging toward the door. “You can’t fight a bureaucracy,” she said. “You just become a goal. They put the goal in memos. It’s like trying to argue with the IRS.”

  But I couldn’t quit, not yet. The names were out there, and once the cops started unraveling a few identities, they would probably get them all—and we could get hurt without ever knowing why, or what was happening.

  “I have to find out more about Firewall,” I said. “Just for self-protection. If AmMath’s involved, then I’ll look into AmMath.”

  “You’re giving up on Jack?” Lane asked. “It sounds like you’re giving up.”

  “No, but we’ve got to be careful. From what it looks like, AmMath may be more than some mean-ass private company. Jack may have been messing with something serious—big-time trouble, of the kind we really don’t want to know about.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That means that the only way to get at them would be politics. We find some paper, we sic your senator on them, they do an internal investigation and cough somebody up and disown him. But if Jack was killed by some kind of operation . . . that’s gonna be tough.”

  The best thing we could do, I thought, was to run down the Monger information in Maryland. Maybe, with luck, we’d find some fourteen-year-old computer hack at the bottom of the Firewall conspiracy. We could dump him in the lap of the local sheriff, get a good laugh out of the press, and go home.

  “Fat chance,” LuEllen said.

  “It could happen,” I said. “It’s better than trying to crawl through AmMath’s basement window.”

  “What about Lane?” Green asked.

  “Call the Dallas cops and tell them that you’re coming out to pick up Jack’s computers and whatever other property they seized, that they don’t want anymore. But that you’ve got to close down his home out here first.”

  “And you guys will be in Maryland doing what?” Lane asked.

  “You know,” I said. “Looking around.”

  We flew out of San Francisco the same night. Before we left, when we were at the motel, packing, I went back out to Bobby and told him that we’d be moving to Washington. He booked us business-class seats on an evening flight into National, and a car under one of the phony IDs LuEllen had been using in New York. That ID was more solid than the two we’d picked up in San Francisco, and the credit cards that went with them were definitely good. Bobby had also developed more stuff on Corbeil and AmMath.

  Corbeil was a smart guy, but he was also nuts. He spent way too much time thinking about godless socialists, mindless bureaucrats, confiscatory taxation, black agitators, the yellow peril, the red menace, the International Jewish Conspiracy, and the New World Order. He’d been known to allow in public that Hitler had done a lot of good things.

  I’ve never been much interested in politics, but once wrote some do-it-yourself polling that allowed low-rent politicians to do their own telephone polls. I eventually sold off the business, but before I did, I got to know quite a few politicians. They were a pretty lively bunch, no more or less corrupt than schoolteachers, newspaper reporters, cops, or doctors.

  Anyway, it didn’t take much exposure to politics for me to realize that there are as many nuts on the left as there are on the right, and in the long run, the lefties are probably more dangerous. But in the short run, if you find a guy on top of your hometown clock tower with a cheap Chinese semiauto assault-weapon lookalike, that guy will be one of Corbeil’s buddies, dreaming of black helicopters and socialist tanks massing on the Canadian border, preparing to pollute America’s vital fluids.

  Smart and nuts: Corbeil’s description sounded a little like an advertisement for breakfast cereal, but wasn’t.

  Bobby had more about Corbeil’s lifestyle, as portrayed by the local city magazines. Corbeil’s salary was modest for a CEO, running about $150,000 a year, but then, he also owned a big chunk of AmMath stock. He liked fast cars and blond women; he made a point of being seen with Dallas’s flavor-of-the-day model. One of them had been a Playboy playmate of the month. Bobby included the centerfold picture.

  “Why do they shave their pubic hair into those little stripes?” LuEllen asked.

  We contemplated this mystery for a moment; then I said, “Maybe they don’t wear OshKosh B’Gosh brand bathing suits, like some people.”

  “You think?”

  LOTS MORE STUFF, I’LL SEND IT AS SOON AS I WEED THROUGH IT. HAVEN’T PICKED OUT AMMATH COMPUTER LINES YET, WILL GET BACK LATER.

  ANYTHING ON THE JAZ ?

  YES. OPENED THE BIG FILES, GOT PHOTOS, VERY HIGH RES. ALL THE SAME PARKING LOT. DON’T UNDERSTAND.

  CAN YOU MAKE JPEG, LEAVE IN MY BOX ?

  YES.

  ALSO , COPY OUT JAZ DISKS , OVERNIGHT THEM TO WASH HOTEL .

  OK.

  On the flight, we talked about What Next. We didn’t know what AmMath was doing, in anything more than a general sense, or why Jack might have been killed, if he wasn’t killed exactly like the AmMath people said he was. I still suspected that Firewall was a phantom.

  “Gonna have to spend some more time with Jack’s Jaz disks,” I said.

  “There’re only four . . .”

  I looked at her. “Four Jaz disks at two gigabytes each,” I said. “You could put two thousand pretty fat novels on one of them. We’re dealing with as much text as you’d get, say, in eight thousand Tom Clancy novels.”

  “Whoa.”

  “A bigger whoa than you think.” I closed my eyes and held up a finger to indicate that I was thinking. A minute later I had it. “If you broke everything up into texts the size of Clancy novels, and looked in each one of them for one minute, and worked forty hours a week at it, it’d take you better than three weeks to look in all of them.”

  “For one minute each.”

  “One minute,” I said.

  “You’re a mathematical fucking marvel,” she said.

  “That’s not the end of the problem,” I said. “The biggest part of it is, we don’t know what’s bullshit and what’s not.”

  We thought about that, and she said, “I see a light at the end of the tunnel.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Jack looked for less than a week, and he apparently found something.”

  “Unless they just killed him for trying to take it . . .”

  An hour out of Washington, with nothing to do, I got out the tarot deck and did a couple of spreads. LuEllen watched with mixed skepticism and nervousness, and finally said, “Well?”

  “Just bullshit,” I said. “Confusion.”

&
nbsp; “Let me cut the deck.” I gave the deck a light shuffle, and let her cut it. She cut out the devil card. The devil represents a force of evil, but not usually from the outside, not a standard bad guy. The devil is usually inside. He sits on top of you, controlling you, without your even being aware of it.

  “That’s bad,” she said. “I can tell by your face.”

  11

  In the course of my life, I’d spent maybe six months in Washington. Though it might not be fashionable to admit it, I like the place. Usually portrayed as a mass of greed-heads packed liked oiled sardines inside the Beltway, Washington has nice places to walk and good art to look at. People who like central Italy, the campagna, would like the rural landscape out in Virginia.

  We got into National late, and picked up the car and a map. We wouldn’t be right in Washington. According to Rufus, the server we were looking for was in Laurel, which is actually closer to Baltimore—not far, I noticed on the map, from Fort Meade, headquarters of the National Security Agency.

  I’d had some dealings with the NSA when I was in the military and I’d always been impressed by two things: their employees’ technical expertise and their arrogance. I hadn’t had anything to do with the agency for a couple of decades, but because it was so heavily involved in computers, there was always a lot of back-and-forth between NSA computer geeks and the outside computer world.

  Word got around, and the word was that the NSA was rapidly becoming obsolete. Once upon a time, agency operatives could tap any phone call or radio transmission in the world; they could put Mao Tsetung’s private words on the president’s desk an hour after the Maximum Leader spoke them into his office phone; they could provide real-time intercepts to the special ops people in the military.

  No more. The world was rife with unbreakable codes—any good university math department could whip one up in a matter of days. Just as bad, the most critical diplomatic and military traffic had come out of the air and gone underground, into fiber-optic cable. Even if a special forces team managed to get at a cable, messages were routinely encoded with ultrastrong encryption routines.

  The NSA was going deaf. And the word was, they didn’t know what to do about it. They’d become a bin full of aging bureaucrats worried about their jobs, and spinning further and further out of the Washington intelligence center.

  LuEllen and I checked into a Ramada Inn off I-95 near Laurel, Maryland. Separate rooms, under separate IDs, gave us some easy options if there were trouble. In the burglary business, you never know when you might need a bolt-hole.

  The next morning, after pancakes and coffee and The New York Times for me and The Wall Street Journal for LuEllen, we went looking for the server. The T-1 line it used was located in a suburban office complex called the Carter-Byrd Center, building 2233. We found it fifteen minutes from the motel, two rows of four, two-story yellow-brick buildings, facing each other, behind small parking lots, on a dead-end street.

  The tenants were professional services companies: accountants, financial advisors, a legal publishing firm, a title company, and several law firms. Most of them occupied an entire floor or building wing. The company we were looking for, Bloch Technology, was one of the small companies, grouped with other smaller companies, in a suite of offices in the end building on the right.

  LuEllen, dressed in a dark blue business suit and navy low heels, clipped her miniature Panasonic movie camera into her briefcase, gave me a hot little kiss on the lips—going into a job always turned her on—and headed for 2233 to do the first reconnaissance. I waited in the car.

  The idea was, she was looking for one of the other companies in Carter-Byrd, but got the building wrong. She’d be inside, we thought, for two or three minutes.

  Fifteen minutes after she’d disappeared through the double glass doors, I was about ready to go in after her. Then she walked back outside, with a guy in a short-sleeved white shirt, who pointed up the hill toward the first building. She nodded, and they talked for a few more seconds, she laughed, patted his arm, and started for the car. I slumped a little lower in the passenger seat. The guy watched her go; he wasn’t watching her shoulders.

  As she came up to the car, I slumped another six inches. She climbed into the driver’s seat, fired it up, backed out of the parking space, and we headed up the hill. “He’s back inside,” she said, as we pulled away.

  I pushed myself up. “That took a while.”

  “I knocked on the door—it’s got a Vermond combination pad, not alarmed—and asked where Clayton Accounting was, and we got to chatting,” she said. “Those computer people are amazing. They’ve got all these interesting machines.”

  “Really.”

  “Really. He’s got five of them. They look like air conditioners, all lined up in the back room.”

  “Two rooms?”

  “Three. One is a standard office, one has the computers, one has a futon on the floor and a miniature refrigerator where he keeps his Cokes.”

  “Is he in there alone?”

  “There’re two desks, but one of them looks pretty unused—like maybe a part-timer. I got the phone number.”

  She’d pissed me off a little by casually talking to the guy. “We’re gonna have to do a really light break. If we screw anything up, he’ll remember talking to you. He’ll remember your face.”

  “I thought it was worth the effort. And you know what? There is no security. The rest rooms are on the second floor. I went into the ladies’ room, and there’s a drop ceiling, but it’s a mess above it. If we went up, and anybody came in to clean up . . . they’d know.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “All right.” I looked at my watch. “Let’s go get some deodorant, and then we can hang out for the day. You can think.”

  We found a drugstore, and I bought a travel-sized can of a woman’s deodorant, the kind that advertises actual freshening powder in its spray, and a couple of Cokes. We drank the Cokes on the way back to Carter-Byrd. This time, LuEllen slumped in the seat while I went inside, carrying her briefcase so I looked like I had a reason to be there.

  The building was essentially a long string of business offices opening off central hallways that ran the length of the building. There was nobody in the hall when I walked inside, and I made a left, slipped the deodorant can out of my pocket, and gave it a couple of shakes. Bloch Technology was the third door on the left. I spotted the keypad as I came up, looked both ways, and then gave it a thorough spraying with the deodorant. I waved my hand in the air a couple of times to disperse the smell as best I could, then headed back out. Total time in the building, less than one minute. Total people encountered, none.

  “So let’s go hang out,” I said.

  We hung out, more or less; I took her to a driving range, where she hit golf balls, and very well, with a five-iron older than she was, and with a three-wood that was not only wood, but was no bigger than her fist. I did some quick sketches of her swing. Later, we caught a movie, and in between, I got back to Bobby, who had what he called a curiosity: a sudden spate of rumors on the Net that Firewall was planning a major attack. Bobby knew about Rufus and the Monger; I suggested that he call Rufus and have him trace the latest round of rumors. And I had a new question of my own, that popped into my head just as we were signing off. Bobby said:

  WILL TRACE RUMORS SOONEST.

  OK.

  CALL TONIGHT.

  YES . NEW THOUGHT : LOOK AT AIRLINES . SEE IF JM FLEW IN DAYS BEFORE HE WAS KILLED .

  YES. WILL ALSO CHECK GAS CARD. ALSO, JPEG IN YOUR BOX.

  THANKS .

  I downloaded the JPEG, which is a picture format, and saved it to examine later. After the movie, which sucked, LuEllen pointed me at a sporting goods store, where she bought a spool of black monofilament fishing line called Spider Wire. We went back to the motel, looked at the movies she’d made that morning at Bloch—five Dell servers sitting on heavy plastic benches with a monitor and keyboard off to th
e side—then had a slow dinner at a fast diner. The nerves were getting on top of me, like they always do. After dinner, we went back to the motel, picked up her bag, and at seven o’clock, when it was good and dark, we were back at Carter-Byrd.

  There were maybe forty offices in 2233. Seven or eight still showed lights—Americans work all the time, no getting around it. Bloch Technology was not one of the lighted offices; Bloch’s futon was only a tiny cloud on the horizon.

  We took the end space in the parking lot, and LuEllen tied one end of the Spider Wire around the steering wheel, led the line out through the window, across the lawn to the door. She checked to make sure that nobody was coming from inside; she did a quick knot on the outside door handle, cut the line at the spool, and strolled back to the car. When she was back, and inside, she pulled the line tight, until it stretched, absolutely invisible, directly across the sidewalk to the door.

  “Now, if somebody wants to use the sidewalk, they’ll simply have to go around,” I said. “Either that, or garrote themselves.”

  “If somebody comes, we cut the string. It flies halfway back across the yard, and nobody sees it.”

  “Did you ever do this before?”

  “No, but I read about it.”

  We sat in the lot for twenty minutes before the door opened: and the rest worked just like LuEllen thought it would. The guy pushed through the door and walked away, headed toward his car in the parking lot. She put pressure on the door as it slid closed . . .

  “Gotta hurry,” she grunted. “I don’t know if the line’ll hold. The door’s heavier than I thought.”

  “Hang on, hang on . . .” I didn’t want the guy who was leaving to see me get out of the car. When he was up the hill, I hurried across the lawn. She’d stopped the door just as it touched the doorpost. I pulled it open, and snapped the line off the handle. We were in.