The Devil's Code Read online

  Goodie didn’t count the shots, but his whole world seemed to consist of noise; then the back of his head hit the carpet and his mouth opened and he groaned, and his body was on fire. He lay there, not stirring, until Hart’s face appeared in his line of vision: “Hold on, Larry, goddamnit, hold on, I’m calling an ambulance . . . Hold on . . .”

  2

  The Canadian winter arrived on Friday morning.

  Bleak Thomas and I had been fishing late-season northern pike along the English River, sunny days and cold, crisp nights, the bugs knocked down by the frost, pushing our luck down a lingering Ontario autumn.

  The bad weather came in overnight. We’d gotten up to a hazy sunshine, but by nine o’clock, a dark wedge of cloud was piling in from the northwest. We could smell the cold. It wasn’t a scent, exactly, but had something to do with the sense of smell: you turn your face to it, and your nose twitches, and you think winter.

  The bad weather was no surprise. We’d seen it on satellite pictures, forming up as a low-pressure system in the Arctic, before we left the float-plane base five days earlier—but waiting for the plane on the last morning, looking at our watches as we listened for the noisy single-engine Cessna 185, with nickel-sized snowflakes drifting in from the northwest . . . maybe we began to wonder what would happen if the plane had gone down. And if there’d been a mix-up, and the people at the base thought we’d gone down with it.

  Winter was long in northwest Ontario, and Bleak Thomas probably wouldn’t taste that good. Bleak might have been thinking along the same lines, with a change of menu. When the Cessna turned the corner at the end of the lake, like a silver wink, and the roar of the aircraft engine rolled across the water, Bleak said, “Only an hour late.”

  “Really? I thought he was a little early.” I yawned and stretched.

  “Sure,” Bleak said. “That’s why you chewed your fingernails down to your armpits.”

  The pilot was in a hurry. He taxied up to the rickety dock, pushed along by a gust of snow. Bleak and I threw our gear onboard, and we were gone, bouncing across the whitecaps and into the air. The pilot didn’t bother to check that the boats had been rolled or that the fire was dead in the potbellied stove; he took our word for it. Ten minutes after takeoff, we broke out of the snow and he said, “Good. I always land better when I can find the lake.” Then, to me, “You got some woman calling about every ten minutes.”

  “Yeah? Did she say what her name was?” I was thinking LuEllen because she was the only woman I knew who might want to get in touch in a hurry. But the pilot said, “Lane Ward.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t know her.”

  “Well, she knows you and she’s hot to talk,” the pilot said. We were half-shouting over the noisy clatter of the engine. “She didn’t say what about. She says she’s traveling and doesn’t have a call-back number.”

  He didn’t have much to say after that. We all concentrated on the lakes and canyons flicking by eight hundred feet below. In three weeks, the pilot would need skis to land. A few miles out of the base, as the pilot slipped the plane sideways to line up with the long axis of the lake, Bleak leaned forward from the backseat and said, “We were getting a little worried about you, back there.”

  “Had a little trouble with the plane, getting off this morning,” the pilot said. “I was warming her up and the prop come off.” We both looked out at the prop and then over at the pilot. He just barely grinned and said, “That joke was old when Pontius was a pilot.”

  The pilot’s wife’s name was Moony. She was a leftover hippie with a toothy grin, paisley shifts, and a little weed growing in the window box. After thirty years of cooking for fly-in fishermen, she still couldn’t put together a decent meal. Clients would take her flapjacks down to the lake and skip them off the water like rocks. When they sank, the fish wouldn’t touch them.

  Moony offered to throw together a quick lunch, but we hastily declined, jumped in the rented station wagon and drove down to Kenora. Six hours later, we were walking up the stairs at the local-carrier ramp at Minneapolis–St. Paul International.

  I been on worse trips, I guess,” Bleak said.

  His way of saying he’d had a good time. Bleak was a furniture maker, who got a thousand dollars for a chair and fifteen thousand for one of his hand-carved, ten-place craftsman-style walnut dining sets. He gave most of the money away, through the Lutheran Social Services. Bleak believed that craftsmen who got rich got soft, a sentiment I didn’t share. Not that he was a religious fanatic: he was on his fifth wife, and all five of them had been excellent women. And as we walked up the stairs into the terminal, he spotted a dark-haired woman standing at the top and said, quietly, “Look at the ass on this one, Kidd.”

  “Jesus, Bleak, you can’t talk like that in Minnesota,” I muttered; and looked.

  “Intended purely as a compliment,” Thomas said, under his breath.

  The woman turned, and was looking us over as we climbed the steps, taking in the duffels and gear bags and rod tubes. She checked Bleak for a minute, the way a lot of women check Bleak—he had long black hair and was bronzed like an Indian guide—then her eyes drifted back to me. As we crossed the top of the steps, she asked, “Are you Kidd?”

  “I am,” I said.

  “I’m Lane Ward.” She looked like her father might have been Mexican. She had the black hair and matching eyes, and the round face; but she was pale, like an Irishwoman. She stuck out her hand, and I shook it, and picked up the faintest scent: something light, flowery, French. “I’m Jack Morrison’s sister.”

  “Jack,” I said. “How is he?”

  “He’s dead,” she said. “He was shot to death a week ago today.”

  That stopped me. I looked at Bleak and he said, “Yow.”

  The parking garage at Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport is under permanent reconstruction, a running joke perpetrated by the Metropolitan Airports Commission. Since parking is impossible, we’d all taken taxis in. Bleak would take a cab down south of the cities to his workshop, and Lane and I got a cab to my place in St. Paul.

  “How’d you know I was Kidd—that Bleak wasn’t me?” I asked, as we waited for a cab to come up.

  “You looked more like a criminal,” she said.

  “Thanks. But I’m an artist.”

  “Oh, bullshit. I know about Anshiser,” she said. “I know what you and Jack did.”

  That she knew about Anshiser was disturbing. Anshiser had been a rough operation which, in the end, had taken down a major aircraft corporation. If I’d known Jack would tell her about it, I wouldn’t have worked with Jack. But then, that might not be realistic. All kinds of people knew a little bit about what I did. They just didn’t know each other so they could compare notes. “You think I look like a criminal?”

  “You look tougher than your friend, with your . . . nose.”

  Hell, I’ve always thought I was a good-looking guy. Forty-something, six feet and a bit, hardly any white in my hair, and I still have all of it. The nose, I admit, had been broken a couple of times and never gotten quite straight. I thought it lent my face a certain charm. “It’s part of my charm,” I said, wounded, as the cab came up. I held the back door for her.

  “Jack said you can be charming . . . if you wanted to be. He said you didn’t want to be, that often.” She got in the cab, and I slid in beside her.

  “What happened to Jack?” I asked.

  “Let’s wait until we get over to your place,” she said, her eyes going to the back of the driver’s head.

  Though winter was on the way, for the moment it was still in Ontario. St. Paul’s trees were shedding their leaves, but the temperature was in the sixties as we crossed the Mississippi and headed down West Seventh Street into St. Paul. Lane was quiet, checking out the local color: most notably, a cigar-chewing guy humping along, slowly, on an ancient Honda Dream. He was wearing knee shorts and black dress socks. “Sophisticated place, for a Midwestern capital city,” she said.

  “Yea
h. We’re blessed with individualism,” I said.

  We spent the rest of the ride in idle chitchat; and I sort of took her in, physically. She was pretty, with a good figure, but a figure that came from a careful diet, rather than exercise; a magazine-model’s figure, not an athlete’s.

  She had an undergraduate degree from Berkeley in philosophy and mathematics, and a couple of graduate degrees in computer science from Stanford. She now lived in Palo Alto and divided her time between an Internet start-up and teaching at Stanford. The start-up, called e-Accountant, would provide billing, collection, accounting, and tax services to Web sites too small to efficiently do it on their own. She expected to get modestly rich from it. She was no longer married to the guy named Ward.

  “He always said he wanted children, but he always wanted one more thing first,” she said. “A car or a boat or a house or a vacation place. I told him that I couldn’t wait any longer, and if he didn’t want to start on a kid, I was going to pull the plug. Even then, he couldn’t decide.”

  “So you pulled the plug.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Any candidates for the eventual fatherhood?” I asked.

  “Yes. A very nice man at Stanford, an anthropologist. He’s working on his own divorce.”

  “Ah. Were you involved in his problem?”

  “No. He doesn’t even know he’s a candidate for the new position,” she said. “Although he should be getting that idea pretty soon, now. He’ll be an excellent father, I think.”

  “Good for him,” I said.

  The cab driver’s eyes came up in the rearview mirror, and I caught him smiling. Pretty women are easily amusing.

  I’m not sure how glad your heart should be when you arrive home in a taxicab with the grieving sister of a friend who’d just been shot to death, but when the cab dropped us, I was happy. Always happy to head up north, always happy to get back. The water gives you ideas, and if you’re up there long enough, you develop an irresistible urge to work, to get the ideas on paper. Bleak was the same way; leave him in a cabin long enough, and he’ll start improving the furniture with his pocket knife.

  And things were going on around home. We had to walk up five flights of stairs because the elevator was jammed full of Alice Beck’s stoneware and porcelain pieces, which she was moving out for a show. Alice yelled down the atrium, “Sorry, Kidd, we’ll be out in ten minutes.” We traipsed on up the stairs, me with the duffel and rod tubes, Lane carrying the tackle bag.

  We stopped on the third floor for a moment, so Lane could look at some of Alice’s vases. She liked them, and Alice invited us to the opening, two days away.

  Lane shook her head. “I’d love to, but we’ve got a funeral to go to,” she said, and we continued on up. At the next flight, she looked down and said, quietly, “Beautiful stuff,” and I nodded and said, “People say she’s as good as Lucie Rie, but I’m afraid she’s gonna burn the building down some day. She’s got a Marathon gas kiln in her back room. I can hear it roaring away at night, that whooshing sound, like the cremation of Sam McGee.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “The cremation of Sam McGee?”

  “No, stupid: the kiln.”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  “Have you complained?”

  “Nah. I helped her carry it up.”

  Home; and the Cat was in.

  He was sitting on the back of the couch, looking out at the Mississippi, a red tiger-stripe with a head the size of a General Electric steam iron. He didn’t bother to hop down when I came in. In fact, he pretended not to notice. An old lady artist downstairs, a painter, kept him fed for me while I was gone, and he had his own flap so he didn’t need a cat pan except in deepest winter.

  “Hey, Cat,” I said. He looked away—but he’d come creeping around about bedtime, looking for a scratch.

  “He looks like you,” Lane said.

  “Who?”

  “The cat.”

  “Thanks.” I supposed that could be a flattering comment; on the other hand, the Cat was pretty beat up. One ear had been damn near chewed off, and sometimes, on cold mornings, he’d limp a little, and look up at me and meow, like he was asking for a couple of aspirin. I dumped the duffel, stepped into the kitchen, and said to Lane, “Tell me about Jack,” and asked, “Want some coffee?”

  She agreed to the coffee. “I think he was murdered,” she said, as we waited for the water to heat in the microwave. “He was supposedly shot to death after he broke into a secure area of a company called AmMath in Dallas. He was shot twice in the chest and died immediately. Another man was wounded.”

  “But not killed?”

  “Not killed.”

  “So he could tell you what they were doing . . .” The microwave beeped and I took the cups out.

  “No, no, no . . . The man who was wounded was supposedly shot by Jack,” she said. “They say that Jack had a gun and opened fire when he was caught. There were two guards or security men, whatever you call them, and supposedly, Jack shot one, and the second guard shot Jack.”

  “Jack?” You had to know him.

  “Exactly,” she said. “There’s no way that Jack would shoot at somebody. He wouldn’t shoot at somebody to save his own life, much less to keep from getting caught in a burglary, or whatever he was supposedly doing. Unless . . .” She looked sideways at me, and her eyes sort of hooked on.

  “Yeah?”

  “Unless, working with you, you taught him to take a gun along. A technique, or something.”

  I shook my head: “Never. I never take a gun. The only thing you can do with a gun is shoot somebody. I’m not gonna shoot somebody over the schematics for a microchip.”

  “That’s what he told me,” she said. “That nothing you did involved violence.”

  Nothing that Jack knew about involved violence, I thought. But violence had been done, a time or two or three, as much as I tried to avoid it, and regretted it. Or, to be honest, as much as I regretted some of it. I’d met a sonofabitch down the Mississippi one time, who, if he came back from the dead, I’d cheerfully run through a stump chipper.

  “What was Jack doing?” I stirred instant coffee crystals into the hot water and handed her a cup. She had a way of looking at you directly, and standing an inch too close, that might have bent the attention of a lesser man.

  “Nobody will say exactly. All they will say is that he entered a high-security area in AmMath—they’re the people doing Clipper II—and that he opened fire when they walked in on him,” she said.

  Clipper II was an Orwellian nightmare come true, a practical impossibility, or a huge joke at the taxpayers’ expense—take your pick. It was designed in response to a fear of the U.S. government that unbreakable codes would make intercept-intelligence impractical. And really, they had a point, but their solution was so draconian that it was doomed to failure from the start.

  The Clipper II chip—like the original Clipper chip before it—was a chip designed to handle strong encryption. If it was made mandatory (which the government wanted), everyone would have to use it. And the encryption was guaranteed secure. Absolutely unbreakable.

  Except that the chip contained a set of keys just for the government, just in case. If they needed to, they could look up the key for a particular chip, get a wiretap permit, and decrypt any messages that were sent using the chip. They would thereby bring to justice (they said) all kinds of Mafiosos, drug dealers, money launderers, and other lowlifes.

  Hackers, of course, hated the idea. They were already using encryption so strong that nobody, including the government, could break it. The idea of going back to less secure encryption, so that the government could spy on whoever it wanted, drove them crazy. No hacker on earth really believed that the government would carefully seek wiretap permits before doing the tap. It’d be tap first, ask later, just like it is now with phone taps.

  The good part of the whole controversy was that everybody seriously concerned with encryption knew it was too late for the
Clipper II. It had been too late for the Clipper I a decade earlier. Strong encryption was out of the bag, and it would be impossible to push it back in.

  Lane had taken a sip of coffee, winced, and asked something, but thinking about Clipper II, I missed it. “Huh?”

  She repeated the question. “Do people kill for software?”

  “Not me. But Windows is software, and it made the creator a hundred billion dollars. In parts of some cities, you could get a killing done for twelve dollars ninety-five. So some software could get some killing done,” I said. We both thought about that for a minute. Then, “If it really happened like you say it did—hang on, let me finish—if Jack shot somebody, it wasn’t for the software, necessarily. It was to keep from getting caught and maybe sent to prison. Prison in Texas.”

  “But you know and I know,” she continued, “that Jack didn’t shoot anybody. Since somebody shot the guard, there had to be somebody else in the room when Jack was shot, even though the company says nobody else was there but the guard and another security man.”

  “Maybe one security guy shot the other to make it look like Jack shot first . . .”

  I said it in a not-quite-joking way, but she took it seriously: “No, I thought about that. But the guard who was shot was hurt bad. The bullet went right through his lung. He’s an old guy and he almost died on the way to the hospital.”

  “So the whole thing holds together.”

  “Almost too well,” she said. “There aren’t any seams at all. They searched Jack’s house and found some supposedly secret files on a Jaz disk hidden in a shoe. Very convenient. That really nailed it down. The only thing that doesn’t work is the shooting. Jack hated guns. They scared him. He wouldn’t even pick one up.”

  She was getting hot: I slowed her down with a straight factual question. “What was he doing in Dallas?”

  “A contract job,” she said. “He’d been there three months and had maybe another three to go. AmMath had a couple of old supercomputers, Crays, that they’d bought from the weather service, and they were having trouble keeping them talking. Jack had done some work on them years ago, and they hired him to straighten out the operating software.”