The Devil's Code Read online

  Computer people, a lot of them, have the same attitude I do toward bigness, toward bureaucracy, toward being pounded into round holes. They don’t like it. Maybe there was a Firewall, and maybe some of these people were in it, and because they were, then I was suspect . . .

  Paranoia is good for you, if you’re a crook; but it doesn’t make life any easier.

  9

  ST. JOHN CORBEIL

  Corbeil was intent. Not angry, not stunned, not confused.

  Focused.

  “I don’t know where she got them, but she apparently knew they were important because she made copies,” Hart was saying. His voice was distant, tinny, with traffic in the background. He was calling from a payphone in San Jose.

  A television was mounted on the wall opposite Corbeil’s desk. One of the talking heads on CNBC was chattering about the newest disaster on the NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange. “MUTING” was printed across his face in green letters, like a TV-chip editorial.

  “If she had access . . .” Corbeil began, speaking to Hart.

  “We know she had access . . . goddamnit, nothing is clear,” Hart said.

  “Make it clear,” Corbeil snapped. “What’s the problem?”

  “She had four Jaz disks that probably came out of our supply room,” Hart said. “They have that blue OEM tint to the cases, and we assume that her brother stole them to make his copies. But on the other four disks, the cases are clear plastic—not ours. We looked in the wastebaskets and found a receipt from CompUSA, which shows that she bought three three-packs of Jaz disks. Nine disks. We found one set of four disks in clear cases—the copies—and one blank disk in a clear case . . .”

  “Which means four are missing, and that’s the exact number you’d need for another set of copies,” Corbeil said, picking up on it instantly. “Goddamnit. Where are they?”

  “That’s the problem. We don’t know. I can only think of one reason that she even made another set of copies.”

  “For security reasons. She ditched them somewhere.”

  “Yes. That’s what we think,” Hart said. “We don’t know exactly why she’d go to the trouble, though. The thing is, you can’t load an OMS file unless you have five hundred megs of memory. Not without making the computer go crazy. Her home computer had three hundred eighty-four megs, and her laptop has one hundred twenty-eight. Neither one had any of the files from the Jaz drive on it—not even the small files.”

  “So what are you saying? That she never looked at them?”

  “Not at home,” Hart said. “She could have taken them to her university office, except that we’ve been cruising her place almost since she got here, and as far as we know, she hasn’t been to the university. So the question is, if she doesn’t even know what’s on the disks, why’d she make all those copies? If she did?”

  “Could you take a look at her office?”

  “Doubtful. It’s right off a college computer lab, and there are always people around there, day and night. Not right in her office, but up and down the hall and around the lab.”

  “We’ve got to get those disks, before she does something with them.”

  “We don’t know what to do, other than watch her. We could snatch her, and squeeze the disks out of her, but, man . . . if she disappeared, that might be one too many accidents even for the Dallas police. Also, there’s been a guy hanging around with her, maybe a boyfriend or something. It’s like she doesn’t want to be alone.”

  Corbeil thought for a long time, Hart waiting through the pause. As he thought, with the CNBC mimes doing their silent chat opposite his desk, it occurred to Corbeil that he’d like to fuck every single one of the reporting women, but as for stock information, he wouldn’t trust any of them as far as he could spit a rat. That was not a coincidence, he thought. That was marketing. He wrenched himself back to the problem: “So keep an eye on her. Monitor her.”

  Hart was disappointed; Corbeil could hear it in his voice. He didn’t say “That’s it?” but he wanted to. Instead, he said, “We can’t really hang around her neighborhood, but if you want to cough up a couple of grand, in cash, I can put a bug on her car. At least we’ll know where she goes.”

  “Do it. I’ll send the cash through American Express. I’ll find out where the local office is out there, and you’ll have the money in a couple of hours. How long will it take you to get the bug?”

  “Probably tomorrow. I’ll have to call around.”

  “Good,” Corbeil said. “One other thing. I want you to start e-mailing reports to me. I’ve set up a new account called, um, Arclight. A-R-C-L-I-G-H-T. Regular number. Tell me that you’re monitoring them, that you’re watching them, and ask for advice. I’ll send one back that tells you to watch them for another week, to see if they make any contacts that seem to reflect an association with Firewall. We can discuss the feasibility of going to the FBI. Don’t be overly dramatic, but mention something about national security. We want to sound ethically challenged in the defense of the good old USA.”

  “Building a paper trail?”

  “Exactly. Give me a note or two every day, reporting on the surveillance. Maybe even suggest that we might want to get an ex-FBI guy to do a black-bag job, but I’ll turn you down on that.”

  “All right. I’ll get Benson to chip in a report.”

  “Read it first. He’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier.”

  When Hart was off the line, Corbeil leaned back in his chair, made a steeple with his fingers, and thought about it. Hart’s memos would be useful in a couple of different ways. If everything went smoothly, and they either recovered the disks or discovered there was no second copy, then the memos could stay in the files just as Hart sent them.

  If, on the other hand, the situation got out of control, the memos could be altered to show an illegal operation running inside AmMath. The memos could be altered without changing the time stamp on them, and a check of the phone records would show the matching calls coming and going . . .

  Since the Arclight file had been opened from the computer in Tom Woods’s office, it would be at least credible that Corbeil didn’t know about it; especially if Woods wasn’t around to testify.

  That’s all Corbeil would need: a level of credibility, and the silence of contrary witnesses.

  And a good lawyer, of course.

  10

  Since I couldn’t sleep anyway, I kicked LuEllen out of bed at six-thirty and we went to look for Clarence Mason. We stopped at a diner for cholesterol and caffeine, got clogged in traffic heading into San Francisco, crossed the Golden Gate at eight o’clock, and after a bit of wandering, LuEllen ran into a gas station and got a guess on the location of LaCoste Road. Mason’s place was a small dark-green bungalow with an old-style two-track drive. Nobody home.

  “Why didn’t I think of that?” I said, back in the car. “Most people work during the day.” We went out to a phone, and I hooked up the laptop and got online with Bobby. Mason, he said, had his own photography business in Santa Rosa. We found him on the second floor of a downtown building, above a flower store: Mason Restorations.

  The office door looked like it might open on a detective office from a noir movie—textured glass with a gold-leaf name. Inside, it was all windows, blond hardwood floors, and high-tech machinery. The place had two rooms—a big working space behind the counter at the entrance, and a small glassed-in office at the far end, along the window wall. The working space was occupied by a half-dozen top-end Macs, a number of film and flatbed scanners and several large color printers. Three women were looking at a computer screen when we pushed through the door; one of them straightened and walked over to the counter.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “We’re here to see Mr. Mason.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, but it’s fairly urgent.” A thirtyish blond man had looked up from a computer inside the glassed-in office; I was willing to bet he was Mason. “Could you tell him we’re frien
ds of Bobby?”

  “We really need to talk to him,” LuEllen said from my shoulder, with a smile.

  “Just a minute, please.”

  She walked back to the glassed-in office, stuck her head inside, and said something; I could see the blond’s head bobbing. She motioned to us, and we pushed through the counter gate and down to the office. The woman rejoined the other two, who were looking at the yellowed image of an old woman, apparently scanned from a paper photograph.

  Mason stood up, looking unhappy. “I’m not sure if we know the same Bobby . . .”

  “If you go online and call him, he’ll tell you we’re all right,” I said.

  He swallowed and said, “I’m not online much anymore. . . . Who are you?”

  “You saw the list of the people in Firewall? I’m k.”

  He sat down, and sat perfectly still for a moment, except for his bobbing Adam’s apple, then said, “I’ve heard a couple of things about you . . . if you’re really k. Did you once have a contract with a wine company to help straighten out their distribution system?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know my friend Clark,” he said.

  “Miller,” I said. “He lives in St. Helena in a redwood house with a real redwood hot tub in back, and his wife’s name is . . . Tom.”

  “Ex-wife,” Mason said. “She got the house.” He looked at LuEllen and said, “Close the door.” LuEllen pushed the door shut and we sat down in a couple of wooden visitors’ chairs. Mason pushed both hands through his hair and said, “This Firewall—I don’t know anything about it, but my name is all over the place. It’s driving me crazy. What’s going on? I keep waiting for the FBI to show up.”

  I looked at LuEllen, who shook her head. To Mason, I said, “Goddamnit. You don’t know anything?”

  He spread his hands: “Honest to God, I was sitting at my kitchen table reading the paper and eating shredded wheat and scanning this article on the Lighter killing, and all of a sudden I see this list with my name in it—omeomi. I almost choked to death. I never heard of Firewall before this thing. Now I’m supposed to be some sort of terrorist.”

  “Yeah. Me, too. And Bobby. We’re trying to figure out what’s going on.”

  Mason looked at LuEllen again. “Are you on the list?”

  “No. I’m just a friend. Of k’s and Bobby’s.”

  Mason shook his head. “I don’t know what to do. I’ve thought about calling the FBI and identifying myself, but . . . I don’t know, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “I don’t know your history,” I said. “I might wait a while before dragging in the law.”

  “Yeah. So would I.” He wasn’t a tough-looking guy, but the way he said it suggested a need to stay away from the feds. As a matter of privacy, ethics, and personality, I didn’t ask him what he did; LuEllen wasn’t so inhibited.

  “So what’d you do as omeomi, hold up banks?”

  She can be so perky, when she wants, that it works an odd magic on men, especially technics, who have residual fantasies about cheerleaders. That’s what I hear anyway. Mason showed a small grin and said, “No, nothing like that. I do . . . specialty photography.”

  “Jeez. When people say that, I usually think porno,” LuEllen said.

  “It’s not porno,” he said.

  “You guys should talk sometime,” I said to LuEllen. “You could trade tips.”

  “You do photography?” Now he was a little more interested. “What kind?”

  “Specialty,” she said.

  He actually chuckled, leaned back and stretched. “That’s the best kind, isn’t it?”

  We sat in silence for a couple of minutes, and then I said, “Well . . . we better go.”

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “Just checking out whoever you can find from the list?”

  “That’s the idea. Between Bobby and me, on the original list of names, we knew a few people. None of us are involved with Firewall. Then Bobby tracked down you and one other guy . . . through friends, I guess. We haven’t checked with the other guy, but your story is like the rest of ours.”

  “What’re you gonna do if you find them? Firewall?”

  “I don’t know. Bobby thinks we ought to turn them in. If they did the Lighter thing, anyway.”

  “Do it,” he said. “Find ’em, and fuck ’em.”

  Currier lived in an apartment in Santa Cruz. Again, nobody home, and Bobby hadn’t been able to find a job for him. I checked with the manager, telling her that I was an old friend in the area for a day. “He’s gone to Mexico, on vacation,” she said.

  “When did he leave?”

  “Last week. He said he’d be gone for three weeks. Too bad you missed him.”

  Now what?” LuEllen asked, as we walked away.

  “Back to Rufus. He’s three hours ahead of us—let’s see if Monger worked.”

  “What do you think about Currier?”

  “He might be running. He’s on the list; maybe he’s got reason to run.”

  “Like you.”

  “Like all of us.”

  Monger had worked. “A lot of the traffic was out of individual computers from about ten major sites—all colleges, all easy to get into,” Rufus said. “It looks like somebody went looking for online computers, planted a rumor message in a virus that dumped it into AOL message boards and other places like that. In the days before the rumors started, a lot of those ten sites had some extended traffic with a server in Laurel, Maryland.”

  “How much before the rumors started?”

  “Week or so. That’s about as far back as I can get, before the universe gets too large for Monger.”

  “A week or so.”

  “That’s what it looks like. Does this help?”

  “I have to think about it,” I said.

  Bobby came back with some info about AmMath, and the guy who ran it.

  St. John Corbeil was a smart guy, a guy who quit the Marine Corps as a major and moved to the National Security Agency. He worked for the NSA for another five years, doing nothing that Bobby could find out about, except getting an advanced degree in software design. After a five-year hitch at NSA, he quit, moved to Dallas, and started his own high-tech encryption-products firm. He’d taken a half-dozen NSA encryption, math, and software specialists with him. The company had done well, coming along with its product line just at the beginning of the Internet boom. Corbeil was reasonably rich, with his ten percent of AmMath stock and his CEO’s spot.

  I don’t understand any of that encryption shit,” LuEllen said.

  “Like this,” I said. “Suppose you wanted to send me an Internet note that said, ‘Let’s sneak into Bill Gates’s house and steal his dog.’ If strong encryption is allowed, you could run the message through a software package—you’d just push a button—and it would be impossible for anybody to break. Anybody. Unless he had the key. No matter how hot-shit somebody else’s computers were, they couldn’t break it.”

  “But with the Clipper chip . . .”

  “There’d be two keys. I’d have one, and the government would have one. You could send the message, and I’d get it okay, but so would the government. If they were watching.”

  “We’d get to Bill Gates’s house and we’d find a whole bunch of cops waiting.”

  “And we’d be standing there with our dicks in our hands.”

  “Or a can of Alpo, in my case,” she said.

  Jack had had a small house in Santa Cruz, about a mile from Currier’s apartment. After he was killed, the FBI had gotten a warrant to go through the place, and Lane told them where to find the keys. The day after the funeral, she’d called to see if she could get back in, and the feds had no objection: they’d turned the place over, and had taken out everything that appeared to be computer-related, along with all his old phone bills, personal correspondence, and so on.

  While LuEllen and I were looking up Firewall names, Lane and Green had gone over to the house to look around, and to start cleaning up. That�
��s what Lane had called it. Cleaning up.

  What she meant was, throwing away anything that couldn’t be sold or given away. All the small pieces of a life—posters, notes, letters, unidentifiable photos; like that. Jack had never had children, so there was nobody to get it, except his sister; nobody to wonder who this ancestor had been, and to sit down in 2050 or 2100 and paw through the remains . . .

  When they got back, Green said, “Somebody was there before any of us. Somebody spread the lock on the back door.”

  “Gotta be the AmMath guys,” I said. “Maybe they’re happy, since they got the disks from you . . .”

  What’d you find out about Firewall?”

  Lane asked. “Nothing,” I said. I ran it down for her.

  “This guy who went to Mexico,” Green said. “He could have gone for more than one reason. You’re assuming he went because he was scared because he was on the list, like Mason. But what if he’s running because he is with Firewall?”

  “I mentioned that,” LuEllen said. “Kidd didn’t buy it. He’s got a theory.”

  “What’s the theory?”

  “There is no Firewall,” I said. “It’s bullshit, made up out of whole cloth.”

  Then we launched into one of those circular arguments in which you almost feel as though you can grasp what’s going on, but there’s always one critical piece missing from every possible logical construction. Lane started it.

  “Exactly what would that do?” Lane asked. “If somebody made up Firewall, why would they do it?”

  “To cover some other reason for killing Lighter?” I suggested.

  “They didn’t have anything to cover. The police thought it was a mugging. They weren’t happy, but I’ve never heard there was any other big investigation going on, before the Firewall thing came up.”

  “Clipper II was dying. Is dying. Maybe they thought if one of the Clipper II people was killed by hackers, there’d be some kind of groundswell . . .”

  “There’s not going to be any groundswell,” Lane said. “The feds might want Clipper II, but it’s too late. Everybody knows it’s too late. It doesn’t have anything to do with preferences or laws. Trying to get rid of strong encryption and replace it with the Clipper II would be like trying to get rid of pi or the Round Earth Theory. It’s too fucking late.”