The Devil's Code

by John Sandford

  I said, “Huh,” because I couldn’t think of anything wiser.

  “Ask me why I came to see you,” she said.

  “All right. Why’d you come to see me?”

  “First, to ask if you were in Dallas? Ever? With Jack?”

  “No.” I shook my head: “Jack and I haven’t worked together for two years.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. He rewrote some software for me.” So I’d be able to plug into a Toyota design computer anytime I needed to. “Two years ago . . . November.”

  “Then what’s this mean?” She dug in her purse and handed me a printout of an e-mail letter. “Look at the last couple of lines.”

  I scanned all of it. Most was just brother-sister talk about their father’s estate—their parents were both dead now, their father dying nine months back.

  The last two lines of Jack’s letter said, “I’m into something a little weird here. I don’t want to worry you, but if anything unusual should happen, get in touch with Kidd, okay? Just say Bobby and 3ratsass3.”

  3

  If you look in the shaving mirror in the morning and ask what you’ve become, and the answer is “Artist & Professional Criminal,” then you may have taken a bad turn down life’s dark alley. While other people were wistfully contemplating the grassy fork in “The Road Not Taken,” I’d lurched down a gutter full of broken wine bottles, and kicked asses and people telling me to go fuck myself. Nobody to blame, really.

  Well, maybe the Army. The Army had left me a roster of dead friends, a vicious dislike for bureaucratic organization, and a few unusual skills. And hell, it was interesting. At least I’m not stuck in a garret somewhere, with a pointy little beard and a special rap for victim women, trying to peddle my paintings to assholes in shiny Italian suits. At least I’m not that.

  What I am, is an artist. A painter. I make decent money from it. But even though I was working harder than ever, my production—artists actually talk about things like production—had been falling over the years. I’d always been a little fussy about what I sold, and I’d gotten fussier as I’d gotten older, so even as my prices went up, my income actually declined a little. The year before, I’d sold six paintings. I’d gotten a little more than $300,000, but let me tell you about the taxes . . .

  Or maybe not. I sound a little too Republican when I get started on taxes.

  In any case, I still worked at my night job. I stole things. Computer code, schematics for new chips or new computers, designs for new cars. I suppose I could have stolen jewelry or cash, but I wasn’t interested in jewelry or cash—and besides, that kind of thievery didn’t pay as well as my kind.

  I knew that for sure, because my best friend is a woman named LuEllen, who was exactly that kind of thief: she stole cash and jewelry and coin collections and even stamps—or anything else that was portable and could easily and invisibly be turned into cash. LuEllen and I had known each other since I caught her trying to break into another guy’s apartment in my building. That was several years ago. Ever since, we’d been friends and sometimes more than friends.

  Even with that history, I had no idea what LuEllen’s real last name was, or where exactly she lived. She was comfortable with my ignorance.

  I’m not exactly embarrassed by the night job, though I’ve often thought I’d give it up if I could make nine paintings a year instead of six. Then again, I might not. If I were French, and philosophical, I might even argue that “professional criminal” wasn’t that far from “freedom fighter.”

  But there was always that skeptical face in the mirror, the face that asked whether freedom fighting should generate large amounts of expendable income. I could say—“Hey, even freedom fighters gotta eat.” But what do you do when the face in the mirror asks, “Yeah, but should freedom fighters get condos in New Orleans and painting trips to Siena and fishing jaunts to Ontario and season tickets for the Wolves?”

  Being neither French nor philosophical—rather, a believer in the Great God WYSIWYG, that What You See Is What You Get—I had no ready answer for the question, except . . .

  You gotta shave faster.

  I did not immediately believe, or believe in, Lane Ward; believe that I was getting what I was seeing. “Let me get out on the Net for a couple of minutes,” I said.

  “Check me out?” Ward asked.

  “See if I’ve got mail,” I said, politely.

  “ ‘3ratsass3’ sounds like a password,” she said. “So who’s Bobby?” She had large, dark eyes. I’d first thought maybe Mexican, with an Irish complexion. Now I was thinking Oriental, one of the robust-yet-delicate Japanese ladies of the Hiroshige woodcuts. Something about the eyebrows. I would like to draw her, from a quarter angle off her face, to get the brow ridge, the cheekbone, and the ear. I didn’t say that.

  “Bobby runs an information service,” I said. An information service for people like me, I might have added—but I didn’t add it. “ ‘3ratsass3’ is probably the password on one of Bobby’s mailboxes.”

  “So let’s see what’s in it.” She looked around. “Where’s your computer?”

  “In the back.”

  I’ve been in the apartment for a while. I own it, part of a deal the city of St. Paul had going years ago, to bring people back downtown. I’ve got a tiny kitchen with a small breakfast nook off to one side; a compact living room with a river view; a workroom with maybe three thousand books, two hundred various bits and pieces of software, and, most of the time, three or four operating computers; a studio with a wall of windows facing northeast; and a bedroom. On the way back to the workroom, Lane paused in the door of the studio, looked up at the wall of windows, the big beat-up easel and all the crap that goes with painting, and asked, “What’s this?”

  “I’m a painter,” I said. “That’s what I really do. The computer stuff is a sideline.”

  “You really are an artist?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jack never told me,” she said. She peered at me for a second, as if doing a reevaluation.

  “Jack didn’t know me that way,” I said. “We mostly knew each other on the Net. I only met him twice face-to-face.”

  “He came here?”

  “No, no, I saw him once when he was between planes, out at the airport, and once when I had some business out in Redmond.”

  “Redmond,” she said, and, “Huh.” She stepped over to a painting I’d propped against a wall. I’d finished it a few weeks before the fishing trip, a line of stone buildings dropping down a hill in the flat yellow light of a Minnesota September. The light is thin, then, but yellow-creamy—almost like the light you get in central Italy on hot summer evenings, although in St. Paul, it only lasts three weeks.

  After a few seconds of peering at the painting, Lane cocked her head and did a little shuffle step to get a better look. “Only two dimensions and all that light,” she said, “but it looks so like . . . it might be.” I shrugged, and she said, “Jeez. I really like it.”

  I never know what to say, so I said, “The workroom’s down this way.”

  An old cow-box Pentium was set up on a table at the far end of the workroom. A shoulder-high stack of Dell chassis were sitting on the floor, with a couple of big cardboard boxes. She looked at the chassis and asked, “What’re you doing here?”

  “Some people in Chicago want to build an America’s Cup boat,” I said. “They need a supercomputer to design the hull, but they can’t afford it, so I’m making one, with a friend.”

  “Yeah? Neat.” She wasn’t particularly impressed, as though she’d done the same thing a time or two herself. “What’s the setup?”

  “We’re gonna chain sixty-four Dell Pentium IIIs with an Ethernet array running through these stacked hubs”—I whacked a stack of cardboard boxes with the palm of my hand—“as a single distributed OS. We got the operating system off a freeware site . . .”

  “Love the freeware,” she said.

  “ . . . and my friend—she’s really
doing the numbers—will come over and write whatever connections she needs, and . . . go to work.”

  “Cool.” She looked around again, taking in the books. “Where’s your Net hookup?”

  I took her down to the cow-box machine. Some previous owner, or more likely the wife or girlfriend of a previous owner, had written “Fuck you, fat boy,” on the beige front panel of the monitor, in pink indelible ink. “Top of the line, huh?” she asked.

  “What can I tell you?” You don’t need a workstation to read your e-mail. When we were up, I said, “Why don’t you, uh, go look at the Dells?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m gonna dial a number I don’t want you to see, and follow a procedure I also don’t want you to see.”

  “Really?” she asked. “So it’s out in the dark? Okay. I forgot.”

  “What?”

  She smiled, for the first time, a smile bordering on greatness: “That you’re a crook.”

  She wandered down to the end of the room, and I dialed Bobby’s 800 number, a number I’m sure that AT&T doesn’t know about, since ten digits follow the 800. I then waited through ten seconds of electronic silence; in the eleventh second, the modem burped and a “?” appeared on the screen. I typed eight digits, got another “?” and typed “k” and got a further “?” I typed “MALE,” which was either a deliberate misspelling in the interests of security, or a joke. When the final “?” appeared, I typed “3RATSASS3.”

  A letter popped up.

  OH, FUCK: UNLESS I’M READING THIS MYSELF, I COULD BE IN DEEP SHIT.

  KIDD: GET DOWN TO DALLAS AND FIND ME—I MIGHT BE IN JAIL.

  THIS IS THE DEAL: I CONTRACTED WITH AMMATH TO OVERHAUL THEIR SYSTEM SOFTWARE, WHICH JOB I GOT BECAUSE I HAVE A DOD CLEARANCE FROM WHEN I WAS AT JPL. IT’S ALL SUPPOSED TO BE SECRET, BUT EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT THEY’RE WORKING ON SOFTWARE FOR THE CLIPPER II—IT’S BEEN IN THE NEWSPAPERS. SO I FIGURE THAT’S NO BIG DEAL, BECAUSE CLIPPER II IS DEAD IN THE HOUSE AND EVEN DEADER IN THE SENATE AND EVERYBODY EXCEPT THE INTELLIGENCE GOOFS IN WASHINGTON KNOWS IT’S TOO LATE ANYWAY. BUT AROUND HERE, THEY’RE ACTING LIKE IT’S A NEW ATOMIC BOMB, AND THESE PEOPLE AIN’T GOOFS. IN FACT, THEY SCARE ME A LITTLE BIT.

  THE OTHER DAY I WAS MANIPULATING A BUNCH OF STUFF IN A FILE CALLED OMS JUST TO SEE IF THE SYSTEM WAS RIGHT. I GOT TO READING SOME OF IT, AND FUCK ME WITH A PHONE POLE IF IT HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH CLIPPER. I WAS STILL READING THROUGH IT WHEN A SECURITY GUY CAME DOWN FROM CORPORATE AND ASKED ME WHAT I WAS DOING. I TOLD HIM, ACCESS TESTS, AND TOLD HIM I WASN’T REALLY READING ANYTHING, AND HE TELLS ME TO STAY OFF THAT LINK UNLESS I GIVE PRIOR NOTICE. I SAY OK. THEY MUST’VE HAD A TRIP WIRE ON IT.

  SO ANYWAY, I’M GOING BACK TONIGHT WITH A BUNCH OF JAZ DISKS, I’M GONNA DISCONNECT THE TRIP WIRE AND DUMP THE OMS FILE. (OMS I FOUND OUT STANDS FOR OLD MAN OF THE SEA, BUT I DIDN’T SEE ANYTHING IN IT ABOUT HEMINGWAY.) ANYWAY, JUST IN CASE, I’LL STASH COPIES IN THE SAFEST POSSIBLE PLACE.

  IF YOU’RE READING THIS, I’M PROBABLY IN A JAM. THE GUY TO WATCH IS A SECURITY ASSHOLE NAMED WILLIAM HART. THERE ARE RUMORS THAT HE USED TO BE SOME KIND OF MILITARY SECURITY GUY OR SOMETHING, AND HE GOT KICKED OUT. ONE OF THE SECRETARIES TOLD ME THAT HE’D DONE TIME IN PRISON BEFORE HE CAME TO AMMATH, SO YOU WANT TO STAY AWAY FROM HIM.

  SO, THAT’S IT. I HOPE TO HELL I’M READING THIS, AND NOT YOU. IF IT’S YOU, COME GET ME. SAY HELLO TO LUELLEN FOR ME . . . DON’T TAKE ANY WOODEN PUSSY.

  JACK

  That did not sound good. I looked at if for a couple of minutes, then buzzed Bobby: Bobby’s always available. After I buzzed him, I got the “?” again, and went back with a “k.” He was on immediately.

  KIDD, WHERE YOU BEEN?

  FISHING .

  BEEN TRYING TO FIND YOU: SAW AIRLINE TO KENORA AND THEN LOS T YOU.

  OUT OF TOUCH . WHAT ’S HAPPENING ?

  YOU READ ABOUT FIREWALL?

  I KNOW NOTHING . JUST BACK NOW .

  GO OUT ON NET, LOOK AT PAPERS, NEW YORK TIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL, WASHINGTON POST. WE NEED TO FIND FIREWALL AND GIVE THEM TO COPS. BUT FIREWALL NAMES ARE NOT GOOD. YOU ARE NOT FIREWALL. STANFORD IS NOT. ONE2OXFORD IS NOT. CARLG IS NOT.

  I DON ’T KNOW WHAT YOU ’RE TALKING ABOUT .

  READ PAPERS AND GET BACK. YOUR NAME IS ON LIST.

  DO YOU KNOW STANFORD IS DEAD ?

  Standford was Jack’s working name. There was a pause; something you didn’t get with Bobby.

  DEAD? ARE YOU SURE? WHEN AND WHERE?

  LAST FRIDAY IN DALLAS . SUPPOSEDLY SHOT TO DEATH DURING BREAK -IN AT SOFTWARE COMPANY CALLED AM MATH .

  DID NOT KNOW. WILL CHECK IMMEDIATELY. STANFORD IS ON FIREWALL LIST.

  DO YOU KNOW LANE WARD ?

  NO. I’VE HEARD NAME. COMPUTERS AT BERKELEY.

  I NEED BROTHERS AND SISTERS FOR LANE WARD AND ALSO PHOTO FOR WARD . SOONEST .

  WILL DUMP TO YOUR BOX ONE HOUR. YOU MUST GO OUT ON NET!!! READ FIREWALL. I WILL CHECK ON STANFORD.

  OK . . . WILL CALL BACK .

  Dial tone and out.

  I read down the screen once more, wiped out everything but the letter, printed it, and then said, “Hey.”

  Lane drifted back. “What?” she asked.

  “A letter from your brother.”

  “Aw, jeez.”

  I pulled it out of the printer and handed it to her. She took a minute reading it, a little vertical line between her eyes. Then she read it again and a tear trickled down one cheek. Finally, she looked up.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Curiosity. Jack was a computer guy. If you tell a computer guy not to look in a file, he’ll look in the file.”

  “Especially if he thinks of himself as some kind of cool James Bond guy,” she said. Like it was my fault.

  “Do you know anything about a group called Firewall?” I asked.

  She gave me a long look and then asked, “Are you working for the government?”

  That took a while to sort out. I told her about Bobby’s strange anxiety and she suggested that I do what Bobby wanted: that I look up Firewall in the papers and on the Net. I went back out, with Lane looking over my shoulder.

  Eight days earlier, as I’d been sitting on my living room floor sorting out pike lures, a National Security Agency bureaucrat named Lighter had been murdered walking near his home in Maryland. Jack was killed the next night, twelve hours before I flew out to Kenora.

  According to the online papers, the Lighter killing was at first thought to be a random mugging, although the detectives working the murder had been disturbed by some of its aspects. There was no sign that Lighter had fought his assailants, or tried to run. He’d simply been gunned down. Lighter’s wife told police that he’d been mugged once before, when they lived in Washington, and that he had calmly handed over his wallet while he tried to reassure the muggers that he was not a threat. In other words, there was no reason to kill him to get his money. And he’d been shot down on a quiet suburban street, where mugging, much less murder, was almost unknown.

  A couple of days later, rumors began to surface on the Net that he’d been killed by a radical hacker group calling itself Firewall. Firewall claimed to be taking “preemptive revenge” for the Clipper II, although the Clipper II was widely believed to be a dead issue. And some names had surfaced . . . CarlG, Dave, Bobby, FirstOctober, RasputinIV, k, LotusElan, One2Oxford, Stanford, Whitey.

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  “What?”

  To cover myself: “Do you know your brother’s working name?”

  “You mean, Yellowjacket? That’s his gamer name.”

  “I never heard that. He’d always been Stanford.” I tapped the list on the screen. “They’ve got him listed as a member of this Firewall.”

  She looked. “Stanford is Jack? Huh . . .” She turned away, slowly, thinking.

  “What?”

  “You don’t talk with the government,” she said. A statement, with a question inside.

  “No. Of course not.”

  “I have,” she s
aid, slowly. “They asked me not to tell anyone. I talked to them on Tuesday. I was interviewed for two hours by the FBI. About Firewall. Where Jack had been traveling and who his friends are. I didn’t know any of that, except some friends we have in common. Jack would travel about once a year, to Europe, but that was about it. The last time he was out of the country was six months ago.”

  “You didn’t mention me?”

  “No, of course not. I know better than that,” she said.

  “What do you know about Firewall?”

  “Nothing. I’d never heard of it. Jack would have told me, if he was involved. But those little Net conspiracies . . . you know what they are. They’re socially retarded geeks who think they’re living a comic book. Jack wouldn’t have anything to do with them. Neither would I.”

  “Executing a guy because he’s working on Clipper II . . . that doesn’t sound like socially retarded geeks,” I said.

  “Oh, no?” she asked. “Then who else could it be? Murdering somebody over a chip—not even a real chip? And who else would care, besides geeks?”

  “The Mafia?”

  “Oh, bullshit.” She rolled her eyes.

  “It’s too . . . physical.”

  She put her hands on her hips: “Look at yourself, for Christ’s sakes, Kidd. You’re some kind of aging jock-nerd-engineer-fisherman-artist with a broken nose. What if it’s somebody just like you, with a taste for blood?”

  No answer to that. The question was urgent, if the feds and spy people and God knew who else were tearing up the countryside, because Bobby was on the list. And so was I. I was “k.”

  Lane kept going back to Jack’s letter.

  “Where’s the safest possible place?” she asked.

  “Somewhere I could get at them, I guess.” I had an idea, but wasn’t about to show it. Not until I knew her better. “Maybe he shipped them somewhere. I’ve got a bunch of mailboxes, scattered around. I’ve even got one at AOL.”