The Devil's Code

by John Sandford

  “We should have spent a little time fooling around,” I said. “For verisimilitude—you don’t really have that nice pink postorgasmic look that you get afterwards.”

  “We could still go for it,” she offered.

  “Too late to impress the clerk,” I said.

  The OMS2 file was mostly interesting for the names—military people from around the world, but mostly from the band of Islamic states that stretched from Syria to Indonesia. Only Egypt in Africa; and Turkey was missing.

  “Why is that odd?” LuEllen asked, when I commented on it.

  “Just the selection of names. If you’re doing the Clipper, these people might all be customers, but the main customers would be the bigger states—England, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, China, India, like that. Instead, we have Syria, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kazakhstan—missing Afghanistan, missing Saudi Arabia, missing Turkey.”

  “It’s only one file. If it’s OMS2, that implies other numbers, even if we couldn’t get them. Maybe they’re someplace else, or they erased them.”

  “Yeah, that’s true . . .”

  The CLPR file included a couple of thousand memos on routine technical, personnel, and financial matters. We spent four hours reading through them—scanning them, really—without finding a single useful fact.

  “You know what?” LuEllen said. “If I had to be an administrative guy, I’d cut my wrists. I can’t imagine even writing this shit, much less worrying about it.”

  “Not a single goddamn thing,” I said, discouraged.

  “Maybe there is one thing,” she said. “Not a fact . . . and I’m not sure, but let’s look at the dates on these things.”

  We looked at the dates, and LuEllen pointed out that two years earlier, there were ten or twenty Clipper memos being filed every week. A year ago, there were ten at the most. For the past six or eight months, there were four or five being filed weekly.

  “Like the project is running down,” she said.

  “Maybe it’s running out of time, or money. Maybe they’ve been stealing from it, and that’s what they’re trying to cover,” I suggested.

  “So why would they kill for a picture of three guys in a parking lot? If they did?”

  “We’d know, if we could figure out who the guys were,” I said.

  “How do we do that? Figure it out?”

  “I don’t think we do. We’re not the fuckin’ FBI. We’re just some guys.”

  19

  ST. JOHN CORBEIL

  Corbeil was in a rage: the necklace was gone, and the palm of his hand itched for it. His space had been violated. He had been so angry about the necklace that he hadn’t seen that it was a diversion. And they’d done it so beautifully.

  They’d absolutely suckered him. Those greasy footprints all over the living room, with only one track leading past the computer. He could still see the footprints in his mind’s eye, could still feel the way he’d relaxed when he realized that the computer hadn’t been touched.

  He’d been angry about the necklace, but that had only been thieves. Lord knows he’d paraded the stones around enough, hanging them off the necks of half the models in Dallas. But they’d used him, they’d known how he’d think.

  Then, that same night, they’d looted the computer. They would not have been found out if Woods hadn’t been watching, hadn’t seen, the next morning, the odd groping-about in the files. He’d come in to ask about it, and Corbeil knew instantly what had happened.

  Suckered.

  “Lane Ward,” he said.

  “She wouldn’t have the resources,” Hart protested. “Whoever went into your apartment was a pro. That safe wasn’t ripped out of the wall by hackers. That took special gear. They goddamned near destroyed your apartment and nobody in the building heard a thing.”

  “Then who is it? The FBI doing a black-bag job? Not anymore, it’s not. The CIA? They’re the most gun-shy intelligence agency in the West. The NSA? They have fewer resources in the dark than we do. So who? Somehow, it’s Ward. Or if it’s not Ward, she can tell us who it is. Look at what they did with the bug in San Francisco. She’s got help.” He turned and looked at Hart. “Find her. Take her. We’ll talk to her out at the ranch.”

  “Mr. Corbeil, if she disappears, the shit’s going to hit the fan. I’m already tied to the Morrison killing.”

  “Look: we can make her out to be a member of Firewall. We’ve already started the groundwork on that. I’ll have Woods do an entry from the outside, using the stuff from my apartment, just like they did it—but they’ll go into Clipper files, and we’ll call the NSA and the FBI in. We’ll lead them back to her, somehow.”

  “What? She drops her driver’s license on the motel floor?” Hart asked skeptically. “And she’s got somebody with her.”

  “Yeah, and that’s another guy we want to talk to. I’ll bet it’s some little Stanford computer genius who happens to know how to hack into anything. One of those goddamned pencil-necked hundred-and-sixty-IQ smart-asses who might even be able to pull a safe out of a wall.”

  Hart shook his head, and then Corbeil said, “Fingerprints, maybe.”

  “What?”

  “A computer attack’s launched from a motel room. When the FBI investigates, it finds her fingerprints all over the place.”

  “How’re we going to get her to do that?”

  “We’ll talk to her first in a motel room. Rent a room, talk to her there, make sure there are plenty of prints around, then take her out to the ranch. As soon as she’s gone, we have Woods make an intrusion call from the motel room . . . The Agency can still trace that kind of crap.”

  “Sounds too complicated. If she broke away, if she started screaming . . .”

  “So if it’s too complicated, take her right out to the ranch,” Corbeil snarled.

  “Then we can’t . . .”

  “We’ll have her hands,” Corbeil said. “She won’t need them. Not when we’re done talking to her.”

  “Jesus,” Hart said.

  “No, he’s not here,” Corbeil answered.

  “I just think, I’m starting to feel . . .”

  “What?”

  “This is out of control.”

  “William, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. We’ve got to get it back under control, or we’re dead meat. You did a year in the softest prison in Texas. How’d you like a real hard place, the kind of place they reserve for traitors? That’s what they’d call us: traitors. William, we would spend the rest of our lives up to our necks in shit.”

  “But if we just . . .”

  “Do nothing? We’ve been trying that, William. It’s not working. We need to know what’s happening. If worse comes to worst, we at least need the time to run.”

  “Run.” Hart clasped his head in his hands. “Ah, Jesus. Running.”

  “So you get Lane Ward. And the geek who’s driving her around, whoever it is. In the meantime, I’ll sit here, behind this desk—” he pointed to the cherrywood desk in the corner—“and try to think of a way to pin the whole thing on Firewall. Pin it hard enough that we won’t go down for it, anyway.”

  “We should shut down the Old Man of the Sea.”

  Corbeil shrugged. “If you insist, but there’s really no point. They’re not close to it; they have no hint of it.”

  “I would just feel easier about it,” Hart said.

  “I’ll talk to Woods,” Corbeil said.

  20

  We slept late the next morning, LuEllen later than I. At ten o’clock, I rolled out, stretched, cleaned up. When I came back into the main room, LuEllen was still half asleep. She’d thrown the blanket off, and from one angle, near the bathroom door, her face was nicely framed by one outflung arm, and was just rising—from that perspective—over a thigh, with her foot in the foreground. Feet are always nice to draw, especially when you get to see them from the bottom. I tiptoed around to my briefcase, got out my drawing book, eased a chair over to the bathroom door, sat down, and drew for an ho
ur.

  Finally, growing aware of the total silence, she pushed herself halfway up and looked around. “Kidd?”

  “Right here.”

  “Drawing my butt again?” She pushed herself all the way up, stretched and yawned.

  “It’s in the picture, but it’s not the focus; it’s sorta half cut off.”

  She came to look as I worked some shading in around her toes. “My feet aren’t that big,” she said.

  “From this perspective.”

  “They’re not that big. They’re fives.”

  “From this angle.”

  “Bullshit. Not that big. And my toe isn’t that bent.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. I apologize.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said. She stretched again. “You don’t care whose fragile ego you crush. All artists are like that.”

  “Somebody once said that a portrait is a painting where there’s something not quite right about the mouth,” I said. “It might have been Sargent. Anyway, nobody’s ever said that about the foot.”

  “I’m the first.”

  “Go take a shower,” I said.

  She went to take a shower and I struggled with the foreshortening of her leg and foot, and with her face in the back, rising over her thigh, and the pillow behind that. When I was done, I took the drawing out, ripped it up, and tossed it in the wastebasket. Something not quite right about the foot. With all that in my head, waiting for LuEllen to get out of the bathroom, I looked out the window down at the parking lot.

  And understood what I hadn’t understood before.

  Why I had looked down at the parking lot and thought I’d missed an important thought.

  Understood the AmMath photographs—or something about them, anyway. It all came out of the perspective of LuEllen’s foot . . .

  The shower was running and I could hear her humming to herself in the bathroom as I brought the laptop up, and one of the photos.

  “Jesus.” I was right. I sat staring at it, then brought up another one. Ripped a piece of paper out of my drawing book, got a pen, and began making comparative measurements on the computer screen. I was still doing it when LuEllen came bobbling out of the bathroom with a towel around her head. I glanced at her and looked back at the computer.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’m here with my nice pink . . .”

  “Shut up. I gotta get online with Bobby. Get dressed.”

  “What?”

  “Look at this photograph.”

  She looked over my shoulder. “What?” she asked again.

  “Look how this shadow comes down from this light pole? The shadow from the sun?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Look how it comes down from this light pole,” I said.

  “All right.”

  “And this one.”

  “I see all the shadows and all the light poles, Kidd. So what?”

  “All the shadows are in exactly the same perspective. Exactly, as close as I can measure. Doesn’t it look weird to you?”

  “No. And so what?”

  “It’s impossible, that’s all. Well, not impossible, if the camera was far enough back.”

  “We were thinking it might be a surveillance camera up on a roof. It’d have to be, to get that high angle.”

  “Still not high enough,” I said. “I gotta get with Bobby. He could make some better measurements and do the numbers.”

  “If that’s not high enough, what? You think it was made by a plane?”

  “Not high enough,” I said. “I think that’s a satellite photograph.”

  She still wasn’t much impressed; I had to work to get that. “Think what a face would look like if you took it from three blocks away with your Nikon and then blew it up to this size. It’d look like a thumbprint,” I said. “Look at those faces. You can’t quite recognize them, but you almost can. If that camera’s in orbit, it has one unbelievable capability.”

  Now she was hunched over me, and spotted something we should have seen before. “You know, those cars . . .” There were only a half-dozen of them in the parking lot. “Not a single one of them is American-made. Look at this one . . .” She tapped the screen with a fingernail. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that kind. It looks like a combination of a pickup truck and a sedan.”

  “You see those in the Middle East,” I said. “Lots of them.”

  She straightened. “So it’s a satellite photo. So what?”

  “I don’t know, yet. But it seems unlikely that a satellite would take a picture of three guys and the three guys were important,” I said. “How could you time something like that?”

  “Radios, maybe . . .”

  I shook my head. “I bet it’s not the guys that are important. I bet it’s the photograph. Not the content, just the photograph, that they have it. They’re supposed to be working on the Clipper chip, and they have this. This has got to be some kind of ungodly high-level secret capability. You could not only see stuff like ammo dumps, you could see what’s in them. If they can do something with computers to punch up the resolution—just a probability engine—they might be able to figure out who gets into which car, might be able to track cars through traffic . . . all kinds of stuff.”

  “They’re NSA, right? Isn’t that what they do?”

  “No, no, that’s another group, the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office. They do all the satellite stuff.”

  “So let’s get online with Bobby, and see what he says.”

  We got online from a mall. Bobby thought he could figure out the height of the camera by picking out small parts of the original full-strength photos and making some precise measurements on the shadows.

  FREAKY IF IT’S A SATELLITE PHOTO. NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS.

  MAYBE WHAT THEY ’RE HIDING .

  BUT WHAT DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH FIREWALL?

  There was the other side of Lane’s question. Lane was interested in what happened to Jack; Bobby was interested in how his name got attached to Firewall. Somehow, AmMath was involved in both of those things, but how and why were they related? Or were they related?

  We talked about it as we were leaving the mall, and decided they had to be linked. Jack went to Maryland, where the computer that started the Firewall rumors was located. The guy he saw, who was later killed, was a client of that same server. It was all tied. We just couldn’t see the knot.

  Lane, it turned out, had been worrying about the same questions all night. We all had breakfast together, and she leaned across the diner table, picked up my glass of Coke, and rapped it on the table. She had a theory, she said.

  “Say the photographs are wildly important, for some reason. We don’t know why, but let’s say that’s a given. Jack steals them. They know he stole them, but they don’t know why, or who he might have given them to. So they come up with a scheme. They invent this Firewall group, using names that they harvest from the Internet. Legendary hackers. There’s all kinds of talk on the Net. Anybody could get a list like that. They make Jack a part of the group, so when the names finally come out, the cops’ll say, ‘Ah-ah, he was a member of the radical Firewall group, that’s why he broke into AmMath and it was only bad luck that he got caught . . .’ ”

  “Why use the server in Maryland?” I asked. “The same one that Lighter just happened to be on.”

  “You said it was mostly NSA people,” she said. “Maybe it was one server they all knew. That they all had access to.”

  “Sounds weak,” LuEllen said.

  “But the rest of it sounds pretty good,” Green said. “It ties things together.”

  “What about the IRS attack? That was set up weeks ago.”

  “But the Firewall name wasn’t around weeks ago,” I said. “That could have been made up at the last minute. These hacks are ready to attack the IRS, and just at that moment, somebody invents a group with a neat-sounding name. So they say, ‘All right, we’re Firewall, too.’ ”

  “Goddamnit,” LuEllen said, “it’s still too hard t
o think about.”

  “I’ll tell you what, though,” Lane said. “When we go back into AmMath’s computer, I think we ought to be looking for stuff on Firewall and satellites. This Clipper stuff is a dead end. Whatever’s going on doesn’t have anything to do with Clipper.”

  “When we go back in?” I asked.

  “Darn right: I know my way around mainframes as well as anyone. I want to be there tonight, when we go back in,” she said.

  “Gotta find a new motel,” I said.

  “There’s a place called Eighty-Eight right across the street from where we’re at,” Green said.

  “So we’ll set up there tonight,” I said. “We’ll use one of LuEllen’s IDs, and call you when we’re settled in.”

  Lane didn’t have much to say about her talk with the cops: “They say they don’t believe that AmMath had anything to do with anything—but I think they believe there’s some kind of government deal going on, and they don’t want to know about it. They think we’re the bad guys—Jack and me.”

  “You told them about the burglary at your house.”

  “Of course,” Lane said. “We gave them every single detail. We told them we thought Jack’s house had been broken into, too.”

  “They’re dead in the water,” Green said. “I used to work with a program in Oakland that investigated shootings by cops. Most of the shootings were open-and-shut. But every once in a while, we’d get a shooting and there’d be something wrong about it. No proof, no evidence, just something wrong. We’d try to get the cops to look a little deeper, to ask a few more questions, and they’d say they would, but you could see it in their eyes: they’d signed off. They either believed they knew what happened, or they didn’t want to know any more. That’s what’s happened with this case. I could see it: they’ve signed off. They’re all done. They don’t want to know any more.”

  “Damnit, nobody’ll move,” I said.

  We thought about that; then Lane said, “By the way, I looked up McLennan County, where Corbeil has that ranch. It’s about a hundred miles south. Near Waco.”