The Devil's Code

by John Sandford

  We made arrangements to meet them that night in Denton, and then LuEllen and I took the rest of the day off. We’d been cooped up too long, hanging out in hotel rooms and restaurants. We were the kind of people who liked to move around. I got my laptop and sketchbook, and my watercolor tin and a plastic squeeze bottle of water, and we went out to a driving range and LuEllen hit balls for an hour while I drew the shelter over the driving line. The whole thing with the satellite photos—if that’s what they were—had gotten me thinking about perspective. The driving line was sheltered by a fifty-yard-long metal roof mounted on steel poles, and from the corners, made a fairly interesting challenge in three-point perspective.

  When LuEllen got tired of hitting balls, we went back to the hotel, talked to a desk clerk who got a map out and drew a six-mile jogging circuit that he ran himself every morning, and we drove out to his starting point and did the six miles in forty-five minutes, just cruising along suburban streets looking at all the pickups.

  “Not bad,” she said, when we got back to the car. “Let’s go buy some boots.”

  She bought two pair of cowboy boots, and paid six hundred dollars for them. I’ve never actually seen her on a horse, but she does like horses, and she liked the boots. They put an inch or two on her height, and she liked that, too.

  At nine o’clock, LuEllen checked us into the Eighty-Eight Motel in Denton. We got online, and took a look in the dump box. Corbeil had been online in the morning, before we’d even gotten up—no rest for the wicked—but hadn’t used the computer since then. “Maybe they’re fixing up his apartment and he’s staying someplace else while they do it,” LuEllen suggested.

  “I hope not. I’d like to be sure that he’s in his apartment, and done for the day, before I sign on with his codes,” I said. “If we were on, and he tried to get on, he might see the conflict.”

  LuEllen called Lane on the cell phone, and told her where we were. We didn’t want any calls on the room phone going out to a number that could be connected with any of us, and figured to throw the cell phone away in the next day or two. Lane and Green showed up ten minutes later, having walked over from the Radisson.

  I told them about the dump box, and how we were using it as a cut-out, and why I didn’t want to go online immediately. “Makes sense,” Lane said. “I’d like to look at those files you got . . .”

  She spent the next two hours flipping through the administrative files, stopping every fifteen minutes or so to look at the dump box. Green, LuEllen, and I chatted for a while, then LuEllen ordered a pay-TV movie, a hyper-violent science-fiction flick that had all the depth of a comic book. The production values, on the other hand, were great.

  Ten minutes after the movie ended, Lane went online to check the dump box, and found that Corbeil was working. The sign-on protocols and codes were the same as the night before. He sent a couple of short memos, one of them berating a guy named John McNeal about a production problem on CDs carrying what apparently were commercial code products. Then he signed off. We waited another half-hour, Lane with increasing impatience, to make sure he wouldn’t sign on again, then went out to the AmMath computer.

  We looked for anything that involved satellites, photographs, Middle Eastern nations, the NSA, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office; tried all of those things as keywords in a variety of searches, and even threw in oddball stuff—“orbit,” “surveillance,” “resolution.”

  After half an hour, I suggested that we shut down. “We need to do more research into what we’re looking for,” I said. “Maybe just go to the library and get business stuff about AmMath. Trying to flog our way through the computer is like trying to find a two-inch article in ten years’ worth of newspapers.”

  Lane wanted to continue: “Fifteen more minutes,” she said. “Twenty minutes. We’re in, who knows whether they’ll change all the protocols or something?”

  LuEllen wasn’t doing anything, and bored, said, “I’m going down the street to that Randy’s place and get coffee and a doughnut. Anybody want anything?”

  “I’ll walk along,” I said. To Lane: “Fifteen minutes . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Randy’s was a combination greasy spoon and greasy bakery. We bought doughnuts and coffee and a diet Coke, and talked about not much at all; two people carrying a couple of white bakery sacks along the highway. We were a hundred yards from the motel when we saw the flashes. LuEllen said, “Did you see that?”

  I was already trotting toward the motel. Night-time gun flashes are hard to mistake, and even with the background noise of the highway we could now hear the rapid pop-pop-pop of gunfire.

  We got closer and saw two men break away from the motel, from the end where our room was. Another couple, young kids, college kids, maybe, both carrying book bags, stopped to look at them as they crossed the parking lot to a waiting car. The shorter of the two men was hobbling. One of the kids broke away from the other, running toward the motel. Then the other one followed, and I ditched the white bags behind a car and the car with the two guys screeched out of the parking lot, fishtailed once in the street and disappeared into traffic.

  We turned the corner of the motel and saw an older guy, white-haired in a burgundy windbreaker, walking toward our room, the college kids just coming up. I was ten steps back now, LuEllen a few steps farther behind and the college kid, a boy, went inside and then popped back out and started screaming, “Call an ambulance call an ambulance . . .”

  I pushed past his white face to the door and saw Lane on the bed. She was dead, her face gone. Couldn’t see Green; the bathroom door was mostly closed and shot to pieces. I stepped over to the door and knuckled it open. Green was in the bathtub, looking up at me, a gun in one hand.

  “Got an ambulance coming,” I said. “Are you hurt bad?”

  “Hit twice,” he groaned. “What about Lane?”

  “Gone.”

  “Get out of here,” he said.

  I went back out into the main room. The college girl was inside with LuEllen and I shouted at her, “Go out to the street, wave the ambulance in.”

  “What?”

  “I dunno, I dunno,” I shouted at her. She stepped back, frightened of me, and turned and ran toward the street. “Flag the ambulance,” I shouted after her. To the old guy in the burgundy windbreaker I yelled, “Two people shot. Run down to the office and make sure that kid’s called an ambulance . . .”

  He turned and ran. The minute he was gone, I stepped past the bed, not looking at Lane, ripped the phone wire out of the telephone, bundled up the laptop, which had fallen on the floor, and stuck it in the back of my waistband, under my jacket.

  LuEllen had stopped to take a close look at Lane—Lane had been hit at least twice in the side of the head, and laid sprawled face-up, eyes open just a crack, on the yellow bedspread. LuEllen shook her head. Lane’s purse was lying on the floor. LuEllen rolled it with her foot, took the pistol out, and slid it into her jacket pocket. Without another word, we were out of the room. Two motel people were running toward us, and I waved at them: “In here, in here . . . hurry, hurry, get an ambulance.”

  More people came running, and LuEllen and I eased to the outside of the group, and then turned, and then were around the corner, and in the car. We went out the back of the parking lot, slowly, onto a service road, down a block, and were out of sight when the first cop car arrived.

  “She had no chance,” LuEllen said grimly. “Executed.”

  “Green’s alive, but he was hit a couple of times,” I said. “He was in the tub. He was still thinking. He said to get out, so he’ll cover us.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Not from me,” I said.

  “The only hard surface I touched was the TV remote, and Green was using it after I did, so I should be okay.”

  “You used the bathroom.”

  “I was careful. You used the telephone . . .”

  “Just plugged into the side, never picked up the receiver. I don’t think
I touched anything with my fingertips.”

  “Guys from AmMath,” she said.

  “Gotta be.”

  “What is it with them?”

  “I don’t know; but they must have spotted me coming online last night, and set up to back-trace our entry tonight. Took them an hour to do it and get here . . . Christ, Lane and Green probably thought that was us at the door, coming back with coffee.”

  21

  LuEllen and I had been in jams before. I don’t know whether it was simply experience, or some essential defect in our personalities, that allowed us to carry on as efficiently as we did. To get the laptop, to get out. To do it without talking about it or hesitating.

  If I’ve ever been seriously attached to any one person in my adult life, it was LuEllen. But if she’d been in that motel room, and if I’d walked back to find her dead on the yellow bedspread, then, God help me, I believe I would have reacted the same way. And if I’d been dead, and she’d looked in, it would have been the same. No rage, no horror or fear or even sorrow. Efficiency. Get the laptop. Get the gun. Get out. Assess the damage.

  The rage and sorrow comes later.

  But it comes.

  On the way out, in the car, LuEllen kept coming back at me about fingerprints: that’s where we could hang up. If I’d left my prints behind, they could put a face with them—I’d been thoroughly and repeatedly printed in the Army—and the other witnesses at the motel would confirm it.

  But I didn’t think I’d left any. LuEllen and I had done all this before, operating out of remote sites, and you go in thinking about not leaving prints. If you get sloppy about it, then you’ll always leave a few. The only hard thing I’d touched was the phone and the room key-card, which I still had in my shirt pocket. Still, we both ran the whole night through our heads, picking out each move we’d made. After a while, I let out a breath and said, “I’m good.”

  “So am I, except that the clerk saw me when I checked in.”

  “Yeah, but Lane looked sort of Latino and half the people around there looked Latino. I bet the clerk identifies her as the woman who checked in, because she looked like a lot of other women who checked in. And her face is shot up . . . Good thing I didn’t check us in, with Green being black. Then they’d know.”

  “Maybe Green won’t cover for us.”

  “He couldn’t give them too much. He doesn’t know who we are, really.”

  “He could find out. Or give the cops enough information that they could.”

  “I don’t know. I think Texas is a felony-murder state. If he says he doesn’t know what was going on, that he was simply a hired bodyguard for Lane, who was doing something with her computer . . . If he says that, he’ll kick clear. If he lets them know that he knew what Lane was doing, then she would have been killed in the course of committing a crime, and that might make a case against him for felony murder.”

  “So he can’t talk.”

  “He wouldn’t—if he knows all this.”

  “So let’s call Bobby; maybe he can get the word back.”

  We called Bobby from a pay phone. When he came up on the laptop, I wrote:

  CALL ME NOW VOICE LINE : EMERGENCY .

  He called back five seconds after I was off. I’d only talked to him on a voice line a couple of times. The only thing I knew about him was that he was a black guy, who I thought lived someplace in the Mississippi River South. He had one of those soft Delta accents, and was tied into a lot of interesting black people who, in the sixties, would have been called activists, or maybe, in that part of the world, agitators.

  “What happened?” he asked, without preamble.

  I gave it to him as succinctly as I could, then said, “Somebody’s got to get with Green. A lawyer, who can tell him to stick with the ignorant bodyguard story. If he lets on that he knew Lane was committing a crime, then they might . . .”

  “Felony murder,” Bobby said. “Bad for you, bad for me.”

  “Yeah. Somebody’s got to get in touch.”

  “I can handle that,” Bobby said softly. “How are you?”

  “We’re good, but we’re clearing out. We don’t think anybody will be looking for us too hard, but just in case . . . we’re gonna run down, to, ah, Austin.”

  “Check in from there.”

  “Talk to you,” I said, and hung up.

  “Austin?” LuEllen asked.

  “It’s a big city with lots of people coming and going,” I said. “Other than Dallas, it’s about the closest big city to Waco.”

  “Corbeil’s ranch.” She was quiet for a while, then said, “So now you’re on a revenge trip. Forget Jack, you’re going to get them because they killed Lane.”

  “No. If I could, I’d go home right now. But I need to get loose; I can’t get loose. The feds have a list of names, they’ve got murder and evidence of a conspiracy and the IRS attack and maybe what looks like an attack on a major encryption company. They’ll eventually start peeling back the names. I’ve got to figure out what’s going on, and get them running that way, or I’m fucked.”

  She didn’t say anything, so eventually I said, “I’m not sure you really need to stay around. From here on out, it’s gonna be mostly computer stuff.”

  “Oh, shit, Kidd. You know I’m not going anyplace,” she said irritably.

  “Maybe if you . . .”

  “Shut up.”

  So I shut up: I wanted her around.

  We stayed the night in Dallas. Given the time the shooting took place, it was too late to make the regular television news. If the papers bothered with it, they wouldn’t get more than a few basic facts from the cops. We decided to stay over, and to leave at the peak check-out time in the morning. That’s what we did: there’d been nothing on the late-night news and nothing in the morning papers. At eight o’clock, we were headed down I-35 to Austin.

  “Hope Bobby got somebody to Green,” LuEllen said, partway down. Neither of us was talking much. The images from the motel were too clear, the kind of images that push you back into your own head.

  “He said he would, and he’s got good contacts,” I said.

  “I hope.”

  Austin used to be a small-town pretty place. Take away the heat, and it’s more like Minnesota than the rest of Texas. Twenty years ago, I could have imagined living there, except that the landscape colors weren’t mine. Now, there’re too many people, and the city has gone from a Great Place to a Pain in the Ass.

  Somebody else’s problem. We checked into a Holiday Inn and started making phone calls.

  WHAT HAPPENED ?

  ATTORNEY TALKED TO GREEN THIS MORNING. GREEN’S IN INTENSIVE CARE / WOUNDED LEGS/THIGHS / WILL BE OKAY. GREEN KNOWS FELONY LAW, TELLS COPS HE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT WAS GOING ON EXCEPT CLIENT HAD BEEN ATTACKED SEVERAL TIMES, HAD BEEN BURGLARIZED, BROTHER SHOT. HE WAS HIRED TO DO BODYGUARD WORK. GREEN SAYS HE WAS IN BATHROOM WHEN DOOR KNOCK CAME, SHE SAID THEY’RE BACK AND HE SAID STAY AWAY BUT SHE OPENED DOOR AND SHOOTING STARTED. HE SAYS HE HIT ONE, COPS FIND BLOOD TRAIL.

  HE DID GOOD . MUST PLAY DUMB .

  HE DOES THAT. COPS PUSH HIM HARD BUT ALL HE HAS IS HIRING ON RECOMMENDATION OF FRIEND—FRIEND WILL COVER. TELLS COPS HE DOESN’T KNOW LW, DOESN’T KNOW COMPUTERS, SAW NO TROUBLE UNTIL SHOOTING STARTED.

  OK.

  YOU STILL WORKING?

  YES . IRS ATTACK CONTINUES ?

  CONTINUES, BUT CLOSING DOWN NOW. RUMORS: FEDS HUNTING FIREWALL NAMES, MAKE SOME BUSTS; NOTHING IN PAPERS. WASH POST: FBI, NSA IN CONFLICT OVER FIREWALL. RUMORS: GERMAN CALLED COPERNIX DOES I T.

  OK. YOU MONITOR , WE WILL CALL DAILY .

  YES. ONE MORE THING. THE FIVE DATA STRINGS WITH THE PICTURES INCLUDE VARIOUS 125–200 (APPROX.) BYTE FILES FOLLOWED BY DISTINCT 512-BYTE/4096-BIT FILES FOLLOWED BY VARIOUS 350–600 BYTE FILES. 4096-BIT FILES ARE LIKELY ULTRASTRONG KEYS, BUT DON’T KNOW LOCK. POSSIBLE PHOTOS ENCRYPTED/DECRYPTED WITH KEYS?

  WILL LOOK .

  GOOD. BYE.

  “What?” LuEllen wanted to know.

&nb
sp; “Those goddamned files. As soon as we got them, we should have gone to Mexico or someplace and hid out, and figured them out. If they’re killing for them, there’s got to be a reason; they must think we can figure them out.”

  “Why don’t you just mail them to the NSA and let them figure them out?”

  “Not until I know what they are. If they’re important enough to kill for, then they might be important enough that the NSA or the CIA or somebody else would just keep coming after them. Anyway, I’ve got a new theory.”

  “Lane had a theory.”

  “But I have another one. The theory is that AmMath screwed something up so badly that they figured they had to cover it, and the whole thing got out of control when Jack was killed. Now they’re killing to cover up the killing.”

  “Sounds like a bad movie.”

  “That’s what I got,” I said.

  That afternoon, we got something else. After looking gloomily through the files—I saw how Bobby isolated the 4096-bit file, and there wasn’t any question that it was distinct from the garbage before and after, and it did look like a key—I noticed the OMS tab again. The Old Man and the Sea. No, that wasn’t right: everyplace I’d seen the whole name, it was Old Man of the Sea: either a mistake, or not Hemingway.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Down to the university library. See if I can get somebody to tell me about this Old Man of the Sea.”

  “Kidd . . . this is the University of Texas.”

  “And a damn fine university it is,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yup. It is.”

  “But then if it turns out to be something important, whoever you talk to will probably remember you.”

  “I think it’s a chance we’ve got to take.”

  “Couldn’t you just look it up on the Internet or something?”

  “Well . . .” I scratched my head. I could try, of course, but I’d become so accustomed to thinking of the Net as a large sewer clogged with crap, that it hadn’t occurred to me. “We can try.”