The Devil's Code

by John Sandford

  He’d built a company that once must have been on the cutting edge of cyberintelligence, creating code products that could be used by anyone who needed absolute secure communication. Other companies could do the same thing, but the AmMath people had an advantage: their product would be the software component of the Clipper II, and they would essentially have a government-sponsored monopoly on encoded transmissions.

  Then, just as Corbeil stepped on the road to billionaire-dom, the catch jumped up and bit him on the ass.

  Outside the intelligence community, nobody wanted the Clipper. The Clipper was an obsolete idea when it was floated the first time. By the time Clipper II came along, even the Congress recognized its stupidity. So they said the hell with it, and instead of the road to billions, Corbeil found himself in the alley to Chapter Eleven.

  Corbeil had to find something else to sell—this was all part of my fantasy—and found it, circling the earth every few hours. Perhaps AmMath had developed the code that the National Reconnaissance Office used for its satellite transmissions. However they did it, AmMath was pulling down the recon stuff and retailing it. Jack Morrison had been killed for knowing about it, and his sister was murdered because they thought she might know about it; and Firewall had been invented to cover it up, or at least to confuse any trail that might lead to it.

  Could it be some sort of official dark operation? I doubted it. There are plenty of people working around the U.S. intelligence community who would be willing to kill if ordered to—I’d known some of them—but the fact is, nobody will give the order. American intelligence, in my experience, doesn’t kill people.

  So Corbeil was almost certainly out in the dark by himself, and if he was, then it was impossible that many people knew about it. Not more than three or four, I’d bet. The danger of what they were doing, and the penalties, were just too great to let too many people in on the secret.

  At four o’clock in the morning, the dish hadn’t moved. Bobby wouldn’t have sent me back unless he really needed the information from the transmissions; and down below, the house that probably acted as the control center for the dish array was sitting dark and apparently empty.

  LuEllen would have given me a ton of shit for even thinking about it, but a few minutes after four o’clock in the morning, I began scouting the house. First, I stripped the recording package off the dish and stuffed it in the backpack; then, using the needle-beam, I changed batteries in the night-vision glasses and checked to make sure they were still working.

  I followed the gully as far to the north as I could, duckwalking the last fifty yards, staying below the horizon so I wouldn’t be seen from the house. I listened and, for a while, worried. And then, working from the northeast corner of the house, I began closing in. Watched the windows for movement, for light, for anything. Stopped often, and long, to listen, but heard nothing but my heart and the occasional passing car.

  At five o’clock, I was fifty yards from the house and facing the decision. Go in, or stay put. We needed any docs that might be inside: we needed anything we could find. Nothing moved. Nothing even breathed.

  I crossed the last fifty yards quickly: now I was so close, with enough ambient light from the yard lights, that if anyone were looking right at me, they’d see me, even without night-vision glasses. The base of the house was landscaped with a variety of broad-leafed cactus—Spanish bayonet, I thought, so named for good reason—and I pushed through them with care. Overhead, a balcony. Too far overhead. But the house was a log cabin, and I could put one foot on a window frame, then step up two feet or more on a log, and then, doing a quick step-up, catch the edge of the balcony.

  And it went like that: I made the step, I did the pull up, and boosted myself over the edge of the balcony. There were four rustic chairs on the balcony, and a sliding glass door that led into the house. I waited, listened; tried to feel vibration, but felt nothing. Got the flash out of the backpack, and looked at the door. As far as I could see, it wasn’t alarmed, but I would have to assume that the house was. So: inside, five minutes max. If the call went out instantly, it would be purely bad luck to have security arrive in five minutes . . . unless there was another man in the bunkhouse.

  I sat thinking about it.

  I looked through the window with the needle-beam again. Took a deep breath, used the butt of the flashlight to crush the glass near the door handle, flipped the lock, and went in.

  There was no time. I turned on the needle flash and followed it through the top floor: bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, moving as quickly and quietly as I could. I suspected an intrusion alarm was already dialing out.

  With three bedrooms and two bathrooms already down, I almost didn’t push the fourth door. But I did, and behind the fourth door I found the control room, such as it was: a computer, what looked like a ham radio setup—is there still such a thing as ham radio?—and a couple of notebooks, all stuffed into a windowless cubicle that was more like a closet than a room.

  I turned the computer on, looked at my watch. Almost a minute gone since I entered. I would be out in five. The computer was a standard IBM-compatible running the last generation Windows, but it was probably running nothing more complicated than a time-of-day and switch program, which would orient the receivers and turn them on and off. So Windows was a logical program; what drove me crazy was the time it took to load. As I shifted from foot to foot, waiting, I pulled the notebooks off the shelf and flipped them open.

  They were empty. Well, not empty—they were filled with blank paper.

  Oh, shit.

  I’d been suckered. Pulled into a small room with exactly one exit. Forget the computer. Move.

  I stuck the flashlight in my jacket pocket and pulled the revolver. The hallway was still dark, and I went into it hard and low, on my knees and elbows, the pistol in one hand, already pointed down the hall.

  I saw movement and then the overwhelming, bone-shaking blast and brilliant muzzle flash of a fully automatic weapon. A long burst burned past two feet overhead. I was in an ocean of noise and light, without being much aware of it: aware only that I wasn’t yet dead. I fired once, lurched forward to the bedroom door, and rolled through it.

  A half-second later, another burst chewed up the carpet where I’d just been. I did a quick peek, then stuck my head around the corner and fired again.

  Bedroom. I looked around, panicked. I didn’t have a chance against the automatic weapon, if it came to a straight shootout. The bedroom had a glass door and a short balcony, but if I went over the side, I’d have to run across fifty yards of lighted, bald-as-a-pool-table lawn before there was any cover. I’d be cut in half before I made ten of them.

  What to do? Who was that out there? Had to be Corbeil.

  “Corbeil! Why are you killing us?”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “We’re just some guys, trying to stay away from the feds,” I shouted back. “Why are you killing us?”

  He said nothing for a moment, then: “Because I like it. I’m gonna cut you to pieces, dickhead.”

  No way for a CEO to talk, but he was right about one thing: if I moved, he’d cut me to pieces. I did an inventory. I had the flashlight, the revolver, the night glasses, LuEllen’s usual break-in kit . . .

  Ten seconds later, I had the quilt off the bed behind me. A fat one, a nice traditional quilt filled with cotton batting. I balled it up, watching the door, snapped LuEllen’s lighter under the blanket, and got it burning. When the fire was going hard, I threw it over across the hallway and over the railing onto the main floor.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Corbeil screamed, “What are you doing?”

  “You burned Jack’s house down,” I shouted back. I pulled the pack back on. “You burned it down: so suck on this.”

  Another row of gunfire and the edge of the door splintered. I risked a quick peek the instant it stopped, and saw—felt—another movement, on the stairs, going down. Had to risk it: crossed to the railing in the nea
r dark, saw the blanket burning on a couch below. And in the glow of the small fire, movement.

  I took a quick, unsteady shot, and missed. Corbeil turned and fired a burst along the railing, but by that time, I was farther up the hall, crawling toward the bedroom where I came in. At the stairs, I paused.

  Corbeil was screaming something unintelligible, and then a cloud exploded across the room below. He’d gotten a fire extinguisher from somewhere, CO2, and I fired another shot at what seemed to be the source of the cloud. He screamed again and the cloud suddenly went sideways. Had I hit him? I moved, fast and low as I could, scrambling, and nearly lost the gun.

  He opened fire again, this time shooting at the railing farther along the balcony, but not as far as I had gotten. The light was growing: the couch was now fully on fire.

  Run, or wait? I could run fifty yards in maybe six or seven seconds, dressed as I was and carrying the pack. But now, caught in the break-in without a chance to clean up behind myself, I really wouldn’t mind seeing more of a fire. So I waited.

  Corbeil, whether he was hit or not, was soon back with another extinguisher, this one firing some kind of spray. But the couch was burning too hard, the fire now running along what looked like a big Oriental carpet under a grand piano. He began shouting again, but I was concentrating on the gun. I had no wish to lose any shells, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember how many times I’d pulled the trigger. Four? Five? Was it empty?

  I flipped the cylinder out, pulled the flashlight out of my jacket, looked at the primers. Four of them had firing-pin dents. Two shots left. I clicked the cylinder back into place, so a shell would come under the hammer with the next trigger pull.

  Move or wait? The fire was growing and Corbeil had shouted something unintelligible again.

  I shouted back: “Satellites.”

  One loud word. One word to get him thinking about what I was saying, get him looking up at the balcony. I was out the window, over the edge, and running. Waiting for the impact at my back. Across the lighted lawn, running, running, thirty more steps, twenty, five, and down on the ground. Laying still. Then up and moving again, fast, running hard for fifty yards, dropping to the ground again. Listening.

  I could hear Corbeil, still in the house, screaming: and I could see firelight in all the windows now.

  A minute later, Corbeil ran out into the yard, running as I had, but at an opposite angle. He dropped to the ground, and I realized that from his angle, he could see most of the lighted yard around the house—that the only part that he couldn’t see was the driveway. He must have thought that I was still inside, but if the fire was building, he knew I’d have to run for it. And I probably wouldn’t run down the driveway. He waited, patiently, as the fire spread through his log palace, and began eating it alive.

  Moving as slowly as I could, I shrugged off the pack and got out the night glasses. The yard lights were still burning, and the fire glowed from the windows of the house: I turned down the gain on the glasses, and looked toward the last place I’d seen Corbeil. He was still there, looking toward the house, then away, then back toward the house.

  I studied him for another minute, then flattened into the ground cover. He had night glasses, just like mine, and was scanning the fields around him. I didn’t dare move, except snakelike, pushing backward on my belly, watching him. Every time his face turned toward me, I flattened, frozen in place. I would wait fifteen seconds, then look: each time I expected a quick slap on the forehead and the final darkness.

  I made progress. At the beginning, we were fifty yards apart. Ten minutes later, I had another fifty. I was there, a hundred yards out, studying Corbeil’s position with the glasses, when a car swerved off the highway, drove up the driveway, and a man got out and ran up to the front door of the house and began pounding on it, shouting. Then he ran back to his car, took what must have been a cell phone from the front seat, and staring up at the house, made a call.

  Two or three minutes later, I heard the sirens, and far down the road, the flashing lights of the first fire trucks. The man who called them was running around the house, looking in the windows. I could see Corbeil watching him with the glasses, and I backed farther away.

  When I was two hundred yards out, I stopped to watch the fire: the house was now fully involved, flames leaping from the rooftop. One of the fire trucks sprayed foam on the bunkhouse and garage. They didn’t bother with the house: they had no good water source, and the house was burning so hard it probably wouldn’t have helped if they did have water. The best they could hope for was to keep the flames from spreading to the outbuildings.

  I switched back to Corbeil. He was standing now, just outside the circle of light cast by the flames. He was turning, his hands to his face, scanning the fields.

  And I thought: how odd.

  He’d been questioned about a murder. He must’ve worried that the cops—or the FBI, if we’d made any impression with the NSA—were going to break down his door at any moment. Anything in his apartment would be up for grabs.

  It stood to reason that he’d move anything incriminating out of his apartment, out of his office, out of any place that the police or the feds could get at by looking at records, like safe deposit boxes. He couldn’t actually destroy it: the docs and software used for controlling a satellite system would not be something you commit to memory.

  My eyes drifted back to the burning house. I’d gone in because the last guy who left took the only vehicle. There were no other cars visible. It seemed unlikely that Corbeil would take the chance of being stranded on foot, so he probably had a car somewhere.

  Like in the garage.

  I looked back at him, still scanning. I was due east of the garage, if I moved out, and around to the south, I could come up behind it. As long as I could see him . . .

  I started moving . . .

  27

  Fifteen minutes later, I’d crawled and pulled myself through the ground cover to a spot fifty feet behind the garage, in the deep shadow cast by the fire. For the moment, I was safe. But you win a little, and you lose a little. Halfway through the crawl, I lost Corbeil. He’d been looking up the hill, toward the satellite dish in the gully, when I’d last checked.

  I checked again from the shadow, and he was gone. Had he seen me? But if he’d seen me crawling, why couldn’t I see him stalking me? He couldn’t have seen me using the night glasses, so he wouldn’t have known that he needed concealment. If he were walking anywhere, up to four or five hundred yards or so, I should have been able to see him.

  Unless he’d moved opposite of the fire. When I turned so that my line of sight crossed too close to the fire, the glasses whited out. But if he were on the opposite side of the house, I was good for a few minutes, anyway.

  Staying in the shadow cast by the fire, I edged closer to the garage. Fifteen feet out, I had to commit. I took one last look around, stood up, and trotted to a back window and looked in. A car squatted inside. I punched the glass out with the butt of the pistol, unlocked the window, lifted it, and crawled through into the utter darkness inside.

  Waited, listened. Corbeil couldn’t be inside, I thought: I’d have seen him coming. If I moved quickly, I’d be okay. Went to the car: Mercedes-Benz S430. Looked in the front seat with the needle-beam flash, saw nothing. And in the backseat, behind the passenger seat, a briefcase. The car doors were locked. I looked around the garage, which also served to hold yard gear, and found an ax.

  I was going to make some noise, here. A car this expensive had an alarm, for sure. I put the flashlight back in the pack, put the gun in my pants pocket, where I could feel it if it began to slip out—I’d seen one too many of those TV shows where the good guy loses his gun at a critical moment—took a breath, and swung the ax. It went through the window like a spoon through whipped cream. The alarm went and I used the ax handle to smash the rest of the glass out, grabbed the briefcase, and went out the window.

  Nothing subtle about this: I ran as hard as I could, fifty
yards, a hundred. Out of the deepest shadow, out into the dark, and then flat on the ground.

  Listening. The garage was suddenly full of firelight: somebody on the fire side had gone into the garage and pushed the door up. I took the moment to run another fifty yards; and dropped.

  A human head appeared in the garage window, silhouetted by the firelight. Another head appeared in a moment, then a third. Looking out the window, toward me. Dressed as I was, I was almost certainly invisible. But the car alarm was going, and Corbeil, wherever he was, would be hunting me in the dark.

  I scanned the hillside, saw nothing. Thought about it for a moment. Corbeil was between me and my car. I might be able to slip around him—that would certainly be the most direct route—but if I headed south instead, crossed the highway, and stayed to the roadside ditch, or on the other side of the fence on the far side of the highway, I could make a circle away from him and get back to the car.

  If I could only see him . . .

  But sooner or later, it would occur to the cops who were with the firemen that anyone who broke into the garage would have to be somewhere in these surrounding fields. If they started crawling through the fields in their squads, with searchlights, I’d be cooked.

  I started crawling toward the highway, moving slowly, stopping to scan, then moving on. At the fence line along the highway I paused, scanning. And saw him coming. He was jogging straight down toward me, carrying a gun across his chest. He stopped and scanned for me. He was too far away for a quick shot, so I crawled to a fence post, tossed the briefcase over, stood up, put my hand on the post, and vaulted over into the ditch.

  In the ditch, I recovered the briefcase after a moment of panic—it wasn’t exactly where I thought I’d thrown it—pivoted, turned, looked up the hill. He was coming, running as hard as he could.

  I went left, running hard for five seconds, paused, scanned, saw him still coming, put a hand on another fence post and vaulted back over and got the glasses out again, scanning. He ran to the fence, stopped, scanned. Waited. He knew I was on the other side. When he hadn’t seen me in fifteen seconds, he stood up and clambered over the fence, knelt, and scanned up and down the ditch. Then he went left, as I had: passed me not fifteen feet away.