“I’m going to Chicago,” I said. “I’ll be back the next day.”
“We start the day after you get back?” asked LuEllen.
“Yes. The fuckin’ Rubicon.”
Chapter 12
MAGGIE WAS WAITING at the O’Hare arrival gate. She wore shades of blue this time, and low business heels. The outfit was subtly chic and must have set her back a thousand or more. She wore no makeup except a touch of pearl-pink lipstick. When she saw me, she smiled briefly and lifted a hand in greeting.
“Did you check any bags?” she asked, as I came through the gate.
“Nope. Just this.” I held up the canvas carry-on.
“I’ve got a car.” She led the way toward the exit, and I tagged along behind like a friendly basset. The first two times I’d seen her, her hair had been loose on her shoulders. Now it was swept up in a knot. Her bare neck made her seem more vulnerable. Her carriage had also changed. She seemed softer. Tired. Crumpled.
“You look down. Worn out,” I said, struggling for the right words.
She glanced back. “It’s Rudy,” she said. “There’s been a lot of pressure.”
“How sick is he?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s been having headaches, pretty bad ones. He had migraines when he was young. He’s afraid they’ve come back.”
“You called in a doctor?”
She gave me the brief smile again. “Oh, sure. Billionaires aren’t allowed to suffer. He’s had all kinds of scans and probes. They can’t find anything organic. They’ve given him tranquilizers. They seem to help.”
I grabbed her arm and stopped her. She pivoted to face me.
“What are you telling me? That he’s out of control?”
“No. He still has control, but sometimes the pain . . . affects him.” We started walking again, and I held onto her arm. “He gets angry, out of all proportion to whatever set him off. And when it goes away, the relief is so strong that he gets almost maniacally happy. Overconfident. The swings are hard to deal with.”
“How is he now?”
“He’s in pretty good shape. He had a bad headache yesterday, but it was gone this morning.”
“Are you still planning to come to Washington?”
“Yes. He insists on it. The worse the headaches get, the more determined he is to follow this through.”
We passed all the usual exits to the parking ramps and approached an unmarked desk manned by an elderly guard. He saw us coming and nodded at Maggie. She walked past him to a door labeled FIRE and bumped it open with her hip. We were in a reserved section of the parking ramp, separated from the rest of it by a concrete wall. It was the kind of place whose existence I never would have suspected, though it made sense. The average car was probably worth sixty or seventy thousand. There were a half dozen Rolls-Royces and a few sleek Italian jobs that made Maggie’s Porsche look Puritan-plain. She dropped neatly into the driver’s seat, opened the passenger door, and I climbed inside.
During the ride to Anshiser’s she was friendlier than she had been in the past. LuEllen fascinated her, and she asked a dozen questions about the burglaries as we loafed along. When I mentioned that LuEllen and Dace were sleeping together, she half turned toward me in the dark.
“Isn’t that a major change?”
“Um.”
“You’re not distraught?”
“LuEllen and I like to roll around together. Our relationship is important, but not serious. If you know what I mean.”
“This Dace. From what you’ve told me, he seems very . . . likeable.”
“LuEllen says he’s a nice guy. She says I’m not. She wants to try nice for a while.”
She thought about that, and it occurred to me that I was feeling some electricity. I wrote it off as fantasy, a product of unrequited hormones. In any case, she stopped talking about LuEllen, and I brought her up-to-date on the Whitemark project.
“So you’re ready,” she said when I finished.
“Yeah. If Anshiser says go.”
“He will,” she said. She glanced at me. “Dillon was doing more research, you know, just because he’s Dillon. Anyway, he found a reference to a paper you wrote about the tarot. He went out and bought a deck.”
I grinned in the dark. “Where did he find it? The paper?”
“That was the strange thing. It was at the War College.”
“Yeah. I knew they were using it.”
She wanted more, but we were in the twisting streets, and a moment later she turned in at Anshiser’s wrought-iron gate. It rolled smoothly out of the way and she gunned the car up to the house.
Anshiser was a shock. He’d been thin when I last saw him, and he’d lost another ten pounds. The lines in his face had deepened and his short hair seemed to stand on end. His nose appeared redder and larger.
“Mr. Kidd,” he said hoarsely, as Maggie ushered me into the office. Dillon was nowhere to be seen. “I understand we’re ready to go.”
I gave him the report I’d given Maggie on the way in. He was pleased. When I told him what we planned to do with the child pornographers, he said, “Goddamned right,” and laughed. “That ought to open up some sinuses over there.” He whacked the top of his desk with sudden energy.
“You don’t look so good,” I said. “Maggie said you’re having migraines.”
“Something like it. Not quite, but close,” he said somberly. “To tell you the truth, I think I’m dying.”
“My God, Rudy,” Maggie protested. “The doctors say it’s tension. It could be Kidd’s project doing this. Who knows? You’re not dying.”
Anshiser laughed again, the laugh trailing off to a cough. “The doctors are full of horseshit,” he said. “I know what I feel like.” He looked at me and held his hand to his head. “I can’t explain it, but when I have one of these headaches, my whole body feels empty. I don’t know what it is; I’ve never had it before. And it’s bad.”
“Look,” I said, “you’re making me nervous. If you’re about to lose it, either mentally or physically, we could have serious problems. You’re our backup, if anything goes wrong.”
He hacked again, covering his mouth with his fist, his eyes never leaving mine. “I’ll last,” he said. “I’m too damn mean to die before that’s done.” He reached under his desk and produced a nylon handbag and pushed it toward me.
“Half of the remaining money,” he said. “A half million dollars. I’m extremely pleased with your progress.”
I looked at the bag for a minute and then back up at Anshiser.
“The real thing starts the day after tomorrow,” I said. “Maggie and I will get out of here tomorrow, we’ll show her where we’re at, and then we do it. I need you to say right now to go ahead.”
“Do it. I wish you luck, I do,” Anshiser said. He pushed himself slowly out of the chair, and I picked up the bag and leaned forward to shake his hand.
“You take good care of Maggie,” he said. “She’s the daughter I should have had. Or the wife.” He grinned, and for another instant, the vitality was back.
Maggie led the way to the door, and just outside, put a hand on my arm. “I wasn’t expecting this,” I said, holding up the money bag.
“That’s Rudy’s way of telling you he’s happy,” she said. “Do you have reservations in town?”
“No. I thought it would be better to show up somewhere and pay in cash. I sure as hell have enough of it.”
“Why don’t you stay at my place? I have an extra room, and you’re welcome to it. It would be untraceable.”
“That’s nice of you. Thanks.”
“I have to talk to Rudy privately for a moment. I’ll be right back.” I waited in the hallway, heard the sound of their voices, then Anshiser laughed again, and a moment later she came out.
“His sense of humor seems to be intact,” I said as we headed down the stairs.
“You seem . . . not exactly to amuse him, but to make him laugh,” she said. “It’s good for him.”
She glanced back at me, the smile extending to her eyes this time.
“I told him I’d offered to let you stay at my place, in the spare bedroom. And how you said, ‘That’s nice of you.’ And he said, ‘God Almighty, Maggie, why don’t you take that boy home and let him screw your brains loose?’ ”
“That’s when he laughed?”
“No, he laughed on my line. He never laughs on his own.” She was ahead of me going down the stairs, so all I could see was that tantalizing neck, and not her face.
“What was your line?”
She’d reached the bottom of the stairs and crossed the short hall to the outside door. She turned at just the right moment, with one hand on the knob. “I said I planned to do exactly that.”
I said “Oh” to an empty doorway.
AS A TOP—LEVEL manager, and a large, athletic woman, she was surprisingly soft and yielding in the bedroom. While LuEllen went after sex with the enthusiasm of a beer-drinking cowgirl, Maggie was slower and looser and almost submissive. When we broke apart after making love the first time, she rolled onto her back. The skin of her stomach and breasts was shiny-damp in the dim bedside light, and she said, sounding satisfied with herself, “There.”
“There, what?”
She propped herself on one elbow and looked down at me. “There are some men . . . getting them in bed is a challenge, you know? You were such an arrogant asshole the first time we met, out on the sandbar, with your brushes and your paintings and your torn shirt and your tan. I was sweating like a pig, my nylons were full of holes, my hair was a mess, and when I try to make conversation about the hole you cut in your painting, you cut me off at the knees. What a jerk.”
“Jesus,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’d just . . . heard something similar.”
“Well, you’re the type who would.”
“Not about me. About someone else,” I said. Time to change the subject. “Are you worried about the raid? We could call it off right now, and nobody would ever know.”
She dropped flat on her back again. “Sure I’m worried. I’m paid to worry. I’m worried about Rudy, too. The way he talks about dying.”
“Don’t ignore that,” I said. “Sometimes people know what the doctors don’t.”
“That’s what worries me. That he might somehow talk himself right into the grave.” She looked sideways at me. “Tell me why this attack is going to work.”
I thought for a moment. “Because it’s set up right,” I said. “We took some time, and we know what we’re doing. There’s a possibility that we’ll be nailed right away, that there’s some kind of invisible monitoring system in Whitemark’s software, but I’ve been careful and I haven’t seen it; and I’ve been deep enough into their system to know that they depend on it. When we corrupt that system, they’ll be effectively frozen.”
“People will be hurt.”
“Not physically. Like Anshiser said the first time I saw him, it’s either his company or Whitemark. Somebody’s got to lose. Whitemark cheated. That makes it a little more okay.”
“But not completely okay.”
“Nothing is completely okay.”
“What about this problem with what’s-his-name, Ratface?” she asked. She knew about the incident with the woman from down the hall, and that we thought the landlord had been lying about Ratface.
“I still don’t know what that was about,” I said. “Bobby’s watching him, but nothing’s happened. I have it in the back of my head that maybe it wasn’t a divorce thing, that maybe Ratface and the landlord were involved in some kind of blackmail business. You know, we’re not even sure that the technician was putting those bugs on the phones. Maybe he was taking them off. Maybe the landlord called them and said, ‘Hey, these guys are some kind of computer freaks, maybe you better get those bugs out of there.’ I don’t know. That doesn’t feel right either.”
Maggie laughed softly. “It all sounds nuts. You know, whacky. Like something one of those right-wing fascist weirdo groups would fantasize about.”
“Yeah, but they’d do it in tree-bark camo,” I said. “The main thing is, nothing has happened. Ratface is still off in Jersey.”
Maggie snuggled up on my shoulder and I looked at the ceiling, feeling her there, and neither one of us said anything for a few minutes. Then her hand crept down my stomach and she said, “Hmm.”
“IT’S GOING TO work,” she said a half hour later. I was a little confused and wondered for a second if that was a personal comment. I thought it did work. “Dillon did a risk evaluation on this job. We had a hard time evaluating the first phase, the burglaries, because we didn’t know what kind of personnel you’d have. That’s why Rudy kept me out of it until now.”
I’d caught up with her. “How about the second phase, going into the company?”
“That was easier to evaluate. We know you and your work, and there have been studies of this kind of attack by the National Security Agency and the FBI. Dillon thinks this will be the least risky phase. But after we hit, and the news reports start coming out, the risks escalate. The key is picking the time to get out. If you wait too long . . . zut.” She drew a finger across my throat.
“And if we get caught? What happens then?”
“That depends. It’s absolutely critical to keep your name and face, everybody’s name and face, out of the media. The biggest danger is that you would be arrested, and processed, before we could interfere. Once something is on paper, it gets much harder,” she said. “If you can keep things private and give Rudy time to operate, we should be okay.”
“So we keep things informal.”
“Absolutely.”
“Jesus, I wish I still smoked.”
“Why?”
“I could use a cigarette.”
THE NEXT DAY, while Maggie took care of last-minute business at Anshiser’s, I went into Chicago and stashed my share of the extra money in a second safety-deposit box. I mailed the key to Emily in St. Paul, along with a note telling her that everything was fine.
We flew out of Chicago in the early afternoon and got to Washington in time to catch the evening crush on 1-395. When we arrived at the apartment, I unlocked the door and pushed through, carrying my own overnight case and Maggie’s three-suiter. Dace and LuEllen were working in the office. LuEllen was wearing jeans and her white, tassled cowboy boots; Maggie was in one of her blue power suits.
“Dace and LuEllen, this is Maggie Kahn, and Maggie . . .” I gestured at the other two.
“Pleased to meet you,” LuEllen said cheerfully, sticking out a hand. Maggie shook it, smiling, and said, “My pleasure. I’ve heard something about your work from Kidd. I’d like to hear more.”
LuEllen glanced sideways at me, then back at Maggie. “What did he say?” Her tone was light, but her eyes were dark and serious.
“Well, he told me that LuEllen might not be your real name, that he doesn’t know your last name or where you live, and he doesn’t know what you do when you’re not working, but that he does know you’re good when you are working.”
LuEllen relaxed. Her security was sound. Dace shook Maggie’s hand and offered to show her around. She looked at the office, tapped on the keyboard of one computer, and glanced through the letters between Whitemark and the generals. “I’d like to look at those administrative formats you worked out. Maybe I could help run through their files,” she said in her executive voice.
“Any time you want to see them,” Dace said. “We can take you through the sign-on routine tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” Maggie said. She glanced around the office again, then stepped outside and looked down the hall.
“Where’s our room?” she asked. “I want to get out of this suit.”
“Uh, right over here.” I pointed at the door. “I’ll bring your suitcase.”
She disappeared into the bedroom, and as I picked up the heavy case in the living room, a grinning L
uEllen slapped me on the butt and whispered, “Way to go, José.”
I may have blushed.
Chapter 13
COMPUTER PROGRAMMING CAN be as beautiful and complicated as a tree, as compelling as the best painting. Programmers admire each other’s code. They talk like rock climbers: that was a very difficult pitch, and look how he did it—with style. A good programmer uses a computer’s potential to create worlds where other people will live. Or, in some cases, where they will fight.
The attack on Whitemark began after breakfast on a beautiful August morning. Maggie and I split a bag of bagels and a pot of coffee, chatted and laughed, cleaned up the kitchen, and went to war. The attack lasted precisely four weeks: twenty-eight days to the hour.
The first moves were invisible to Whitemark. We infested their system with a virus. A virus is a chunk of computer code, compact and deadly. Once a virus has infected a computer’s system software, it makes copies of itself and inserts them into the working programs being run through the system. The working program, in turn, infects other operating systems. Unless the virus is detected, it will eventually infect every program that passes through the system. And those programs will infect every other program they encounter.
Besides replicating itself, the virus usually does damage. Not always. There are Christmas card viruses, for example, that insert graphic Christmas cards in every text file they find. When somebody opens the computer file, the first thing that appears is the Christmas card.
The disease viruses are a different story. They are killer bugs. They erase information, jumble it, destroy expensive, one-of-a-kind custom programs. There are some viruses, more complicated than the straight-out bombs, that may change a system’s programming in more subtle ways.
Our first virus was not subtle. It was a bomb, pure and simple. Forty-five days after being inserted in the Whitemark computer system (viruses can count), it would explode. Any Whitemark program containing a virus would be thoroughly and irretrievably jumbled. Nothing would come out of the company’s computers but garbage.
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