Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  “Like you.”

  “Like all of us.”

  Monger had worked. “A lot of the traffic was out of individual computers from about ten major sites—all colleges, all easy to get into,” Rufus said. “It looks like somebody went looking for online computers, planted a rumor message in a virus that dumped it into AOL message boards and other places like that. In the days before the rumors started, a lot of those ten sites had some extended traffic with a server in Laurel, Maryland.”

  “How much before the rumors started?”

  “Week or so. That’s about as far back as I can get, before the universe gets too large for Monger.”

  “A week or so.”

  “That’s what it looks like. Does this help?”

  “I have to think about it,” I said.

  Bobby came back with some info about AmMath, and the guy who ran it.

  St. John Corbeil was a smart guy, a guy who quit the Marine Corps as a major and moved to the National Security Agency. He worked for the NSA for another five years, doing nothing that Bobby could find out about, except getting an advanced degree in software design. After a five-year hitch at NSA, he quit, moved to Dallas, and started his own high-tech encryption-products firm. He’d taken a half-dozen NSA encryption, math, and software specialists with him. The company had done well, coming along with its product line just at the beginning of the Internet boom. Corbeil was reasonably rich, with his ten percent of AmMath stock and his CEO’s spot.

  I don’t understand any of that encryption shit,” LuEllen said.

  “Like this,” I said. “Suppose you wanted to send me an Internet note that said, ‘Let’s sneak into Bill Gates’s house and steal his dog.’ If strong encryption is allowed, you could run the message through a software package—you’d just push a button—and it would be impossible for anybody to break. Anybody. Unless he had the key. No matter how hot-shit somebody else’s computers were, they couldn’t break it.”

  “But with the Clipper chip . . .”

  “There’d be two keys. I’d have one, and the government would have one. You could send the message, and I’d get it okay, but so would the government. If they were watching.”

  “We’d get to Bill Gates’s house and we’d find a whole bunch of cops waiting.”

  “And we’d be standing there with our dicks in our hands.”

  “Or a can of Alpo, in my case,” she said.

  Jack had had a small house in Santa Cruz, about a mile from Currier’s apartment. After he was killed, the FBI had gotten a warrant to go through the place, and Lane told them where to find the keys. The day after the funeral, she’d called to see if she could get back in, and the feds had no objection: they’d turned the place over, and had taken out everything that appeared to be computer-related, along with all his old phone bills, personal correspondence, and so on.

  While LuEllen and I were looking up Firewall names, Lane and Green had gone over to the house to look around, and to start cleaning up. That’s what Lane had called it. Cleaning up.

  What she meant was, throwing away anything that couldn’t be sold or given away. All the small pieces of a life—posters, notes, letters, unidentifiable photos; like that. Jack had never had children, so there was nobody to get it, except his sister; nobody to wonder who this ancestor had been, and to sit down in 2050 or 2100 and paw through the remains . . .

  When they got back, Green said, “Somebody was there before any of us. Somebody spread the lock on the back door.”

  “Gotta be the AmMath guys,” I said. “Maybe they’re happy, since they got the disks from you . . .”

  What’d you find out about Firewall?”

  Lane asked. “Nothing,” I said. I ran it down for her.

  “This guy who went to Mexico,” Green said. “He could have gone for more than one reason. You’re assuming he went because he was scared because he was on the list, like Mason. But what if he’s running because he is with Firewall?”

  “I mentioned that,” LuEllen said. “Kidd didn’t buy it. He’s got a theory.”

  “What’s the theory?”

  “There is no Firewall,” I said. “It’s bullshit, made up out of whole cloth.”

  Then we launched into one of those circular arguments in which you almost feel as though you can grasp what’s going on, but there’s always one critical piece missing from every possible logical construction. Lane started it.

  “Exactly what would that do?” Lane asked. “If somebody made up Firewall, why would they do it?”

  “To cover some other reason for killing Lighter?” I suggested.

  “They didn’t have anything to cover. The police thought it was a mugging. They weren’t happy, but I’ve never heard there was any other big investigation going on, before the Firewall thing came up.”

  “Clipper II was dying. Is dying. Maybe they thought if one of the Clipper II people was killed by hackers, there’d be some kind of groundswell . . .”

  “There’s not going to be any groundswell,” Lane said. “The feds might want Clipper II, but it’s too late. Everybody knows it’s too late. It doesn’t have anything to do with preferences or laws. Trying to get rid of strong encryption and replace it with the Clipper II would be like trying to get rid of pi or the Round Earth Theory. It’s too fucking late.”

  “Then how did all of those names come up all of a sudden? Mine and Bobby’s and Jack’s and omeomi and the others,” I asked. “We are linked. If you look at it from the right direction, we are a conspiracy, because a lot of us sure as shit have conspired with each other . . .”

  “I don’t know; I don’t know why Firewall came up. I don’t know how it ties in. But it seems to. There’s something out there, and it’s not totally made up. Something is happening. And Jack is dead and Lighter is dead . . .”

  “But it might just be coincidence . . .”

  “How could it possibly be?” She ticked it off on her fingers. “Jack is connected with Clipper II and AmMath and Firewall. Firewall kills Lighter who is connected with Clipper II and AmMath.”

  “But we can’t find a single person who is really connected with Firewall,” I said. “Not a single one.”

  Green asked, “Did Jack know Lighter?”

  I shook my head. “Not as far as we know.”

  “Might be something to check.”

  I turned to LuEllen, who’d kept her mouth shut during the argument. “What do you think?”

  “Three choices,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Look at AmMath. Keeping digging at Firewall. Get the fuck out.”

  Lane wanted to go after AmMath because of her brother. Green didn’t much care; his job was to take care of Lane, which he would do one way or the other. LuEllen was edging toward the door. “You can’t fight a bureaucracy,” she said. “You just become a goal. They put the goal in memos. It’s like trying to argue with the IRS.”

  But I couldn’t quit, not yet. The names were out there, and once the cops started unraveling a few identities, they would probably get them all—and we could get hurt without ever knowing why, or what was happening.

  “I have to find out more about Firewall,” I said. “Just for self-protection. If AmMath’s involved, then I’ll look into AmMath.”

  “You’re giving up on Jack?” Lane asked. “It sounds like you’re giving up.”

  “No, but we’ve got to be careful. From what it looks like, AmMath may be more than some mean-ass private company. Jack may have been messing with something serious—big-time trouble, of the kind we really don’t want to know about.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That means that the only way to get at them would be politics. We find some paper, we sic your senator on them, they do an internal investigation and cough somebody up and disown him. But if Jack was killed by some kind of operation . . . that’s gonna be tough.”

  The best thing we could do, I thought, was to run down the Monger information in Maryland. Maybe, with luck, we�
�d find some fourteen-year-old computer hack at the bottom of the Firewall conspiracy. We could dump him in the lap of the local sheriff, get a good laugh out of the press, and go home.

  “Fat chance,” LuEllen said.

  “It could happen,” I said. “It’s better than trying to crawl through AmMath’s basement window.”

  “What about Lane?” Green asked.

  “Call the Dallas cops and tell them that you’re coming out to pick up Jack’s computers and whatever other property they seized, that they don’t want anymore. But that you’ve got to close down his home out here first.”

  “And you guys will be in Maryland doing what?” Lane asked.

  “You know,” I said. “Looking around.”

  We flew out of San Francisco the same night. Before we left, when we were at the motel, packing, I went back out to Bobby and told him that we’d be moving to Washington. He booked us business-class seats on an evening flight into National, and a car under one of the phony IDs LuEllen had been using in New York. That ID was more solid than the two we’d picked up in San Francisco, and the credit cards that went with them were definitely good. Bobby had also developed more stuff on Corbeil and AmMath.

  Corbeil was a smart guy, but he was also nuts. He spent way too much time thinking about godless socialists, mindless bureaucrats, confiscatory taxation, black agitators, the yellow peril, the red menace, the International Jewish Conspiracy, and the New World Order. He’d been known to allow in public that Hitler had done a lot of good things.

  I’ve never been much interested in politics, but once wrote some do-it-yourself polling that allowed low-rent politicians to do their own telephone polls. I eventually sold off the business, but before I did, I got to know quite a few politicians. They were a pretty lively bunch, no more or less corrupt than schoolteachers, newspaper reporters, cops, or doctors.

  Anyway, it didn’t take much exposure to politics for me to realize that there are as many nuts on the left as there are on the right, and in the long run, the lefties are probably more dangerous. But in the short run, if you find a guy on top of your hometown clock tower with a cheap Chinese semiauto assault-weapon lookalike, that guy will be one of Corbeil’s buddies, dreaming of black helicopters and socialist tanks massing on the Canadian border, preparing to pollute America’s vital fluids.

  Smart and nuts: Corbeil’s description sounded a little like an advertisement for breakfast cereal, but wasn’t.

  Bobby had more about Corbeil’s lifestyle, as portrayed by the local city magazines. Corbeil’s salary was modest for a CEO, running about $150,000 a year, but then, he also owned a big chunk of AmMath stock. He liked fast cars and blond women; he made a point of being seen with Dallas’s flavor-of-the-day model. One of them had been a Playboy playmate of the month. Bobby included the centerfold picture.

  “Why do they shave their pubic hair into those little stripes?” LuEllen asked.

  We contemplated this mystery for a moment; then I said, “Maybe they don’t wear OshKosh B’Gosh brand bathing suits, like some people.”

  “You think?”

  LOTS MORE STUFF, I’LL SEND IT AS SOON AS I WEED THROUGH IT. HAVEN’T PICKED OUT AMMATH COMPUTER LINES YET, WILL GET BACK LATER.

  ANYTHING ON THE JAZ ?

  YES. OPENED THE BIG FILES, GOT PHOTOS, VERY HIGH RES. ALL THE SAME PARKING LOT. DON’T UNDERSTAND.

  CAN YOU MAKE JPEG, LEAVE IN MY BOX ?

  YES.

  ALSO , COPY OUT JAZ DISKS , OVERNIGHT THEM TO WASH HOTEL .

  OK.

  On the flight, we talked about What Next. We didn’t know what AmMath was doing, in anything more than a general sense, or why Jack might have been killed, if he wasn’t killed exactly like the AmMath people said he was. I still suspected that Firewall was a phantom.

  “Gonna have to spend some more time with Jack’s Jaz disks,” I said.

  “There’re only four . . .”

  I looked at her. “Four Jaz disks at two gigabytes each,” I said. “You could put two thousand pretty fat novels on one of them. We’re dealing with as much text as you’d get, say, in eight thousand Tom Clancy novels.”

  “Whoa.”

  “A bigger whoa than you think.” I closed my eyes and held up a finger to indicate that I was thinking. A minute later I had it. “If you broke everything up into texts the size of Clancy novels, and looked in each one of them for one minute, and worked forty hours a week at it, it’d take you better than three weeks to look in all of them.”

  “For one minute each.”

  “One minute,” I said.

  “You’re a mathematical fucking marvel,” she said.

  “That’s not the end of the problem,” I said. “The biggest part of it is, we don’t know what’s bullshit and what’s not.”

  We thought about that, and she said, “I see a light at the end of the tunnel.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Jack looked for less than a week, and he apparently found something.”

  “Unless they just killed him for trying to take it . . .”

  An hour out of Washington, with nothing to do, I got out the tarot deck and did a couple of spreads. LuEllen watched with mixed skepticism and nervousness, and finally said, “Well?”

  “Just bullshit,” I said. “Confusion.”

  “Let me cut the deck.” I gave the deck a light shuffle, and let her cut it. She cut out the devil card. The devil represents a force of evil, but not usually from the outside, not a standard bad guy. The devil is usually inside. He sits on top of you, controlling you, without your even being aware of it.

  “That’s bad,” she said. “I can tell by your face.”

  11

  In the course of my life, I’d spent maybe six months in Washington. Though it might not be fashionable to admit it, I like the place. Usually portrayed as a mass of greed-heads packed liked oiled sardines inside the Beltway, Washington has nice places to walk and good art to look at. People who like central Italy, the campagna, would like the rural landscape out in Virginia.

  We got into National late, and picked up the car and a map. We wouldn’t be right in Washington. According to Rufus, the server we were looking for was in Laurel, which is actually closer to Baltimore—not far, I noticed on the map, from Fort Meade, headquarters of the National Security Agency.

  I’d had some dealings with the NSA when I was in the military and I’d always been impressed by two things: their employees’ technical expertise and their arrogance. I hadn’t had anything to do with the agency for a couple of decades, but because it was so heavily involved in computers, there was always a lot of back-and-forth between NSA computer geeks and the outside computer world.

  Word got around, and the word was that the NSA was rapidly becoming obsolete. Once upon a time, agency operatives could tap any phone call or radio transmission in the world; they could put Mao Tsetung’s private words on the president’s desk an hour after the Maximum Leader spoke them into his office phone; they could provide real-time intercepts to the special ops people in the military.

  No more. The world was rife with unbreakable codes—any good university math department could whip one up in a matter of days. Just as bad, the most critical diplomatic and military traffic had come out of the air and gone underground, into fiber-optic cable. Even if a special forces team managed to get at a cable, messages were routinely encoded with ultrastrong encryption routines.

  The NSA was going deaf. And the word was, they didn’t know what to do about it. They’d become a bin full of aging bureaucrats worried about their jobs, and spinning further and further out of the Washington intelligence center.

  LuEllen and I checked into a Ramada Inn off I-95 near Laurel, Maryland. Separate rooms, under separate IDs, gave us some easy options if there were trouble. In the burglary business, you never know when you might need a bolt-hole.

  The next morning, after pancakes and coffee and The New York Times for me and The Wall Street Journal for LuEllen, we went looking for the
server. The T-1 line it used was located in a suburban office complex called the Carter-Byrd Center, building 2233. We found it fifteen minutes from the motel, two rows of four, two-story yellow-brick buildings, facing each other, behind small parking lots, on a dead-end street.

  The tenants were professional services companies: accountants, financial advisors, a legal publishing firm, a title company, and several law firms. Most of them occupied an entire floor or building wing. The company we were looking for, Bloch Technology, was one of the small companies, grouped with other smaller companies, in a suite of offices in the end building on the right.

  LuEllen, dressed in a dark blue business suit and navy low heels, clipped her miniature Panasonic movie camera into her briefcase, gave me a hot little kiss on the lips—going into a job always turned her on—and headed for 2233 to do the first reconnaissance. I waited in the car.

  The idea was, she was looking for one of the other companies in Carter-Byrd, but got the building wrong. She’d be inside, we thought, for two or three minutes.

  Fifteen minutes after she’d disappeared through the double glass doors, I was about ready to go in after her. Then she walked back outside, with a guy in a short-sleeved white shirt, who pointed up the hill toward the first building. She nodded, and they talked for a few more seconds, she laughed, patted his arm, and started for the car. I slumped a little lower in the passenger seat. The guy watched her go; he wasn’t watching her shoulders.

  As she came up to the car, I slumped another six inches. She climbed into the driver’s seat, fired it up, backed out of the parking space, and we headed up the hill. “He’s back inside,” she said, as we pulled away.

  I pushed myself up. “That took a while.”

  “I knocked on the door—it’s got a Vermond combination pad, not alarmed—and asked where Clayton Accounting was, and we got to chatting,” she said. “Those computer people are amazing. They’ve got all these interesting machines.”

  “Really.”

  “Really. He’s got five of them. They look like air conditioners, all lined up in the back room.”

  “Two rooms?”