I thought about that until LuEllen emerged from the bathroom, and then I stopped thinking about it for a while.
>>> “WHAT do you think we should do?” she asked late in the night. We were tangled up in the sheets of the big king-sized bed. We each had a bottle of Dos Equis.
“I’ve been thinking about that since they took you,” I said. “I had nothing else to do but talk on the phone and wait . . . and I did some tarot readings that were all over the place. And I think you should go on home. Lay low. If you stay with me, you become dangerous to both of us.”
“Tell me how,” she said.
“Because I may do something that would attract some attention—not much, but some. If they see you, then they know that they’ve got the right guy. And they’ll know who I am, and then they might be able to get back to you. I mean, get all the way back to the real you.”
“What’re you gonna do?”
“I want Carp punished. And I want this Deep Data Correlation program stopped. I’m thinking of going to Bob—Congressman Bob. He’s in the DDC file. I’m not sure he could blow up the program, but he’s got his hand on a lot of government money. If nothing else, he might be able to starve it to death. In any case, he’d be pretty damn interested in what they’ve got on him.”
“Bad?”
“A little questionable dealing here and there. Bob did some favors that were a little too enthusiastic. They don’t have him nailed down, but you get the impression that if they pushed hard enough, they might get him.”
“So you tell Bob . . .”
“I tell him that I’ve dealt some code with a guy who’s involved in some big hassle with the government. That this guy knew I’d worked with Bob and asked me to pass the file on.”
“That’s pretty thin ice.”
“Yeah, but there’s no way to prove anything else happened. I’m a painter, for Christ’s sakes.”
She sighed. “I’ll get a plane out tomorrow morning.”
“That’d be good,” I said.
We were silent for a while, and then she said, “If they really dug into you about the e-mail file, they’d ask how come you got to Washington before you got the e-mail file.”
“No, they won’t. I e-mailed the file to myself a couple days ago. I sorta thought this might be coming.”
“You didn’t tell me?” One eyebrow went up.
“I figured you’d squeal like a piggy,” I said. “There was the possibility that I’d never need to do it, so why mention it and put up with all the squealing?”
“Ah, jeez,” she said. “You want another Two-X?”
>>> LUELLEN had dumped her ID, but it hadn’t been the real LuEllen anyway. She carried a backup behind the lining of a lockable jewelry case in her luggage, along with a few credit cards, a Sam’s Club card, and a membership card to the Museum of Modern Art.
She wore her hair short as a matter of course, and carried two very good wigs as a regular part of her wardrobe. We bought her a new wallet the next day, along with a new purse and a ton of the usual crap that women carry around with them. We were at National at eleven o’clock. I kissed her good-bye in the car, then trailed her, at a little distance, into the airport. There was no trouble at all. The razor-sharp security made her take off her shoes, because they had steel shanks in the heels, but it never occurred to anyone that the pretty blonde might be wearing a wig. She looked nothing like she had in the park.
She turned on the other side of the security line and nodded at me, a quick eye-lock and a nod, and then she was gone, a small, well-dressed woman carrying a medium-sized purse, maybe somebody doing business for a nonprofit, or a congressman’s aide going home.
>>> BEFORE leaving with LuEllen for the airport, I’d called Congressman Wayne Bob at the number he’d given me for the casino research. When he answered, I said, “This is Kidd. Congressman, I gotta see you today. This is a no-shit, honest-to-God emergency. It has to do with all this corruption stuff on TV. You need to talk to me.”
“Am I gonna be on?” he blurted.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so, but you could be. They’ve got a file on you, and it goes into a deal with Whit Dickens. You know a Whit Dickens?”
You could almost hear him lick his lips, and he said, “Maybe.”
I said, “I could explain better if we could get off in a corner somewhere.”
“Where?” he asked.
“How about the Hay-Adams?”
“Good. How about two forty-five? I’ll get us a cranny.”
“See you then.”
>>> THE thing about the Hay-Adams is that politicians wander in and out of it all the time, every day, virtually every hour; and the restaurant has lots of little nooks and crannies, where you can have intense conversations without being seen or overheard. Even better, I could get to the restaurant in a couple of minutes from my room.
I got to the restaurant at 2:45 on the dot. A waiter took me back to the reserved cranny, gave me a glass of ice water and a menu, and a minute later came back to say that Bob was running ten minutes late. I ordered a Dos Equis and drank ice water and beer and read the Post until 2:55, when Bob came around the corner.
Bob was short and too heavy in a masculine, pink, southern way. He had a florid, short-nosed face and a belly, white haystack hair, and a perpetual smile. He was sweating with the summer heat when he slid into the booth across from me; he was wearing a blue-striped seersucker suit, which you’re only allowed to wear if you come from the South, and a pinkie ring with a deep blue oval stone, and he looked pretty good in all of it. He was about fifty, I thought, and his pale blue eyes were worried. Bob was kind to old people, children, and dogs, but had a reputation for striking like a rattlesnake if you pissed him off.
“What’s shakin’?” he asked. Before I could answer, he pointed a pistol finger at a waiter, and then tipped his thumb into his mouth. The waiter nodded and disappeared. “Universal signal for a Beefeater’s martini, up, with two olives and ice-cold.”
I dug into my pocket and found a printout of the documents that had been compiled against Bob. I passed it to him. He read it once, then again, more carefully, then put the paper on the table, folded it four times, into a small square, and stuck it into his pocket. “Could cause me some trouble,” he said thoughtfully. He looked me over. “Where’s it coming from?”
“Frank Krause. Your friendly neighborhood senator.”
He took a moment to think about that, and then a single wrinkle appeared in his forehead. “Frank Krause? I saw something on TV about Frank Marsh, they said something about Krause.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” I said.
“How are you mixed up in it?”
“There’s a guy I know only on the Internet. He’s apparently involved in some kind of hassle with Krause. Anyway, he says that Krause has got a rat’s-nest inter-agency intelligence operation going, and one of the things that they’re testing is called Deep Data Correlation. The basic concept was supposed to be that they could look at an ocean of data and figure out from that who might be bad guys. Terrorists.”
“Is that bad?” The waiter came back with a martini, waited, with me, until Bob nodded. The waiter went away and I continued.
“Not if that was what was happening. But there are some fundamental problems with that kind of data-mining,” I said. I explained the numbers problem. “So essentially, what they were trying to do is impossible. But—if you come at it from the other end, starting with a name, then going after associated data, you can develop some pretty powerful tools.”
“Wait a minute,” Bob said. “You’re saying that instead of looking at the data, and finding suspects, they find a suspect, and then mine the data to support the suspicion.”
“Yeah. Except, of course, that you’ve got to identify a target first. With terrorists, identifying the target is the whole problem. That’s the hard part. If they’d been a private company, say, hired to find techniques that would identify terrorists, they’d have co
ncluded that data-mining was a waste of time. But they’re not in a private company. They’re with the government. So they apparently said to themselves, ‘Well, data-mining won’t work, but we’ve got this great research tool, let’s just check it out on a few targets.’ ”
“They chose me?” He looked floridly earnest, but not all that surprised.
“Bob,” I said, “I gotta trust you, I think, but honest to God, we’ve occasionally given each other reason to think that neither one of us might not be . . .”
I shrugged, and he finished the sentence for me. “. . . as close to God as our mothers might wish.”
“Exactly,” I said. “So I’m gonna show you something. But if you tie me to it, or mention it to anyone that you heard it from me, I’m gonna shove it up your ass sideways.”
He smiled. “That’s the kinda deal I understand.” His smile vanished like a turned-off light, and he looked at me over the rim of his martini glass as he finished the drink, his eyes cold as ice. “They won’t hear about you from me; you got my word.”
I took my laptop off the seat beside me, turned it on, waited until it was up, then called up the file. I turned it toward him and said, “You can page through it with the Page Down key.”
He started paging through, stopping occasionally to mutter, “Just saw this one on TV . . . Krause is doing this? . . . Jesus, I didn’t know this guy was queer, I was just peeing in the next stall to him . . . Landford Hewes took a half-million out of Mejico Rico? Holy shit, he’s supposed to be Mr. Clean . . . Oh man: Davy Fergusson, he’s a friend of mine and so is Tina, and this says he beats the shit out of her. Look at the mouse on that woman, and the hometown cops bailed him out without a word.”
He was slack-jawed, fascinated.
“You gotta think about this,” I said. “This use of their data-mining tool is inevitable. It’s the perfect weapon to use against elected politicians. I mean, I might not care if they find out that I’ve been renting porno videos or getting blow jobs from seventeen-year-old boy hookers in the local park, but a politician would. Imagine what would happen if this capability got into the hands of lobbyists. We’d be at the mercy of any special interest willing to use it.”
“Umm . . .” he said. He took thirty minutes to work through the file. “If you’re making mental notes, don’t bother,” I said. “I got the whole thing on a CD for you. I’m giving them to you.”
He looked up. “What for? There’s a lotta horsepower here.”
“Not for me,” I said. “I’m a painter. Just being around this shit scares me to death. But this DDC stuff scares me, too. I thought if you had the information, you could talk to some of the people there . . .” I nodded at the laptop.
Again, he finished my sentence for me: “. . . and shove it up Krause’s ass sideways?”
“Something like that. I don’t care so much about Krause as this group he’s got working for them. It’s not right. It won’t catch terrorists; all it can be used for is blackmail.”
“It ain’t right,” he agreed. “You got that CD?”
I took it out of my pocket and passed it to him. “We are now two of the most powerful people in this whole fuckin’ capital of the world,” he said, looking at his reflection in the CD. “You and me, and we’re sitting here in a hotel booth drinking a martini and a beer and I’m looking at my face in a record.”
I couldn’t think of a quip, so I said, stupidly, “Makes you think, huh?”
Chapter
Eighteen
>>> AFTER ANOTHER AFTERNOON and night in Washington, and a span of boring computer digging, I carefully checked out of the hotel—that is, I got my bags and took a cab to National, went inside, then back outside, and took another cab to a department store adjoining the parking structure where I’d left my car. I walked through the store to the car, and two minutes later was on my way to St. Paul, looking over my shoulder all the time.
Washington to St. Paul by car is two killer days, or three easy ones. I decided to take three. I’d get enough ideas while driving the car that I’d want to get out and crank on the computer for a while. Motels are good for that: nothing but silence, give or take the odd housekeeper. I had my cell phone plugged into the car’s inverter, hoping that LuEllen would finally feel safe enough to call. As the hills and mountains of Pennsylvania rolled by, the phone remained silent.
At three o’clock, I stopped at a convenience store, bought a half-dozen Diet Cokes, then pulled into a Ramada Inn just off I-76 south of Youngstown, Ohio. I got a no-smoking room on the second floor and plugged in for more boring computer diddling.
I was getting nowhere; I got so desperate that I dug out the tarot cards, did a series of spreads, and figured out nothing at all. The cards were disorganized, random, trivial.
How had Carp done it? That’s what I needed to know. How had he found the keys? I went to the bed, lay down, and put a pillow over my eyes. Instead of random digging at the machine, let’s look at Carp, I thought. What did Carp do?
After worrying about it for a while, a thought popped into my head. An encryption key would consist of characters that you can see on a keyboard, because, on occasion, folks had to manually type them, and not everybody knows how to get to the alternate character sets on a keyboard. An encrypted file, on the other hand, usually includes all the characters that a computer can generate, including many that are not represented on a keyboard. If I were to write a search program that looked for strings of letters and numbers that were visible on the keyboard, but contained none of the other, hidden characters . . . then, if the keys were hidden in the huge files, maybe I could pull them out.
Hell, it was a start, and writing a little software program would keep my brain from turning to cheddar. I pulled out my own notebook, where I had my software tool kit, and spent a quarter-hour or so creating the search program. The coding was interspersed with a few minutes watching CNN, a few more watching the Weather Channel, and maybe a moment or two of self-doubt, a feeling that I was wasting my time. When I finished, instead of transferring the program via disk, I got a cable out of my briefcase and hooked my laptop to Bobby’s, to transfer the program.
And the minute I did, Bobby’s laptop began running the Dogabone program, trying to fetch something from my laptop; and it did it as my laptop was transferring the search program. If I hadn’t been able to see his laptop, I would never have known that he was searching mine.
Huh.
>>> THE search program found nothing in the encrypted files, no long strings of out-front characters. But as I sat on the bed, watching the machines talk . . .
After we grabbed Carp’s laptop back in Louisiana, he’d only had Bobby’s laptop to work with. He’d been going online with me, as Lemon, and who else? Who else that Bobby knew?
I could think of only one person: Rachel Willowby. Rachel Willowby, who had gotten a free computer from Bobby. Ten minutes later, I was calling John from a pay phone in a strip shopping mall. “John, where’s Rachel?”
“She went down to the library with Marvel,” he said. “What’s up?”
“I need to go online for a minute with Rachel’s notebook. Is it there? Or did she take it with her?”
“She takes it everywhere. That’s why she’s at the library—they got it fixed so she can plug into their ethernet and she can get a fast line free. She’s in heaven.”
“Got a phone number for the library?”
>>> I TALKED to the Longstreet librarian, told her it was urgent, and she went and found Rachel. “Hello?”
“Rachel, this is Kidd. You remember?”
“Sure. What’s up?” She asked the question just like John; already picking up the family traits.
“I’m at a pay phone in Ohio. I need to go online with you for a minute. I’ve got a couple of phone numbers and some protocols for you. Give me your ethernet address and I’ll be down to hook up with you in a couple of minutes.”
“All right.” She was enthusiastic. More phone numbers were always good.
>>> TWO minutes later, I hooked up with Rachel, using Bobby’s laptop, and watched the Dogabone program go straight into her. Five seconds later, I had fifty short blocks of numbers and letters that looked like nothing more than computer keys. Sonofabitch. Bobby had hidden his keys with the little computer kids, scattered anonymously all over the country.
Now I had them. Just like Christmas. I talked with Rachel for a few seconds, then transferred a couple of good phone numbers for her to look at. They were big, semi-secure computers where she wouldn’t get caught, but would have a lot to explore. And they’d keep her from thinking too hard about why I’d wanted to go online with her.
Back at the hotel, I got busy with Bobby’s laptop. The keys were in the same order as the files, so opening the files was no problem. I sat at the shaky little motel table and started scanning through what Bobby had accumulated over the years.
Forty-five of the fifty files contained text documents on topics that interested Bobby—biographies and photos of hundreds of people, along with what were apparently confidential assessments of many of those people, made by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Out of curiosity, I looked and found one on me, though it wasn’t much more than a standard FBI file, listing my military service, my technical specialties, and a few additional random notes: “. . . currently self-employed as a fine arts painter.”
>>> AH, but the other five files.
These were the keys to the kingdom.
Here were the routings and codes that would get you into almost any computer database in the world. I won’t list the stuff, but it is this simple: Bobby had access to almost everything, everywhere. He’d been around as a phone phreak in the CP/M and early DOS days, had fiddled with Commodores and Z80s and all that. He’d been in the early networked computers before anybody thought about online security, and he’d been building trapdoors and secret entrances all along.
Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4 Page 91