The Hanged Man’s Song

by John Sandford

  “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.

  As they’d grown, and shifted, and evolved, he’d grown right along with them.

  There are, undoubtedly, some serious databases that he couldn’t get at-computers that had been isolated from any phone service; computers where, to download information, you had to accept the information on disk or on paper, handed to you by a guy who checked your cr
edentials in person and got a signed receipt for the disk.

  But those computers are damned few. It’s just too inconvenient. If the director of the CIA wants to look at something on his desktop, he doesn’t want to have to go down in the basement to look at it. He wants it in his office. And if he looked at it on his desktop, then Bobby could look at it too. Because Bobby was everywhere.

  I scanned through the information in the last five files, and thought three things.

  First, when Wayne Bob had looked at that single disk of information and commented that we were now two of the most powerful people in Washington, he may have been right, but that disk was a child’s trinket compared to Bobby’s laptop.

  Second, it occurred to me that I was now the Invisible Man-I could go anywhere, and see almost anything, and probably do quite a bit to people I didn’t like.

  And third, I thought, You’re in a lot of trouble now, Kidd.

  AFTER considering it for a while, I transferred the encryption keys to my own notebook, so I wouldn’t have to re-fetch them from Rachel every time I wanted to look at Bobby’s files. I had a good-sized hard disk myself, and hid them in the clutter. Still, if the feds got their hands on it, and knew what they were looking for, they’d find the keys. I’d find a better hiding place as soon as I got home.

  Home… What if Carp had called Krause back, had given him my name and my license plate number, and some thugs were waiting in my apartment to take me down? I got paranoid thinking about it, and finally called the old lady who lived downstairs from me-a painter, and a good one, who took care of the cat when I was gone-to check on the apartment and to tell her I was on my way back.

  “Means nothing to me. You can stay away as long as you want.” She loudly crunched on a carrot stick or piece of celery, and said while she was chewing, “I put the cat through the garbage disposal two days ago, the stinky thing, and stole your Whistler. What else do you have that I need?”

  “How about a real sense of humor?” I suggested.

  She was ragging on me, which was good: she knew everything that happened in the apartment building, so there probably weren’t any thugs waiting on the landing.

  THE rest of the evening was spent systematically going through the last five files, figuring out exactly what was there. An index helped, but the entries were often cryptic in themselves-just a couple of words or initials that Bobby would recognize.

  At one o’clock in the morning, I popped an Ambien to take me down, and got six hours of good sleep. Sometime before nine o’clock the next morning, I was again crossing the rolling green landscape of Ohio, heading toward I-80, which would take me into Chicago.

  I hadn’t thought much about Carp-what he might be doing-since I’d last seen him on his bicycle outside Rock Creek Park. He was in hiding, I thought. I’d also lost track of the murder investigation in Jackson, which I resolved to check into that night. If the feds didn’t winkle him out pretty soon, I’d start messaging the FBI myself.

  At ten o’clock, or a little after, I stopped at a Dairy Queen to get an ice-cream cone. I was leaning against the car’s front fender, munching the dipped-chocolate coating off the ice cream, when I heard the phone ring in the car. LuEllen.

  I scrambled to get inside without dripping ice cream on the upholstery, got the phone, and punched it up. “Yeah?”

  Child’s voice, shaky, and thin, as if she were some distance from the phone’s mouthpiece: “Mr. Kidd? He took me on the way to the liberry.”

  “What?”

  “He took me on the way to the liberry. He wants Bobby’s laptop.”

  Shit. Not LuEllen. It was Rachel. “Where are you, honey? What’re-”

  “Kidd? This is James Carp.”

  Like getting whacked in the forehead. “Carp?”

  “I assume you’re the one who took the laptop out of my car. Pretty smart. I want it back. I’ll trade you.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “The laptop. And Rachel, here. I’ve got her, and I’m going to keep her until I get the laptop. But there’s a deadline. I assume you’re still in Washington. I want you down here near this place, Longstreet, as soon as you can get here. Tonight? Tonight, I think.”

  “I’m not in Washington,” I said. “I can’t get there tonight. I’m in my car in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Then get somewhere,” he snapped. His voice had a high, squeaky quality, as though it were on the edge of cracking; as though he were on the edge of cracking. “I’ll tell you this. This is what I’m going to do. I’m gonna stick this girl so far out in the woods that you’ll never find her. Out in the wilderness. I’m gonna chain her to a tree. If you fuck with me, I’ll never go back, and you’ll never find out where she is.”

  “I’ll get you the laptop, but I can’t get there tonight,” I said. My voice was scared, and I didn’t care if it showed; maybe it was better that it showed. And I was lying like a motherfucker, trying to buy time. “I’m way up in West Virginia. I can get there maybe tomorrow afternoon. Honest to God, I’m out in the sticks. I’ll get to an airport, try to find a flight that’ll get me into Memphis, and I’ll get a car from there. But don’t put her out in the woods. If you put her out in the woods and she dies, you’ll get the death penalty. You still might be clear with the cops.”

  “Oh, bullshit. They know I killed Bobby. The only thing that’ll get me clear is that laptop, and the files. If I have that, they’ll talk. They’ll let me go off somewhere and play with myself. Otherwise, I’m toast. You try to jump me, I swear to God I’ll put a gun in my mouth and little miss black girl here will rot under a tree in the middle of a swamp.”

  “Don’t do that. Don’t do that,” I said, as urgently as I could.

  “Fuck you. I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.”

  He was gone.

  I CALLED John. “I just got a phone call from James Carp. He’s there in Longstreet and he says he’s got Rachel. Have you seen her?”

  “Rachel?” He was sputtering like I had. “Rachel? She just left here half an hour ago, walking down to the library.”

  “I talked to a little girl, just for a moment. Sounded like Rachel. She said he got her on the way to the library, goddamnit, John, I think he got her, you gotta check.”

  “Call you back,” he rasped, and he was gone.

  I HAD passed Cleveland on I-80. As soon as John was off the phone, I turned around and headed back, my laptop propped against the steering wheel. I pulled up Microsoft’s Streets and Trips program. Cleveland International was on my side of the metro area, fortunately, and I was able to take I-480 right back in. As soon as I figured out where I was going, I called directory assistance and got phone numbers for four charter air services. I was probably sixteen hours from Longstreet by road, close to a thousand miles. But maybe I could get a plane into Greenville.

  The first place I called at Cleveland International was basically an air ambulance service. The woman who answered the phone recommended another service, whose number I didn’t have, but who she said was most likely to have a plane free quickly.

  I called, and got a man’s quiet voice. “Rogers Air Transport.”

  “I need to get a plane to Greenville, Mississippi, in the next couple of hours,” I said, and my voice reflected it. “Do you have one, or do you know where I could get one?”

  “What do you want, exactly?”

  “To get down there as fast as I can. I’ve got a family emergency.”

  “Well, uh, I can get you a Lear into Greenville, have you down there in a couple of hours or a little more. But, uh, it won’t be cheap.”

  “How much?”

  “Mm, I’d have to figure it.” There was a moment of silence, and I had the feeling that he was staring at the ceiling, rather than running an accounting program. He came back. “About forty-five hundred. That’s if I don’t have to hang around down there.” He sounded apologetic.

  “I’ll take it,” I said. “I’m on the way to your place now. I’m maybe thirty
or forty miles out. You won’t have to hang around, I’ll fly back commercial to pick up my car.”

  “About payment, uh, we require-”

  “You can have it any way you want it,” I said. “Cash, check, or credit card.”

  “Cash would be fine.”

  ROGERS Air Transport had its worldwide headquarters in a cream-colored metal pole barn that served as both hangar and office. I parked in front, dug my stash cash out of the trunk, got one bag with clothes and another that had all three laptops, and carried them around to the office, which smelled pleasantly of aviation gas and hot oil, and was empty.

  “Hello?” I called. Nothing. A side door led out of the office, and I stuck my head out and saw a redheaded man walking toward me. He wore denim overalls and a train engineer’s hat, and was wiping his hands on a rag. “Mr. Kidd?” he asked cheerfully.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Jim Rogers.” He stuck out a hand and I shook it. “We’re ready if you are.”

  “My car’s outside.”

  “It’ll be okay there until you can get back. I hope it’s nothing terrible down in Greenville.”

  “It’s bad enough,” I said. I wasn’t going to be able to avoid saying something. “My dad’s had a heart attack. They’re gonna try to fix things, but nobody knows what’s going to happen.”

  “Aw, too bad,” he said. A woman came around the corner, mid-thirties with smile lines around her eyes, a good tan, a ponytail, and a flight suit.

  “This is Marcia, our co-pilot,” Rogers said.

  “I’m his old lady,” Marcia said. “You ready?”

  Jim’s eyes sort of drifted-I had the feeling he wasn’t the most dynamic of executives, though he might have been a hell of a guy-and I said, “Oh, yeah, better give you this,” and handed him forty-five hundred from my stash cash. He took it and nodded, not asking the obvious question, which I answered anyway. “I was up here buying pottery,” I said. “Lucky for me, a lot of those places only take cash.”