The Devil's Code

CHAPTER 10

Since I couldn't sleep anyway, I kicked LuEllen out of bed at six-thirty and we went to look for Clarence Mason. We stopped at a diner for cholesterol and caffeine, got clogged in traffic heading into San Francisco, crossed the Golden Gate at eight o'clock, and after a bit of wandering, LuEllen ran into a gas station and got a guess on the location of LaCoste Road. Mason's place was a small dark-green bungalow with an old-style two-track drive. Nobody home.

"Why didn't I think of that?" I said, back in the car. "Most people work during the day." We went out to a phone, and I hooked up the laptop and got online with Bobby. Mason, he said, had his own photography business in Santa Rosa. We found him on the second floor of a downtown building, above a flower store: Mason Restorations.

The office door looked like it might open on a detective office from a noir movie-textured glass with a gold-leaf name. Inside, it was all windows, blond hardwood floors, and high-tech machinery. The place had two rooms-a big working space behind the counter at the entrance, and a small glassed-in office at the far end, along the window wall. The working space was occupied by a half-dozen top-end Macs, a number of film and flatbed scanners and several large color printers. Three women were looking at a computer screen when we pushed through the door; one of them straightened and walked over to the counter.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

"We're here to see Mr. Mason."

"Do you have an appointment?"

"No, but it's fairly urgent." A thirtyish blond man had looked up from a computer inside the glassed-in office; I was willing to bet he was Mason. "Could you tell him we're friends of Bobby?"

"We really need to talk to him," LuEllen said from my shoulder, with a smile.

"Just a minute, please."

She walked back to the glassed-in office, stuck her head inside, and said something; I could see the blond's head bobbing. She motioned to us, and we pushed through the counter gate and down to the office. The woman rejoined the other two, who were looking at the yellowed image of an old woman, apparently scanned from a paper photograph.

Mason stood up, looking unhappy. "I'm not sure if we know the same Bobby."

"If you go online and call him, he'll tell you we're all right," I said.

He swallowed and said, "I'm not online much anymore. Who are you?"

"You saw the list of the people in Firewall? I'm k."

He sat down, and sat perfectly still for a moment, except for his bobbing Adam's apple, then said, "I've heard a couple of things about you. if you're really k. Did you once have a contract with a wine company to help straighten out their distribution system?"

"Yes."

"Then you know my friend Clark," he said.

"Miller," I said. "He lives in St. Helena in a redwood house with a real redwood hot tub in back, and his wife's name is. Tom."

"Ex-wife," Mason said. "She got the house." He looked at LuEllen and said, "Close the door." LuEllen pushed the door shut and we sat down in a couple of wooden visitors' chairs. Mason pushed both hands through his hair and said, "This FirewallI don't know anything about it, but my name is all over the place. It's driving me crazy. What's going on? I keep waiting for the FBI to show up."

I looked at LuEllen, who shook her head. To Mason, I said, "Goddamnit. You don't know anything?"

He spread his hands"Honest to God, I was sitting at my kitchen table reading the paper and eating shredded wheat and scanning this article on the Lighter killing, and all of a sudden I see this list with my name in itomeomi. I almost choked to death. I never heard of Firewall before this thing. Now I'm supposed to be some sort of terrorist."

"Yeah. Me, too. And Bobby. We're trying to figure out what's going on."

Mason looked at LuEllen again. "Are you on the list?"

"No. I'm just a friend. Of k's and Bobby's."

Mason shook his head. "I don't know what to do I've thought about calling the FBI and identifying myself, but. I don't know, I don't think that's a good idea."

"I don't know your history," I said. "I might wait a while before dragging in the law."

"Yeah. So would I." He wasn't a tough-looking guy, but the way he said it suggested a need to stay away from the feds. As a matter of privacy, ethics, and personality, I didn't ask him what he did; LuEllen wasn't so inhibited.

"So what'd you do omeomi, hold up banks?"

She can be so perky, when she wants, that it works an odd magic on men, especially technics, who have residual fantasies about cheerleaders. That's what I hear anyway. Mason showed a small grin and said, "No, nothing like that. I do. specialty photography."

"Jeez. When people say that, I usually think porno," LuEllen said.

"It's not porno," he said.

"You guys should talk sometime," I said to LuEllen. "You could trade tips."

"You do photography?" Now he was a little more interested. "What kind?"

"Specialty," she said.

He actually chuckled, leaned back and stretched. "That's the best kind, isn't it?"

We sat in silence for a couple of minutes, and then I said, "Well. we better go."

"What are you doing?" he asked. "Just checking out whoever you can find from the list?"

"That's the idea. Between Bobby and me, on the original list of names, we knew a few people. None of us are involved with Firewall. Then Bobby tracked down you and one other guy. through friends, I guess. We haven't checked with the other guy, but your story is like the rest of ours."

"What're you gonna do if you find them? Firewall?"

"I don't know. Bobby thinks we ought to turn them in. If they did the Lighter thing, anyway."

"Do it," he said. "Find 'em, and fuck 'em."

Currier lived in an apartment in Santa Cruz. Again, nobody home, and Bobby hadn't been able to find a job for him. I checked with the manager, telling her that I was an old friend in the area for a day. "He's gone to Mexico, on vacation," she said.

"When did he leave?"

"Last week. He said he'd be gone for three weeks. Too bad you missed him."

Now what?" LuEllen asked, as we walked away.

"Back to Rufus. He's three hours ahead of uslet's see if Monger worked."

"What do you think about Currier?"

"He might be running. He's on the list; maybe he's got reason to run."

"Like you."

"Like all of us."

Monger had worked. "A lot of the traffic was out of individual computers from about ten major sitesall 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' house and steal his dog.' If strong encryption is allowed, you could run the message through a software packageyou'd just push a buttonand 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 alland 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 seriousbig-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 semi-auto 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."