The Devil's Code

CHAPTER 20

We slept late the next morning, LuEllen later than I. At ten o'clock, I rolled out, stretched, cleaned up. When I came back into the main room, LuEllen was still half asleep. She'd thrown the blanket off, and from one angle, near the bathroom door, her face was nicely framed by one outflung arm, and was just risingfrom that perspectiveover a thigh, with her foot in the foreground. Feet are always nice to draw, especially when you get to see them from the bottom. I tiptoed around to my briefcase, got out my drawing book, eased a chair over to the bathroom door, sat down, and drew for an hour.

Finally, growing aware of the total silence, she pushed herself halfway up and looked around. "Kidd?"

"Right here."

"Drawing my butt again?" She pushed herself all the way up, stretched and yawned.

"It's in the picture, but it's not the focus; it's sorta half cut off."

She came to look as I worked some shading in around her toes. "My feet aren't that big," she said.

"From this perspective."

"They're not that big. They're fives."

"From this angle."

"Bullshit. Not that big. And my toe isn't that bent."

"You're right. I'm sorry. I apologize."

"No, you don't," she said. She stretched again. "You don't care whose fragile ego you crush. All artists are like that."

"Somebody once said that a portrait is a painting where there's something not quite right about the mouth," I said. "It might have been Sargent. Anyway, nobody's ever said that about the foot."

"I'm the first."

"Go take a shower," I said.

She went to take a shower and I struggled with the foreshortening of her leg and foot, and with her face in the back, rising over her thigh, and the pillow behind that. When I was done, I took the drawing out, ripped it up, and tossed it in the wastebasket. Something not quite right about the foot. With all that in my head, waiting for LuEllen to get out of the bathroom, I looked out the window down at the parking lot.

And understood what I hadn't understood before.

Why I had looked down at the parking lot and thought I'd missed an important thought.

Understood the AmMath photographsor something about them, anyway. It all came out of the perspective of LuEllen's foot.

The shower was running and I could hear her humming to herself in the bathroom as I brought the laptop up, and one of the photos.

"Jesus." I was right. I sat staring at it, then brought up another one. Ripped a piece of paper out of my drawing book, got a pen, and began making comparative measurements on the computer screen. I was still doing it when LuEllen came hobbling out of the bathroom with a towel around her head. I glanced at her and looked back at the computer.

"Thanks," she said. "I'm here with my nice pink."

"Shut up. I gotta get online with Bobby. Get dressed."

"What?"

"Look at this photograph."

She looked over my shoulder. "What?" she asked again.

"Look how this shadow comes down from this light pole? The shadow from the sun?"

"Yeah?"

"Look how it comes down from this light pole," I said.

"All right."

"And this one."

"I see all the shadows and all the light poles, Kidd. So what?"

"All the shadows are in exactly the same perspective. Exactly, as close as I can measure. Doesn't it look weird to you?"

"No. And so what?"

"It's impossible, that's all. Well, not impossible, if the camera was far enough back."

"We were thinking it might be a surveillance camera up on a roof. It'd have to be, to get that high angle."

"Still not high enough," I said. "I gotta get with Bobby. He could make some better measurements and do the numbers."

"If that's not high enough, what? You think it was made by a plane?"

"Not high enough," I said. "I think that's a satellite photograph."

She still wasn't much impressed; I had to work to get that. "Think what a face would look like if you took it from three blocks away with your Nikon and then blew it up to this size. It'd look like a thumbprint," I said. "Look at those faces. You can't quite recognize them, but you almost can. If that camera's in orbit, it has one unbelievable capability."

Now she was hunched over me, and spotted something we should have seen before. "You know, those cars." There were only a half-dozen of them in the parking lot. "Not a single one of them is American-made. Look at this one." She tapped the screen with a fingernail. "I don't think I've ever seen that kind. It looks like a combination of a pickup truck and a sedan."

"You see those in the Middle East," I said. "Lots of them."

She straightened. "So it's a satellite photo. So what?"

"I don't know, yet. But it seems unlikely that a satellite would take a picture of three guys and the three guys were important," I said. "How could you time something like that?"

"Radios, maybe."

I shook my head. "I bet it's not the guys that are important. I bet it's the photograph. Not the content, just the photograph, that they have it. They're supposed to be working on the Clipper chip, and they have this. This has got to be some kind of ungodly high-level secret capability. You could not only see stuff like ammo dumps, you could see what's in them. If they can do something with computers to punch up the resolutionjust a probability enginethey might be able to figure out who gets into which car, might be able to track cars through traffic. all kinds of stuff."

"They're NSA, right? Isn't that what they do?"

"No, no, that's another group, the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office. They do all the satellite stuff."

"So let's get online with Bobby, and see what he says."

We got online from a mall. Bobby thought he could figure out the height of the camera by picking out small parts of the original full-strength photos and making some precise measurements on the shadows.

freaky if it's a satellite photo. never seen anything like this.

maybe what they're hiding.

but what does it have to do with firewall?

There was the other side of Lane's question. Lane was interested in what happened to Jack; Bobby was interested in how his name got attached to Firewall. Somehow, AmMath was involved in both of those things, but how and why were they related? Or were they related?

We talked about it as we were leaving the mall, and decided they had to be linked Jack went to Maryland, where the computer that started the Firewall rumors was located. The guy he saw, who was later killed, was a client of that same server. It was all tied. We just couldn't see the knot.

Lane, it turned out, had been worrying about the same questions all night. We all had breakfast together, and she leaned across the diner table, picked up my glass of Coke, and rapped it on the table. She had a theory, she said.

"Say the photographs are wildly important, for some reason. We don't know why, but let's say that's a given. Jack steals them. They know he stole them, but they don't know why, or who he might have given them to. So they come up with a scheme. They invent this Firewall group, using names that they harvest from the Internet. Legendary hackers. There's all kinds of talk on the Net. Anybody could get a list like that. They make Jack a part of the group, so when the names finally come out, the cops'll say, 'Ah-ah, he was a member of the radical Firewall group, that's why he broke into AmMath and it was only bad luck that he got caught.' "

"Why use the server in Maryland?" I asked. "The same one that Lighter just happened to be on."

"You said it was mostly NSA people," she said. "Maybe it was one server they all knew. That they all had access to."

"Sounds weak," LuEllen said.

"But the rest of it sounds pretty good," Green said. "It ties things together."

"What about the IRS attack? That was set up weeks ago."

"But the Firewall name wasn't around weeks ago," I said. "That could have been made up at the last minute. These hacks are ready to attack the IRS, and just at that moment, somebody invents a group with a neat-sounding name. So they say, 'All right, we're Firewall, too.' "

"Goddamnit," LuEllen said, "It's still too hard to think about."

"I'll tell you what, though," Lane said. "When we go back into AmMath's computer, I think we ought to be looking for stuff on Firewall and satellites. This Clipper stuff is a dead end. Whatever's going on doesn't have anything to do with Clipper."

"When we go back in?" I asked.

"Darn right: I know my way around mainframes as well as anyone. I want to be there tonight, when we go back in," she said.

"Gotta find a new motel," I said.

"There's a place called Eighty-Eight right across the street from where we're at," Green said.

"So we'll set up there tonight," I said "We'll use one of LuEllen's IDs, and call you when we're settled in."

Lane didn't have much to say about her talk with the cops: "They say they don't believe that AmMath had anything to do with anythingbut I think they believe there's some kind of government deal going on, and they don't want to know about it. They think we're the bad guysJack and me."

"You told them about the burglary at your house."

"Of course." Lane said. "We gave them every single detail. We told them we thought Jack's house had been broken into, too."

"They're dead in the water," Green said. "I used to work with a program in Oakland that investigated shootings by cops. Most of the shootings were open-and-shut. But every once in a while, we'd get a shooting and there'd be something wrong about it. No proof, no evidence, just something wrong. We'd try to get the cops to look a little deeper, to ask a few more questions, and they'd say they would, but you could see it in their eyes, they'd signed off. They either believed they knew what happened, or they didn't want to know any more. That's what's happened with this case. I could see it: they've signed off. They're all done. They don't want to know any more."

"Damnit, nobody'll move," I said.

We thought about that; then Lane said, "By the way, I looked up McLennan County, where Corbeil has that ranch. It's about a hundred miles south Near Waco."

We made arrangements to meet them that night in Denton, and then LuEllen and I took the rest of the day off. We'd been cooped up too long, hanging out in hotel rooms and restaurants. We were the kind of people who liked to move around. I got my laptop and sketchbook, and my watercolor tin and a plastic squeeze bottle of water, and we went out to a driving range and LuEllen hit balls for an hour while I drew the shelter over the driving line. The whole thing with the satellite photosif that's what they werehad gotten me thinking about perspective. The driving line was sheltered by a fifty-yard-long metal roof mounted on steel poles, and from the corners, made a fairly interesting challenge in three-point perspective.

When LuEllen got tired of hitting balls, we went back to the hotel, talked to a desk clerk who got a map out and drew a six-mile jogging circuit that he ran himself every morning, and we drove out to his starting point and did the six miles in forty-five minutes, just cruising along suburban streets looking at all the pickups.

"Not bad," she said, when we got back to the car. "Let's go buy some boots."

She bought two pair of cowboy boots, and paid six hundred dollars for them. I've never actually seen her on a horse, but she does like horses, and she liked the boots. They put an inch or two on her height, and she liked that, too.

At nine o'clock, LuEllen checked us into the Eighty-Eight Motel in Denton. We got online, and took a look in the dump box. Corbeil had been online in the morning, before we'd even gotten upno rest for the wickedbut hadn't used the computer since then. "Maybe they're fixing up his apartment and he's staying someplace else while they do it," LuEllen suggested.

"I hope not. I'd like to be sure that he's in his apartment, and done for the day, before I sign on with his codes," I said. "If we were on, and he tried to get on, he might see the conflict."

LuEllen called Lane on the cell phone, and told her where we were. We didn't want any calls on the room phone going out to a number that could be connected with any of us, and figured to throw the cell phone away in the next day or two. Lane and Green showed up ten minutes later, having walked over from the Radisson

I told them about the dump box, and how we were using it as a cut-out, and why I didn't want to go online immediately. "Makes sense," Lane said. "I'd like to look at those files you got."

She spent the next two hours flipping through the administrative files, stopping every fifteen minutes or so to look at the dump box. Green, LuEllen, and I chatted for a while, then LuEllen ordered a pay-TV movie, a hyperviolent science-fiction flick that had all the depth of a comic book. The production values, on the other hand, were great.

Ten minutes after the movie ended, Lane went online to check the dump box, and found that Corbeil was working. The sign-on protocols and codes were the same as the night before. He sent a couple of short memos, one of them berating a guy named John McNeal about a production problem on CDs carrying what apparently were commercial code products. Then he signed off. We waited another half-hour, Lane with increasing impatience, to make sure he wouldn't sign on again, then went out to the AmMath computer.

We looked for anything that involved satellites, photographs, Middle Eastern nations, the NSA, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office; tried all of those things as keywords in a variety of searches, and even threw in oddball stuff"orbit," "surveillance," "resolution."

After half an hour, I suggested that we shut down. "We need to do more research into what we're looking for," I said. "Maybe just go to the library and get business stuff about AmMath. Trying to flog our way through the computer is like trying to find a two-inch article in ten years' worth of newspapers."

Lane wanted to continue: "Fifteen more minutes," she said. "Twenty minutes. We're in, who knows whether they'll change all the protocols or something?"

LuEllen wasn't doing anything, and bored, said, "I'm going down the street to that Randy's place and get coffee and a doughnut. Anybody want anything3"

"I'll walk along," I said. To Lane. "Fifteen minutes."

"Yeah, yeah."

Randy's was a combination greasy spoon and greasy bakery. We bought doughnuts and coffee and a Diet Coke, and talked about not much at all; two people carrying a couple of white bakery sacks along the highway. We were a hundred yards from the motel when we saw the flashes. LuEllen said, "Did you see that?"

I was already trotting toward the motel. Night-time gun flashes are hard to mistake, and even with the background noise of the highway we could now hear the rapid pop-pop-pop of gunfire.

We got closer and saw two men break away from the motel, from the end where our room was. Another couple, young kids, college kids, maybe, both carrying book bags, stopped to look at them as they crossed the parking lot to a waiting car. The shorter of the two men was hobbling. One of the kids broke away from the other, running toward the motel. Then the other one followed, and I ditched the white bags behind a car and the car with the two guys screeched out of the parking lot, fishtailed once in the street and disappeared into traffic.

We turned the corner of the motel and saw an older guy, white-haired in a burgundy windbreaker, walking toward our room, the college kids just coming up. I was ten steps back now, LuEllen a few steps further behind and the college kid, a boy, went inside and then popped back out and started screaming, "Call an ambulance call an ambulance."

I pushed past his white face to the door and saw Lane on the bed. She was dead, her face gone. Couldn't see Green; the bathroom door was mostly closed and shot to pieces. I stepped over to the door and knuckled it open. Green was in the bathtub, looking up at me, a gun in one hand.

"Got an ambulance coming," I said. "Are you hurt bad?"

"Hit twice," he groaned. "What about Lane?"

"Gone."

"Get out of here," he said.

I went back out into the main room. The college girl was inside with LuEllen and I shouted at her, "Go out to the street, wave the ambulance in."

"What?"

"I dunno, I dunno," I shouted at her. She stepped back, frightened of me, and turned and ran toward the street. "Flag the ambulance," I shouted after her. To the old guy in the burgundy windbreaker I yelled, "Two people shot. Run down to the office and make sure that kid's called an ambulance."

He turned and ran. The minute he was gone, I stepped past the bed, not looking at Lane, ripped the phone wire out of the telephone, bundled up the laptop, which had fallen on the floor, and stuck it in the back of my waistband, under my jacket.

LuEllen had stopped to take a close look at LaneLane had been hit at least twice in the side of the head, and laid sprawled faceup, eyes open just a crack, on the yellow bedspread. LuEllen shook her head. Lane's purse was lying on the floor. LuEllen rolled it with her foot, took the pistol out, and slid it into her jacket pocket. Without another word, we were out of the room. Two motel people were running toward us, and I waved at them: "In here, in here. hurry, hurry, get an ambulance."

More people came running, and LuEllen and I eased to the outside of the group, and then turned, and then were around the corner, and in the car. We went out the back of the parking lot, slowly, onto a service road, down a block, and were out of sight when the first cop car arrived.

"She had no chance," LuEllen said grimly. "Executed."

"Green's alive, but he was hit a couple of times," I said. "He was in the tub. He was still thinking. He said to get out, so he'll cover us."

"Fingerprints?"

"Not from me," I said.

"The only hard surface I touched was the TV remote, and Green was using it after I did, so I should be okay."

"You used the bathroom."

"I was careful. You used the telephone."

"Just plugged into the side, never picked up the receiver. I don't think I touched anything with my fingertips."

"Guys from AmMath," she said.

"Gotta be."

"What is it with them?"

"I don't know; but they must have spotted me coming online last night, and set up to back-trace our entry tonight. Took them an hour to do it and get here. Christ, Lane and Green probably thought that was us at the door, coming back with coffee."