The Devil's Code

CHAPTER 21

LuEllen and I had been in jams before. I don't know whether it was simply experience, or some essential defect in our personalities, that allowed us to carry on as efficiently as we did. To get the laptop, to get out. To do it without talking about it or hesitating.

If I've ever been seriously attached to any one person in my adult life, it was LuEllen. But if she'd been in that motel room, and if I'd walked back to find her dead on the yellow bedspread, then, God help me, I believe I would have reacted the same way. And if I'd been dead, and she'd looked in, it would have been the same. No rage, no horror or fear or even sorrow. Efficiency. Get the laptop. Get the gun. Get out. Assess the damage.

The rage and sorrow comes later.

But it comes.

On the way out, in the car, LuEllen kept coming back at me about fingerprints: that's where we could hang up. If I'd left my prints behind, they could put a face with themI'd been thoroughly and repeatedly printed in the Armyand the other witnesses at the motel would confirm it.

But I didn't think I'd left any. LuEllen and I had done all this before, operating out of remote sites, and you go in thinking about not leaving prints. If you get sloppy about it, then you'll always leave a few. The only hard thing I'd touched was the phone and the room key-card, which I still had in my shirt pocket. Still, we both ran the whole night through our heads, picking out each move we'd made. After a while, I let out a breath and said, "I'm good."

"So am I, except that the clerk saw me when I checked in."

"Yeah, but Lane looked sort of Latino and half the people around there looked Latino. I bet the clerk identifies her as the woman who checked in, because she looked like a lot of other women who checked in. And her face is shot up. Good thing I didn't check us in, with Green being black. Then they'd know."

"Maybe Green won't cover for us."

"He couldn't give them too much. He doesn't know who we are, really."

"He could find out. Or give the cops enough information that they could."

"I don't know. I think Texas is a felony-murder state. If he says he doesn't know what was going on, that he was simply a hired bodyguard for Lane, who was doing something with her computer. If he says that, he'll kick clear. If he lets them know that he knew what Lane was doing, then she would have been killed in the course of committing a crime, and that might make a case against him for felony murder."

"So he can't talk."

"He wouldn'tif he knows all this."

"So let's call Bobby; maybe he can get the word back."

We called Bobby from a pay phone. When he came up on the laptop, I wrote:

call me now voice line: emergency.

He called back five seconds after I was off. I'd only talked to him on a voice line a couple of times. The only thing I knew about him was that he was a black guy, who I thought lived someplace in the Mississippi River South. He had one of those soft Delta accents, and was tied into a lot of interesting black people who, in the sixties, would have been called activists, or maybe, in that part of the world, agitators.

"What happened?" he asked, without preamble.

I gave it to him as succinctly as I could, then said, "Somebody's got to get with Green. A lawyer, who can tell him to stick with the ignorant bodyguard story. If he lets on that he knew Lane was committing a crime, then they might."

"Felony murder," Bobby said. "Bad for you, bad for me."

"Yeah. Somebody's got to get in touch."

"I can handle that," Bobby said softly. "How are you?"

"We're good, but we're clearing out. We don't think anybody will be looking for us too hard, but just in case. we're gonna run down, to, ah, Austin."

"Check in from there."

"Talk to you," I said, and hung up.

"Austin?" LuEllen asked.

"It's a big city with lots of people coming and going," I said. "Other than Dallas, it's about the closest big city to Waco."

"Corbeil's ranch." She was quiet for a while, then said, "So now you're on a revenge trip. Forget Jack, you're going to get them because they killed Lane."

"No. If I could, I'd go home right now. But I need to get loose; I can't get loose. The feds have a list of names, they've got murder and evidence of a conspiracy and the IRS attack and maybe what looks like an attack on a major encryption company. They'll eventually start peeling back the names. I've got to figure out what's going on, and get them running that way, or I'm fucked."

She didn't say anything, so eventually I said, "I'm not sure you really need to stay around. From here on out, it's gonna be mostly computer stuff."

"Oh, shit, Kidd. You know I'm not going anyplace," she said irritably.

"Maybe if you."

"Shut up."

So I shut up: I wanted her around.

We stayed the night in Dallas. Given the time the shooting took place, it was too late to make the regular television news. If the papers bothered with it, they wouldn't get more than a few basic facts from the cops. We decided to stay over, and to leave at the peak checkout time in the morning. That's what we did: there'd been nothing on the late-night news and nothing in the morning papers. At eight o'clock, we were headed down 1-35 to Austin.

"Hope Bobby got somebody to Green," LuEllen said, partway down. Neither of us was talking much. The images from the motel were too clear, the kind of images that push you back into your own head.

"He said he would, and he's got good contacts," I said.

"I hope."

Austin used to be a small-town pretty place. Take away the heat, and it's more like Minnesota than the rest of Texas. Twenty years ago, I could have imagined living there, except that the landscape colors weren't mine. Now, there're too many people, and the city has gone from a Great Place to a Pain in the Ass.

Somebody else's problem. We checked into a Holiday Inn and started making phone calls.

what happened?

attorney talked to green this morning. green's in intensive care / wounded legs/thighs / will be okay. green knows felony law, tells cops he didn't know what was going on except client had been attacked several times, had been burglarized, brother shot. he was hired to do bodyguard work. green says he was in bathroom when door knock came, she said they're back and he said stay away but she opened door and shooting started. he says he hit one, cops find blood trail.

he did good. must play dumb.

he does that. cops push him hard but all he has is hiring on recommendation of friendfriend will cover, tells cops he doesn't know lw, doesn't know computers, saw no trouble until shooting started.

ok.

you still working?

yes. irs attack continues?

continues, but closing down now. rumors: feds hunting firewall names, make some busts; nothing in papers. wash post: fbi, nsa in conflict over firewall. rumors: german called copernix does it.

ok. you monitor, we will call daily.

yes. one more thing. the five data strings with the pictures include various 125-200 (approx.) byte files followed by distinct 512-byte/4096-bit files followed by various 350-600 byte files. 4096-bit files are likely ultrastrong keys, but don't know lock. possible photos encrypted/decrypted with keys?

will look.

good. bye.

"What?" LuEllen wanted to know.

"Those goddamned files. As soon as we got them, we should have gone to Mexico or someplace and hid out, and figured them out. If they're killing for them, there's got to be a reason; they must think we can figure them out."

"Why don't you just mail them to the NSA and let them figure them out?"

"Not until I know what they are. If they're important enough to kill for, then they might be important enough that the NSA or the CIA or somebody else would just keep coming after them. Anyway, I've got a new theory."

"Lane had a theory."

"But I have another one. The theory is that AmMath screwed something up so badly that they figured they had to cover it, and the whole thing got out of control when Jack was killed. Now they're killing to cover up the killing."

"Sounds like a bad movie."

"That's what I got," I said.

That afternoon, we got something else. After looking gloomily through the filesI saw how Bobby isolated the 4096-bit file, and there wasn't any question that it was distinct from the garbage before and after, and it did look like a keyI noticed the OMS tab again. The Old Man and the Sea. No, that wasn't right: everyplace I'd seen the whole name, it was Old Man of the Sea: either a mistake, or not Hemingway.

"Let's go," I said.

"Where?"

"Down to the university library. See if I can get somebody to tell me about this Old Man of the Sea."

"Kidd. this is the University of Texas."

"And a damn fine university it is," I said.

"Really?"

"Yup. It is."

"But then if it turns out to be something important, whoever you talk to will probably remember you."

"I think it's a chance we've got to take."

"Couldn't you just look it up on the Internet or something?"

"Well." I scratched my head. I could try, of course, but I'd become so accustomed to thinking of the Net as a large sewer clogged with crap, that it hadn't occurred to me. "We can try."

I plugged "Old Man of the Sea" into the Alta Vista search engine and got back 756 Web pages; most of it was junk, but it became pretty clear that the original Old Man of the Sea was a character from the Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.

According to the story, Sinbad was stranded on an islandhe never learnedwhere he came across an old man who he believed to be crippled. The old man asked to be carried to a pool of water, but when Sinbad got him there, the old man wouldn't get off Sinbad's back.

In fact, he grew something like spurs, and claws, and dug into Sinbad's neck. For days, Sinbad was forced to carry him around the island and feed him Sinbad himself, in an excess of pain, hollowed out a gourd that he found, and filled it with grapes. In a few days, the grape juice had become strong wine, which he drank to kill the pain.

The old man noticed him doing this, and demanded some of the wine. Sinbad gave it to him. The old man became drunk, and Sinbad was able to throw him off his shoulders. Not being a major moralist, Sinbad then beat the old man to death. When he managed to get a ship off the island, he was told that the old man was a famous devil, who would beg to be carried, but then would ride his victim to death, eventually eating the body.

"Nice story," LuEllen said.

"I should have remembered it," I said. "I read all the Sinbad stories, but a long time ago."

"So. what does it mean?"

"There are some very heavy social and psychological implications to it."

"You have no fuckin' idea what it means," she said.

"Why do you think we've been cutting the devil card out of my tarot deck?"

She opened her mouth to crack wise, and then shut it. And kept it shut.

Actually going out on the Net suggested something else to me. I did a quick search, found a site, and plugged in www.dallasnews.com. The Dallas Morning News had one of the better newspaper sites, and on page one, it earned a teaser: "One Killed, One Wounded in Denton Shooting."

I punched it up and after a minute, a brief story trickled down the laptop's screen.

A california woman was killed and a man who told police that he was her "bodyguard" was wounded in a shooting at the Eighty-Eight motel in Denton late saturday night. Denton police say the shooting may be drug related.

Lane Ward, an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, was pronounced dead at the scene, while her "bodyguard," identified by police as Lethridge Green, of Oakland, California, was in fair condition at Mount of Olives Hospital.

Police said that both Ward and Green had prior drug-related arrests, Ward in 1986 in San Francisco for possession of marijuana, Green in 1977 in Oakland for possession of cocaine.

Witnesses said the gunmen were two white males, one of whom was wounded in the shooting. Neither gunman has been found.

Police said Green was being held for questioning at the hospital.

"Ooo. Little Lane was smoking dope," LuEllen said

"In 1986," I said. "She was a college kid."

"But it sounds bad, doesn't it?"

"Not unless the cops dropped some dope in the room, and the paper doesn't mention any dope being found," I said. "Of course, there's the other possibility."

"Yeah?"

"That it's all bullshit from start to finish; that the FBI or somebody is mixing in with the cops, and don't want reporters asking any more questions. I mean, right now, it's another dope-related shooting. Nobody'll give it another look."

"Good for Green."

"Probably," I said.

So we didn't go to the library. We didn't go to Waco, either; not that day, or the next. If there was anything going on at the ranch, they might be looking out for conspicuously non-rancher cars, for at least a couple of days.

So we spent Sunday and Monday wandering around Austin; bought a basketball at a Wal-Mart and played a little one-on-one at a local playground, hit some more golf balls, did some drawing. Checked the Dallas Morning News Web site a couple more times, but the story was dead.

Talked to Bobby. The FBI had interviewed Green, pretty much cutting out the local cops. He'd convinced them that he was hired muscle: he had all the background, plus the attitude. They left with a few threats, but both Green and his lawyer thought it was all over.

I also spent some time calling around Austin, and found a place I could rent a pickup"I need to help my daughter move some furniture from one house to another," I told the guy at Access Car Rental, who didn't care one way or the otherand picked up the truck. On Monday night, we watched movies on pay TV. The next morning, at eight o'clock, we left for Waco.

Or Whacko, as LuEllen pronounced it.