The Devil's Code

CHAPTER 28

Memphis is a crappy place to spend November. The sky gets cloudy and stays that way, and the days get cold, but instead of really cold, the kind of cold you can enjoy, the kind of cold that spreads snow over the landscape, Memphis gets that English bone-chilling wet cold. Instead of snow, there's icy drizzle. You go around with your shoulders hunched and your hands in your pockets, feeling like you're being pissed on.

Six of us were living in three different motels around town. We'd sleep half the day and work most of the night, rotating any necessary meetings among the three motels. Bobby attended by conference line, and in the last three weeks of November, with a break for Thanksgiving when two of the guys had to go home, we got the software package together.

We also hacked out the implications of what we were doing. That, in most ways, was the hardest part. Three of the guys wanted to write the software and turn it over to the NSA as an example of what could be done. The rest of us wanted to go ahead and do it. Bobby and I were the hardest of the hard-liners: we'd had experience with these government assholes.

"If we don't break it off in them, they're gonna break it off in us," Bobby said. "In fact, they're doing it right now."

And they were. There was something of a reign of terror running through the hack community, with the bully-boys from the FBI kicking down doors and seizing equipment. Evidence of wrongdoing no longer seemed to matter. If you were an independent computer hack operating above a certain level, you were a target. The general line seemed to be the same one that the government used against gun owners, with whom I began to sympathize for the first time.

The argument ran like this: nobody needs these big powerful computers unless he or she intends to do something wrong. Sure, stockbrokers, accountants, and suits from Microsoft and Sun might have some reason to own them, but a kid from Wyoming? That kid has no reason to own anything more powerful than a Gameboy. Powerful computers are prima-facie evidence that they're doing something wrong and un-American.

It was only a matter of time before we had Mothers Against Computer Hackers marching in Washington to make sure we wouldn't be rolling any software while we're not drinking, smoking, eating cheeseburgers, getting high, shooting guns, or having unprotected sex.

Of the five other guys in Memphis, I knew two, Dick Enroy from Lansing, Michigan, and Larry Cole from Raleigh, North Carolina, and had vaguely heard of the other three. Bobby said they were all good guys, and Enroy and Cole were, so I took his word for it on the others. Nobody asked exactly what anybody else was doing in their computer lives, but everybody wrote good code. A guy named Chick from Columbus, Ohio, wrote a piece of switching code that was so tight and cool and elegant that I was almost embarrassed for the stuff I was writing.

As it happened, Corbeil's briefcase contained mostly financial papers: he had money stashed all over the place. One nonfinancial item was a simple 3M 1.4 megabyte floppy that he carried around in a fluorescent blue Zip-disk case. The disk explained the whole OMS code thing. OMS did stand for Old Man of the Sea, the Sinbad story. The OMS code was a piece of code that sat on top of a highly intricate encryption engine inside the computers running each of the National Reconnaissance Office's array of Keyhole 15 satellites.

The OMS code sat on the satellite controls just like the Old Man of the Sea sat on Sinbad's back. Whenever they needed to, Corbeil's group could go into a satellite, order a photo scan, get it transmitted to their ground station, and then erase any sign of what had been done. Even the satellite's internal photo-shot counter had been reset.

The problem from our point of view was that if the NRO found out about the OMS code, they could block it. The NRO still controlled the satellites and could send up software patches and work-arounds that would effectively take the OMS out of it.

The code we were writing would prevent that. The code that we were writing would give us the control of the satellites.

In the arguments about whether we should write the code and give it to the NSA as a demonstration, or actually take control of the satellites, one of the guys I didn't know, who said his name was Loomis, said that we were about to become the Old Man of the Sea.

"From the way Sinbad looked at it, he couldn't get the Old Man of the Sea off his back. From the Old Man of the Sea's point of view, he couldn't get off Sinbad's back, or Sinbad would kill him. If we get on the NRO's back, or the NSA's, we can never let go, or they will hunt us down like rats. If they just say fuck it, and put up a new Keyhole system, and we're locked out of it, we're cooked."

"But there's a time element," Bobby said, his voice rattling down the phone connection and then out a couple of cheap computer speakers. "If we can keep the government off for three, four, five years, it'll be too late to really do anything about us. The control of the world is slipping away from those people; in five years, it'll be gone."

"Still."

"There's another thing. We'll let it be known that this whole thing was pulled off by Bobby, the phamous phone phreak. I've got maybe five years left on earth. I'll be on a voice synthesizer by this time next year. If I'm their target, and they catch me two or three years from now. they ain't gonna catch much."

"Goddamn," I said. "That's harsh."

"Life sucks and then you die," Bobby said.

We took control on December third.

Bobby transmitted the changes over a four-hour period from a dish normally used for satellite telephone communications. The way it worked, essentially, was this: we took the NRO's spot, giving us control of the system. The NRO got the OMS controls, plus some enhancements we addedthis would not be a secret for very long, so we didn't have to go to all of AmMath's trouble to hide what we'd done.

If we hadn't told them about it, the NRO might have taken a while to discover what we'd done. They still talked to the satellites with the same encrypted commands; they could still take pictures and maneuver the satellites; in fact, before we told them about it, the only change that would have given us away was a difference in the number of computer bytes in the satellite's memory. But that changes often enough that we expected that they wouldn't notice. Not right away.

On December third and fourth, we ran checks, and tried to find ways to break our control. We made a couple of small patches, and the other five guys headed home. I went to Washington.

Rosalind Welsh, the NSA security executive, left her home at six-thirty in the morning, driving a metallic blue Toyota Camry. I noted the license plate; Bobby'd gotten the number the day before from the DMV, but he we wanted to make sure. I couldn't follow her all the way to the NSA building, but we'd done a time projection, and I called Bobby on a cell phone and said, "She's crossing the line now. Four or five minutes to the parking lot."

"Did you get the plate?"

"Yeah. Your numbers were right."

"Are you nervous?"

"Yeah "

"So you've still got your sanity." He chuckled. "One way or another, this is gonna be interesting."

The next day, I was in eastern Ohio, on my way home I pulled into a truck stop on I-80, got out the cell phone, and called Rosalind Welsh at her desk. Her secretary answered and I said, "This is Bill Clinton. You've got fifteen seconds to put Welsh on the phone. This may be the most important call she'll get this year, so I'd suggest you find her."

Welsh came on five seconds later. "What?"

"I need a phone number where I can dump a computer file."

"Why should."

"Don't argue with me. You'll want to see these photos. Give me a number or I'm gone."

She gave me the number.

I called Bobby from a truck-stop phone, gave him the number, and headed back east. I didn't doubt that the NSA could spot the cell that my call had gone through, and would be able to spot the next one. From that, they would be able to tell that I was headed east.

I called again twenty minutes later. "This is Bill Clinton," I told the secretary.

"Just a minute."

Welsh picked up, but the phone sounded funny. "What are you doing with the phone?" I asked.

"We've got some people here who want to listen in," she said. "You're on a conference call."

"Did you look at the pictures?"

"Yes."

"Do you know what they are?"

"Well, we have an idea. They look like our parking lot."

"They are. If you check the arrangement of carsthat's your car up in the northeast, and that's you getting out of ityou'll find out that the pictures were taken yesterday, with a Keyhole satellite. That's what AmMath was doing. They'd written a code sequencewhich you approved, by the waythat sat on top of the satellite encryption engine, and allowed them to use the satellites. They've been retailing satellite recon photos all over the Middle East and South Asia since the Keyholes went up. From what we've figured out, they were supplying recon for both India and Pakistan."

"Who have you told about this?" A man's voice, deep, harsh, angry.

"Nobody," I said. "But we've got a PR package ready to go to a dozen congressmen and senators, as well at The New York Times, The Washington Post, the L.A. Times, The Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Tribune, and a few other places you wouldn't want to see it. I mean, maybe we're going to do that."

"Maybe?"

"If you don't get off our backs. You fuckin' fascists are running innocent people all over the place, this so-called Firewall crackdown. AmMath invented Firewall and the IRS attack was just a bunch of punks from Europe. You know it, we know it, and most of the press knows it, but they're riding along with you for the amusement value. We want you to knock it off, or we'll ship our PR package, and the NSA becomes a greasy spot on the road. A few of you, I wouldn't doubt, will be looking at the inside of Leavenworth."

"We know who you are: we're tracking you right now, we're breaking down the walls," the male voice said.

"Bullshit. You've only found a couple of serious people so far and you only got them because they got careless," I said. "The rest of us are going to fuck you up if you don't back off."

"You're talking to the U.S. Government here, asshole."

"No, I'm not. I'm talking to a scared bureaucrat. But not as scared as you will be when we start sending recon photos to the press."

"You're gone; you no longer have any access to the Keyholes "

"Sorry, pal, it doesn't work that way," I said. "We own Keyhole. The only access you have is entirely walled off by our software. We built a firewall around your access port. Go ask your guys who are trying to get inside; go ask them. They can take picturesif we let them. They can even retask the satellites, if we let them. But if we get pissed, we'll eliminate your access and then we're gonna start taking pictures of nude beaches and the Royal Families and the president's vacation, and start flogging them off to The Star and People and whoever else wants them. With a nice little Keyhole credit line on them."

There was a long silence; then Rosalind Welsh said, "Don't do that."

"It's up to you," I said. "You'll be able to tell when we're pissed, because we'll cut off your Keyhole access. I mean, you could go ask Congress for another twenty billion to put up another Keyhole system, but I suspect that they'll be pretty pissed when they find out you lost the one you had."

The male voice: "You fucker. you fuckin' traitor."

"This is Bill Clinton you're talking to," I said. "We don't want to overthrow anything. We just want you off our backs."

"We can't promise anything in detail." Welsh said tentatively.

"Look, we're not bargaining with you," I said. "Don't get that idea. This is a straightforward extortion. If you get off our backs, you can run Keyhole like you always have. Nobody'll ever hear about how AmMath was selling American recon photos to Pakistan, or how AmMath invented Firewall to cover up a couple of murders and that you knew about it, or about how Keyhole now belongs to a bunch of hackers. All you have to do is stop. If you don't, well, you better grab on to something solid and bend over, because something ugly is about to happen."

I hung up, got off at the next exit, wiped the cell phone and threw it into a ditch, and headed back to St. Paul.

And they quit.

The IRS announced that Interpol, in coordination with U.S. authorities, had issued warrants for the arrest of a half-dozen European hackers for their attack on the tax-return site, and said that the IRS site was now fully protected. The FBI declared victory over Firewall, said that we were seeing the fine results of eternal vigilance. Other hacker organizations, the FBI spokesman said, had better take warning, and not mess with the bulldog of federal law enforcement.

I was lying on the couch, reading the St. Paul paper, the Cat sitting next to my head, when somebody knocked at the door. I opened it, and LuEllen was standing there. She was wearing jeans and cowboy boots under a waist-length coat that looked suspiciously like mink.

"We cool?" she asked.

"We cool," I said. "Come in."

She came in, and we had a cup of coffee, sitting at my kitchen window looking out over the Mississippi. The river was locked in ice, and down on the streets, we could see people in heavy parkas puffing up and down the hill. Twelve below zero, the weather service said: a splendid day to stay inside and paint.

We had a lot to talk about. About the relative quality of our safety, about Jack and Lane. About whether the government might come creeping around. About the collapse of AmMath, and the disappearance of Corbeil.

"The government's out of it," I said. "At least for a good long while."

I told her how the Net would occasionally be saturated with the cryptic message, "Bobby, call your Uncle."

"Does he?"

"I don't know. I leave that to him," I said.

"You think he's going to die?"

"That's what he says. But not for a while."

We were silent for a moment, then she said, "The devil cardit was like the tarot said."

"In hindsight, I suppose."

"Don't be skeptical with me, Kidd. You're getting messages from somewhere, and I think maybe you oughta stop it."

"Right. Messages," I said. She was so serious about it, I had to laugh. Superstitious claptrap.

The Texas newspapers reported that a man carrying Corbeil's passport had crossed into Mexico shortly after his Waco ranch house burned downa ranch purchased under a phony name, the papers said, and which was now cordoned off by the FBI. Corbeil hadn't been found yet, but there were hints that he might be in Southeast Asia.

LuEllen was worried that he might somehow come back on us.

"Not to worry," I said. She didn't ask.

LuEllen stayed over. Clancy, the computer lady who had been designing the America's Cup boat, had found somebody else to design it with, and my feet, had, in fact, been cold all winter. So LuEllen was welcome.

But as I lay beside her that night, awake, listening to her easy breathing, I felt the finger of darkness pressing on me again. It had come any number of times in the past two months, usually just before sleep: the ghost of St. John Corbeil.

I was the only one who'd ever know, but the passport that crossed into Mexico was the same one that Green, Lane, LuEllen, and I had passed around a diner table after the raid on Corbeil's apartment. The man who'd carried it was a friend of Bobby's, reliable, and who, for a price, was willing to check the passport through Mexican passport control, without asking why. He'd burned it in a bathroom of the California Royal Motel in Matamoros; and that is the last, I hope, that we'd hear of St. John Corbeil.

Corbeil himself was buried under a foot of sandy Texas soil, in a hastily scratched-out grave, a few miles northwest of Waco, Texas.

At night, lying in bed, I sometimes felt his loneliness out there.

Maybe, I thought, as I turned over and touched the woman's back, LuEllen could make him go away.

Maybe.