The Devil's Code

CHAPTER 8

A few minutes after talking to Green, I went out and checked my cache with Bobby, to see if he'd gotten anything on the guy at the cemetery. He had. He'd run the plate back to Hertz, dug through their computer, and come up with the credit card and license information on the renter: A Lester Benson, of Dallas, using a corporate American Express card issued to AmMath. The car had not been checked in yet.

Lester Benson: hadn't seen that name before.

There was no hint of a second man in any of the Hertz information, but Bobby was looking through airline reservation files to see if he could spot Benson's seat from Dallas to San Francisco, and then determine who might have been sitting next to him.

I left a note asking him to find everything he could on AmMath and to dump all the information to my mailbox.

Lethridge Green was standing on Lane's porch, knocking on the door, when I pulled up. Green looked like a big Malcolm Xtall, too slender, intent, with round gold-rimmed glasses, short hair, and a solemn, searching intensity.

"Mr. Green?" I pushed through the door. "Come on in."

"You're Mr. Kidd," he said, as he stepped inside. His eyes took in the room, and LuEllen and Lane on the couch, and the.357 on the end table next to LuEllen's hand. "I see a gun. What's the situation here?"

"Somebody killed my brother, and somebody burglarized my house this afternoon." Lane started.

"Did you call the police?"

"Yes. They think it was burglars attracted by my brother's funeral."

"You don't think so?"

"I know it wasn't. We even know who it was; but not exactly why."

Green held up a finger: "Before you tell me anything else, maybe we should take the first security precaution."

"What?" Lane asked. We all looked at him expectantly.

"Pull the drapes," he said.

After we'd pulled the drapes, Lane gave him the storynot all of it, but most of it: her brother being killed in Dallas in suspicious circumstances, the funeral, the burglary at her home. She told him about the fire, but didn't mention that we were there. She told him about our record search through Hertz, and the two names we had so far: William Hart, mentioned by Jack, and Lester Benson, from the Hertz records. "We're afraid they might come backthat they might think that Jack passed information to me, or computer files."

"Did he?"

Lane looked at me, and I nodded. "Yes. He sent me some Jaz disks. A Jaz disk is a high-capacity storage."

"I know what a Jaz disk is," he said. "What's on it?"

"Everything from memos to computer games to a lot of gobbledygook that we haven't had time to figure out. That we might not be able to figure out," I said. "Whatever it is, we think Jack might have been killed to keep it private. The shoot-out might have been a setup."

"The guard took a slug as part of a setup?" he asked skeptically.

"The guard didn't see anything," I said. "As far as he knows, he might have been shot by the Easter Bunny. He opens the door and, boom, he's down. The other guy supposedly fires four times and Jack's killed. The guard didn't see a thing."

"Why didn't you just give them back? The disks?"

"That might not help; because we know about them, and we can't erase that. Then there's this group called Firewall." I explained Firewall, as much as I knew about it.

"You're starting to scare me," Green said. "If this is some kind of government thing, the FBI or the CIA or one of those other alphabet agencies. I mean, I don't want to be protecting a bunch of terrorists or spies or something."

"Do we look like terrorists? I'm a college professor," Lane said.

"A lot of terrorists start out as college professors," he said.

"Well, I'm not one of them," she snapped. "I'm just scared."

"We're not asking you to crawl down a sewer pipe with a bomb in your mouth," I said. "Just keep her healthy."

"That's it? All I do is keep them off her?"

"That's it. And if it gets heavy, call the cops. We already did that once, and these guys ran for it. Which tells you where they are."

"For how long?" he asked.

"For a while. Two or three weeks, anyway. She's gonna have to make a trip to Dallas. In a couple of weeks, these guys should have figured out that if she had anything, they'd know about it, one way or another."

He looked at me for a few seconds, a steady gaze, and finally nodded: "You're lying a little. But if that's the basic idea of what's going on, I'll take the job."

Green got a hard-shell suitcase out of his car and I cleared out of the guest room. "I'll get a room in LuEllen's motel tonight," I said. "It'll have a clean phone line. I'll get with Bobby about AmMath and we'll start looking for Firewall."

"Okay," Lane said. She reached out and touched the.357 on the table. Green asked, "You know how to use that?"

"I just shot a big stack of phone books down in the basement," she said. "LuEllen told me if I need to, just point it and keep pulling the trigger until I run out of bullets."

Green sighed and said, "Nuts."

I wasn't sure I liked leaving them alone in Lane's house. If they were targets, they were just sitting there. It's easy to get lost in America, for a few days or weeks, anyway, and if you try hard enough, nobody can find you. But sitting ducks.

There was a momentary awkwardness while I was checking into the motel. LuEllen and I had spent quite a bit of time together, and probably would again in the future, and she wasn't involved with anybody and I wasn't that involved, but the awkwardness went away and I checked into a separate room. She came down ten minutes later with a couple of beers while I was talking to a guy named Rufus Carr in Atlanta.

"How's Monger doing?" I asked Rufus.

"You're talking to a pentamillionaire," he said.

"I don't know what that is."

"I got five million bucks in the bank, m' boy," he said. Rufus was a fat red-haired man who affected a bad W. C. Fields accent. "Until I have to pay taxes, anyway."

"It works?" I asked.

"Of course it works; I told you it'd work."

"I knew that," I said.

"Yeah, bullshit. You were one of the naysayers. You were one of the guys who said Rufus was going to be eating frozen cheese pizza for the rest of his life. Well, I'll tell you what, pal, it's nothing but order-out pepperoni and mushroom from now on. And a private booth at Taco Bell."

"I've got a favor to ask. Could you mong some stuff for me?"

"On what?"

"You know about Firewall?"

"Yeah?"

"The rumors are weird. Could you just pick up a few of the bigger sites where you see the rumors, and mong them?"

"Is there any money in it?" he asked.

"Fuck, no. But I won't burn your house down."

"Well, thank you, General Sherman. Am I going to get in trouble?"

"I doubt it," I said. "But this whole Firewall thing is getting totally out of hand."

"You're right; it's my patriotic duty. Besides, I'm not doing anything else."

"Can I call you tomorrow?"

"Sure. I'll put it on the trail right now, and get it back tomorrow morning," he said.

What's 'mong'?" LuEllen asked, when I hung up. She was sitting on the bed with a beer bottle.

"Monger. It's a rumor-tracking program," I said. "Rufus built it for some securities companies. They use it to bust day traders who try to spread rumors to move the stock market."

"It works?"

"Hell, he's a pentamillionaire," I said.

Next I got back onto Bobby: he had some preliminary company stuff on AmMath, mostly public information pulled out of various open databases. More interesting was his news on Firewall.

Got a new list supposedly with Firewall. They are: exdeus, fillyjonk, fleece, ladyfingers, neoxellos, omeomi, pixystyx. Friends give me two hard IDs near you. Fleece is Jason B. Currier, 12548 Baja Viejo, Santa Cruz. Omeomi is Clarence Mason of 3432 LaCoste Road in Petaluma.

We'd gotten a map with the car; I went out and got it, and checked. Mason was maybe an hour or an hour and a half away, up north of San Francisco in Marin County. Currier was practically across the street. All part of the Silicon Valley culture that's grown up around San Francisco like a bunch of magic mushrooms.

"So we're gonna find these guys," LuEllen said.

"First thing tomorrow."

I'm not an easy sleeper; I kicked around the bed overnight, getting a couple of hours here and another hour there, with fifteen minutes of wide-awake worrying in between. I don't like big, arrogant organizations that push people around, or manipulate them, or extort thembut I don't see it as my personal obligation to stop them. I just go my own way. I fish and paint and lie in the sunshine like a lizard. I might steal something from one of them, from time to time, software or schematics or business plans, but I'm very careful about it.

The whole AmMath business was not my style. I liked Jack Morrison. He was a good guy, as far as I knew, but I really didn't know that much about him. Maybe that whole thing about "k" was bullshit; maybe he made it up to pull me into whatever he was doing at AmMath. Maybe he put the rumors out. And Lane herself was a computer freak: maybe she was involved with Firewall.

But if not, "k" was cause for concern. It was not a computer identity as such, it was just an initial, and there may be ten thousand people on the Net who sign themselves with a k. The same with Bobby and Stanfordthere are probably a thousand Stanfords out on the Net. And I would imagine that there are quite a few people calling themselves Fleece, although omeomi is not quite as generic. The troubling thing was the grouping. I had heard most of those names at one time or another. I even knew what a couple of them did, although I didn't know who they were.

Computer people, a lot of them, have the same attitude I do toward bigness, toward bureaucracy, toward being pounded into round holes. They don't like it. Maybe there was a Firewall, and maybe some of these people were in it, and because they were, then Iwas suspect.

Paranoia is good for you, if you're a crook; but it doesn't make life any easier.