The Hanged Man’s Song

Chapter Seventeen

LuELLEN DISAPPEARED into the bathroom, taking her cosmetics bag with her, leaving the Goodwill clothes on the floor. She said she expected to be in there awhile. I gathered up the clothes and stuffed them in a sack. We could drop them somewhere the next day.

With the bathwater running in the background, with LuEllen home and well, I went back to Bobby’s computer, the laptop I’d taken from Carp’s car. I’d been poking at it during the afternoon, while I waited to hear from LuEllen. What I’d found was curious.

The files that had been on Carp’s computer, the blackmail files, were there, all right, as were the encrypted files. But some of the encrypted files had been decrypted. He’d made notes: This from File 23, Indexed as MRG Cleanup: and there was the Norwalk virus file.

The question that plagued me was, how had he decrypted it? Where had he gotten the decryption keys? Bobby’s laptop had the encryption program right there, out front, and it was a good, solid commercial program that would essentially produce an uncrackable file.

From the bathroom, LuEllen said, “Oh, Jesus,” and I looked up, then rolled off the bed, went to the bathroom door, and poked my head inside.

“What was that?”

“My ass hitting the hot water. Close the door, you’re letting the cold air in.” I took a longer lingering look before I backed out. She’d put some bubble bath in the water, and it smelled good; and some pink parts were poking out of the bubbles, fairly artfully, I thought. She said, “Your look is lingering.”

“I wanted to make sure you were physically okay,” I said.

“What do you think?”

“I’ll need a closer look.” I shut the door.

BACK to the laptop. The thing had an abnormally huge hard drive. And the files were large, I could see that much. From Carp’s note, I knew that one, or part of one, was an index.

Was it possible that Bobby had hidden the keys somewhere in the computer itself, and that Carp had found them?

I began tearing the laptop apart, a boring and ultimately fruitless activity. The problem was the size of the files-they were just too big. What I was doing was like walking through a library looking for a particular sentence, without knowing what book it was in. Yet Carp had done it. Was he that much smarter than I was?

Leaving behind the mystery files, I looked through some non-encrypted utility programs that Bobby had stashed in a corner. They had esoteric names like Whodat and Whatsis and Dogabone and Bandersnatch, a bunch of fishhooks for various jobs that Bobby had needed done. I had the same kind of collection in my laptop, with the same kind of names.

I transferred Whodat to my laptop and pulled it apart, and found a search program that looked for names. That’s all it did; but it was nicely written, and would be very fast. I had encountered circumstances where it would be useful, like searching a company’s database for memos to or from a particular person. Whatsis was a big library of electronic circuits. If you had a big enough circuit diagram, you could import it into Whatsis and Whatsis would give you a list of machines that you might be looking at, that used that precise circuit.

Dogabone was a modification of an old program I’d written myself, years ago, which would find programs in one place and put them in another. I still had the same program on my computer, but my original was called Fetcher, which is where I suppose Bobby got the Dogabone. The next program, Bandersnatch, was meant to be left in a remote computer, where it would watch whatever file you attached it to. When that file was manipulated, Bandersnatch would immediately make a copy of the manipulated file, change its name, and re-store it. So Bobby could go into an outside computer, and if he encountered an encrypted file, he could attach Bandersnatch to it. When it was manipulated-that is, decrypted-Bandersnatch would copy and store it. Bobby could then come back and retrieve the file without ever having the decryption key.

I thought about that until LuEllen emerged from the bathroom, and then I stopped thinking about it for a while.

“WHAT do you think we should do?” she asked late in the night. We were tangled up in the sheets of the big king-sized bed. We each had a bottle of Dos Equis.

“I’ve been thinking about that since they took you,” I said. “I had nothing else to do but talk on the phone and wait… and I did some tarot readings that were all over the place. And I think you should go on home. Lay low. If you stay with me, you become dangerous to both of us.”

“Tell me how,” she said.

“Because I may do something that would attract some attention-not much, but some. If they see you, then they know that they’ve got the right guy. And they’ll know who I am, and then they might be able to get back to you. I mean, get all the way back to the real you.”

“What’re you gonna do?”

“I want Carp punished. And I want this Deep Data Correlation program stopped. I’m thinking of going to Bob-Congressman Bob. He’s in the DDC file. I’m not sure he could blow up the program, but he’s got his hand on a lot of government money. If nothing else, he might be able to starve it to death. In any case, he’d be pretty damn interested in what they’ve got on him.”

“Bad?”

“A little questionable dealing here and there. Bob did some favors that were a little too enthusiastic. They don’t have him nailed down, but you get the impression that if they pushed hard enough, they might get him.”

“So you tell Bob…”

“I tell him that I’ve dealt some code with a guy who’s involved in some big hassle with the government. That this guy knew I’d worked with Bob and asked me to pass the file on.”

“That’s pretty thin ice.”

“Yeah, but there’s no way to prove anything else happened. I’m a painter, for Christ’s sakes.”

She sighed. “I’ll get a plane out tomorrow morning.”

“That’d be good,” I said.

We were silent for a while, and then she said, “If they really dug into you about the e-mail file, they’d ask how come you got to Washington before you got the e-mail file.”

“No, they won’t. I e-mailed the file to myself a couple days ago. I sorta thought this might be coming.”

“You didn’t tell me?” One eyebrow went up.

“I figured you’d squeal like a piggy,” I said. “There was the possibility that I’d never need to do it, so why mention it and put up with all the squealing?”

“Ah, jeez,” she said. “You want another Two-X?”

LuELLEN had dumped her ID, but it hadn’t been the real LuEllen anyway. She carried a backup behind the lining of a lockable jewelry case in her luggage, along with a few credit cards, a Sam’s Club card, and a membership card to the Museum of Modern Art.

She wore her hair short as a matter of course, and carried two very good wigs as a regular part of her wardrobe. We bought her a new wallet the next day, along with a new purse and a ton of the usual crap that women carry around with them. We were at National at eleven o’clock. I kissed her good-bye in the car, then trailed her, at a little distance, into the airport. There was no trouble at all. The razor-sharp security made her take off her shoes, because they had steel shanks in the heels, but it never occurred to anyone that the pretty blonde might be wearing a wig. She looked nothing like she had in the park.

She turned on the other side of the security line and nodded at me, a quick eye-lock and a nod, and then she was gone, a small, well-dressed woman carrying a medium-sized purse, maybe somebody doing business for a nonprofit, or a congressman’s aide going home.

BEFORE leaving with LuEllen for the airport, I’d called Congressman Wayne Bob at the number he’d given me for the casino research. When he answered, I said, “This is Kidd. Congressman, I gotta see you today. This is a no-shit, honest-to-God emergency. It has to do with all this corruption stuff on TV. You need to talk to me.”

“Am I gonna be on?” he blurted.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, but you could be. They’ve got a file on you, and it goes into a deal with Whit Dickens. You know a Whit Dickens?”

You could almost hear him lick his lips, and he said, “Maybe.”

I said, “I could explain better if we could get off in a corner somewhere.”

“Where?” he asked.

“How about the Hay-Adams?”

“Good. How about two forty-five? I’ll get us a cranny.”

“See you then.”

THE thing about the Hay-Adams is that politicians wander in and out of it all the time, every day, virtually every hour; and the restaurant has lots of little nooks and crannies, where you can have intense conversations without being seen or overheard. Even better, I could get to the restaurant in a couple of minutes from my room.

I got to the restaurant at 2:45 on the dot. A waiter took me back to the reserved cranny, gave me a glass of ice water and a menu, and a minute later came back to say that Bob was running ten minutes late. I ordered a Dos Equis and drank ice water and beer and read the Post until 2:55, when Bob came around the corner.

Bob was short and too heavy in a masculine, pink, southern way. He had a florid, short-nosed face and a belly, white haystack hair, and a perpetual smile. He was sweating with the summer heat when he slid into the booth across from me; he was wearing a blue-striped seersucker suit, which you’re only allowed to wear if you come from the South, and a pinkie ring with a deep blue oval stone, and he looked pretty good in all of it. He was about fifty, I thought, and his pale blue eyes were worried. Bob was kind to old people, children, and dogs, but had a reputation for striking like a rattlesnake if you pissed him off.

“What’s shakin’?” he asked. Before I could answer, he pointed a pistol finger at a waiter, and then tipped his thumb into his mouth. The waiter nodded and disappeared. “Universal signal for a Beefeater’s martini, up, with two olives and ice-cold.”

I dug into my pocket and found a printout of the documents that had been compiled against Bob. I passed it to him. He read it once, then again, more carefully, then put the paper on the table, folded it four times, into a small square, and stuck it into his pocket. “Could cause me some trouble,” he said thoughtfully. He looked me over. “Where’s it coming from?”

“Frank Krause. Your friendly neighborhood senator.”

He took a moment to think about that, and then a single wrinkle appeared in his forehead. “Frank Krause? I saw something on TV about Frank Marsh, they said something about Krause.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” I said.

“How are you mixed up in it?”

“There’s a guy I know only on the Internet. He’s apparently involved in some kind of hassle with Krause. Anyway, he says that Krause has got a rat’s-nest inter-agency intelligence operation going, and one of the things that they’re testing is called Deep Data Correlation. The basic concept was supposed to be that they could look at an ocean of data and figure out from that who might be bad guys. Terrorists.”

“Is that bad?” The waiter came back with a martini, waited, with me, until Bob nodded. The waiter went away and I continued.

“Not if that was what was happening. But there are some fundamental problems with that kind of data-mining,” I said. I explained the numbers problem. “So essentially, what they were trying to do is impossible. But-if you come at it from the other end, starting with a name, then going after associated data, you can develop some pretty powerful tools.”

“Wait a minute,” Bob said. “You’re saying that instead of looking at the data, and finding suspects, they find a suspect, and then mine the data to support the suspicion.”

“Yeah. Except, of course, that you’ve got to identify a target first. With terrorists, identifying the target is the whole problem. That’s the hard part. If they’d been a private company, say, hired to find techniques that would identify terrorists, they’d have concluded that data-mining was a waste of time. But they’re not in a private company. They’re with the government. So they apparently said to themselves, ‘Well, data-mining won’t work, but we’ve got this great research tool, let’s just check it out on a few targets.’ ”

“They chose me?” He looked floridly earnest, but not all that surprised.

“Bob,” I said, “I gotta trust you, I think, but honest to God, we’ve occasionally given each other reason to think that neither one of us might not be…”

I shrugged, and he finished the sentence for me. “… as close to God as our mothers might wish.”

“Exactly,” I said. “So I’m gonna show you something. But if you tie me to it, or mention it to anyone that you heard it from me, I’m gonna shove it up your ass sideways.”

He smiled. “That’s the kinda deal I understand.” His smile vanished like a turned-off light, and he looked at me over the rim of his martini glass as he finished the drink, his eyes cold as ice. “They won’t hear about you from me; you got my word.”

I took my laptop off the seat beside me, turned it on, waited until it was up, then called up the file. I turned it toward him and said, “You can page through it with the Page Down key.”

He started paging through, stopping occasionally to mutter, “Just saw this one on TV… Krause is doing this?… Jesus, I didn’t know this guy was queer, I was just peeing in the next stall to him… Landford Hewes took a half-million out of Mejico Rico? Holy shit, he’s supposed to be Mr. Clean… Oh man: Davy Fergusson, he’s a friend of mine and so is Tina, and this says he beats the shit out of her. Look at the mouse on that woman, and the hometown cops bailed him out without a word.”

He was slack-jawed, fascinated.

“You gotta think about this,” I said. “This use of their data-mining tool is inevitable. It’s the perfect weapon to use against elected politicians. I mean, I might not care if they find out that I’ve been renting porno videos or getting blow jobs from seventeen-year-old boy hookers in the local park, but a politician would. Imagine what would happen if this capability got into the hands of lobbyists. We’d be at the mercy of any special interest willing to use it.”

“Umm…” he said. He took thirty minutes to work through the file. “If you’re making mental notes, don’t bother,” I said. “I got the whole thing on a CD for you. I’m giving them to you.”

He looked up. “What for? There’s a lotta horsepower here.”

“Not for me,” I said. “I’m a painter. Just being around this shit scares me to death. But this DDC stuff scares me, too. I thought if you had the information, you could talk to some of the people there…” I nodded at the laptop.

Again, he finished my sentence for me: “… and shove it up Krause’s ass sideways?”

“Something like that. I don’t care so much about Krause as this group he’s got working for them. It’s not right. It won’t catch terrorists; all it can be used for is blackmail.”

“It ain’t right,” he agreed. “You got that CD?”

I took it out of my pocket and passed it to him. “We are now two of the most powerful people in this whole fuckin’ capital of the world,” he said, looking at his reflection in the CD. “You and me, and we’re sitting here in a hotel booth drinking a martini and a beer and I’m looking at my face in a record.”

I couldn’t think of a quip, so I said, stupidly, “Makes you think, huh?”