The Devil's Code (24 page)

 26 

I
spent the next day intermittently monitoring the Net, watching news programs, and checking the newspapers’ online editions, looking for something—anything—that would tell me what was going on with AmMath, Firewall, or with Benson or Hart.

When I wasn’t doing that, I was playing with the tarot, or drawing. The landscape north of Dallas is interesting, in its own Southern Plains way, though not as interesting as the area around Tulsa, some parts of Kansas, or the Dakota grasslands.

Still: interesting. The relative flatness of the landscape, only sparsely inflected by humans and weather phenomena, gives the land and atmosphere a natural abstraction that you don’t see in landscape paintings, but
that you often see in nonobjective art. By working with the land and sky, without adding human inflection, you wind up with something that looks like abstraction, but has a kind of organic quality that pulls the eye in. Under the best conditions, the viewer falls
into
the picture, rather than colliding with the painted surface of the abstraction . . .

Either that, or I’m completely full of shit. In any case, the first real break came that evening, and left me astonished. I’d been clicking around the cable channels with the remote, and heard Corbeil’s name mentioned. Channel 3: the newsreader had more hair than the average werewolf, and teeth just as shiny; he liked this stuff, and this story.

Benson had been found dead in his hospital bed, a victim of what police said was a deliberate barbituate overdose. He’d been murdered.

Benson had been with a man named William Hart when he was shot, and had given Hart’s name as an alibi for the time that Lane Ward had been shot. After Benson had been found dead, police went to talk with Hart. They found him dead in an easy chair, a pistol on the floor beside him, an apparent suicide. The newsreader added that police had interviewed Corbeil in the case, but that he had not been charged with anything, nor was he being held.

“Corbeil says that his company, AmMath, a high-tech concern that creates top-secret coding software for the federal government, has been under attack for several days by the hacker group that calls itself Firewall,
apparently because AmMath is one of the lead contractors on the Clipper II chip. The Clipper II, if you recall, is the chip that the government would like to see incorporated as a standard in communications hardware, including that used on the Internet. Firewall is the group that has taken credit for the continuing denial-of-service attack on the IRS.

“Corbeil said that he did not understand Benson’s involvement with Lane Ward or her brother, Jack Morrison, who was slain last month after an alleged break-in at AmMath’s secure computer facility. He said that he had asked Hart to monitor Benson’s activities after the Morrison shooting, but hadn’t known of Ward’s presence in Dallas or his security officers’ shoot-out with them,” the newsreader intoned, his eyebrows signaling a moderate level of skepticism.

B
enson and Hart were dead. Who’d done that? Corbeil himself? Or were there more security goons in the background somewhere? Corbeil’s story was actually pretty good, from a legal standpoint: he took no position; he was confused. If it all got mixed in with national security and codes and spies and Firewall, and if the guy held out, he might walk . . .

I spent fifteen minutes pacing around the motel, then went out, found a phone, and dropped a message with Bobby. He batted it away: he was no longer interested in AmMath or revenge for Jack or Lane. He thought he might have found a way out for those of us still alive.

N
EED MORE RECORDINGS OF RANCH TRANSMISSIONS
. S
ENDING MAN TO YOU WITH PACKAGE
,
ARRIVES TONIGHT
. N
EED TRANSMISSIONS MOST QUICKLY
.

OK. P
ROBLEM
?

W
E NEED SATELLITE PROTOCOLS
,
CAN
’
T GET INTO
A
M
M
ATH
. C
OMPUTERS SEALED OFF
. C
AN YOU COME
M
EMPHIS
W
EDNESDAY
?

Y
ES
.

G
OOD
. W
ILL SEND ADDRESS LATER
.

The idea of going back to Corbeil’s ranch was not appealing, especially since I’d dumped the rifle. I still had the pistol that LuEllen had picked up in Lane’s room, but I had little faith in pistols. With the very best of them, like a .45 Colt ACP, I could probably ding a guy up at twenty-five yards, if neither of us were moving. Otherwise, I might as well be throwing apples.

Still: Bobby had a plan. Crack the satellites, he said, then talk to the government. Demonstrate that we were
not
a danger. Build a case for ourselves . . .

Maybe.

At eight-thirty that night, a guy with one of those uneven Southern faces, the kind that looked like they got a little crunched in a vise or a wine press or something, knocked on my door, and when I opened it, handed me a box. “From Bobby,” he said.

He did not look like the kind of guy who’d be hanging with Bobby: if you were going to cast a movie and needed a guy with hair like straw and pink lips and big freckles, to stand with his foot on a pickup truck’s
running board and talk about the Imperial Wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, this guy would be a candidate.

“How is he? Bobby?” I asked.

“Same as ever.” He raised a hand in what used to be a black-power salute. “Off the pigs,” he said. Then he laughed and I laughed with him, feeling ridiculous, and he headed down the hall in his beat-up cowboy boots, ragged stepped-on back cuffs, and jean jacket.

Gone.

So was I, five minutes later, headed south in the night.

T
hird time’s the charm.

That’s what I kept thinking all the way back to the dish in the gully. I took it slow, like still hunting for deer. I started down the road at eleven o’clock, deep in the darkness, watching, listening. I didn’t make it to the fence-crossing until midnight. Twelve cars passed along the road as I moved parallel to it, hunkered down in the weeds as they passed.

At midnight, I crossed the fence into the eastern pasture, and began moving parallel to Corbeil’s fence line. At twelve-thirty, having taken a half-hour to move four hundred yards, I crossed Corbeil’s fence and began working my way toward the nearest dish. As I got close, I spent some time watching the ranch house.

The yard lights illuminated the area around the house and showed a single pickup truck parked in front of the garage. The house itself was absolutely dark. The bunkhouse, if that’s what it was, had one lit window. A
shadow fell on the window once, and then went away. Whoever it was, was up late.

Nervous, but satisfied that nothing much was happening at the house, I crossed carefully into the gully, using the needle-beam flashlight now, and hooked the detection package into the dish. Then I climbed the far side of the gully and lay down, looking down at the farmhouse while I waited for the dish to start moving.

At one o’clock, or a few minutes later, the light in the bunkhouse went out, and a man stepped into the lighted driveway, walked over to the house, unlocked the door, went inside. A light flashed on, then, twenty seconds later, went out. The man stepped outside, closed the door behind himself, rattled it—locked—and walked over to the pickup truck. He got in and bumped slowly down the driveway to the highway, paused, turned left, and drove away.

Huh.

For the next three hours, I perched on top of the ridge waiting for the dish to move. Eventually, I realized that it wasn’t going to. Lying in the dark, with nothing much to do, I began to work out my own version of Corbeil’s caper.

He’d built a company that once must have been on the cutting edge of cyberintelligence, creating code products that could be used by anyone who needed absolute secure communication. Other companies could do the same thing, but the AmMath people had an advantage: their product would be the software component of the Clipper II, and they would essentially have a government-sponsored monopoly on encoded transmissions.

Then, just as Corbeil stepped on the road to billionaire-dom, the catch jumped up and bit him on the ass.

Outside the intelligence community, nobody wanted the Clipper. The Clipper was an obsolete idea when it was floated the first time. By the time Clipper II came along, even the Congress recognized its stupidity. So they said the hell with it, and instead of the road to billions, Corbeil found himself in the alley to Chapter Eleven.

Corbeil had to find something else to sell—this was all part of my fantasy—and found it, circling the earth every few hours. Perhaps AmMath had developed the code that the National Reconnaissance Office used for its satellite transmissions. However they did it, AmMath was pulling down the recon stuff and retailing it. Jack Morrison had been killed for knowing about it, and his sister was murdered because they
thought
she might know about it; and Firewall had been invented to cover it up, or at least to confuse any trail that might lead to it.

Could it be some sort of official dark operation? I doubted it. There are plenty of people working around the U.S. intelligence community who would be willing to kill if ordered to—I’d known some of them—but the fact is, nobody will give the order. American intelligence, in my experience, doesn’t kill people.

So Corbeil was almost certainly out in the dark by himself, and if he was, then it was impossible that many people knew about it. Not more than three or four, I’d bet. The danger of what they were doing, and the penalties, were just too great to let too many people in on the secret.

A
t four o’clock in the morning, the dish hadn’t moved. Bobby wouldn’t have sent me back unless he really needed the information from the transmissions; and down below, the house that probably acted as the control center for the dish array was sitting dark and apparently empty.

LuEllen would have given me a ton of shit for even thinking about it, but a few minutes after four o’clock in the morning, I began scouting the house. First, I stripped the recording package off the dish and stuffed it in the backpack; then, using the needle-beam, I changed batteries in the night-vision glasses and checked to make sure they were still working.

I followed the gully as far to the north as I could, duckwalking the last fifty yards, staying below the horizon so I wouldn’t be seen from the house. I listened and, for a while, worried. And then, working from the northeast corner of the house, I began closing in. Watched the windows for movement, for light, for anything. Stopped often, and long, to listen, but heard nothing but my heart and the occasional passing car.

At five o’clock, I was fifty yards from the house and facing the decision. Go in, or stay put. We needed any docs that might be inside: we needed anything we could find. Nothing moved. Nothing even breathed.

I crossed the last fifty yards quickly: now I was so close, with enough ambient light from the yard lights, that if anyone were looking right at me, they’d see me, even without night-vision glasses. The base of the
house was landscaped with a variety of broad-leafed cactus—Spanish bayonet, I thought, so named for good reason—and I pushed through them with care. Overhead, a balcony. Too far overhead. But the house was a log cabin, and I could put one foot on a window frame, then step up two feet or more on a log, and then, doing a quick step-up, catch the edge of the balcony.

And it went like that: I made the step, I did the pull up, and boosted myself over the edge of the balcony. There were four rustic chairs on the balcony, and a sliding glass door that led into the house. I waited, listened; tried to feel vibration, but felt nothing. Got the flash out of the backpack, and looked at the door. As far as I could see, it wasn’t alarmed, but I would have to assume that the house was. So: inside, five minutes max. If the call went out instantly, it would be purely bad luck to have security arrive in five minutes . . . unless there was another man in the bunkhouse.