The Devil's Code (3 page)

“But not killed?”

“Not killed.”

“So he could tell you what they were doing . . .” The microwave beeped and I took the cups out.

“No, no, no . . . The man who was wounded was supposedly shot by
Jack
,” she said. “They say that Jack had a gun and opened fire when he was caught. There were two guards or security men, whatever you call them, and supposedly, Jack shot one, and the second guard shot Jack.”

“Jack?”
You had to know him.

“Exactly,” she said. “There’s no way that Jack would shoot at somebody. He wouldn’t shoot at somebody to save his own life, much less to keep from getting caught in a burglary, or whatever he was supposedly doing. Unless . . .” She looked sideways at me, and her eyes sort of hooked on.

“Yeah?”

“Unless, working with you, you taught him to take a gun along. A technique, or something.”

I shook my head: “Never. I never take a gun. The only thing you can do with a gun is shoot somebody. I’m not gonna shoot somebody over the schematics for a microchip.”

“That’s what he told me,” she said. “That nothing you did involved violence.”

Nothing that Jack knew about involved violence, I thought. But violence had been done, a time or two or three, as much as I tried to avoid it, and regretted it. Or,
to be honest, as much as I regretted some of it. I’d met a sonofabitch down the Mississippi one time, who, if he came back from the dead, I’d cheerfully run through a stump chipper.

“What was Jack doing?” I stirred instant coffee crystals into the hot water and handed her a cup. She had a way of looking at you directly, and standing an inch too close, that might have bent the attention of a lesser man.

“Nobody will say exactly. All they will say is that he entered a high-security area in AmMath—they’re the people doing Clipper II—and that he opened fire when they walked in on him,” she said.

C
lipper II was an Orwellian nightmare come true, a practical impossibility, or a huge joke at the taxpayers’ expense—take your pick. It was designed in response to a fear of the U.S. government that unbreakable codes would make intercept-intelligence impractical. And really, they had a point, but their solution was so draconian that it was doomed to failure from the start.

The Clipper II chip—like the original Clipper chip before it—was a chip designed to handle strong encryption. If it was made mandatory (which the government wanted), everyone would have to use it. And the encryption was guaranteed secure. Absolutely unbreakable.

Except that the chip contained a set of keys just for the government,
just in case.
If they needed to, they could look up the key for a particular chip, get a wiretap permit, and decrypt any messages that were sent using
the chip. They would thereby bring to justice (they said) all kinds of Mafiosos, drug dealers, money launderers, and other lowlifes.

Hackers, of course, hated the idea. They were already using encryption so strong that nobody, including the government, could break it. The idea of going back to less secure encryption, so that the government could spy on whoever it wanted, drove them crazy. No hacker on earth really believed that the government would carefully seek wiretap permits before doing the tap. It’d be tap first, ask later, just like it is now with phone taps.

The good part of the whole controversy was that everybody seriously concerned with encryption knew it was too late for the Clipper II. It had been too late for the Clipper I a decade earlier. Strong encryption was out of the bag, and it would be impossible to push it back in.

Lane had taken a sip of coffee, winced, and asked something, but thinking about Clipper II, I missed it. “Huh?”

She repeated the question. “Do people kill for software?”

“Not me. But Windows is software, and it made the creator a hundred billion dollars. In parts of some cities, you could get a killing done for twelve dollars ninety-five. So some software could get some killing done,” I said. We both thought about that for a minute. Then, “If it really happened like you say it did—hang on, let me finish—if Jack shot somebody, it wasn’t for the software, necessarily. It was to keep from getting caught and maybe sent to prison. Prison in Texas.”

“But you know and I know,” she continued, “that
Jack didn’t shoot anybody. Since
somebody
shot the guard, there had to be somebody else in the room when Jack was shot, even though the company says nobody else was there but the guard and another security man.”

“Maybe one security guy shot the other to make it look like Jack shot first . . .”

I said it in a not-quite-joking way, but she took it seriously: “No, I thought about that. But the guard who was shot was hurt bad. The bullet went right through his lung. He’s an old guy and he almost died on the way to the hospital.”

“So the whole thing holds together.”

“Almost too well,” she said. “There aren’t any seams at all. They searched Jack’s house and found some supposedly secret files on a Jaz disk hidden in a shoe. Very convenient. That really nailed it down. The only thing that doesn’t work is the shooting. Jack hated guns. They scared him. He wouldn’t even pick one up.”

She was getting hot: I slowed her down with a straight factual question. “What was he doing in Dallas?”

“A contract job,” she said. “He’d been there three months and had maybe another three to go. AmMath had a couple of old supercomputers, Crays, that they’d bought from the weather service, and they were having trouble keeping them talking. Jack had done some work on them years ago, and they hired him to straighten out the operating software.”

I said, “Huh,” because I couldn’t think of anything wiser.

“Ask me why I came to see you,” she said.

“All right. Why’d you come to see me?”

“First, to ask if you were in Dallas? Ever? With Jack?”

“No.” I shook my head: “Jack and I haven’t worked together for two years.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. He rewrote some software for me.” So I’d be able to plug into a Toyota design computer anytime I needed to. “Two years ago . . . November.”

“Then what’s this mean?” She dug in her purse and handed me a printout of an e-mail letter. “Look at the last couple of lines.”

I scanned all of it. Most was just brother-sister talk about their father’s estate—their parents were both dead now, their father dying nine months back.

The last two lines of Jack’s letter said, “I’m into something a little weird here. I don’t want to worry you, but if anything unusual should happen, get in touch with Kidd, okay? Just say
Bobby
and
3ratsass3.
”

 3 

I
f you look in the shaving mirror in the morning and ask what you’ve become, and the answer is “Artist & Professional Criminal,” then you may have taken a bad turn down life’s dark alley. While other people were wistfully contemplating the grassy fork in “The Road Not Taken,” I’d lurched down a gutter full of broken wine bottles, and kicked asses and people telling me to go fuck myself. Nobody to blame, really.

Well, maybe the Army. The Army had left me a roster of dead friends, a vicious dislike for bureaucratic organization, and a few unusual skills. And hell, it was interesting. At least I’m not stuck in a garret somewhere, with a pointy little beard and a special rap for victim women, trying to peddle my paintings to assholes in shiny Italian suits. At least I’m not that.

What I am, is an artist. A painter. I make decent money from it. But even though I was working harder than ever, my production—artists actually talk about things like production—had been falling over the years. I’d always been a little fussy about what I sold, and I’d gotten fussier as I’d gotten older, so even as my prices went up, my income actually declined a little. The year before, I’d sold six paintings. I’d gotten a little more than $300,000, but let me tell you about the taxes . . .

Or maybe not. I sound a little too Republican when I get started on taxes.

In any case, I still worked at my night job. I stole things. Computer code, schematics for new chips or new computers, designs for new cars. I suppose I could have stolen jewelry or cash, but I wasn’t interested in jewelry or cash—and besides, that kind of thievery didn’t pay as well as my kind.

I knew that for sure, because my best friend is a woman named LuEllen, who was exactly that kind of thief: she stole cash and jewelry and coin collections and even stamps—or anything else that was portable and could easily and invisibly be turned into cash. LuEllen and I had known each other since I caught her trying to break into another guy’s apartment in my building. That was several years ago. Ever since, we’d been friends and sometimes more than friends.

Even with that history, I had no idea what LuEllen’s real last name was, or where exactly she lived. She was comfortable with my ignorance.

I’m not exactly embarrassed by the night job, though I’ve often thought I’d give it up if I could make nine
paintings a year instead of six. Then again, I might not. If I were French, and philosophical, I might even argue that “professional criminal” wasn’t that far from “freedom fighter.”

But there was always that skeptical face in the mirror, the face that asked whether freedom fighting should generate large amounts of expendable income. I could say—“Hey, even freedom fighters gotta eat.” But what do you do when the face in the mirror asks, “Yeah, but should freedom fighters get condos in New Orleans and painting trips to Siena and fishing jaunts to Ontario and season tickets for the Wolves?”

Being neither French nor philosophical—rather, a believer in the Great God WYSIWYG, that What You See Is What You Get—I had no ready answer for the question, except . . .

You gotta shave faster.

I
did not immediately believe, or believe in, Lane Ward; believe that I was getting what I was seeing. “Let me get out on the Net for a couple of minutes,” I said.

“Check me out?” Ward asked.

“See if I’ve got mail,” I said, politely.

“ ‘3ratsass3’ sounds like a password,” she said. “So who’s Bobby?” She had large, dark eyes. I’d first thought maybe Mexican, with an Irish complexion. Now I was thinking Oriental, one of the robust-yet-delicate Japanese ladies of the Hiroshige woodcuts. Something about the eyebrows. I would like to draw
her, from a quarter angle off her face, to get the brow ridge, the cheekbone, and the ear. I didn’t say that.

“Bobby runs an information service,” I said. An information service for people like me, I might have added—but I didn’t add it. “ ‘3ratsass3’ is probably the password on one of Bobby’s mailboxes.”

“So let’s see what’s in it.” She looked around. “Where’s your computer?”

“In the back.”

I
’ve been in the apartment for a while. I own it, part of a deal the city of St. Paul had going years ago, to bring people back downtown. I’ve got a tiny kitchen with a small breakfast nook off to one side; a compact living room with a river view; a workroom with maybe three thousand books, two hundred various bits and pieces of software, and, most of the time, three or four operating computers; a studio with a wall of windows facing northeast; and a bedroom. On the way back to the workroom, Lane paused in the door of the studio, looked up at the wall of windows, the big beat-up easel and all the crap that goes with painting, and asked, “What’s this?”

“I’m a painter,” I said. “That’s what I really do. The computer stuff is a sideline.”

“You really
are
an artist?”

“Yeah.”

“Jack never told me,” she said. She peered at me for a second, as if doing a reevaluation.

“Jack didn’t know me that way,” I said. “We mostly knew each other on the Net. I only met him twice face-to-face.”

“He came here?”

“No, no, I saw him once when he was between planes, out at the airport, and once when I had some business out in Redmond.”

“Redmond,” she said, and, “Huh.” She stepped over to a painting I’d propped against a wall. I’d finished it a few weeks before the fishing trip, a line of stone buildings dropping down a hill in the flat yellow light of a Minnesota September. The light is thin, then, but yellow-creamy—almost like the light you get in central Italy on hot summer evenings, although in St. Paul, it only lasts three weeks.

After a few seconds of peering at the painting, Lane cocked her head and did a little shuffle step to get a better look. “Only two dimensions and all that light,” she said, “but it looks so like . . . it might be.” I shrugged, and she said, “Jeez. I really like it.”

I never know what to say, so I said, “The workroom’s down this way.”

A
n old cow-box Pentium was set up on a table at the far end of the workroom. A shoulder-high stack of Dell chassis were sitting on the floor, with a couple of big cardboard boxes. She looked at the chassis and asked, “What’re you doing here?”

“Some people in Chicago want to build an America’s
Cup boat,” I said. “They need a supercomputer to design the hull, but they can’t afford it, so I’m making one, with a friend.”

“Yeah? Neat.” She wasn’t particularly impressed, as though she’d done the same thing a time or two herself. “What’s the setup?”

“We’re gonna chain sixty-four Dell Pentium IIIs with an Ethernet array running through these stacked hubs”—I whacked a stack of cardboard boxes with the palm of my hand—“as a single distributed OS. We got the operating system off a freeware site . . .”

“Love the freeware,” she said.

“ . . . and my friend—she’s really doing the numbers—will come over and write whatever connections she needs, and . . . go to work.”

“Cool.” She looked around again, taking in the books. “Where’s your Net hookup?”

I took her down to the cow-box machine. Some previous owner, or more likely the wife or girlfriend of a previous owner, had written “Fuck you, fat boy,” on the beige front panel of the monitor, in pink indelible ink. “Top of the line, huh?” she asked.

“What can I tell you?” You don’t need a workstation to read your e-mail. When we were up, I said, “Why don’t you, uh, go look at the Dells?”

“Why?”

“Because I’m gonna dial a number I don’t want you to see, and follow a procedure I also don’t want you to see.”

“Really?” she asked. “So it’s out in the dark? Okay. I forgot.”

“What?”

She smiled, for the first time, a smile bordering on greatness: “That you’re a crook.”

S
he wandered down to the end of the room, and I dialed Bobby’s 800 number, a number I’m sure that AT&T doesn’t know about, since ten digits follow the 800. I then waited through ten seconds of electronic silence; in the eleventh second, the modem burped and a “?” appeared on the screen. I typed eight digits, got another “?” and typed “k” and got a further “?” I typed “MALE,” which was either a deliberate misspelling in the interests of security, or a joke. When the final “?” appeared, I typed “3RATSASS3.”

A letter popped up.

O
H
,
FUCK
: U
NLESS
I’
M READING THIS MYSELF
, I
COULD BE IN DEEP SHIT
.

K
IDD
: G
ET DOWN TO
D
ALLAS AND FIND ME
—I
MIGHT BE IN JAIL
.

T
HIS IS THE DEAL
: I
CONTRACTED WITH
A
M
M
ATH TO OVERHAUL THEIR SYSTEM SOFTWARE
,
WHICH JOB
I
GOT BECAUSE
I
HAVE A
DOD
CLEARANCE FROM WHEN
I
WAS AT
JPL. I
T
’
S ALL SUPPOSED TO BE SECRET
,
BUT EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT THEY
’
RE WORKING ON SOFTWARE FOR THE
C
LIPPER
II—
IT
’
S BEEN IN THE NEWSPAPERS
. S
O
I
FIGURE THAT
’
S NO BIG DEAL
,
BECAUSE
C
LIPPER
II
IS DEAD IN THE
H
OUSE AND EVEN DEADER IN THE
S
ENATE AND EVERYBODY EXCEPT THE INTELLIGENCE GOOFS IN
W
ASHINGTON KNOWS IT
’
S TOO LATE ANYWAY
. B
UT AROUND HERE
,
THEY
’
RE ACTING LIKE IT
’
S A NEW ATOMIC BOMB
,
AND THESE PEOPLE AIN
’
T GOOFS
. I
N FACT
,
THEY SCARE ME A LITTLE BIT
.

T
HE OTHER DAY
I
WAS MANIPULATING A BUNCH OF STUFF IN A FILE CALLED
OMS
JUST TO SEE IF THE SYSTEM WAS RIGHT
. I
GOT TO READING SOME OF IT
,
AND FUCK ME WITH A PHONE POLE IF IT HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH
C
LIPPER
. I
WAS STILL READING THROUGH IT WHEN A SECURITY GUY CAME DOWN FROM
C
ORPORATE AND ASKED ME WHAT
I
WAS DOING
. I
TOLD HIM
,
ACCESS TESTS
,
AND TOLD HIM
I
WASN
’
T REALLY READING ANYTHING
,
AND HE TELLS ME TO STAY OFF THAT LINK UNLESS
I
GIVE PRIOR NOTICE
. I
SAY OK
. T
HEY MUST
’
VE HAD A TRIP WIRE ON IT
.

S
O ANYWAY
, I’
M GOING BACK TONIGHT WITH A BUNCH OF
J
AZ DISKS
, I’
M GONNA DISCONNECT THE TRIP WIRE AND DUMP THE
OMS
FILE
. (OMS I
FOUND OUT STANDS FOR
O
LD
M
AN OF THE
S
EA
,
BUT
I
DIDN
’
T SEE ANYTHING IN IT ABOUT
H
EMINGWAY
.) A
NYWAY
,
JUST IN CASE
, I’
LL STASH COPIES IN THE SAFEST POSSIBLE PLACE
.

I
F YOU
’
RE READING THIS
, I’
M PROBABLY IN A JAM
. T
HE GUY TO WATCH IS A SECURITY ASSHOLE NAMED
W
ILLIAM
H
ART
. T
HERE ARE RUMORS THAT HE USED TO BE SOME KIND OF MILITARY SECURITY GUY OR SOMETHING
,
AND HE GOT KICKED OUT
. O
NE OF THE SECRETARIES TOLD ME THAT HE
’
D DONE TIME IN PRISON BEFORE HE CAME TO
A
M
M
ATH
,
SO YOU WANT TO STAY AWAY FROM HIM
.

S
O
,
THAT
’
S IT
. I
HOPE TO HELL
I’
M READING THIS
,
AND NOT YOU
. I
F IT
’
S YOU
,
COME GET ME
. S
AY HELLO TO
L
U
E
LLEN FOR ME
 . . .
DON
’
T TAKE ANY WOODEN PUSSY
.

 

J
ACK