John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

“Huh?” I said as I paid him.

“Ah, you know,” he said. He was too tall, too skinny, and had spent twelve seconds getting dressed for work that morning. Maybe less. “Or maybe you don’t need a Lucent gold card.”

“What’s that about?” I asked.

“About ninety dollars,” he said.

I took two fifties out of my billfold and stood there. He disappeared into the back for a minute, then came back with a Lucent card in the kind of Ziploc bag usually used to hold marijuana and cocaine… and maybe peanuts and raspberries and other legal stuff, for all I know. He handed me the card and I handed him the money and said, “Keep the change,” and he put it in his shirt pocket.

“If you go about nine blocks that way, there’s an all-night supermarket that sells Dinty Moore beef stew,” he said for the extra ten dollars. “I recommend the can. It’s just about perfect for a waveguide. And the area around Tulane is your happy hunting ground.”

“You are a prince among men,” I said. “Have a nice day.”

Did I mention the service at Radio Shack?

I STOPPEDat the supermarket, got the can of Dinty Moore and a can opener, drove back to the motel, and built the antenna. The worst part was trying to flush the cold beef stew down the toilet: it just didn’t want to go. John stood there, grimacing at the bowl, flushing it over and over, saying, “Man, that’s nasty. It looks like somebody was really sick.” A bright orange ring-around-the-bowl was still there the next morning.

After cleaning the beef-stew can, I went online to an antenna site with a calculator, did some figuring, and with the soldering iron put together a nice little wi-fi antenna. Wi-fi stands for “wireless fidelity” and works as a high-frequency wireless local network-it’s cheap, and it allows several people, in several different places around the house, office, or classroom to use the same Internet connection. It’ll probably be obsolete by tomorrow, but today, it was spreading around the country like a rash. Usually, the range is limited to just about the area of a big house. With an antenna, though…

Normally, I wouldn’t ride on somebody else’s Internet connection, simply because it wasn’t necessary. Connections are a dime a dozen, if you’re legal. Most Starbucks have a wi-fi connection. But the Carp problem made me nervous, and if I rode on somebody else’s network connection, there’d be no way to backtrack our inquiries. And it would be faster than doing it from the motel: working over a telephone hookup was like having water drip on your forehead.

The kid at the Radio Shack store had recommended the Tulane area as a happy hunting ground, but I had a different idea. I’d found that lots of warehouses use wi-fi because warehouses are constantly involved in inventory movements, and those movements are often uploaded via the Internet to central control offices. Few of them have any kind of protection.

LuEllen and I took I-10 out toward Kenner and New Orleans International, LuEllen driving while I watched the laptop, and eventually we found a truck stop parking lot next to what looked like a warehouse, where we got a strong signal from a wi-fi network.

And it was a fast one, maybe a T-1 line. In the next hour, I pulled every bit of information I could out of the National Crime Information Center, out of credit agencies and insurance companies, and from three different credit card companies. When I was done, I still didn’t have a photograph of Jimmy James Carp, but I had a different kind of picture, and it was one that scared us.

“THEguy might be working for the Senate Intelligence Committee,” LuEllen blurted to John, when we got back to the Baton Noir. John was stretched on his bed, watching CNN. “He might be a spy or something.”

He sat up, dropped his feet to the floor. “ What ?”

“The last job I can find for him, the last one that paid Social Security taxes, was the U.S. government, and the reference number traces back to the Senate Intelligence Committee,” I said.

“The government killed Bobby?”

“I don’t know-the Social Security payments stopped a month ago, but if he’s fucking around with the intelligence community, that might not mean anything,” I said. “On the other hand, that didn’t look like a government operation out at the trailer park. If the feds knew what was on that computer, they’d have it locked in a vault somewhere.”

“It feels bad, though,” LuEllen said.

“Tell you something,” John said, pointing at the TV. “He’s done it again. Bobby. Carp. There’s a story out there, coming out now, about how some Homeland Security department might have sprayed a virus into San Francisco to see how it would spread. It was supposed to be a test in case of a smallpox attack, they wanted to see what would happen, and they used a virus called, uh, Newport? That’s not right, but something like that. Anyway, a lot of people got sick and four people may have died… the shit is hitting the fan, and CNN says the leak involves a lot of classified government computer files and the sourcing resembles the Bobby releases of the past couple of days.”

“ Norwalk? Norwalk virus?” LuEllen asked.

He snapped his fingers. “That’s it.”

“Weren’t there a whole bunch of cruise ships a while back, where they had epidemics?”

“Exactly!” John said. “That’s the one. They’re saying-they say it’s only speculation-that those could have been a more controlled test, before they dumped it into San Francisco.”

“Ah, man. That means there must be a bunch of stuff that’s not encrypted-or he found a key.”

“We’ve gotta find the fucker,” John said.

LuEllen said, “He’s probably not twenty miles from here.”

“Might as well be in Chicago,” I said. “I got his credit card numbers, if he uses them…”

“Everybody’s gonna be looking for him,” John said.

“Everybody’s gonna be looking for Bobby, unless we tell them he’s dead. Or for one of Bobby’s friends, if we decide to tell them,” I said. “We’re the only ones looking for Jimmy James Carp.”

WE TALKEDabout it as we watched CNN, and then LuEllen said, “Hey, we found out about Melissa. Melissa Carp.”

“Yeah?” John said.

“She was his mother. She’s dead. She was killed in an automobile accident a month ago.”

“Maybe flipped him out,” John said.

And we talked about other trips we’d been on together, we talked about Longstreet, we talked a little more about Rachel Willowby, and what would happen to her. “If she thought Jimmy James Carp wanted to talk to her because he wanted to fuck her… then there are people who are talking to her because they want to fuck her,” John said. “She’s about ten-to-one for winding up on the corner.”

Something to mull over. Even later, after watching more about the Norwalk virus story, and more talk, we decided to tell the NSA that Bobby had been murdered.

LATEthat night, I went back out-way back out-up I-10 into Baton Rouge. I found a pay phone in a bar parking lot and, using LuEllen’s anonymous calling card, called long distance to Glen Burnie, Maryland. The phone rang seven times before Rosalind Welsh picked it up. She sounded as though she’d been asleep, and I realized that it was after two in the morning, Eastern time. “Hello?”

“Rosalind. Bill Clinton here. Remember me? Hope I didn’t wake you up, but I guess I must have.” At that moment, honest to God, a rat walked past the pay phone on its way to the bar, as confident and casual as a cat heading home. “Jesus,” I said.

“Who?” Welsh was struggling up out of the sleep. “Jesus?” I heard a man’s voice say, “Who is it?”