John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

I stuck the key into my laptop’s USB slot, dumped a half megabyte of something into my hard drive, and put the key back into the satchel. No time to see what it was. I’d been inside the apartment for three or four minutes and was already feeling the pressure.

I sat at her machine, hooked it into my laptop, and started dumping her document files to the laptop’s hard drive. Most of the files had unpromising names like Budget and Letters , and I didn’t have a lot of confidence that I was breaking out her computer passwords. While I waited for the files to clear, I checked her desk drawers, the bottom of the keyboard, the underside of the desk, and minutely examined the satchel for any anomalous number-letter combinations that might be passwords. I found nothing.

Probably was around somewhere, I thought. High-security places tell their employees to come up with passwords of random numbers, letters, and symbols, so that they can’t be cracked by hackers doing research. The problem is, nobody can remember the high-security numbers, so they get written down.

A better policy would be to tell the password holder to think of a person or place that’s significant to him, subtract a letter or two, and add a significant number or two. Say, your father’s middle name backwards, with your mother’s birthday attached. That way, you’d have a password that you could work out, would never come up in a hacker’s dictionary, and wouldn’t be written down so it couldn’t be stolen. As it is, most high-security passwords look like the registration code on the back of a Windows software box.

And I couldn’t find one. I found an address book, flipped through it, looked in a checkbook, scanned a small Rolodex, flipped through the pages of a wall calendar featuring English kitchen gardens. Still nothing. The document files cleared, and I went into her computer, looking for other files, finding not much.

The cell phone rang. A single ring-LuEllen’s signal that I’d been inside for ten minutes. Now we were pushing it. Too many things happen when you stay inside too long. People notice lights, decide to stop by for a visit. People come home.

Getting nowhere. Shut down the computer. Gave up.

I CALLEDLuEllen on the way out, and when I got downstairs, she was already walking across the parking lot to the car. I got in, and she said, “What?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

“Bummer.”

“Well, I dumped a lot of stuff to the computer, but most of it looked personal.”

“She’s a Russian major, she’s gotta have a good memory-maybe she just memorizes her codes.”

“Maybe. But a lot of those places change passwords every month, or every week.”

I GOTher passwords, all right, and because of LuEllen, a lot faster than I might have.

At the hotel, I started by looking at the stuff I’d dumped from the USB memory key. When I opened it, I found a novel, chapters 1 through 17.

“Ah, Christ, she’s writing a novel,” I said. I scanned a page. “She writes okay.”

“What’s it about?” LuEllen was a reader.

“Some mystery thing,” I said. “She’s got this bounty-hunter chick or something. I don’t know. Not gonna tell us anything about the working group.”

I quit the novel files and started through the stuff I’d stripped from her desktop. First up was Strom’s personal budget, and it was a little surprising. She was well-off, for a thirty-three-year-old mid-level bureaucrat. Digging in a little, I found that she’d had an inheritance from her grandfather, nearly half a million dollars, all nicely invested with Fidelity. The next file up was what looked like a series of letters, but I couldn’t be sure, since they were written in Russian.

I closed that out and rubbed the back of my neck. “I’m gonna go stand in a shower for a few minutes. I’ve been spending too much time in front of a screen.”

“We oughta go out and run,” LuEllen said. She stood up and stretched. “I’m getting tight myself.”

“So let’s find a place,” I said. “I’ll do the shower later. Let me pee and wash my face.”

“Sit down for a minute, I’ll do your shoulders.” I sat. She did my neck and shoulders, and as she started on my shoulders, looked at the laptop and asked, “Which one is the novel?”

I reached out and clicked on it, Word came up, and the novel ran down the screen. LuEllen was running her knuckles up and down the sides of my spine and I’d just said, “Jeez, that feels good,” when she stopped, leaned forward, and scrolled down the novel.

“What?”

“This isn’t right,” she said. “How do I get the next chapter up?”

I selected CH2 from the list. She read for a moment, then said, “She didn’t write this. This is a Janet Evanovich novel. I read it a couple of years ago.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” She reached out and touched the screen, which she did occasionally, and which always left an oily fingerprint. “Novels come on computer files now?”

“I know you can get some for PalmPilots… e-books. I didn’t know you could get them in Word format. Maybe the group steals them.”

She went back to rubbing my shoulders and said, “I couldn’t read a book that way. Maybe kids can. You know, people who had their first computer when they were babies.”

“Not a friendly way to read a book,” I said. “Great for reference stuff, though.” A thought struck me and I said, “Hang on a minute. Let me look at something.” I spent a couple of minutes combining the files into one large new file, then ran a search for the numeral 1. There was a single hit, but not relevant.

I got another nonrelevant hit with 2, but with 3, I got a hit on 39@1czt8*p* and on ll5f4!35lp0 .

“She’s buried her passwords in the novel,” I said. Finding them felt like my fifth-grade Christmas, and I laughed out loud. “Pretty goddamn smart. Instantly accessible and completely portable with the data key, and totally invisible.”

“Wonder if she talked to Evanovich about it?” LuEllen asked. But she was pleased with herself; I know she was pleased because she gave me a noogie.

WE DROVEback to our wi-fi spot, signed in on Strom’s account, then took the next step, pushing into the files. I had two passwords to choose from.

“No way to tell?” LuEllen asked. We were set up right on the street, in a dark spot.

“Not that I see.”

“Do a scissors-paper-rock. You’re the first code, I’m the second one.”

We did a scissors-paper-rock, three rounds, and then she won. We put in the second code, and the remote computer cracked open like an egg.

“Shazam,” I said.

EVERYBODYprobably has a few moments in his life when he feels like he’s fallen down Alice ’s rabbit hole. That’s what I felt like when I got into DDC Working Group-Bobby.

To begin with, DDC was the official name, with no Bobby-but Bobby was all over the place. The DDC, it seemed, was an actual experimental arm for a package of anti-terrorism techniques being developed by the military and the various intelligence organizations. One of their tests was to find Bobby, using a whole array of Web-scanning devices and surveillance.

I pulled a file labeled South and found an elaborate argument that Bobby was probably living in Louisiana, because analysis of the DuChamps name suggested a Cajun French background, and other analyses had already established that he probably lived in the Gulf states.

The South file noted a counterargument that suggested that Bobby was active in racial affairs, was probably black and therefore not Cajun at all.

“They were moving closer, but they had no idea of who he really was,” I said. “Not yet. Look, they were even analyzing phone-use patterns.”