John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

How had Carp done it? That’s what I needed to know. How had he found the keys? I went to the bed, lay down, and put a pillow over my eyes. Instead of random digging at the machine, let’s look at Carp, I thought. What did Carp do?

After worrying about it for a while, a thought popped into my head. An encryption key would consist of characters that you can see on a keyboard, because, on occasion, folks had to manually type them, and not everybody knows how to get to the alternate character sets on a keyboard. An encrypted file , on the other hand, usually includes all the characters that a computer can generate, including many that are not represented on a keyboard. If I were to write a search program that looked for strings of letters and numbers that were visible on the keyboard, but contained none of the other, hidden characters… then, if the keys were hidden in the huge files, maybe I could pull them out.

Hell, it was a start, and writing a little software program would keep my brain from turning to cheddar. I pulled out my own notebook, where I had my software tool kit, and spent a quarter-hour or so creating the search program. The coding was interspersed with a few minutes watching CNN, a few more watching the Weather Channel, and maybe a moment or two of self-doubt, a feeling that I was wasting my time. When I finished, instead of transferring the program via disk, I got a cable out of my briefcase and hooked my laptop to Bobby’s, to transfer the program.

And the minute I did, Bobby’s laptop began running the Dogabone program, trying to fetch something from my laptop; and it did it as my laptop was transferring the search program. If I hadn’t been able to see his laptop, I would never have known that he was searching mine.

Huh.

THEsearch program found nothing in the encrypted files, no long strings of out-front characters. But as I sat on the bed, watching the machines talk…

After we grabbed Carp’s laptop back in Louisiana, he’d only had Bobby’s laptop to work with. He’d been going online with me, as Lemon, and who else? Who else that Bobby knew?

I could think of only one person: Rachel Willowby. Rachel Willowby, who had gotten a free computer from Bobby. Ten minutes later, I was calling John from a pay phone in a strip shopping mall. “John, where’s Rachel?”

“She went down to the library with Marvel,” he said. “What’s up?”

“I need to go online for a minute with Rachel’s notebook. Is it there? Or did she take it with her?”

“She takes it everywhere. That’s why she’s at the library-they got it fixed so she can plug into their ethernet and she can get a fast line free. She’s in heaven.”

“Got a phone number for the library?”

I TALKEDto the Longstreet librarian, told her it was urgent, and she went and found Rachel. “Hello?”

“Rachel, this is Kidd. You remember?”

“Sure. What’s up?” She asked the question just like John; already picking up the family traits.

“I’m at a pay phone in Ohio. I need to go online with you for a minute. I’ve got a couple of phone numbers and some protocols for you. Give me your ethernet address and I’ll be down to hook up with you in a couple of minutes.”

“All right.” She was enthusiastic. More phone numbers were always good.

TWOminutes later, I hooked up with Rachel, using Bobby’s laptop, and watched the Dogabone program go straight into her. Five seconds later, I had fifty short blocks of numbers and letters that looked like nothing more than computer keys. Sonofabitch. Bobby had hidden his keys with the little computer kids, scattered anonymously all over the country.

Now I had them. Just like Christmas. I talked with Rachel for a few seconds, then transferred a couple of good phone numbers for her to look at. They were big, semi-secure computers where she wouldn’t get caught, but would have a lot to explore. And they’d keep her from thinking too hard about why I’d wanted to go online with her.

Back at the hotel, I got busy with Bobby’s laptop. The keys were in the same order as the files, so opening the files was no problem. I sat at the shaky little motel table and started scanning through what Bobby had accumulated over the years.

Forty-five of the fifty files contained text documents on topics that interested Bobby-biographies and photos of hundreds of people, along with what were apparently confidential assessments of many of those people, made by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Out of curiosity, I looked and found one on me, though it wasn’t much more than a standard FBI file, listing my military service, my technical specialties, and a few additional random notes: “… currently self-employed as a fine arts painter.”

AH,but the other five files.

These were the keys to the kingdom.

Here were the routings and codes that would get you into almost any computer database in the world. I won’t list the stuff, but it is this simple: Bobby had access to almost everything, everywhere. He’d been around as a phone phreak in the CP/M and early DOS days, had fiddled with Commodores and Z80s and all that. He’d been in the early networked computers before anybody thought about online security, and he’d been building trapdoors and secret entrances all along.

As they’d grown, and shifted, and evolved, he’d grown right along with them.

There are, undoubtedly, some serious databases that he couldn’t get at-computers that had been isolated from any phone service; computers where, to download information, you had to accept the information on disk or on paper, handed to you by a guy who checked your credentials in person and got a signed receipt for the disk.

But those computers are damned few. It’s just too inconvenient. If the director of the CIA wants to look at something on his desktop, he doesn’t want to have to go down in the basement to look at it. He wants it in his office. And if he looked at it on his desktop, then Bobby could look at it too. Because Bobby was everywhere.

I scanned through the information in the last five files, and thought three things.

First, when Wayne Bob had looked at that single disk of information and commented that we were now two of the most powerful people in Washington, he may have been right, but that disk was a child’s trinket compared to Bobby’s laptop.

Second, it occurred to me that I was now the Invisible Man-I could go anywhere, and see almost anything, and probably do quite a bit to people I didn’t like.

And third, I thought, You’re in a lot of trouble now, Kidd .

AFTERconsidering it for a while, I transferred the encryption keys to my own notebook, so I wouldn’t have to re-fetch them from Rachel every time I wanted to look at Bobby’s files. I had a good-sized hard disk myself, and hid them in the clutter. Still, if the feds got their hands on it, and knew what they were looking for, they’d find the keys. I’d find a better hiding place as soon as I got home.

Home… What if Carp had called Krause back, had given him my name and my license plate number, and some thugs were waiting in my apartment to take me down? I got paranoid thinking about it, and finally called the old lady who lived downstairs from me-a painter, and a good one, who took care of the cat when I was gone-to check on the apartment and to tell her I was on my way back.

“Means nothing to me. You can stay away as long as you want.” She loudly crunched on a carrot stick or piece of celery, and said while she was chewing, “I put the cat through the garbage disposal two days ago, the stinky thing, and stole your Whistler. What else do you have that I need?”