John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

That’d be just about the final little chip of horror in the story. The doctor would make sure that wouldn’t happen.

On the way, Rachel confirmed what I thought but hadn’t mentioned, about how Carp had found her. She’d been going to the Longstreet library with her laptop, and from there, she logged into her regular baby-hacker chat rooms with her baby-hacker name. If you knew what you were doing-and with most programs, it’s really easy-you could track that back to her location.

LuELLENwas at my apartment when I got back to St. Paul from Cleveland. I walked in the door and she called, “Kidd? In the kitchen.” I dropped my bag in the hallway and found her eating a toasted bagel with cream cheese. The red cat was sitting on the kitchen counter, next to her, licking his chops. Cream cheese was one of his favorites.

“So what happened?” she asked.

I told her. All of it.

“Fuck him,” she said about Carp.

TWOdays later-this is while the DDC was still operating-I found her file in a DDC computer under the tag Betty 47. “Betty,” as it turned out, was intelligence-speak for an unidentified female. The file contained partial fingerprints from her car and a dozen photographs taken by a concealed camera in the room where she’d been detained.

“They did a good job hiding the camera,” LuEllen said. “I never saw a thing. And I looked.”

“Some of the lenses are the size of pinheads,” I said.

I downloaded the photographs, went out to the FBI files and picked up another dozen surveillance photos of a dark-haired woman named Harriet. With a few hours of tedious work in Photoshop, I replaced LuEllen’s face with Harriet’s, while leaving LuEllen’s body and the room backgrounds. The fingerprints were replaced with a set picked at random from the FBI files.

Is she safe? I don’t know. There may be hard copies, or optical-disk copies, of all the stuff on LuEllen. You can’t get into somebody’s desk drawer from a computer.

Am I safe? I don’t know that, either. I do have reason to believe that they don’t know who I am. Not yet, anyway-because if they did, they’d come through the door with an Abrams tank.

Before we went to sleep that night, LuEllen said, into the dark, “My real name is Lauren. My mother named me after Lauren Bacall.”

She still hasn’t told me her real last name; maybe we’re getting to that.

CONGRESSMANBob had been busy with the CD I gave him, though not exactly saving the Republic. When the Bobby attacks suddenly stopped, most of the air went out of the other charges, too. The political counterattack started with a lot of media bullshit about responsibility and McCarthyism and anonymous smears, despite the black-and-white evidence for many of the charges.

The hottest charge, the supposed Norwalk virus experiment on San Francisco, cooled off when the governor of California, a possible presidential candidate in three years, congenially agreed that there wasn’t much evidence to support the claim. Somebody, I thought, had gotten to him. With evidence from the DDC files? Who knows?

ONEpolitician who did take a heavy hit was Frank Krause.

Like this: Two weeks after the Bobby attacks ended, a UN deputy secretary-general got rolled on the east end of Capitol Hill. At a previously scheduled press conference, somebody asked the President about it. The President made a few comments about the poor physical condition of the capital city-the bad roads, the deteriorating building stock east of Fourteenth Street -and suggested that America could do better. A week later, the Senate majority leader named Krause to head a special Senate Committee on the Capital, said that Krause would now be the Capital Czar, and everybody shook hands and smiled.

Bob, in a mildly lubricated call a few days later, told me that the Committee on the Capital was the political equivalent of an isolation chamber. Krause could remain a senator until his constituents realized that he could no longer deliver the pork, but he wouldn’t have any real clout. He’d hurt too many colleagues.

The DDC itself disappeared. The initials did, anyway. They tried to hide it all away, but nothing hides from the All-Seeing Bobby Eye. The Inter-Service Research Bureau is slowly gathering itself back together-same people, different building. They work under the guidance of the House Special Sub-Committee on Coordination, Congressman Wayne Bob, chairman.

SO INSeptember, after time to talk and do a bit of contemplation, I went back to Louisiana and the Penders project. I stopped in Longstreet and talked with Marvel and John, and they were full of each other again. Rachel was as deep into her laptop as ever. We didn’t talk about Carp.

Lauren calls every night. She’s at my place most of the time, now. The Minnesota weather had turned crappy; they got snow flurries on the fifteenth, she said. She grumbled about the shortness of the golf season and said she was planning to rent a place down in Palm Springs in January, February, and March.

I was invited.

“There’s a golf club there, they’ve invited me to join.”

“That was nice of them,” I said. “Nonsexist.”

“The downstroke is a nonsexist quarter-million dollars.” A downstroke, she explained, was the up-front membership fee.

“Ah. Maybe they’re not liberals after all,” I said.

“Maybe not. I’ve got the money. I’m thinking about it.”

“A quarter-million dollars to chase a little white ball around a sod farm?”

“Hey-remember what I said about golf… When are you coming back?”

“Another ten days or two weeks.”

“Miss you,” she said. “We could have a good time in Palm Springs.”

California dreaming…

THENone evening, the twenty-second of September, as I sat on a rickety motel chair among the fumes of the oil sketches drying against the wall, I got a note from Bobby. The note came into one of my alarmed dump sites. When I opened it, it scared the shit out of me-I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck, and I thought, Carp.

But it wasn’t. It was Bobby:

Kidd:

As you probably know by now, I’m gone. I’ve waited this long to send the note just to be sure. I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed working with you. Hell, it was a short life, but an interesting one, hey?

You’re worried about my files, but you don’t need to be. I didn’t keep anything that could come back on any of my friends. Not a thing, encrypted or otherwise. That’s all in my dead head.

I’m sorry I’m dead, because now I won’t know how the world comes out. Hope *you* live long enough to find out. This was the best time to be alive, these past thirty years. What would I have done without computers? Say good-bye to Lauren for me… and if you don’t know who that is, you’ll figure it out sooner or later.

By the way, I’ve appended a list of databases and filenames that would be of use to you. Good luck, friend.

Bobby (Robert L. Fields, Jackson, Mississippi)

I told Lauren about it that night, in our bedtime phone call. “You know who he is?” she asked. “He’s the Hanged Man. Remember those tarot readings, right at the start of everything, where the Hanged Man came up? You said it was somebody in a state of suspension, between this and that. Bobby’s like that. Dead, but not dead. Everything that’s happened was because he was gone, but not entirely gone. Like Janis Joplin’s song. And he’s still doing stuff.”

I thought about it, and rendered an opinion. “Horseshit,” I said.

NOW,at this moment, unable to sleep, I sit in the near-dark of the motel room, with nothing but the blue glow of the computer screen in front of me. The All-Seeing Bobby Eye goes into operation.