John Sandford - The Devil's Code

"Helps for a while," she said. "Then it starts to hurt again."

"I'm sorry."

"Not your fault," she said. "But I don't think I could do what you do. For a living, I mean."

"This usually isn't a part of it," I said.

"Sometimes it must be." She looked me over, and I couldn't deny that there'd been trouble in the past.

"Nothing like fire," I said. "Fire scares me."

"Me, too, now." She reached toward her neck as though she were going to scratch, stopped herself and smiled and said, "I'm going to be a really bitchy patient."

I went out and got a sack of bagels and some cream cheese, and we toasted bagels and drank coffee and talked about Jack and the Jaz disks. When we finished, she said she was going to try to lie down again"The pain really isn't terrible; it just makes me want to scream. It's giving me a headache."

"All right. Point me to your computer first. You got a Jaz drive?"

"No. But we're about two minutes from a CompUSA."

She showed me her office, with its standard beige desktop Dell, and then went off to lie down. I walked out to the CompUSA, bought an external Jaz drive and a bunch of disks, lugged it all back, hooked up the drive, and got the disks we'd taken from Jack's house.

I started with the top one, and the first thing I found was a file called, simply, notes. I opened it and found a couple of random e-mails, apparently picked up from somewhere else on the disk. Jack had been picking out things that might be significant; making notes.

The first one said, Add CarlG, RasputinIV to list. High correlation on both.

CarlG and RasputinIV were on the list of Firewall members mentioned in the Web rumors, and now being investigated by the FBI.

The second note said, check: endodays, exdeus, fillyjonk, laguna8, omeomi, pixystyx.

More hacker names? They sounded right. Was this some kind of security thing? Was AmMath worried about Firewall, or dealing with Firewall? Or maybe it was Firewall.

I started browsing the rest of the files, all under the general heading of OMS, and twice found the heading "Old Man of the Sea." They'd gotten the Hemingway title wrong, if that's, what it was meant to be. Anyway, the only easily comprehensible part of the files was a huge batch of e-mail and memos that Jack had apparently copied out raw. I looked at maybe three hundred pieces of it, out of fifteen thousand or so, and all of it was routine company stuff: days off, raises, complaints, scheduling.

Of the twenty gigabytes of information on the four disks, the most interesting files I couldn't really open at all. They were five hundred megabytes each and Lane's computer only had 384 megs of RAM. I looked at the first few blocks of each, though, and figured out that the files were graphics of some kind, probably photographs.

Bored and frustrated, I spent a while making two copies of each of the Jaz disks. As I finished, Lane got up, wandered out to the kitchen and began dabbing anesthetic on her burns. I shut down the computer and went out to tell her what I'd found.

"Did his work file. did that have a time stamp on it?" she asked.

"I didn't even look," I said, and we headed back to her office, and cranked the computer up. Lane was standing four inches away from me, looking at the screen, waiting through all the stupid Windows-opening stuff. She was an attractive woman; she looked like she'd feel good. I had the sudden feeling that if I touched her, somehow, something might happen.

But I didn't; I sat looking at the screen, and the moment passed. She moved a little, and wound up a few extra inches away. And when we opened Jack's work file, it did have a time stamp. It was last closed on Sunday, five days before he was killed.

"So he did go in on Sunday," she said.

"You said the cops said he made a phone call from his house and turned off the security system, a camera, and motion detectors," I reminded her.

"Yes."

"That's something we could check," I said.

"How?" She reached down to her arm, unconsciously, to scratch the burns; and caught herself.

"The phone company has these things called Message Unit Details or Message Unit Records," I said. "We called them Mothers back in the bad-old-phone-phreak days. They'll tell you where all the phone calls from your telephones went."

"How do we get them?"

"That guy I called from St. PaulBobby, the one I didn't want you to know aboutcould get them in two minutes," I said.

"So let's get them," she said.

"I have to go out to a pay phone," I said. "You wouldn't want to call that number from here."

"And if we go out to a pay phone, then I won't know it," she said. "It won't be on my long-distance bill."

"That, too," I said.

We went out to a mall and I hooked up my own laptop at a pay phone using a pair of old-fashioned acoustic-adapter earmuffs. After going through the security rigamarole, I got Bobby online and asked him to get me the numbers dialed from all phones at Jack's house on Sunday night, and then on Friday night, when he was killed. He said it would take a few minutes, but he should have them by the time we got back to the house. I said fine, and then added that I needed a mailing address to send him a package.

what?

4 2-Gb jaz disks. need more eyes looking at them. come from stanford.

send to john. he will bring to me.

Lane was looking over my shoulder and said, "So he doesn't mind calling in, as long as we don't call out."

"If you managed to trace the incoming call, it'd probably go back to the local bagel bakery, or Pontiac dealer, or something. He's weird about telephones," I said.

"What does this guy do for a living? Bobby?"

"Databases. Thousands of them. He still does some phone work, but mostly to cover up his database entries. About the only things he can't get into are the ones without an outside connection, and that's damn few of them, anymore. Maybe some military or national security computers; stuff at that level would be pretty tough, though I know he's in some of them. He's been there forever. He's like an unknown, unofficial systems administrator."

The phone was ringing when we got back to the house. Not Bobbyit was an air freight place: Jack's body would arrive the following day, and would be taken to a local funeral home. Lane put the phone down to say something, but it rang against almost instantly. Again, not Bobby.

"Yes, this is Lane. yes? What! What do you mean? Burned down? Well, how much is left? Did it get all of his personal stuff? Well, how bad? Aw, jeez. I told you guysI hold you guys responsible, I'm gonna talk to an attorney, you never let me in there and then I told you somebody killed my brother, and now they burned his house, and you guys didn't even have time to look into it. Bullshit. BULLSHIT! I'm gonna come there, I'm gonna come there as soon as the funeral is over, and I'm going to want to talk to whoever is in charge."

"Was I good?" she asked when she hung up.

"You were very good," I said.

Bobby called ten minutes later. We got the tone, I hastily slapped the muffs on, and two columns of numbers popped up. Between six and midnight Sunday, Jack made three phone calls. On Friday, he made a long-distance call to California at seven o'clock, that lasted twenty minutes: "That's our ISP, I have the same one," Lane said. He made another call at nine forty-five, and nothing later.

"So the nine forty-five call must be the one to the security computers," I said. "We can check that."

"But he didn't call that number on Sunday night," Lane said.

"Which means he didn't turn off the camera on Sunday night," I said.

"Which means that maybe he hadn't found the security system. I wonder if the camera's out in the open?"

I scratched my head and thought about it for a couple of minutes, and finally said, "You know, I think maybe they killed him."