John Sandford - The Devil's Code

But I couldn't quit, not yet. The names were out there, and once the cops started unraveling a few identities, they would probably get them alland we could get hurt without ever knowing why, or what was happening.

"I have to find out more about Firewall," I said. "Just for self-protection. If AmMath's involved, then I'll look into AmMath."

"You're giving up on Jack?" Lane asked. "It sounds like you're giving up."

"No, but we've got to be careful. From what it looks like, AmMath may be more than some mean-ass private company. Jack may have been messing with something seriousbig-time trouble, of the kind we really don't want to know about."

"What does that mean?"

"That means that the only way to get at them would be politics. We find some paper, we sic your senator on them, they do an internal investigation and cough somebody up and disown him. But if Jack was killed by some kind of operation. that's gonna be tough."

The best thing we could do, I thought, was to run down the Monger information in Maryland. Maybe, with luck, we'd find some fourteen-year-old computer hack at the bottom of the Firewall conspiracy. We could dump him in the lap of the local sheriff, get a good laugh out of the press, and go home.

"Fat chance," LuEllen said.

"It could happen," I said. "It's better than trying to crawl through AmMath's basement window."

"What about Lane?" Green asked.

"Call the Dallas cops and tell them that you're coming out to pick up Jack's computers and whatever other property they seized, that they don't want anymore. But that you've got to close down his home out here first."

"And you guys will be in Maryland doing what?" Lane asked.

"You know," I said. "Looking around."

We flew out of San Francisco the same night. Before we left, when we were at the motel, packing, I went back out to Bobby and told him that we'd be moving to Washington. He booked us business-class seats on an evening flight into National, and a car under one of the phony IDs LuEllen had been using in New York. That ID was more solid than the two we'd picked up in San Francisco, and the credit cards that went with them were definitely good. Bobby had also developed more stuff on Corbeil and AmMath.

Corbeil was a smart guy, but he was also nuts. He spent way too much time thinking about godless socialists, mindless bureaucrats, confiscatory taxation, black agitators, the yellow peril, the red menace, the International Jewish Conspiracy, and the New World Order. He'd been known to allow in public that Hitler had done a lot of good things.

I've never been much interested in politics, but once wrote some do-it-yourself polling that allowed low-rent politicians to do their own telephone polls. I eventually sold off the business, but before I did, I got to know quite a few politicians. They were a pretty lively bunch, no more or less corrupt than schoolteachers, newspaper reporters, cops, or doctors.

Anyway, it didn't take much exposure to politics for me to realize that there are as many nuts on the left as there are on the right, and in the long run, the lefties are probably more dangerous. But in the short run, if you find a guy on top of your hometown clock tower with a cheap Chinese semi-auto assault-weapon lookalike, that guy will be one of Corbeil's buddies, dreaming of black helicopters and socialist tanks massing on the Canadian border, preparing to pollute America's vital fluids.

Smart and nuts: Corbeil's description sounded a little like an advertisement for breakfast cereal, but wasn't.

Bobby had more about Corbeil's lifestyle, as portrayed by the local city magazines. Corbeil's salary was modest for a CEO, running about $150,000 a year, but then, he also owned a big chunk of AmMath stock. He liked fast cars and blond women; he made a point of being seen with Dallas's flavor-of-the-day model. One of them had been a Playboy playmate of the month. Bobby included the centerfold picture.

"Why do they shave their pubic hair into those little stripes?" LuEllen asked.

We contemplated this mystery for a moment; then I said, "Maybe they don't wear OshKosh B'Gosh brand bathing suits, like some people."

"You think?"

lots more stuff, i'll send it as soon as i weed through it. haven't picked out ammath computer lines yet, will get back later.

anything on the jaz?

yes. opened the big files, got photos, very high res. all the same parking lot. don't understand.

can you make jpeg, leave in my box?

yes.

also, copy out jaz disks, overnight them to wash hotel.

ok

On the flight, we talked about What Next. We didn't know what AmMath was doing, in anything more than a general sense, or why Jack might have been killed, if he wasn't killed exactly like the AmMath people said he was. I still suspected that Firewall was a phantom.

"Gonna have to spend some more time with Jack's Jaz disks," I said.

"There're only four."

I looked at her. "Four Jaz disks at two gigabytes each," I said. "You could put two thousand pretty fat novels on one of them. We're dealing with as much text as you'd get, say, in eight thousand Tom Clancy novels."

"Whoa."

"A bigger whoa than you think." I closed my eyes and held up a finger to indicate that I was thinking. A minute later I had it. "If you broke everything up into texts the size of Clancy novels, and looked in each one of them for one minute, and worked forty hours a week at it, it'd take you better than three weeks to look in all of them."

"For one minute each."

"One minute," I said.

"You're a mathematical fucking marvel," she said.

"That's not the end of the problem," I said. "The biggest part of it is, we don't know what's bullshit and what's not."

We thought about that, and she said, "I see a light at the end of the tunnel."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Jack looked for less than a week, and he apparently found something."

"Unless they just killed him for trying to take it."

An hour out of Washington, with nothing to do, I got out the tarot deck and did a couple of spreads. LuEllen watched with mixed skepticism and nervousness, and finally said, "Well?"

"Just bullshit," I said. "Confusion."

"Let me cut the deck." I gave the deck a light shuffle, and let her cut it. She cut out the devil card. The devil represents a force of evil, but not usually from the outside, not a standard bad guy. The devil is usually inside. He sits on top of you, controlling you, without your even being aware of it.

"That's bad," she said. "I can tell by your face."

In the course of my life, I'd spent maybe six months in Washington. Though it might not be fashionable to admit it, I like the place. Usually portrayed as a mass of greed-heads packed liked oiled sardines inside the Beltway, Washington has nice places to walk and good art to look at. People who like central Italy, the campagna, would like the rural landscape out in Virginia.

We got into National late, and picked up the car and a map. We wouldn't be right in Washington. According to Rufus, the server we were looking for was in Laurel, which is actually closer to Baltimorenot far, I noticed on the map, from Fort Meade, headquarters of the National Security Agency.

I'd had some dealings with the NSA when I was in the military and I'd always been impressed by two things: their employees' technical expertise and their arrogance. I hadn't had anything to do with the agency for a couple of decades, but because it was so heavily involved in computers, there was always a lot of back-and-forth between NSA computer geeks and the outside computer world.

Word got around, and the word was that the NSA was rapidly becoming obsolete. Once upon a time, agency operatives could tap any phone call or radio transmission in the world; they could put Mao Tse-tung's private words on the president's desk an hour after the Maximum Leader spoke them into his office phone; they could provide real-time intercepts to the special ops people in the military.