John Sandford - The Devil's Code

"If that's not high enough, what? You think it was made by a plane?"

"Not high enough," I said. "I think that's a satellite photograph."

She still wasn't much impressed; I had to work to get that. "Think what a face would look like if you took it from three blocks away with your Nikon and then blew it up to this size. It'd look like a thumbprint," I said. "Look at those faces. You can't quite recognize them, but you almost can. If that camera's in orbit, it has one unbelievable capability."

Now she was hunched over me, and spotted something we should have seen before. "You know, those cars." There were only a half-dozen of them in the parking lot. "Not a single one of them is American-made. Look at this one." She tapped the screen with a fingernail. "I don't think I've ever seen that kind. It looks like a combination of a pickup truck and a sedan."

"You see those in the Middle East," I said. "Lots of them."

She straightened. "So it's a satellite photo. So what?"

"I don't know, yet. But it seems unlikely that a satellite would take a picture of three guys and the three guys were important," I said. "How could you time something like that?"

"Radios, maybe."

I shook my head. "I bet it's not the guys that are important. I bet it's the photograph. Not the content, just the photograph, that they have it. They're supposed to be working on the Clipper chip, and they have this. This has got to be some kind of ungodly high-level secret capability. You could not only see stuff like ammo dumps, you could see what's in them. If they can do something with computers to punch up the resolutionjust a probability enginethey might be able to figure out who gets into which car, might be able to track cars through traffic. all kinds of stuff."

"They're NSA, right? Isn't that what they do?"

"No, no, that's another group, the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office. They do all the satellite stuff."

"So let's get online with Bobby, and see what he says."

We got online from a mall. Bobby thought he could figure out the height of the camera by picking out small parts of the original full-strength photos and making some precise measurements on the shadows.

freaky if it's a satellite photo. never seen anything like this.

maybe what they're hiding.

but what does it have to do with firewall?

There was the other side of Lane's question. Lane was interested in what happened to Jack; Bobby was interested in how his name got attached to Firewall. Somehow, AmMath was involved in both of those things, but how and why were they related? Or were they related?

We talked about it as we were leaving the mall, and decided they had to be linked Jack went to Maryland, where the computer that started the Firewall rumors was located. The guy he saw, who was later killed, was a client of that same server. It was all tied. We just couldn't see the knot.

Lane, it turned out, had been worrying about the same questions all night. We all had breakfast together, and she leaned across the diner table, picked up my glass of Coke, and rapped it on the table. She had a theory, she said.

"Say the photographs are wildly important, for some reason. We don't know why, but let's say that's a given. Jack steals them. They know he stole them, but they don't know why, or who he might have given them to. So they come up with a scheme. They invent this Firewall group, using names that they harvest from the Internet. Legendary hackers. There's all kinds of talk on the Net. Anybody could get a list like that. They make Jack a part of the group, so when the names finally come out, the cops'll say, 'Ah-ah, he was a member of the radical Firewall group, that's why he broke into AmMath and it was only bad luck that he got caught.' "

"Why use the server in Maryland?" I asked. "The same one that Lighter just happened to be on."

"You said it was mostly NSA people," she said. "Maybe it was one server they all knew. That they all had access to."

"Sounds weak," LuEllen said.

"But the rest of it sounds pretty good," Green said. "It ties things together."

"What about the IRS attack? That was set up weeks ago."

"But the Firewall name wasn't around weeks ago," I said. "That could have been made up at the last minute. These hacks are ready to attack the IRS, and just at that moment, somebody invents a group with a neat-sounding name. So they say, 'All right, we're Firewall, too.' "

"Goddamnit," LuEllen said, "It's still too hard to think about."

"I'll tell you what, though," Lane said. "When we go back into AmMath's computer, I think we ought to be looking for stuff on Firewall and satellites. This Clipper stuff is a dead end. Whatever's going on doesn't have anything to do with Clipper."

"When we go back in?" I asked.

"Darn right: I know my way around mainframes as well as anyone. I want to be there tonight, when we go back in," she said.

"Gotta find a new motel," I said.

"There's a place called Eighty-Eight right across the street from where we're at," Green said.

"So we'll set up there tonight," I said "We'll use one of LuEllen's IDs, and call you when we're settled in."

Lane didn't have much to say about her talk with the cops: "They say they don't believe that AmMath had anything to do with anythingbut I think they believe there's some kind of government deal going on, and they don't want to know about it. They think we're the bad guysJack and me."

"You told them about the burglary at your house."

"Of course." Lane said. "We gave them every single detail. We told them we thought Jack's house had been broken into, too."

"They're dead in the water," Green said. "I used to work with a program in Oakland that investigated shootings by cops. Most of the shootings were open-and-shut. But every once in a while, we'd get a shooting and there'd be something wrong about it. No proof, no evidence, just something wrong. We'd try to get the cops to look a little deeper, to ask a few more questions, and they'd say they would, but you could see it in their eyes, they'd signed off. They either believed they knew what happened, or they didn't want to know any more. That's what's happened with this case. I could see it: they've signed off. They're all done. They don't want to know any more."

"Damnit, nobody'll move," I said.

We thought about that; then Lane said, "By the way, I looked up McLennan County, where Corbeil has that ranch. It's about a hundred miles south Near Waco."

We made arrangements to meet them that night in Denton, and then LuEllen and I took the rest of the day off. We'd been cooped up too long, hanging out in hotel rooms and restaurants. We were the kind of people who liked to move around. I got my laptop and sketchbook, and my watercolor tin and a plastic squeeze bottle of water, and we went out to a driving range and LuEllen hit balls for an hour while I drew the shelter over the driving line. The whole thing with the satellite photosif that's what they werehad gotten me thinking about perspective. The driving line was sheltered by a fifty-yard-long metal roof mounted on steel poles, and from the corners, made a fairly interesting challenge in three-point perspective.

When LuEllen got tired of hitting balls, we went back to the hotel, talked to a desk clerk who got a map out and drew a six-mile jogging circuit that he ran himself every morning, and we drove out to his starting point and did the six miles in forty-five minutes, just cruising along suburban streets looking at all the pickups.

"Not bad," she said, when we got back to the car. "Let's go buy some boots."

She bought two pair of cowboy boots, and paid six hundred dollars for them. I've never actually seen her on a horse, but she does like horses, and she liked the boots. They put an inch or two on her height, and she liked that, too.