John Sandford - The Devil's Code

Eight days earlier, as I'd been sitting on my living room floor sorting out pike lures, a National Security Agency bureaucrat named Lighter had been murdered walking near his home in Maryland. Jack was killed the next night, twelve hours before I flew out to Kenora.

According to the online papers, the Lighter killing was at first thought to be a random mugging, although the detectives working the murder had been disturbed by some of its aspects. There was no sign that Lighter had fought his assailants, or tried to run. He'd simply been gunned down. Lighter's wife told police that he'd been mugged once before, when they lived in Washington, and that he had calmly handed over his wallet while he tried to reassure the muggers that he was not a threat. In other words, there was no reason to kill him to get his money. And he'd been shot down on a quiet suburban street, where mugging, much less murder, was almost unknown.

A couple of days later, rumors began to surface on the Net that he'd been killed by a radical hacker group calling itself Firewall. Firewall claimed to be taking "preemptive revenge" for the Clipper II, although the Clipper II was widely believed to be a dead issue. And some names had surfaced. CarlG, Dave, Bobby, FirstOctober, RasputinIV, k, LotusElan, One2Oxford, Stanford, Whitey.

"Oh, shit," I said.

"What?"

To cover myself: "Do you know your brother's working name?"

"You mean, Yellowjacket? That's his gamer name."

"I never heard that. He'd always been Stanford." I tapped the list on the screen. "They've got him listed as a member of this Firewall."

She looked. "Stanford is Jack? Huh." She turned away, slowly, thinking.

"What?"

"You don't talk with the government," she said. A statement, with a question inside.

"No. Of course not."

"I have," she said, slowly. "They asked me not to tell anyone. I talked to them on Tuesday. I was interviewed for two hours by the FBI. About Firewall. Where Jack had been traveling and who his friends are. I didn't know any of that, except some friends we have in common. Jack would travel about once a year, to Europe, but that was about it. The last time he was out of the country was six months ago."

"You didn't mention me?"

"No, of course not. I know better than that," she said.

"What do you know about Firewall?"

"Nothing. I'd never heard of it. Jack would have told me, if he was involved. But those little Net conspiracies. you know what they are. They're socially retarded geeks who think they're living a comic book. Jack wouldn't have anything to do with them. Neither would I."

"Executing a guy because he's working on Clipper II. that doesn't sound like socially retarded geeks," I said.

"Oh, no?" she asked. "Then who else could it be? Murdering somebody over a chipnot even a real chip? And who else would care, besides geeks?"

"The Mafia?"

"Oh, bullshit." She rolled her eyes.

"It's too. physical."

She put her hands on her hips: "Look at yourself, for Christ's sakes, Kidd. You're some kind of aging jock-nerd-engineer-fisherman-artist with a broken nose. What if it's somebody just like you, with a taste for blood?"

No answer to that. The question was urgent, if the feds and spy people and God knew who else were tearing up the countryside, because Bobby was on the list. And so was I. I was "k."

Lane kept going back to Jack's letter.

"Where's the safest possible place?" she asked.

"Somewhere I could get at them, I guess." I had an idea, but wasn't about to show it. Not until I knew her better. "Maybe he shipped them somewhere. I've got a bunch of mailboxes, scattered around. I've even got one at AOL."

"Check them."

I went back online, checked them, and came up empty. Lane was reading Jack's letter again. She snapped it with a fingertip and said, "One thing that bothers me about the letter is the line about not taking any wooden pussy."

"Wooden what?" I'd barely noticed the line.

"Pussy. The thing that bothers me is, I don't think Jack talked like that. Are we sure this is from Jack?"

I had to laugh, because it sounded exactly like Jack; and exactly the kind of thing that Jack would never say around, say, a sister, or any other woman. "Yeah, he did talk that way, sometimes," I said. Then: "Is it possible that you really didn't know Jack as well as you thought you did? That he might have a life that you didn't know about. Maybe involving guns?"

"No," she said positively. "I mean, I'm sure he did things I don't know about, that he'd hide from me. He got along very well with a certain kind of ditzy chick. Maybe he'd say pussyhe just didn't say it to me. But with the guns, we're talking basic, rock-bottom personality. He didn't shoot anybody."

"Okay." Then I noticed something a little odd. "You say he was killed on Friday?"

"Yes. Friday night." She caught the puzzled look as I read the letter again. "Why?"

"Because the letter was time-stamped on Sundaythe Sunday before he was killed. He said he was going in then."

"What have I been telling you? There's something seriously wrong with the whole thing."

We talked about the possibilities; and in the back of my head, there was that "k" floating around out there. The feds were looking for k.

So are you going back to Dallas with me?" she asked, eventually.

"You're going back?"

"I've got to. I've got to sign papers and everything, when they're done with him." Another tear popped out and I turned away: I don't deal well with weeping women. I tend to babble. "So are you going? I made a reservation for you. I could really use somebody to lean on."

"Yeah, yeah, okay," I said. "But don't cry, huh? Please?"

She'd made a reservation for that same night, on the last plane out. I took a moment to go downstairs to tell Alice to watch after the cat, and then I went back out on the Net and read everything I could find on Firewall: there was a ton of stuff, but mostly bullshit. Then I went to my box at Bobby's, and found a picture and a note. The picture was of Lane Ward, looking nice in a professorial business suit, a wall of books in the background. The note said, Her only brother was JM.

Finally, I called the Wee Blue Inn in Duluth, on a voice line, and got Weenie, the owner-bartender. He's a toothpick-chewing fat man with a steel-gray butch; an apron that he laundered every month, whether it needed it or not; and who always smells like greasy hamburgers and barbequed onion rings. I said, "This is the guy from St. Paul. I need to talk to LuEllen."

"She's off right now," he said. "I can take a message."

LuEllen was always off. Weenie theoretically paid her $28,000 a year as a waitress, and she paid taxes on the $28,000 plus $6,000 in tips. In reality, Weenie stuck the tax-free $28,000 in his pocket and sent LuEllen the W-2 form. Weenie was her answering service. The W-2 form explained to the government how she paid for her house, wherever that was.

"Tell her that Stanford was killed," I said. "The funeral's set for Santa Cruz next Wednesday. I'm going to Dallas, but I'll be in Santa Cruz for the funeral."

"I'll tell her," Weenie said. "That's Stanford, like in the university."

On the way out the door, on the way to the airport, I stopped, Lane already in the hall, went back to the workroom and got a small wooden box made in Poland. I stuck it in my jacket pocket. Just in case.

At the airport, I picked up the major papers, and as soon as we were off the ground, began looking for Firewall stories. They all carried at least one, but nothing on the front page. Firewall appeared to be suffering media death.

While I read, Lane kicked back and slept. She was not a large woman and could snuggle into the seat like a squirrel on a pillow. I stared at the seat in front of me for a while, and when she was asleep, took the wooden box out of my pocket. Inside, I kept a Ryder-Waite tarot deck wrapped in a silk cloth.