John Sandford - The Fool's Run

Each night I'd do between a dozen and a hundred tarot spreads, figuring the possibilities. The Fool was back, and that was okay. After the tarot, I'd call Bobby for progress. There was none until the fifth night, when I put into a tidy little Ma-and-Pa motel on the edge of the Ozarks.

Got exchange.

Great.

Not great. Dipped in. Have very heavy security. No on-line help. Get zero. Think one-time codes. Think probes spotted.

Traced?

No. But guard up now.

One-time codes are essentially unbreakable. There is no pattern, and they are used only once. Sometimes the operators on opposite ends of a phone link literally have identical pads of words: one is used, then that piece of paper is ripped off and thrown away, and the next one is used. The words may be of any length, pulled at random from a dictionary. Or they may be lists of numbers produced by a random-number generator.

Our problems were compounded by what Bobby thought was individual call monitoring: when we tried to get in, it set off an alarm. They knew somebody was knocking on the door, and without the correct codes. They would be watching for us.

The next night we went back into the exchange, intending to proceed most delicately. It was empty. They had changed it again.

Unless we get codes we locked out. Watched Anshiser/Vegas Hotel data line, there was call-in call-back, enough data that may be two-way one-time codes, maybe simultaneous voice monitoring and clearance.

Okay. Hold probes. Need time to think.

Call when need us.

Sometimes, in high-security environments, a clerk from a remote computer, like that of Anshiser/ Vegas, would be brought into the home computer installation. He would go to a company-sponsored lunch and dinner with the home computer operators, often with a shrink or "enabler" present. The shrink would keep the conversation going, both in person and over internal telephones.

When the clerk returned to his remote site, he would call one of his new friends at the home base before each computer entry. They would chat until his identity was confirmed. Some companies even used voice-print analyzers as a backup. Only when the identity was confirmed would they begin the sign-on procedure. Since the procedure was a two-way affair, with conversation and code going both ways, it was essentially unbeatable. While there might be ways to read the transmissions, there was no electronic way to get inside and work with the computer itself. We would need a different route.

How good is access to credit computers?

Read-only or read-write?

Read-only.

Good access.

Need complete run on all Anshiser lower-level execs with likely computer access. Find worst credit, forward names.

OK. Tomorrow.

While Bobby was running the credit reports, I went back into the NCIC computers using the codes we'd stolen from Denton, the Washington cop. This time I wasn't looking for anything deep, just the standard rap sheets. And I wasn't looking for felonies, I was looking for sleaze. I came up with a half dozen possibilities. When Bobby sent his list of bad credit reports the next day, we had one match.

I dumped the car in St. Louis and flew to Miami the next afternoon. Our man, Phil Denzer, was in the book. There was no answer at his apartment up to eleven o'clock that night. I found his apartment on the map, in a complex in North Dade County, and the next morning drove up to talk to him.

Denzer lived in a run-down complex of town houses surrounded by several acres of hot asphalt. The parking lot featured redneck specials, Firebirds and Camaros and five-liter Mustangs, most of them several years old, along with broken-down Dodge Swingers with rusted-out taillights. Sickly, yellow-leafed palm trees lined the lots. The town houses were arranged in a donut shape around two swimming pools. It was a hot and cloudless day, and a few women in bikinis, and one guy wearing shorts, a gold chain, and loafers, were arrayed on lounge chairs around the pools. Nobody was actually swimming.

I got Denzer's apartment number from the manager. The jalousie windows on the door were cranked open, and disco music poured out through the glass slats. I peered in and could see a guy in a white T-shirt and black slacks dancing to the music, by himself. Practicing moves. I knocked, and Denzer came to the door.

"You a Witness?"

"Do I look like a Witness?"

He thought about it and eventually shook his head. "No. They dress neater. What'd ya want?" He talked past a cigarette and, on his way to the door, had picked up a plastic plate with a half-eaten slice of cherry pie on it, which he was now holding.

"I've got a proposition for you."

"Oh yeah? You gonna make me rich?"

"There might be a few bucks in it."

"Tell me in ten words. I gotta get to work."

"That's what I'm interested in. Your work. You work on a computer, right?"

His mouth actually dropped open.

"Hey. I bet you're one of the guys trying to break into our system, right?" He pointed a fork at my chest and I looked for a place to run. "Well, shit, come on in," he said, holding the door open. He was delighted. "I hoped you'd call me, but I didn't really think you would."

I stepped inside. It was cool and damp and smelled like beer.

"I'm just having a beer and piece of pie before I take off for work. You want a beer?"

"Sure."

He got one from the refrigerator, popped the top, and handed me the can. "Sit down, sit down," he said. "How much can you pay me?"

I sat on a rickety armchair that might have been stolen from a budget motel. "Depends on what you've got."

"I want some money up front. They told us you were well-heeled. 'A well-heeled operation,' is what they said."

"How about five hundred?"

"Fuck, how about five grand?"

"We're not that well-heeled. I'll give you a grand now, and if it's worth more, I'll give you another."

He scratched his head. He had long black hair, combed straight back. He must have held it down with grease or wax, because you could see tooth marks from his comb.

"All right." I had three thousand in my pocket; I took it out and started counting. He looked at it greedily. I stopped counting for a second.

"Look, Phil, I know all about your money problems. But don't think about taking this away from me, okay? I'd just beat the shit out of you."

"Hey, man.

I handed him a thousand and he counted it, folded it, and put it in his front pants pocket and sat back.

"Okay. So here's what I know. And this was why I was so happy to hear from you. 'Cause all I can tell you is that you can't get in. Even if you put a gun to my head, and marched me in there, and made me sign on, and we got in, it wouldn't do you any good. Things are so tight that almost nothing moves anymore. It's all voice-backup and it's all one-way. We dump it into a computer on the other end that's physically separated from the main data banks. Then they've got operators to put all of the data up on the screen from the dump bank, and they scan it for code. Only when they're sure it's clean, they call up the main bank on their own internal line and dump it. There's no way in from the outside."

"What if you need to go interactive with something in the main banks?"

"Well, they're trying not to let that happen. If it's really serious, then they'll download the interactive program to the remote computer; you'll interact there. They sterilize the input before they ship it back to the main banks. I mean, there's one way to break it: you have to get to the systems programmers. And that won't happen. I'll tell you, man, this is a pretty good company, but they've got some rough customers roaming around. You know what I mean?"

"Yeah. I think so."

"Just in case you don't, let me lay it out in a couple of sentences. Their top systems programmers are taking home maybe a hundred grand a year, plus options and benefits and bonuses. That's good money. That's the golden goose. If they get greedy and go for some small change from you, they'd be fired and blackballed and maybe, you know, hurt. The chances of those guys taking your money are slim and fat, and slim is out of town." He took a gulp of Bud.