John Sandford - Silken Prey

Still, he was sure that if the government people thought they could set up an invisible spiderweb, so they’d get the vibration if Kidd touched the web . . . then they’d do that. They’d give it a shot.

So Kidd had had to stay with the computers, watching for trouble, although now, painting six and seven hours a day, he was working so hard that he hadn’t time to do anything creative with the machines; and he was making so much money that he didn’t have to.

He and the other members of his network understood that even monitoring the feds could be dangerous. Computer systems were totally malleable, changing all the time. Updating access code could lead to serious trouble if it was detected. In addition to that problem, the number of major computer systems was increasing all the time, and security was constantly getting better. So care was needed, and time was on the government’s side.

The most powerful aspect of any bureaucracy, in Kidd’s eyes, was the same thing that gave cancer its power: it was immortal. If you didn’t seek it out and kill it, cell by cell, it’d just keep growing. Bureaucracies could chase you forever. You could defeat them over and over and over again, and the bureaucracy didn’t much care, though some individual bureaucrats might.

The bureaucracy, as a whole, just kept coming, as long as the funding lasted.

• • •

AS PART OF his monitoring efforts, Kidd had long been resident in the Minneapolis Police Department’s computer systems, which had useful access to several federal systems. The federal systems had safeguards, of course, but since the basic design of the system had been done to encourage access by law enforcement, the safeguards were relatively weak. Once you had unrestricted access to a few big federal systems, you could get to some pretty amazing places.

None of which concerned him when he went out on the network from a Grand Avenue coffee shop eight hours after he’d testified for the attorney general. In his testimony, he’d represented himself as a former computer consultant who was mostly out of the business, and was now concentrating on art. That was true.

Which didn’t mean he’d misplaced his brain.

So he got a grande no-foam latte and sat at a round plastic table at the back of the shop and slipped into the Minneapolis Police Department’s computer system. Instead of going out to the federal networks, he began probing individual computers on the network. He was looking for a group of numbers—the number of bytes represented by the photo collection.

The collection was a big one, and though there’d be thousands of files in the department’s computers, the actual number of bytes would vary wildly from file to file. If he found a matching number, it’d almost certainly be the porn file.

He’d thought he had a good chance to find the file; and he was right.

• • •

“THE PROBLEM,” he told Lauren later that night, “is that I found four copies of it. I know which computers have accessed the files, but I don’t know who runs those computers.”

“Sounds like something Lucas should find out for himself,” she said.

“Yeah. But how’s he going to explain that he knows about the files? Without explaining about me?”

“Maybe that’s something you should talk to him about,” she said.

Kidd looked at his watch: “You think it’s too late to call?”

“He said he stays up late.”

Lucas answered on the third ring. “Hey, what’s up?”

“I have a certain amount of access to the Minneapolis police computer system,” Kidd began.

“I’m shocked,” Lucas said. “So . . . what’d you find?”

“I found the porn file. I found it in four different places, but I don’t know who controls the files. The files themselves have four different names. The thing is, I don’t want to be connected to this one.”

“Because then the cops will know you’re inside,” Lucas said.

“That’s right.”

“So how’d you do it?” Lucas asked.

Kidd explained, briefly, Lucas thought about it for a moment, then said, “How about this? I get a warrant, or a subpoena, or just an okay, whichever works. I show the file to ICE, and she finds that number. That byte number. We go over to Minneapolis and jack up their systems manager and ICE finds the files, like you did, using that number, all on the up-and-up.”

“That would be perfect,” Kidd said. “Let me give you the number you’re looking for.”

“You’re not in the BCA system, are you?” Lucas asked.

“Of course not,” Kidd said.

“Then how’d you get this phone number?” Lucas asked. “You’re calling on my work phone.”

“You called me on this phone—so your number was on my phone,” Kidd said. “Jesus, don’t you trust anyone?”

Lucas said, “Oh . . . maybe.”

Kidd gave Lucas the number he’d be looking for, and hung up. Lauren said, “He suspects you’re in the BCA system, huh?”

“Naw, he was just kicking the anthill, to see if anything ran out,” Kidd said. “He’s got no clue.”

“I’d stay out of there for a while, anyway,” Lauren said. “Just in case.”

• • •

“KIDD IS INTO EVERYTHING,” Lucas told Weather, as they got in bed. “He’s all over Minneapolis and I know damn well he’s in the BCA computers, too. He says he’s not, but he’s lying.”

“Don’t you trust anyone?” she asked.

“You and Letty,” Lucas said. “Most of the time. Of course, I always check back and verify.”

• • •

THE NEXT MORNING, he called ICE, described the file to her, and asked, “How do I find out how many bytes are in it?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because when I was working at the company, the guys there could find specific files by the number of bytes they had in them. I’d like to know how many are in this one, then I can take it over to the Minneapolis cops’ system and look for it there.”

“That’ll work,” she said. “Okay, you got the file up? I’ll walk you through it.”

She did, and eventually had Lucas write down the same number that Kidd had come up with, although he didn’t tell her that. When he had the number, she said, “Do you trust the Minneapolis cops?”

“If somebody puts a gun in my ear,” he said. “Why?”

“Because what if their systems guy plugs the number into his machine, says, ‘Nope, not here.’ You’re far too ignorant to argue. Then what?”

“I’ve got that figured out—that was easy,” he said.

“Yeah? What’re you going to do?”

“I’m gonna take you with me.”

• • •

THERE WAS BUREAUCRACY to be worked through. When Lucas talked to Rose Marie, she was unhappy about the necessity of jacking up the Minneapolis cops, even though she’d known it was coming. “We’re doing everything right out in front of the media now, and I’m not going to have you serve a search warrant on Minneapolis,” she said. “Talk to Robin and get him straight, we’ll bring in their own Internal Affairs unit, and we’ll talk about all the cooperation we’re getting.”

Robin Connolly was the Minneapolis chief of police.

“What if Connolly says no?” Lucas asked.

“He won’t. He’ll want to be out front on this, he’ll want to be informed. If he does say no, I’ll call him. I’ll tell him that I’ll personally stick the search warrant up his ass and then cut him out of the loop on the return.”

“You’re so grandmotherly sometimes,” Lucas said.

Which didn’t mean that Connolly didn’t throw a fit when Lucas called him and told him what he wanted to do.

“What the hell are you talking about? You think we planted the porn file on Smalls? You’re nuts, Davenport. I’m not going to . . .” blah blah blah.