The Devil's Code (7 page)

 6 

T
he plane touched down in San Francisco a little after three in the morning, taking a turn out to sea, then landing across the stem of highway lights between the ocean and the bay. When we touched down, a tight wire in my spine suddenly relaxed. Whatever happened now, we could fake it. In Dallas, where the cops could look at us, where they could
see
the burns, we were in trouble.

A purely selfish reaction: because Lane hurt. I’d found some Solarcaine in a drugstore, and she’d smeared it on the burns, and she’d taken a half-dozen ibuprofen, though we weren’t sure they’d help much. That was about the best we could do before we left for the airport.

At the check-in counter, Lane hung back, the shy Little Woman in a long-sleeved blouse, head down, while I handled the tickets. On the plane, she sat on the aisle, and got up twice to go to the bathroom, to lather on more of the Solarcaine.

“You okay?” I asked after the second trip.

“I’ll make it,” she said through her teeth.

“The ibuprofen . . .”

“Didn’t help much,” she said. “I hope I don’t scar.”

“It doesn’t look that bad,” I said. “I . . .”

She held up the bottom side of her arm, and showed me a half-dozen blisters the size of quarters.

“I’m afraid to lance them, ’cause of infection,” she said.

“Ah, Jesus . . .”

Halfway through the flight, I half-stood and looked around. The woman in the seat in front of Lane was asleep, her mouth hanging open. There was nobody behind us, and the guy across the aisle had spread across two seats, and had his head propped uncomfortably against a window shade.

“You know,” I said quietly, “the police know we left Dallas this evening and the house burned down before we left. They’re gonna want to talk to you.”

“Oh, boy. You’re right.”

“You’re gonna have to lie a little,” I said.

“I’m gonna have to lie a
lot,
” she said.

“You can pull it off if you think about it,” I said. “You’ve gotta be surprised and you’ve gotta be pissed. It’s
their
fault—the cops’ fault—that the place burned
down. You
told
them that something was going on, that your brother had been murdered. You gotta yell at them.”

“Not yell. But I’ll be mad. I
am
mad,” she said. “Somebody
did
murder him.”

“You gotta
insist
that you go back to Dallas, and you have to demand to look at the hard drives on the computers. That might keep them from having a local cop come around to talk to you. There’s no reason for them to suspect that you were burned in the fire, there’s no reason for them to think that they have to see you right away. And you do have to stay here for the funeral.”

“So it depends on how long it takes the burns to heal,” she said.

“Yes. But you can’t stall them: you just have to be busy. You have to leave them with the impression that you’re pissed off and you’re gonna be back in their faces as soon as you have the time.”

She thought about it for a minute, then said, “I can do that.”

“Cops aren’t dummies. Not most of them, anyway.”

“Maybe he won’t be the same guy I talked to last time. I mean, I talked to a different cop the first time. . . . That’d make it easier.”

“Whoever it is, you’ve got to be careful, and you’ve got to be real. Cops got built-in bullshit detectors,” I said.

At San Francisco, we picked up her car from a satellite lot and drove south to Palo Alto, went straight to her house, dumped the luggage: “Emergency room,” I said.

“I’ve got a doctor I see . . .”

“Emergency room is
right now,
and it’s anonymous, and it may stop the pain,” I said.

She didn’t argue.

W
e even managed to get a little sleep that night.

At ten o’clock in the morning, after five hours in bed, I heard somebody knocking around in the house. I rolled off the bed—I’d crashed in her spare room—and pulled on my jeans and T-shirt. She was in the kitchen, making coffee.

“How is it?”

“Hurts,” she said. She’d gotten cleaned up, as best she could, but said that water hurt the burns. She was wearing loose khaki pants with a long-sleeved cotton peasant shirt, and again I could sense just a dab of the flowery French scent. She smelled terrific, and looked terrific in the peasant blouse, if you didn’t know that she was dressed to hide new burns.

Her face was all right; the burn there resembled a bad sunburn, and would heal soon enough. Her arms were the worst of it. The doc had lanced the blisters the night before, to relieve the pressure, but they were filling again.

“The anesthetic doesn’t help?” I asked. She’d gotten a spray-on topical anesthetic at the hospital. The doctors had said it was stronger than the Solarcaine.

“Helps for a while,” she said. “Then it starts to hurt again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” she said. “But I don’t think I could do what you do. . . . For a living, I mean.”

“This usually isn’t a part of it,” I said.

“Sometimes it must be . . .” She looked me over, and I couldn’t deny that there’d been trouble in the past.

“Nothing like fire,” I said. “Fire scares me.”

“Me, too, now.” She reached toward her neck as though she were going to scratch, stopped herself and smiled and said, “I’m going to be a really bitchy patient.”

I went out and got a sack of bagels and some cream cheese, and we toasted bagels and drank coffee and talked about Jack and the Jaz disks. When we finished, she said she was going to try to lie down again—“The pain really isn’t terrible; it just makes me want to scream. It’s giving me a headache.”

“All right. Point me to your computer first. You got a Jaz drive?”

“No. But we’re about two minutes from a CompUSA.”

S
he showed me her office, with its standard beige desktop Dell, and then went off to lie down. I walked out to the CompUSA, bought an external Jaz drive and a bunch of disks, lugged it all back, hooked up the drive, and got the disks we’d taken from Jack’s house.

I started with the top one, and the first thing I found was a file called, simply,
notes.
I opened it and found a couple of random e-mails, apparently picked up from somewhere else on the disk. Jack had been picking out things that might be significant; making notes.

The first one read,
Add CarlG, RasputinIV to list. High correlation on both.

CarlG and RasputinIV were on the list of Firewall members mentioned in the Web rumors, and now being investigated by the FBI.

The second note read,
check: endodays, exdeus, fillyjonk, laguna8, omeomi, pixystyx.

More hacker names? They sounded right. Was this some kind of security thing? Was AmMath worried about Firewall, or
dealing
with Firewall? Or maybe it
was
Firewall.

I started browsing the rest of the files, all under the general heading of OMS, and twice found the heading “Old Man of the Sea.” They’d gotten the Hemingway title wrong, if that’s what it was meant to be. Anyway, the only easily comprehensible part of the files was a huge batch of e-mail and memos that Jack had apparently copied out raw. I looked at maybe three hundred pieces of it, out of fifteen thousand or so, and all of it was routine company stuff: days off, raises, complaints, scheduling.

Of the twenty gigabytes of information on the four disks, the most interesting files I couldn’t really open at all. They were five hundred megabytes each and Lane’s computer only had 384 megs of RAM. I looked at the first few blocks of each, though, and figured out that the files were graphics of some kind, probably photographs.

Bored and frustrated, I spent a while making two copies of each of the Jaz disks. As I finished, Lane got up, wandered out to the kitchen and began dabbing anesthetic on her burns. I shut down the computer and went out to tell her what I’d found.

“Did his work file . . . did that have a time stamp on it?” she asked.

“I didn’t even look,” I said, and we headed back to her office, and cranked the computer up. Lane was standing four inches away from me, looking at the screen, waiting through all the stupid Windows-opening stuff. She was an attractive woman; she looked like she’d feel good. I had the sudden feeling that if I touched her, somehow, something might happen.

But I didn’t; I sat looking at the screen, and the moment passed. She moved a little, and wound up a few extra inches away . . . And when we opened Jack’s work file, it did have a time stamp. It was last closed on Sunday, five days before he was killed.

“So he
did
go in on Sunday,” she said.

“You said the cops said he made a phone call from his house and turned off the security system, a camera, and motion detectors,” I reminded her.

“Yes.”

“That’s something we could check,” I said.

“How?” She reached down to her arm, unconsciously, to scratch the burns; and caught herself.

“The phone company has these things called Message Unit Details or Message Unit Records,” I said. “We called them Mothers back in the bad-old-phone-phreak days. They’ll tell you where all the phone calls from your telephones went.”

“How do we get them?”

“That guy I called from St. Paul—Bobby, the one I didn’t want you to know about—could get them in two minutes,” I said.

“So let’s get them,” she said.

“I have to go out to a pay phone,” I said. “You wouldn’t want to call that number from here.”

“And if we go out to a pay phone, then I won’t know it,” she said. “It won’t be on my long-distance bill.”

“That, too,” I said.

W
e went out to a mall and I hooked up my own laptop at a pay phone using a pair of old-fashioned acoustic-adapter earmuffs. After going through the security rigamarole, I got Bobby online and asked him to get me the numbers dialed from all phones at Jack’s house on Sunday night, and then on Friday night, when he was killed. He said it would take a few minutes, but he should have them by the time we got back to the house. I said fine, and then added that I needed a mailing address to send him a package.

W
HAT
?

4 2-
GIG
J
AZ DISKS
. N
EED MORE EYES LOOKING AT THEM
. C
OME FROM
S
TANFORD
.

S
END TO
J
OHN
. H
E WILL BRING TO ME
.

L
ane was looking over my shoulder and said, “So he doesn’t mind calling in, as long as we don’t call out.”

“If you managed to trace the incoming call, it’d probably go back to the local bagel bakery, or Pontiac dealer, or something. He’s weird about telephones,” I said.

“What does this guy do for a living? Bobby?”

“Databases. Thousands of them. He still does some phone work, but mostly to cover up his database entries. About the only things he can’t get into are the ones without an outside connection, and that’s damn few of them, anymore. Maybe some military or national security computers; stuff at that level would be pretty tough, though I know he’s in some of them. He’s been there forever. He’s like an unknown, unofficial systems administrator.”

T
he phone was ringing when we got back to the house. Not Bobby—it was an air freight place: Jack’s body would arrive the following day, and would be taken to a local funeral home. Lane put the phone down to say something, but it rang again almost instantly. Again, not Bobby.

“Yes, this is Lane . . . yes? What! What do you mean? Burned down? Well, how much is left? Did it get all of his personal stuff? Well, how bad? Aw, jeez. I told you guys—I hold you guys responsible, I’m gonna talk to an attorney, you never let me in there and then I told you somebody killed my brother, and now they burned his house, and you guys didn’t even have time to look into it  . . . Bullshit. BULLSHIT! I’m gonna come there, I’m gonna come there as soon as the funeral is over, and I’m going to want to talk to whoever is in charge . . .”

“Was I good?” she asked when she hung up.