Silken Prey

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.
    •   •   •
    A S 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.
    •   •   •
    “ T HE 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.”
    •   •   •
    “ K IDD 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.”
    •   •   •
    T HE NEXT MORNING, he called ICE,