The Devil's Code

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 ClipperII . . . that doesn’t sound like socially retarded geeks,” I said.
    “Oh, no?” she asked. “Then who else could it be? Murdering somebody over a chip—not 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.”
    L ane 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