The Devil's Code

hear about it, and after we’d snarled at each other for a few minutes, I let it go. “So that’s it—they got a gun.”
    “There were a couple more things,” she said, reluctantly. Then, “Watch it!”
    I hit the brakes; a blue Toyota pickup chopped us off just as we headed up a freeway on-ramp. He never knew I was there. I shook my head, and said, “Asshole,” and then, “Listen, Lane, you gotta tell me everything they said. I don’t want to have to drag it out of you. I’m supposed to be on your side.”
    “It’s all bullshit. You should’ve come in, then you could have heard it for yourself.”
    “What’re the other things?”
    The cop had explained that there were three doors into the secure area—two of them alarmed. The third door came out of a short hallway connected to the systemadministrator’s office, and the main entrance of his office was well down the hall from the secure area. But if you knew which doors were wired with alarms, you could force the door into the system administrator’s office, which had the corridor leading directly into the secure area. That one locked from the system administrator’s side, so it would not have to be forced. An outsider trying to intrude into the secure area would not know any of that, and would be stuck with trying to find a way around the alarms . . .
    “What else?”
    “It turns out that the guard wasn’t responding to anything. He was making his regular rounds. Another guy, this security guy, was on his way to his office, and they went up together in the elevator, and the guard noticed that the door to the office suite had some damage around the door knob. So they went in . . .” She stopped, shaking her head.
    “So what they’re saying is, it wasn’t like there was a sudden shooting and then a bunch of explanations. It was just a guard’s routine trip through the building.”
    “It still could have been set up,” she said, stubbornly.
    “Yeah, but, boy . . .” Didn’t sound good.
    I concentrated on driving for a couple of minutes, getting us out of a pod of Texans headed up the freeway in what seemed to be a test of Chaos Theory: you sensed an order in their driving, but you couldn’t say exactly what it was. I could see the Toyota pickup at the head of the pack, like the lead dolphin.
    A fter the shooting, Lane said, the police went to a house Jack had rented, with a second security man from AmMath, and found a bunch of computer disks—“Two of them were in a pair of shoes in the closet, which doesn’t sound like Jack at all”—and a lot of other unauthorized stuff from AmMath, including manuals and confidential information about the Clipper II. AmMath wanted to take it, but the cops wouldn’t give it to them: instead, they called in the FBI.
    “They’ve still got it?”
    “Yes. The FBI.”
    “And that’s all.”
    “Well. They say the back entrance and the secure area at AmMath are covered with cameras. A call came into the building computer at TrendDirect—that’s the building owner—and the security cameras were interfered with. The scanning range for the one in the back was changed so that it didn’t scan a door at the end of the building; and the camera that watches the secure area was turned off.”
    “The guards didn’t see that? Weren’t the cameras monitored?”
    “I asked that,” she said. “The camera in back constantly scans back and forth, and the only change was to cut out part of the range. The other camera is one of about ten around the premises, with a constant cycle, three seconds at each station, and they cut out one station. They never noticed the changes.”
    We sat and thought about that for a moment; thenLane sighed and said, “They said we can probably get his computers back. Not the hard drives, but the rest of them. And the monitors, and his personal stuff.”
    “What about Jack? I mean, the body.”
    “I’ve got to go to the medical examiner’s office and sign for him. They’ve released it . . . him.”
    “Huh. So maybe we should stop by his house and take a look around,” I said. Over time, I’d crept up on the blue Toyota. He edged over to make it onto an exit, and I chopped him off, nearly sending him into the retaining wall. At the bottom of the ramp, I went right and he went left, but I could see his middle finger wagging out the window.
    “For what?” Lane was unaware of the drama.
    “Those Jaz disks. He said he’d put them in the safest possible