The Devil's Code

sometimes shook with the rush of sugar and caffeine, and he liked it.
    The men outside his door stressed exercise and drug therapy, mixed Creatine with androstenedione and Vitamins E, C, B, and A. The closest Morrison got to exercise was a habitual one-footed twirl in his thousand-dollar Herman Miller Aeron office chair, which he took with him on his cross-country consulting trips.
    Morrison and the chair rolled through a shambles of perforated wide-carriage printer paper and diet Coke cans in the smaller of the rambler’s two bedrooms. Arancid, three-day-old Domino’s box, stinking of pepperoni and soured cheese, was jammed into an overflowing trash can next to the desk. He’d do something about the trash later. Right now, he didn’t have the time.
    Morrison peered into the flat blue-white glow of the computer screen, struggling with the numbers, checking and rechecking code. An Optimus transportable stereo sat on the floor in the corner, with a stack of CDs on top of the right speaker. Morrison pushed himself out of his chair and bent over the CDs, looked for something he wouldn’t have to think about. He came up with a Harry Connick Jr. disk, and dropped it in the changer. Love Is Here to Stay burbled from the speakers and Morrison took a turn around in the chair. Did a little dance step. Maybe another hit of caffeine . . .
    T he doorbell rang.
    Eleven o’clock at night, and Morrison had no good friends in Dallas, nobody to come calling late. He took another two steps, to the office door, and looked sideways across the front room, through a crack in the front drapes. He could see the front porch. One or two men, their bulk visible in the lamplight. He couldn’t see their faces, but he recognized the bulk.
    “Oh, shit.” He stepped back into the office, clicked on a computer file, and dragged it to a box labeled Shredder. He clicked Shred , waited until the confirmation box came up, clicked Yes, I’m sure. The shredder was set to the highest level: if the file was completelyshredded, it couldn’t be recovered. But that would take time . . .
    He had to make some. He killed the monitors, but let the computer run. He picked up his laptop, turned off the lights in the office, and pulled the door most of the way closed, leaving a crack of an inch or two so they could see the room was dark. Maybe they wouldn’t go in right away, and the shredder would have more time to grind. The laptop he carried into the kitchen, turning it on as he walked. He propped it open on the kitchen counter, and pulled a stool in front of it.
    The doorbell rang again and he hurried out the door and called, “Just a minute.” He looked back in the computer room, just a glance, and could see the light blinking on the hard drive. He was shredding only one gigabyte of the twenty that he had. Still, it would take time . . .
    He was out of it. The man outside was pounding on the door.
    He headed back through the house, snapped on the living room overhead lights to let them know he was coming, looked out through the drapes—another ten seconds gone—and unlocked the front door. “Had to get my pants on,” he said to the two men on the stoop. “What’s up?”
    T hey brought Morrison into the building through the back, up a freight elevator, through a heavily alarmed lock-out room at the top, and into the main security area. Corbeil was waiting.
    St. John Corbeil was a hard man; in his early forties,his square-cut face seamed with stress and sun and wind. His blue eyes were small, intelligent, and deeply set beneath his brow ridge; his nose and lips narrow, hawklike. He wore a tight, military haircut, with just a hint of a fifties flattop.
    “Mr. Morrison,” he said. “I have a tape I want you to listen to.”
    Morrison was nervous, but not yet frightened. There’d been a couple of threats back at the house, but not of violence. If he didn’t come with them, they’d said, he would be dismissed on the spot, and AmMath would sue him for violating company security policies, industrial espionage, and theft of trade secrets. He wouldn’t work for a serious company again, they told him.
    The threats resonated. If they fired him, and sued him, nobody would hire him again. Trust was all-important, when a company gave a man root in its computer system. When you were that deep in the computers, everything was laid bare. Everything. On the other hand, if he could talk with them, maybe he could deal. He might lose this job, but