The Devil's Code

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