The Devil's Code

take the job.”
    Green got a hard-shell suitcase out of his car and I cleared out of the guest room. “I’ll get a room in LuEllen’s motel tonight,” I said. “It’ll have a cleanphone line. I’ll get with Bobby about AmMath and we’ll start looking for Firewall.”
    “Okay,” Lane said. She reached out and touched the .357 on the table. Green asked, “You know how to use that?”
    “I just shot a big stack of phone books down in the basement,” she said. “LuEllen told me if I need to, just point it and keep pulling the trigger until I run out of bullets.”
    Green sighed and said, “Nuts.”
    I wasn’t sure I liked leaving them alone in Lane’s house. If they were targets, they were just sitting there. It’s easy to get lost in America, for a few days or weeks, anyway, and if you try hard enough, nobody can find you. But sitting ducks . . .
    There was a momentary awkwardness while I was checking into the motel. LuEllen and I had spent quite a bit of time together, and probably would again in the future, and she wasn’t involved with anybody and I wasn’t that involved, but the awkwardness went away and I checked into a separate room. She came down ten minutes later with a couple of beers while I was talking to a guy named Rufus Carr in Atlanta.
    “How’s Monger doing?” I asked Rufus.
    “You’re talking to a pentamillionaire,” he said.
    “I don’t know what that is.”
    “I got five million bucks in the bank, m’ boy,” he said. Rufus was a fat red-haired man who affected a bad W. C. Fields accent. “Until I have to pay taxes, anyway.”
    “It works?” I asked.
    “Of course it works; I told you it’d work.”
    “I knew that,” I said.
    “Yeah, bullshit. You were one of the naysayers. You were one of the guys who said Rufus was going to be eating frozen cheese pizza for the rest of his life. Well, I’ll tell you what, pal, it’s nothing but order-out pepperoni and mushroom from now on. And a private booth at Taco Bell.”
    “I’ve got a favor to ask. Could you mong some stuff for me?”
    “On what?”
    “You know about Firewall?”
    “Yeah?”
    “The rumors are weird. Could you just pick up a few of the bigger sites where you see the rumors, and mong them?”
    “Is there any money in it?” he asked.
    “Fuck, no. But I won’t burn your house down.”
    “Well, thank you, General Sherman. Am I going to get in trouble?”
    “I doubt it,” I said. “But this whole Firewall thing is getting totally out of hand.”
    “You’re right; it’s my patriotic duty. Besides, I’m not doing anything else.”
    “Can I call you tomorrow?”
    “Sure. I’ll put it on the trail right now, and get it back tomorrow morning,” he said.
    W hat’s ‘mong’?” LuEllen asked, when I hung up. She was sitting on the bed with a beer bottle.
    “Monger. It’s a rumor-tracking program,” I said. “Rufus built it for some securities companies. They use it to bust day traders who try to spread rumors to move the stock market.”
    “It works?”
    “Hell, he’s a pentamillionaire,” I said.
    N ext I got back onto Bobby: he had some preliminary company stuff on AmMath, mostly public information pulled out of various open databases. More interesting was his news on Firewall.
    Got a new list supposedly with Firewall. They are: exdeus, fillyjonk, fleece, ladyfingers, neoxellos, omeomi, pixystyx. Friends give me two hard IDs near you. Fleece is Jason B. Currier, 12548 Baja Viejo, Santa Cruz. Omeomi is Clarence Mason of 3432 LaCoste Road in Petaluma.
    We’d gotten a map with the car; I went out and got it, and checked. Mason was maybe an hour or an hour and a half away, up north of San Francisco in Marin County. Currier was practically across the street. All part of the Silicon Valley culture that’s grown up around San Francisco like a bunch of magic mushrooms.
    “So we’re gonna find these guys,” LuEllen said.
    “First thing tomorrow.”
    I ’m not an easy sleeper; I kicked around the bed overnight, getting a couple of hours here and another hour there, with fifteen minutes of wide-awake worrying in between. I don’t like big, arrogant organizations that push people around, or manipulate them, or extort them—but I don’t see it as my personal obligation to stop them. I just go my own way. I fish and paint and lie in the sunshine like a lizard. I might steal something from one of them, from time to time, software or schematics or business plans, but I’m very careful