The Devil's Code

about it.
    The whole AmMath business was not my style. I liked Jack Morrison. He was a good guy, as far as I knew, but I really didn’t know that much about him. Maybe that whole thing about “k” was bullshit; maybe he made it up to pull me into whatever he was doing at AmMath. Maybe he put the rumors out. And Lane herself was a computer freak: maybe she was involved with Firewall.
    But if not, “k” was cause for concern. It was not a computer identity as such, it was just an initial, and there may be ten thousand people on the Net who sign themselves with a k. The same with Bobby and Stanford—there are probably a thousand Stanfords out on the Net. And I would imagine that there are quite a few people calling themselves Fleece, although omeomi is not quite as generic. The troubling thing was the grouping. I had heard most of those names at one time or another. I even knew what a couple of them did, although I didn’t know who they were.
    Computer people, a lot of them, have the sameattitude I do toward bigness, toward bureaucracy, toward being pounded into round holes. They don’t like it. Maybe there was a Firewall, and maybe some of these people were in it, and because they were, then I was suspect . . .
    Paranoia is good for you, if you’re a crook; but it doesn’t make life any easier.

 9 
    ST. JOHN CORBEIL
    C orbeil was intent. Not angry, not stunned, not confused.
    Focused.
    “I don’t know where she got them, but she apparently knew they were important because she made copies,” Hart was saying. His voice was distant, tinny, with traffic in the background. He was calling from a payphone in San Jose.
    A television was mounted on the wall opposite Corbeil’s desk. One of the talking heads on CNBC was chattering about the newest disaster on the NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange. “MUTING” was printed across his face in green letters, like a TV-chip editorial.
    “If she had access . . .” Corbeil began, speaking to Hart.
    “We know she had access . . . goddamnit, nothing is clear,” Hart said.
    “Make it clear,” Corbeil snapped. “What’s the problem?”
    “She had four Jaz disks that probably came out of our supply room,” Hart said. “They have that blue OEM tint to the cases, and we assume that her brother stole them to make his copies. But on the other four disks, the cases are clear plastic—not ours. We looked in the wastebaskets and found a receipt from CompUSA, which shows that she bought three three-packs of Jaz disks. Nine disks. We found one set of four disks in clear cases—the copies—and one blank disk in a clear case . . .”
    “Which means four are missing, and that’s the exact number you’d need for another set of copies,” Corbeil said, picking up on it instantly. “Goddamnit. Where are they?”
    “That’s the problem. We don’t know. I can only think of one reason that she even made another set of copies.”
    “For security reasons. She ditched them somewhere.”
    “Yes. That’s what we think,” Hart said. “We don’t know exactly why she’d go to the trouble, though. The thing is, you can’t load an OMS file unless you have five hundred megs of memory. Not without making the computer go crazy. Her home computer had three hundred eighty-four megs, and her laptop has one hundred twenty-eight. Neither one had any of the files from the Jaz drive on it—not even the small files.”
    “So what are you saying? That she never looked at them?”
    “Not at home,” Hart said. “She could have taken them to her university office, except that we’ve been cruising her place almost since she got here, and as far as we know, she hasn’t been to the university. So the question is, if she doesn’t even know what’s on the disks, why’d she make all those copies? If she did?”
    “Could you take a look at her office?”
    “Doubtful. It’s right off a college computer lab, and there are always people around there, day and night. Not right in her office, but up and down the hall and around the lab.”
    “We’ve got to get those disks, before she does something with them.”
    “We don’t know what to do, other than watch her. We could snatch her, and squeeze the disks out of her, but, man . . . if she disappeared, that might be one too many accidents even for the Dallas police. Also, there’s been a guy hanging around with her, maybe a boyfriend or something. It’s like she doesn’t want to be alone.”
    Corbeil thought