The Devil's Code

appointment?”
    “No, but it’s fairly urgent.” A thirtyish blond man had looked up from a computer inside the glassed-in office; I was willing to bet he was Mason. “Could you tell him we’re friends of Bobby?”
    “We really need to talk to him,” LuEllen said from my shoulder, with a smile.
    “Just a minute, please.”
    She walked back to the glassed-in office, stuck her head inside, and said something; I could see the blond’s head bobbing. She motioned to us, and we pushed through the counter gate and down to the office. The woman rejoined the other two, who were looking at the yellowed image of an old woman, apparently scanned from a paper photograph.
    Mason stood up, looking unhappy. “I’m not sure if we know the same Bobby . . .”
    “If you go online and call him, he’ll tell you we’re all right,” I said.
    He swallowed and said, “I’m not online much anymore. . . . Who are you?”
    “You saw the list of the people in Firewall? I’m k .”
    He sat down, and sat perfectly still for a moment, except for his bobbing Adam’s apple, then said, “I’ve heard a couple of things about you . . . if you’re really k. Did you once have a contract with a wine company to help straighten out their distribution system?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then you know my friend Clark,” he said.
    “Miller,” I said. “He lives in St. Helena in a redwood house with a real redwood hot tub in back, and his wife’s name is . . . Tom.”
    “Ex-wife,” Mason said. “She got the house.” He looked at LuEllen and said, “Close the door.” LuEllen pushed the door shut and we sat down in a couple of wooden visitors’ chairs. Mason pushed both hands through his hair and said, “This Firewall—I don’t know anything about it, but my name is all over the place. It’s driving me crazy. What’s going on? I keep waiting for the FBI to show up.”
    I looked at LuEllen, who shook her head. To Mason, I said, “Goddamnit. You don’t know anything ?”
    He spread his hands: “Honest to God, I was sitting at my kitchen table reading the paper and eating shredded wheat and scanning this article on the Lighter killing, and all of a sudden I see this list with my name in it—omeomi. I almost choked to death. I never heard of Firewall before this thing. Now I’m supposed to be some sort of terrorist.”
    “Yeah. Me, too. And Bobby. We’re trying to figure out what’s going on.”
    Mason looked at LuEllen again. “Are you on the list?”
    “No. I’m just a friend. Of k’s and Bobby’s.”
    Mason shook his head. “I don’t know what to do. I’ve thought about calling the FBI and identifying myself, but . . . I don’t know, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
    “I don’t know your history,” I said. “I might wait a while before dragging in the law.”
    “Yeah. So would I.” He wasn’t a tough-looking guy, but the way he said it suggested a need to stay away from the feds. As a matter of privacy, ethics, and personality, I didn’t ask him what he did; LuEllen wasn’t so inhibited.
    “So what’d you do as omeomi, hold up banks?”
    She can be so perky, when she wants, that it works an odd magic on men, especially technics, who have residual fantasies about cheerleaders. That’s what I hear anyway. Mason showed a small grin and said, “No, nothing like that. I do . . . specialty photography.”
    “Jeez. When people say that, I usually think porno,” LuEllen said.
    “It’s not porno,” he said.
    “You guys should talk sometime,” I said to LuEllen. “You could trade tips.”
    “You do photography?” Now he was a little more interested. “What kind?”
    “Specialty,” she said.
    He actually chuckled, leaned back and stretched. “That’s the best kind, isn’t it?”
    We sat in silence for a couple of minutes, and then I said, “Well . . . we better go.”
    “What are you doing?” he asked. “Just checking out whoever you can find from the list?”
    “That’s the idea. Between Bobby and me, on the original list of names, we knew a few people. None of us are involved with Firewall. Then Bobby tracked down you and one other guy . . . through friends, I guess. We haven’t checked with the other guy, but your story is like the rest of ours.”
    “What’re you gonna do if you find them? Firewall?”
    “I don’t know. Bobby thinks we ought to turn them in. If they did the Lighter thing, anyway.”
    “Do it,” he said. “Find ’em, and fuck