The Devil's Code

basement window.”
    “What about Lane?” Green asked.
    “Call the Dallas cops and tell them that you’re coming out to pick up Jack’s computers and whatever other property they seized, that they don’t want anymore. But that you’ve got to close down his home out here first.”
    “And you guys will be in Maryland doing what?” Lane asked.
    “You know,” I said. “Looking around.”
    W e flew out of San Francisco the same night. Before we left, when we were at the motel, packing, I went back out to Bobby and told him that we’d be moving to Washington. He booked us business-class seats on an evening flight into National, and a car under one of the phony IDs LuEllen had been using in New York. That ID was more solid than the two we’d picked up in San Francisco, and the credit cards that went with them were definitely good. Bobby had also developed more stuff on Corbeil and AmMath.
    Corbeil was a smart guy, but he was also nuts. He spent way too much time thinking about godless socialists, mindless bureaucrats, confiscatory taxation, black agitators, the yellow peril, the red menace, the International Jewish Conspiracy, and the New World Order.He’d been known to allow in public that Hitler had done a lot of good things.
    I’ve never been much interested in politics, but once wrote some do-it-yourself polling that allowed low-rent politicians to do their own telephone polls. I eventually sold off the business, but before I did, I got to know quite a few politicians. They were a pretty lively bunch, no more or less corrupt than schoolteachers, newspaper reporters, cops, or doctors.
    Anyway, it didn’t take much exposure to politics for me to realize that there are as many nuts on the left as there are on the right, and in the long run, the lefties are probably more dangerous. But in the short run, if you find a guy on top of your hometown clock tower with a cheap Chinese semiauto assault-weapon lookalike, that guy will be one of Corbeil’s buddies, dreaming of black helicopters and socialist tanks massing on the Canadian border, preparing to pollute America’s vital fluids.
    Smart and nuts: Corbeil’s description sounded a little like an advertisement for breakfast cereal, but wasn’t.
    B obby had more about Corbeil’s lifestyle, as portrayed by the local city magazines. Corbeil’s salary was modest for a CEO, running about $150,000 a year, but then, he also owned a big chunk of AmMath stock. He liked fast cars and blond women; he made a point of being seen with Dallas’s flavor-of-the-day model. One of them had been a Playboy playmate of the month. Bobby included the centerfold picture.
    “Why do they shave their pubic hair into those little stripes?” LuEllen asked.
    We contemplated this mystery for a moment; then I said, “Maybe they don’t wear OshKosh B’Gosh brand bathing suits, like some people.”
    “You think?”
L OTS MORE STUFF , I’ LL SEND IT AS SOON AS I WEED THROUGH IT . H AVEN ’ T PICKED OUT A M M ATH COMPUTER LINES YET , WILL GET BACK LATER .
    A NYTHING ON THE J AZ ?
    Y ES . O PENED THE BIG FILES , GOT PHOTOS , VERY HIGH RES . A LL THE SAME PARKING LOT . D ON ’ T UNDERSTAND .
    C AN YOU MAKE JPEG, LEAVE IN MY BOX ?
    Y ES.
    A LSO , COPY OUT J AZ DISKS , OVERNIGHT THEM TO W ASH HOTEL .
    OK.
    On the flight, we talked about What Next. We didn’t know what AmMath was doing, in anything more than a general sense, or why Jack might have been killed, if he wasn’t killed exactly like the AmMath people said he was. I still suspected that Firewall was a phantom.
    “Gonna have to spend some more time with Jack’s Jaz disks,” I said.
    “There’re only four . . .”
    I looked at her. “Four Jaz disks at two gigabytes each,” I said. “You could put two thousand pretty fat novels on one of them. We’re dealing with as muchtext as you’d get, say, in eight thousand Tom Clancy novels.”
    “Whoa.”
    “A bigger whoa than you think.” I closed my eyes and held up a finger to indicate that I was thinking. A minute later I had it. “If you broke everything up into texts the size of Clancy novels, and looked in each one of them for one minute, and worked forty hours a week at it, it’d take you better than three weeks to look in all of them.”
    “For one minute each.”
    “One minute,” I said.
    “You’re a mathematical fucking marvel,” she said.
    “That’s not the end of the problem,” I said. “The biggest part of it is, we don’t know what’s