The Devil's Code

bullshit and what’s not.”
    We thought about that, and she said, “I see a light at the end of the tunnel.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. Jack looked for less than a week, and he apparently found something.”
    “Unless they just killed him for trying to take it . . .”
    A n hour out of Washington, with nothing to do, I got out the tarot deck and did a couple of spreads. LuEllen watched with mixed skepticism and nervousness, and finally said, “Well?”
    “Just bullshit,” I said. “Confusion.”
    “Let me cut the deck.” I gave the deck a light shuffle,and let her cut it. She cut out the devil card. The devil represents a force of evil, but not usually from the outside, not a standard bad guy. The devil is usually inside. He sits on top of you, controlling you, without your even being aware of it.
    “That’s bad,” she said. “I can tell by your face.”

 11 
    I n the course of my life, I’d spent maybe six months in Washington. Though it might not be fashionable to admit it, I like the place. Usually portrayed as a mass of greed-heads packed liked oiled sardines inside the Beltway, Washington has nice places to walk and good art to look at. People who like central Italy, the campagna , would like the rural landscape out in Virginia.
    We got into National late, and picked up the car and a map. We wouldn’t be right in Washington. According to Rufus, the server we were looking for was in Laurel, which is actually closer to Baltimore—not far, I noticed on the map, from Fort Meade, headquarters of the National Security Agency.
    I’d had some dealings with the NSA when I was in the military and I’d always been impressed by twothings: their employees’ technical expertise and their arrogance. I hadn’t had anything to do with the agency for a couple of decades, but because it was so heavily involved in computers, there was always a lot of back-and-forth between NSA computer geeks and the outside computer world.
    Word got around, and the word was that the NSA was rapidly becoming obsolete. Once upon a time, agency operatives could tap any phone call or radio transmission in the world; they could put Mao Tsetung’s private words on the president’s desk an hour after the Maximum Leader spoke them into his office phone; they could provide real-time intercepts to the special ops people in the military.
    No more. The world was rife with unbreakable codes—any good university math department could whip one up in a matter of days. Just as bad, the most critical diplomatic and military traffic had come out of the air and gone underground, into fiber-optic cable. Even if a special forces team managed to get at a cable, messages were routinely encoded with ultrastrong encryption routines.
    The NSA was going deaf. And the word was, they didn’t know what to do about it. They’d become a bin full of aging bureaucrats worried about their jobs, and spinning further and further out of the Washington intelligence center.
    L uEllen and I checked into a Ramada Inn off I-95 near Laurel, Maryland. Separate rooms, under separateIDs, gave us some easy options if there were trouble. In the burglary business, you never know when you might need a bolt-hole.
    The next morning, after pancakes and coffee and The New York Times for me and The Wall Street Journal for LuEllen, we went looking for the server. The T-1 line it used was located in a suburban office complex called the Carter-Byrd Center, building 2233. We found it fifteen minutes from the motel, two rows of four, two-story yellow-brick buildings, facing each other, behind small parking lots, on a dead-end street.
    The tenants were professional services companies: accountants, financial advisors, a legal publishing firm, a title company, and several law firms. Most of them occupied an entire floor or building wing. The company we were looking for, Bloch Technology, was one of the small companies, grouped with other smaller companies, in a suite of offices in the end building on the right.
    LuEllen, dressed in a dark blue business suit and navy low heels, clipped her miniature Panasonic movie camera into her briefcase, gave me a hot little kiss on the lips—going into a job always turned her on—and headed for 2233 to do the first reconnaissance. I waited in the car.
    The idea was, she was looking for one of the other companies in Carter-Byrd, but got the building wrong. She’d be inside, we thought, for two or three minutes.
    Fifteen minutes after she’d