The Devil's Code

atseven o’clock, when it was good and dark, we were back at Carter-Byrd.
    There were maybe forty offices in 2233. Seven or eight still showed lights—Americans work all the time, no getting around it. Bloch Technology was not one of the lighted offices; Bloch’s futon was only a tiny cloud on the horizon.
    We took the end space in the parking lot, and LuEllen tied one end of the Spider Wire around the steering wheel, led the line out through the window, across the lawn to the door. She checked to make sure that nobody was coming from inside; she did a quick knot on the outside door handle, cut the line at the spool, and strolled back to the car. When she was back, and inside, she pulled the line tight, until it stretched, absolutely invisible, directly across the sidewalk to the door.
    “Now, if somebody wants to use the sidewalk, they’ll simply have to go around,” I said. “Either that, or garrote themselves.”
    “If somebody comes, we cut the string. It flies halfway back across the yard, and nobody sees it.”
    “Did you ever do this before?”
    “No, but I read about it.”
    We sat in the lot for twenty minutes before the door opened: and the rest worked just like LuEllen thought it would. The guy pushed through the door and walked away, headed toward his car in the parking lot. She put pressure on the door as it slid closed . . .
    “Gotta hurry,” she grunted. “I don’t know if the line’ll hold. The door’s heavier than I thought.”
    “Hang on, hang on . . .” I didn’t want the guy whowas leaving to see me get out of the car. When he was up the hill, I hurried across the lawn. She’d stopped the door just as it touched the doorpost. I pulled it open, and snapped the line off the handle. We were in.
    LuEllen had programmed Bloch’s phone number into her cell phone earlier in the evening, and dialed the number as she got out of the car. The hallway leading past Bloch Tech was empty. I walked to the door, LuEllen close behind, and mimed a knock: we could hear the phone ringing inside. No answer.
    As I mimed another knock, LuEllen turned off her phone and pointed a little battery-operated black light, the kind teenagers used to buy in head shops, at the keypad. The powdery crystals in the deodorant fluoresced in the light—except for the three that had no powdery crystals.
    “Four-six-seven,” she said. “But there are four digits in a Vermond lock. In this model. So they repeated one of them.”
    Nobody in the hall: I took a dime notebook out of my pocket and began scrawling number combinations as quickly as I could write, calling them out as I jotted them down. The thing about number pads is, with ten digits, there are 10,000 possible combinations. Getting inside with a brute-force attack is tough. And a few locks, but not this one, were alarmed, or would lock up, after a certain number of incorrect combinations. Then they could only be opened with a key.
    But if you know the four digits involved in the combination . . . ah, then there were only twenty-four possible combinations. If one of the digits is repeated, like itwas here, and you don’t know which, the number goes up to thirty-six. But most people start their combination with the lowest number, in this case, a four. We started with four-four-six-seven, and went to four-four-seven-six, and to four-six-four-seven, and so on. We were lucky, hit it on the eighth combination, and pushed into the darkened office.
    “Gloves,” LuEllen said.
    We pulled on vinyl gloves, and followed the hair-thin beams of the flashlights into the server room. The Dell servers looked like five little dwarfs, lined up for breakfast; the room was windowless, and windowless was good. The futon was rolled into a corner of the third room, with a fuzzy blue blanket tossed carelessly on top of it. LuEllen, using her flash, found a roll of tape in the outer office, and brought the blanket into the server room. We taped the blanket to the wall so it covered the door, and then LuEllen slipped under the blanket into the outer office, and closed the door behind her. I pulled the blanket so it covered the door completely, and turned on the light.
    “Light’s on,” I said. Then I turned it off, and LuEllen pushed back inside.
    “Almost perfect,” she said. “There was a little tiny dot of light near the right corner . . .”
    We rearranged the blanket and I went to work on the machines. Servers are nothing but specialized computers, optimized