The Devil's Code

BE OPEN TO THE OUTSIDE TO RECEIVE LEGITIMATE TAX RETURNS . T HE ATTACK INVOLVES SENDING AND RESENDING HUNDREDS OF LEGITIMATE - LOOKING , BUT SLIGHTLY FLAWED RETURNS , WHICH THE IRS COMPUTERS THEN ATTEMPT TO RETURN TO THE SENDER . A S THE VOLUME BUILT , THE COMPUTERS WERE NO LONGER CAPABLE OF HANDLING THE FLOW OF TRAFFIC .
    “I NDIVIDUALLY , THE ATTACK FILINGS WOULDN ’ T BE A PROBLEM ; THE PROBLEM IS THAT THEY JUST KEEP COMING , OVER AND OVER , FROM SO MANY DIFFERENT SOURCES ,” THE IRS SOURCE SAID .
    T HE FBI’ S C ONNERS SAID THAT THE ATTACK MAY HAVE STARTED IN S WITZERLAND , WITH THE ATTACK PROGRAMS PLANTED AS LONG AS A MONTH AGO  . . .
    “If the attack isn’t sophisticated . . .”
    “It’s not sophisticated, but a fire ant isn’t sophisticated either,” I said. “But you get a few thousand of them swarming up your shorts, and you’ve got a problem. If the feds get really pissed, and start hammering on that list of names, who knows where it’ll end?”
    “There’ve been other attacks like this. I read about one in Newsweek. ”
    “Yeah, but there’s a huge difference,” I said. “Before,they were messing with private businesses. The politicians’ public attitude was, well, that’s too bad, but the real feeling was, fuck a bunch of private businesses— those guys got too much money anyway. But now, these guys are messing with the politicians’ money . . .”
    “Ah.”
    “Yeah. Big ‘Ah.’ ”
    T he JPEG photo that Bobby sent me was still on my hard drive. I opened it, and took a look. A parking lot, apparently taken from a fairly high angle. Three men in suits were walking across a parking lot full of pickup trucks. All three of them were carrying briefcases, and one had his face turned up toward the camera. The resolution of the JPEG was not high enough to make out the faces. All of the photos, Bobby had said, were the same.
    “So who are they?” LuEllen asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    “If the picture’s important . . . it must be that the three shouldn’t be together. You know, like a gangster and a cop.”
    “Or a Chinese and an American,” I said. “Look at this guy . . . there’s something about him that looks Oriental.”
    “Shape of his face . . . unless it’s a woman.”
    “Huh. I don’t know.” And I didn’t.
    Late that night I went into Bloch Tech’s server. There’s so much stuff in a server, even a small one, that there’s no real-time, hands-on way to sort through it—it’s not like flipping through a book. It’s like flipping through a library, like trying to make sense of Jack’s disks.
    I did a search for references to Firewall, and found several hundred in saved e-mail and in postings on Web sites. Six accounts seemed to have a lot of traffic about Firewall. I went into the administrative files, pulled the accounts, and copied out names and addresses. As I finished, I noticed a peculiarity: they were all new accounts, they’d all signed up in the last two weeks, and they’d all paid the up-front minimum of three months by check, rather than opting for credit-card payments.
    “Damn it, I’ll bet the names are fakes,” I told LuEllen. I saved the names. I could ship them to Bobby later, and have him look them up.
    Since I had the administrative files up, I checked for Jack Morrison and came up empty; then, on the off-chance, I checked Terrence Lighter, and got a surprise. Lighter had an account on this server, and better yet, his e-mail had dozens of letters. A few were encrypted, so I skipped over those. Most of the rest were letters to and from collectors and dealers in antique scientific instruments, apparently a hobby of his.
    And there was one letter that said, unencrypted and in the clear, the Sunday before last:
M R . M ORRISON . I WILL SEE YOU TOMORROW AT MY OFFICE AT 8:30. P LEASE BRING THE FILES WITH YOU . T HANK YOU . T. L. L IGHTER .

 12 
    A t three in the morning—midnight Pacific time—I called Lane. Green answered the phone and said, “We got somebody on us.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Somebody watching. Not close, but they’re around. It’s almost like being paranoid, but I’ve seen one car—it’s green, and I think it’s a Camry—a few too many times, and a face looking toward us. Always a couple of blocks away.”
    “What do you think?”
    “We need to get out of here. If we can lose them, I’d feel a lot easier. Here, we’re pinned like butterflies.”
    “Okay. We’ve got a couple more