The Devil's Code

He can’t run—not literally, anyway. He needs to stay at the . . . business.”
    “If he calls, tell him I need him.”
    “Do that,” he said.
    After hanging up, I turned the television down and went out on the Net. Trying to learn about the NSA and find some names. I got nothing but bullshit. But I have a few mailboxes scattered around, under different names and IDs; and when it became obvious that I wasn’t going to get anything useful off the Net, I checked the box at AOL. I found a message: six digits, beginning with 800.
    “Bobby,” I said aloud. He knew a couple of the boxes. I tried the next one, and found seven more digits. The last box was empty. I picked up my laptop, got the acoustic earmuffs out of my travel bag, and headed for the door.
    I called from a drive-up pay phone at a gas stationtwo miles from the motel, using the muffs. Earmuffs are a valuable item, if you travel. It makes no difference what the country, what the phone system, or what the line voltages are—if you can get an audible signal from your home Internet service provider, you can get online. I dialed using the old protocol, and after getting the “?,” I typed in “ k .”
T HAT WASN ’ T ME .
    N O SHIT . T ELL ME , WHAT DID THE WOMAN DO AFTER THE AMAZING EVENTS ON THE M ISSISSIPPI ?
    I got a couple of seconds of silence, as he thought about it. I wanted some confirmation that I was actually talking to Bobby, and he was quick, Bobby was. He came back with a woman’s name. The right one.
M ARVEL .
    I NEED SEVERAL NAMES OF NSA GUYS THAT I CAN TALK TO PRIVATELY ABOUT F IREWALL . S ERVER IN MD HAS NSA CLIENTS . F IREWALL RUMORS MAY COME FROM NSA.
    FBI BE BETTER TO TALK TO . NSA MAY DISAPPEAR SERVER MATERIAL .
    W OULD PREFER TO TALK TO INPERSON . FBI HAS GUNS .
    OK. W ILL CHECK NSA NAMES .
    M AYBE GET FBI NAMES ALSO .
    I CAN DO THAT .
    W ILL YOU BE AT THIS NUMBER ?
    N O . C HANGING NUMBERS WITH EACH CONTACT , LIMITING CALLS TO 2 MIN . W ILL LEAVE NEW # FOR YOU LIKE THIS TIME . W ILL DUMP NSA INFORMATION TO SF BOX .
    Before I signed off, I gave him the information that would give him system administrator status at the Bloch Technology server, and suggested that he look at the client list.
W ILL DO THAT . M UST GO .
    T AKE CARE .
    Y OU TOO .
    LuEllen was waiting when I got back. I quickly filled her in on what had happened. “So what do we do now?” she asked.
    “Wait. Until Bobby gets us a contact.”
    “And you want to talk to this guy personally.”
    “Yeah. If we do it online, or call, as far as he might know it could be some teenaged crank. If we look him up personally, we can be a little more definite.”
    “It’s a risk.”
    “Yeah . . . And you know, I’ve been thinking. Bobby thought maybe we should go to the FBI instead of the NSA, because the NSA might just decide to dump whatever’s on that server. So if he gets us some FBI names, maybe we should drop a note to them, too.”
    “Let’s think about it.”
    W e went out and hit more golf balls, and went to another movie, which also sucked—there’ve been awhole line of movies starring old action-adventure stars paired with much, much, much younger women; they’re kinda creepy—and kept checking the mailbox. At two o’clock, the SF box, which has an ancient heritage going back to the original Well, popped up with three paragraphs of type.
    The recommended NSA contact was an executive in the security section, a woman named Rosalind Welsh. She was high enough up that she could talk directly to the top levels of the bureaucracy, far enough down that she’d not have any minders. And, Bobby said, she was newly divorced, with a son going to college. Her husband was also an NSA exec, but he was showing a new address, while Rosalind Welsh kept the Glen Burnie address and the old phone number. All of that, taken together, meant that she was living alone.
    We also got five names with the FBI, including the personal home phone number of the director. If we used it, I thought, we should get some attention . . .
    And finally, Bobby said,
R AN B LOCH SERVER CLIENTS AGAINST NSA ROSTER . O F THREE THOUSAND CLIENTS , 1844 APPEAR TO BE NSA.
    A MAZING . NSA IS F IREWALL .
    M AYBE .
    G ET OUT OF SERVER . I MAY TALK TO FBI.
    Y ES.
    I f I was going to talk to Rosalind Welsh personally, I needed to cover my face and hair. LuEllenrecommended a Halloween mask, since Halloween was coming and they should be easy to find, and because from any distance, they don’t look