The Devil's Code

like masks. We drove all the way to Philadelphia to get it: a full-face molded rubber mask of Bill Clinton. It worked fine, except that I couldn’t talk very well through the mouth slit, and we wound up snipping off the lips with sewing scissors. We got a plastic water pistol from a toy store, and a baseball hat to complete the outfit.
    We went to Philadelphia because it was only two hours away by car, and LuEllen had contacts there—a gun guy who I’d met once, and now, it turned out, a phone guy. We got another cold cell phone, guaranteed for a week, for $300. We were back in Baltimore a little after seven o’clock. Glen Burnie is south of the city, and we were scouting Welsh’s house at seven-thirty.
    “Lights; she’s home,” LuEllen said.
    “So we cruise it a couple of times, and I hit the door.”
    “You’re gonna scare the life out of her . . . and the other problem is, what if there’s somebody in there with her?”
    “There’s a garage window,” I said. “I can check the garage on my way up—see how many cars are in there.”
    “Not perfect,” she said.
    “Nothing is . . .”
    W e didn’t need to do it, anyway. We were cruising the place for the third time, picking out a place for LuEllen to wait with the car, when Rosalind Welsh walked out the front door of her house, did a fewstretches in the driveway, and jogged off down the street. We rolled slowly past, and I got a look at her. She was probably fifty, and ran with the earnest, hunched-up stance of somebody who hadn’t been running long, but was determined to lose the armchair ass.
    “Let’s do it on the street,” I said. “Stop ahead of her and let me out in front of a house without lights. I’ll bend over the car like I’m saying good-bye, and when she comes up, I’ll stop her.”
    “She’ll see the car. Maybe get the plates.”
    “Pull into a driveway, so we’re sideways to her. When I stop her, I’ll turn her around, and you pull out and go around the corner. When I’m done, I’ll get her jogging the other direction.”
    “This worries me.”
    “Yeah, well. It’s better than the door.”
    “If she screams?” LuEllen asked.
    “I’ll run.”
    T his was the only part of what I do that bothers me—the involvement of innocents in ways that might hurt them. For the most part, when I’m working, I’ll take information from one place and deliver it to another. In most cases, I can make at least a thin argument that what I do benefits the population as a whole—encourages competition, saves jobs, etc.
    But sometimes, although I regret it, I involve an innocent. Like this lady, a bureaucrat, a little too heavy, earnestly chugging off the pounds on a quiet suburban street. Whatever else came out of it, I was about to scarethe hell out of her. I wouldn’t do it, if not for the Firewall thing . . .
    I pulled the mask over my head, put on the cap, and got the plastic gun out. LuEllen guided us past her again and pulled into a driveway a half block ahead. I got out, and bent over the open door: LuEllen said, “A hundred feet, seventy-five, fifty, forty, shut the door and make your move.”
    I stood up, slammed the door, and turned to the sidewalk. Rosalind Welsh was twenty feet away and smiled reflexively as I turned toward her. I said, feeling the rubber edges of the mask flapping against my lips, “Mrs. Welsh. Stop where you are. I have a gun pointed at you. Don’t scream, just stop, and I won’t hurt you.”
    As I said the words, I moved to block her; she tried to turn, but I said, sharply, “Don’t,” and when she saw my face she opened her mouth and shrank away, and I said, sharply, “Don’t scream: I won’t hurt you. I just want to talk.”
    She looked all around, and I stepped close, directly between her and the car and said, “I have to ask you to turn around. We’re going to back the car out of the driveway and we don’t want you to see the license plates. If you do . . . well, you don’t want to see them. Just turn around and look straight ahead, and when your back is to the car, I’ll walk around and face you . . .”
    I tried to keep talking quietly, in a nonfrightening way, explaining what was happening: giving her something to focus on. When she was turned, I edged around her and said, “Don’t look at the car.” LuEllen backed out of the driveway and turned at the corner.
    “I’m one of the people the NSA is putting out rumors about—I’m supposedly a member of