The Devil's Code

had a bug.”
    “Still got it,” he said. “But I moved it inside the car, and duct-taped a big alnico magnet to it. When we get to the airport, I’ll stick it on a car that’s leaving. That ought to confuse them for a while . . . then we’ll fly the Seattle-to-Houston route, and drive up to Dallas.”
    “Good. We’re on our way now. We’ll be in Dallas tonight.”
    “We’ll probably stay over in Houston, see you tomorrow.”
    We talked for another minute, and then he was gone.
    And we were gone. Seven hours later, we were in Dallas.

 14 
    ST. JOHN CORBEIL
    C orbeil was sweating. In the cold air-conditioning of his office, he could feel the dampness under his shirt collar and despised himself for it. Not good clean sweat, the kind you got lifting weights. This was nervous sweat, the kind you got when a hard-nosed NSA security officer cornered you with unexpected questions, while some FBI faggot sat in the back smiling and playing with his tennis bracelet.
    Strunk—the security officer’s name was Karl Strunk—had questions about the Bloch Tech ISP, about the emergence of Firewall, about the deaths of Lighter and Morrison. Corbeil managed to finesse the questions, to play dumb. He hated having to project even the appearance of ignorance, but it had been necessary. And it had been a close-run thing.
    How had they gotten onto Bloch Tech and the connection between Bloch Tech and the Firewall rumors? That was the last thing he would have expected . . .
    H art knocked once and pushed into the office. “What happened?” he asked. “Trouble?”
    “I’m not sure. Something’s going on. They know about Bloch Tech, and they suspect that Lighter and Morrison are connected. But they don’t seem to have any idea what the connection might be. And I don’t understand that . . . how they could suspect a connection without having any idea what it might be . . . ” He stopped, pulled himself in. He’d almost been sputtering, like some striped-tie civil service asshole who’d lost a box of paper clips.
    “We took care of that with the Morrison plane tickets,” Hart said. “Did they find the tickets?”
    “I wasn’t asking any questions—but I assume they did. I came down hard on the idea that we were monitoring everything, that we were afraid that we’d been penetrated by Firewall. I suggested that Firewall had penetrated Bloch Tech, recognizing that it was the biggest ISP in Glen Burnie, and figuring that there must’ve been a lot of NSA people in it . . . Probably in there looking for anything they could get.”
    “What’d he say?”
    “The idea didn’t surprise him. I kept talking about his IRS attack. That has them confused, too.”
    “That has me confused.”
    Corbeil smiled: “I think it’s absolutely wonderful.They’re going to find some people who profess to be Firewall, and they’ll have nothing to do with us. If you’ve ever dealt with those little cocksuckers who infest the Internet these days, you know that they’ll probably take credit for every bit of damage that gets done. They think it’s glamorous.”
    “It’d still be nice to have an . . . overview.”
    Corbeil nodded. “I’ll go up to Meade and tap the old-boy line. See if I can find out what’s happening . . .”
    “I can make a couple of calls,” Hart said. “Ask a couple of guys to keep an eye out—tell them that if there’s trouble, I want to get out while the getting is good. That might produce something.”
    “Do it,” Corbeil said. “And tell Woods to keep an eye on the computers, just in case the people at Meade have a backdoor into it.”
    W hen Hart was gone, Corbeil made a half-dozen calls and managed to wangle an invitation to visit NSA headquarters to talk about Firewall and AmMath. Once inside, it’d be usual enough to visit old pals, an ordinary thing to pick up on the gossip. He’d made a lot of money on the outside, and had jobs prospects to dangle . . .
    Somewhere, somebody was working a vein of information, and if he couldn’t find out who, he might get hurt.
    He spent another half-hour online, using an encrypted spreadsheet to move money between offshore accounts: from the “in” account to, eventually, the “invest” account. Corbeil had a number that he had takenout of The Wall Street Journal. The head of a big arbitrage fund had set aside twenty-five million for his own use, the Journal said, and with the rest of his fortune, he simply played. Twenty-five