The Devil's Code

away.
    She’d try to pressure them on AmMath. The more pressure that we could apply, the more curious the cops and the FBI and the NSA got about AmMath, the better chance there was that something would break loose. If we could get it into the media, make it a political problem, we had a chance of generating a legitimate investigation.
    “I don’t see the logic of it,” Lane said.
    “There is no logic. We just keep bringing AmMath up, hooking them to Firewall, to Jack’s killing, to the house burning down, to the burglary at your place . . . we don’t have to explain it, we just have to keep hooking them up.”
    W e agreed to meet the next afternoon, after Lane’s talk with the cops. When we left, I was still getting a bad vibration from Lane—for her, Jack was the main question, and it obviously wasn’t the same for LuEllen and me.
    “She’s starting to worry me a little,” LuEllen said. “What happens if she decides that the only thing to do is to talk about us, about Firewall, about the NSA, about everything, to get the cops to look at Jack?”
    “She doesn’t know that much,” I said.
    “She knows we’re the ones who hit Corbeil. That’s a lot right there.”
    “Yeah.” We drove along in silence for a moment; then I sighed and said, “It’s not out of control yet. I think we could talk to her about the damage she’d do, if she dumped on all of us. She’d listen.”
    “I hope,” LuEllen said. “But we’ve got to keep our options open.” She thought a moment, then added, “Too bad she knows where you live.”
    C orbeil went online that night. There was no way to tell when they found that the apartment had been cracked, but I checked the dump box all day, every hour, and at ten o’clock, it was spooling stuff from an online session between Corbeil’s apartment and the AmMath computer. The software I was using was simple enough—you can buy copies of the heart of it for $99, over the counter. Essentially, it records keystrokes. Everything that Corbeil typed on his keyboard type was recorded, picked up, and sent to my dump box. Sometimes, it can be a little hard to follow, if the guy you’re recording is a bad typist, but I’ve had enough practice that I can read it like a letter.
    “What do you got?” LuEllen asked, looking over my shoulder.
    “To begin with, we’ve got the phone number, the sign-on protocols, and Corbeil’s password to get into the AmMath computer,” I said. “After that, not much.”
    Corbeil sent company mail to one of his security people, telling him about the break-in.
W HERE ARE YOU ? C AN ’ T FIND YOU . M Y APARTMENT WAS HIT BY BURGLARS . T HEY PULLED THE SAFE OUT OF THE WALL , MUST HAVE USED INDUSTRIAL EQUIPMENT BECAUSE THEY WRECKED THE PLACE . T HEY GOT MONEY AND JEWELRY . W E NEED A FULL ALERT DOWNTOWN , AND SOMEBODY ’ S GOT TO KEEP AN EYE ON THE RANCH . W E NEED SOME OVERNIGHT TEMPS AT THE OFFICE . I TRIED TO CALL N ASMITH S ECURITY BUT CAN ’ T GET HOOKED UP . W E NEED PEOPLE DOWNTOWN TONIGHT !! (I’ LL GO DOWN MYSELF WHEN WE ’ RE FINISHED HERE .) I HAD TO CALL COPS ABOUT THE BURGLARY BECAUSE THE APARTMENT MANAGEMENT DISCOVERED IT . N O WAY AROUND IT . C OPS ON WAY NOW . M AYBE IT WAS THE MONEY & JEWELRY , M ARIAN WORE IT F RIDAY & EVERYBODY SAW IT . T HERE ’ S NO WAY TO BE SURE , WE HAVE TO ASSUME OTHERWISE . W E BETTER GET LOW FOR ANOTHER WEEK OR TWO . I’ LL CALL THE PAKS THIS AFTERNOON AND PUT THEM OFF . W IPE THIS WHEN YOU GET IT & CALL ME .
    He also pulled a file. We couldn’t see what it was, because the program only recorded keystrokes, but we got the name, OMS2. All he did was read, and then the connection shut down, and he was off-line.
    “Let’s go,” I said. “He’s off, and he’s going to be occupied for a while.”
    W e went out to a Red Roof Inn—checked in with the fake ID I got in San Francisco, but paid cash—and got online. The dump box was still off-line, which meant that Corbeil’s computer was shut down. I went out to the AmMath number, punched in his password, and we were in.
    The OMS2 file was short and sweet: a few corporate memos, and a list of names and phone numbers. I then checked for an OMS3, got nothing, went to OMS1, got nothing, and then simply OMS, and again, got nothing—which was odd, because the files we’d inherited from Jack were labeled OMS. They could have been in another sector of the computer, or a different computer entirely, someplace where I didn’t have access.
    I did find