The Devil's Code

moment, so Lane could look at some of Alice’s vases. She liked them, and Alice invited us to the opening, two days away.
    Lane shook her head. “I’d love to, but we’ve got a funeral to go to,” she said, and we continued on up. At the next flight, she looked down and said, quietly, “Beautiful stuff,” and I nodded and said, “People say she’s as good as Lucie Rie, but I’m afraid she’s gonna burn the building down some day. She’s got a Marathon gas kiln in her back room. I can hear it roaring away at night, that whooshing sound, like the cremation of Sam McGee.”
    “Is that legal?”
    “The cremation of Sam McGee?”
    “No, stupid: the kiln.”
    “I doubt it,” I said.
    “Have you complained?”
    “Nah. I helped her carry it up.”
    H ome; and the Cat was in.
    He was sitting on the back of the couch, looking out at the Mississippi, a red tiger-stripe with a head the size of a General Electric steam iron. He didn’t bother to hop down when I came in. In fact, he pretended not to notice. An old lady artist downstairs, a painter, kept him fed for me while I was gone, and he had his own flap so he didn’t need a cat pan except in deepest winter.
    “Hey, Cat,” I said. He looked away—but he’d come creeping around about bedtime, looking for a scratch.
    “He looks like you,” Lane said.
    “Who?”
    “The cat.”
    “Thanks.” I supposed that could be a flattering comment; on the other hand, the Cat was pretty beat up. One ear had been damn near chewed off, and sometimes, on cold mornings, he’d limp a little, and look up at me and meow, like he was asking for a couple of aspirin. I dumped the duffel, stepped into the kitchen, and said to Lane, “Tell me about Jack,” and asked, “Want some coffee?”
    She agreed to the coffee. “I think he was murdered,” she said, as we waited for the water to heat in the microwave. “He was supposedly shot to death after he broke into a secure area of a company called AmMathin Dallas. He was shot twice in the chest and died immediately. Another man was wounded.”
    “But not killed?”
    “Not killed.”
    “So he could tell you what they were doing . . .” The microwave beeped and I took the cups out.
    “No, no, no . . . The man who was wounded was supposedly shot by Jack ,” she said. “They say that Jack had a gun and opened fire when he was caught. There were two guards or security men, whatever you call them, and supposedly, Jack shot one, and the second guard shot Jack.”
    “Jack?” You had to know him.
    “Exactly,” she said. “There’s no way that Jack would shoot at somebody. He wouldn’t shoot at somebody to save his own life, much less to keep from getting caught in a burglary, or whatever he was supposedly doing. Unless . . .” She looked sideways at me, and her eyes sort of hooked on.
    “Yeah?”
    “Unless, working with you, you taught him to take a gun along. A technique, or something.”
    I shook my head: “Never. I never take a gun. The only thing you can do with a gun is shoot somebody. I’m not gonna shoot somebody over the schematics for a microchip.”
    “That’s what he told me,” she said. “That nothing you did involved violence.”
    Nothing that Jack knew about involved violence, I thought. But violence had been done, a time or two or three, as much as I tried to avoid it, and regretted it. Or,to be honest, as much as I regretted some of it. I’d met a sonofabitch down the Mississippi one time, who, if he came back from the dead, I’d cheerfully run through a stump chipper.
    “What was Jack doing?” I stirred instant coffee crystals into the hot water and handed her a cup. She had a way of looking at you directly, and standing an inch too close, that might have bent the attention of a lesser man.
    “Nobody will say exactly. All they will say is that he entered a high-security area in AmMath—they’re the people doing Clipper II—and that he opened fire when they walked in on him,” she said.
    C lipper II was an Orwellian nightmare come true, a practical impossibility, or a huge joke at the taxpayers’ expense—take your pick. It was designed in response to a fear of the U.S. government that unbreakable codes would make intercept-intelligence impractical. And really, they had a point, but their solution was so draconian that it was doomed to failure from the start.
    The Clipper II chip—like the original Clipper chip before it—was a chip designed to handle strong encryption.