The Devil's Code

probability engine—they might be able to figure out who gets into which car, might be able to track cars through traffic . . . all kinds of stuff.”
    “They’re NSA, right? Isn’t that what they do?”
    “No, no, that’s another group, the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office. They do all the satellite stuff.”
    “So let’s get online with Bobby, and see what he says.”
    We got online from a mall. Bobby thought he could figure out the height of the camera by picking out smallparts of the original full-strength photos and making some precise measurements on the shadows.
F REAKY IF IT ’ S A SATELLITE PHOTO . N EVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS .
    M AYBE WHAT THEY ’ RE HIDING .
    B UT WHAT DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH F IREWALL ?
    There was the other side of Lane’s question. Lane was interested in what happened to Jack; Bobby was interested in how his name got attached to Firewall. Somehow, AmMath was involved in both of those things, but how and why were they related? Or were they related?
    We talked about it as we were leaving the mall, and decided they had to be linked. Jack went to Maryland, where the computer that started the Firewall rumors was located. The guy he saw, who was later killed, was a client of that same server. It was all tied. We just couldn’t see the knot.
    L ane, it turned out, had been worrying about the same questions all night. We all had breakfast together, and she leaned across the diner table, picked up my glass of Coke, and rapped it on the table. She had a theory, she said.
    “Say the photographs are wildly important, for some reason. We don’t know why, but let’s say that’s a given. Jack steals them. They know he stole them, but theydon’t know why, or who he might have given them to. So they come up with a scheme. They invent this Firewall group, using names that they harvest from the Internet. Legendary hackers. There’s all kinds of talk on the Net. Anybody could get a list like that. They make Jack a part of the group, so when the names finally come out, the cops’ll say, ‘Ah-ah, he was a member of the radical Firewall group, that’s why he broke into AmMath and it was only bad luck that he got caught . . .’ ”
    “Why use the server in Maryland?” I asked. “The same one that Lighter just happened to be on.”
    “You said it was mostly NSA people,” she said. “Maybe it was one server they all knew. That they all had access to.”
    “Sounds weak,” LuEllen said.
    “But the rest of it sounds pretty good,” Green said. “It ties things together.”
    “What about the IRS attack? That was set up weeks ago.”
    “But the Firewall name wasn’t around weeks ago,” I said. “That could have been made up at the last minute. These hacks are ready to attack the IRS, and just at that moment, somebody invents a group with a neat-sounding name. So they say, ‘All right, we’re Firewall, too.’ ”
    “Goddamnit,” LuEllen said, “it’s still too hard to think about.”
    “I’ll tell you what, though,” Lane said. “When we go back into AmMath’s computer, I think we ought to be looking for stuff on Firewall and satellites. This Clipperstuff is a dead end. Whatever’s going on doesn’t have anything to do with Clipper.”
    “When we go back in?” I asked.
    “Darn right: I know my way around mainframes as well as anyone. I want to be there tonight, when we go back in,” she said.
    “Gotta find a new motel,” I said.
    “There’s a place called Eighty-Eight right across the street from where we’re at,” Green said.
    “So we’ll set up there tonight,” I said. “We’ll use one of LuEllen’s IDs, and call you when we’re settled in.”
    L ane didn’t have much to say about her talk with the cops: “They say they don’t believe that AmMath had anything to do with anything—but I think they believe there’s some kind of government deal going on, and they don’t want to know about it. They think we’re the bad guys—Jack and me.”
    “You told them about the burglary at your house.”
    “Of course,” Lane said. “We gave them every single detail. We told them we thought Jack’s house had been broken into, too.”
    “They’re dead in the water,” Green said. “I used to work with a program in Oakland that investigated shootings by cops. Most of the shootings were open-and-shut. But every once in a while, we’d get a shooting and there’d be something wrong about it. No proof, no evidence, just something wrong.