The Devil's Code

We’d try to get the cops to look a little deeper, to ask a few more questions,and they’d say they would, but you could see it in their eyes: they’d signed off. They either believed they knew what happened, or they didn’t want to know any more. That’s what’s happened with this case. I could see it: they’ve signed off. They’re all done. They don’t want to know any more.”
    “Damnit, nobody’ll move, ” I said.
    We thought about that; then Lane said, “By the way, I looked up McLennan County, where Corbeil has that ranch. It’s about a hundred miles south. Near Waco.”
    We made arrangements to meet them that night in Denton, and then LuEllen and I took the rest of the day off. We’d been cooped up too long, hanging out in hotel rooms and restaurants. We were the kind of people who liked to move around. I got my laptop and sketchbook, and my watercolor tin and a plastic squeeze bottle of water, and we went out to a driving range and LuEllen hit balls for an hour while I drew the shelter over the driving line. The whole thing with the satellite photos—if that’s what they were—had gotten me thinking about perspective. The driving line was sheltered by a fifty-yard-long metal roof mounted on steel poles, and from the corners, made a fairly interesting challenge in three-point perspective.
    When LuEllen got tired of hitting balls, we went back to the hotel, talked to a desk clerk who got a map out and drew a six-mile jogging circuit that he ran himself every morning, and we drove out to his starting point and did the six miles in forty-five minutes, just cruising along suburban streets looking at all the pickups.
    “Not bad,” she said, when we got back to the car. “Let’s go buy some boots.”
    She bought two pair of cowboy boots, and paid six hundred dollars for them. I’ve never actually seen her on a horse, but she does like horses, and she liked the boots. They put an inch or two on her height, and she liked that, too.
    A t nine o’clock, LuEllen checked us into the Eighty-Eight Motel in Denton. We got online, and took a look in the dump box. Corbeil had been online in the morning, before we’d even gotten up—no rest for the wicked—but hadn’t used the computer since then. “Maybe they’re fixing up his apartment and he’s staying someplace else while they do it,” LuEllen suggested.
    “I hope not. I’d like to be sure that he’s in his apartment, and done for the day, before I sign on with his codes,” I said. “If we were on, and he tried to get on, he might see the conflict.”
    LuEllen called Lane on the cell phone, and told her where we were. We didn’t want any calls on the room phone going out to a number that could be connected with any of us, and figured to throw the cell phone away in the next day or two. Lane and Green showed up ten minutes later, having walked over from the Radisson.
    I told them about the dump box, and how we were using it as a cut-out, and why I didn’t want to go online immediately. “Makes sense,” Lane said. “I’d like to look at those files you got . . .”
    She spent the next two hours flipping through the administrative files, stopping every fifteen minutes or so to look at the dump box. Green, LuEllen, and I chatted for a while, then LuEllen ordered a pay-TV movie, a hyper-violent science-fiction flick that had all the depth of a comic book. The production values, on the other hand, were great.
    Ten minutes after the movie ended, Lane went online to check the dump box, and found that Corbeil was working. The sign-on protocols and codes were the same as the night before. He sent a couple of short memos, one of them berating a guy named John McNeal about a production problem on CDs carrying what apparently were commercial code products. Then he signed off. We waited another half-hour, Lane with increasing impatience, to make sure he wouldn’t sign on again, then went out to the AmMath computer.
    We looked for anything that involved satellites, photographs, Middle Eastern nations, the NSA, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office; tried all of those things as keywords in a variety of searches, and even threw in oddball stuff—“orbit,” “surveillance,” “resolution.”
    After half an hour, I suggested that we shut down. “We need to do more research into what we’re looking for,” I said. “Maybe just go to the library and get business stuff about AmMath. Trying to flog our way through the computer is like