The Devil's Code

If it was made mandatory (which the government wanted), everyone would have to use it. And the encryption was guaranteed secure. Absolutely unbreakable.
    Except that the chip contained a set of keys just for the government, just in case. If they needed to, they could look up the key for a particular chip, get a wiretap permit, and decrypt any messages that were sent usingthe chip. They would thereby bring to justice (they said) all kinds of Mafiosos, drug dealers, money launderers, and other lowlifes.
    Hackers, of course, hated the idea. They were already using encryption so strong that nobody, including the government, could break it. The idea of going back to less secure encryption, so that the government could spy on whoever it wanted, drove them crazy. No hacker on earth really believed that the government would carefully seek wiretap permits before doing the tap. It’d be tap first, ask later, just like it is now with phone taps.
    The good part of the whole controversy was that everybody seriously concerned with encryption knew it was too late for the Clipper II. It had been too late for the Clipper I a decade earlier. Strong encryption was out of the bag, and it would be impossible to push it back in.
    Lane had taken a sip of coffee, winced, and asked something, but thinking about Clipper II, I missed it. “Huh?”
    She repeated the question. “Do people kill for software?”
    “Not me. But Windows is software, and it made the creator a hundred billion dollars. In parts of some cities, you could get a killing done for twelve dollars ninety-five. So some software could get some killing done,” I said. We both thought about that for a minute. Then, “If it really happened like you say it did—hang on, let me finish—if Jack shot somebody, it wasn’t for the software, necessarily. It was to keep from getting caught and maybe sent to prison. Prison in Texas.”
    “But you know and I know,” she continued, “thatJack didn’t shoot anybody. Since somebody shot the guard, there had to be somebody else in the room when Jack was shot, even though the company says nobody else was there but the guard and another security man.”
    “Maybe one security guy shot the other to make it look like Jack shot first . . .”
    I said it in a not-quite-joking way, but she took it seriously: “No, I thought about that. But the guard who was shot was hurt bad. The bullet went right through his lung. He’s an old guy and he almost died on the way to the hospital.”
    “So the whole thing holds together.”
    “Almost too well,” she said. “There aren’t any seams at all. They searched Jack’s house and found some supposedly secret files on a Jaz disk hidden in a shoe. Very convenient. That really nailed it down. The only thing that doesn’t work is the shooting. Jack hated guns. They scared him. He wouldn’t even pick one up.”
    She was getting hot: I slowed her down with a straight factual question. “What was he doing in Dallas?”
    “A contract job,” she said. “He’d been there three months and had maybe another three to go. AmMath had a couple of old supercomputers, Crays, that they’d bought from the weather service, and they were having trouble keeping them talking. Jack had done some work on them years ago, and they hired him to straighten out the operating software.”
    I said, “Huh,” because I couldn’t think of anything wiser.
    “Ask me why I came to see you,” she said.
    “All right. Why’d you come to see me?”
    “First, to ask if you were in Dallas? Ever? With Jack?”
    “No.” I shook my head: “Jack and I haven’t worked together for two years.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “Yeah, I’m sure. He rewrote some software for me.” So I’d be able to plug into a Toyota design computer anytime I needed to. “Two years ago . . . November.”
    “Then what’s this mean?” She dug in her purse and handed me a printout of an e-mail letter. “Look at the last couple of lines.”
    I scanned all of it. Most was just brother-sister talk about their father’s estate—their parents were both dead now, their father dying nine months back.
    The last two lines of Jack’s letter said, “I’m into something a little weird here. I don’t want to worry you, but if anything unusual should happen, get in touch with Kidd, okay? Just say Bobby and 3ratsass3. ”

 3 
    I f you look in the shaving mirror in the morning and ask what you’ve become, and the answer is “Artist &