The Devil's Code

monitoring the Net, watching news programs, and checking the newspapers’ online editions, looking for something—anything—that would tell me what was going on with AmMath, Firewall, or with Benson or Hart.
    When I wasn’t doing that, I was playing with the tarot, or drawing. The landscape north of Dallas is interesting, in its own Southern Plains way, though not as interesting as the area around Tulsa, some parts of Kansas, or the Dakota grasslands.
    Still: interesting. The relative flatness of the landscape, only sparsely inflected by humans and weather phenomena, gives the land and atmosphere a natural abstraction that you don’t see in landscape paintings, butthat you often see in nonobjective art. By working with the land and sky, without adding human inflection, you wind up with something that looks like abstraction, but has a kind of organic quality that pulls the eye in. Under the best conditions, the viewer falls into the picture, rather than colliding with the painted surface of the abstraction . . .
    Either that, or I’m completely full of shit. In any case, the first real break came that evening, and left me astonished. I’d been clicking around the cable channels with the remote, and heard Corbeil’s name mentioned. Channel 3: the newsreader had more hair than the average werewolf, and teeth just as shiny; he liked this stuff, and this story.
    Benson had been found dead in his hospital bed, a victim of what police said was a deliberate barbituate overdose. He’d been murdered.
    Benson had been with a man named William Hart when he was shot, and had given Hart’s name as an alibi for the time that Lane Ward had been shot. After Benson had been found dead, police went to talk with Hart. They found him dead in an easy chair, a pistol on the floor beside him, an apparent suicide. The newsreader added that police had interviewed Corbeil in the case, but that he had not been charged with anything, nor was he being held.
    “Corbeil says that his company, AmMath, a high-tech concern that creates top-secret coding software for the federal government, has been under attack for several days by the hacker group that calls itself Firewall,apparently because AmMath is one of the lead contractors on the Clipper II chip. The Clipper II, if you recall, is the chip that the government would like to see incorporated as a standard in communications hardware, including that used on the Internet. Firewall is the group that has taken credit for the continuing denial-of-service attack on the IRS.
    “Corbeil said that he did not understand Benson’s involvement with Lane Ward or her brother, Jack Morrison, who was slain last month after an alleged break-in at AmMath’s secure computer facility. He said that he had asked Hart to monitor Benson’s activities after the Morrison shooting, but hadn’t known of Ward’s presence in Dallas or his security officers’ shoot-out with them,” the newsreader intoned, his eyebrows signaling a moderate level of skepticism.
    B enson and Hart were dead. Who’d done that? Corbeil himself? Or were there more security goons in the background somewhere? Corbeil’s story was actually pretty good, from a legal standpoint: he took no position; he was confused. If it all got mixed in with national security and codes and spies and Firewall, and if the guy held out, he might walk . . .
    I spent fifteen minutes pacing around the motel, then went out, found a phone, and dropped a message with Bobby. He batted it away: he was no longer interested in AmMath or revenge for Jack or Lane. He thought he might have found a way out for those of us still alive.
N EED MORE RECORDINGS OF RANCH TRANSMISSIONS . S ENDING MAN TO YOU WITH PACKAGE , ARRIVES TONIGHT . N EED TRANSMISSIONS MOST QUICKLY .
    OK. P ROBLEM ?
    W E NEED SATELLITE PROTOCOLS , CAN ’ T GET INTO A M M ATH . C OMPUTERS SEALED OFF . C AN YOU COME M EMPHIS W EDNESDAY ?
    Y ES .
    G OOD . W ILL SEND ADDRESS LATER .
    The idea of going back to Corbeil’s ranch was not appealing, especially since I’d dumped the rifle. I still had the pistol that LuEllen had picked up in Lane’s room, but I had little faith in pistols. With the very best of them, like a .45 Colt ACP, I could probably ding a guy up at twenty-five yards, if neither of us were moving. Otherwise, I might as well be throwing apples.
    Still: Bobby had a plan. Crack the satellites, he said, then talk to the government. Demonstrate that we were not a danger. Build a case