The Fool's Run

in, and a couple other engineers tried to break it up and wound up in the fight themselves.
    “Something weird is happening out there,” Dace’s friend told him. “The security guys hauled everybody down to the lounge area to cool them off. One of the computer techs told one of these security guys that the computers were possessed.”
    “Possessed?”
    “Yeah. You know, by the Devil.”
     
    ALL THROUGH THE attack, when I was alone, I looked at tarot spreads. I did two dozen spreads on day 22. The Emperor, the Empress, the Wheel, the Moon, the Hanged Man. The Fool. I worried it, I assigned identities and reassigned them. I went to bed dreaming of Anshiser and the Hermit.
     
    ON DAY 23, Maggie had a long talk with Dillon. LuEllen and Dace and I were in the kitchen drinking coffee when she got off the line.
    “Dillon’s freaked out,” she said. “Whitemark is shaking right down to the roots. They’re paralyzed, their String copy is failing, they’re running into new problems with Hellwolf. Dillon said they’re completely out of control. He sounded scared. He said we’re making history. He said this was like Pearl Harbor, but nobody recognizes it except us.”
    “So it’s working,” said LuEllen.
    “Look what happened to the Japs,” Dace said.
    “How’s Anshiser?” I asked.
    Maggie shook her head. “Dillon says he’s about the same. He’s not losing much, but he’s not gaining, either.”
    “So?”
    “So we just go on.”
     
    AT ONE O’CLOCK on the morning of day 24, a few hours after Maggie talked with Dillon, the phone rang. I picked it up and got a 2400-baud carrier tone. I punched the modem up, and there was a quick squirt of data and the line shut down.
    Something happens with Whitemark phone lines. Cutouts. Watching incoming calls at Whitemark, set to trace. From now on call me at special line number only. Call now.
    I dialed a special number Bobby had arranged that couldn’t be traced out to him. The techniques were unremarkable, he said, but if a trace were made, it would end at an Afghanistan banana stand, which he’d found while paging through a Kabul phone directory in the Kremlin.
    When he came up this time, there was no What?
    Tried to trace the tracers. Not go to FBI, go to NSA. Scary shit. Recommend stay off wires, use back door only.
     
    Okay. Recommend that you change your main number, leave me only special line.
     
    Will do now.
     
    Need more money?
     
    You got more?
     
    Sure. Will send $10K.
     
    ’Bye.
    Frankly, what I did in Vietnam—it sounds silly now, when I think about it—was run up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail and bug VC telephone lines. Most people don’t think about the VC having phone lines and operators and all that, but they did, of course. I’d find a good place, tap into a line, lead it out to a battery-operated radio disguised to look like a lump of mud or a pollywog or whatever the backroom boys at the CIA thought was good that month, and sneak away. For the next couple of weeks, we’d listen to their phone calls, which, I was told, went mostly like this: “Hey Vang, you see the knockers on that PFC came down with that load of bike tires yesterday? Honest to Ho, I wanted to crawl right in between them and play motorboat, you know what I mean?”
    In the course of gathering this intelligence, I met dozens of people from the CIA. Most of them were okay, a few were stone killers, and one or two were terminally stupid. I met only two guys from the National Security Agency. Both were frighteningly smart. Somewhere at the back of my head, I tucked away a personal memo that said, “If you get your ass out of this, don’t fuck with the NSA.”
     
    AFTER BOBBY’S WARNING, I began entering the Whitemark computer through the satellite, the computer that used the codes from the Mersenne Prime. It was an old machine, a minicomputer with its own phone lines. It wasn’t used much, but it did have that direct line into the main system. I would call into the satellite, and from there, plug into the main system. If the NSA was watching only the incoming phone lines for the main computer, I could still get in without being noticed. If my presence in the main machine was detected, it would seem that I was working from inside the system itself.
    On the morning of day 26, I put in several minor bombs calculated to alter some critical bits of software in a way that would not be immediately detectable, but which would thoroughly screw selected work