The Fool's Run

miles from the cabin. I wiped it down before we left it.
    “Now what?” LuEllen asked.
    “We got their shooters. They might have more, but they’ll be cautious. And now Maggie knows that we know, so there’ll be no more bullshit.”
    “Is that good?”
    “Maybe. I’ve got a couple of ideas. I’ve got to get on the terminal and talk to Bobby. You ought to get out of here. Back to Duluth. It’ll all be computer stuff from here on. If we travel together, we’d just be easier to spot.”
    “You think they could spot us? They’re not the cops, they’re just a bunch of hoods.”
    “Yeah. But like Maggie said, why take a chance?”
    “You’re right,” she said after a while. “But I’m not going back to Duluth.”
    “Where?”
    “Mexico. Right where we were going. I’m all packed.” And she started to cry.
     
    WE DROVE NORTH through Cumberland across into Pennsylvania and arrived outside of Pittsburgh in the early morning hours, running, in the end, on pure adrenaline. We slept late, and in the evening I put her on a plane to San Diego.
    “Take care of yourself, Kidd.” LuEllen kissed me on the cheek and went through the gate. Unlike Maggie, she never looked back.
    What?
     
    Need long talk.
     
    Call 3 A.M.

Chapter 19
    E ARLY THE NEXT morning I laid out a program for Bobby.
    Big bux.
     
    Yes.
     
    Need 2 more hacks.
     
    OK.
     
    10K each for hacks.
     
    OK.
     
    25K for me. Cash. Pay when we win.
     
    I pay out front. If we lose, I might not be able to pay. Give PO Box.
     
    Leave terminal on answer.
    I woke at midmorning to the terminal alarm and a squirt of data—a post office box in Memphis where I could send the money and registered mail, and also the names of the other two hacks. They were both from California. Bobby called them Cal Tech and Stanford. I couldn’t remember either one, but Bobby said that Stanford met me on a Vegas gaming board a few years before. Bobby said he would begin checking Anshiser phone lines for incoming data.
    Anshiser company/house show no incoming data lines. Must have private exchanges. Major pain.
     
    Yes.
    Most computers are hooked into the local telephone exchange. In simpler days, the data-line numbers were often variants of the telephone number of the company that owned the computers. If the company’s number was 555-1115, the computer number might be 555-1116.
    Hackers got onto that right away. Whole nights were spent exploring the guts of various expensive on-line computers. A generation of computer fanatics learned their jobs by doing it. The first illegal entry I made, way back in the early seventies, was to a call-in board that regulated the heating, cooling, water, and other systems of one of the biggest office buildings in Minneapolis. I could have turned off the building’s heat in the middle of a January night, but I didn’t. I left a note for the operator, though, and the next time I called, entry was more difficult.
    A little later, computer security got tight enough that data-line numbers were moved well away from the company’s regular phone—but still in the same exchange. Hackers fought back by producing autodial programs that would dial all of the ten thousand numbers in a given exchange. Whenever the modem got a carrier tone, the computer would note it. If there was no answer or a voice answer, the computer would hang up and move on. A computer could call a thousand numbers overnight, and it was a sad night that didn’t produce a dozen new computer lines.
    Eventually, security-phone companies began creating their own exchanges. The secret exchanges were not listed in the phone book. Only a few numbers out of the ten thousand possible for that special exchange would be used as data lines. That meant that even if hackers knew that Company X was running an open computer on a hidden exchange, they would first have to find the exchange. If they tried to do it randomly, they would have ten thousand calls for each exchange tested. Most of the time it wasn’t worth the effort.
     
    THERE WAS A way to break the hidden exchanges. Bobby was deep into the phone system. If he monitored a number of Anshiser businesses, and one called into a hidden exchange, we would have it. I worked through our Anshiser research again, and isolated five hotels most likely to use regular phone lines to transmit reports. Bobby would watch them for a few days, and if nothing happened, we’d look at different ones.
    While Bobby was working, I took off again,