The Fool's Run

heading south through Kentucky and Tennessee, dipping into Alabama and Mississippi. I spent a day at Vicksburg, down on the river, painting, then turned south and into Louisiana. The idea of New Orleans was tempting, but I was known there. I turned back north through Arkansas and into Missouri.
    Each night I’d do between a dozen and a hundred tarot spreads, figuring the possibilities. The Fool was back, and that was okay. After the tarot, I’d call Bobby for progress. There was none until the fifth night, when I put into a tidy little Ma-and-Pamotel on the edge of the Ozarks.
    Got exchange.
     
    Great.
     
    Not great. Dipped in. Have very heavy security. No on-line help. Get zero. Think one-time codes. Think probes spotted.
     
    Traced?
     
    No. But guard up now.
    One-time codes are essentially unbreakable. There is no pattern, and they are used only once. Sometimes the operators on opposite ends of a phone link literally have identical pads of words: one is used, then that piece of paper is ripped off and thrown away, and the next one is used. The words may be of any length, pulled at random from a dictionary. Or they may be lists of numbers produced by a random-number generator.
    Our problems were compounded by what Bobby thought was individual call monitoring: when we tried to get in, it set off an alarm. They knew somebody was knocking on the door, and without the correct codes. They would be watching for us.
     
    THE NEXT NIGHT we went back into the exchange, intending to proceed most delicately. It was empty. They had changed it again.
    Unless we get codes we locked out. Watched Anshiser/Vegas Hotel data line, there was call-in call-back, enough data that may be two-way one-time codes, maybe simultaneous voice monitoring and clearance.
     
    Okay. Hold probes. Need time to think.
     
    Call when need us.
    Sometimes, in high-security environments, a clerk from a remote computer, like that of Anshiser/Vegas, would be brought into the home computer installation. He would go to a company-sponsored lunch and dinner with the home computer operators, often with a shrink or “enabler” present. The shrink would keep the conversation going, both in person and over internal telephones.
    When the clerk returned to his remote site, he would call one of his new friends at the home base before each computer entry. They would chat until his identity was confirmed. Some companies even used voice-print analyzers as a backup. Only when the identity was confirmed would they begin the sign-on procedure. Since the procedure was a two-way affair, with conversation and code going both ways, it was essentially unbeatable. While there might be ways to read the transmissions, there was no electronic way to get inside and work with the computer itself. We would need a different route.
    How good is access to credit computers?
     
    Read-only or read-write?
     
    Read-only.
     
    Good access.
     
    Need complete run on all Anshiser lower-level execs witb likely computer access. Find worst credit, forward names.
     
    OK. Tomorrow.
    While Bobby was running the credit reports, I went back into the NCIC computers using the codes we’d stolen from Denton, the Washington cop. This time I wasn’t looking for anything deep, just the standard rap sheets. And I wasn’t looking for felonies, I was looking for sleaze. I came up with a half dozen possibilities. When Bobby sent his list of bad credit reports the next day, we had one match.
    I dumped the car in St. Louis and flew to Miami the next afternoon. Our man, Phil Denzer, was in the book. There was no answer at his apartment up to eleven o’clock that night. I found his apartment on the map, in a complex in North Dade County, and the next morning drove up to talk to him.
    Denzer lived in a run-down complex of town houses surrounded by several acres of hot asphalt. The parking lot featured redneck specials, Fire-birds and Camaros and five-liter Mustangs, most of them several years old, along with broken-down Dodge Swingers with rusted-out taillights. Sickly, yellow-leafed palm trees lined the lots. The town houses were arranged in a donut shape around two swimming pools. It was a hot and cloudless day, and a few women in bikinis, and one guy wearing shorts, a gold chain, and loafers, were arrayed on lounge chairs around the pools. Nobody was actually swimming.
    I got Denzer’s apartment number from the manager. The jalousie windows on the door were cranked open, and disco music poured out