The Fool's Run

his back to the windows. Another man, dressed in a gray business suit, white shirt, wine tie, and wingtips, sat on a side chair, one leg crossed over the other. Maggie and I plodded across a pond-sized carpet, and Anshiser stood to shake my hand.
    “Mr. Kidd.” His face had once been craggy, but the crags were softening with age and erosion. His eyebrows were thick tangled mats hanging over the pale blue eyes of a born killer—a man who lived on energy, but his energy, betrayed by the flesh, was beginning to fail. He gestured to a leather chair. As I sat down, facing him across the table, I noticed that his hand shook.
    “This is Mr. Dillon,” he said, indicating the man in the side chair. Dillon nodded.
    Two computer terminals squatted on Anshiser’s table. One was a dedicated stock-trading link, its screen covered with lists of numbers in tiny amber print. The other was a general-purpose IBM showing a dense block of text, a report of some kind. As he introduced Dillon, Anshiser reached out and tapped a key sequence, and the screen went blank.
    “Tell me how you identified us,” he said. “I don’t want any trade secrets, just in general.”
    I told him, without mentioning names or phone numbers.
    “Hmm.” He pulled at his chin when I finished. “Suppose somebody like your friend wanted to get into my company files. Is there any foolproof way to protect them?”
    “From the outside? Sure. Don’t hook them up to a telephone. Your little IBM there”—I nodded at his desktop terminal—“is absolutely secure from telephone interference as long as the modem is turned off. If you set it to auto-answer, because you have people calling in, then you could have a problem. And I assume you’re hooked into a mainframe, which means that it has incoming lines, so that could be vulnerable.”
    “Everything important is protected by randomly generated passwords.”
    “There are lots of ways to get passwords.”
    “Tell me one.”
    I told him several, and, since he lived on a lake, mentioned work done in the Netherlands involving the processing of images projected onto computer monitors.
    “Everything that shows up on a monitor is the result of a high-speed beam that scans back and forth across it—letters, words, pictures, everything. As the beam switches on and off it creates an electromagnetic pulse, sort of like a radio wave. It’s weak, but with the right gear, it can be picked up, amplified, sorted, synchronized, and reproduced on another screen, up to a few hundred feet away. Or further, if there isn’t much interference. A boat on the lake would do quite well. They wouldn’t have independent access to your files, but they’d see everything you see.”
    When I finished, Anshiser glanced out at the lake, then over at Maggie, who was sitting at a side table with a leather-bound book.
    “Check this,” he said briefly.
    She nodded. “I’ll call that FBI fellow who helped on the container ship contamination problem. He should know somebody.”
    Anshiser turned back to me, contemplated my face for a minute, and then decided. “Have you had any contact with the aviation industry?”
    I shrugged. “Not much. I did some work on Boeing’s economic and political clout in Seattle, and plugged the data into a political model. It didn’t come to much.”
    “Why not?” he asked curiously.
    “It wasn’t a vote discriminator. Nobody in Seattle fools with Boeing. The discriminators involved other issues.”
    “Hmph.” Anshiser pivoted his leather chair and peered out the window toward the lake. It was getting dark, and the line of the horizon was splitting deep blue sky and black water.
    “I have a problem,” he said, after a moment. He sighed and shook his head and pivoted back to face me. “It’s the biggest problem of my career. It could destroy or badly damage the heart of this company. More than forty years of work for me, and twenty-five more for my father.”
    “I can help?”
    He grunted. “Maybe.” He turned the chair again, to look out over the lake, gathering his thoughts.
    “About ten years ago, it appeared that there would be an opportunity. An opportunity to design a cutting-edge, all-weather fighter aircraft. It would be a half-step after the F-15, F-16, F-18 generation, but earlier than a really operational F-30 hypersonic plane came on. There was a lot of skepticism back then, in and out of government, about new military fighters. We were paying huge amounts of money for tiny