The Hanged Man's Song

software issues and security problems. In an e-mail file, I found a couple hundred complaints and questions typical of an office system: questions about ethernet connections, lost e-mail, distribution lists, password changes, equipment upgrades.
    LuEllen came back, carrying a Coke, looking for her suntan cream. The pool was getting crowded, and she was moving from display to exhibition mode.
    As she was about to leave again, I hit the mother lode: a file of photographs and short films, two of which we’d already seen on television—the military execution and the blackface film. Nothing about the Norwalk virus.
    “This is the Bobby file,” LuEllen said. “This is it.”
    We paged through the photos, looking at the captions. John, who’d spent most of his life in politics of a kind, was fascinated. “You could do an unbelievable amount of damage with these things,” he said. He wasn’t enthusiastic, he was awed. “Some of the biggest assholes in the Congress would go down . . . if this stuff is real.”
    “What are they doing in Carp’s computer?” LuEllen asked.
    “Must’ve transferred it from Bobby’s,” I said. “A backup, or something, before he started messing with the other files.”
    “Okay,” John said, still looking over my shoulder. “Oh my God, look at this. This guy’s a cabinet guy, he’s what? HUD? HEW? Something like that.”
    We talked about the effect of the photos for a while. LuEllen thought they’d be revolutionary, but John shook his head. “You read those books about people finding the body of Christ and it ends Christianity, or somebody finds out that the President likes to screw little boys, and that leads to an atomic war. It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “Nothing is simple. Stuff like this ruins careers, it might change the way things work for a while, but the world goes on.”
    “You’re an optimist, John,” LuEllen said. “I’m going back to the pool. There are a whole bunch of guys from Texas up there.”
    “That’s a blessing,” John said. “Wouldn’t want to miss that.”
    I went back to the computer and John finished with the paper. A half hour later, sitting in a dwindling pile of scraps, he said, “Ah, man.” He was holding a slip of paper, shook his head and passed it to me. It was a phone bill for cable repair service, made to Robert Fields. Bobby’s address was right there. “Took it out of Baird’s file,” I said.
    “Gotta be,” John said.
    >>> L U ELLEN had come back, glowing with the sun, took her bikini-ed self into the bathroom to clean up and dress, and when she came back out, turned on the TV. A little while later, changing from Oprah to CNN, she said, “Look at this.”
    The Norwalk virus story was exploding: the President, in person, was promising a full investigation. If the so-called test had actually taken place, he said, the persons responsible would be prosecuted. He added that the government had no evidence of such a test and suggested that this “supposed revelation” might be a new kind of terrorist attack intended to discredit the American military and shake up financial markets.
    “Getting ugly,” John said.
    I went back to the laptop. In a file called Carly, I found thirteen letters to a woman. The earliest ones were friendly technical advice on printing photographs from a new digital camera. They gradually became more personal, and he began trying to cajole her into a date. That apparently didn’t work. In a file called Linda, there were six letters to another woman, with the same tone. There were other files named Shannon and Barb that were a bit more businesslike, but still had that feeling of attention that would make most women nervous.
    Another file contained unremarkable glamour shots of super-models, along with a major selection of hard-core porn. Half of it seemed to be young Japanese schoolgirls in plaid skirts; or out of plaid skirts. Given the resolution of the photos, it appeared that most of it had been downloaded from the ’net.
    In a file called Contacts, I found addresses and phone numbers for Thomas Baird and Rachel Willowby. In his Microsoft address book, there were several hundred e-mail addresses, and in a PalmPilot sync file, there were thirty or forty home addresses and phone numbers for people I’d never heard of.
    Then I stumbled over a file called DDC Working Group—Bobby, and inside, a list of names, e-mail addresses, and a half-dozenphone numbers and a few memos. One of