The Hanged Man's Song

working group. I got the log-in screen and started running names. Darryl Finch, the sixth guy on the list, had given us Dfinch/Bluebird9 in our solicitation for the senator’s log. That didn’t work, but Dfinch/bluebird5 punched us right through.
    Dfinch/bluebird5 got me into a personnel computer. Lots of details on the staffers, but no files on James Carp or Bobby. Then, browsing through a file on a Linda Soukanov, I spotted a letter that supported a complaint from a co-worker against Carp. Soukanov was with the working group. She said that she had witnessed Carp paying “unwelcome attention” to a co-worker in the next cubicle. The co-worker was identified as a Michelle Strom, with the Bobby project.
    “Excellent,” I said.
    “Got something?” LuEllen was bored.
    “Maybe . . . give me a minute.”
    I pulled the file on Michelle Strom and found a complaint that said that Carp had touched her in an elevator, “pressing his front against my back,” and that he’d one other time touched her breast under the pretext of looking at her identification photograph. She said she wouldn’t have reported the incidents because she wasn’tsure that he had intentionally touched her, but she’d heard reports now from other women. . . .
    I looked at my senator-log sign-up list. Nothing from Linda Soukanov, but Michelle Strom was there: Mickey/DasMaus1. God help me.
    I signed out of Dfinch and tried Mickey/DasMaus1 and failed, spent five minutes going through possible combinations and got in on Mickey/Mauser. All things come to hackers who are patient.
    Most things, anyway. I got into Michelle Strom’s space, and found that I could push memos or reports into the system, but nothing could be retrieved without another code. From the way the front-end was set up, I suspected the link would shut me down rather than let me experiment—and would tell the system people that somebody was trying to crack the system after getting in with Strom’s password.
    “Stone wall,” I said.
    I got in on four more name/password combinations, but the security was better than I’d hoped. I could get administrative stuff, but I couldn’t get any operations files. Before I shut down, I entered William Heffron into a general search engine and immediately popped a half-dozen reports from Washington TV-news websites. I pulled the first one and read to LuEllen:
    “Two Virginia men were shot to death at a Meridian Park apartment building Friday night by an assailant who shot one man on the building’s stairway and another as he fled to the sidewalk outside the building, District police said Saturday.
    “Terrance Small of Alexandria and William Heffron of McLean, both government employees with a Justice Department data processing center, were apparently on their way to visit afriend when they were shot. Police speculated that the men had inadvertently stumbled into a drug transaction at the Marlybone Apartments on Clay Ave.
    “Police say each of the men was shot once in the head at extremely close range, execution-style, in addition to suffering wounds to the body. Neither of the men had criminal records, police said. Terry Banks, a supervisor at the Justice Department’s Division of Data Integration, said, ‘This is a terrible tragedy. These were fine men; everybody liked them. I just don’t understand how these things can happen. The people in this division will be devastated.’ ”
    There was more, but that was the substance of it.
    “A drug deal? The government’s not even talking to the cops when their own people get murdered,” LuEllen said. “They’re as nuts as Carp is.”
    “Maybe they really don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they don’t know what Heffron and Small were doing there, that Carp has an apartment there.” I went back into the search engine, looking for Carp, and got only fish-related sites. “Nothing at all on Jimmy or James Carp.”
    LuEllen shook her head, the corners of her mouth turned down. I’m a skeptic when it comes to government; she’s a couple steps further along that road than I am.
    >>> “SO now what?” LuEllen twisted around in her seat, looking out for passersby. “We’ve been here a long time.”
    “If you had to get better entry equipment, instead of the Target stuff, could you get it close by?”
    “In Philly,” she said. “You met the guy.”
    “I thought he was just guns.” He’d once armed me for a confrontation in West Virginia. Another thing I try not to dream