The Hanged Man's Song

plant food. I found, in the kitchen, six African violets, all freshly watered, sitting on a draining board across the sink.
    Then I headed into the second bedroom, which had a cozy office setup, including a desktop Dell and a good office chair. A black-leather satchel, the kind prosperous women executives use as briefcases, sat next to the chair. I brought the machine up, then checked the satchel. Inside was the usual collection of officejunk—pens, pencils, Kleenex, an airlines sleep mask, a telephone connection cord for a laptop but no laptop, a spare pair of regular glasses and a pair of prescription sunglasses, a hundred or so business cards, and, tucked away in a pen slot, a gray USB memory key. Terrific.
    I stuck the key into my laptop’s USB slot, dumped a half megabyte of something into my hard drive, and put the key back into the satchel. No time to see what it was. I’d been inside the apartment for three or four minutes and was already feeling the pressure.
    I sat at her machine, hooked it into my laptop, and started dumping her document files to the laptop’s hard drive. Most of the files had unpromising names like Budget and Letters, and I didn’t have a lot of confidence that I was breaking out her computer passwords. While I waited for the files to clear, I checked her desk drawers, the bottom of the keyboard, the underside of the desk, and minutely examined the satchel for any anomalous number-letter combinations that might be passwords. I found nothing.
    Probably was around somewhere, I thought. High-security places tell their employees to come up with passwords of random numbers, letters, and symbols, so that they can’t be cracked by hackers doing research. The problem is, nobody can remember the high-security numbers, so they get written down.
    A better policy would be to tell the password holder to think of a person or place that’s significant to him, subtract a letter or two, and add a significant number or two. Say, your father’s middle name backwards, with your mother’s birthday attached. That way, you’d have a password that you could work out, would never come up in a hacker’s dictionary, and wouldn’t be written down soit couldn’t be stolen. As it is, most high-security passwords look like the registration code on the back of a Windows software box.
    And I couldn’t find one. I found an address book, flipped through it, looked in a checkbook, scanned a small Rolodex, flipped through the pages of a wall calendar featuring English kitchen gardens. Still nothing. The document files cleared, and I went into her computer, looking for other files, finding not much.
    The cell phone rang. A single ring—LuEllen’s signal that I’d been inside for ten minutes. Now we were pushing it. Too many things happen when you stay inside too long. People notice lights, decide to stop by for a visit. People come home.
    Getting nowhere. Shut down the computer. Gave up.
    >>> I CALLED LuEllen on the way out, and when I got downstairs, she was already walking across the parking lot to the car. I got in, and she said, “What?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”
    “Bummer.”
    “Well, I dumped a lot of stuff to the computer, but most of it looked personal.”
    “She’s a Russian major, she’s gotta have a good memory—maybe she just memorizes her codes.”
    “Maybe. But a lot of those places change passwords every month, or every week.”
    >>> I GOT her passwords, all right, and because of LuEllen, a lot faster than I might have.
    At the hotel, I started by looking at the stuff I’d dumped from the USB memory key. When I opened it, I found a novel, chapters 1 through 17.
    “Ah, Christ, she’s writing a novel,” I said. I scanned a page. “She writes okay.”
    “What’s it about?” LuEllen was a reader.
    “Some mystery thing,” I said. “She’s got this bounty-hunter chick or something. I don’t know. Not gonna tell us anything about the working group.”
    I quit the novel files and started through the stuff I’d stripped from her desktop. First up was Strom’s personal budget, and it was a little surprising. She was well-off, for a thirty-three-year-old mid-level bureaucrat. Digging in a little, I found that she’d had an inheritance from her grandfather, nearly half a million dollars, all nicely invested with Fidelity. The next file up was what looked like a series of letters, but I couldn’t be sure, since they were written in Russian.
    I closed that out and