The Hanged Man's Song

rubbed the back of my neck. “I’m gonna go stand in a shower for a few minutes. I’ve been spending too much time in front of a screen.”
    “We oughta go out and run,” LuEllen said. She stood up and stretched. “I’m getting tight myself.”
    “So let’s find a place,” I said. “I’ll do the shower later. Let me pee and wash my face.”
    “Sit down for a minute, I’ll do your shoulders.” I sat. She did my neck and shoulders, and as she started on my shoulders, looked at the laptop and asked, “Which one is the novel?”
    I reached out and clicked on it, Word came up, and the novel ran down the screen. LuEllen was running her knuckles up anddown the sides of my spine and I’d just said, “Jeez, that feels good,” when she stopped, leaned forward, and scrolled down the novel.
    “What?”
    “This isn’t right,” she said. “How do I get the next chapter up?”
    I selected CH2 from the list. She read for a moment, then said, “She didn’t write this. This is a Janet Evanovich novel. I read it a couple of years ago.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah.” She reached out and touched the screen, which she did occasionally, and which always left an oily fingerprint. “Novels come on computer files now?”
    “I know you can get some for PalmPilots . . . e-books. I didn’t know you could get them in Word format. Maybe the group steals them.”
    She went back to rubbing my shoulders and said, “I couldn’t read a book that way. Maybe kids can. You know, people who had their first computer when they were babies.”
    “Not a friendly way to read a book,” I said. “Great for reference stuff, though.” A thought struck me and I said, “Hang on a minute. Let me look at something.” I spent a couple of minutes combining the files into one large new file, then ran a search for the numeral 1. There was a single hit, but not relevant.
    I got another nonrelevant hit with 2, but with 3, I got a hit on 39@1czt8*p* and on ll5f4!35lp0.
    “She’s buried her passwords in the novel,” I said. Finding them felt like my fifth-grade Christmas, and I laughed out loud. “Pretty goddamn smart. Instantly accessible and completely portable with the data key, and totally invisible.”
    “Wonder if she talked to Evanovich about it?” LuEllen asked. But she was pleased with herself; I know she was pleased because she gave me a noogie.
    >>> WE DROVE back to our wi-fi spot, signed in on Strom’s account, then took the next step, pushing into the files. I had two passwords to choose from.
    “No way to tell?” LuEllen asked. We were set up right on the street, in a dark spot.
    “Not that I see.”
    “Do a scissors-paper-rock. You’re the first code, I’m the second one.”
    We did a scissors-paper-rock, three rounds, and then she won. We put in the second code, and the remote computer cracked open like an egg.
    “Shazam,” I said.
    >>> EVERYBODY probably has a few moments in his life when he feels like he’s fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole. That’s what I felt like when I got into DDC Working Group—Bobby.
    To begin with, DDC was the official name, with no Bobby—but Bobby was all over the place. The DDC, it seemed, was an actual experimental arm for a package of anti-terrorism techniques being developed by the military and the various intelligence organizations. One of their tests was to find Bobby, using a whole array of Web-scanning devices and surveillance.
    I pulled a file labeled South and found an elaborate argumentthat Bobby was probably living in Louisiana, because analysis of the DuChamps name suggested a Cajun French background, and other analyses had already established that he probably lived in the Gulf states.
    The South file noted a counterargument that suggested that Bobby was active in racial affairs, was probably black and therefore not Cajun at all.
    “They were moving closer, but they had no idea of who he really was,” I said. “Not yet. Look, they were even analyzing phone-use patterns.”
    “And they never got the word that Bobby was dead. Nobody told them.”
    >>> MOVING ON.
    “Look at this. They’re talking about getting rid of money,” I said. I was astonished. “Jesus Christ, they’re running models, already. They’re talking about a few years. ”
    “They can’t.”
    “Sure they could. They’re laying it out. Everybody carries a smart card from the bank, backed by the government. It has your ID right on the card, along with a little liquid crystal display to