The Hanged Man's Song

in a row with the same woman, not your wife, in the next seat on the airplane?
    They were already running the program on fifty-odd subjects. Some of the names rang bells, but only vaguely, until LuEllen said, “This guy’s a senator. From Wisconsin.”
    “Holy shit,” I said. I scanned down the list. “I think they’re all senators. Or congressmen. Look, here’s Bob. Congressman Bob. Jesus—look at the stuff. This looks like the stuff that Carp’s putting out there. The Bobby file. What the hell are they doing with this stuff?”
    We’d been slumped over the screen and LuEllen suddenly sat up and looked around. “Kidd, unplug the goddamn thing. Let’s get out of here. C’mon, let’s get going.”
    Her nervousness affected me, too. I pulled the plug on the wi-fi and we drove away, slowly, as always. LuEllen said, after a while, “You know what’s so weird about all of this? One thing, anyway?”
    “What?”
    “That you could get into their files. They’re this bunch of rocket scientists down in the basement talking about databases the size of the moon—they’re talking about building the Death Star—and some broken-ass hacker gets into their system and it all pops out.”
    “Thanks. I wasn’t completely sure my ass was broken,” I said.
    “You know what I mean. They can’t even secure themselves.”
    “We might be coming to a time when nobody is secure. When nothing is secret. You sit up in your chair and behave yourself, or your little secret is on CNN.”
    “I’m moving to fuckin’ Argentina,” she said, disgusted.
    “They’d have it in Burundi,” I said. “Once the technology is demonstrated, it’ll get used. Pakistan and North Korea have the bomb and they can’t even feed their people.”
    We drove around for a while, thinking our own thoughts, occasionally looking out the back window, and then LuEllen said, “I’m glad people don’t live forever. I don’t think I want to be here when all this gets worked through the system and gets established. It’s like . . .”
    “A nightmare,” I said.
    >>> BACK at the hotel, I started opening files that I’d simply snatched, without reading, from the DDC database. Usually when I was doing laptop stuff, LuEllen was restless and moving around, watching TV, shopping, playing golf, whatever; now she was glued to my elbow.
    The working group was a secret inside the intelligence community. The Senate committee, as the intelligence oversight group, knew about it, without apparently knowing all of the details. The senators apparently got everything about the biometric research, about the money card proposals and the telephone intercept analysis, and the future map, but may not have known about the Background files.
    Not that an experiment was taking place, at any rate. And some of the items in the Background section made me think.
    “You know what? Bobby was inside this project. He was in their system. Look, they’re talking about the senator’s daughter’s DWI case, and about the Bole-blackface tape.”
    “Maybe that’s why they were so worried about him.”
    “No, no—but that’s why Carp went after him so hard. He suspected Bobby was in there, or maybe the operation hinted what a guy like Bobby might have. But I bet that’s what got the ball rolling.”
    >>> WE FOUND more about Carp, too. Carp had sent a memo around repeating a rumor that Bobby had sent computers to poor black kids and suggesting that the name of a poor black kid be dragged through sites Bobby was known to inhabit. He even had a name, a young computer freak he’d known in New Orleans.
    The idea was summarily rejected—a notation on a separate file called Carp a “technician” who seemed “obsessed” by Bobby, even though it was possible that Bobby didn’t actually exist, but was some kind of elaborate hacker construct. The memo suggested that Carp’s “access to group personnel” be limited, which might have been a reference to the sexual harassment problem.
    Then there had been a recent exchange of memos, begun after the Bobby attacks started, suggesting that they “keep all bases covered” by contacting Carp to see if he had had any contact with Bobby. Heffron and Small, the two guys we’d seen at the trailer, and who had gone into Carp’s apartment building the night before, had been delegated the job. There was a note from Small suggesting that somebody else be sent, because neither he nor Heffron knew Carp by sight, but an answer from