The Hanged Man's Song

door.
    >>> BACK to the laptop. The thing had an abnormally huge hard drive. And the files were large, I could see that much. From Carp’s note, I knew that one, or part of one, was an index.
    Was it possible that Bobby had hidden the keys somewhere in the computer itself, and that Carp had found them?
    I began tearing the laptop apart, a boring and ultimatelyfruitless activity. The problem was the size of the files—they were just too big. What I was doing was like walking through a library looking for a particular sentence, without knowing what book it was in. Yet Carp had done it. Was he that much smarter than I was?
    Leaving behind the mystery files, I looked through some non-encrypted utility programs that Bobby had stashed in a corner. They had esoteric names like Whodat and Whatsis and Dogabone and Bandersnatch, a bunch of fishhooks for various jobs that Bobby had needed done. I had the same kind of collection in my laptop, with the same kind of names.
    I transferred Whodat to my laptop and pulled it apart, and found a search program that looked for names. That’s all it did; but it was nicely written, and would be very fast. I had encountered circumstances where it would be useful, like searching a company’s database for memos to or from a particular person. Whatsis was a big library of electronic circuits. If you had a big enough circuit diagram, you could import it into Whatsis and Whatsis would give you a list of machines that you might be looking at, that used that precise circuit.
    Dogabone was a modification of an old program I’d written myself, years ago, which would find programs in one place and put them in another. I still had the same program on my computer, but my original was called Fetcher, which is where I suppose Bobby got the Dogabone. The next program, Bandersnatch, was meant to be left in a remote computer, where it would watch whatever file you attached it to. When that file was manipulated, Bandersnatch would immediately make a copy of the manipulated file, change its name, and re-store it. So Bobby could go into an outside computer, and if he encountered an encrypted file, he could attach Bandersnatch to it. When it was manipulated—that is, decrypted— Bandersnatch would copy and store it. Bobby could then come back and retrieve the file without ever having the decryption key.
    I thought about that until LuEllen emerged from the bathroom, and then I stopped thinking about it for a while.
    >>> “WHAT do you think we should do?” she asked late in the night. We were tangled up in the sheets of the big king-sized bed. We each had a bottle of Dos Equis.
    “I’ve been thinking about that since they took you,” I said. “I had nothing else to do but talk on the phone and wait . . . and I did some tarot readings that were all over the place. And I think you should go on home. Lay low. If you stay with me, you become dangerous to both of us.”
    “Tell me how,” she said.
    “Because I may do something that would attract some attention—not much, but some. If they see you, then they know that they’ve got the right guy. And they’ll know who I am, and then they might be able to get back to you. I mean, get all the way back to the real you.”
    “What’re you gonna do?”
    “I want Carp punished. And I want this Deep Data Correlation program stopped. I’m thinking of going to Bob—Congressman Bob. He’s in the DDC file. I’m not sure he could blow up the program, but he’s got his hand on a lot of government money. If nothing else, he might be able to starve it to death. In any case, he’d be pretty damn interested in what they’ve got on him.”
    “Bad?”
    “A little questionable dealing here and there. Bob did some favors that were a little too enthusiastic. They don’t have him nailed down, but you get the impression that if they pushed hard enough, they might get him.”
    “So you tell Bob . . .”
    “I tell him that I’ve dealt some code with a guy who’s involved in some big hassle with the government. That this guy knew I’d worked with Bob and asked me to pass the file on.”
    “That’s pretty thin ice.”
    “Yeah, but there’s no way to prove anything else happened. I’m a painter, for Christ’s sakes.”
    She sighed. “I’ll get a plane out tomorrow morning.”
    “That’d be good,” I said.
    We were silent for a while, and then she said, “If they really dug into you about the e-mail file, they’d ask how come you got to