Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  “I just shot a big stack of phone books down in the basement,” she said. “LuEllen told me if I need to, just point it and keep pulling the trigger until I run out of bullets.”

  Green sighed and said, “Nuts.”

  I wasn’t sure I liked leaving them alone in Lane’s house. If they were targets, they were just sitting there. It’s easy to get lost in America, for a few days or weeks, anyway, and if you try hard enough, nobody can find you. But sitting ducks . . .

  There was a momentary awkwardness while I was checking into the motel. LuEllen and I had spent quite a bit of time together, and probably would again in the future, and she wasn’t involved with anybody and I wasn’t that involved, but the awkwardness went away and I checked into a separate room. She came down ten minutes later with a couple of beers while I was talking to a guy named Rufus Carr in Atlanta.

  “How’s Monger doing?” I asked Rufus.

  “You’re talking to a pentamillionaire,” he said.

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “I got five million bucks in the bank, m’ boy,” he said. Rufus was a fat red-haired man who affected a bad W. C. Fields accent. “Until I have to pay taxes, anyway.”

  “It works?” I asked.

  “Of course it works; I told you it’d work.”

  “I knew that,” I said.

  “Yeah, bullshit. You were one of the naysayers. You were one of the guys who said Rufus was going to be eating frozen cheese pizza for the rest of his life. Well, I’ll tell you what, pal, it’s nothing but order-out pepperoni and mushroom from now on. And a private booth at Taco Bell.”

  “I’ve got a favor to ask. Could you mong some stuff for me?”

  “On what?”

  “You know about Firewall?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The rumors are weird. Could you just pick up a few of the bigger sites where you see the rumors, and mong them?”

  “Is there any money in it?” he asked.

  “Fuck, no. But I won’t burn your house down.”

  “Well, thank you, General Sherman. Am I going to get in trouble?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “But this whole Firewall thing is getting totally out of hand.”

  “You’re right; it’s my patriotic duty. Besides, I’m not doing anything else.”

  “Can I call you tomorrow?”

  “Sure. I’ll put it on the trail right now, and get it back tomorrow morning,” he said.

  What’s ‘mong’?” LuEllen asked, when I hung up. She was sitting on the bed with a beer bottle.

  “Monger. It’s a rumor-tracking program,” I said. “Rufus built it for some securities companies. They use it to bust day traders who try to spread rumors to move the stock market.”

  “It works?”

  “Hell, he’s a pentamillionaire,” I said.

  Next I got back onto Bobby: he had some preliminary company stuff on AmMath, mostly public information pulled out of various open databases. More interesting was his news on Firewall.

  Got a new list supposedly with Firewall. They are: exdeus, fillyjonk, fleece, ladyfingers, neoxellos, omeomi, pixystyx. Friends give me two hard IDs near you. Fleece is Jason B. Currier, 12548 Baja Viejo, Santa Cruz. Omeomi is Clarence Mason of 3432 LaCoste Road in Petaluma.

  We’d gotten a map with the car; I went out and got it, and checked. Mason was maybe an hour or an hour and a half away, up north of San Francisco in Marin County. Currier was practically across the street. All part of the Silicon Valley culture that’s grown up around San Francisco like a bunch of magic mushrooms.

  “So we’re gonna find these guys,” LuEllen said.

  “First thing tomorrow.”

  I’m not an easy sleeper; I kicked around the bed overnight, getting a couple of hours here and another hour there, with fifteen minutes of wide-awake worrying in between. I don’t like big, arrogant organizations that push people around, or manipulate them, or extort them—but I don’t see it as my personal obligation to stop them. I just go my own way. I fish and paint and lie in the sunshine like a lizard. I might steal something from one of them, from time to time, software or schematics or business plans, but I’m very careful about it.

  The whole AmMath business was not my style. I liked Jack Morrison. He was a good guy, as far as I knew, but I really didn’t know that much about him. Maybe that whole thing about “k” was bullshit; maybe he made it up to pull me into whatever he was doing at AmMath. Maybe he put the rumors out. And Lane herself was a computer freak: maybe she was involved with Firewall.

  But if not, “k” was cause for concern. It was not a computer identity as such, it was just an initial, and there may be ten thousand people on the Net who sign themselves with a k. The same with Bobby and Stanford—there are probably a thousand Stanfords out on the Net. And I would imagine that there are quite a few people calling themselves Fleece, although omeomi is not quite as generic. The troubling thing was the grouping. I had heard most of those names at one time or another. I even knew what a couple of them did, although I didn’t know who they were.

  Computer people, a lot of them, have the same attitude I do toward bigness, toward bureaucracy, toward being pounded into round holes. They don’t like it. Maybe there was a Firewall, and maybe some of these people were in it, and because they were, then I was suspect . . .

  Paranoia is good for you, if you’re a crook; but it doesn’t make life any easier.

  9

  ST. JOHN CORBEIL

  Corbeil was intent. Not angry, not stunned, not confused.

  Focused.

  “I don’t know where she got them, but she apparently knew they were important because she made copies,” Hart was saying. His voice was distant, tinny, with traffic in the background. He was calling from a payphone in San Jose.

  A television was mounted on the wall opposite Corbeil’s desk. One of the talking heads on CNBC was chattering about the newest disaster on the NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange. “MUTING” was printed across his face in green letters, like a TV-chip editorial.

  “If she had access . . .” Corbeil began, speaking to Hart.

  “We know she had access . . . goddamnit, nothing is clear,” Hart said.

  “Make it clear,” Corbeil snapped. “What’s the problem?”

  “She had four Jaz disks that probably came out of our supply room,” Hart said. “They have that blue OEM tint to the cases, and we assume that her brother stole them to make his copies. But on the other four disks, the cases are clear plastic—not ours. We looked in the wastebaskets and found a receipt from CompUSA, which shows that she bought three three-packs of Jaz disks. Nine disks. We found one set of four disks in clear cases—the copies—and one blank disk in a clear case . . .”

  “Which means four are missing, and that’s the exact number you’d need for another set of copies,” Corbeil said, picking up on it instantly. “Goddamnit. Where are they?”

  “That’s the problem. We don’t know. I can only think of one reason that she even made another set of copies.”

  “For security reasons. She ditched them somewhere.”

  “Yes. That’s what we think,” Hart said. “We don’t know exactly why she’d go to the trouble, though. The thing is, you can’t load an OMS file unless you have five hundred megs of memory. Not without making the computer go crazy. Her home computer had three hundred eighty-four megs, and her laptop has one hundred twenty-eight. Neither one had any of the files from the Jaz drive on it—not even the small files.”

  “So what are you saying? That she never looked at them?”

  “Not at home,” Hart said. “She could have taken them to her university office, except that we’ve been cruising her place almost since she got here, and as far as we know, she hasn’t been to the university. So the question is, if she doesn’t even know what’s on the disks, why’d she make all those copies? If she did?”

  “Could you take a look at her office?”

  “Doubtful. It’s right off a
college computer lab, and there are always people around there, day and night. Not right in her office, but up and down the hall and around the lab.”

  “We’ve got to get those disks, before she does something with them.”

  “We don’t know what to do, other than watch her. We could snatch her, and squeeze the disks out of her, but, man . . . if she disappeared, that might be one too many accidents even for the Dallas police. Also, there’s been a guy hanging around with her, maybe a boyfriend or something. It’s like she doesn’t want to be alone.”

  Corbeil thought for a long time, Hart waiting through the pause. As he thought, with the CNBC mimes doing their silent chat opposite his desk, it occurred to Corbeil that he’d like to fuck every single one of the reporting women, but as for stock information, he wouldn’t trust any of them as far as he could spit a rat. That was not a coincidence, he thought. That was marketing. He wrenched himself back to the problem: “So keep an eye on her. Monitor her.”

  Hart was disappointed; Corbeil could hear it in his voice. He didn’t say “That’s it?” but he wanted to. Instead, he said, “We can’t really hang around her neighborhood, but if you want to cough up a couple of grand, in cash, I can put a bug on her car. At least we’ll know where she goes.”

  “Do it. I’ll send the cash through American Express. I’ll find out where the local office is out there, and you’ll have the money in a couple of hours. How long will it take you to get the bug?”

  “Probably tomorrow. I’ll have to call around.”

  “Good,” Corbeil said. “One other thing. I want you to start e-mailing reports to me. I’ve set up a new account called, um, Arclight. A-R-C-L-I-G-H-T. Regular number. Tell me that you’re monitoring them, that you’re watching them, and ask for advice. I’ll send one back that tells you to watch them for another week, to see if they make any contacts that seem to reflect an association with Firewall. We can discuss the feasibility of going to the FBI. Don’t be overly dramatic, but mention something about national security. We want to sound ethically challenged in the defense of the good old USA.”

  “Building a paper trail?”

  “Exactly. Give me a note or two every day, reporting on the surveillance. Maybe even suggest that we might want to get an ex-FBI guy to do a black-bag job, but I’ll turn you down on that.”

  “All right. I’ll get Benson to chip in a report.”

  “Read it first. He’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier.”

  When Hart was off the line, Corbeil leaned back in his chair, made a steeple with his fingers, and thought about it. Hart’s memos would be useful in a couple of different ways. If everything went smoothly, and they either recovered the disks or discovered there was no second copy, then the memos could stay in the files just as Hart sent them.

  If, on the other hand, the situation got out of control, the memos could be altered to show an illegal operation running inside AmMath. The memos could be altered without changing the time stamp on them, and a check of the phone records would show the matching calls coming and going . . .

  Since the Arclight file had been opened from the computer in Tom Woods’s office, it would be at least credible that Corbeil didn’t know about it; especially if Woods wasn’t around to testify.

  That’s all Corbeil would need: a level of credibility, and the silence of contrary witnesses.

  And a good lawyer, of course.

  10

  Since I couldn’t sleep anyway, I kicked LuEllen out of bed at six-thirty and we went to look for Clarence Mason. We stopped at a diner for cholesterol and caffeine, got clogged in traffic heading into San Francisco, crossed the Golden Gate at eight o’clock, and after a bit of wandering, LuEllen ran into a gas station and got a guess on the location of LaCoste Road. Mason’s place was a small dark-green bungalow with an old-style two-track drive. Nobody home.

  “Why didn’t I think of that?” I said, back in the car. “Most people work during the day.” We went out to a phone, and I hooked up the laptop and got online with Bobby. Mason, he said, had his own photography business in Santa Rosa. We found him on the second floor of a downtown building, above a flower store: Mason Restorations.

  The office door looked like it might open on a detective office from a noir movie—textured glass with a gold-leaf name. Inside, it was all windows, blond hardwood floors, and high-tech machinery. The place had two rooms—a big working space behind the counter at the entrance, and a small glassed-in office at the far end, along the window wall. The working space was occupied by a half-dozen top-end Macs, a number of film and flatbed scanners and several large color printers. Three women were looking at a computer screen when we pushed through the door; one of them straightened and walked over to the counter.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “We’re here to see Mr. Mason.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, but it’s fairly urgent.” A thirtyish blond man had looked up from a computer inside the glassed-in office; I was willing to bet he was Mason. “Could you tell him we’re friends of Bobby?”

  “We really need to talk to him,” LuEllen said from my shoulder, with a smile.

  “Just a minute, please.”

  She walked back to the glassed-in office, stuck her head inside, and said something; I could see the blond’s head bobbing. She motioned to us, and we pushed through the counter gate and down to the office. The woman rejoined the other two, who were looking at the yellowed image of an old woman, apparently scanned from a paper photograph.

  Mason stood up, looking unhappy. “I’m not sure if we know the same Bobby . . .”

  “If you go online and call him, he’ll tell you we’re all right,” I said.

  He swallowed and said, “I’m not online much anymore. . . . Who are you?”

  “You saw the list of the people in Firewall? I’m k.”

  He sat down, and sat perfectly still for a moment, except for his bobbing Adam’s apple, then said, “I’ve heard a couple of things about you . . . if you’re really k. Did you once have a contract with a wine company to help straighten out their distribution system?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know my friend Clark,” he said.

  “Miller,” I said. “He lives in St. Helena in a redwood house with a real redwood hot tub in back, and his wife’s name is . . . Tom.”

  “Ex-wife,” Mason said. “She got the house.” He looked at LuEllen and said, “Close the door.” LuEllen pushed the door shut and we sat down in a couple of wooden visitors’ chairs. Mason pushed both hands through his hair and said, “This Firewall—I don’t know anything about it, but my name is all over the place. It’s driving me crazy. What’s going on? I keep waiting for the FBI to show up.”

  I looked at LuEllen, who shook her head. To Mason, I said, “Goddamnit. You don’t know anything?”

  He spread his hands: “Honest to God, I was sitting at my kitchen table reading the paper and eating shredded wheat and scanning this article on the Lighter killing, and all of a sudden I see this list with my name in it—omeomi. I almost choked to death. I never heard of Firewall before this thing. Now I’m supposed to be some sort of terrorist.”

  “Yeah. Me, too. And Bobby. We’re trying to figure out what’s going on.”

  Mason looked at LuEllen again. “Are you on the list?”

  “No. I’m just a friend. Of k’s and Bobby’s.”

  Mason shook his head. “I don’t know what to do. I’ve thought about calling the FBI and identifying myself, but . . . I don’t know, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “I don’t know your history,” I said. “I might wait a while before dragging in the law.”

  “Yeah. So would I.” He wasn’t a tough-looking guy, but the way he said it suggested a need to stay away from the feds. As a matter of privacy, ethics, and personality, I didn’t ask him what he did; LuEllen wasn’t so inhibited.

  “So what’d you do as omeomi, hold up banks?”

>   She can be so perky, when she wants, that it works an odd magic on men, especially technics, who have residual fantasies about cheerleaders. That’s what I hear anyway. Mason showed a small grin and said, “No, nothing like that. I do . . . specialty photography.”

  “Jeez. When people say that, I usually think porno,” LuEllen said.

  “It’s not porno,” he said.

  “You guys should talk sometime,” I said to LuEllen. “You could trade tips.”

  “You do photography?” Now he was a little more interested. “What kind?”

  “Specialty,” she said.

  He actually chuckled, leaned back and stretched. “That’s the best kind, isn’t it?”

  We sat in silence for a couple of minutes, and then I said, “Well . . . we better go.”

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “Just checking out whoever you can find from the list?”

  “That’s the idea. Between Bobby and me, on the original list of names, we knew a few people. None of us are involved with Firewall. Then Bobby tracked down you and one other guy . . . through friends, I guess. We haven’t checked with the other guy, but your story is like the rest of ours.”

  “What’re you gonna do if you find them? Firewall?”

  “I don’t know. Bobby thinks we ought to turn them in. If they did the Lighter thing, anyway.”

  “Do it,” he said. “Find ’em, and fuck ’em.”

  Currier lived in an apartment in Santa Cruz. Again, nobody home, and Bobby hadn’t been able to find a job for him. I checked with the manager, telling her that I was an old friend in the area for a day. “He’s gone to Mexico, on vacation,” she said.

  “When did he leave?”

  “Last week. He said he’d be gone for three weeks. Too bad you missed him.”

  Now what?” LuEllen asked, as we walked away.

  “Back to Rufus. He’s three hours ahead of us—let’s see if Monger worked.”

  “What do you think about Currier?”

  “He might be running. He’s on the list; maybe he’s got reason to run.”