Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  “Ah, Firewall,” she said. She batted the thought away, like a gnat. “They’ll find these kids, and that’ll be it.”

  “I wish it was true,” I said, “but I don’t think it is.”

  We talked about Firewall for a couple of minutes, about the technique of the attack on the IRS and the use of the zombie computers. We also talked for a few minutes about her talks with the cops, which were set for Monday morning, sixteen hours away.

  She’d try to pressure them on AmMath. The more pressure that we could apply, the more curious the cops and the FBI and the NSA got about AmMath, the better chance there was that something would break loose. If we could get it into the media, make it a political problem, we had a chance of generating a legitimate investigation.

  “I don’t see the logic of it,” Lane said.

  “There is no logic. We just keep bringing AmMath up, hooking them to Firewall, to Jack’s killing, to the house burning down, to the burglary at your place . . . we don’t have to explain it, we just have to keep hooking them up.”

  We agreed to meet the next afternoon, after Lane’s talk with the cops. When we left, I was still getting a bad vibration from Lane—for her, Jack was the main question, and it obviously wasn’t the same for LuEllen and me.

  “She’s starting to worry me a little,” LuEllen said. “What happens if she decides that the only thing to do is to talk about us, about Firewall, about the NSA, about everything, to get the cops to look at Jack?”

  “She doesn’t know that much,” I said.

  “She knows we’re the ones who hit Corbeil. That’s a lot right there.”

  “Yeah.” We drove along in silence for a moment; then I sighed and said, “It’s not out of control yet. I think we could talk to her about the damage she’d do, if she dumped on all of us. She’d listen.”

  “I hope,” LuEllen said. “But we’ve got to keep our options open.” She thought a moment, then added, “Too bad she knows where you live.”

  Corbeil went online that night. There was no way to tell when they found that the apartment had been cracked, but I checked the dump box all day, every hour, and at ten o’clock, it was spooling stuff from an online session between Corbeil’s apartment and the AmMath computer. The software I was using was simple enough—you can buy copies of the heart of it for $99, over the counter. Essentially, it records keystrokes. Everything that Corbeil typed on his keyboard type was recorded, picked up, and sent to my dump box. Sometimes, it can be a little hard to follow, if the guy you’re recording is a bad typist, but I’ve had enough practice that I can read it like a letter.

  “What do you got?” LuEllen asked, looking over my shoulder.

  “To begin with, we’ve got the phone number, the sign-on protocols, and Corbeil’s password to get into the AmMath computer,” I said. “After that, not much.”

  Corbeil sent company mail to one of his security people, telling him about the break-in.

  WHERE ARE YOU? CAN’T FIND YOU. MY APARTMENT WAS HIT BY BURGLARS. THEY PULLED THE SAFE OUT OF THE WALL, MUST HAVE USED INDUSTRIAL EQUIPMENT BECAUSE THEY WRECKED THE PLACE. THEY GOT MONEY AND JEWELRY. WE NEED A FULL ALERT DOWNTOWN, AND SOMEBODY’S GOT TO KEEP AN EYE ON THE RANCH. WE NEED SOME OVERNIGHT TEMPS AT THE OFFICE. I TRIED TO CALL NASMITH SECURITY BUT CAN’T GET HOOKED UP. WE NEED PEOPLE DOWNTOWN TONIGHT!! (I’LL GO DOWN MYSELF WHEN WE’RE FINISHED HERE.) I HAD TO CALL COPS ABOUT THE BURGLARY BECAUSE THE APARTMENT MANAGEMENT DISCOVERED IT. NO WAY AROUND IT. COPS ON WAY NOW. MAYBE IT WAS THE MONEY & JEWELRY, MARIAN WORE IT FRIDAY & EVERYBODY SAW IT. THERE’S NO WAY TO BE SURE, WE HAVE TO ASSUME OTHERWISE. WE BETTER GET LOW FOR ANOTHER WEEK OR TWO. I’LL CALL THE PAKS THIS AFTERNOON AND PUT THEM OFF. WIPE THIS WHEN YOU GET IT & CALL ME.

  He also pulled a file. We couldn’t see what it was, because the program only recorded keystrokes, but we got the name, OMS2. All he did was read, and then the connection shut down, and he was off-line.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “He’s off, and he’s going to be occupied for a while.”

  We went out to a Red Roof Inn—checked in with the fake ID I got in San Francisco, but paid cash—and got online. The dump box was still off-line, which meant that Corbeil’s computer was shut down. I went out to the AmMath number, punched in his password, and we were in.

  The OMS2 file was short and sweet: a few corporate memos, and a list of names and phone numbers. I then checked for an OMS3, got nothing, went to OMS1, got nothing, and then simply OMS, and again, got nothing—which was odd, because the files we’d inherited from Jack were labeled OMS. They could have been in another sector of the computer, or a different computer entirely, someplace where I didn’t have access.

  I did find a find a large administrative file called CLPR, which turned out to be internal memos about the Clipper II program. I dumped it to our Jaz disk, which took a while. Too long, actually. When we had it, I closed down the connection.

  We’d taken care not to touch any hard surfaces inside the room that we didn’t have to, and when we were done, we wiped those we’d had to touch, told the motel clerk that something had come up at home and that we’d have to check out—you could see the Yeah, right, in his eyes as he looked at LuEllen—and headed back to our hotel.

  “We should have spent a little time fooling around,” I said. “For verisimilitude—you don’t really have that nice pink postorgasmic look that you get afterwards.”

  “We could still go for it,” she offered.

  “Too late to impress the clerk,” I said.

  The OMS2 file was mostly interesting for the names—military people from around the world, but mostly from the band of Islamic states that stretched from Syria to Indonesia. Only Egypt in Africa; and Turkey was missing.

  “Why is that odd?” LuEllen asked, when I commented on it.

  “Just the selection of names. If you’re doing the Clipper, these people might all be customers, but the main customers would be the bigger states—England, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, China, India, like that. Instead, we have Syria, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kazakhstan—missing Afghanistan, missing Saudi Arabia, missing Turkey.”

  “It’s only one file. If it’s OMS2, that implies other numbers, even if we couldn’t get them. Maybe they’re someplace else, or they erased them.”

  “Yeah, that’s true . . .”

  The CLPR file included a couple of thousand memos on routine technical, personnel, and financial matters. We spent four hours reading through them—scanning them, really—without finding a single useful fact.

  “You know what?” LuEllen said. “If I had to be an administrative guy, I’d cut my wrists. I can’t imagine even writing this shit, much less worrying about it.”

  “Not a single goddamn thing,” I said, discouraged.

  “Maybe there is one thing,” she said. “Not a fact . . . and I’m not sure, but let’s look at the dates on these things.”

  We looked at the dates, and LuEllen pointed out that two years earlier, there were ten or twenty Clipper memos being filed every week. A year ago, there were ten at the most. For the past six or eight months, there were four or five being filed weekly.

  “Like the project is running down,” she said.

  “Maybe it’s running out of time, or money. Maybe they’ve been stealing from it, and that’s what they’re trying to cover,” I suggested.

  “So why would they kill for a picture of three guys in a parking lot? If they did?”

  “We’d know, if we could figure out who the guys were,” I said.

  “How do we do that? Figure it out?”

  “I don’t think we do. We’re not the fuckin’ FBI. We’re just some guys.”

  19

  ST. JOHN CORBEIL

  Corbeil was in a rage: the necklace was gone, and the palm of his hand itched for it. His space had been violated. He had been so angry about the necklace that he hadn’t seen that it was a diversion. And they’d done it so beautifully.

  They’d absolutely suckered him. Thos
e greasy footprints all over the living room, with only one track leading past the computer. He could still see the footprints in his mind’s eye, could still feel the way he’d relaxed when he realized that the computer hadn’t been touched.

  He’d been angry about the necklace, but that had only been thieves. Lord knows he’d paraded the stones around enough, hanging them off the necks of half the models in Dallas. But they’d used him, they’d known how he’d think.

  Then, that same night, they’d looted the computer. They would not have been found out if Woods hadn’t been watching, hadn’t seen, the next morning, the odd groping-about in the files. He’d come in to ask about it, and Corbeil knew instantly what had happened.

  Suckered.

  “Lane Ward,” he said.

  “She wouldn’t have the resources,” Hart protested. “Whoever went into your apartment was a pro. That safe wasn’t ripped out of the wall by hackers. That took special gear. They goddamned near destroyed your apartment and nobody in the building heard a thing.”

  “Then who is it? The FBI doing a black-bag job? Not anymore, it’s not. The CIA? They’re the most gun-shy intelligence agency in the West. The NSA? They have fewer resources in the dark than we do. So who? Somehow, it’s Ward. Or if it’s not Ward, she can tell us who it is. Look at what they did with the bug in San Francisco. She’s got help.” He turned and looked at Hart. “Find her. Take her. We’ll talk to her out at the ranch.”

  “Mr. Corbeil, if she disappears, the shit’s going to hit the fan. I’m already tied to the Morrison killing.”

  “Look: we can make her out to be a member of Firewall. We’ve already started the groundwork on that. I’ll have Woods do an entry from the outside, using the stuff from my apartment, just like they did it—but they’ll go into Clipper files, and we’ll call the NSA and the FBI in. We’ll lead them back to her, somehow.”

  “What? She drops her driver’s license on the motel floor?” Hart asked skeptically. “And she’s got somebody with her.”

  “Yeah, and that’s another guy we want to talk to. I’ll bet it’s some little Stanford computer genius who happens to know how to hack into anything. One of those goddamned pencil-necked hundred-and-sixty-IQ smart-asses who might even be able to pull a safe out of a wall.”

  Hart shook his head, and then Corbeil said, “Fingerprints, maybe.”

  “What?”

  “A computer attack’s launched from a motel room. When the FBI investigates, it finds her fingerprints all over the place.”

  “How’re we going to get her to do that?”

  “We’ll talk to her first in a motel room. Rent a room, talk to her there, make sure there are plenty of prints around, then take her out to the ranch. As soon as she’s gone, we have Woods make an intrusion call from the motel room . . . The Agency can still trace that kind of crap.”

  “Sounds too complicated. If she broke away, if she started screaming . . .”

  “So if it’s too complicated, take her right out to the ranch,” Corbeil snarled.

  “Then we can’t . . .”

  “We’ll have her hands,” Corbeil said. “She won’t need them. Not when we’re done talking to her.”

  “Jesus,” Hart said.

  “No, he’s not here,” Corbeil answered.

  “I just think, I’m starting to feel . . .”

  “What?”

  “This is out of control.”

  “William, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. We’ve got to get it back under control, or we’re dead meat. You did a year in the softest prison in Texas. How’d you like a real hard place, the kind of place they reserve for traitors? That’s what they’d call us: traitors. William, we would spend the rest of our lives up to our necks in shit.”

  “But if we just . . .”

  “Do nothing? We’ve been trying that, William. It’s not working. We need to know what’s happening. If worse comes to worst, we at least need the time to run.”

  “Run.” Hart clasped his head in his hands. “Ah, Jesus. Running.”

  “So you get Lane Ward. And the geek who’s driving her around, whoever it is. In the meantime, I’ll sit here, behind this desk—” he pointed to the cherrywood desk in the corner—“and try to think of a way to pin the whole thing on Firewall. Pin it hard enough that we won’t go down for it, anyway.”

  “We should shut down the Old Man of the Sea.”

  Corbeil shrugged. “If you insist, but there’s really no point. They’re not close to it; they have no hint of it.”

  “I would just feel easier about it,” Hart said.

  “I’ll talk to Woods,” Corbeil said.

  20

  We slept late the next morning, LuEllen later than I. At ten o’clock, I rolled out, stretched, cleaned up. When I came back into the main room, LuEllen was still half asleep. She’d thrown the blanket off, and from one angle, near the bathroom door, her face was nicely framed by one outflung arm, and was just rising—from that perspective—over a thigh, with her foot in the foreground. Feet are always nice to draw, especially when you get to see them from the bottom. I tiptoed around to my briefcase, got out my drawing book, eased a chair over to the bathroom door, sat down, and drew for an hour.

  Finally, growing aware of the total silence, she pushed herself halfway up and looked around. “Kidd?”

  “Right here.”

  “Drawing my butt again?” She pushed herself all the way up, stretched and yawned.

  “It’s in the picture, but it’s not the focus; it’s sorta half cut off.”

  She came to look as I worked some shading in around her toes. “My feet aren’t that big,” she said.

  “From this perspective.”

  “They’re not that big. They’re fives.”

  “From this angle.”

  “Bullshit. Not that big. And my toe isn’t that bent.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. I apologize.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said. She stretched again. “You don’t care whose fragile ego you crush. All artists are like that.”

  “Somebody once said that a portrait is a painting where there’s something not quite right about the mouth,” I said. “It might have been Sargent. Anyway, nobody’s ever said that about the foot.”

  “I’m the first.”

  “Go take a shower,” I said.

  She went to take a shower and I struggled with the foreshortening of her leg and foot, and with her face in the back, rising over her thigh, and the pillow behind that. When I was done, I took the drawing out, ripped it up, and tossed it in the wastebasket. Something not quite right about the foot. With all that in my head, waiting for LuEllen to get out of the bathroom, I looked out the window down at the parking lot.

  And understood what I hadn’t understood before.

  Why I had looked down at the parking lot and thought I’d missed an important thought.

  Understood the AmMath photographs—or something about them, anyway. It all came out of the perspective of LuEllen’s foot . . .

  The shower was running and I could hear her humming to herself in the bathroom as I brought the laptop up, and one of the photos.

  “Jesus.” I was right. I sat staring at it, then brought up another one. Ripped a piece of paper out of my drawing book, got a pen, and began making comparative measurements on the computer screen. I was still doing it when LuEllen came bobbling out of the bathroom with a towel around her head. I glanced at her and looked back at the computer.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’m here with my nice pink . . .”

  “Shut up. I gotta get online with Bobby. Get dressed.”

  “What?”

  “Look at this photograph.”

  She looked over my shoulder. “What?” she asked again.

  “Look how this shadow comes down from this light pole? The shadow from the sun?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Look how it comes down from this light pole,” I said.

  “All right.”
/>   “And this one.”

  “I see all the shadows and all the light poles, Kidd. So what?”

  “All the shadows are in exactly the same perspective. Exactly, as close as I can measure. Doesn’t it look weird to you?”

  “No. And so what?”

  “It’s impossible, that’s all. Well, not impossible, if the camera was far enough back.”

  “We were thinking it might be a surveillance camera up on a roof. It’d have to be, to get that high angle.”

  “Still not high enough,” I said. “I gotta get with Bobby. He could make some better measurements and do the numbers.”

  “If that’s not high enough, what? You think it was made by a plane?”

  “Not high enough,” I said. “I think that’s a satellite photograph.”

  She still wasn’t much impressed; I had to work to get that. “Think what a face would look like if you took it from three blocks away with your Nikon and then blew it up to this size. It’d look like a thumbprint,” I said. “Look at those faces. You can’t quite recognize them, but you almost can. If that camera’s in orbit, it has one unbelievable capability.”

  Now she was hunched over me, and spotted something we should have seen before. “You know, those cars . . .” There were only a half-dozen of them in the parking lot. “Not a single one of them is American-made. Look at this one . . .” She tapped the screen with a fingernail. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that kind. It looks like a combination of a pickup truck and a sedan.”

  “You see those in the Middle East,” I said. “Lots of them.”

  She straightened. “So it’s a satellite photo. So what?”

  “I don’t know, yet. But it seems unlikely that a satellite would take a picture of three guys and the three guys were important,” I said. “How could you time something like that?”

  “Radios, maybe . . .”

  I shook my head. “I bet it’s not the guys that are important. I bet it’s the photograph. Not the content, just the photograph, that they have it. They’re supposed to be working on the Clipper chip, and they have this. This has got to be some kind of ungodly high-level secret capability. You could not only see stuff like ammo dumps, you could see what’s in them. If they can do something with computers to punch up the resolution—just a probability engine—they might be able to figure out who gets into which car, might be able to track cars through traffic . . . all kinds of stuff.”