Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  “They’re NSA, right? Isn’t that what they do?”

  “No, no, that’s another group, the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office. They do all the satellite stuff.”

  “So let’s get online with Bobby, and see what he says.”

  We got online from a mall. Bobby thought he could figure out the height of the camera by picking out small parts of the original full-strength photos and making some precise measurements on the shadows.

  FREAKY IF IT’S A SATELLITE PHOTO. NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS.

  MAYBE WHAT THEY ’RE HIDING .

  BUT WHAT DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH FIREWALL?

  There was the other side of Lane’s question. Lane was interested in what happened to Jack; Bobby was interested in how his name got attached to Firewall. Somehow, AmMath was involved in both of those things, but how and why were they related? Or were they related?

  We talked about it as we were leaving the mall, and decided they had to be linked. Jack went to Maryland, where the computer that started the Firewall rumors was located. The guy he saw, who was later killed, was a client of that same server. It was all tied. We just couldn’t see the knot.

  Lane, it turned out, had been worrying about the same questions all night. We all had breakfast together, and she leaned across the diner table, picked up my glass of Coke, and rapped it on the table. She had a theory, she said.

  “Say the photographs are wildly important, for some reason. We don’t know why, but let’s say that’s a given. Jack steals them. They know he stole them, but they don’t know why, or who he might have given them to. So they come up with a scheme. They invent this Firewall group, using names that they harvest from the Internet. Legendary hackers. There’s all kinds of talk on the Net. Anybody could get a list like that. They make Jack a part of the group, so when the names finally come out, the cops’ll say, ‘Ah-ah, he was a member of the radical Firewall group, that’s why he broke into AmMath and it was only bad luck that he got caught . . .’ ”

  “Why use the server in Maryland?” I asked. “The same one that Lighter just happened to be on.”

  “You said it was mostly NSA people,” she said. “Maybe it was one server they all knew. That they all had access to.”

  “Sounds weak,” LuEllen said.

  “But the rest of it sounds pretty good,” Green said. “It ties things together.”

  “What about the IRS attack? That was set up weeks ago.”

  “But the Firewall name wasn’t around weeks ago,” I said. “That could have been made up at the last minute. These hacks are ready to attack the IRS, and just at that moment, somebody invents a group with a neat-sounding name. So they say, ‘All right, we’re Firewall, too.’ ”

  “Goddamnit,” LuEllen said, “it’s still too hard to think about.”

  “I’ll tell you what, though,” Lane said. “When we go back into AmMath’s computer, I think we ought to be looking for stuff on Firewall and satellites. This Clipper stuff is a dead end. Whatever’s going on doesn’t have anything to do with Clipper.”

  “When we go back in?” I asked.

  “Darn right: I know my way around mainframes as well as anyone. I want to be there tonight, when we go back in,” she said.

  “Gotta find a new motel,” I said.

  “There’s a place called Eighty-Eight right across the street from where we’re at,” Green said.

  “So we’ll set up there tonight,” I said. “We’ll use one of LuEllen’s IDs, and call you when we’re settled in.”

  Lane didn’t have much to say about her talk with the cops: “They say they don’t believe that AmMath had anything to do with anything—but I think they believe there’s some kind of government deal going on, and they don’t want to know about it. They think we’re the bad guys—Jack and me.”

  “You told them about the burglary at your house.”

  “Of course,” Lane said. “We gave them every single detail. We told them we thought Jack’s house had been broken into, too.”

  “They’re dead in the water,” Green said. “I used to work with a program in Oakland that investigated shootings by cops. Most of the shootings were open-and-shut. But every once in a while, we’d get a shooting and there’d be something wrong about it. No proof, no evidence, just something wrong. We’d try to get the cops to look a little deeper, to ask a few more questions, and they’d say they would, but you could see it in their eyes: they’d signed off. They either believed they knew what happened, or they didn’t want to know any more. That’s what’s happened with this case. I could see it: they’ve signed off. They’re all done. They don’t want to know any more.”

  “Damnit, nobody’ll move,” I said.

  We thought about that; then Lane said, “By the way, I looked up McLennan County, where Corbeil has that ranch. It’s about a hundred miles south. Near Waco.”

  We made arrangements to meet them that night in Denton, and then LuEllen and I took the rest of the day off. We’d been cooped up too long, hanging out in hotel rooms and restaurants. We were the kind of people who liked to move around. I got my laptop and sketchbook, and my watercolor tin and a plastic squeeze bottle of water, and we went out to a driving range and LuEllen hit balls for an hour while I drew the shelter over the driving line. The whole thing with the satellite photos—if that’s what they were—had gotten me thinking about perspective. The driving line was sheltered by a fifty-yard-long metal roof mounted on steel poles, and from the corners, made a fairly interesting challenge in three-point perspective.

  When LuEllen got tired of hitting balls, we went back to the hotel, talked to a desk clerk who got a map out and drew a six-mile jogging circuit that he ran himself every morning, and we drove out to his starting point and did the six miles in forty-five minutes, just cruising along suburban streets looking at all the pickups.

  “Not bad,” she said, when we got back to the car. “Let’s go buy some boots.”

  She bought two pair of cowboy boots, and paid six hundred dollars for them. I’ve never actually seen her on a horse, but she does like horses, and she liked the boots. They put an inch or two on her height, and she liked that, too.

  At nine o’clock, LuEllen checked us into the Eighty-Eight Motel in Denton. We got online, and took a look in the dump box. Corbeil had been online in the morning, before we’d even gotten up—no rest for the wicked—but hadn’t used the computer since then. “Maybe they’re fixing up his apartment and he’s staying someplace else while they do it,” LuEllen suggested.

  “I hope not. I’d like to be sure that he’s in his apartment, and done for the day, before I sign on with his codes,” I said. “If we were on, and he tried to get on, he might see the conflict.”

  LuEllen called Lane on the cell phone, and told her where we were. We didn’t want any calls on the room phone going out to a number that could be connected with any of us, and figured to throw the cell phone away in the next day or two. Lane and Green showed up ten minutes later, having walked over from the Radisson.

  I told them about the dump box, and how we were using it as a cut-out, and why I didn’t want to go online immediately. “Makes sense,” Lane said. “I’d like to look at those files you got . . .”

  She spent the next two hours flipping through the administrative files, stopping every fifteen minutes or so to look at the dump box. Green, LuEllen, and I chatted for a while, then LuEllen ordered a pay-TV movie, a hyper-violent science-fiction flick that had all the depth of a comic book. The production values, on the other hand, were great.

  Ten minutes after the movie ended, Lane went online to check the dump box, and found that Corbeil was working. The sign-on protocols and codes were the same as the night before. He sent a couple of short memos, one of them berating a guy named John McNeal about a production problem on CDs carrying what apparently were commercial code products. Then he signed off. We waited another half-hour, Lane with increasing impatience, to make sure he wouldn’t sign on again, then went out to the AmMa
th computer.

  We looked for anything that involved satellites, photographs, Middle Eastern nations, the NSA, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office; tried all of those things as keywords in a variety of searches, and even threw in oddball stuff—“orbit,” “surveillance,” “resolution.”

  After half an hour, I suggested that we shut down. “We need to do more research into what we’re looking for,” I said. “Maybe just go to the library and get business stuff about AmMath. Trying to flog our way through the computer is like trying to find a two-inch article in ten years’ worth of newspapers.”

  Lane wanted to continue: “Fifteen more minutes,” she said. “Twenty minutes. We’re in, who knows whether they’ll change all the protocols or something?”

  LuEllen wasn’t doing anything, and bored, said, “I’m going down the street to that Randy’s place and get coffee and a doughnut. Anybody want anything?”

  “I’ll walk along,” I said. To Lane: “Fifteen minutes . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Randy’s was a combination greasy spoon and greasy bakery. We bought doughnuts and coffee and a diet Coke, and talked about not much at all; two people carrying a couple of white bakery sacks along the highway. We were a hundred yards from the motel when we saw the flashes. LuEllen said, “Did you see that?”

  I was already trotting toward the motel. Night-time gun flashes are hard to mistake, and even with the background noise of the highway we could now hear the rapid pop-pop-pop of gunfire.

  We got closer and saw two men break away from the motel, from the end where our room was. Another couple, young kids, college kids, maybe, both carrying book bags, stopped to look at them as they crossed the parking lot to a waiting car. The shorter of the two men was hobbling. One of the kids broke away from the other, running toward the motel. Then the other one followed, and I ditched the white bags behind a car and the car with the two guys screeched out of the parking lot, fishtailed once in the street and disappeared into traffic.

  We turned the corner of the motel and saw an older guy, white-haired in a burgundy windbreaker, walking toward our room, the college kids just coming up. I was ten steps back now, LuEllen a few steps farther behind and the college kid, a boy, went inside and then popped back out and started screaming, “Call an ambulance call an ambulance . . .”

  I pushed past his white face to the door and saw Lane on the bed. She was dead, her face gone. Couldn’t see Green; the bathroom door was mostly closed and shot to pieces. I stepped over to the door and knuckled it open. Green was in the bathtub, looking up at me, a gun in one hand.

  “Got an ambulance coming,” I said. “Are you hurt bad?”

  “Hit twice,” he groaned. “What about Lane?”

  “Gone.”

  “Get out of here,” he said.

  I went back out into the main room. The college girl was inside with LuEllen and I shouted at her, “Go out to the street, wave the ambulance in.”

  “What?”

  “I dunno, I dunno,” I shouted at her. She stepped back, frightened of me, and turned and ran toward the street. “Flag the ambulance,” I shouted after her. To the old guy in the burgundy windbreaker I yelled, “Two people shot. Run down to the office and make sure that kid’s called an ambulance . . .”

  He turned and ran. The minute he was gone, I stepped past the bed, not looking at Lane, ripped the phone wire out of the telephone, bundled up the laptop, which had fallen on the floor, and stuck it in the back of my waistband, under my jacket.

  LuEllen had stopped to take a close look at Lane—Lane had been hit at least twice in the side of the head, and laid sprawled face-up, eyes open just a crack, on the yellow bedspread. LuEllen shook her head. Lane’s purse was lying on the floor. LuEllen rolled it with her foot, took the pistol out, and slid it into her jacket pocket. Without another word, we were out of the room. Two motel people were running toward us, and I waved at them: “In here, in here . . . hurry, hurry, get an ambulance.”

  More people came running, and LuEllen and I eased to the outside of the group, and then turned, and then were around the corner, and in the car. We went out the back of the parking lot, slowly, onto a service road, down a block, and were out of sight when the first cop car arrived.

  “She had no chance,” LuEllen said grimly. “Executed.”

  “Green’s alive, but he was hit a couple of times,” I said. “He was in the tub. He was still thinking. He said to get out, so he’ll cover us.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Not from me,” I said.

  “The only hard surface I touched was the TV remote, and Green was using it after I did, so I should be okay.”

  “You used the bathroom.”

  “I was careful. You used the telephone . . .”

  “Just plugged into the side, never picked up the receiver. I don’t think I touched anything with my fingertips.”

  “Guys from AmMath,” she said.

  “Gotta be.”

  “What is it with them?”

  “I don’t know; but they must have spotted me coming online last night, and set up to back-trace our entry tonight. Took them an hour to do it and get here . . . Christ, Lane and Green probably thought that was us at the door, coming back with coffee.”

  21

  LuEllen and I had been in jams before. I don’t know whether it was simply experience, or some essential defect in our personalities, that allowed us to carry on as efficiently as we did. To get the laptop, to get out. To do it without talking about it or hesitating.

  If I’ve ever been seriously attached to any one person in my adult life, it was LuEllen. But if she’d been in that motel room, and if I’d walked back to find her dead on the yellow bedspread, then, God help me, I believe I would have reacted the same way. And if I’d been dead, and she’d looked in, it would have been the same. No rage, no horror or fear or even sorrow. Efficiency. Get the laptop. Get the gun. Get out. Assess the damage.

  The rage and sorrow comes later.

  But it comes.

  On the way out, in the car, LuEllen kept coming back at me about fingerprints: that’s where we could hang up. If I’d left my prints behind, they could put a face with them—I’d been thoroughly and repeatedly printed in the Army—and the other witnesses at the motel would confirm it.

  But I didn’t think I’d left any. LuEllen and I had done all this before, operating out of remote sites, and you go in thinking about not leaving prints. If you get sloppy about it, then you’ll always leave a few. The only hard thing I’d touched was the phone and the room key-card, which I still had in my shirt pocket. Still, we both ran the whole night through our heads, picking out each move we’d made. After a while, I let out a breath and said, “I’m good.”

  “So am I, except that the clerk saw me when I checked in.”

  “Yeah, but Lane looked sort of Latino and half the people around there looked Latino. I bet the clerk identifies her as the woman who checked in, because she looked like a lot of other women who checked in. And her face is shot up . . . Good thing I didn’t check us in, with Green being black. Then they’d know.”

  “Maybe Green won’t cover for us.”

  “He couldn’t give them too much. He doesn’t know who we are, really.”

  “He could find out. Or give the cops enough information that they could.”

  “I don’t know. I think Texas is a felony-murder state. If he says he doesn’t know what was going on, that he was simply a hired bodyguard for Lane, who was doing something with her computer . . . If he says that, he’ll kick clear. If he lets them know that he knew what Lane was doing, then she would have been killed in the course of committing a crime, and that might make a case against him for felony murder.”

  “So he can’t talk.”

  “He wouldn’t—if he knows all this.”

  “So let’s call Bobby; maybe he can get the word back.”

  We called Bobby from a pay phone. When he came up on the laptop, I wrote:
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  CALL ME NOW VOICE LINE : EMERGENCY .

  He called back five seconds after I was off. I’d only talked to him on a voice line a couple of times. The only thing I knew about him was that he was a black guy, who I thought lived someplace in the Mississippi River South. He had one of those soft Delta accents, and was tied into a lot of interesting black people who, in the sixties, would have been called activists, or maybe, in that part of the world, agitators.

  “What happened?” he asked, without preamble.

  I gave it to him as succinctly as I could, then said, “Somebody’s got to get with Green. A lawyer, who can tell him to stick with the ignorant bodyguard story. If he lets on that he knew Lane was committing a crime, then they might . . .”

  “Felony murder,” Bobby said. “Bad for you, bad for me.”

  “Yeah. Somebody’s got to get in touch.”

  “I can handle that,” Bobby said softly. “How are you?”

  “We’re good, but we’re clearing out. We don’t think anybody will be looking for us too hard, but just in case . . . we’re gonna run down, to, ah, Austin.”

  “Check in from there.”

  “Talk to you,” I said, and hung up.

  “Austin?” LuEllen asked.

  “It’s a big city with lots of people coming and going,” I said. “Other than Dallas, it’s about the closest big city to Waco.”

  “Corbeil’s ranch.” She was quiet for a while, then said, “So now you’re on a revenge trip. Forget Jack, you’re going to get them because they killed Lane.”

  “No. If I could, I’d go home right now. But I need to get loose; I can’t get loose. The feds have a list of names, they’ve got murder and evidence of a conspiracy and the IRS attack and maybe what looks like an attack on a major encryption company. They’ll eventually start peeling back the names. I’ve got to figure out what’s going on, and get them running that way, or I’m fucked.”