Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  “Just a minute . . .”

  Welsh picked up, but the phone sounded funny. “What are you doing with the phone?” I asked.

  “We’ve got some people here who want to listen in,” she said. “You’re on a conference call.”

  “Did you look at the pictures?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what they are?”

  “Well, we have an idea. They look like our parking lot.”

  “They are. If you check the arrangement of cars—that’s your car up in the northeast, and that’s you getting out of it—you’ll find out that the pictures were taken yesterday, with a Keyhole satellite. That’s what AmMath was doing. They’d written a code sequence—which you approved, by the way—that sat on top of the satellite encryption engine, and allowed them to use the satellites. They’ve been retailing satellite recon photos all over the Middle East and South Asia since the Keyholes went up. From what we’ve figured out, they were supplying recon for both India and Pakistan.”

  “Who have you told about this?” A man’s voice, deep, harsh, angry.

  “Nobody,” I said. “But we’ve got a PR package ready to go to a dozen congressmen and senators, as well as The New York Times, The Washington Post, the L.A. Times, The Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Tribune, and a few other places you wouldn’t want to see it. I mean, maybe we’re going to do that.”

  “Maybe?”

  “If you don’t get off our backs. You fuckin’ fascists are running innocent people all over the place, this so-called Firewall crackdown. AmMath invented Firewall and the IRS attack was just a bunch of punks from Europe. You know it, we know it, and most of the press knows it, but they’re riding along with you for the amusement value. We want you to knock it off, or we’ll ship our PR package, and the NSA becomes a greasy spot on the road. A few of you, I wouldn’t doubt, will be looking at the inside of Leavenworth.”

  “We know who you are: we’re tracking you right now, we’re breaking down the walls,” the male voice said.

  “Bullshit. You’ve only found a couple of serious people so far and you only got them because they got careless,” I said. “The rest of us are going to fuck you up if you don’t back off.”

  “You’re talking to the U.S. Government here, asshole . . .”

  “No, I’m not. I’m talking to a scared bureaucrat. But not as scared as you will be when we start sending recon photos to the press.”

  “You’re gone; you no longer have any access to the Keyholes.”

  “Sorry, pal, it doesn’t work that way,” I said. “We own Keyhole. The only access you have is entirely walled off by our software. We built a firewall around your access port. Go ask your guys who are trying to get inside; go ask them . . . They can take pictures—if we let them. They can even retask the satellites, if we let them. But if we get pissed, we’ll eliminate your access and then we’re gonna start taking pictures of nude beaches and the Royal Families and the president’s vacation, and start flogging them off to The Star and People and whoever else wants them . . . With a nice little Keyhole credit line on them.”

  There was a long silence; then Rosalind Welsh said, “Don’t do that.”

  “It’s up to you,” I said. “You’ll be able to tell when we’re pissed, because we’ll cut off your Keyhole access. I mean, you could go ask Congress for another twenty billion to put up another Keyhole system, but I suspect that they’ll be pretty pissed when they find out you lost the one you had.”

  The male voice: “You fucker . . . you fuckin’ traitor.”

  “This is Bill Clinton you’re talking to,” I said. “We don’t want to overthrow anything. We just want you off our backs.”

  “We can’t promise anything in detail . . .” Welsh said tentatively.

  “Look, we’re not bargaining with you,” I said. “Don’t get that idea. This is a straightforward extortion. If you get off our backs, you can run Keyhole like you always have. Nobody’ll ever hear about how AmMath was selling American recon photos to Pakistan, or how AmMath invented Firewall to cover up a couple of murders and that you knew about it, or about how Keyhole now belongs to a bunch of hackers. All you have to do is stop. If you don’t, well, you better grab on to something solid and bend over, because something ugly is about to happen . . .”

  I hung up, got off at the next exit, wiped the cell phone and threw it into a ditch, and headed back to St. Paul.

  And they quit.

  The IRS announced that Interpol, in coordination with U.S. authorities, had issued warrants for the arrest of a half-dozen European hackers for their attack on the tax-return site, and said that the IRS site was now fully protected. The FBI declared victory over Firewall, said that we were seeing the fine results of eternal vigilance. Other hacker organizations, the FBI spokesman said, had better take warning, and not mess with the bulldog of federal law enforcement.

  I was lying on the couch, reading the St. Paul paper, the Cat sitting next to my head, when somebody knocked at the door. I opened it, and LuEllen was standing there. She was wearing jeans and cowboy boots under a waist-length coat that looked suspiciously like mink.

  “We cool?” she asked.

  “We cool,” I said. “Come in.”

  She came in, and we had a cup of coffee, sitting at my kitchen window looking out over the Mississippi. The river was locked in ice, and down on the streets, we could see people in heavy parkas puffing up and down the hill. Twelve below zero, the weather service said: a splendid day to stay inside and paint.

  We had a lot to talk about. About the relative quality of our safety, about Jack and Lane. About whether the government might come creeping around. About the collapse of AmMath, and the disappearance of Corbeil.

  “The government’s out of it,” I said. “At least for a good long while.”

  I told her how the Net would occasionally be saturated with the cryptic message, “Bobby, call your Uncle.”

  “Does he?”

  “I don’t know. I leave that to him,” I said.

  “You think he’s going to die?”

  “That’s what he says. But not for a while.”

  We were silent for a moment, then she said, “The devil card—it was like the tarot said.”

  “In hindsight, I suppose.”

  “Don’t be skeptical with me, Kidd. You’re getting messages from somewhere, and I think maybe you oughta stop it.”

  “Right. Messages,” I said. She was so serious about it, I had to laugh. Superstitious claptrap.

  The Texas newspapers reported that a man carrying Corbeil’s passport had crossed into Mexico shortly after his Waco ranch house burned down—a ranch purchased under a phony name, the papers said, and which was now cordoned off by the FBI. Corbeil hadn’t been found yet, but there were hints that he might be in Southeast Asia.

  LuEllen was worried that he might somehow come back on us.

  “Not to worry,” I said.

  She didn’t ask.

  LuEllen stayed over. Clancy, the computer lady who had been designing the America’s Cup boat, had found somebody else to design it with, and my feet had, in fact, been cold all winter. So LuEllen was welcome.

  But as I lay beside her that night, awake, listening to her easy breathing, I felt the finger of darkness pressing on me again. It had come any number of times in the past two months, usually just before sleep: the ghost of St. John Corbeil.

  I was the only one who’d ever know, but the passport that crossed into Mexico was the same one that Green, Lane, LuEllen, and I had passed around a diner table after the raid on Corbeil’s apartment. The man who’d carried it was a friend of Bobby’s, reliable, and who, for a price, was willing to check the passport through Mexican passport control, without asking why. He’d burned it in a bathroom of the California Royal Motel in Matamoros; and that is the last, I hope, that we’d hear of St. John Corbeil.

  Corbeil himself was buried under a foot of sandy Texas soil, in a hastily scratched-out grave, a few miles northwes
t of Waco, Texas.

  At night, lying in bed, I sometimes felt his loneliness out there.

  Maybe, I thought, as I turned over and touched the woman’s back, LuEllen could make him go away . . .

  Maybe.

  author’s note

  Those of you who are regular readers of John Sandford novels will be familiar with the tough and sometimes downright nasty Minneapolis police detective Lucas Davenport, the featured character in the Prey series of thriller novels. Davenport was not my first thriller anti-hero, however. My first was the protagonist of this book, the hacker/artist Kidd (who has also appeared, credited and uncredited, in a couple of Prey novels). Because of the way the book market works, Kidd was retired when Davenport started selling well—but over the years, as I traveled around on book tours, there was always somebody ready to ask when I’d bring back Kidd. One of the most persistent of the Kidd fans was my son, Ros, who knows a few things about computers himself. Finally, I told Ros that if he’d block out the novel, come up with some concepts and character possibilities, then help me brainstorm my way through it, I’d try to write it. He did, and I did, and this is it. I hope you enjoyed it.

  John Camp (John Sandford)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THE HANGED MAN’S SONG

  A G.P. Putnam's Sons Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2003 by John Sandford

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 1-101-14659-1

  A G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS BOOK®

  G.P. Putnam's Sons Books first published by The G.P. Putnam's Sons Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS and the “P” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: February, 2004

  ALSO BY JOHN SANDFORD

  RULES OF PREY

  SHADOW PREY

  EYES OF PREY

  SILENT PREY

  WINTER PREY

  NIGHT PREY

  MIND PREY

  SUDDEN PREY

  THE NIGHT PREY

  SECRET PREY

  CERTAIN PREY

  EASY PREY

  CHOSEN PREY

  MORTAL PREY

  NAKED PREY

  KIDD NOVELS

  THE FOOL’S RUN

  THE EMPRESS FILE

  THE DEVIL’S CODE

  THIS ONE IS FOR MY FELLOW HOSERS AT THE ST. PAUL PAPERS.

  YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Chapter

  One

  >>> NOW THE BLACK MAN screamed No!, now the black man shouted, Get out, motherfucker, and Carp, a big-boy at thirty, felt the explosion behind his eyes.

  Tantrum.

  They were in the black man’s neatly kept sick-house, his infirmary. Carp snatched the green oxygen cylinder off its stand, felt the weight as he swung it overhead. The black man began to turn in his wheelchair, his dark eyes coming around through the narrow, fashionable glasses, the gun turning, the gun looking like a toy.

  And now it goes to slo-mo, the sounds of the house fading—the soprano on public radio, fading; the rumble of a passing car, fading; the hoarse, angry words from the black man, fading to inaudible gibberish; and the black man turning, and the gun, all in slo-mo, the sounds fading as time slowed down. . . .

  Then lurching to fast forward:

  “HAIYAH!” James Carp screamed it, gobs of spit flying, one explosive syllable, and he swung the steel cylinder as hard as he could, as though he were spiking a football.

  The black man’s skull shattered and the black man shouted a death-shout, a HUH! that came at once with the WHACK! of the cylinder smashing bone.

  The black man spun out of his wheelchair, blood flying in a crimson spray. A .25-caliber automatic pistol skittered out of his fingers and across the red-and-blue oriental carpet into a corner; the wheelchair crashed into a plaster wall, sounding as though somebody had dropped an armful of pipes.

  Time slowed again. The quiet sounds came back: the soprano, the cars, an airplane, a bird, and the black man: almost subliminally, the air squeezed out of his dying lungs and across his vocal cords, producing not a moan, but a drawn-out vowel oooohhhh . . .

  Blood began to seep from the black man’s close-cut hair into the carpet. He was a pile of bones wrapped in a blue shirt.

  >>> CARP stood over him, sweating, shirt stuck to his broad back, breathing heavily, angry adrenaline burning in his blood, listening, hearing nothing but the rain ticking on the tin roof and the soprano in the unintelligible Italian opera; smelling the must and the old wood of the house tainted by the coppery odor of blood. He was pretty sure he knew what he’d done but he said, “Get up. C’mon, get up.”

  The black man didn’t move and Carp pushed the skinny body with a foot, and the body, already insubstantial, shoulders and legs skeletal, small skull like a croquet ball, flopped with the slackness of death. “Fuck you,” Carp said. He tossed the oxygen cylinder on a couch, where it bounced silently on the soft cushions.

  A car turned the corner. Carp jerked, stepped to a window, split the blinds with an index finger, and looked out at the street. The car kept going, splashing through a roadside puddle.

  Breathing even harder, now. He looked around, for other eyes, but there was nobody in the house but him and the black man’s body. Fear rode over the anger, and Carp’s body told him to run, to get away, to put this behind him, to pretend it never happened; but his brain was saying, Take it easy, take it slow.

  Carp was a big man, too heavy for his height, round-shouldered, shambling. His eyes were flat and shallow, his nose was long and fleshy, like a small banana. His two-day beard was patchy, his brown hair was lank, mop-like. Turning away from the body, he went first for the laptop.

  The dead man’s name was Bobby, and Bobby’s laptop was fastened to a steel tray that swiveled off the wheelchair like an old-fashioned school desk. The laptop was no lightweight—it was a desktop replacement model from IBM with maximum RAM, a fat hard drive, built-in CD/DVD burner, three USB ports, a variety of memory-card slots.

  A powerful laptop, but not exactly what Carp had expected. He’d expected something like. . . well, an old-fashioned CIA computer room, painted white with plastic floors and men in spectacles walking around in white coats with clipboards, Bobby perched in some kind of Star Wars control console. How could the most powerful hacker in the United States of America operate out of a laptop? A laptop and a wheelchair and Giorgio Armani glasses and a blue, freshly pressed oxford-cloth shirt?

/>   The laptop wasn’t the only surprise—the whole neighborhood was unexpected, a run-down, gravel-road section of Jackson, smelling of Spanish moss and red-pine bark and marsh water. He could hear croakers chipping away in the twilight when he walked up the flagstones to the front porch.

  >>> RIGHT from the start, his search seemed to have gone bad. He’d located Bobby’s caregiver, and the guy wasn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the dishwasher: Carp had talked his way into the man’s house with an excuse that sounded unbelievably lame in his own ears, so bad that he couldn’t believe that the man had been trusted with Bobby’s safety. But he had been.

  >>> ANY question had been resolved when Bobby had come to the front door and Carp had asked, “Bobby?” and Bobby’s eyes had gone wide and he’d started backing away.

  “Get away from me. Who are you? Who . . . get away . . .”

  The whole thing had devolved into a thrashing, screaming argument and Carp had bulled his way through the door, and then Bobby had sent the wheelchair across the room to a built-in bookcase, pushed aside a ceramic bowl, and Carp could see that a gun was coming up and he’d picked up the oxygen cylinder.

  Didn’t really mean to do it. Not yet, anyway. He’d wanted to talk for a while.

  Whatever he’d intended, Bobby was dead. No going back now. He moved over to the wheelchair, turned the laptop around, found it still running. Bobby hadn’t had time to do anything with it, hadn’t tried. The machine was running UNIX, no big surprise there. A security-aware hacker was as likely to run Windows as the Navy was to put a screen door on a submarine.

  He’d figure it out later; one thing he didn’t dare do was turn it off. He checked the power meter and found the battery at 75 percent. Good for the time being. Next he went to the system monitor to look at the hard drive. Okay: 120 gigabytes, 60 percent full. The damn thing had more data in it than the average library.