Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  And I told LuEllen about it as soon as we cleared Drexel’s.

  “Didn’t ask me about it,” she said.

  “I didn’t think about it until we were down there in the basement,” I said. I took the gun out of my pocket and pushed it under the seat. “I didn’t want you to veto it.”

  “At this point, I wouldn’t have,” she said. “Not after we saw the execution. But it bums me out . . . but why’d you tell me now?”

  “If we get caught inside, and we have a gun . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  In most states, armed illegal entry will get you a few additional years. Not that we’d get caught.

  Chapter

  Twelve

  >>> MICHELLE STROM lived in an Arlington apartment, like half of the other DDC employees. The apartment was in a complex fifteen minutes from our hotel. From the street, it was a tidy, well-kept collection of six-story yellow-brick buildings, with a swimming pool deck and parking garage. There were a bunch of trendy chain stores—Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma, Barnes & Noble—as part of the same complex of buildings, and a lot of pedestrian traffic around it all.

  “Well-off singles, mostly,” LuEllen said. “Won’t be any trouble getting in the door. Hope the corridor outside Strom’s place isn’t too busy.”

  We began by figuring out which part of the building she was in, and then calling her. No answer.

  Then I sat in the car, on the street, where I could see one of the entry doors. LuEllen, carrying a cloth tote with the laptop and probe inside, sat on a retaining wall a few yards down from the entrance, as though waiting for a car to pick her up. When I saw a man inside, walking toward the door, I gave her a beep with the car horn. She bounced to her feet, hurried up the steps with her key ring in her hand. By that time, the guy was coming through the door, and she caught it, smiled at him, and went through.

  I sat in the car, not a care in the world, for five minutes. Then she reappeared, looking positively perky—she loved doing this. I don’t know how in the hell she thought she’d be able to quit. She walked to the car, hopped in, said, “Routine Schlage,” and we were out of there.

  The software gave us the blank number and we stole three blanks from a suburban Home Depot. We also got a tiny triangular file, which we paid for. LuEllen took three hours to make three keys, looking at the software designs and working very carefully. When she was done, we drove back to the apartment and tried them on the outer door. All three worked, but outside locks are notoriously loose. We probably wouldn’t have that kind of luck with Strom’s lock.

  “Single, early thirties, Saturday night. What are the chances?” LuEllen asked.

  “I don’t know. We can call.”

  “Better off if we could watch her, isolate her, then you go in while I make sure she’s out of the way.”

  “In a perfect world,” I said. “But we’re short on time.”

  She thought about it for a minute. “We call her, and if she’s in, we go away. Maybe until Monday. If there’s no answer, you go in. I do my waiting-impatiently act in the downstairs hallway, and if she comes in, I call you on your cell, and you get out.”

  “If she still looks like her ID photos. And that assumes she’s not somewhere else in the building, and that she won’t come in the end doors instead of the main door.”

  “It assumes she’ll take an elevator instead of walking up the steps,” LuEllen said. “Nothing we can do about it if she’s at the next-door neighbor’s. She’ll walk in on your ass and you’ll have to chop her head off and make it look like Carp did it.”

  “Got it. I’ll draw the sign of the Carp on the walls.”

  “In her blood.”

  “Naturally.”

  We tended toward heartiness when we suspected we were about to do something stupid, of which there had been a couple of instances in the past.

  We went back to the apartment complex, walked arm in arm past all the commercial stuff, window-shopping, looking up at where LuEllen thought Strom’s apartment was. The window was dark. We called from the Barnes & Noble. No answer. Called her cell phone, and she picked it up on the third ring. “Sharon?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number,” she said. Strom was a natural soprano, and sounded like a nice woman—a polite one, anyway. I could hear other voices in the background, and said, “I’m sorry, is this . . . ?” I gave a number close to hers.

  “No, you’re very close, but you’ve got two of the numbers turned around. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I hope I didn’t disturb you.” Another voice, and a clank—dishes—and we both hung up.

  I looked at LuEllen. “She’s in a restaurant.”

  “Could be five minutes from here,” LuEllen said. “Probably is.”

  “No better time,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  >>> I HAD the keys in my pocket, my laptop under my arm. We went through the front door, and up. LuEllen pointed me at Strom’s and I tried the first key. The door popped open. “I’m a genius,” LuEllen said. “I’ll be downstairs.”

  I stepped inside the apartment and called, “Hello?”

  No response. I pushed the door shut with my foot, tripped a light switch, and called, a bit louder, “Hello? Anybody home?”

  No answer. I moved quickly, one fast lap of what turned out to be a two-bedroom apartment, looking for the lights on a burglar alarm key pad. No pad. The place smelled of plants and the acrid odor of plant food. I found, in the kitchen, six African violets, all freshly watered, sitting on a draining board across the sink.

  Then I headed into the second bedroom, which had a cozy office setup, including a desktop Dell and a good office chair. A black-leather satchel, the kind prosperous women executives use as briefcases, sat next to the chair. I brought the machine up, then checked the satchel. Inside was the usual collection of office junk—pens, pencils, Kleenex, an airlines sleep mask, a telephone connection cord for a laptop but no laptop, a spare pair of regular glasses and a pair of prescription sunglasses, a hundred or so business cards, and, tucked away in a pen slot, a gray USB memory key. Terrific.

  I stuck the key into my laptop’s USB slot, dumped a half megabyte of something into my hard drive, and put the key back into the satchel. No time to see what it was. I’d been inside the apartment for three or four minutes and was already feeling the pressure.

  I sat at her machine, hooked it into my laptop, and started dumping her document files to the laptop’s hard drive. Most of the files had unpromising names like Budget and Letters, and I didn’t have a lot of confidence that I was breaking out her computer passwords. While I waited for the files to clear, I checked her desk drawers, the bottom of the keyboard, the underside of the desk, and minutely examined the satchel for any anomalous number-letter combinations that might be passwords. I found nothing.

  Probably was around somewhere, I thought. High-security places tell their employees to come up with passwords of random numbers, letters, and symbols, so that they can’t be cracked by hackers doing research. The problem is, nobody can remember the high-security numbers, so they get written down.

  A better policy would be to tell the password holder to think of a person or place that’s significant to him, subtract a letter or two, and add a significant number or two. Say, your father’s middle name backwards, with your mother’s birthday attached. That way, you’d have a password that you could work out, would never come up in a hacker’s dictionary, and wouldn’t be written down so it couldn’t be stolen. As it is, most high-security passwords look like the registration code on the back of a Windows software box.

  And I couldn’t find one. I found an address book, flipped through it, looked in a checkbook, scanned a small Rolodex, flipped through the pages of a wall calendar featuring English kitchen gardens. Still nothing. The document files cleared, and I went into her computer, looking for other files, finding not much.

  The cell phone rang. A single ring—LuEllen’s signal that I’d been in
side for ten minutes. Now we were pushing it. Too many things happen when you stay inside too long. People notice lights, decide to stop by for a visit. People come home.

  Getting nowhere. Shut down the computer. Gave up.

  >>> I CALLED LuEllen on the way out, and when I got downstairs, she was already walking across the parking lot to the car. I got in, and she said, “What?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

  “Bummer.”

  “Well, I dumped a lot of stuff to the computer, but most of it looked personal.”

  “She’s a Russian major, she’s gotta have a good memory—maybe she just memorizes her codes.”

  “Maybe. But a lot of those places change passwords every month, or every week.”

  >>> I GOT her passwords, all right, and because of LuEllen, a lot faster than I might have.

  At the hotel, I started by looking at the stuff I’d dumped from the USB memory key. When I opened it, I found a novel, chapters 1 through 17.

  “Ah, Christ, she’s writing a novel,” I said. I scanned a page. “She writes okay.”

  “What’s it about?” LuEllen was a reader.

  “Some mystery thing,” I said. “She’s got this bounty-hunter chick or something. I don’t know. Not gonna tell us anything about the working group.”

  I quit the novel files and started through the stuff I’d stripped from her desktop. First up was Strom’s personal budget, and it was a little surprising. She was well-off, for a thirty-three-year-old mid-level bureaucrat. Digging in a little, I found that she’d had an inheritance from her grandfather, nearly half a million dollars, all nicely invested with Fidelity. The next file up was what looked like a series of letters, but I couldn’t be sure, since they were written in Russian.

  I closed that out and rubbed the back of my neck. “I’m gonna go stand in a shower for a few minutes. I’ve been spending too much time in front of a screen.”

  “We oughta go out and run,” LuEllen said. She stood up and stretched. “I’m getting tight myself.”

  “So let’s find a place,” I said. “I’ll do the shower later. Let me pee and wash my face.”

  “Sit down for a minute, I’ll do your shoulders.” I sat. She did my neck and shoulders, and as she started on my shoulders, looked at the laptop and asked, “Which one is the novel?”

  I reached out and clicked on it, Word came up, and the novel ran down the screen. LuEllen was running her knuckles up and down the sides of my spine and I’d just said, “Jeez, that feels good,” when she stopped, leaned forward, and scrolled down the novel.

  “What?”

  “This isn’t right,” she said. “How do I get the next chapter up?”

  I selected CH2 from the list. She read for a moment, then said, “She didn’t write this. This is a Janet Evanovich novel. I read it a couple of years ago.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.” She reached out and touched the screen, which she did occasionally, and which always left an oily fingerprint. “Novels come on computer files now?”

  “I know you can get some for PalmPilots . . . e-books. I didn’t know you could get them in Word format. Maybe the group steals them.”

  She went back to rubbing my shoulders and said, “I couldn’t read a book that way. Maybe kids can. You know, people who had their first computer when they were babies.”

  “Not a friendly way to read a book,” I said. “Great for reference stuff, though.” A thought struck me and I said, “Hang on a minute. Let me look at something.” I spent a couple of minutes combining the files into one large new file, then ran a search for the numeral 1. There was a single hit, but not relevant.

  I got another nonrelevant hit with 2, but with 3, I got a hit on 39@1czt8*p* and on ll5f4!35lp0.

  “She’s buried her passwords in the novel,” I said. Finding them felt like my fifth-grade Christmas, and I laughed out loud. “Pretty goddamn smart. Instantly accessible and completely portable with the data key, and totally invisible.”

  “Wonder if she talked to Evanovich about it?” LuEllen asked. But she was pleased with herself; I know she was pleased because she gave me a noogie.

  >>> WE DROVE back to our wi-fi spot, signed in on Strom’s account, then took the next step, pushing into the files. I had two passwords to choose from.

  “No way to tell?” LuEllen asked. We were set up right on the street, in a dark spot.

  “Not that I see.”

  “Do a scissors-paper-rock. You’re the first code, I’m the second one.”

  We did a scissors-paper-rock, three rounds, and then she won. We put in the second code, and the remote computer cracked open like an egg.

  “Shazam,” I said.

  >>> EVERYBODY probably has a few moments in his life when he feels like he’s fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole. That’s what I felt like when I got into DDC Working Group—Bobby.

  To begin with, DDC was the official name, with no Bobby—but Bobby was all over the place. The DDC, it seemed, was an actual experimental arm for a package of anti-terrorism techniques being developed by the military and the various intelligence organizations. One of their tests was to find Bobby, using a whole array of Web-scanning devices and surveillance.

  I pulled a file labeled South and found an elaborate argument that Bobby was probably living in Louisiana, because analysis of the DuChamps name suggested a Cajun French background, and other analyses had already established that he probably lived in the Gulf states.

  The South file noted a counterargument that suggested that Bobby was active in racial affairs, was probably black and therefore not Cajun at all.

  “They were moving closer, but they had no idea of who he really was,” I said. “Not yet. Look, they were even analyzing phone-use patterns.”

  “And they never got the word that Bobby was dead. Nobody told them.”

  >>> MOVING ON.

  “Look at this. They’re talking about getting rid of money,” I said. I was astonished. “Jesus Christ, they’re running models, already. They’re talking about a few years.”

  “They can’t.”

  “Sure they could. They’re laying it out. Everybody carries a smart card from the bank, backed by the government. It has your ID right on the card, along with a little liquid crystal display to tell you what your balance is.” I tapped the screen, a photo of a working prototype of the card. “Use it for everything, but see, they require you use it for all transactions over twenty dollars. So you have a card and pocket change, and that’s it. No more illegal purchases. You couldn’t even buy your dope with pocket change, because anytime somebody showed up with a thousand bucks in twenties, they’d have to explain where it came from.”

  “It’d totally fuck me,” LuEllen said.

  “Depending on what you stole,” I said. “Jewelry, stamps, high-value stuff . . . take them across the border, sell them in Mexico.”

  “For what? What would I bring back? Sombreros?”

  “That’s a point. You might have to move down there permanently.”

  >>> WE DUG into a directory called Biometric. They were running 3-D cameras set up at FedEx Field that would examine faces and gaits, compare them to faces and gaits of known criminals and terrorists, and alert the monitoring authority in real time. They were using the faces and gaits of a selected sample of their own people, who would go to the stadium during games to see if the cameras could pick them up.

  “You walk past a convenience store camera and a bell rings somewhere,” LuEllen said.

  “More or less.”

  The success rate was down at the 30 percent level, but was inching up; they were going for a 150-meter recognition distance. When the success rate moved past the 50 percent mark, the plan was to place the cameras in airports, shopping centers, car rental agencies, and in selected “observation points”—for that, you could read “across the street from the neighborhood mosque.”

  “Eventually, you could track anyone,” I said. “All you’d have to do is be inter
ested in what the person was doing. Take a few observational tapes, get your recognition formula together, and there you are. A guy couldn’t walk around town without the cops knowing who you were and where you were, every minute of the day.”

  “Like 1984.”

  “Exactly like that. The camera in the front room.”

  >>> THEY were testing programs that would intercept phone messages—the implication was all phone messages—and would analyze conversations for words and phrases that might indicate illegal activity.

  “Like how would they do that?”

  “You’d say, ‘Why don’t we get the rest of the Al Qaeda sleeper cell together and spend some time building dirty bombs and talking in Arabic about chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare with which to blow up these infidel dogs.’ The computer would then automatically record the message, figure out from the vocabulary that something was going on, and alert a live monitor.”

  “Wouldn’t a terrorist talk in code?”

  “I don’t know, a lot of them are kinda stupid. Even if it didn’t work on terrorists, if they got this set up, it sure would let them fuck with everybody else.”

  >>> THE group was also looking at real-time language translation with a heavy emphasis on Chinese and Central Asian languages, and was talking about a new generation of databases that could handle amounts of data several orders of magnitude greater than anything we yet had.

  The giant databases would also be tied to the money-card program, because the databases would be used to analyze virtually everybody’s purchases—all of them—looking for “suspicious” activity.

  The group was also talking about a highly developed computer model that would, in some sense, predict likely futures, so that the government could begin taking early action to avoid whatever outcome it wanted to avoid.

  The idea was to intercept futures that led, say, to revolution in Saudi Arabia. The problem was, if it worked, there was no way that it would not be used to prevent the opposition party, the party out of power, from winning an election. That would happen almost at once—probably as soon as the program was running. I mean, it was just too good not to use.