by John Barnes
As Durango’s scream level declined, mostly because Hale kept interrupting him and trying to focus him, it became clear just what Calvin Durango wanted. He wanted me to jump on that case and bust it wide open and arrest everyone within a hundred miles, right now. “Don’t you understand?” he shrieked at Hale. “If this leaks out at this stage in the research, we’re all dead one way or another. It’s either like the atom bomb but a hundred times worse, because you could build this in any well-equipped high school anywhere in the world, or it’s suddenly as public domain as the wheel and the whole world gets rich but we don’t, or … for god’s sake, Hale, try to at least look a little concerned! This is a disaster, to have this outside the company anywhere.”
“Mr. Durango,” I said, “we have no way to compel you to do this, but it might help for me to put you under a polygraph. Would you be willing?”
Durango nodded emphatically. “I have nothing to hide. How soon can we do it?”
“I need to see some other people and formulate my questions, based on what they say,” I said. “I’ll need your permission to talk to everyone in your group.”
“I’ll order full and complete cooperation, and then stay away from them so that they don’t shade the truth. And in this environment I can order them all to take a polygraph test at any time. Just let me know who and I’ll issue the order.” Being able to say that he was taking drastic action seemed to calm him considerably.
“All right, well, what I ask during the polygraph sessions will depend on what I find out while questioning. So it might be a day or two before I start that. But I’m on it, and I’m busy about it. You can at least count on that.”
Durango nodded and finally caught his breath, beginning to seem almost human. “Are you cleared at a high enough level to know what a disaster this is?”
“I believe so, yes, sir, though it’s always possible that there’s more I don’t know about.”
After he left, Hale looked like a poisoned fish, but not so cheerful. “All right, I know you’ve been in the security business a long time. So have I. Wasn’t that the best innocent act you’ve ever seen?”
“Damn straight it was. Yeah. But on the other hand—”
“I know the evidence. I just don’t see how it all adds up. If Calvin Durango is guilty, how can he be carrying off an act like the one we just saw? I can believe he could give us that performance but not of that story; he’d have to know that we might have the goods on him. And why would he immediately agree to everything you asked?”
I gave him my best Bruce-Willis-style cocky, irritating grin, and said, “Because he’s not guilty of anything serious. Not to his knowledge, I mean. He’s not stealing the information, but it’s being stolen through him. He didn’t know that till now, and he doesn’t really know it yet, but he suspects it, probably because he himself knows some way that it could be happening, which means he’ll be trying to find out if his horrible suspicions are true. So I gotta go track him for a spell; and chances are that as he tries to find out if the worst is happening, he’ll lead me to what I want to know. So, if you don’t mind—I got things to do.”
Hale nodded, tugging at his lower lip. “I am not in the habit of second-guessing; sorry I asked.”
“Naw, you needed to know I wasn’t crazy.”
Hale and I got the schedule of interviews set up—he really wasn’t a bad guy, for a pickle-butted Yankee—and I got out of there. I had another idea, and good guy or not, Hale was one person I shouldn’t discuss it with.
CHAPTER SIX
One thing that just gnawed at my intuition was the spooky flatness of Lena Logan’s voice when she had relayed that paper over the phone, and the methodical way she went about every bit of description. You picked up on it, a little, John, when you noticed that she pronounced “Subj” rather than saying “Subject.”
My brain just wouldn’t leave that alone. Now, if I’d been law enforcement, some lawyer would have been telling me I had to convince a judge enough to get a warrant. Or if I’d told Hale about it and made him see how weird it was—she has sex with Jason, calls him Calvin, and somehow that causes something on Calvin’s desk to download verbatim into Lena—well, even if he’d had the imagination to say, yeah, that must be happening, he’s corporate security, and he’d have to think about what might happen if company employers or contractors got caught.
Whereas I could just figure, it was Tuesday night. She had her seminar. Perfect time for a very low-profile burglary.
So that evening, I walked by her apartment’s front door on that second-floor gallery, real slow, and looked through the gaps in the drapes; a few minutes later I did the same thing, coming from the other direction. Of course I needed to look like I belonged, which was why I wore a bland brown uniform and carried a clipboard.
She had her drapes drawn, but I could catch glimpses of her living room through the openings. It looked like the model apartments that managers show you if you’re thinking about moving into a fancy complex.
She had a lot of hardware on that door. And the door itself was visible from many angles. So I headed around to the back side, which turned out friendlier—darker, fewer angles it could be seen from, time and space to get a good look. She had a “model” bedroom, her own messy bedroom, and an office, which was nearest the kitchen. So she’d actually rented a big three-bedroom, but with its layout and all, her student friends, if she ever had them over, wouldn’t notice that her apartment should have been out of her price range.
There was quite the array of locks on the back door too, but with privacy, I could work confidently and quickly. Two minutes later I walked into her office and sat down at her computer.
I’d modem-watched her enter her mom’s birthday as a password for three different subscriber web sites. Sure enough, all the password-protected stuff on her hard drive took the same password.
All she had was password protection, and very simple off-the-rack commercial password protection at that, for her money-related files, which are the first things somebody like me goes after. She had a plain old Excel spreadsheet with her business records, and from those records, I learned a hundred times what I had learned from that bug on her window—and became at least a thousand times as baffled.
Now, a good-looking young incall hooker in a high-tech area makes money. Affording a nice three-bedroom apartment at the high end of student living, all to herself, was no doubt a breeze, and she probably had other nice extras and luxuries too, especially since the income tends to be in cash and therefore easy to hide from the IRS. Even the stuff that was on the books was a nice little chunk of change. But then I saw the rest of her books.
All that prostitution income was chump change compared to what she was getting from selling goddies—she was turning maybe eight tricks a week, but every goddy she sold—just the individual pills, and she sold ’em in boxes of twenty—was almost as much as half a trick, and she was selling about two hundred pills a week. That was the point where I found out that goddies were yet another thing named Gaudeamus, a registered trademark of the Krygon Corporation, according to an image of one label that she’d scanned and stored for no reason I knew.
Yeah, I thought that too. Xegon, Negon, Krygon—three names that were kind of but not quite the names of the inert gases—and … well, anyway, I still don’t know what that’s about. Logically I’m gonna run into Argon, Hegon, and Ragon before this is over, eh? But here’s one thought that would make some of our old Wash U profs proud of us, John. Suppose that -gon is like in polygon and hexagon and pentagon, it’s side. Then you stick other roots on, and shrink things for English tongues that don’t like jammed-together consonants, and you get Xegon, the Strange Side, Negon, the Anti-Side, and Krygon, the Hidden Side. What’s that mean? Fuck if I know. But, like one English professor used to yell at us, “it doesn’t matter if anyone meant it, it matters if it’s there, and if you can see it, it must be there!”
“You do a pretty good impression of him even now,” I said,
“or at least our memories faded the same way. He was sure a character. He died last year, it was in the alum news, which you don’t get because you were a slacker dropout who went off to kill babies—”
“That’s what he would have thought, for sure. Well, say nothing bad about the dead, because they get all eternity to make fun of us, eh?”
“And you’ll never guess who did the ‘I remember Old Yellowfang’ article in the alum mag. A name I bet you haven’t thought in twenty years.”
“Wallace the Waffle Whiffer.”
“More obscure than that. Hint. What genius was nearly seven feet tall and looked like a dirty haystack and smelled like a laundry bag that got forgotten and was going to save the Earth—and was the only student that Old Yellowfang ever acted like he liked?”
“Not Brown Pierre! I thought he had to be dead! He was gonna chain himself to a moose to save it from hunters or something, wasn’t he?”
I shrugged. “People change. I didn’t want to be confined to an office and now most of the time my offices, here and at school, are the only places I feel comfortable.”
“People don’t change that much. Brown Pierre … wow, yeah. The man who wrote a thirty-page paper, in one night, about how Black Beauty was a better book than Huckleberry Finn because horses had it rougher than slaves, and got a black Twain scholar to give him an A on it. The man who wrote about The Last of the Mohicans from the viewpoint of the trees, and got an intervarsity prize for it. And it wasn’t just that all those English profs were a bunch of woo woo nutbags, either. Damn that man-mountain hippie dirtbag could argue. I always figured that if I’d been trapped on an elevator with the Giant Envirohippie Walking Compost Pile for three hours, I’d have come out a Quaker vegetarian.”
“If you hadn’t asphyxiated in the first ten minutes,” I agreed. “Yeah, when I’m teaching rhetoric, I sort of understand why our profs were that way about him. Very few undergrads can really argue anything; when you meet one that can, you almost don’t care if he’s a creationist or a cannibal, it’s just so nice to see that. Anyway, he wrote about just what you were making fun of, that the big thing he learned from Old Yellowfang was that it wasn’t what was meant but what was said, and that that was a lodestone in his life, and had made him the vagrant pile of laundry and literary genius that he was today, and like that. Same structure as Biff Oldbux’s memoir in which he says some biz professor’s inspirational example led directly to Biff’s deciding to become head of Oldbux Corporation (after he inherited it). Anyway the article finished up saying ‘Brown Pierre is a writer and lives in Colorado most of the time.’ So I guess it could’ve been him instead of you at my door. Here to hold a funeral for the chicken in my freezer, perhaps.”
“Yeah—hey, I have to ask—when the Unabomber stuff was getting all that publicity, and the manifesto came out … did you think of Brown Pierre?”
“Um, I thought real hard, about how much the Unabomber Manifesto sounded like Brown Pierre, and then I called the FBI and turned him in.”
“So did I, old son. And I still think I was right—I don’t mean that Brown Pierre was the Unabomber, I mean I was right to turn him in, because the manifesto and Brown Pierre sure did sound alike, and if I’d kept silent, and it had been Brown Pierre, I’d feel like there was blood on my hands when he hit again. Wonder if Brown Pierre is one of those people that writes fan letters to Kaszcynski? They’d have a lot to agree about, you know.”
“Yeah. Well, anyway, I just thought it was interesting that we had an old buddy in the neighborhood, and you made me think of it. So, you were reading through this hooker’s biz records—”
“Oh, yeah.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Well, if what you are is the main thing you do, and everything else is a hobby, then old Lena isn’t exactly a hooker. What she is, is a real conundrum, and I got no idea how to solve it.”
Lena’s earnings from selling goddies were about an order of magnitude bigger than her earnings from being an incall. Figure she didn’t work year round, most of ’em don’t, then she had a fifty k a year or so prostitution business but she had a more than half a million a year coming in from goddies—that’s net. Her supplier was charging her something, but her sales were about three times her cost of supply. And like I said, that was all chump change compared to her large business.
Yeah, her large business. The one that dwarfed hooking and pills—the one that came in at at least ten million a year. Industrial espionage. She wasn’t just selling Xegon secrets to Negon. Through a separate line, she was doing the reverse—probably many of the reports I’d seen from Xegon’s intel op had in fact come from old Lena. Besides those two companies, she’d been stealing from and selling to just over a dozen high-tech companies, defense, computers, aerospace, nukes, robotics, name it … if you wanted tech reports from a lab that the public wasn’t even supposed to know existed, Lena Logan was your gal. She had a neat little file naming every technical paper she’d sold or acquired, all of them mp3 voice files, with who’d paid how much for it.
Turning tricks must be her cover, in case some tax authority noticed that she had bales of unreported income. I mean, nobody really likes having sex for money, or at least in all the years I’ve been interviewing and hiring—to get the goods on wandering-eyed husbands, smartass—in all those years I never met a girl who really liked what she did. Not enough to keep doing it as a hobby.
Even selling goddies looked like a hobby compared to the industrial espionage work.
But why pick two highly illegal activities that are a lot more work, and don’t make as much money, as covers for a quasi-legal one that makes orders of magnitude more money?
And incidentally, she wasn’t just making enough to pay for grad school. She was making enough to have put three or four good physicists on the payroll, if there was really something she wanted to know. So why the hell would she want a masters in physics? It’s employable and all that good stuff, but this girl didn’t need a job. She was already getting paid like a ballplayer, and working shorter hours than a preacher. The only purpose of the incalls and the drug deals had to be to get her the access for the espionage.
But that was dwarfed by another fact: her records showed that she was writing checks to the business, every now and then. It wasn’t feeding her; she was subsidizing it—or more likely it was shell for buying things she wanted, for whatever her real purposes were.
Imagine that you’ve got Rockefeller-class money, either inherited or earned. So you use that to set up an incredibly lucrative spying business that could get it all sued away from you and maybe land you in a federal pen, which you then hide behind a massive drugsmuggling operation, except that, to keep all of the above concealed, you turn tricks. Now, why do you do that?
I didn’t have any idea either, so I just popped a copy over to my laptop, and looked for more things, and finally saw one of the most obvious.
Lena Logan was using an off-the-rack commercial hidden partition program, one of those things that makes your hundred-gig hard drive look like it’s a sixty, so you can hide forty gig of whatever, with a secret key combo to get in. Once I booted her machine up from a CD, and saw that the hard drive was actually a hundred, I restarted again, held down the four keys for the numbers of her mom’s birthday, and tried hitting alt and control and so forth, singly and in combination—a little routine I’ve made up for that, because the trick is so common. Sure enough, shift-alt-mom’s-birthday got me onto the hidden part of the hard drive.
It held a single ten-gig file called GAUDEAMUS CONTROL. I brought it up—it was an application—and of course the first screen was an enter button with a password—Mama’s birthday worked again (you know, if I ever marry old Lena, I’m gonna so impress her mother with the way I remember her birthday). I clicked on it and it felt like the furnace came on—a weird low thrum in the floor. I opened some doors, and found the next weird part of the weird part.
Lena Logan had a big old refrigerator sitting where her dryer ought to be, and it had
come on with a whump. That was my first thought. But it had obviously been messed with, and not neatly—there were holes patched with plywood and duct tape, and things running through the plywood covers, cables and hoses and pipes. On the back of the fridge, the hot-side coils were covered by an oven hood and the exhaust of the oven hood had been connected with an aluminum duct to the dryer vent.
Down lower, beside the freezer compartment, two thick cables came in; she had both her dryer 220 and her stove 220 jumpered over to something inside that fridge. That at least made sense of the hood and fan; she had up to 17,600 watts going into there, enough to heat her big apartment and then some, and she needed a way to get rid of the waste heat. The fridge itself was running, moving the heat out onto the hot side coils, but that wasn’t the humming I’d noticed; a fridge running is one of those sounds that no modern person can focus attention on. The deeper, more resonant bass hum I heard was coming from the freezer compartment.
I opened it and saw a big old mother of a transformer, the kind of thing that normally you’d have in a metal housing outside a decent-sized machine shop. She was using the freezer to cool it enough to keep it running.
There was a set of leads as thick as my wrist running up into the fridge compartment. I wrapped two bandanas around the fridge compartment door handle—I really didn’t want to grab on to that much power, and remember I had no idea what might be inside that door—and pulled it open.
There was rack on rack of old computer motherboards, every one I could see a Pentium. She had a homebuilt Beowulf. I didn’t take time to count exactly, but since there’s architectural advantages to using powers of two, and she had way over a hundred, my guess is she had 256 processors in there. All that power—as much as the dryer, oven, and range together would use to run flat out—was just barely enough to keep that homemade monster running.
