The Fool's Run

  Plenty. How much?

  My pleasure. No charge.

  Bobby is not a person to bother with unimportant matters, so I never asked him directly how he figured it out. That he did is bizarre beyond words.

  Once I had the codes, I got inside the satellite. It turned out to be a small computer in the accounting department. I got its phone number from its files.

  On the tenth day of the attack, Maggie flew out to Chicago. She was back two days later.

  “How was Anshiser?” I asked.

  She sat at a dressing table with her back to me, peering into a dark mirror as she took down her hair.

  “Worse,” she said tersely. “I hate to look at him. He’s losing more weight. His skin looks like crepe paper.”

  “The doctors still don’t know what’s wrong?”

  “They keep saying stress, but some of them are nervous about the diagnosis. He may go out to the Mayo.”

  “He should have gone a month ago.”

  I was lying on the bed in my shorts, all the lights out except the small pink-shaded lamp on the dressing table. The apartment was quiet. Dace was at his apartment, closing it down, and LuEllen was in Duluth.

  “How has it been here?” Maggie asked, unscrewing an earring.

  “Whitemark will figure it out soon now,” I said. “The engineering system is falling apart. Things must be chaotic. The office mail system will stop working tomorrow. That’s the main way they route assignments and schedules, so that’ll be shot. On Friday the paychecks all come up short.”

  Maggie dropped a second earring on the tabletop and turned on the cushioned bench, so she was facing me. “Turret comes out tomorrow,” she said. “I called Dace this morning before I left Chicago. He had solid word that the generals’ story would be in it.”

  “He didn’t mention it to me,” I said. “I didn’t see him today, just the note on the table saying he would be at his place tonight.”

  She stood up and stepped toward the bed, wearing a brassiere and panties and slip. She pulled the slip over her head and tossed it negligently on a side chair. “You were on the computer, and he didn’t want to bother you,” she said. “He said you were in a fugue state. Undo me?”

  She sat on the edge of the bed; I propped myself up and unsnapped the brassiere, and kissed her between the shoulder blades. She arched her shoulders and pivoted on her butt and lay back on her pillow, her hair spreading out.

  “Haven’t heard anything about the kiddie porn yet,” I said.

  “Ah. Dace said something was happening. He attached his video recorder to the TV and set the timer for the news programs. It’s running now,” she said.

  “Jesus, I didn’t even see it. I’ve been out of it.”

  She rolled on her side facing me and slid her hand down inside my shorts. “Aw, has you been aw wonesome and sulking since mama’s been gone?”

  I groaned. “God save me from women who talk baby talk to my dick.”

  “Oh yeah?” she said.

  Later that night we were lying in spoons, my arm over her hip, her butt against my stomach. When she had been breathing deep and steady for ten minutes, I got up and padded out of the room and quietly closed the door behind me. I had the computer up a minute later, and I was out on the phone lines, looking around. Sometimes, nothing will stop the code in your head.

  THE NEXT DAY was the peak of the programming. I sat on the computer for nine straight hours, working out one piece after another, checking, debugging, rechecking. When I got out of the chair I could barely walk.

  “You need a Fuji,” Dace said as I hobbled out of the office.

  “What’s that?”

  Fuji’s Water-Gate was a thoroughly westernized Japanese bathhouse not far from the Pentagon— westernized because the patrons wore tank suits and bathed in private groups. The bathing pools were not much bigger than good-sized hot tubs, but the water was infinitely hotter. Dace and Maggie dropped into it, moaned for a few seconds, then relaxed, and watched LuEllen and me test the water.

  “C’mon, you’ll live,” Maggie said. “No guts?” With that, LuEllen dropped in like a stone, went completely under, gasped, and tried to crawl back out. Dace, laughing, grabbed her around the waist and held her squealing until she settled down. “Get your ass in here, Kidd,” she said.

  The water was hot enough to boil lobsters. I slipped in, an inch at a time, to my hips, supporting my weight with my hands.

  “That’s the worst way,” Dace said snidely. “You get ten minutes of pain instead of ten seconds.”

  “I’ll do it my way,” I said.

  “You’ll boil your balls, is what you’ll do,” Maggie snorted. LuEllen and Dace looked at her strangely, and she blushed, then all three burst out laughing.

  “All right, all right.” I took a breath and dropped the rest of the way in, up to my chin. LuEllen, who is as strong as an ox, reached over and pushed my head under. For a moment, I thought my heart had stopped. When it started again, I huddled up next to Maggie until all the nerve endings died and I could straighten out.

  “Jesus. How long do we have to stay in here?”

  “An hour or so,” Maggie said, grinning.

  “We’ll be dead in an hour.”

  “Nonsense. In two minutes, you’ll feel fine.”

  She was right. Two minutes later I felt fine. We floated around the pool, talking, not touching, never mentioning Whitemark or the attack. LuEllen had been to the Smithsonian and—Dace laughed—had been looking at the display of locks. Dace, LuEllen said, had been closing down his apartment, and she had been helping. When she cleaned out the front room, she found a sack lunch behind the couch. Dace admitted that it was probably two years old, from a tough time when he was making his own lunch. There was a little plastic container of green grapes, LuEllen said, that had gone past raisinhood and had reached petrification.

  Maggie told the other two that when I thought she was asleep, I snuck out of the bedroom and went back to the computer. “I can’t compete, I guess.”

  “Of course you can,” Dace said, ogling her thinly concealed breasts.

  “Down, boy,” said LuEllen.

  Maggie threw back her head and laughed and lay back in the water, and she looked like a medieval swan queen come to life. Sometime during the forty-five minutes we spent in the pool, the code stopped running through my head.

  THE HEAD OF the Whitemark systems department, his wife, and twenty-three-year-old son were arrested at seven o’clock the next morning on a variety of pornography charges, all of them felonies. It was midmorning, and I was already on the machine, working, when the phone rang and Maggie answered. She listened for a moment, said, “Great” and “What channel?” and “Goodbye.”

  “That was Dace,” she reported, leaning in the doorway. “He said to look at the ‘Morning Break’ news on Channel Three. He said the cops picked up our pornographer friends. There was a ‘Live Eye’ report right from the house.”

  We went into the living room and backed up the video recorder until we found the “Morning Break” segment, and watched the three people coming out of the house in handcuffs.

  “I feel kind of sorry for them,” Maggie said. The wife, a weighty, gray-haired matron, was weeping. She tried to cover her face with her hands, but the cameras tracked her right to the car.

  “Think about what they were doing,” I said. But it wasn’t pretty.

  After the unhappy family was bundled off in a squad car, the camera cut to a half dozen uniformed cops filing in and out of the garage door, carrying boxes full of magazines. We watched until the end of the segment, and then Maggie called Channel Three.

  “Listen,” she said when she got the news department, “if you hadn’t heard, this man they arrested on the child pornography is a very important executive at Whitemark Aerospace. I work there, and I know. He runs all their computers. I think some of the other guys in that department may be working with him on this porn thing. They’re pretty close.”

  She li
stened for a minute. “No, I can’t. If I told you my name I could get fired. But he’s really a bigshot.”

  She dropped the phone on the hook, and it rang again almost before she had taken her hand away. She listened for a moment, said “Thanks,” and hung up. “Dace again,” she said. “Turret is out. The generals are on the front. They reprinted the critical letters word for word.”

  “Ah. We’re rolling.”

  “Yes.” She got the phone book and methodically called the rest of the television stations about the tie between the pornographer and Whitemark. Then she started calling the newspapers and wire services, urging them to look at the Turret article.

  On day 16, The Wall Street Journal ran an expanded version of the Turret story. The New York Times, the Post, and the Associated Press followed the next day, although the AP story was so hedged against libel that it was hard to tell what was happening.

  The Post is not nearly as good a paper as the Times, but it can bleed a story like an eighteenth-century barber-surgeon squeezing every exquisite moment of agony out of a public death. After reporting the generals’ relationship with Whitemark, it followed the next day with a complicated explanation by Whitemark. The day after that, there was an even more complicated explanation from the generals, paired with a Post editorial deploring military corruption. The day after that, there was an analysis, and the day after that, more of the letters—Dace had saved a few to use as fresheners after the story started to age. Dace also called the Post metro desk and reminded them of the pornographers’ arrest. He hinted that the release of letters was revenge taken by somebody in the computer department on the company that was currently blackguarding their former systems director. That produced a master-piece of analysis that ran on day 23.

  In the meantime, the paychecks failed on day 18, and Maggie planted rumors that swept through Wall Street on the following Monday, containing the killer phrase, “inadequate cash flow.” Whitemark stock, which had drifted higher during the year, on favorable rumors about the Hellwolf, plummeted from seventy-one to fifty-nine on Monday, rebounded to sixty on Tuesday, and dropped to fifty-four on Wednesday.

  “Is that good enough?” I asked.

  She snorted. “Anytime you take twenty-five percent of value off your target in two days, you’re doing okay,” she said.

  “You’ve done this before?”

  She had one computer hooked into a market bank, and she looked up from the numbers and smiled. “Not exactly like this. But we’ve taken down a few in our time.”

  ON DAY 21, Dace overheard a rumor about a fistfight at Whitemark. He chased it, and over a couple of drinks an old friend told him that an engineer had attacked a computer tech on the production floor. Another computer tech jumped in, and a couple other engineers tried to break it up and wound up in the fight themselves.

  “Something weird is happening out there,” Dace’s friend told him. “The security guys hauled everybody down to the lounge area to cool them off. One of the computer techs told one of these security guys that the computers were possessed.”

  “Possessed?”

  “Yeah. You know, by the Devil.”

  ALL THROUGH THE attack, when I was alone, I looked at tarot spreads. I did two dozen spreads on day 22. The Emperor, the Empress, the Wheel, the Moon, the Hanged Man. The Fool. I worried it, I assigned identities and reassigned them. I went to bed dreaming of Anshiser and the Hermit.

  ON DAY 23, Maggie had a long talk with Dillon. LuEllen and Dace and I were in the kitchen drinking coffee when she got off the line.

  “Dillon’s freaked out,” she said. “Whitemark is shaking right down to the roots. They’re paralyzed, their String copy is failing, they’re running into new problems with Hellwolf. Dillon said they’re completely out of control. He sounded scared. He said we’re making history. He said this was like Pearl Harbor, but nobody recognizes it except us.”

  “So it’s working,” said LuEllen.

  “Look what happened to the Japs,” Dace said.

  “How’s Anshiser?” I asked.

  Maggie shook her head. “Dillon says he’s about the same. He’s not losing much, but he’s not gaining, either.”

  “So?”

  “So we just go on.”

  AT ONE O’CLOCK on the morning of day 24, a few hours after Maggie talked with Dillon, the phone rang. I picked it up and got a 2400-baud carrier tone. I punched the modem up, and there was a quick squirt of data and the line shut down.

  Something happens with Whitemark phone lines. Cutouts. Watching incoming calls at Whitemark, set to trace. From now on call me at special line number only. Call now.

  I dialed a special number Bobby had arranged that couldn’t be traced out to him. The techniques were unremarkable, he said, but if a trace were made, it would end at an Afghanistan banana stand, which he’d found while paging through a Kabul phone directory in the Kremlin.

  When he came up this time, there was no What?

  Tried to trace the tracers. Not go to FBI, go to NSA. Scary shit. Recommend stay off wires, use back door only.

  Okay. Recommend that you change your main number, leave me only special line.

  Will do now.

  Need more money?

  You got more?

  Sure. Will send $10K.

  ’Bye.

  Frankly, what I did in Vietnam—it sounds silly now, when I think about it—was run up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail and bug VC telephone lines. Most people don’t think about the VC having phone lines and operators and all that, but they did, of course. I’d find a good place, tap into a line, lead it out to a battery-operated radio disguised to look like a lump of mud or a pollywog or whatever the backroom boys at the CIA thought was good that month, and sneak away. For the next couple of weeks, we’d listen to their phone calls, which, I was told, went mostly like this: “Hey Vang, you see the knockers on that PFC came down with that load of bike tires yesterday? Honest to Ho, I wanted to crawl right in between them and play motorboat, you know what I mean?”

  In the course of gathering this intelligence, I met dozens of people from the CIA. Most of them were okay, a few were stone killers, and one or two were terminally stupid. I met only two guys from the National Security Agency. Both were frighteningly smart. Somewhere at the back of my head, I tucked away a personal memo that said, “If you get your ass out of this, don’t fuck with the NSA.”

  AFTER BOBBY’S WARNING, I began entering the Whitemark computer through the satellite, the computer that used the codes from the Mersenne Prime. It was an old machine, a minicomputer with its own phone lines. It wasn’t used much, but it did have that direct line into the main system. I would call into the satellite, and from there, plug into the main system. If the NSA was watching only the incoming phone lines for the main computer, I could still get in without being noticed. If my presence in the main machine was detected, it would seem that I was working from inside the system itself.

  On the morning of day 26, I put in several minor bombs calculated to alter some critical bits of software in a way that would not be immediately detectable, but which would thoroughly screw selected work output.

  On day 27, on the same day the Justice Department announced a special task force to investigate the Whitemark relationship with Defense Department officials, I changed the code that did Whitemark’s floating-point mathematics. The change would be virtually undetectable, and the resulting design problems would be almost impossible to pinpoint.

  At one o’clock on the morning of day 28, as I was working on a couple of final items, Bobby called again.

  More phone changes. Believe monitoring entire exchange for data transmissions. Recommend shutdown.

  Can I get in one last time?

  There was a pause, and then:

  If you call special number, can piggyback on me. I call Whitemark, when get in, you put in code, I watch lines. One time only.

  Okay.

  Tomorrow 10 a.m. your time.

  LuEllen was back the next
morning, and she and Dace came in with Maggie to watch over my shoulder as we put the last program in. Or tried to.

  “Is there any possibility that they could trace us here?” LuEllen asked.

  “I don’t think so. But with the NSA, you can’t be sure. If they do, Bobby will know. We’ll get out.”

  LuEllen looked around the room. “What about fingerprints and everything? We’re all over this place.”

  “If they’re good enough to trace us through Bobby’s intercepts, we’re cooked,” I admitted.

  “All we can do is run for it and hope Anshiser’s interference will pay off. Even if they pick up prints, we’d have a day or two. You guys can get out to Mexico, Maggie can get back to Chicago, and I’ll take off in my car.”

  “Shit. That doesn’t sound so good,” LuEllen said.

  “What’s the risk, what’s the benefit?” Maggie asked.

  “I’ve got a nice finishing touch to put in. And to tell you the truth, I think Bobby’s at least as good with phones as anybody at NSA. Besides, they’re not expecting him. They don’t know we can see the traces coming out.”

  She thought about it for a minute, pulling at her lip. “Let’s do it,” she said.

  You on line with code?

  Yes. 9-second squirt.

  Be ready.

  Bobby dialed us into Whitemark through the satellite. When it came up, I punched it in, and our modem started transmitting. Two seconds into it, the transmission shut down as though cut with an ax.