The Fool's Run

  The beeper on my radio went off. I said, “What?” and she said, “Maggie’s out of the car and heard the shots. She’s just standing there.”

  “Well, we got problems,” I said. “It’s the right guys, but one of them jumped off the bridge and he’s on the loose. He may be hurt. It was a hell of a fall, and I sprayed the place down.”

  “I’m coming down,” she said.

  “You keep an eye on Maggie,” I said.

  “Fuck that.”

  I tossed the radio on top of the backpack and crawled along the upper edge of the road until I was thirty yards from the ravine and around a shallow curve. There was no sign of Ratface. If he was uninjured and sat tight, he would be almost impossible to get at. On the other hand, he might be unconscious under the bridge, helpless from the fall. Either way, he might not expect me to be on his side of the road. I moved up the road, ran across, then dropped flat on a game trail. Nothing. Moving slowly, slowly, I turned back toward the ravine. Still nothing. I stopped, waited, moved up, stopped.

  I was fifteen yards from the bridge when Maggie gave him away. They had radios, handsets, and his had been clipped to his belt. She beeped him. I heard the beep, high and electronic, as distinct in the woods as a raven call would be in a computer lab. It came from the near bank of the ravine, over the lip. Was he still with the radio, or had he dumped it? There was no second beep, and I crouched, watching, ears straining.

  LuEllen broke the impasse when she came down the hill over my old position. She touched a tree, or stepped on some brush, and Ratface heard it and moved. He was hurt, all right. His face was covered with blood, one leg was apparently twisted at the knee, but he still had the gun. He dragged himself up beside the roadbed opposite my ambush site. I waited until he was fully in the open and brought the M16 down on him. At the last second he apparently sensed me behind him, because he twisted and threw out a hand and, like Dace, said, “Wait.” I unloaded the M16 into his side and back. He was dead before the bullets stopped shuddering through him.

  “LuEllen!” I shouted across the road. “Two down.”

  “Are there more?”

  “I don’t think so. I didn’t see a backup.”

  “Maggie.”

  LuEllen started running along the hill parallel to the road, an awkward galumphing in the camouflage suit. I followed on my side. We came through the bend and saw Maggie running back toward her car.

  “Shoot her,” LuEllen screamed.

  I dropped to one knee and put the scope on her back. She ran so well. I watched as she took five steps, ten, long, lithe strides like a college runner . . .

  “Shoot,” LuEllen screamed again.

  “Ah, shit,” I said, and took the gun down.

  LuEllen looked at me, looked at Maggie, close to her car now, put up her MAC-10, and sprayed out the whole clip. A MAC-10’s effective range must be about thirty yards; she was shooting at more than two hundred. I saw one slug hit the dirt road perhaps fifty yards behind Maggie. The rest must have gone into the woods or the hillside. Maggie got back to the car, climbed in, and cranked it around in a circle. She stopped abruptly, a bag flew out of the window, and she was gone.

  GRAVEDIGGING IS BRUTAL work.

  With Maggie gone, I ran back to the bridge, dragged both bodies into the brush above the ravine, and scuffed dirt over the bloodstains, while LuEllen picked up the brass from the M16. If a car came down the road—an unlikely occurrence—nothing would be visible. That done, LuEllen and I climbed the hillside together, all the way to the top, toward the lower end of the road. Once over the ridgeline, we doubled back toward the top end. We found a good clump of trees above the road and crawled into it and lay there for three hours, and never a thing moved. Later on, we walked back down the road and looked at the bundle Maggie had thrown out of the window. It was the rest of the money.

  “Maybe she wanted to deal,” LuEllen said doubtfully.

  “If she had to. If we’d come up with something she couldn’t fight,” I said.

  “We did, I guess,” said LuEllen. We looked at the money for a while, glumly shuffled through it, and carried it back to the cabin.

  “Let’s get the shovel,” I said finally.

  We buried Ratface and his large friend a hundred feet up the hill, in a small natural hollow where I could work out of sight. LuEllen sat on the hill above me with the MAC-10. I first cut out the clumps of sod and put them to one side and then threw the dirt on a tarp. I dug for two hours in the yellow, sandy soil before I was both satisfied and too tired to dig anymore.

  Getting bodies up the hill was as bad as the digging. I checked their pockets, found car keys and wallets, kept the keys but left the wallets with the bodies. I dragged Ratface up the hill by his coat, but the big man was too heavy, so I tied three loops of rope around his waist to use as a handle. Their heads and hands rolled loosely and their skin was as white as candle wax. When I dropped them in the grave, they made an untidy and unholy pile. I tossed the M16 and both of their guns in on top of them.

  It took another half hour to get the dirt in, and the sod tramped into place.

  “Should we say a prayer?” LuEllen asked as I fitted the last of the sod back in place.

  I said nothing and finally she said, “Ah, fuck it.”

  There was some extra dirt left on the tarp, and I dragged it down to the ravine and dumped it in the creek. LuEllen loaded the car and shut down the cabin. I found her wiping the table, the stove, and the woodwork.

  “I hope it doesn’t come to that,” I said.

  “Remember what Maggie said? Why take a chance?”

  We left the cabin, going out the back way, at seven o’clock. The red Buick was parked near the intersection of the all-weather road. I checked the front seat and trunk as LuEllen waited, and found a box with fourteen thousand dollars in it. I took the money and drove the car out to the main highway, with LuEllen following. We eventually left it at a turnoff by a historical marker, fifteen miles from the cabin. I wiped it down before we left it.

  “Now what?” LuEllen asked.

  “We got their shooters. They might have more, but they’ll be cautious. And now Maggie knows that we know, so there’ll be no more bullshit.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Maybe. I’ve got a couple of ideas. I’ve got to get on the terminal and talk to Bobby. You ought to get out of here. Back to Duluth. It’ll all be computer stuff from here on. If we travel together, we’d just be easier to spot.”

  “You think they could spot us? They’re not the cops, they’re just a bunch of hoods.”

  “Yeah. But like Maggie said, why take a chance?”

  “You’re right,” she said after a while. “But I’m not going back to Duluth.”

  “Where?”

  “Mexico. Right where we were going. I’m all packed.” And she started to cry.

  WE DROVE NORTH through Cumberland across into Pennsylvania and arrived outside of Pittsburgh in the early morning hours, running, in the end, on pure adrenaline. We slept late, and in the evening I put her on a plane to San Diego.

  “Take care of yourself, Kidd.” LuEllen kissed me on the cheek and went through the gate. Unlike Maggie, she never looked back.

  What?

  Need long talk.

  Call 3 A.M.

  Chapter 19

  EARLY THE NEXT morning I laid out a program for Bobby.

  Big bux.

  Yes.

  Need 2 more hacks.

  OK.

  10K each for hacks.

  OK.

  25K for me. Cash. Pay when we win.

  I pay out front. If we lose, I might not be able to pay. Give PO Box.

  Leave terminal on answer.

  I woke at midmorning to the terminal alarm and a squirt of data—a post office box in Memphis where I could send the money and registered mail, and also the names of the other two hacks. They were both from California. Bobby called them Cal Tech and Stanford. I couldn’t remember either one, but Bobby said th
at Stanford met me on a Vegas gaming board a few years before. Bobby said he would begin checking Anshiser phone lines for incoming data.

  Anshiser company/house show no incoming data lines. Must have private exchanges. Major pain.

  Yes.

  Most computers are hooked into the local telephone exchange. In simpler days, the data-line numbers were often variants of the telephone number of the company that owned the computers. If the company’s number was 555-1115, the computer number might be 555-1116.

  Hackers got onto that right away. Whole nights were spent exploring the guts of various expensive on-line computers. A generation of computer fanatics learned their jobs by doing it. The first illegal entry I made, way back in the early seventies, was to a call-in board that regulated the heating, cooling, water, and other systems of one of the biggest office buildings in Minneapolis. I could have turned off the building’s heat in the middle of a January night, but I didn’t. I left a note for the operator, though, and the next time I called, entry was more difficult.

  A little later, computer security got tight enough that data-line numbers were moved well away from the company’s regular phone—but still in the same exchange. Hackers fought back by producing autodial programs that would dial all of the ten thousand numbers in a given exchange. Whenever the modem got a carrier tone, the computer would note it. If there was no answer or a voice answer, the computer would hang up and move on. A computer could call a thousand numbers overnight, and it was a sad night that didn’t produce a dozen new computer lines.

  Eventually, security-phone companies began creating their own exchanges. The secret exchanges were not listed in the phone book. Only a few numbers out of the ten thousand possible for that special exchange would be used as data lines. That meant that even if hackers knew that Company X was running an open computer on a hidden exchange, they would first have to find the exchange. If they tried to do it randomly, they would have ten thousand calls for each exchange tested. Most of the time it wasn’t worth the effort.

  THERE WAS A way to break the hidden exchanges. Bobby was deep into the phone system. If he monitored a number of Anshiser businesses, and one called into a hidden exchange, we would have it. I worked through our Anshiser research again, and isolated five hotels most likely to use regular phone lines to transmit reports. Bobby would watch them for a few days, and if nothing happened, we’d look at different ones.

  While Bobby was working, I took off again, heading south through Kentucky and Tennessee, dipping into Alabama and Mississippi. I spent a day at Vicksburg, down on the river, painting, then turned south and into Louisiana. The idea of New Orleans was tempting, but I was known there. I turned back north through Arkansas and into Missouri.

  Each night I’d do between a dozen and a hundred tarot spreads, figuring the possibilities. The Fool was back, and that was okay. After the tarot, I’d call Bobby for progress. There was none until the fifth night, when I put into a tidy little Ma-and-Pamotel on the edge of the Ozarks.

  Got exchange.

  Great.

  Not great. Dipped in. Have very heavy security. No on-line help. Get zero. Think one-time codes. Think probes spotted.

  Traced?

  No. But guard up now.

  One-time codes are essentially unbreakable. There is no pattern, and they are used only once. Sometimes the operators on opposite ends of a phone link literally have identical pads of words: one is used, then that piece of paper is ripped off and thrown away, and the next one is used. The words may be of any length, pulled at random from a dictionary. Or they may be lists of numbers produced by a random-number generator.

  Our problems were compounded by what Bobby thought was individual call monitoring: when we tried to get in, it set off an alarm. They knew somebody was knocking on the door, and without the correct codes. They would be watching for us.

  THE NEXT NIGHT we went back into the exchange, intending to proceed most delicately. It was empty. They had changed it again.

  Unless we get codes we locked out. Watched Anshiser/Vegas Hotel data line, there was call-in call-back, enough data that may be two-way one-time codes, maybe simultaneous voice monitoring and clearance.

  Okay. Hold probes. Need time to think.

  Call when need us.

  Sometimes, in high-security environments, a clerk from a remote computer, like that of Anshiser/Vegas, would be brought into the home computer installation. He would go to a company-sponsored lunch and dinner with the home computer operators, often with a shrink or “enabler” present. The shrink would keep the conversation going, both in person and over internal telephones.

  When the clerk returned to his remote site, he would call one of his new friends at the home base before each computer entry. They would chat until his identity was confirmed. Some companies even used voice-print analyzers as a backup. Only when the identity was confirmed would they begin the sign-on procedure. Since the procedure was a two-way affair, with conversation and code going both ways, it was essentially unbeatable. While there might be ways to read the transmissions, there was no electronic way to get inside and work with the computer itself. We would need a different route.

  How good is access to credit computers?

  Read-only or read-write?

  Read-only.

  Good access.

  Need complete run on all Anshiser lower-level execs witb likely computer access. Find worst credit, forward names.

  OK. Tomorrow.

  While Bobby was running the credit reports, I went back into the NCIC computers using the codes we’d stolen from Denton, the Washington cop. This time I wasn’t looking for anything deep, just the standard rap sheets. And I wasn’t looking for felonies, I was looking for sleaze. I came up with a half dozen possibilities. When Bobby sent his list of bad credit reports the next day, we had one match.

  I dumped the car in St. Louis and flew to Miami the next afternoon. Our man, Phil Denzer, was in the book. There was no answer at his apartment up to eleven o’clock that night. I found his apartment on the map, in a complex in North Dade County, and the next morning drove up to talk to him.

  Denzer lived in a run-down complex of town houses surrounded by several acres of hot asphalt. The parking lot featured redneck specials, Fire-birds and Camaros and five-liter Mustangs, most of them several years old, along with broken-down Dodge Swingers with rusted-out taillights. Sickly, yellow-leafed palm trees lined the lots. The town houses were arranged in a donut shape around two swimming pools. It was a hot and cloudless day, and a few women in bikinis, and one guy wearing shorts, a gold chain, and loafers, were arrayed on lounge chairs around the pools. Nobody was actually swimming.

  I got Denzer’s apartment number from the manager. The jalousie windows on the door were cranked open, and disco music poured out through the glass slats. I peered in and could see a guy in a white T-shirt and black slacks dancing to the music, by himself. Practicing moves. I knocked, and Denzer came to the door.

  “You a Witness?”

  “Do I look like a Witness?”

  He thought about it and eventually shook his head. “No. They dress neater. What’d ya want?” He talked past a cigarette and, on his way to the door, had picked up a plastic plate with a half-eaten slice of cherry pie on it, which he was now holding.

  “I’ve got a proposition for you.”

  “Oh yeah? You gonna make me rich?”

  “There might be a few bucks in it.”

  “Tell me in ten words. I gotta get to work.”

  “That’s what I’m interested in. Your work. You work on a computer, right?”

  His mouth actually dropped open.

  “Hey. I bet you’re one of the guys trying to break into our system, right?” He pointed a fork at my chest and I looked for a place to run. “Well, shit, come on in,” he said, holding the door open. He was delighted. “I hoped you’d call me, but I didn’t really think you would.”

  I stepped inside. It was cool and damp and smelled like beer.


  “I’m just having a beer and piece of pie before I take off for work. You want a beer?”

  “Sure.”

  He got one from the refrigerator, popped the top, and handed me the can. “Sit down, sit down,” he said. “How much can you pay me?”

  I sat on a rickety armchair that might have been stolen from a budget motel. “Depends on what you’ve got.”

  “I want some money up front. They told us you were well-heeled. ‘A well-heeled operation,’ is what they said.”

  “How about five hundred?”

  “Fuck, how about five grand?”

  “We’re not that well-heeled. I’ll give you a grand now, and if it’s worth more, I’ll give you another. ”

  He scratched his head. He had long black hair, combed straight back. He must have held it down with grease or wax, because you could see tooth marks from his comb.

  “All right.” I had three thousand in my pocket; I took it out and started counting. He looked at it greedily. I stopped counting for a second.