She walked back to the glassed-in office, stuck her head inside, and said something; I could see the blond's head bobbing. She motioned to us, and we pushed through the counter gate and down to the office. The woman rejoined the other two, who were looking at the yellowed image of an old woman, apparently scanned from a paper photograph.
Mason stood up, looking unhappy. "I'm not sure if we know the same Bobby."
"If you go online and call him, he'll tell you we're all right," I said.
He swallowed and said, "I'm not online much anymore. Who are you?"
"You saw the list of the people in Firewall? I'm k."
He sat down, and sat perfectly still for a moment, except for his bobbing Adam's apple, then said, "I've heard a couple of things about you. if you're really k. Did you once have a contract with a wine company to help straighten out their distribution system?"
"Yes."
"Then you know my friend Clark," he said.
"Miller," I said. "He lives in St. Helena in a redwood house with a real redwood hot tub in back, and his wife's name is. Tom."
"Ex-wife," Mason said. "She got the house." He looked at LuEllen and said, "Close the door." LuEllen pushed the door shut and we sat down in a couple of wooden visitors' chairs. Mason pushed both hands through his hair and said, "This FirewallI don't know anything about it, but my name is all over the place. It's driving me crazy. What's going on? I keep waiting for the FBI to show up."
I looked at LuEllen, who shook her head. To Mason, I said, "Goddamnit. You don't know anything?"
He spread his hands"Honest to God, I was sitting at my kitchen table reading the paper and eating shredded wheat and scanning this article on the Lighter killing, and all of a sudden I see this list with my name in itomeomi. I almost choked to death. I never heard of Firewall before this thing. Now I'm supposed to be some sort of terrorist."
"Yeah. Me, too. And Bobby. We're trying to figure out what's going on."
Mason looked at LuEllen again. "Are you on the list?"
"No. I'm just a friend. Of k's and Bobby's."
Mason shook his head. "I don't know what to do I've thought about calling the FBI and identifying myself, but. I don't know, I don't think that's a good idea."
"I don't know your history," I said. "I might wait a while before dragging in the law."
"Yeah. So would I." He wasn't a tough-looking guy, but the way he said it suggested a need to stay away from the feds. As a matter of privacy, ethics, and personality, I didn't ask him what he did; LuEllen wasn't so inhibited.
"So what'd you do omeomi, hold up banks?"
She can be so perky, when she wants, that it works an odd magic on men, especially technics, who have residual fantasies about cheerleaders. That's what I hear anyway. Mason showed a small grin and said, "No, nothing like that. I do. specialty photography."
"Jeez. When people say that, I usually think porno," LuEllen said.
"It's not porno," he said.
"You guys should talk sometime," I said to LuEllen. "You could trade tips."
"You do photography?" Now he was a little more interested. "What kind?"
"Specialty," she said.
He actually chuckled, leaned back and stretched. "That's the best kind, isn't it?"
We sat in silence for a couple of minutes, and then I said, "Well. we better go."
"What are you doing?" he asked. "Just checking out whoever you can find from the list?"
"That's the idea. Between Bobby and me, on the original list of names, we knew a few people. None of us are involved with Firewall. Then Bobby tracked down you and one other guy. through friends, I guess. We haven't checked with the other guy, but your story is like the rest of ours."
"What're you gonna do if you find them? Firewall?"
"I don't know. Bobby thinks we ought to turn them in. If they did the Lighter thing, anyway."
"Do it," he said. "Find 'em, and fuck 'em."
Currier lived in an apartment in Santa Cruz. Again, nobody home, and Bobby hadn't been able to find a job for him. I checked with the manager, telling her that I was an old friend in the area for a day. "He's gone to Mexico, on vacation," she said.
"When did he leave?"
"Last week. He said he'd be gone for three weeks. Too bad you missed him."
Now what?" LuEllen asked, as we walked away.
"Back to Rufus. He's three hours ahead of uslet's see if Monger worked."
"What do you think about Currier?"
"He might be running. He's on the list; maybe he's got reason to run."
"Like you."
"Like all of us."
Monger had worked. "A lot of the traffic was out of individual computers from about ten major sitesall colleges, all easy to get into," Rufus said. "It looks like somebody went looking for online computers, planted a rumor message in a virus that dumped it into AOL message boards and other places like that. In the days before the rumors started, a lot of those ten sites had some extended traffic with a server in Laurel, Maryland."
"How much before the rumors started?"
"Week or so. That's about as far back as I can get, before the universe gets too large for Monger." "A week or so."
"That's what it looks like. Does this help?"
"I have to think about it," I said.
Bobby came back with some info about AmMath, and the guy who ran it.
St. John Corbeil was a smart guy, a guy who quit the Marine Corps as a major and moved to the National Security Agency. He worked for the NSA for another five years, doing nothing that Bobby could find out about, except getting an advanced degree in software design. After a five-year hitch at NSA, he quit, moved to Dallas, and started his own high-tech encryption-products firm. He'd taken a half-dozen NSA encryption, math, and software specialists with him. The company had done well, coming along with its product line just at the beginning of the Internet boom. Corbeil was reasonably rich, with his ten percent of AmMath stock and his CEO's spot.
"I don't understand any of that encryption shit," LuEllen said.
"Like this," I said. "Suppose you wanted to send me an Internet note that said, 'Let's sneak into Bill Gates' house and steal his dog.' If strong encryption is allowed, you could run the message through a software packageyou'd just push a buttonand it would be impossible for anybody to break. Anybody. Unless he had the key. No matter how hot-shit somebody else's computers were, they couldn't break it."
"But with the Clipper chip."
"There'd be two keys. I'd have one, and the government would have one. You could send the message, and I'd get it okay, but so would the government. If they were watching."
"We'd get to Bill Gates's house and we'd find a whole bunch of cops waiting."
"And we'd be standing there with our dicks in our hands."
"Or a can of Alpo, in my case," she said.
Jack had had a small house in Santa Cruz, about a mile from Currier's apartment. After he was killed, the FBI had gotten a warrant to go through the place, and Lane told them where to find the keys. The day after the funeral, she'd called to see if she could get back in, and the feds had no objection: they'd turned the place over, and had taken out everything that appeared to be computer-related, along with all his old phone bills, personal correspondence, and so on.
While LuEllen and I were looking up Firewall names, Lane and Green had gone over to the house to look around, and to start cleaning up. That's what Lane had called it. Cleaning up.
What she meant was, throwing away anything that couldn't be sold or given away. All the small pieces of a life-posters, notes, letters, unidentifiable photos; like that. Jack had never had children, so there was nobody to get it, except his sister; nobody to wonder who this ancestor had been, and to sit down in 2050 or 2100 and paw through the remains.