"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.

When they got back, Green said, "Somebody was there before any of us. Somebody spread the lock on the back door."

"Gotta be the AmMath guys," I said. "Maybe they're happy, since they got the disks from you."

"What'd you find out about Firewall?" Lane asked.

"Nothing," I said. I ran it down for her.

"This guy who went to Mexico," Green said. "He could have gone for more than one reason. You're assuming he went because he was scared because he was on the list, like Mason. But what if he's running because he is with Firewall?"

"I mentioned that," LuEllen said. "Kidd didn't buy it. He's got a theory."

"What's the theory?"

"There is no Firewall," I said. "It's bullshit, made up out of whole cloth."

Then we launched into one of those circular arguments in which you almost feel as though you can grasp what's going on, but there's always one critical piece missing from every possible logical construction. Lane started it.

"Exactly what would that do?" Lane asked. "If somebody made up Firewall, why would they do it?"

"To cover some other reason for killing Lighter?" I suggested.

"They didn't have anything to cover. The police thought it was a mugging. They weren't happy, but I've never heard there was any other big investigation going on, before the Firewall thing came up."

"Clipper II was dying. Is dying. Maybe they thought if one of the Clipper II people was killed by hackers, there'd be some kind of groundswell."

"There's not going to be any groundswell," Lane said. "The feds might want Clipper II, but it's too late. Everybody knows it's too late. It doesn't have anything to do with preferences or laws. Trying to get rid of strong encryption and replace it with the Clipper II would be like trying to get rid of pi or the Round Earth Theory. It's too fucking late."

"Then how did all of those names come up all of a sudden? Mine and Bobby's and Jack's and omeomi and the others," I asked. "We are linked. If you look at it from the right direction, we are a conspiracy, because a lot of us sure as shit have conspired with each other."

"I don't know; I don't know why Firewall came up. I don't know how it ties in. But it seems to. There's something out there, and it's not totally made up. Something is happening. And Jack is dead and Lighter is dead."

"But it might just be coincidence."

"How could it possibly be?" She ticked it off on her fingers. "Jack is connected with Clipper II and AmMath and Firewall. Firewall kills Lighter who is connected with Clipper II and AmMath."

"But we can't find a single person who is really connected with Firewall," I said. "Not a single one."