An FBI spokesman said that many of the DOS calls appear to be coming from small-college computer labs.

"What apparently happened is that some individual or group planted small attack programs inside these open computers, and designed them to go off at the same time. We are getting in touch with these schools as we identify them, asking that they go off-line long enough to remove the programs from their computers. Most of them have no idea that their computers are participating in the attack," FBI spokesman Larry Conners said.

Conners said that the attack program is an unsophisticated one, but the IRS official said that it takes advantage of the fact that the IRS computers must be open to the outside to receive legitimate tax returns. The attack involves sending and resending hundreds of legitimate-looking, but slightly flawed returns, which the IRS computers then attempt to return to the sender. As the volume built, the computers were no longer capable of handling the flow of traffic.

"Individually, the attack filings wouldn't be a problem; the problem is that they just keep coming, over and over, from so many different sources," the IRS source said.

The FBI's Conners said that the attack may have started in Switzerland, with the attack programs planted as long as a month ago.

"If the attack isn't sophisticated."

"It's not sophisticated, but a fire ant isn't sophisticated either," I said. "But you get a few thousand of them swarming up your shorts, and you've got a problem. If the feds get really pissed, and start hammering on that list of names, who knows where it'll end?"

"There've been other attacks like this. I read about one in Newsweek."

"Yeah, but there's a huge difference," I said. "Before, they were messing with private businesses. The politicians' public attitude was, well, that's too bad, but the real feeling was, fuck a bunch of private businessesthose guys got too much money anyway. But now, these guys are messing with the politicians' money."

"Ah."

"Yeah. Big 'Ah.' "

The JPEG photo that Bobby sent me was still on my hard drive. I opened it, and took a look. A parking lot, apparently taken from a fairly high angle. Three men in suits were walking across a parking lot full of pickup trucks. All three of them were carrying briefcases, and one had his face turned up toward the camera. The resolution of the JPEG was not high enough to make out the faces. All of the photos, Bobby had said, were the same.

"So who are they?" LuEllen asked.

"I don't know."

"If the picture's important. it must be that the three shouldn't be together. You know, like a gangster and a cop."

"Or a Chinese and an American," I said. "Look at this guy. there's something about him that looks Oriental."

"Shape of his face. unless it's a woman."

"Huh. I don't know." And I didn't.

Late that night I went into Bloch Tech's server. There's so much stuff in a server, even a small one, that there's no real-time, hands-on way to sort through itit's not like flipping through a book. It's like flipping through a library, like trying to make sense of Jack's disks.

I did a search for references to Firewall, and found several hundred in saved e-mail and in postings on Web sites. Six accounts seemed to have a lot of traffic about Firewall. I went into the administrative files, pulled the accounts, and copied out names and addresses. As I finished, I noticed a peculiarity: they were all new accounts, they'd all signed up in the last two weeks, and they'd all paid the up-front minimum of three months by check, rather than opting for credit-card payments.

"Damn it, I'll bet the names are fakes," I told LuEllen. I saved the names. I could ship them to Bobby later, and have him look them up.

Since I had the administrative files up, I checked for Jack Morrison and came up empty; then, on the off-chance, I checked Terrence Lighter, and got a surprise. Lighter had an account on this server, and better yet, his e-mail had dozens of letters. A few were encrypted, so I skipped over those. Most of the rest were letters to and from collectors and dealers in antique scientific instruments, apparently a hobby of his.

And there was one letter that said, unencrypted and in the clear, the Sunday before last:

Mr. Morrison. I will see you tomorrow at my office at 8:30.

Please bring the files with you. Thank you. T.L. Lighter.

CHAPTER 12

At three in the morningmidnight Pacific timeI called Lane. Green answered the phone and said, "We got somebody on us."

"What do you mean?"

"Somebody watching. Not close, but they're around. It's almost like being paranoid, but I've seen one carit's green, and I think it's a Camrya few too many times, and a face looking toward us. Always a couple of blocks away."

"What do you think?"

"We need to get out of here. If we can lose them, I'd feel a lot easier. Here, we're pinned like butterflies."

"Okay. We've got a couple more things to do here, but we'll be in Dallas the day after tomorrow. Or the day after that, not later than. You could surprise them somehow, get out to the airport, ditch the car, get on a plane."

"What if they've got people in Dallas?"

"Fly to Seattle first," I suggested.

"All right; I'll talk to Lane about it,"

"How is she?"

"Antsy. But here, you talk to her."

Lane came on and I told her about Jack and Lighter, that Jack may have found something at AmMath that needed Lighter's attention. She didn't immediately pick up on the problem of the second trip.

"I knew something was going on," she said. "If Jack was talking to this guy, and this guy was killed, then we've got to tell somebody. This proves it. That something was going on with AmMath."

"It doesn't prove anything in particular," I said. "And the second tripthat's a problem."

"I don't see a problem. The guy-"

"They'll say Jack shot him," I said.

That stopped her only for a few seconds: "But we know he didn't," she argued. "He wouldn't do that."

"They've got a gun in Texas that was stolen in San Jose years ago. They've got witnesses who say he was the shooter, and one of those witnesses took a bullet in the chest. Now, if they ever get around to looking, they can show that he flew into Baltimore late in the afternoon-after working hoursand flew back the next morning. His NSA contact was murdered right in the middle of that time period, and he never said a word about it to anyone."

That stopped her for a little longer: "Okay. That sounds bad. When you put it that way. But maybe he didn't even know about it."

"There's another problem. If we pass information to the FBI. where did we get it'"

"We could finesse that. An anonymous call from Dallas."

"All right, we could figure something out. Maybe we'll do it. But later When the information doesn't look so incriminating. Or when there's something else to go with it."

"How are the burns?" I asked.

"The bad ones are peeling, like a heavy tan. The lighter ones are almost gone. Not much pain anymore. Everything itches like crazy."

"Have you talked to the Dallas cops again?"

"Yup. The lead detective of the case called today and wanted me to fly out. I told him it'd be a couple of days yet and got on his case about AmMath again."

"How're you fixed for cash?" I asked.

"I'm okay. You need some?"

"No. But get Green to use his credit cards when you go to Dallas, and give him cash to pay him back. They don't know who he is, so they won't be able to track him using his credit cards. Take your cell phone."

"Of course. Where're you guys going?"

"We've got some more research to do here and then we'll hook up with you in Dallas. Stay with the phone."

I have never been a particularly good sleeper. My sleep/wake cycle is about twenty-five hours long, so I tend to push the clock around, until I'm sleeping all day and working all night. Then I just keep pushing. In any case, seven hours is about right: anything shorter than that and I tend to get grumpy.