And I thought, Jesus, Kidd, you’re doing a gypsy reading, as if you believe in this shit. That says something about my level of stress.

Before I put the cards away-my little man, the leprechaun-like id-character that everyone carries in the back of his head-was laughing at me, but I did a reading on my own future. Just killing time. Came up with the King of Swords, which told me nothing I might not suspect even without the cards.

Not entirely bad, but not entirely good, either. But self-psychoanalysis is not what I needed. Or, rather, I may have needed it, but it wasn’t what I so desperately wanted. What I wanted I got at eleven o’clock; I almost ruptured an appendix getting to the phone.

“YEAH,” I said. LuEllen had known where I’d be; and she’d call me through a hotel switchboard, so there wouldn’t be anything on my cell phone.

“It’s me,” she said. She sounded tired. “I’m near that narrow lane, the one we used to check for tails the last time we were here. The airplane time. You remember? I don’t want to say the name. Nobody could have followed me this far. I went to a Goodwill store and bought clothes and dumped all of my stuff, every stitch, and my shoes, so I’m not bugged.”

“Are you okay?”

“Mmm. Physically. Otherwise, I’m pretty screwed up. They put me in a room and every once in a while, somebody would come in and ask a question. I didn’t say one fuckin’ word to them. Then they came and got me, put me in a car, drove around for a while, gave me a hundred dollars, dropped me off, and told me to get lost. I don’t know where I was in the room, it was like an office building, but I don’t know where.”

“They got your car?”

“Yes. They’ll have my prints. I didn’t see anybody take a picture. They… they weren’t real cops. They were something else. I thought maybe Army-some of them had those funny white-sidewall haircuts.”

“Okay. So I’ll cruise the lane in exactly twenty minutes. You got your watch?”

“No, I dumped everything. But I know twenty minutes.”

“You come in at the same time I do, so you’re moving. I’ll flick the lights when I come into the street.”

“See you.” She really did sound beat.

I GOT her twenty minutes later, on a narrow one-way lane that we’d once used to make sure that nobody was behind us. I went into the lane slowly, blinked my lights, and crawled through, worried sick that she wouldn’t be there.

She was. She stepped out from behind some kind of evergreen, next to a low stone wall and a garbage can, and held up her hand and I slowed and she got in.

“You look like you just got out of Vogue,” I said.

“Shut up and drive,” she said. I was still wound tight as a grandfather clock, afraid that a black federal car would suddenly block the way, and guys with guns would come parachuting out of the trees.

But they didn’t. Six blocks down the road and around a few corners, and she said, “Pull over.”

“What?” I looked in all the mirrors and saw nothing.

“I need a squeeze,” she said. “Really bad.”

I pulled over and we spent a little time just squeezing each other, though modern cars aren’t built for it. Christ, I’d been worried. I’d been so worried…

“You got me back,” she said.

Chapter Seventeen

LuELLEN DISAPPEARED into the bathroom, taking her cosmetics bag with her, leaving the Goodwill clothes on the floor. She said she expected to be in there awhile. I gathered up the clothes and stuffed them in a sack. We could drop them somewhere the next day.

With the bathwater running in the background, with LuEllen home and well, I went back to Bobby’s computer, the laptop I’d taken from Carp’s car. I’d been poking at it during the afternoon, while I waited to hear from LuEllen. What I’d found was curious.

The files that had been on Carp’s computer, the blackmail files, were there, all right, as were the encrypted files. But some of the encrypted files had been decrypted. He’d made notes: This from File 23, Indexed as MRG Cleanup: and there was the Norwalk virus file.

The question that plagued me was, how had he decrypted it? Where had he gotten the decryption keys? Bobby’s laptop had the encryption program right there, out front, and it was a good, solid commercial program that would essentially produce an uncrackable file.

From the bathroom, LuEllen said, “Oh, Jesus,” and I looked up, then rolled off the bed, went to the bathroom door, and poked my head inside.

“What was that?”

“My ass hitting the hot water. Close the door, you’re letting the cold air in.” I took a longer lingering look before I backed out. She’d put some bubble bath in the water, and it smelled good; and some pink parts were poking out of the bubbles, fairly artfully, I thought. She said, “Your look is lingering.”

“I wanted to make sure you were physically okay,” I said.

“What do you think?”

“I’ll need a closer look.” I shut the door.

BACK to the laptop. The thing had an abnormally huge hard drive. And the files were large, I could see that much. From Carp’s note, I knew that one, or part of one, was an index.

Was it possible that Bobby had hidden the keys somewhere in the computer itself, and that Carp had found them?

I began tearing the laptop apart, a boring and ultimately fruitless activity. The problem was the size of the files-they were just too big. What I was doing was like walking through a library looking for a particular sentence, without knowing what book it was in. Yet Carp had done it. Was he that much smarter than I was?

Leaving behind the mystery files, I looked through some non-encrypted utility programs that Bobby had stashed in a corner. They had esoteric names like Whodat and Whatsis and Dogabone and Bandersnatch, a bunch of fishhooks for various jobs that Bobby had needed done. I had the same kind of collection in my laptop, with the same kind of names.

I transferred Whodat to my laptop and pulled it apart, and found a search program that looked for names. That’s all it did; but it was nicely written, and would be very fast. I had encountered circumstances where it would be useful, like searching a company’s database for memos to or from a particular person. Whatsis was a big library of electronic circuits. If you had a big enough circuit diagram, you could import it into Whatsis and Whatsis would give you a list of machines that you might be looking at, that used that precise circuit.

Dogabone was a modification of an old program I’d written myself, years ago, which would find programs in one place and put them in another. I still had the same program on my computer, but my original was called Fetcher, which is where I suppose Bobby got the Dogabone. The next program, Bandersnatch, was meant to be left in a remote computer, where it would watch whatever file you attached it to. When that file was manipulated, Bandersnatch would immediately make a copy of the manipulated file, change its name, and re-store it. So Bobby could go into an outside computer, and if he encountered an encrypted file, he could attach Bandersnatch to it. When it was manipulated-that is, decrypted-Bandersnatch would copy and store it. Bobby could then come back and retrieve the file without ever having the decryption key.

I thought about that until LuEllen emerged from the bathroom, and then I stopped thinking about it for a while.

“WHAT do you think we should do?” she asked late in the night. We were tangled up in the sheets of the big king-sized bed. We each had a bottle of Dos Equis.