“They chose me?” He looked floridly earnest, but not all that surprised.

“Bob,” I said, “I gotta trust you, I think, but honest to God, we’ve occasionally given each other reason to think that neither one of us might not be…”

I shrugged, and he finished the sentence for me. “… as close to God as our mothers might wish.”

“Exactly,” I said. “So I’m gonna show you something. But if you tie me to it, or mention it to anyone that you heard it from me, I’m gonna shove it up your ass sideways.”

He smiled. “That’s the kinda deal I understand.” His smile vanished like a turned-off light, and he looked at me over the rim of his martini glass as he finished the drink, his eyes cold as ice. “They won’t hear about you from me; you got my word.”

I took my laptop off the seat beside me, turned it on, waited until it was up, then called up the file. I turned it toward him and said, “You can page through it with the Page Down key.”

He started paging through, stopping occasionally to mutter, “Just saw this one on TV… Krause is doing this?… Jesus, I didn’t know this guy was queer, I was just peeing in the next stall to him… Landford Hewes took a half-million out of Mejico Rico? Holy shit, he’s supposed to be Mr. Clean… Oh man: Davy Fergusson, he’s a friend of mine and so is Tina, and this says he beats the shit out of her. Look at the mouse on that woman, and the hometown cops bailed him out without a word.”

He was slack-jawed, fascinated.

“You gotta think about this,” I said. “This use of their data-mining tool is inevitable. It’s the perfect weapon to use against elected politicians. I mean, I might not care if they find out that I’ve been renting porno videos or getting blow jobs from seventeen-year-old boy hookers in the local park, but a politician would. Imagine what would happen if this capability got into the hands of lobbyists. We’d be at the mercy of any special interest willing to use it.”

“Umm…” he said. He took thirty minutes to work through the file. “If you’re making mental notes, don’t bother,” I said. “I got the whole thing on a CD for you. I’m giving them to you.”

He looked up. “What for? There’s a lotta horsepower here.”

“Not for me,” I said. “I’m a painter. Just being around this shit scares me to death. But this DDC stuff scares me, too. I thought if you had the information, you could talk to some of the people there…” I nodded at the laptop.

Again, he finished my sentence for me: “… and shove it up Krause’s ass sideways?”

“Something like that. I don’t care so much about Krause as this group he’s got working for them. It’s not right. It won’t catch terrorists; all it can be used for is blackmail.”

“It ain’t right,” he agreed. “You got that CD?”

I took it out of my pocket and passed it to him. “We are now two of the most powerful people in this whole fuckin’ capital of the world,” he said, looking at his reflection in the CD. “You and me, and we’re sitting here in a hotel booth drinking a martini and a beer and I’m looking at my face in a record.”

I couldn’t think of a quip, so I said, stupidly, “Makes you think, huh?”

Chapter Eighteen

AFTER ANOTHER AFTERNOON and night in Washington, and a span of boring computer digging, I carefully checked out of the hotel-that is, I got my bags and took a cab to National, went inside, then back outside, and took another cab to a department store adjoining the parking structure where I’d left my car. I walked through the store to the car, and two minutes later was on my way to St. Paul, looking over my shoulder all the time.

Washington to St. Paul by car is two killer days, or three easy ones. I decided to take three. I’d get enough ideas while driving the car that I’d want to get out and crank on the computer for a while. Motels are good for that: nothing but silence, give or take the odd housekeeper. I had my cell phone plugged into the car’s inverter, hoping that LuEllen would finally feel safe enough to call. As the hills and mountains of Pennsylvania rolled by, the phone remained silent.

At three o’clock, I stopped at a convenience store, bought a half-dozen Diet Cokes, then pulled into a Ramada Inn just off I-76 south of Youngstown, Ohio. I got a no-smoking room on the second floor and plugged in for more boring computer diddling.

I was getting nowhere; I got so desperate that I dug out the tarot cards, did a series of spreads, and figured out nothing at all. The cards were disorganized, random, trivial.

How had Carp done it? That’s what I needed to know. How had he found the keys? I went to the bed, lay down, and put a pillow over my eyes. Instead of random digging at the machine, let’s look at Carp, I thought. What did Carp do?

After worrying about it for a while, a thought popped into my head. An encryption key would consist of characters that you can see on a keyboard, because, on occasion, folks had to manually type them, and not everybody knows how to get to the alternate character sets on a keyboard. An encrypted file, on the other hand, usually includes all the characters that a computer can generate, including many that are not represented on a keyboard. If I were to write a search program that looked for strings of letters and numbers that were visible on the keyboard, but contained none of the other, hidden characters… then, if the keys were hidden in the huge files, maybe I could pull them out.

Hell, it was a start, and writing a little software program would keep my brain from turning to cheddar. I pulled out my own notebook, where I had my software tool kit, and spent a quarter-hour or so creating the search program. The coding was interspersed with a few minutes watching CNN, a few more watching the Weather Channel, and maybe a moment or two of self-doubt, a feeling that I was wasting my time. When I finished, instead of transferring the program via disk, I got a cable out of my briefcase and hooked my laptop to Bobby’s, to transfer the program.

And the minute I did, Bobby’s laptop began running the Dogabone program, trying to fetch something from my laptop; and it did it as my laptop was transferring the search program. If I hadn’t been able to see his laptop, I would never have known that he was searching mine.

Huh.

THE search program found nothing in the encrypted files, no long strings of out-front characters. But as I sat on the bed, watching the machines talk…

After we grabbed Carp’s laptop back in Louisiana, he’d only had Bobby’s laptop to work with. He’d been going online with me, as Lemon, and who else? Who else that Bobby knew?

I could think of only one person: Rachel Willowby. Rachel Willowby, who had gotten a free computer from Bobby. Ten minutes later, I was calling John from a pay phone in a strip shopping mall. “John, where’s Rachel?”

“She went down to the library with Marvel,” he said. “What’s up?”

“I need to go online for a minute with Rachel’s notebook. Is it there? Or did she take it with her?”

“She takes it everywhere. That’s why she’s at the library-they got it fixed so she can plug into their ethernet and she can get a fast line free. She’s in heaven.”

“Got a phone number for the library?”

I TALKED to the Longstreet librarian, told her it was urgent, and she went and found Rachel. “Hello?”

“Rachel, this is Kidd. You remember?”

“Sure. What’s up?” She asked the question just like John; already picking up the family traits.

“I’m at a pay phone in Ohio. I need to go online with you for a minute. I’ve got a couple of phone numbers and some protocols for you. Give me your ethernet address and I’ll be down to hook up with you in a couple of minutes.”

“All right.” She was enthusiastic. More phone numbers were always good.