TWO minutes later, I hooked up with Rachel, using Bobby’s laptop, and watched the Dogabone program go straight into her. Five seconds later, I had fifty short blocks of numbers and letters that looked like nothing more than computer keys. Sonofabitch. Bobby had hidden his keys with the little computer kids, scattered anonymously all over the country.
Now I had them. Just like Christmas. I talked with Rachel for a few seconds, then transferred a couple of good phone numbers for her to look at. They were big, semi-secure computers where she wouldn’t get caught, but would have a lot to explore. And they’d keep her from thinking too hard about why I’d wanted to go online with her.
Back at the hotel, I got busy with Bobby’s laptop. The keys were in the same order as the files, so opening the files was no problem. I sat at the shaky little motel table and started scanning through what Bobby had accumulated over the years.
Forty-five of the fifty files contained text documents on topics that interested Bobby-biographies and photos of hundreds of people, along with what were apparently confidential assessments of many of those people, made by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Out of curiosity, I looked and found one on me, though it wasn’t much more than a standard FBI file, listing my military service, my technical specialties, and a few additional random notes: “… currently self-employed as a fine arts painter.”
AH, but the other five files.
These were the keys to the kingdom.
Here were the routings and codes that would get you into almost any computer database in the world. I won’t list the stuff, but it is this simple: Bobby had access to almost everything, everywhere. He’d been around as a phone phreak in the CP/M and early DOS days, had fiddled with Commodores and Z80s and all that. He’d been in the early networked computers before anybody thought about online security, and he’d been building trapdoors and secret entrances all along.
As they’d grown, and shifted, and evolved, he’d grown right along with them.
There are, undoubtedly, some serious databases that he couldn’t get at-computers that had been isolated from any phone service; computers where, to download information, you had to accept the information on disk or on paper, handed to you by a guy who checked your credentials in person and got a signed receipt for the disk.
But those computers are damned few. It’s just too inconvenient. If the director of the CIA wants to look at something on his desktop, he doesn’t want to have to go down in the basement to look at it. He wants it in his office. And if he looked at it on his desktop, then Bobby could look at it too. Because Bobby was everywhere.
I scanned through the information in the last five files, and thought three things.
First, when Wayne Bob had looked at that single disk of information and commented that we were now two of the most powerful people in Washington, he may have been right, but that disk was a child’s trinket compared to Bobby’s laptop.
Second, it occurred to me that I was now the Invisible Man-I could go anywhere, and see almost anything, and probably do quite a bit to people I didn’t like.
And third, I thought, You’re in a lot of trouble now, Kidd.
AFTER considering it for a while, I transferred the encryption keys to my own notebook, so I wouldn’t have to re-fetch them from Rachel every time I wanted to look at Bobby’s files. I had a good-sized hard disk myself, and hid them in the clutter. Still, if the feds got their hands on it, and knew what they were looking for, they’d find the keys. I’d find a better hiding place as soon as I got home.
Home… What if Carp had called Krause back, had given him my name and my license plate number, and some thugs were waiting in my apartment to take me down? I got paranoid thinking about it, and finally called the old lady who lived downstairs from me-a painter, and a good one, who took care of the cat when I was gone-to check on the apartment and to tell her I was on my way back.
“Means nothing to me. You can stay away as long as you want.” She loudly crunched on a carrot stick or piece of celery, and said while she was chewing, “I put the cat through the garbage disposal two days ago, the stinky thing, and stole your Whistler. What else do you have that I need?”
“How about a real sense of humor?” I suggested.
She was ragging on me, which was good: she knew everything that happened in the apartment building, so there probably weren’t any thugs waiting on the landing.
THE rest of the evening was spent systematically going through the last five files, figuring out exactly what was there. An index helped, but the entries were often cryptic in themselves-just a couple of words or initials that Bobby would recognize.
At one o’clock in the morning, I popped an Ambien to take me down, and got six hours of good sleep. Sometime before nine o’clock the next morning, I was again crossing the rolling green landscape of Ohio, heading toward I-80, which would take me into Chicago.
I hadn’t thought much about Carp-what he might be doing-since I’d last seen him on his bicycle outside Rock Creek Park. He was in hiding, I thought. I’d also lost track of the murder investigation in Jackson, which I resolved to check into that night. If the feds didn’t winkle him out pretty soon, I’d start messaging the FBI myself.
At ten o’clock, or a little after, I stopped at a Dairy Queen to get an ice-cream cone. I was leaning against the car’s front fender, munching the dipped-chocolate coating off the ice cream, when I heard the phone ring in the car. LuEllen.
I scrambled to get inside without dripping ice cream on the upholstery, got the phone, and punched it up. “Yeah?”
Child’s voice, shaky, and thin, as if she were some distance from the phone’s mouthpiece: “Mr. Kidd? He took me on the way to the liberry.”
“What?”
“He took me on the way to the liberry. He wants Bobby’s laptop.”
Shit. Not LuEllen. It was Rachel. “Where are you, honey? What’re-”
“Kidd? This is James Carp.”
Like getting whacked in the forehead. “Carp?”
“I assume you’re the one who took the laptop out of my car. Pretty smart. I want it back. I’ll trade you.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“The laptop. And Rachel, here. I’ve got her, and I’m going to keep her until I get the laptop. But there’s a deadline. I assume you’re still in Washington. I want you down here near this place, Longstreet, as soon as you can get here. Tonight? Tonight, I think.”
“I’m not in Washington,” I said. “I can’t get there tonight. I’m in my car in the middle of nowhere.”
“Then get somewhere,” he snapped. His voice had a high, squeaky quality, as though it were on the edge of cracking; as though he were on the edge of cracking. “I’ll tell you this. This is what I’m going to do. I’m gonna stick this girl so far out in the woods that you’ll never find her. Out in the wilderness. I’m gonna chain her to a tree. If you fuck with me, I’ll never go back, and you’ll never find out where she is.”
“I’ll get you the laptop, but I can’t get there tonight,” I said. My voice was scared, and I didn’t care if it showed; maybe it was better that it showed. And I was lying like a motherfucker, trying to buy time. “I’m way up in West Virginia. I can get there maybe tomorrow afternoon. Honest to God, I’m out in the sticks. I’ll get to an airport, try to find a flight that’ll get me into Memphis, and I’ll get a car from there. But don’t put her out in the woods. If you put her out in the woods and she dies, you’ll get the death penalty. You still might be clear with the cops.”
“Oh, bullshit. They know I killed Bobby. The only thing that’ll get me clear is that laptop, and the files. If I have that, they’ll talk. They’ll let me go off somewhere and play with myself. Otherwise, I’m toast. You try to jump me, I swear to God I’ll put a gun in my mouth and little miss black girl here will rot under a tree in the middle of a swamp.”