The Devil's Code

become the Old Man of the Sea.
    “From the way Sinbad looked at it, he couldn’t get the Old Man of the Sea off his back. From the Old Man of the Sea’s point of view, he couldn’t get off Sinbad’s back, or Sinbad would kill him. If we get on the NRO’s back, or the NSA’s, we can never let go, or they will hunt us down like rats. If they just say fuck it, and put up a new Keyhole system, and we’re locked out of it, we’re cooked.”
    “But there’s a time element,” Bobby said, his voice rattling down the phone connection and then out a couple of cheap computer speakers. “If we can keep the government off for three, four, five years, it’ll be too late to really do anything about us. The control of the world is slipping away from those people; in five years, it’ll be gone.”
    “Still . . .”
    “There’s another thing. We’ll let it be known that this whole thing was pulled off by Bobby, the phamous phone phreak. I’ve got maybe five years left on earth. I’ll be on a voice synthesizer by this time next year. If I’m their target, and they catch me two or three years from now . . . they ain’t gonna catch much.”
    “Goddamn,” I said. “That’s harsh.”
    “Life sucks and then you die,” Bobby said.
    W e took control on December third.
    Bobby transmitted the changes over a four-hour period from a dish normally used for satellite telephone communications. The way it worked, essentially, was this: we took the NRO’s spot, giving us control of the system. The NRO got the OMS controls, plus some enhancements we added—this would not be a secret for very long, so we didn’t have to go to all of AmMath’s trouble to hide what we’d done.
    If we hadn’t told them about it, the NRO might have taken a while to discover what we’d done. They still talked to the satellites with the same encrypted commands; they could still take pictures and maneuver the satellites; in fact, before we told them about it, the only change that would have given us away was a difference in the number of computer bytes in the satellite’s memory. But that changes often enough that we expected that they wouldn’t notice. Not right away . . .
    O n December third and fourth, we ran checks, and tried to find ways to break our control. We made a couple of small patches, and the other five guys headed home. I went to Washington.
    Rosalind Welsh, the NSA security executive, left her home at six-thirty in the morning, driving a metallic blue Toyota Camry. I noted the license plate; Bobby’d gotten the number the day before from the DMV, but we wanted to make sure. I couldn’t follow her all the way to the NSA building, but we’d done a time projection, and I called Bobby on a cell phone and said, “She’s crossing the line now. Four or five minutes to the parking lot.”
    “Did you get the plate?”
    “Yeah. Your numbers were right.”
    “Are you nervous?”
    “Yeah.”
    “So you’ve still got your sanity.” He chuckled. “One way or another, this is gonna be interesting . . .”
    T he next day, I was in eastern Ohio, on my way home. I pulled into a truck stop on I-80, got out the cell phone, and called Rosalind Welsh at her desk. Her secretary answered and I said, “This is Bill Clinton. You’ve got fifteen seconds to put Welsh on the phone. This may be the most important call she’ll get this year, so I’d suggest you find her.”
    Welsh came on five seconds later. “What?”
    “I need a phone number where I can dump a computer file.”
    “Why should . . .”
    “Don’t argue with me. You’ll want to see these photos. Give me a number or I’m gone.”
    She gave me the number.
    I called Bobby from a truck-stop phone, gave him the number, and headed back east. I didn’t doubt that the NSA could spot the cell that my call had gone through, and would be able to spot the next one. From that, they would be able to tell that I was headed east . . .
    I called again twenty minutes later. “This is Bill Clinton,” I told the secretary.
    “Just a minute . . .”
    Welsh picked up, but the phone sounded funny. “What are you doing with the phone?” I asked.
    “We’ve got some people here who want to listen in,” she said. “You’re on a conference call.”
    “Did you look at the pictures?”
    “Yes.”
    “Do you know what they are?”
    “Well, we have an idea. They look like our parking lot.”
    “They are. If you check the arrangement of cars—that’s your car up