The Devil's Code

for ourselves . . .
    Maybe.
    At eight-thirty that night, a guy with one of those uneven Southern faces, the kind that looked like they got a little crunched in a vise or a wine press or something, knocked on my door, and when I opened it, handed me a box. “From Bobby,” he said.
    He did not look like the kind of guy who’d be hanging with Bobby: if you were going to cast a movie and needed a guy with hair like straw and pink lips and big freckles, to stand with his foot on a pickup truck’srunning board and talk about the Imperial Wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, this guy would be a candidate.
    “How is he? Bobby?” I asked.
    “Same as ever.” He raised a hand in what used to be a black-power salute. “Off the pigs,” he said. Then he laughed and I laughed with him, feeling ridiculous, and he headed down the hall in his beat-up cowboy boots, ragged stepped-on back cuffs, and jean jacket.
    Gone.
    So was I, five minutes later, headed south in the night.
    T hird time’s the charm.
    That’s what I kept thinking all the way back to the dish in the gully. I took it slow, like still hunting for deer. I started down the road at eleven o’clock, deep in the darkness, watching, listening. I didn’t make it to the fence-crossing until midnight. Twelve cars passed along the road as I moved parallel to it, hunkered down in the weeds as they passed.
    At midnight, I crossed the fence into the eastern pasture, and began moving parallel to Corbeil’s fence line. At twelve-thirty, having taken a half-hour to move four hundred yards, I crossed Corbeil’s fence and began working my way toward the nearest dish. As I got close, I spent some time watching the ranch house.
    The yard lights illuminated the area around the house and showed a single pickup truck parked in front of the garage. The house itself was absolutely dark. The bunkhouse, if that’s what it was, had one lit window. Ashadow fell on the window once, and then went away. Whoever it was, was up late.
    Nervous, but satisfied that nothing much was happening at the house, I crossed carefully into the gully, using the needle-beam flashlight now, and hooked the detection package into the dish. Then I climbed the far side of the gully and lay down, looking down at the farmhouse while I waited for the dish to start moving.
    At one o’clock, or a few minutes later, the light in the bunkhouse went out, and a man stepped into the lighted driveway, walked over to the house, unlocked the door, went inside. A light flashed on, then, twenty seconds later, went out. The man stepped outside, closed the door behind himself, rattled it—locked—and walked over to the pickup truck. He got in and bumped slowly down the driveway to the highway, paused, turned left, and drove away.
    Huh.
    For the next three hours, I perched on top of the ridge waiting for the dish to move. Eventually, I realized that it wasn’t going to. Lying in the dark, with nothing much to do, I began to work out my own version of Corbeil’s caper.
    He’d built a company that once must have been on the cutting edge of cyberintelligence, creating code products that could be used by anyone who needed absolute secure communication. Other companies could do the same thing, but the AmMath people had an advantage: their product would be the software component of the Clipper II, and they would essentially have a government-sponsored monopoly on encoded transmissions.
    Then, just as Corbeil stepped on the road to billionaire-dom, the catch jumped up and bit him on the ass.
    Outside the intelligence community, nobody wanted the Clipper. The Clipper was an obsolete idea when it was floated the first time. By the time Clipper II came along, even the Congress recognized its stupidity. So they said the hell with it, and instead of the road to billions, Corbeil found himself in the alley to Chapter Eleven.
    Corbeil had to find something else to sell—this was all part of my fantasy—and found it, circling the earth every few hours. Perhaps AmMath had developed the code that the National Reconnaissance Office used for its satellite transmissions. However they did it, AmMath was pulling down the recon stuff and retailing it. Jack Morrison had been killed for knowing about it, and his sister was murdered because they thought she might know about it; and Firewall had been invented to cover it up, or at least to confuse any trail that might lead to it.
    Could it be some sort of official dark operation? I doubted it.