The Hanged Man's Song

my back. She has powerful thumbs for a small woman. “Wanna go out for a hot-fudge sundae?”
    “Sure. Keep working, let me check my e-mail.” She was knuckling the muscle along my spine, right at my shoulder, and I rolled my head and punched up the e-mail program on my laptop, and went out, at a dollar a minute, to see what I could see.
    An alarm came up for one of my out-of-sight e-mail addresses. Spam, probably, but I looked. No spam—it was a note from a man I didn’t know, who called himself romeoblue.
    The e-mail said, “Bobby down. Drop word. Ring on.”
    “Motherfucker,” I said, as I read it. I didn’t believe what I was seeing.
    LuEllen caught the tone and looked over my shoulder. She knew about Bobby, so I let her look. “Uh-oh. Who’s romeoblue ?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “How does he know Bobby?”
    I knew the answer to that, but I avoided the question. LuEllen and I trusted each other, but there was no point in being careless. “Lots of people know Bobby. . . . Listen, now we gotta go out. I gotta make a call.”
    >>> BOBBY is the deus ex machina for the hacking community, the fount of all knowledge, the keeper of secrets, the source of critical phone numbers, a guide through the darkness of IBM mainframes. As with LuEllen, I didn’t know his real name or exactly where he lived; but we’d done some business together.
    >>> THE Gulf Coast could probably be a garden spot, but it isn’t. It’s a junkyard. Every form of scummy business you can think of can be found between I-10 and the beach, and most every one of them built the cheapest possible building to do the business in. It’s like Amarillo, Texas, but in bad taste.
    We ran through the rain from my room to the car, then trucked on down I-10 to the nearest Wal-Mart. We made the call from a public phone using a tiny Sony laptop I’d picked up a few weeks earlier. Dialed up my Bobby number and got nothing. No carrier tone, no redirect to some other number, just ringing with no answer. That had never happened before. I made a quick check again of my e-mail and had a second message, from a person named polytrope. He said, “Bobby’s gone. Out six hours now. Drop word. Ring on.”
    “Maybe they got him,” I said to LuEllen, popping theconnection. “The feds. I gotta make another call, but not from here. Let’s go.”
    LuEllen’s a professional thief. When I said, “Let’s go,” she didn’t ask questions. She started walking. Not hurrying, but moving out, smiling, pleasant, but not making eye contact with any of the store clerks.
    In the movies, the FBI makes a call while the bad guy is still on the telephone, and three minutes later, agents drop out of the sky in a black helicopter and the chase begins.
    In reality, if the feds had taken Bobby, and had a watch on his phone line, they could get a read on the Wal-Mart phone almost instantly. Getting to the phone was another matter—that would take a while, even if they went through the local cops. In the very best, most cooperative system, we’d have ten minutes. In a typical federal law-enforcement scramble, we’d have an hour or more. But why take a chance?
    We were out of the Wal-Mart in a minute, and in two minutes, down the highway. Ten miles away, I made a call from an outdoor phone at a Shell station, dropping an e-mail to two guys who, separately, called themselves pr 48stl9 and trilbee : “Bobby is down. Transmit word. Ring on.” I sent a third e-mail to [email protected] : “3577.” The number was my “word,” and I was dropping it into a blind hole.
    >>> “THAT’S IT?” LuEllen asked, when I’d dropped the word.
    “That’s all there is. There’s nothing else to do. Still want that sundae?”
    “I guess.” But she was worried. We’re both illegal, at least someof the time, and we’re sensitive to trouble, to complications that could push us out in the open. Trouble is like a panfish nibbling at the end of your fishing line—you feel it, and if you’re experienced, you know what it means. She could feel the trouble nibbling at us. “Maybe chocolate will cure it.”
    >>> THE ring had been set up by Bobby. A group of people that he more or less trusted were each given one segment of his address. If anything should happen to him—if his system went unresponsive—we’d each dump our “word” at a blind e-mail address.
    Whoever checked the e-mail would assemble the words, derive a street address, and go to Bobby’s house to see what had