"Then why the… why didn't you tell me?"
"You didn't ask me."
They glared at each other for a while. I had no idea what events had led up to this moment, but it was quite clear they didn't like each other even a little bit. Lisa was on top just now, and seemed to be enjoying it. Then she glanced at her screen, looked surprised, and quickly tapped a key. The word that had been there vanished. She gave me an inscrutable glance, then faced Osborne again.
"If you recall, you brought me in because all your own guys were getting was a lot of crashes. This system was brain-damaged when I got here, practically catatonic. Most of it was down and your guys couldn't get it up." She had to grin at that.
"You decided I couldn't do any worse than your guys were doing. So you asked me to try and break Kluge's codes without frying the system. Well, I did it. All you had to do was come by and interface and I would have downloaded N tons of wallpaper right in your lap."
Osborne listened quietly. Maybe he even knew he had made a mistake.
"What did you get? Can I see it now?"
She nodded, and pressed a few keys: Words started to fill her screen, and one close to Osborne. I got up and read Lisa's terminal.
It was a brief bio of Kluge/Gavin. He was about my age, but while I was getting shot at in a foreign land, he was cutting a swath through the infant computer industry. He had been there from the ground up, working at many of the top research facilities. It surprised me that it had taken over a week to identify him.
"I compiled this anecdotally," Lisa said, as we read. "The first thing you have to realize about Gavin is that he exists nowhere in any computerized information system. So I called people all over the country-interesting phone system he's got, by the way; it generates a new number for each call, and you can't call back or trace it-and started asking who the top people were in the fifties and sixties. I got a lot of names. After that, it was a matter of finding out who no longer existed in the files. He faked his death in 1967. I located one account of it in a newspaper file. Everybody I talked to who had known him knew of his death. There is a paper birth certificate in Florida. That's the only other evidence I found of him. He was the only guy so many people in the field knew who left no mark on the world. That seemed conclusive to me."
Osborne finished reading, then looked up.
"All right, Ms. Foo. What else have you found out?"
"I've broken some of his codes. I had a piece of luck, getting into a basic rape-and-plunder program he'd written to attack other people's programs, and I've managed to use it against a few of his own. I've unlocked a file of passwords with notes on where they came from. And I've learned a few of his tricks. But it's the tip of the iceberg."
She waved a hand at the silent metal brains in the room.
"What I haven't gotten across to anyone is just what this is. This is the most devious electronic weapon ever devised. It's armored like a battleship. It has to be; there's a lot of very slick programs out there that grab an invader and hang on like a terrier. If they ever got this far Kluge could deflect them. But usually they never even knew they'd been burgled. Kluge'd come in like a cruise missile, low and fast and twisty. And he'd route his attack through a dozen cut-offs.
"He had a lot of advantages. Big systems these days are heavily protected. People use passwords and very sophisticated codes. But Kluge helped invent most of them. You need a damn good lock to keep out a locksmith. He helped install a lot of the major systems. He left informants behind, hidden in the software. If the codes were changed, the computer itself would send the information to a safe system that Kluge could tap later. It's like you buy the biggest, meanest, best-trained watchdog you can. And that night, the guy who trained the dog comes in, pats him on the head, and robs you blind."
There was a lot more in that vein. I'm afraid that when Lisa began talking about computers, ninety percent of my head shut off.
"I'd like to know something, Osborne," Lisa said.
"What would that be?"
"What is my status here? Am I supposed to be solving your crime for you, or just trying to get this system back to where a competent user can deal with it?"
Osborne thought it over.
"What worries me," she added, "is that I'm poking around in a lot of restricted data banks. I'm worried about somebody knocking on the door and handcuffing me. You ought to be worried, too. Some of these agencies wouldn't like a homicide cop looking into their affairs."
Osborne bridled at that. Maybe that's what she intended.
"What do I have to do?" he snarled. "Beg you to stay?"
"No. I just want your authorization. You don't have to put it in writing. Just say you're behind me."
"Look. As far as L.A. County and the State of California are concerned, this house doesn't exist. There is no lot here. It doesn't appear in the assessor's records. This place is in a legal limbo. If anybody can authorize you to use this stuff, it's me, because I believe a murder was committed in it. So you just keep doing what you've been doing."
"That's not much of a commitment," she mused.
"It's all you're going to get. Now, what else have you got?"
She turned to her keyboard and typed for a while. Pretty soon a printer started, and Lisa leaned back. I glanced at her screen. It said: osculate posterior-p. I remembered that osculate meant kiss. Well, these people have their own language. Lisa looked up at me and grinned.
"Not you," she said, quietly. "Him."
I hadn't the faintest notion of what she was talking about.
Osborne got his printout and was ready to leave. Again, he couldn't resist turning at the door for final orders.
"If you find anything to indicate he didn't commit suicide, let me know."
"Okay. He didn't commit suicide."
Osborne didn't understand for a moment.
"I want proof."
"Well, I have it, but you probably can't use it. He didn't write that ridiculous suicide note."
"How do you know that?"
"I knew that my first day here. I had the computer list the program. Then I compared it to Kluge's style. No way he could have written it. It's tighter'n a bug's ass. Not a spare line in it. Kluge didn't pick his alias for nothing. You know what it means?"
"Clever," I said.
"Literally. But it means… a Rube Goldberg device.
Something overly complex. Something that works, but for the wrong reason. You 'kluge around' bugs in a program. It's the hacker's vaseline."
"So?" Osborne wanted to know.
"So Kluge's programs were really crocked. They were full of bells and whistles he never bothered to clean out. He was a genius, and his programs worked, but you wonder why they did. Routines so bletcherous they'd make your skin crawl. Real crufty bagbiters. But good programming's so rare, even his diddles were better than most people's super-moby hacks."
I suspect Osborne understood about as much of that as I did.
"So you base your opinion on his programming style."
"Yeah. Unfortunately, it's gonna be ten years or so before that's admissible in court, like graphology or fingerprints. But if you know anything about programming you can look at it and see it. Somebody else wrote that suicide note-somebody damn good, by the way. That program called up his last will and testament as a sub-routine. And he definitely did write that. It's got his fingerprints all over it. He spent the last five years spying on the neighbors as a hobby. He tapped into military records, school records, work records, tax files and bank accounts. And he turned every telephone for three blocks into a listening device. He was one hell of a snoop."