That's all Corbeil would need: a level of credibility, and the silence of contrary witnesses.
And a good lawyer, of course.
CHAPTER 10
Since I couldn't sleep anyway, I kicked LuEllen out of bed at six-thirty and we went to look for Clarence Mason. We stopped at a diner for cholesterol and caffeine, got clogged in traffic heading into San Francisco, crossed the Golden Gate at eight o'clock, and after a bit of wandering, LuEllen ran into a gas station and got a guess on the location of LaCoste Road. Mason's place was a small dark-green bungalow with an old-style two-track drive. Nobody home.
"Why didn't I think of that?" I said, back in the car. "Most people work during the day." We went out to a phone, and I hooked up the laptop and got online with Bobby. Mason, he said, had his own photography business in Santa Rosa. We found him on the second floor of a downtown building, above a flower store: Mason Restorations.
The office door looked like it might open on a detective office from a noir movie-textured glass with a gold-leaf name. Inside, it was all windows, blond hardwood floors, and high-tech machinery. The place had two rooms-a big working space behind the counter at the entrance, and a small glassed-in office at the far end, along the window wall. The working space was occupied by a half-dozen top-end Macs, a number of film and flatbed scanners and several large color printers. Three women were looking at a computer screen when we pushed through the door; one of them straightened and walked over to the counter.
"Can I help you?" she asked.
"We're here to see Mr. Mason."
"Do you have an appointment?"
"No, but it's fairly urgent." A thirtyish blond man had looked up from a computer inside the glassed-in office; I was willing to bet he was Mason. "Could you tell him we're friends of Bobby?"
"We really need to talk to him," LuEllen said from my shoulder, with a smile.
"Just a minute, please."
She walked back to the glassed-in office, stuck her head inside, and said something; I could see the blond's head bobbing. She motioned to us, and we pushed through the counter gate and down to the office. The woman rejoined the other two, who were looking at the yellowed image of an old woman, apparently scanned from a paper photograph.
Mason stood up, looking unhappy. "I'm not sure if we know the same Bobby."
"If you go online and call him, he'll tell you we're all right," I said.
He swallowed and said, "I'm not online much anymore. Who are you?"
"You saw the list of the people in Firewall? I'm k."
He sat down, and sat perfectly still for a moment, except for his bobbing Adam's apple, then said, "I've heard a couple of things about you. if you're really k. Did you once have a contract with a wine company to help straighten out their distribution system?"
"Yes."
"Then you know my friend Clark," he said.
"Miller," I said. "He lives in St. Helena in a redwood house with a real redwood hot tub in back, and his wife's name is. Tom."
"Ex-wife," Mason said. "She got the house." He looked at LuEllen and said, "Close the door." LuEllen pushed the door shut and we sat down in a couple of wooden visitors' chairs. Mason pushed both hands through his hair and said, "This FirewallI don't know anything about it, but my name is all over the place. It's driving me crazy. What's going on? I keep waiting for the FBI to show up."
I looked at LuEllen, who shook her head. To Mason, I said, "Goddamnit. You don't know anything?"
He spread his hands"Honest to God, I was sitting at my kitchen table reading the paper and eating shredded wheat and scanning this article on the Lighter killing, and all of a sudden I see this list with my name in itomeomi. I almost choked to death. I never heard of Firewall before this thing. Now I'm supposed to be some sort of terrorist."
"Yeah. Me, too. And Bobby. We're trying to figure out what's going on."
Mason looked at LuEllen again. "Are you on the list?"
"No. I'm just a friend. Of k's and Bobby's."
Mason shook his head. "I don't know what to do I've thought about calling the FBI and identifying myself, but. I don't know, I don't think that's a good idea."
"I don't know your history," I said. "I might wait a while before dragging in the law."
"Yeah. So would I." He wasn't a tough-looking guy, but the way he said it suggested a need to stay away from the feds. As a matter of privacy, ethics, and personality, I didn't ask him what he did; LuEllen wasn't so inhibited.
"So what'd you do omeomi, hold up banks?"
She can be so perky, when she wants, that it works an odd magic on men, especially technics, who have residual fantasies about cheerleaders. That's what I hear anyway. Mason showed a small grin and said, "No, nothing like that. I do. specialty photography."
"Jeez. When people say that, I usually think porno," LuEllen said.
"It's not porno," he said.
"You guys should talk sometime," I said to LuEllen. "You could trade tips."
"You do photography?" Now he was a little more interested. "What kind?"
"Specialty," she said.
He actually chuckled, leaned back and stretched. "That's the best kind, isn't it?"
We sat in silence for a couple of minutes, and then I said, "Well. we better go."
"What are you doing?" he asked. "Just checking out whoever you can find from the list?"
"That's the idea. Between Bobby and me, on the original list of names, we knew a few people. None of us are involved with Firewall. Then Bobby tracked down you and one other guy. through friends, I guess. We haven't checked with the other guy, but your story is like the rest of ours."
"What're you gonna do if you find them? Firewall?"
"I don't know. Bobby thinks we ought to turn them in. If they did the Lighter thing, anyway."
"Do it," he said. "Find 'em, and fuck 'em."
Currier lived in an apartment in Santa Cruz. Again, nobody home, and Bobby hadn't been able to find a job for him. I checked with the manager, telling her that I was an old friend in the area for a day. "He's gone to Mexico, on vacation," she said.
"When did he leave?"
"Last week. He said he'd be gone for three weeks. Too bad you missed him."
Now what?" LuEllen asked, as we walked away.
"Back to Rufus. He's three hours ahead of uslet's see if Monger worked."
"What do you think about Currier?"
"He might be running. He's on the list; maybe he's got reason to run."
"Like you."
"Like all of us."
Monger had worked. "A lot of the traffic was out of individual computers from about ten major sitesall colleges, all easy to get into," Rufus said. "It looks like somebody went looking for online computers, planted a rumor message in a virus that dumped it into AOL message boards and other places like that. In the days before the rumors started, a lot of those ten sites had some extended traffic with a server in Laurel, Maryland."
"How much before the rumors started?"
"Week or so. That's about as far back as I can get, before the universe gets too large for Monger." "A week or so."
"That's what it looks like. Does this help?"
"I have to think about it," I said.
Bobby came back with some info about AmMath, and the guy who ran it.
St. John Corbeil was a smart guy, a guy who quit the Marine Corps as a major and moved to the National Security Agency. He worked for the NSA for another five years, doing nothing that Bobby could find out about, except getting an advanced degree in software design. After a five-year hitch at NSA, he quit, moved to Dallas, and started his own high-tech encryption-products firm. He'd taken a half-dozen NSA encryption, math, and software specialists with him. The company had done well, coming along with its product line just at the beginning of the Internet boom. Corbeil was reasonably rich, with his ten percent of AmMath stock and his CEO's spot.
"I don't understand any of that encryption shit," LuEllen said.