"Like this," I said. "Suppose you wanted to send me an Internet note that said, 'Let's sneak into Bill Gates' house and steal his dog.' If strong encryption is allowed, you could run the message through a software packageyou'd just push a buttonand it would be impossible for anybody to break. Anybody. Unless he had the key. No matter how hot-shit somebody else's computers were, they couldn't break it."
"But with the Clipper chip."
"There'd be two keys. I'd have one, and the government would have one. You could send the message, and I'd get it okay, but so would the government. If they were watching."
"We'd get to Bill Gates's house and we'd find a whole bunch of cops waiting."
"And we'd be standing there with our dicks in our hands."
"Or a can of Alpo, in my case," she said.
Jack had had a small house in Santa Cruz, about a mile from Currier's apartment. After he was killed, the FBI had gotten a warrant to go through the place, and Lane told them where to find the keys. The day after the funeral, she'd called to see if she could get back in, and the feds had no objection: they'd turned the place over, and had taken out everything that appeared to be computer-related, along with all his old phone bills, personal correspondence, and so on.
While LuEllen and I were looking up Firewall names, Lane and Green had gone over to the house to look around, and to start cleaning up. That's what Lane had called it. Cleaning up.
What she meant was, throwing away anything that couldn't be sold or given away. All the small pieces of a life-posters, notes, letters, unidentifiable photos; like that. Jack had never had children, so there was nobody to get it, except his sister; nobody to wonder who this ancestor had been, and to sit down in 2050 or 2100 and paw through the remains.
When they got back, Green said, "Somebody was there before any of us. Somebody spread the lock on the back door."
"Gotta be the AmMath guys," I said. "Maybe they're happy, since they got the disks from you."
"What'd you find out about Firewall?" Lane asked.
"Nothing," I said. I ran it down for her.
"This guy who went to Mexico," Green said. "He could have gone for more than one reason. You're assuming he went because he was scared because he was on the list, like Mason. But what if he's running because he is with Firewall?"
"I mentioned that," LuEllen said. "Kidd didn't buy it. He's got a theory."
"What's the theory?"
"There is no Firewall," I said. "It's bullshit, made up out of whole cloth."
Then we launched into one of those circular arguments in which you almost feel as though you can grasp what's going on, but there's always one critical piece missing from every possible logical construction. Lane started it.
"Exactly what would that do?" Lane asked. "If somebody made up Firewall, why would they do it?"
"To cover some other reason for killing Lighter?" I suggested.
"They didn't have anything to cover. The police thought it was a mugging. They weren't happy, but I've never heard there was any other big investigation going on, before the Firewall thing came up."
"Clipper II was dying. Is dying. Maybe they thought if one of the Clipper II people was killed by hackers, there'd be some kind of groundswell."
"There's not going to be any groundswell," Lane said. "The feds might want Clipper II, but it's too late. Everybody knows it's too late. It doesn't have anything to do with preferences or laws. Trying to get rid of strong encryption and replace it with the Clipper II would be like trying to get rid of pi or the Round Earth Theory. It's too fucking late."
"Then how did all of those names come up all of a sudden? Mine and Bobby's and Jack's and omeomi and the others," I asked. "We are linked. If you look at it from the right direction, we are a conspiracy, because a lot of us sure as shit have conspired with each other."
"I don't know; I don't know why Firewall came up. I don't know how it ties in. But it seems to. There's something out there, and it's not totally made up. Something is happening. And Jack is dead and Lighter is dead."
"But it might just be coincidence."
"How could it possibly be?" She ticked it off on her fingers. "Jack is connected with Clipper II and AmMath and Firewall. Firewall kills Lighter who is connected with Clipper II and AmMath."
"But we can't find a single person who is really connected with Firewall," I said. "Not a single one."
Green asked, "Did Jack know Lighter?"
I shook my head. "Not as far as we know."
"Might be something to check."
I turned to LuEllen, who'd kept her mouth shut during the argument. "What do you think?"
"Three choices," she said.
"Yeah?"
"Look at AmMath. Keeping digging at Firewall. Get the fuck out."
Lane wanted to go after AmMath because of her brother. Green didn't much care; his job was to take care of Lane, which he would do one way or the other. LuEllen was edging toward the door. "You can't fight a bureaucracy," she said. "You just become a goal. They put the goal in memos. It's like trying to argue with the IRS."
But I couldn't quit, not yet. The names were out there, and once the cops started unraveling a few identities, they would probably get them alland we could get hurt without ever knowing why, or what was happening.
"I have to find out more about Firewall," I said. "Just for self-protection. If AmMath's involved, then I'll look into AmMath."
"You're giving up on Jack?" Lane asked. "It sounds like you're giving up."
"No, but we've got to be careful. From what it looks like, AmMath may be more than some mean-ass private company. Jack may have been messing with something seriousbig-time trouble, of the kind we really don't want to know about."
"What does that mean?"
"That means that the only way to get at them would be politics. We find some paper, we sic your senator on them, they do an internal investigation and cough somebody up and disown him. But if Jack was killed by some kind of operation. that's gonna be tough."
The best thing we could do, I thought, was to run down the Monger information in Maryland. Maybe, with luck, we'd find some fourteen-year-old computer hack at the bottom of the Firewall conspiracy. We could dump him in the lap of the local sheriff, get a good laugh out of the press, and go home.
"Fat chance," LuEllen said.
"It could happen," I said. "It's better than trying to crawl through AmMath's basement window."
"What about Lane?" Green asked.
"Call the Dallas cops and tell them that you're coming out to pick up Jack's computers and whatever other property they seized, that they don't want anymore. But that you've got to close down his home out here first."
"And you guys will be in Maryland doing what?" Lane asked.
"You know," I said. "Looking around."
We flew out of San Francisco the same night. Before we left, when we were at the motel, packing, I went back out to Bobby and told him that we'd be moving to Washington. He booked us business-class seats on an evening flight into National, and a car under one of the phony IDs LuEllen had been using in New York. That ID was more solid than the two we'd picked up in San Francisco, and the credit cards that went with them were definitely good. Bobby had also developed more stuff on Corbeil and AmMath.
Corbeil was a smart guy, but he was also nuts. He spent way too much time thinking about godless socialists, mindless bureaucrats, confiscatory taxation, black agitators, the yellow peril, the red menace, the International Jewish Conspiracy, and the New World Order. He'd been known to allow in public that Hitler had done a lot of good things.
I've never been much interested in politics, but once wrote some do-it-yourself polling that allowed low-rent politicians to do their own telephone polls. I eventually sold off the business, but before I did, I got to know quite a few politicians. They were a pretty lively bunch, no more or less corrupt than schoolteachers, newspaper reporters, cops, or doctors.
Anyway, it didn't take much exposure to politics for me to realize that there are as many nuts on the left as there are on the right, and in the long run, the lefties are probably more dangerous. But in the short run, if you find a guy on top of your hometown clock tower with a cheap Chinese semi-auto assault-weapon lookalike, that guy will be one of Corbeil's buddies, dreaming of black helicopters and socialist tanks massing on the Canadian border, preparing to pollute America's vital fluids.