"Not me."
"Of course not; you're not in jeopardy. But I might try to find somebody Icould talk to. I could find somebody, if I had Bobby."
Back at the hotel, I changed to shorts and a T-shirt, and went for a run, the cell phone clipped uncomfortably into the shorts. LuEllen went shopping. I did three miles, fairly hard, and the exercise felt good after all the time cooped up in cars and planes and small rooms. When I got back, I jumped in the shower again, for a quick rinse, and was just toweling off when John called.
"It's not him," he said. He sounded bubbly, which was not usually the case. "The guy they busted is white. They just had a picture of the cops walking him into federal court."
"Ah, Jesus. I hope our guy's okay."
"So do I. He can't runnot literally, anyway. He needs to stay at the. business."
"If he calls, tell him I need him."
"Do that," he said.
After hanging up, I turned the television down and went out on the Net. Trying to learn about the NSA and find some names. I got nothing but bullshit. But I have a few mailboxes scattered around, under different names and IDs; and when it became obvious that I wasn't going to get anything useful off the Net, I checked the box at AOL. I found a message: six digits, beginning with 800.
"Bobby," I said aloud. He knew a couple of the boxes. I tried the next one, and found seven more digits. The last box was empty. I picked up my laptop, got the acoustic earmuffs out of my travel bag, and headed for the door.
I called from a drive-up pay phone at a gas station two miles from the motel, using the muffs. Earmuffs are a valuable item, if you travel. It makes no difference what the country, what the phone system, or what the line voltages areif you can get an audible signal from your home Internet service provider, you can get online. I dialed using the old protocol, and after getting the "?," I typed in "k."
that wasn't me.
no shit. tell me, what did the woman do after the amazing events on the mississippi?
I got a couple of seconds of silence, as he thought about it. I wanted some confirmation that I was actually talking to Bobby, and he was quick, Bobby was. He came back with a woman's name. The right one.
marvel.
i need several names of nsa guys that i can talk to privately about firewall. server in md has nsa clients. firewall rumors may come from nsa.
fbi be better to talk to. nsa may disappear server material.
would prefer to talk to in-person. fbi has guns.
ok. will check nsa names.
maybe get fbi names also.
i can do that.
will you be at this number?
no. changing numbers with each contact, limiting calls to 2 min. will leave new # for you like this time. will dump nsa information to sf box.
Before I signed off, I gave him the information that would give him system administrator status at the Bloch Technology server, and suggested that he look at the client list.
will do that. must go.
take care.
You too.
LuEllen was waiting when I got back. I quickly filled her in on what had happened. "So what do we do now?" she asked.
"Wait. Until Bobby gets us a contact."
"And you want to talk to this guy personally."
"Yeah. If we do it online, or call, as far as he might know it could be some teenaged crank. If we look him up personally, we can be a little more definite."
"It's a risk."
"Yeah. And you know, I've been thinking. Bobby thought maybe we should go to the FBI instead of the NSA, because the NSA might just decide to dump whatever's on that server. So if he gets us some FBI names, maybe we should drop a note to them, too."
"Let's think about it."
We went out and hit more golf balls, and went to another movie, which also suckedthere've been a whole line of movies starring old action-adventure stars paired with much, much, much younger women; they're kinda creepyand kept checking the mailbox. At two o'clock, the SF box, which has an ancient heritage going back to the original Well, popped up with three paragraphs of type.
The recommended NSA contact was an executive in the security section, a woman named Rosalind Welsh. She was high enough up that she could talk directly to the top levels of the bureaucracy, far enough down that she'd not have any minders. And, Bobby said, she was newly divorced, with a son going to college. Her husband was also an NSA exec, but he was showing a new address, while Rosalind Welsh kept the Glen Burnie address and the old phone number. All of that, taken together, meant that she was living alone.
We also got five names with the FBI, including the personal home phone number of the director. If we used it, I thought, we should get some attention.
And finally, Bobby said,
ran bloch server clients against nsa roster. of three thousand clients, 1844 appear to be nsa.
amazing. nsa is firewall.
maybe.
get out of server. i may talk to fbi.
yes.
If I was going to talk to Rosalind Welsh personally, I needed to cover my face and hair. LuEllen recommended a Halloween mask, since Halloween was coming and they should be easy to find, and because from any distance, they don't look like masks. We drove all the way to Philadelphia to get it: a full-face molded rubber mask of Bill Clinton. It worked fine, except that I couldn't talk very well through the mouth slit, and we wound up snipping off the lips with sewing scissors. We got a plastic water pistol from a toy store, and a baseball hat to complete the outfit.
We went to Philadelphia because it was only two hours away by car, and LuEllen had contacts therea gun guy who I'd met once, and now, it turned out, a phone guy. We got another cold cell phone, guaranteed for a week, for $300. We were back in Baltimore a little after seven o'clock. Glen Burnie is south of the city, and we were scouting Welsh's house at seven-thirty.
"Lights; she's home," LuEllen said.
"So we cruise it a couple of times, and I hit the door,"
"You're gonna scare the life out of her. and the other problem is, what if there's somebody in there with her?"
"There's a garage window," I said. "I can check the garage on my way upsee how many cars are in there."
"Not perfect," she said.
"Nothing is."
We didn't need to do it, anyway. We were cruising the place for the third time, picking out a place for LuEllen to wait with the car, when Rosalind Welsh walked out the front door of her house, did a few stretches in the driveway, and jogged off down the street. We rolled slowly past, and I got a look at her. She was probably fifty, and ran with the earnest, hunched-up stance of somebody who hadn't been running long, but was determined to lose the armchair ass.
"Let's do it on the street," I said. "Stop ahead of her and let me out in front of a house without lights. I'll bend over the car like I'm saying good-bye, and when she comes up, I'll stop her."
"She'll see the car. Maybe get the plates."
"Pull into a driveway, so we're sideways to her. When I stop her, I'll turn her around, and you pull out and go around the corner. When I'm done, I'll get her jogging the other direction."
"This worries me."
"Yeah, well. It's better than the door."
"If she screams?" LuEllen asked.
"I'll run."
This was the only part of what I do that bothers methe involvement of innocents in ways that might hurt them. For the most part, when I'm working, I'll take information from one place and deliver it to another. In most cases, I can make at least a thin argument that what I do benefits the population as a wholeencourages competition, saves jobs, etc.
But sometimes, although I regret it, I involve an innocent. Like this lady, a bureaucrat, a little too heavy, earnestly chugging off the pounds on a quiet suburban street. Whatever else came out of it, I was about to scare the hell out of her. I wouldn't do it, if not for the Firewall thing.
I pulled the mask over my head, put on the cap, and got the plastic gun out. LuEllen guided us past her again and pulled into a driveway a half block ahead. I got out, and bent over the open door: LuEllen said, "A hundred feet, seventy-five, fifty, forty, shut the door and make your move."