Finally, growing aware of the total silence, she pushed herself halfway up and looked around. "Kidd?"
"Right here."
"Drawing my butt again?" She pushed herself all the way up, stretched and yawned.
"It's in the picture, but it's not the focus; it's sorta half cut off."
She came to look as I worked some shading in around her toes. "My feet aren't that big," she said.
"From this perspective."
"They're not that big. They're fives."
"From this angle."
"Bullshit. Not that big. And my toe isn't that bent."
"You're right. I'm sorry. I apologize."
"No, you don't," she said. She stretched again. "You don't care whose fragile ego you crush. All artists are like that."
"Somebody once said that a portrait is a painting where there's something not quite right about the mouth," I said. "It might have been Sargent. Anyway, nobody's ever said that about the foot."
"I'm the first."
"Go take a shower," I said.
She went to take a shower and I struggled with the foreshortening of her leg and foot, and with her face in the back, rising over her thigh, and the pillow behind that. When I was done, I took the drawing out, ripped it up, and tossed it in the wastebasket. Something not quite right about the foot. With all that in my head, waiting for LuEllen to get out of the bathroom, I looked out the window down at the parking lot.
And understood what I hadn't understood before.
Why I had looked down at the parking lot and thought I'd missed an important thought.
Understood the AmMath photographsor something about them, anyway. It all came out of the perspective of LuEllen's foot.
The shower was running and I could hear her humming to herself in the bathroom as I brought the laptop up, and one of the photos.
"Jesus." I was right. I sat staring at it, then brought up another one. Ripped a piece of paper out of my drawing book, got a pen, and began making comparative measurements on the computer screen. I was still doing it when LuEllen came hobbling out of the bathroom with a towel around her head. I glanced at her and looked back at the computer.
"Thanks," she said. "I'm here with my nice pink."
"Shut up. I gotta get online with Bobby. Get dressed."
"What?"
"Look at this photograph."
She looked over my shoulder. "What?" she asked again.
"Look how this shadow comes down from this light pole? The shadow from the sun?"
"Yeah?"
"Look how it comes down from this light pole," I said.
"All right."
"And this one."
"I see all the shadows and all the light poles, Kidd. So what?"
"All the shadows are in exactly the same perspective. Exactly, as close as I can measure. Doesn't it look weird to you?"
"No. And so what?"
"It's impossible, that's all. Well, not impossible, if the camera was far enough back."
"We were thinking it might be a surveillance camera up on a roof. It'd have to be, to get that high angle."
"Still not high enough," I said. "I gotta get with Bobby. He could make some better measurements and do the numbers."
"If that's not high enough, what? You think it was made by a plane?"
"Not high enough," I said. "I think that's a satellite photograph."
She still wasn't much impressed; I had to work to get that. "Think what a face would look like if you took it from three blocks away with your Nikon and then blew it up to this size. It'd look like a thumbprint," I said. "Look at those faces. You can't quite recognize them, but you almost can. If that camera's in orbit, it has one unbelievable capability."
Now she was hunched over me, and spotted something we should have seen before. "You know, those cars." There were only a half-dozen of them in the parking lot. "Not a single one of them is American-made. Look at this one." She tapped the screen with a fingernail. "I don't think I've ever seen that kind. It looks like a combination of a pickup truck and a sedan."
"You see those in the Middle East," I said. "Lots of them."
She straightened. "So it's a satellite photo. So what?"
"I don't know, yet. But it seems unlikely that a satellite would take a picture of three guys and the three guys were important," I said. "How could you time something like that?"
"Radios, maybe."
I shook my head. "I bet it's not the guys that are important. I bet it's the photograph. Not the content, just the photograph, that they have it. They're supposed to be working on the Clipper chip, and they have this. This has got to be some kind of ungodly high-level secret capability. You could not only see stuff like ammo dumps, you could see what's in them. If they can do something with computers to punch up the resolutionjust a probability enginethey might be able to figure out who gets into which car, might be able to track cars through traffic. all kinds of stuff."
"They're NSA, right? Isn't that what they do?"
"No, no, that's another group, the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office. They do all the satellite stuff."
"So let's get online with Bobby, and see what he says."
We got online from a mall. Bobby thought he could figure out the height of the camera by picking out small parts of the original full-strength photos and making some precise measurements on the shadows.
freaky if it's a satellite photo. never seen anything like this.
maybe what they're hiding.
but what does it have to do with firewall?
There was the other side of Lane's question. Lane was interested in what happened to Jack; Bobby was interested in how his name got attached to Firewall. Somehow, AmMath was involved in both of those things, but how and why were they related? Or were they related?
We talked about it as we were leaving the mall, and decided they had to be linked Jack went to Maryland, where the computer that started the Firewall rumors was located. The guy he saw, who was later killed, was a client of that same server. It was all tied. We just couldn't see the knot.
Lane, it turned out, had been worrying about the same questions all night. We all had breakfast together, and she leaned across the diner table, picked up my glass of Coke, and rapped it on the table. She had a theory, she said.
"Say the photographs are wildly important, for some reason. We don't know why, but let's say that's a given. Jack steals them. They know he stole them, but they don't know why, or who he might have given them to. So they come up with a scheme. They invent this Firewall group, using names that they harvest from the Internet. Legendary hackers. There's all kinds of talk on the Net. Anybody could get a list like that. They make Jack a part of the group, so when the names finally come out, the cops'll say, 'Ah-ah, he was a member of the radical Firewall group, that's why he broke into AmMath and it was only bad luck that he got caught.' "
"Why use the server in Maryland?" I asked. "The same one that Lighter just happened to be on."
"You said it was mostly NSA people," she said. "Maybe it was one server they all knew. That they all had access to."
"Sounds weak," LuEllen said.
"But the rest of it sounds pretty good," Green said. "It ties things together."
"What about the IRS attack? That was set up weeks ago."
"But the Firewall name wasn't around weeks ago," I said. "That could have been made up at the last minute. These hacks are ready to attack the IRS, and just at that moment, somebody invents a group with a neat-sounding name. So they say, 'All right, we're Firewall, too.' "
"Goddamnit," LuEllen said, "It's still too hard to think about."
"I'll tell you what, though," Lane said. "When we go back into AmMath's computer, I think we ought to be looking for stuff on Firewall and satellites. This Clipper stuff is a dead end. Whatever's going on doesn't have anything to do with Clipper."
"When we go back in?" I asked.
"Darn right: I know my way around mainframes as well as anyone. I want to be there tonight, when we go back in," she said.