The Fool's Run (14 page)

Dace and LuEllen usually went out at night, and often spent the night at his apartment. I worked evenings. Maggie talked with Chicago or worked with the other computer terminal, via telephone, with her Chicago office. One night, simultaneously overcome with office fatigue and horniness, we staggered into our bedroom, pulling off clothes, and fell on the bed in a frenzy. Afterward, Maggie showered and dropped into the bed, naked, and was instantly asleep.

The next morning, I woke first, yawned, slid out of bed, and half-opened the narrow Venetian blinds that covered the bedroom window. Light flooded across the bed, illuminating the long valley of her spine and the turn of her hip and shoulders. Her face was turned away, her blond hair spread over the pillow. She was still sleeping soundly. I looked at her a moment, then tiptoed out and got the big pad of parchment paper I use for sketching. When she woke, I'd done a half dozen preliminaries.

"What are you doing?" she said sleepily.

"Drawing."

She was suddenly awake, alarmed. "Let me see those." She crawled across the bed and I showed her the pad. She looked at the drawings, and lay back. "Can't see my face," she said.

"I can always put it in," I joked.

"Just what I need. A nude picture of myself hanging over the bar. What are you going to do with them?"

"Probably do a painting-if I can convince you to lie in the light for a few mornings, so I can get your skin."

"I don't know; I'd feel silly. I'm no model," she said, and seemed genuinely shy.

That afternoon, by chance, I saw an old-fashioned red-white-and-blue-checked comforter in a shop window, and went in and bought it. Dace and LuEllen were gone again the next morning, and I got her to lie on it, nude, face down, her head turned away, the light streaming in over her shoulders and butt. I spent an hour doing color studies before she put a stop to it.

"How much do models get paid?" she asked.

"Depends on how good they are," I said. "Anything between nine and fifteen dollars an hour."

"You owe me fifteen bucks," she said, pulling up her underpants.

"'Fraid not. You're awful. Five bucks at the most. You kept scratching your back, and you'd move around on that checked background. Drove me nuts."

"Awful, huh? So it's not a fallback if I get fired?"

Dace saw the beginnings of the painting that afternoon and whistled.

"Nice ass, huh?" Maggie said.

"Nice painting," he said seriously.

Maggie looked at me as if she had never seen me before.

The changes I sneaked into the Whitemark computers were worked out on editing programs at the apartment. I wrote the code on our machines, tested it, developed the sequence for inserting it at Whitemark, and put it in. I was on-line with Whitemark for only a few minutes-sometimes a matter of seconds.

As the work progressed I drifted into the traditional programming schedule. The programming and debugging were done at night, and I slept late. Once I even ordered out for a pizza with everything, the only official programmer food.

The attack programs were inserted into the Whitemark software during the heavy computer-working hours in the morning, when we'd be less likely to be noticed.

In the afternoons, I'd paint. I'd never worked in Washington, but it was an exceptional place, with its heavy subtropical flora, the water, the varied stone and brick buildings going back two hundred years. The light was almost Italianate, but bluer and clearer. When I went out to paint, often along the Mall, Maggie would come along, bring a book and a blanket, and lie in the sun and read and doze.

Dace and LuEllen were making plans for Mexico. With the burglaries done, LuEllen had almost nothing to do, and spent the days touring Washington. Scouting possible burglary targets, I suspected. Twice she flew back to Duluth, alone, to make arrangements for a longer absence. Dace had decided on the west coast of Mexico, a semi-modern fishing village in Baja with American-owned villas on the hillside. "Just the right combination of ambience and convenience," he said. His first novel would involve Pentagon power politics with a dash of sexual intrigue. "Like it really is."

Maggie and Dace sent the material on the generals off to Turret. Dace, playing the part of a demoted and treacherous executive, called the newsletter to make sure they had gotten the package, and that they understood it. They had, and they did. The television stations were tipped on the pornographers and promised to make inquiries. Dace also spent some time hanging around the Pentagon, talking with reporter friends, listening for rumors about Whitemark. There was nothing at first. Then, slowly, they began to come. Trouble with plans; trouble with production; disputes between lower-level managers over a series of brutal snafus.

On the ninth day of the attack, I found something interesting in the Whitemark system. I had noticed a data-exchange line that ran out of the main computer to a satellite computer elsewhere. I paid no attention to it, until one day I saw an exchange that involved a remote terminal beyond the satellite. That meant that somebody was telephoning the satellite computer, and from there, was getting into the main computer. If I could learn how to access the satellite from the outside, I could avoid the phone lines that went directly into the main computers. For practical purposes, I would be working from inside the Whitemark building. Toward the end of the attack, it might buy me a few more days of work.

Unfortunately, the computers accessed each other with special codes, and I couldn't find the code listings inside the main system. It was all done inside the satellite.

What I could see were incoming codes. Each five-numeral code group was unique-the same one was never used twice. All the codes were handtyped, so they weren't coming off a master list on a disk. Eventually I fed a list of once-used codes to Bobby, explained the problem, and asked if he had an analysis. He called back three hours later.

The code is the 17th Mersenne Prime, 13,395 digits in 2,679 groups of five, starting with 85450. Your code sample starts 875 groups in and continues in sequence. I am sending you the next 500 sequence groups. Enough?

Plenty. How much?

My pleasure. No charge.

Bobby is not a person to bother with unimportant matters, so I never asked him directly how he figured it out. That he did is bizarre beyond words.

Once I had the codes, I got inside the satellite. It turned out to be a small computer in the accounting department. I got its phone number from its files.

On the tenth day of the attack, Maggie flew out to Chicago. She was back two days later.

"How was Anshiser?" I asked.

She sat at a dressing table with her back to me, peering into a dark mirror as she took down her hair.

"Worse," she said tersely. "I hate to look at him. He's losing more weight. His skin looks like crepe paper."

"The doctors still don't know what's wrong?"

"They keep saying stress, but some of them are nervous about the diagnosis. He may go out to the Mayo."

"He should have gone a month ago."

I was lying on the bed in my shorts, all the lights out except the small pink-shaded lamp on the dressing table. The apartment was quiet. Dace was at his apartment, closing it down, and LuEllen was in Duluth.

"How has it been here?" Maggie asked, unscrewing an earring.

"Whitemark will figure it out soon now," I said. "The engineering system is falling apart. Things must be chaotic. The office mail system will stop working tomorrow. That's the main way they route assignments and schedules, so that'll be shot. On Friday the paychecks all come up short."

Maggie dropped a second earring on the table-top and turned on the cushioned bench, so she was facing me. "Turret comes out tomorrow," she said. "I called Dace this morning before I left Chicago. He had solid word that the generals' story would be in it."

"He didn't mention it to me," I said. "I didn't see him today, just the note on the table saying he would be at his place tonight."

She stood up and stepped toward the bed, wearing a brassiere and panties and slip. She pulled the slip over her head and tossed it negligently on a side chair. "You were on the computer, and he didn't want to bother you," she said. "He said you were in a fugue state. Undo me?"

She sat on the edge of the bed; I propped myself up and unsnapped the brassiere, and kissed her between the shoulder blades. She arched her shoulders and pivoted on her butt and lay back on her pillow, her hair spreading out.

"Haven't heard anything about the kiddie porn yet," I said.

"Ah. Dace said something was happening. He attached his video recorder to the TV and set the timer for the news programs. It's running now," she said.

"Jesus, I didn't even see it. I've been out of it."

She rolled on her side facing me and slid her hand down inside my shorts. "Aw, has you been aw wonesome and sulking since mama's been gone?"

I groaned. "God save me from women who talk baby talk to my dick."

"Oh yeah? "she said.

Later that night we were lying in spoons, my arm over her hip, her butt against my stomach. When she had been breathing deep and steady for ten minutes, I got up and padded out of the room and quietly closed the door behind me. I had the computer up a minute later, and I was out on the phone lines, looking around. Sometimes, nothing will stop the code in your head.

The next day was the peak of the programming. I sat on the computer for nine straight hours, working out one piece after another, checking, debugging, rechecking. When I got out of the chair I could barely walk.

"You need a Fuji," Dace said as I hobbled out of the office.

"What's that?"

Fuji 's Water-Gate was a thoroughly westernized Japanese bathhouse not far from the Pentagon-westernized because the patrons wore tank suits and bathed in private groups. The bathing pools were not much bigger than good-sized hot tubs, but the water was infinitely hotter. Dace and Maggie dropped into it, moaned for a few seconds, then relaxed, and watched LuEllen and me test the water.

"C'mon, you'll live," Maggie said. "No guts?" With that, LuEllen dropped in like a stone, went completely under, gasped, and tried to crawl back out. Dace, laughing, grabbed her around the waist and held her squealing until she settled down. "Get your ass in here, Kidd," she said.

The water was hot enough to boil lobsters. I slipped in, an inch at a time, to my hips, supporting my weight with my hands.

"That's the worst way," Dace said snidely. "You get ten minutes of pain instead of ten seconds."

"I'll do it my way," I said.

"You'll boil your balls, is what you'll do," Maggie snorted. LuEllen and Dace looked at her strangely, and she blushed, then all three burst out laughing.

"All right, all right." I took a breath and dropped the rest of the way in, up to my chin. LuEllen, who is as strong as an ox, reached over and pushed my head under. For a moment, I thought my heart had stopped. When it started again, I huddled up next to Maggie until all the nerve endings died and I could straighten out.

"Jesus. How long do we have to stay in here?"

"An hour or so," Maggie said, grinning.

"We'll be dead in an hour."

"Nonsense. In two minutes, you'll feel fine."

She was right. Two minutes later I felt fine. We floated around the pool, talking, not touching, never mentioning Whitemark or the attack. LuEllen had been to the Smithsonian and-Dace laughed-had been looking at the display of locks. Dace, LuEllen said, had been closing down his apartment, and she had been helping. When she cleaned out the front room, she found a sack lunch behind the couch. Dace admitted that it was probably two years old, from a tough time when he was making his own lunch. There was a little plastic container of green grapes, LuEllen said, that had gone past raisinhood and had reached petrification.

Maggie told the other two that when I thought she was asleep, I snuck out of the bedroom and went back to the computer. "I can't compete, I guess."

"Of course you can," Dace said, ogling her thinly concealed breasts.

"Down, boy," said LuEllen.

Maggie threw back her head and laughed and lay back in the water, and she looked like a medieval swan queen come to life. Sometime during the forty-five minutes we spent in the pool, the code stopped running through my head.

The head of the Whitemark systems department, his wife, and twenty-three-year-old son were arrested at seven o'clock the next morning on a variety of pornography charges, all of them felonies. It was midmorning, and I was already on the machine, working, when the phone rang and Maggie answered. She listened for a moment, said, "Great" and "What channel?" and "Goodbye."

"That was Dace," she reported, leaning in the doorway. "He said to look at the 'Morning Break' news on Channel Three. He said the cops picked up our pornographer friends. There was a 'Live Eye' report right from the house."

We went into the living room and backed up the video recorder until we found the "Morning Break" segment, and watched the three people coming out of the house in handcuffs.

"I feel kind of sorry for them," Maggie said. The wife, a weighty, gray-haired matron, was weeping. She tried to cover her face with her hands, but the cameras tracked her right to the car.

"Think about what they were doing," I said. But it wasn't pretty.

After the unhappy family was bundled off in a squad car, the camera cut to a half dozen uniformed cops filing in and out of the garage door, carrying boxes full of magazines. We watched until the end of the segment, and then Maggie called Channel Three.

"Listen," she said when she got the news department, "if you hadn't heard, this man they arrested on the child pornography is a very important executive at Whitemark Aerospace. I work there, and I know. He runs all their computers. I think some of the other guys in that department may be working with him on this porn thing. They're pretty close."

She listened for a minute. "No, I can't. If I told you my name I could get fired. But he's really a bigshot."

She dropped the phone on the hook, and it rang again almost before she had taken her hand away. She listened for a moment, said "Thanks," and hung up. "Dace again," she said. "Turret is out. The generals are on the front. They reprinted the critical letters word for word."