The Devil's Code Read Online Free PDF Page B

BROTHERS AND SISTERS FOR L ANE W ARD AND ALSO PHOTO FOR W ARD . S OONEST .
    W ILL DUMP TO YOUR BOX ONE HOUR . Y OU MUST GO OUT ON N ET !!! R EAD F IREWALL . I WILL CHECK ON S TANFORD .
    O K  . . . W ILL CALL BACK .
    Dial tone and out.
    I read down the screen once more, wiped out everything but the letter, printed it, and then said, “Hey.”
    Lane drifted back. “What?” she asked.
    “A letter from your brother.”
    “Aw, jeez.”
    I pulled it out of the printer and handed it to her. She took a minute reading it, a little vertical line between her eyes. Then she read it again and a tear trickled down one cheek. Finally, she looked up.
    “Why would he do that?”
    “Curiosity. Jack was a computer guy. If you tell a computer guy not to look in a file, he’ll look in the file.”
    “Especially if he thinks of himself as some kind of cool James Bond guy,” she said. Like it was my fault.
    “Do you know anything about a group called Firewall?” I asked.
    She gave me a long look and then asked, “Are you working for the government?”
    That took a while to sort out. I told her about Bobby’s strange anxiety and she suggested that I do what Bobby wanted: that I look up Firewall in thepapers and on the Net. I went back out, with Lane looking over my shoulder.
    E ight days earlier, as I’d been sitting on my living room floor sorting out pike lures, a National Security Agency bureaucrat named Lighter had been murdered walking near his home in Maryland. Jack was killed the next night, twelve hours before I flew out to Kenora.
    According to the online papers, the Lighter killing was at first thought to be a random mugging, although the detectives working the murder had been disturbed by some of its aspects. There was no sign that Lighter had fought his assailants, or tried to run. He’d simply been gunned down. Lighter’s wife told police that he’d been mugged once before, when they lived in Washington, and that he had calmly handed over his wallet while he tried to reassure the muggers that he was not a threat. In other words, there was no reason to kill him to get his money. And he’d been shot down on a quiet suburban street, where mugging, much less murder, was almost unknown.
    A couple of days later, rumors began to surface on the Net that he’d been killed by a radical hacker group calling itself Firewall. Firewall claimed to be taking “preemptive revenge” for the Clipper II, although the Clipper II was widely believed to be a dead issue. And some names had surfaced . . . CarlG, Dave, Bobby, FirstOctober, RasputinIV, k, LotusElan, One2Oxford, Stanford, Whitey.
    “Oh, shit,” I said.
    “What?”
    To cover myself: “Do you know your brother’s working name?”
    “You mean, Yellowjacket? That’s his gamer name.”
    “I never heard that. He’d always been Stanford.” I tapped the list on the screen. “They’ve got him listed as a member of this Firewall.”
    She looked. “Stanford is Jack? Huh . . .” She turned away, slowly, thinking.
    “What?”
    “You don’t talk with the government,” she said. A statement, with a question inside.
    “No. Of course not.”
    “I have,” she said, slowly. “They asked me not to tell anyone. I talked to them on Tuesday. I was interviewed for two hours by the FBI. About Firewall. Where Jack had been traveling and who his friends are. I didn’t know any of that, except some friends we have in common. Jack would travel about once a year, to Europe, but that was about it. The last time he was out of the country was six months ago.”
    “You didn’t mention me?”
    “No, of course not. I know better than that,” she said.
    “What do you know about Firewall?”
    “Nothing. I’d never heard of it. Jack would have told me, if he was involved. But those little Net conspiracies . . . you know what they are. They’re socially retarded geeks who think they’re living a comic book. Jack wouldn’t have anything to do with them. Neither would