Cafe Underground Presents
PHACKER
Book 3 -- Chapter 6
The Detective Andi Wicksham Series, by RL Bell
Copyright © 1997 RL BELL
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....author RL Bell
Andi Wicksham's INVESTIGATORY SERVICES
Chapter 6
Saturday morning Andi woke early--too early. She pulled the pillow over her head, but outside, kids played loudly, a leaf blower whined and somebody hammered an endless line of nails. It was a conspiracy--the meek and annoying inherit the earth.
A quarter of an hour later she rose, toasted a bagel, sliced an orange, made cocoa and lazed in her robe, listening to the sound of a distant lawn mower. That reverie lasted maybe ten minutes--then she pulled out Eugene's three-by-five cards. There were five, scribed with neat digits. Twenty-seven phone numbers, each followed by a string of symbols. None of the area codes began with zero. She looked for the obvious clues Francois used, but found none. She paged through the phone book to see if any patterns jumped out at her. Nothing. She dialed the first one. "Hello?" a voice answered. "Is Eugene Trafino there?"
"Who?" the voice demanded.
"Sorry wrong number." She tried another. It rang--another voice. She hung up after saying "Sorry" and studied the cards again. In the lower right hand corner on the back of each was a single digit number.
She pull out a pencil, added it to each digit of a telephone number and dialed. Another voice. She tried subtracting, it rang twice, clicked and shrilled a tone. She deciphered the next. One ring and the tone. She tried the next card and the next. She tossed the cards back in her notebook and grinned.
She wandered into the kitchen and cut a grapefruit. Right at the moment, there wasn't a thing she could do about the Trafino case. This was why she worked, she told herself--for the time to relax. Maybe she'd drive to Rooster Rock to catch some sun, it seemed a fitting way to spend the day. She rose and showered, putting on cut-offs and a short sleeved blouse. The phone rang--it was Lena. "How'd it go with Francois?"
Andi sat on her bed and leaned against the wall. "He's looking into things. I don't know what to expect."
"Did you pay him?"
"Of course."
"You want to do something?"
"How about JC?" Andi asked warily.
"Band practice." Lena answered as if it were normal to be gone for a month, then be unavailable.
"Sure. I was thinking Rooster Rock."
"Cruising?" A touch of concern touched Lena's voice.
"Nooo, just a picnic."
"OK." said Lena. "I got an ice chest. We can make sandwiches or buy a cooked chicken, a loaf of bread, a jug of tea and thou, singing in the wilderness. Ahh wilderness..."
"I'll bring a blanket. You make tea." There was magic in the air.
Forty minutes later they headed east on highway 84 with the rocky walls of the Columbia Gorge rising beside the wide expanse of river. The air blew hot and the sky stretched with hardly a streak of cloud. "How long have you known Francois?" asked Andi. A hawk circled and swooped ahead of them.
"Since I moved from Cincinnati five years ago. He stole my boyfriend and we became friends."
"Say what?"
Lena smirked. "Well, Steve and I weren't well matched." The smirk flickered away a brief second, then returned. "I've had better taste in friends than lovers. Anyway, Steve dumped him a month later so we had something in common. I figured he did me a favor."
"Some favor."
"Well, we takes what we gets, don't we?" Lena leaned to look up at a waterfall.
"Works for me. Know about him being busted?"
Lena stuck her elbow out the window and looked across disparagingly. "It was a set up. They planted disks in his room."
"Think so?" Andi said absently.
"Know so. I cleaned his house, the disks weren't there that afternoon. They got desperate and screwed him.”
"Why?" Andi asked skeptically. She swung onto the off-ramp and made the left turn over the highway.
"He embarrassed the cop that was after him...changed a report or two on his word processor before he turned them in. You find it hard to believe?"
"Ramirez wouldn't, probably not Max"
"If ninety-nine percent of the cops are OK it means ten of them should be in jail. Does Max care?"
"Change the subject." The day had started beautifully. She pulled into a parking space and set the brake.
"JC and me are breaking up." Lena opened her door and got out.
"What?"
"He's looking for another place." Lena ducked to grab the ice box out of the back seat.
"I'm sorry." Andi said. She gathered the blanket and food.
"Are you?"
"Of course I am. Why, shouldn't I be?”
Lena stepped down the stairs to the path through the willows, heading up-river toward the quieter end. Lena didn't volunteer more and Andi didn't have nerve to ask. They spent a chaste afternoon watching windsurfers, dozing in the sun and nibbling for three hours.
Pulling into the neighborhood, Andi finally succumbed. "Are you safe in your apartment?" She'd almost asked if she needed a place to stay.
Lena tilted her head and held Andi's eyes. "Naw, JC's harmless, we got things to discuss...but he won't spend the night."
Andi opened her mouth, then shut it. Lena grabbed her cooler and ducked out of the car without meeting eyes--running to the door of her apartment without looking back.
Andi retreated to her kitchen turned on the radio and poured a tumbler of apple juice. A message from Francois blinked on her machine. "I have something you'll find interesting." His voice clipped off before the closing beep. She ran it back twice to triple check that it was him.
She didn't have much enthusiasm for meeting him. She wanted a quiet afternoon with a book or a nap before going over to Ramirez and Tanya's. She looked at her watch--twenty to four; it would take fifteen minutes to change. If she left at five thirty, stopped for wine and chocolate--she had little more than an hour. She stripped and took a cool shower, toweled down and lay for a minute on her bed. She shut her eyes. Somebody outside had their radio turned to an oldies station; the rustle of a breeze in the trees; kids shouting, a car.
The phone rang.
Damn. Andi thought grouchily. She debated ignoring it--two rings, three. The machine kicked in and Andi listened to her disembodied voice greet the caller in a careful, formal tone. She really ought to redo it with something kookie--maybe Lena'd have an idea.
There was a beep and Francois's voice could be heard. "Hi, you home?"
Andi gave in and reached.
"Hello, I'm here." She shut her eyes again.
"Hey, it's me. Can you meet?"
"I got to be done by quarter to five." Andi fended cautiously.
"Great, I'm at the Cafe Underground."
"Uhhh, I just stepped from the shower. It'll take a minute." She lay, eyes closed, clinging to peaceful darkness.
"I'll be here." Francois seemed cheerful.
"Sure, be right there." Lying on her back, she reached without looking to hang up, relaxed every muscle and opened her eyes to stare at the ceiling. The kids outside played baseball in the street. The radio in the kitchen played Diana Ross. She seemed to sink endlessly into the comforter when she unfocused her eyes.
It was too comfortable--she growled irritably to herself. With a twist and a bounce and she'd swung her legs off the bed and was heading for the bathroom. She'd meet Francois and return for a cat-nap.
At the Cafe Underground, Francois sat reading a magazine in a corner in dark glasses and wide brimmed hat. "So what is it?" Andi sat down across from him.
"Coffee?" He put his book face down on the table and waved toward the counter.
"No, I'm going to a friend's for dinner."
Francois smiled. "Eugene's into a lot of things, quite a scientific guy. Takes good notes."
"Yeah?" Andi tried her Ramirez imitation.
Francois noted her lack of excitement and switched to a matter of fact tone. "The outfit he was stalking lifted files to sell, I got their e-mail. They set up their site with an ISDN line"
"Neat. What’s that." Andi encouraged cautiously.
“A wide open computer valve...” Francois continued on, uninterrupted. "Seems they were so busy breaking into other people's systems they never suspected anybody'd be hacking them. Eugene had a Trojan horse shipping out goodies as fast as they got saved."
"Trojan horse?”
"It’s a program snuck in that works from inside, bundling whatever they save and sending it out on the coattails of their own phone traffic. It’s a cool program...incorporated as if it were native. He writes clean code, his accounts are legitimate files using resident systems. The guy's a wizard.”
Andi wished she had a tape recorder. Francois' explanation was going faster than she could understand.
"With the mainframes, he grabs a minute or so off each hour, offset the time code by that exact amount so things look right. Nobody can check things accurately from the outside...his material tacks onto other people's work, inserting every now in then in bunches--again offsetting the clock to keep the accounts to the fraction of a second."
Andi didn't share his excitement. "So where is he?"
Francois looked over the top of his glasses. "That I don't know, but our boy doesn't seem mercenary. Of all the stuff that came through, he only stuff he kept was the intruders from 50th street and trucking firm's. But there's a lot of that...bookkeeping, e-mail, correspondence."
"How close was he?" Andi interrupted eagerly.
Francois shrugged. "Don't know. I haven’t had time for individual documents." He leaned back in his chair and smiled.
"So do I get to see this stuff you found?" Andi asked impatiently.
"Right here." A small blue-plastic floppy appeared magically in his fingers. He savored the transaction in silence, slowly lowering it to Andi's hands. "It's a pleasure to do the work, but it's not like he left a cook book."
"Anything else?"
Francois' eyes rolled as he looked over the frames of his dark glasses. "Always. Weeks worth, months, a lifetime, how deep do you want to go?" He looked up for comment.
"I want the killers from 50th street." Andi's voice was level.
Francois tilted his head and blinked.
Andi glanced down at the floppy she held in her hand. "Maybe the killers were another target of the intruders Eugene was after." Andi tapped her fingers on the table and looked into Francois' eyes. "Explains motivation anyway."
"OK." Francois said slowly. He nodded solemnly.
"Oh, I got something for you." she remembered the index cards and tossed them on the table between them. "The phone numbers connect to computers. There's a number written on back corner, subtract it."
"Sure." The cards whisked away with a wave of his hand.
"I'll give you more money on Monday." Andi rose to her feet. "Anything else?" She looked down into his face.
"Have a nice dinner." He gave a little bobbing bow without rising from his chair, raised his cup and favored her with an indulgent smile. "Bon appetite."
After changing into an embroidered cowboy shirt and tan, tailored slacks, then a stop at her office and another at a market, she arrived at Ramirez's house with a bottle of wine, a thick folder and chocolate.
Tanya greeted her with a kiss and a glass of house red. "Pull up a stool in the kitchen, Roy is out picking basil. He said you got grief from Max."
Andi gave a wary smile. “Wasted time and patience.” She ruffled her hair with her free hand.
"Andi's here Roy, making disparaging cop-remarks." she shouted out the kitchen door before turning back. "Nice shirt. Go pick music." She shooed her toward the living room, then turned to rustle in the fridge.
Andi put on K.D. Lang and set a Beethoven string quartet ready to go next. She ran her eyes along the shelf of CD's. Maybe Phish.
Ramirez came in and the scent of basil filled the kitchen already swirling with enough smells to make a holiday. "Disparaging remarks?" he said in a monotone, but he couldn't keep his face straight.
"Some people can't keep a confidence." complained Andi, giving Tanya a playful elbow in the ribs.
Ramirez smiled smugly. "We're a tag-team. Between the two of us we're one completely incredible human being who can watch their own back. To the secret of success." He held up his wine glass.
"Here, here." chimed Tanya. "To co-dependence and the wisdom to know the difference!"
Andi silently raised her glass and sipped. Then she pushed over the folder, "Here, Ramirez. It's a gift."
He gingerly opened it and looked inside as if expecting a rubber snake to jump out. "What is it?"
"Notes Eugene took while hacking your 50th street people." She perched on one of the kitchen stools.
"Thanks." Ramirez offered mechanically. He shuffled through the pages like a ten year old unwrapping a package of underwear on Christmas.
Andi took a sip of wine--she'd gone through the trouble of wiping both sides of the top and bottom dozen pages. It would be just like Max to look a gift horse in the mouth and try to lift prints. "The e-mail and bookkeeping from the people who sent your 50th street killers and instructions for checking ‘em out. Under the cover of a Salt Lake trucking firm they launder money...lots of it...millions."
"The murderer wasn't one of the hackers?"
“Leaving their computers and fouling their own nest?"
Ramirez carefully set the folder behind him. "We got composite sketch of your client’s visitors."
"And?" asked Andi.
"It looks like the ones you did." Ramirez stared into the side of his wine glass.
Andi gave a tight-lipped smile.
“Too bad we don't know where to find them." Ramirez took a sip and smiled the smile of a gracious host and waved the subject away. "But no sense burdening social time."
Andi leaned forward, elbows on the counter. He hadn’t reacted to her claim of breaking Max's case. She wouldn't let him see that she felt hurt.
Ramirez chatted about basil plants and pesto and Tanya gossiped as she folded chopped fish, basil, onion, and orange rind in a sheet of puff pastry dough--latticing the top and slipping it in the oven.
"I learned some more interesting things." Andi chewed a carrot stick and watched Tanya slice zucchini into diamonds.
"You can't leave well enough alone." Ramirez's grin went ear to ear.
Andi started in mock surprise, “He thinks the world revolves around him. Portland isn't that big, he’s gotta expect coincidence.” She clenched the carrot stick in her teeth like Clint Eastwood’s skinny stogie.
Ramirez reeled in boredom and signaled small circles with his breadstick.
"You probably know all about it."
"I don't know diddly, ‘cause there ain't much to know."
"They hacked businesses and sold the spoils to competitors."
"No sweat Sherlock, even I know that." piped in Tanya. She tossed up her dish towel with one hand and plucked it out of the air with her other.
"You won’t break the encryption code, we might already have."
"How could you when our computer team hasn't?"
"Lucky, I guess. How about your Federal buddies?"
"They wouldn't tell if they knew."
"Why not?" She snatched a second breadstick.
“If they admit they can decode it the bad guys won't use it. If they admit they can't, they lose face." He leaned back. "I suppose you might pass me a copy?"
"It'll cost Max an apology."
"He might ease up."
"Tell him he owes me." She pulled the square, blue disk from her pocket.
"Sure, I'll do that, but he'll want to know where this came from. Sure you want me to say it's you?" He held the disk between finger and thumb and shook it in the air. If your smart you won’t want your name mentioned.”
"Call me an unnamed source."
Ramirez gave a pained look. There was a minute long silence. Tanya looked from one of them to the other. Ramirez sat back, tossed the disk atop the folder, then reached for the bottle of wine. He refilled glasses, sipped and shut his eyes to savor the taste. "So, where’d you get the stuff?”
Andi paused to gather her thoughts. "It was a dark and stormy night."
Tanya snickered and slid a plate of orange slices between them.
"I got this from Frank...well actually, this is a copy of the disk he gave me. I've only glanced at it, but I wanted a copy."
"Wicksham, don't look so proud of yourself. Max won't buy it. Every instinct will tell him to grill you."
"This'll have to be his season of self restraint." Andi answered evenly.
"There's been murders." Ramirez's voice rumbled like glacier ice.
"Sure, but he’s not paid to be the Gestapo. Look, I'm helping you when not even the feds are. He has to trust my decisions."
"He won't. He’ll think you're obstructing justice."
"Then he can shove it." Andi said a little too loudly. "If he hadn't acted like an ass, he wouldn't have this problem. Now cheer up. Good food, good friends, good wine, and maybe I've dropped the case in your lap. Things could be worse."
"You don't know Max, Wicksham. You can’t dump a can of worms in his lap and just sit there smirking."
"Check the table, Roy. Eats'll be ready in minutes." interrupted Tanya. "Andi, how come you didn’t bring your friend Lena?"
Andi dropped her smile, "Sorry...I’ll bring her by. It’s complicated."
Tanya folded her arms like a matriarch.
Andi turned away in embarrassment and checked the table settings. She held up a finger. "Water. Out of my way Ramirez, I'm getting glasses."
Sunday, she didn't hear from either Lena or Francois--but she’d left at ten for her weekly fix of garage-band R&B from which, she joined Paco and Sonny in a movie. They were friends, an unusual couple--Sonny an alterative artist-poet-whatever and Paco, twenty years older, a quietly voracious reader with steely eyes, expressionless face and a past he didn’t talk about.
Monday, the phone started ringing as she stepped through her office door. "We have to talk, Wicksham." Ramirez insisted in a quiet monotone.
"You look through the files?" Andi tossed her jacket over the back of her chair and put on an irksomely-cheerful voice.
"Max has a copy on his desk and I wanted to talk to you before he calls me on the carpet."
"Name a place and time." Andi switched on her business persona and reached for her calendar.
"Nine-fifteen at the Cafe Underground. And Max wants copies of the encrypted versions."
"Nine-fifteen's fine, but I don't have other versions. You have them among what you took from 50th street."
"Wicksham."
"Look, even if I had them, why should I give ‘em to Max when he’s acting the jerk? Sorry, but you're out of luck."
"You're out of line, Wicksham."
"You're up a creek, Ramirez. This is a time for him to back off his control-freak attitude. Just say ‘no.’ Nine-thirty. Have a nice day." She chuckled to herself and gently hung up.
"Playing it fast and loose, aren't we?" asked Lena. She turned from her work at the copy machine. "Isn't he one of the good guys?"
"Tit for tat. I help him and he still comes down threatening. It is not appropriate--the public shouldn't accept it." Andi reached for a file.
"Maybe it's the cutesy-sicko way you two are friends that get’s me. You’re like locker room jocks." She twisted her lips into a sour-mouthed smile.
"Is that a put down?" Andi asked, trying to make her voice as threatening as possible.
"Just accuracy, dear." Lena sauntered to her chair with a smirk and exaggerated rock to her hips.
She sat, then swung around. "I talked to Francois. He's doing eighteen hour days. The cards link to banks. Wait, I got notes." she fiddled in a pocket for a scrap of paper. "Uhhh, he went through a PBX Remote Access Unit, then a #1A EES to a X.25 network. VAX-DECENT, fund transfers. Mean anything to you?"
"Worse than Greek. Did he translate?"
"I wasn't interested. How about Pac Bell’s link with COSMOS?" She looked up, but Andi shook her head.
"Loginout patch?" Lena shook hers too.
Andi's head swiveled from side to side, her eyes locked in synch with Lena's.
"Source code?"
Andi laughed. "Any more?"
"Vulcan nerve pinch or quadruple Bucky." Lena laughed until she was holding her sides. The phone rang. She stifled her mirth and answered. "Investigatory Services." Her voice was professional, corporate-culture neutral.
"It's your friend." Francois mumbled. "Put me through to the gumshoe."
Francois Lena whispered silently to Andi. Wants you. She pressed the hold button.
Andi picked up her phone, "Yo, it's Andi."
"Six hours earlier than last time, same station." Francois' voice was playfully clipped and precise.
"Totally." confirmed Andi. Minimalism was weird.
"Yeah." Francois exhaled, then the line went dead.
Andi looked back in her calendar--they’d met at four o’clock at the Cafe Underground--six hours earlier made today's time ten. Ramirez wanted to meet there at nine-fifteen. She'd have to get rid of him in under a half hour to make it safe for Francois. Close, but it could work.
She had maybe fifteen minutes to kill. "There are checks to deposit." pointed out Lena. "And we need to get a little fridge."
"Thanks. How much will it cost?"
"Hundred and fifty used, two fifty new." Lena's fingers didn't miss a lick at they typed.
"Is the deposit ready?" Andi changed the subject.
"In your desk drawer."
Andi initialed a corner of the file before her, signed the report and threw it to Lena's table. In the bottom drawer was a stuffed envelope labeled Deposit. "Thanks. I'm outa here."
"All in a day's work." Lena murmured.
The Cafe Underground was sleepy that morning, a scattering of patrons read, chatted or stared out the window. Andi got a latte and found a table in a corner, watching the door.
Across the room, a mousey young woman with waif-short hair and bangs talked animatedly to a young man in the wrinkled-nerd esthetic. Andi could almost follow the he-said-she said. The young man sat, hands in his lap, enraptured. Beside them, a woman in a business suit, paged through work. A woman with multiple rings and studs, wearing a golden-brown apron, cleared cups and wiped tables. Two men sat a table away looking about as raptly as herself.
Ramirez swaggered in. He had that certain style. There was a worldliness in the unconscious assumption of power that came with years as a cop. He took in the scene in a single fluid gaze, picked her out and paced purposefully to the table.
"Coffee?" Andi asked, getting up. He nodded and turned toward the serving counter--she joined him.
He ordered, she paid and they returned to the table. The men two tables over got up and left.
"Max is fit to be tied." he opened.
"Can't always get what you want." replied Andi calmly.
"And your trucking firm looks as legitimate as the Mormon Church."
Andi shrugged. "Maybe you haven't looked hard enough. He gave your geeks what, a day or two to look into something eight hundred miles away?"
"Maybe your source is making it up."
Andi shrugged.
"Max has had it, he wants to know everything so he can choose what's significant."
Andi lifted her hands nonchalantly. "Not his decision."
"He's self-righteous about it." Ramirez spread his hands appealing to her.
"That's the problem in a nutshell, isn't it?" observed Andi with a stiff smile. "Self-righteous abuse of authority."
Ramirez held her eyes. "But for a good cause. Law and order for God's sake. Making the streets safe."
"Listen to yourself, Ramirez. Who makes the streets safe from him?" asked Andi. "Either he plays my way or he can pound sand."
Ramirez gave her a hurt expression. "The moral high ground you're defending isn't worth the trouble he can cause. Why do you want to make him an enemy?"
"Why didn't he care about making me one?" Andi responded. "You think because he's self-righteous and can make people's lives hell he should get his way?"
"No. But I'm pragmatic. It's a cost-benefit thing. The cost's high and there’s damn little benefit."
"No." said Andi calmly. "Tell him I just said ‘no’"
"OK." He smiled warmly. "I promised Tanya I'd try. Now, we got to figure a strategy to use the rest of it without putting you and your friends at risk."
Andi eyed at him warily. "It comes from that kid Frank. I just run into him on the streets every now and then. Got it?"
"Yeah, whatever, Max isn't going to be satisfied with copies. And make sure the disks you use are really clean. There was a bunch of poetry in the background of the one you gave me."
"My poetry?"
"Yeah, our computer folk found it right off. Old files you thought deleted. Good thing I told him it was yours, Max already had it in Frank’s profile.”
"Anything else?"
"How do you contact Frank?"
"I don't." Andi answered coldly.
"This a homicide investigation, Wicksham."
"Then decipher the stuff yourself hot shot, if the feds cared, they'd help. If Max can't get along with colleagues why should I trust him?"
"It's not the same thing." Ramirez answered sullenly.
"It's not? I'll give you what I get from Frank--if and when I bump into him. That's all I can do."
"Max said to tell you he'll get a warrant and haul in everything that plugs into electricity--just to shut you down."
"That's blatant intimidation. Tell him he’s corrupt. Anyway, there's nothing there to find." She put on a one-sided grin. "Tell him I recorded you passing on that threat and might go to the Citizen's Review Board."
Andi looked away to avoid his eyes, focusing on the deli-case. She hoped the bravado masked her distress. She needed to get back and scour the office. She prayed Max wasn't already there.
"He's not going to care." Ramirez snorted. "He thinks he's justified."
"That's the point." conceded Andi. "What have you done to let him know he’s off base."
"Wicksham...cops don't challenge their own mythology. Whether or not I agree with you...whether or not it's true. I can't."
"Maybe it's time I go on a vacation. Ask him how badly he wants to solve the case." Andi made a move to get to her feet. "And tell him again to get off my friends' case...all the way off."
"The phone numbers in that stuff you gave me are bogus." Ramirez mentioned casually.
"Encoded is the term you mean." replied Andi.
"But you have the special skills to read them?" An ominous tone reverberated in his voice.
"Ramirez, when have I been able to program a VCR? It’s not like I haven't been forthcoming." She paused, feeling the pulse beat in her neck and the weight of the silence that had fallen between them. "From what I understand the code's pretty obvious."
Ramirez responded with a growl, but sat back in his chair. "You might be interested that there's been another murder, in Oakland. Same MO. Tortured, tied with lamp cord, computers, encrypted files."
"Computers?" Andi held up her hand. "If they were the murderers, wouldn't they have taken them? The Hackers wouldn't have left them around."
"They could have been too stressed to think straight, or arrogant, or stupid.”
"Not twice."
"And your trucking firm was a wild goose chase. You passed on that just to rattle Max's cage, didn't you?" He glared, then smiled. "Don't do it again. I'm trapped in the middle."
Andi bit her lip, unsure whether Francois had been wrong or if the cops were so inept they couldn't follow instructions.
Ramirez finished his coffee and smiled. "I'm worried about you, the murders are nasty. The thing has a dangerous edge and you're standing real close. If it gets ugly, remember, I'm on your side." He laid a protective hand on her wrist.
She gave his fingers a quick squeeze. "I know, tell Max what you like. You might send a picture of my client’s nephew to Oakland."
He nodded and rose to his feet.
"I'm going to finish my coffee. Give my love to Tanya." She leaned back in her chair and gave a little wave.
Ramirez tossed a friendly salute and sauntered out the door.
Andi looked at her watch--nine forty three. Not bad--she wouldn't want it cut any closer.
Almost exactly at ten, Francois entered with a newspaper tucked under his arm. He paused at the door and scanned the interior. "Ohayo gozaimos." he said pleasantly, lowering his gaze in the semblance of a bow.
"Back at ya." responded Andi without getting up.
“You’ll be glad to know I’ve been hard at work.” Francois smiled smugly. "I fed Francois’ operating system machine code to sidestep security, sent a worm to password control and added an alternate password.” He pushed his newspaper halfway across the table.
Andi gave a slight nod.
Francois leaned back in his chair and studied her. "He's got a collection of decryption programs the CIA would be proud of.”
“How the trucking firm? The cops say it’s clean."
"They're inept." Francois replied stiffly.
"They have everything you gave me."
"Then they do sloppy work." he responded in disgust. "Or they're corrupt."
"None the less, my credibility's gone south. Ramirez thinks you faked the files. They think I’m playing them for fools."
Francois looked hurt. "I'll see what I can do. The firm’s only a cover."
“They know that.” Andi met his eyes. "And for what it's worth, I believe you."
"If they did something stupid it would explain how, over the weekend, the material coming in started using layers of different encryption. Last week they were storming about some traitor--somebody who ripped them off. It was getting interesting, then all of a sudden I can’t make sense of it."
"Anything on the hackers?"
“If you really want to get them, we'll need to dig in deeper. And probably break the trucker’s new encryption."
"Not on my dime." she said evenly. "Officially."
He nodded sagely. "Officially I'm not on your dime."
She smiled. "The cops are all over me to finger you."
"Lena told me."
Andi put the envelope on the table and left it there. "This should help."
As if working a kink from an elbow, Francois stretched and then fussily adjusted his lapel. The envelope mysteriously vanished. "She said you're keeping in touch with your police friend."
"Yeah, he’ll get stuff when you find it. There’s been similar murders in the Bay Area, might look for phone calls there. And make sure what you give me is untraceable--they pulled a bunch of my old poems from the last one." He casually pushed his newspaper another couple of inches toward her. "Here’s the next batch, as promised."
"Aren't you going to tell me what it is?" Andi asked conversationally.
"We'll talk after you see it." Francois' face was an unreadable mask.
Andi casually rested her wrist on the newspaper and slid it toward her.
Francois’ eyes never strayed from her face.
"Be careful."
"I will." Francois promised. "You sure you want to give them anything? They don't seem very responsive."
"A kid named Gina got killed." Andi chewed nervously at her lip.
"Lena told me." he whispered softly.
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