The e-mail said, “Bobby down. Drop word. Ring on.”

“Motherfucker,” I said, as I read it. I didn’t believe what I was seeing.

LuEllen caught the tone and looked over my shoulder. She knew about Bobby, so I let her look. “Uh-oh. Who’s romeoblue?”

“I don’t know.”

“How does he know Bobby?”

I knew the answer to that, but I avoided the question. LuEllen and I trusted each other, but there was no point in being careless. “Lots of people know Bobby… Listen, now we gotta go out. I gotta make a call.”

BOBBY is the deus ex machina for the hacking community, the fount of all knowledge, the keeper of secrets, the source of critical phone numbers, a guide through the darkness of IBM mainframes. As with LuEllen, I didn’t know his real name or exactly where he lived; but we’d done some business together.

THE Gulf Coast could probably be a garden spot, but it isn’t. It’s a junkyard. Every form of scummy business you can think of can be found between I-10 and the beach, and most every one of them built the cheapest possible building to do the business in. It’s like Amarillo, Texas, but in bad taste.

We ran through the rain from my room to the car, then trucked on down I-10 to the nearest Wal-Mart. We made the call from a public phone using a tiny Sony laptop I’d picked up a few weeks earlier. Dialed up my Bobby number and got nothing. No carrier tone, no redirect to some other number, just ringing with no answer. That had never happened before. I made a quick check again of my e-mail and had a second message, from a person named polytrope. He said, “Bobby’s gone. Out six hours now. Drop word. Ring on.”

“Maybe they got him,” I said to LuEllen, popping the connection. “The feds. I gotta make another call, but not from here. Let’s go.”

LuEllen’s a professional thief. When I said, “Let’s go,” she didn’t ask questions. She started walking. Not hurrying, but moving out, smiling, pleasant, but not making eye contact with any of the store clerks.

In the movies, the FBI makes a call while the bad guy is still on the telephone, and three minutes later, agents drop out of the sky in a black helicopter and the chase begins.

In reality, if the feds had taken Bobby, and had a watch on his phone line, they could get a read on the Wal-Mart phone almost instantly. Getting to the phone was another matter-that would take a while, even if they went through the local cops. In the very best, most cooperative system, we’d have ten minutes. In a typical federal law-enforcement scramble, we’d have an hour or more. But why take a chance?

We were out of the Wal-Mart in a minute, and in two minutes, down the highway. Ten miles away, I made a call from an outdoor phone at a Shell station, dropping an e-mail to two guys who, separately, called themselves pr 48stl9 and trilbee: “Bobby is down. Transmit word. Ring on.” I sent a third e-mail to pepper@evitable.org: “ 3577.” The number was my “word,” and I was dropping it into a blind hole.

“THAT’S IT?” LuEllen asked, when I’d dropped the word.

“That’s all there is. There’s nothing else to do. Still want that sundae?”

“I guess.” But she was worried. We’re both illegal, at least some of the time, and we’re sensitive to trouble, to complications that could push us out in the open. Trouble is like a panfish nibbling at the end of your fishing line-you feel it, and if you’re experienced, you know what it means. She could feel the trouble nibbling at us. “Maybe chocolate will cure it.”

THE ring had been set up by Bobby. A group of people that he more or less trusted were each given one segment of his address. If anything should happen to him-if his system went unresponsive-we’d each dump our “word” at a blind e-mail address.

Whoever checked the e-mail would assemble the words, derive a street address, and go to Bobby’s house to see what had happened. I didn’t know who’d been designated to go. Somebody closer to Bobby than I was.

To keep the cops from breaking the ring, if one of us should be caught, we knew only the online names of two members of the ring. I didn’t know until that day that romeoblue, whoever he was, was a member of the ring, or that he had one of my blind addresses. The guys I called, pr48stl9 and trilbee, didn’t know that I was part of it; and I had no idea who their guys were, further around the ring.

Nobody, except Bobby, knew how many ring members there were, or their real names-all we knew is that each guy had two names. Two, in case somebody should be out of touch, or even dead, when the ring was turned on.

And the ring on thing-if one of us was caught by the cops, and extorted into contacting the ring, a warning could be sent along with the extorted message. If the message didn’t end with ring on, you’d assume that things were going to hell in a handbasket.

All of this might sound overblown, but several of us were wanted by the feds. We hadn’t been charged with any crimes, you understand. They didn’t even know who we were. They just wanted to get us down in a basement, somewhere, with maybe an electric motor and a coil of wire, to chat for a while.

“YOU think he’s dead? Bobby?” LuEllen asked. We’d been visiting a particular ice-cream parlor, named Robbie’s, about three times a week. The place was designed to look like a railroad dining car, but had good sundaes, anyway. We’d just pulled into the parking lot, to the final thumps of the Stones’ “Satisfaction” on the radio, when she asked her question.

I nodded. “Yeah. Or maybe unconscious, lying on the floor,” I said. That made me sad. I’d never actually met him, but he was a friend, and I could feel that hypothetical loneliness. “Or… hell, it could be a lot of things, but I think he’s probably dead or dying.”

“What’ll you guys do? He’s always been there.”

“Be more careful. Take fewer jobs. Maybe get out of it.”

“I’ve been thinking about getting out,” she said suddenly. “Maybe stop stealing.”

I looked at her and shook my head. “You never said.”

She shrugged. “I’m getting old.”

“Pressing your mid-thirties, I’d say.”

She patted me on the thigh and said, “Let’s go. We’re gonna get wet.”

THE guy who ran the ice-cream parlor wore a name tag that said “Jim” and a distant look, as though he was wishing for mountains. A paper hat perched on his balding head, and he always had a toothpick tucked in one corner of his mouth. He nodded at us, said, “The regular?” and we said, “Yeah,” and watched him dish it up. Lots of hot chocolate. The sundaes cost five dollars each, and I’d been leaving another five on the table when we left. Jim was now taking care of us, chocolate-wise.

In the booth, over the sundaes, LuEllen asked, “You think you could really quit?”

“I don’t need the money.”

She looked out at the rain, hammering down on the street. A veterans convention was in town, and a guy wearing a plastic-straw boater, with a convention tag, wandered by. He’d poked a hole in the bottom of a green garbage bag and had pulled it over himself as a raincoat.

We watched him go, and LuEllen said, “Drunk.”

“Seeing your old war buddies’ll do that,” I said. “World War Two guys are dropping like flies now.”

“Wonder if Bobby…” Her spoon dragged around the rim of the tulip glass; she didn’t finish the sentence.

BOBBY had a degenerative disease, although I had no clear idea of what it was. The ring had been set up to take care of things should he die or suffer a catastrophic decline. If he went slowly, the ring wouldn’t know until the very end. At the last extreme, we would have all gotten files of information that he thought we might individually want-a kind of inheritance-and he would have erased everything else.