"Okay," Lane said. She reached out and touched the.357 on the table. Green asked, "You know how to use that?"

"I just shot a big stack of phone books down in the basement," she said. "LuEllen told me if I need to, just point it and keep pulling the trigger until I run out of bullets."

Green sighed and said, "Nuts."

I wasn't sure I liked leaving them alone in Lane's house. If they were targets, they were just sitting there. It's easy to get lost in America, for a few days or weeks, anyway, and if you try hard enough, nobody can find you. But sitting ducks.

There was a momentary awkwardness while I was checking into the motel. LuEllen and I had spent quite a bit of time together, and probably would again in the future, and she wasn't involved with anybody and I wasn't that involved, but the awkwardness went away and I checked into a separate room. She came down ten minutes later with a couple of beers while I was talking to a guy named Rufus Carr in Atlanta.

"How's Monger doing?" I asked Rufus.

"You're talking to a pentamillionaire," he said.

"I don't know what that is."

"I got five million bucks in the bank, m' boy," he said. Rufus was a fat red-haired man who affected a bad W. C. Fields accent. "Until I have to pay taxes, anyway."

"It works?" I asked.

"Of course it works; I told you it'd work."

"I knew that," I said.

"Yeah, bullshit. You were one of the naysayers. You were one of the guys who said Rufus was going to be eating frozen cheese pizza for the rest of his life. Well, I'll tell you what, pal, it's nothing but order-out pepperoni and mushroom from now on. And a private booth at Taco Bell."

"I've got a favor to ask. Could you mong some stuff for me?"

"On what?"

"You know about Firewall?"

"Yeah?"

"The rumors are weird. Could you just pick up a few of the bigger sites where you see the rumors, and mong them?"

"Is there any money in it?" he asked.

"Fuck, no. But I won't burn your house down."

"Well, thank you, General Sherman. Am I going to get in trouble?"

"I doubt it," I said. "But this whole Firewall thing is getting totally out of hand."

"You're right; it's my patriotic duty. Besides, I'm not doing anything else."

"Can I call you tomorrow?"

"Sure. I'll put it on the trail right now, and get it back tomorrow morning," he said.

What's 'mong'?" LuEllen asked, when I hung up. She was sitting on the bed with a beer bottle.

"Monger. It's a rumor-tracking program," I said. "Rufus built it for some securities companies. They use it to bust day traders who try to spread rumors to move the stock market."

"It works?"

"Hell, he's a pentamillionaire," I said.

Next I got back onto Bobby: he had some preliminary company stuff on AmMath, mostly public information pulled out of various open databases. More interesting was his news on Firewall.

Got a new list supposedly with Firewall. They are: exdeus, fillyjonk, fleece, ladyfingers, neoxellos, omeomi, pixystyx. Friends give me two hard IDs near you. Fleece is Jason B. Currier, 12548 Baja Viejo, Santa Cruz. Omeomi is Clarence Mason of 3432 LaCoste Road in Petaluma.

We'd gotten a map with the car; I went out and got it, and checked. Mason was maybe an hour or an hour and a half away, up north of San Francisco in Marin County. Currier was practically across the street. All part of the Silicon Valley culture that's grown up around San Francisco like a bunch of magic mushrooms.

"So we're gonna find these guys," LuEllen said.

"First thing tomorrow."

I'm not an easy sleeper; I kicked around the bed overnight, getting a couple of hours here and another hour there, with fifteen minutes of wide-awake worrying in between. I don't like big, arrogant organizations that push people around, or manipulate them, or extort thembut I don't see it as my personal obligation to stop them. I just go my own way. I fish and paint and lie in the sunshine like a lizard. I might steal something from one of them, from time to time, software or schematics or business plans, but I'm very careful about it.

The whole AmMath business was not my style. I liked Jack Morrison. He was a good guy, as far as I knew, but I really didn't know that much about him. Maybe that whole thing about "k" was bullshit; maybe he made it up to pull me into whatever he was doing at AmMath. Maybe he put the rumors out. And Lane herself was a computer freak: maybe she was involved with Firewall.

But if not, "k" was cause for concern. It was not a computer identity as such, it was just an initial, and there may be ten thousand people on the Net who sign themselves with a k. The same with Bobby and Stanfordthere are probably a thousand Stanfords out on the Net. And I would imagine that there are quite a few people calling themselves Fleece, although omeomi is not quite as generic. The troubling thing was the grouping. I had heard most of those names at one time or another. I even knew what a couple of them did, although I didn't know who they were.

Computer people, a lot of them, have the same attitude I do toward bigness, toward bureaucracy, toward being pounded into round holes. They don't like it. Maybe there was a Firewall, and maybe some of these people were in it, and because they were, then Iwas suspect.

Paranoia is good for you, if you're a crook; but it doesn't make life any easier.

ST. JOHN CORBEIL

Corbeil was intent. Not angry, not stunned, not confused.

Focused.

"I don't know where she got them, but she apparently knew they were important because she made copies," Hart was saying. His voice was distant, tinny, with traffic in the background. He was calling from a payphone in San Jose.

A television was mounted on the wall opposite Corbeil's desk. One of the talking heads on CNBC was chattering about the newest disaster on the NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange. "MUTING" was printed across his face in green letters, like a TV-chip editorial.

"If she had access." Corbeil began, speaking to Hart.

"We know she had access. goddamnit, nothing is clear," Hart said.

"Make it clear," Corbeil snapped. "What's the problem?"

"She had four Jaz disks that probably came out of our supply room," Hart said. "They have that blue OEM tint to the cases, and we assume that her brother stole them to make his copies. But on the other four disks, the cases are clear plasticnot ours. We looked in the wastebaskets and found a receipt from CompUSA, which shows that she bought three three-packs of Jaz disks. Nine disks. We found one set of four disks in clear casesthe copiesand one blank disk in a clear case."

"Which means four are missing, and that's the exact number you'd need for another set of copies," Corbeil said, picking up on it instantly. "Goddamnit. Where are they?"

"That's the problem. We don't know. I can only think of one reason that she even made another set of copies."

"For security reasons. She ditched them somewhere."

"Yes. That's what we think," Hart said. "We don't know exactly why she'd go to the trouble, though. The thing is, you can't load an OMS file unless you have five hundred megs of memory. Not without making the computer go crazy. Her home computer had three hundred eighty-four megs, and her laptop has one hundred twenty-eight. Neither one had any of the files from the Jaz drive on itnot even the small files."

"So what are you saying? That she never looked at them?"

"Not at home," Hart said. "She could have taken them to her university office, except that we've been cruising her place almost since she got here, and as far as we know, she hasn't been to the university. So the question is, if she doesn't even know what's on the disks, why'd she make all those copies? If she did?"