I got fairly grumpy when LuEllen ran her cold fingers up my spine at eight o'clock in the morning; I nearly bounced off the ceiling, which she thought was moderately hilarious.

"You're gonna give me a fuckin' heart attack some day," I snarled at her, and there were some teeth behind the snarl. I didn't like her sneaking up on me. "How'd you get in?"

"The lock is shit," she said.

"Wonderful, that's just fuckin' great. You give me an aneurysm because you want somebody to talk to at breakfast."

"No, no. I had some seriously bad news to share with you, but you're being such a mean asshole that I'm not going to do it," she said. She crossed her arms.

"What news?"

"Say please."

"Give me the fuckin' news or I'll breathe on you."

"The feds busted Bobby," she said.

"What?" The news left me completely disoriented. "Where'd you get this? Who called?"

"It's on TV. They busted him last night and he'll be arraigned today in federal court in New Orleans. They say he's involved in the attacks on the IRS and that the attacks are continuing."

"Sonofabitch." I fumbled the TV remote off the nightstand and punched up CNN. At the same time, I asked LuEllen, "Did you bring the cold phone?"

"Yeah."

CNN was doing an advertisement for itself. When they got back to news, they were doing the weather. I hopped out of bed, got my notebook, and used the cold phone to punch up John Smith's phone number in Longstreet. John answered on the first ring; he was wideawake.

"This is the guy from upriver," I said. "Is it true?"

"We don't know. I don't think so, but this guy, whoever it is, is gonna be in court in two hours, so we'll know for sure, then. Our guy's off-line, though. All his numbers are down."

"They wouldn't be down unless he took them down," I said. "If the feds grabbed him, they would have left the lines up, to see who called."

"There's something else: if they busted him at his place, they'd most likely be taking him to court in Jackson, not in New Orleans."

"I don't know where his place is at, but I'm glad to hear you say it," I said.

We talked about it for another minute, poking through clues from a TV broadcast neither of us had seen yet. "I'll get back," I said.

"How much trouble are we in?" LuEllen asked.

"Depends on whether they really got him, and if they did, what they got. And if he's willing to deal. I've never met him face-to-face, but if he wanted to deal. he could hurt a lot of us. He knows all about Anshiser. He knows about Longstreet. He knows about Modoc and Redmond." All jobs involving what we lightly call industrial espionage.

"Maybe you ought to back away from this thing," LuEllen said. "Get back home and maybe pack a suitcase."

"Something to think about," I said, "Though I wouldn't be good at running."

"How does ten years in the federal penitentiary sound?" she asked.

"There've got to be other options. Gotta be."

We looked at each other and I realized how hooked up I really was. I'd always thought of myself as something of a loner, going my own way, doing what I wanted when I wanted to do it. But Bobby knew about meknew where to find meand so did LuEllen, and John Smith, and now Lane Ward knew a couple of things, and so did twenty or thirty other people. If the feds somehow managed to get them all in the same room, they could hang me.

"You can get stubborn," she said. "But I still reserve the right to split, you know that."

"Anytime," I said. That'd always been the deal, and she'd always been protective of her identity, background, and home. Nobody knew much about LuEllen; not even me.

We watched television for a half hour, and I got cleaned up. We saw one item on Bobby, which said just that he'd been caught, and was believed to be a leading member of Firewall, and was coordinating the attack on the IRS. The attack was still going on, and the government was considering an extension of filing dates for quarterly business returns. Congress was squealing like a herd of stuck pigs.

"You were right about what gets them excited," LuEllen said.

We went out to breakfast, but neither of us said much. I spent the time trying to figure out what to do next, and one thing kept coming up: call the cops. The problem would be to get the cops to listen, especially since (a) they thought they knew what was going on, and (b) we were the bad guys.

"Not having Bobby to do research is like. I don't know. Like going blind," I told LuEllen as we walked back to the hotel.

"What more research do we need?"

"Anything that would get the bureaucracy running in a different direction. They're tearing up the world looking for fifteen or twenty of us, and we haven't done anythingI mean, nothing that they think we did. Somebody has to talk to them."

"Not me."

"Of course not; you're not in jeopardy. But I might try to find somebody Icould talk to. I could find somebody, if I had Bobby."

Back at the hotel, I changed to shorts and a T-shirt, and went for a run, the cell phone clipped uncomfortably into the shorts. LuEllen went shopping. I did three miles, fairly hard, and the exercise felt good after all the time cooped up in cars and planes and small rooms. When I got back, I jumped in the shower again, for a quick rinse, and was just toweling off when John called.

"It's not him," he said. He sounded bubbly, which was not usually the case. "The guy they busted is white. They just had a picture of the cops walking him into federal court."

"Ah, Jesus. I hope our guy's okay."

"So do I. He can't runnot literally, anyway. He needs to stay at the. business."

"If he calls, tell him I need him."

"Do that," he said.

After hanging up, I turned the television down and went out on the Net. Trying to learn about the NSA and find some names. I got nothing but bullshit. But I have a few mailboxes scattered around, under different names and IDs; and when it became obvious that I wasn't going to get anything useful off the Net, I checked the box at AOL. I found a message: six digits, beginning with 800.

"Bobby," I said aloud. He knew a couple of the boxes. I tried the next one, and found seven more digits. The last box was empty. I picked up my laptop, got the acoustic earmuffs out of my travel bag, and headed for the door.

I called from a drive-up pay phone at a gas station two miles from the motel, using the muffs. Earmuffs are a valuable item, if you travel. It makes no difference what the country, what the phone system, or what the line voltages areif you can get an audible signal from your home Internet service provider, you can get online. I dialed using the old protocol, and after getting the "?," I typed in "k."

that wasn't me.

no shit. tell me, what did the woman do after the amazing events on the mississippi?

I got a couple of seconds of silence, as he thought about it. I wanted some confirmation that I was actually talking to Bobby, and he was quick, Bobby was. He came back with a woman's name. The right one.

marvel.

i need several names of nsa guys that i can talk to privately about firewall. server in md has nsa clients. firewall rumors may come from nsa.

fbi be better to talk to. nsa may disappear server material.

would prefer to talk to in-person. fbi has guns.

ok. will check nsa names.

maybe get fbi names also.

i can do that.

will you be at this number?

no. changing numbers with each contact, limiting calls to 2 min. will leave new # for you like this time. will dump nsa information to sf box.

Before I signed off, I gave him the information that would give him system administrator status at the Bloch Technology server, and suggested that he look at the client list.

will do that. must go.

take care.

You too.

LuEllen was waiting when I got back. I quickly filled her in on what had happened. "So what do we do now?" she asked.