Bad Guys (23 page)

“So what's his problem?”

Lorraine shrugged. “He's a nerd.” She laughed when she said the word. “Did you know these computer whiz kids actually call themselves nerds? What self-images these people must have!”

“What kind of deal did you cut with him?”

“Get this. All last spring as he was putting me off, postponing his exam, he kept begging me to let him do a paper instead. When I asked him what he wanted to write on, he said he wanted to compare Henry II's reign with some character he'd invented playing that game Dungeons & Dragons.”

“I don't believe it.” Gibbons was beaming in disbelief.

“Absolutely true. I told him to take a hike. But when you called me the other night and asked if I knew any discreet computer geniuses, I called Doug and told him I'd reconsider letting him write his paper if he did me a little favor.”

“Very nice, Professor Bernstein,” Gibbons said, taking her hand. “I owe you one.”

They walked down a stone path that suddenly opened up on a magnificently tended flower garden in full bloom. Standing against a background of red and white impatiens, pink gladiolas, and deep orange marigolds was a wedding party posing for photographs. The bride's white gown in the sunlight was actually radiant against all that color. The groom looked very pleased with himself.

Gibbons was suddenly very conscious of Lorraine's hand in his.
No one said anything until they'd passed through the garden. “Do you really think he can get into the Justice Department's computers?” he asked.

Lorraine shrugged. “He's been working on it all night,” she said hopefully. She was trying hard to be cheery, but that desperate look of fear and distress was in her eyes.

He wished he could tell her not to worry, that it would be okay, but he couldn't lie to her.

Douglas Untermann was an eighteen-year-old sophomore. Apparently he'd skipped a grade somewhere along the line. He was extremely antisocial but not in a particularly unfriendly way. Human communication just didn't interest him as much as computers. For him computers presented infinite possibilities and yet were always predictable. People, on the other hand, were all pretty much the same but consistently unpredictable. Doug preferred predictability. Which was all for the best, Gibbons figured, particularly for a guy with the looks of a fetal pig and the personality of a five-speed power drill.

Gibbons sat at a spare desk at the computer center staring out the window as Doug hunched over his keyboard, ceaselessly punching in different combinations of whatever he was doing to get into the Justice Department in Washington. They hadn't said a word to each other since Lorraine left them over two hours ago. She had to go do something or other at her office. In that time, Gibbons had had two cups of burnt coffee, shredded both Styrofoam cups into small bits, and counted the little holes on the toes of his wingtips. He'd refrained from speaking to the kid for fear that he'd bolt like a scared rabbit. But this was getting ridiculous. If Doug was telling the truth, he'd started working on this last night at ten and he was still at it now, seventeen hours later. This was supposed to be the computer age, for chrissake.

Gibbons finally slapped his hand on the metal desktop to get the nerd's attention. “So, Doug, what's the story?”

Doug shot his palm up into the air like a traffic cop, his eyes glued to the monitor. “Wait,” he blurted.

The monitor suddenly filled with numbers, scrolling down at a demon pace. When it had gone through what must have been a thousand sets of numbers, it stopped and the monitor was empty. Doug slumped in his chair like a deflated balloon. “Shit,” he mumbled.

“What happened?”

“I tried everything, but I can't get around it.” Doug looked like he was going to cry.

“You can't get around what?”

“Their security system! There're no back doors. I tried to find one, but the system is airtight.”

Gibbons was amazed to hear that the government could actually do something right for a change. “You can't get into the Justice Department files. Is that what you're telling me?”

Doug just pouted. They'd beaten him, and he wasn't taking it well. The distant ripping sound of a dot-matrix printer in another room filled the void.

Suddenly Doug came back to life. “Goddamn them! It isn't fair.”

“What isn't fair?”

“These new systems. Operators,
human
operators. It's not fair. And everybody's using them now. You've got to call an operator first and give your password. If you've got the right password, they call you back and give you access. The sneaky part is that they call you back at a predetermined phone number, so even if you figure out some authorized user's password, you've got to be at his phone to get in. It's un-fucking-fair!”

Gibbons got the feeling Doug was explaining all this to his hardware, not to him. “So they've turned it into a user's-only club, huh?” He still didn't believe that the government could be so competent. These computer kids were supposed to be able to do anything.

“Yeah, and it really sucks.”

They fell silent for a while, then all of a sudden Doug started up again, like a teletype machine in an empty office.

“This used to be a lot of fun, breaking into their systems. I mean, they really did make it hard, but it could be done.”

“Yeah? What was the best one you ever did?” Gibbons knew this kid didn't have a good bartender he could cry to, and anyway he was curious to hear how these guys operated.

A dreamy look of nostalgia came over Doug's pasty face. “My best one? My best one was when I found my father's girlfriend. That was the best, hands down.”

“How'd you do that?”

Doug slumped down in his chair, stared into space, and gestured with his pudgy hands. “Well, my mother suspected that my father was cheating on her, but she couldn't prove it. I had a feeling he was
too. My father travels a lot in his job, so he certainly had the opportunity to have an affair. He also makes a lot of money, so he could easily afford to keep a wench if he wanted to.”

“Where's he work?”

“IBM.”

It figures.

“So what I did first,” Doug went on, “was get his American Express account number—the business card, not the personal one—and check out where he'd been spending his time—”

Gibbons interrupted. “How'd you get the number?”

“Out of his wallet while he was taking a shower. Anyway, when I accessed his account records, I figured out where he'd been in the past year, and one place stood out like a sore thumb: Great Barrington, Massachusetts. It stood out because it was the only place on his records where IBM doesn't have an office. After that, getting into the Great Barrington town computer was a piece of cake. See, I had a hunch and it turned out to be right. The tax records showed that my father owned a little house up there. His little hideaway.”

Doug cracked his knuckles before he continued. “Now I knew the address of the house and I already had his Social Security number, so I patched into a few of the big DP companies and I looked around for his homeowner's insurance policy. That took some time because there's a lot of data to get through with insurance files. Anyway I finally found it after about a week. He'd insured the house through State Farm and the policy was taken out jointly with his girlfriend. That gave me her name, Social Security number, age, all that stuff. Dad was stupid. He should have put everything in her name. Guess he didn't trust her that much.”

Gibbons couldn't believe this. “So then what did you do?”

“I made a deal with my mother. I told her that if she bought me this autodial twenty-four-hundred-baud modem I wanted, I'd give her Dad's girlfriend's name and the address of their love nest.”

“Did she go for it?” Gibbons already knew the answer to that.

“Of course. Her lawyer sent a private detective up there to follow them around and take the incriminating pictures and all that. Their divorce finally went through at the beginning of the summer.”

Gibbons shook his head. He had to laugh. “Nice kid. Turning on your old man like that.”

“What do you mean? I could've told Mom about all the money he
had socked away in Grandma's name. I found out he was worth at least twice what he reported to the court. I saved him a bundle on alimony.”

“Great. So you screwed your old lady too.”

Doug winced. “She's a real pain. Anyway, my father gave me a forty-meg hard-disk AT with a color monitor for keeping my mouth shut about the money. It all worked out for the best. Dad says he's a lot happier with Emma now.”

Gibbons stood up and stretched his back. “Thanks for the effort, Doug. I'll tell Lorraine you did your best.”

Doug nodded and went right back to the computer.

Another good reason for not getting married again, Gibbons thought.

When Tozzi walked into her office, Joanne leaned back in her high-back chair and looked at him through half-closed eyes. “Is it Halloween?” she asked. She was referring to Tozzi's suit, his “Mr. Thompson” outfit.

Her unexpected sarcasm stung him. He wasn't feeling very secure, having just moved into the EZ Rest Motel right on the highway in Secaucus, taking only what belongings he could stuff into a small suitcase and a plastic Macy's bag. The room had one small window that looked out on a twenty-four-hour Exxon station. The highway traffic was loud but it was constant, like white noise, though every time a car pulled into the gas station and rolled over the pressure wires, the bells rang inside the garage, and that had kept him up most of the night.

Tozzi was wearing his suit because he figured it was only right that he dress appropriately for an office visit. It was bad enough that he was dropping in unannounced again; he couldn't embarrass her by coming in looking like—what?—an undercover cop, a wiseguy, her gigolo? Besides, he had to look decent because he'd come with the vague hope that she might invite him to stay at her place, just for a little while, at least.

She reached for a cigarette from the pack of Newports on her desk and held one between her fingers, the butane lighter poised in her other hand. “Well?” she said.

Tozzi smiled lamely. “Trick or treat.” He sat down on the grayoatmeal
sofa and sank down into the cushions. He could've fallen asleep right there.

She lit her cigarette and squinted behind the rising smoke. “You look like shit. What's wrong?”

Tozzi rubbed his eye sockets with the heels of his hands and exhaled a short bitter laugh. He hesitated before he told her anything, but then went ahead and told her anyway. “That ex-, former, whatever-the-hell-he-is husband of yours—the guy I'm not supposed to mention in front of you—is out to get me. I had to leave my apartment because he knew where I was.”

“You sound paranoid.” She sounded unconvinced. Or unconcerned.

“You ought to see the piano-wire burns on my friend's neck, courtesy of one of Richie's gorillas. You'd be paranoid too.”

“Is he dead?” Finally she looked alarmed.

Tozzi shook his head.

“How do you know Richie's responsible for this?”

Tozzi hesitated again.

“Fuck you,” she suddenly snapped. “You come waltzing in here looking for sympathy, but you still don't trust me enough to tell me the whole story. Well then, just get the hell out of here.”

Tozzi looked at her and sighed. He wished he could just go to sleep. “Richie's after me because I'm after Richie.”

She pursed her lips and tapped her polished nails on the leather edge of her blotter. A thin wavy line of smoke rose from her cigarette. “I figured that out a long time ago,” she said impatiently.

“So what else do you want to know?” This wasn't the way he'd hoped this would go.

“Who do you work for?”

“No one. I work alone.”

“Really. You're a lone wolf? An avenging angel? How goddamn stupid do you think I am?”

He looked her in the eye. “I never thought you were stupid. Just the opposite.”

She turned the page on her calendar with a sharp snap and shuffled papers angrily. “Then what are you doing here? What do you want from me?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I just wanted to see you.”

“Is that a line left over from your disco days?”

He ignored the insult. “The first time I met you, you said that any enemy of Richie Varga's was a friend of yours.”

“So?”

“So help me.”

She looked away, looked at anything else in the room but him. He had a feeling she was deliberately trying to maintain her fury. “Why don't you leave me alone? I don't care about him anymore. He's out of my life. I don't want him back in. Can't you understand that?”

Tozzi noticed that her hand was shaking. “I do understand. But you've got to realize that—”