Chapter 25

Beyond the intensity of my work with Spook, my periodic interactions with Richard, too, kept me on my toes. He continued to probe subtly for any hint of my location—what time was it? (what time zone was I in?) how was the weather? (several times) had I seen this or that sports event? (broadcast selectively in different parts of the country) and on and on. I felt increasingly friendly toward him, he was proving to be a pretty good guy for a Fed, and it made it harder to watch my tongue.

"Why, Richard?" I asked him in exasperation one day. I'd just phoned to tip him off to some woman hunting a hit man to kill her husband—it's amazing how people commit the most incriminating things to e-mail or the Internet, utterly oblivious to the reality that their on-line "privacy" is barely skin deep—and he'd offered another superficially innocuous comment about it being hay fever season and he hoped I wasn't affected.

"Well, Jack, I just meant to show a little concern—"

"No," I cut him off. "I mean why keep probing like you do? Why keep hunting me so ... doggedly? I'm beginning to feel like I'm in a bad rewrite of Les Miserables, the cop chasing that poor guy for years for stealing a loaf of bread."

"Well, you know why," he said.

"Not entirely," I contradicted him. "I know why you started, you thought I was trying to hack DEFCONTROL. But you haven't had any more alarms go off there, have you? Or anywhere? So why aren't I yesterday's news by now?"

He sighed. "There's no statute of limitations on that type of thing," he said. "You tried it once, why wouldn't you try it again? And there's the other stuff, the stuff you threatened to publish if we didn't back off."

"I haven't published, though, have I? Even though you didn't back off."

"We did publicly, that was the agreement," he said. "I told you I'd still be after you."

"Yeah, but again, why? What have I done that's so awful? Jesus, I keep tipping you about bad stuff about to go down, what do I have to do to get you off my back?"

"There's no way, Jack."

"Why?" I asked for the third time.

"Jack, every tip you give us just reinforces how deeply you've hacked the 'Net. And some of it says you've hacked us, too, just like the secrets you said you'd publish. How can we leave you out there, out of control?"

"Out of your control, that's all," I said irritatedly. "So that's what I need to do, quit giving you tips? Let this shit just go down, let"—I said the woman's name—"contract her hubby dead, let snipers and bombers do their thing? Richard, that's crazy."

"No, Jack, and this is from my heart, please don't stop the tips," he responded. "You've saved a lot of lives. And it wouldn't help you. The DEFCONTROL business, maybe you could have explained that away, but you sunk yourself with that call about publishing stuff on the In­ternet and especially what you called the 'carrot, ' that tip about the fertilizer guy. It told us you'd hacked a lot more and a lot deeper than we realized."

I shook my head in self-annoyance; I'd gone too far with that, after all.

"Don't beat yourself up for it, Jack," he continued. "I suspect the main reason was to get Ms. Wentworth clear enough that you could come get her, right?"

"No comment," I said tiredly.

"Yeah. Well, without what you said we wouldn't have let up even as much as we did. She'd never have been in that garage alone. And you'd be on most-wanted signs in every post office. So it bought you that. But nothing's free, it also told us you're a master hacker, maybe the best that ever was. You know too much that you have no business knowing. We can't leave you loose. Even if we—if I, and thank you for that—never hear from you again, we'll always look."

"One last time, why?" I asked. "Hell, you guys have stuff that I don't have. Illegal—OK, questionable—phone taps, 'Net intercepts, also pretty questionable, physical surveillance, all kinds of stuff. You know things that I couldn't even dream of knowing. So how come you're the good guys and I'm the bad guy?"

"The good guys get to define who are the good guys," he said. "And who are the bad guys."

"Shit," I interjected.

"But it isn't just that," he went on. "We're, well, we're us, an official organization constrained by law. Some of the laws aren't real public, and I have to admit we don't always follow them to the letter, but we're subject to oversight, to controls. Due process applies, we can't just do whatever we want, we have limitations we have to observe, constraints on what we may and may not do."

"So?"

"You have none of that," he said. "You're out there alone, a maverick as it were. And a maverick with a lot of power, judging from what you've given us. No due process, no procedures, no protection of law, no nothing. Am I wrong in thinking that's wrong? What's to hold you back from serious abuses?"