The Wizardry Consulted

Fourteen: Raiding on the Parade

It is a truism well-known to lawyers that while the law may be uniform, all judges are not alike. It is a corollary equally well known to prosecutors that some judges are easier than others when it comes to search warrants and such. In San Francisco District Court, Judge David Faraday was what the local federal prosecutors privately-very privately-called a patsy. A law-and-order Nixon appointee, he could be counted on to grant search warrants on nearly any grounds.

So it was hardly surprising that FBI Special Agent George Arnold showed up in Judge Faraday’s office with Special Agent Clueless Pashley in tow to seek warrants to raid Judith’s apartment.

"And this person has been breaking into government computers?" Judge Faraday asked after looking over the papers Pashley and Arnold presented to him.

"Highly sensitive government computers," Pashley amended. "Your honor this is a major national security case."

Arnold nodded. "Your honor, if need be, we have a civilian expert on computer networks and security waiting outside who can testify to the importance of this warrant." Actually it was Ray Whipple cooling his heels in the outer office, but he was an expert in Pashley’s eyes and Arnold was following the lead of the bureau’s out-of-town "expert."

"I know about computer crime, Mr. Arnold," Judge Faraday said mildly. "I saw that movie, War Games." The judge scanned down through the pile of affidavits.

"Search warrant for subject’s apartment, wiretap on subject’s telephone, electronic surveillance of premises. Well, this seems in order," he said as he reached for his pen. "Very well, gentlemen, the warrants are granted."

Pashley managed not to cheer.

"Did you get it?" Ray Whipple asked as Pashley and Arnold emerged from the judge’s chambers. Pashley tapped his breast pocket significantly, even though the warrant was really in Arnold’s briefcase.

"When are you going to serve it?" Ray asked as soon as they were out in the corridor.

"I’d like to hold off on the search warrant for a week or so," Arnold said. "We’ll put the wiretap in place immediately and get a snooping van in the parking lot tonight to start executing the surveillance. That van can pick up the electromagnetic emissions from ordinary computers and decode them from five hundred feet away."

The astronomer gave a low whistle. "That’s scary."

"Oh, we’ve got our methods," Pashley assured him jauntily, missing the expression on Whipple’s face.

"We can lift information right out of a computer without the user knowing it," Arnold added. "If we listen for a few days we may get to watch this hacker in action before the bust goes down."

"When’s she going to do something?" Myron Pashley wondered aloud for roughly the eighth time that evening.

George Arnold squirmed around to get a better view of the readout. "So far she’s still watching television."

Pashley and Arnold were crammed into the surveillance van along with the regular operator and several racks of equipment. "Cramped" was too generous a word for conditions in the van. "Badly ventilated" didn’t really cover the subject either, especially since Pashley had found a Yemeni restaurant near the hotel and dined on a vegetarian dish that was mostly chickpeas and garlic. So far they had been sitting almost in each other’s laps for almost three hours and even Pashley was getting tired of it.

The directional antenna hidden in the van’s roof rack was pointed at Judith Conally’s apartment less than three hundred feet away. At that distance it could easily pick up electronic emanations from Judith’s apartment.

"Wait a minute," the technician said. "The television’s just gone off. Hold it, okay, she’s starting to work on the computer."

"Here we go!" Pashley crowed. For an awful instant Arnold thought Pashley was going to hug him.

"What’s she doing?"

"Looks like loading a program," the tech said, keeping his eyes fixed on the displays. "Okay, she’s just put a file up on the screen. I got it now."

Pashley, Arnold and the technician wriggled around until they could all see the display screen.

"It’s screwed up," Arnold complained.

The tech checked the instruments. "No, that’s what’s on her screen all right."

"What do you make of this stuff?" Arnold asked.

"Code," Pashley assured him. "This is all in code. When we raid the place we’ll probably find a code book that translates all these code words."

Neither Pashley nor Arnold knew it, but it was indeed code they were looking at, although not in the sense they meant. Inside her apartment Judith was settling down to work on one of her private programming projects. Since for preference Judith used C and since her C style was both idiosyncratic and highly personal, it was hardly surprising that the FBI agents couldn’t make sense of it. Since the particular program Judith was laboring over was her entry in this year’s Obfuscated C++ Contest it was to be expected. Since one of the utilities Judith had developed to help her was an uglyprinter, which turned even the best-structured C code into an utter muddle, it was inevitable.

Judith Conally was playing relativistic Tetris when the knock came at the door.

"Damn!" she muttered as the distraction made her miss an especially intricate maneuver in the time direction. The rest of her carefully constructed edifice came tumbling down even before she was out of the chair to answer the door.

Judith had never met Myron Pashley, but as soon as she opened the door she knew what he was. For one thing he was wearing that dark-suit-narrow-tie-white-shirt outfit no one wore anymore but government agents and EDS employees. And EDS employees weren’t allowed to wear wrap-around sunglasses.

"Special Agent Pashley, FBI," the man announced, holding out his identification. "We have a warrant to search these premises." He thrust a paper into Judith’s hands and pushed her aside. "Stand out of the way, please."

He was followed into the apartment by six other men and a woman, all dressed in the same style if not the same clothing. Since Judith’s apartment was not large, it was suddenly very crowded. Judith found herself crammed back against a book case.

One of the agents sat down at her computer and started calling up directories. Others fanned out through the apartment.

After a quick run-through of her more recent sins, Judith relaxed. There was nothing in the apartment which was the least bit incriminating. Then she looked at the search warrant and nearly burst out laughing. A national security case? Get real!

Then she stopped laughing and started worrying. She hadn’t done anything, but what had the people in the other world been up to? Wiz was apparently in some kind of trouble and you never knew what Danny was going to do. There wasn’t anything illegal here, but the laws didn’t anticipate contact with alternate worlds where magic worked. If someone halfway competent had even a hint of a suspicion something like that was going on, the stuff in this apartment would be enough to blow it sky high. Whether that would mean jail or years in protective custody as a "vital resource" she didn’t know, but she wasn’t eager to find out.

Pashley moved to her desk and Judith’s heart caught in her throat. There, lying on top of the stack of unpaid bills and unanswered mail, was her documentation for the magic compiler for Wiz’s world. With its mixture of programming and magic that book alone would be enough to give the whole show away.

"What’s this?" Pashley demanded, hefting the book.

"That’s the design document for magic in my novels," Judith told him as blandly as she could. "Do you want it?"

Pashley knew all about seizing writer’s notes after his experiences in North Carolina. "That won’t be necessary." He turned to put the document back on the desk and missed seeing Judith slump in relief.

The agents went through the apartment like a polite hurricane. They always said "please" and called Judith "ma’am," but they were relentless and unstoppable. After turning the place upside down, taking her computer, boxing up all her disks and tapes, photographing everything (including the dishes in the kitchen sink and the bra hanging on the bedroom doorknob), giving her a carefully itemized receipt with serial numbers, and making an appointment with Judith to come in for questioning "with your attorney present if you desire," the agents finally left.

"Hit me," Wiz said glumly to the demon crouched on his work table.

The demon in the green eyeshade, gaiters and violently checked vest gave Wiz a toothy grin before flipping down a ten. That made twenty-three and Wiz was busted out. The demon gathered the cards in and shuffled them. Then he cocked an eyebrow at Wiz, waiting for the signal to deal again.

Wiz slumped back in his chair and sighed. It was still early afternoon, but it was not a good day. Not that that was unusual. The townfolk had learned by now that "their" wizard wasn’t available before noon, but as soon as noon arrived there was a small line of them on his doorstep, demanding to see him.

He had tried refusing to see anyone, but that meant either being a prisoner in his house or being stopped on every street corner by someone with a long, incomprehensible tale of woe. So he had gone back to seeing a few people every morning, even though there was nothing he could do for most of them.

This morning’s crowd had included a farmer who wanted him to find the pot of gold his grandfather was supposed to have buried on the farm, a lovesick young man who wanted his beloved to notice him and a nervous middle-aged woman who apparently expected him to guess what she wanted since she never did get around to telling him.

Meanwhile, in spite of the building urgency he was at a complete and utter standstill on the dragon problem. He tried to tell himself he was too overcome with distractions to focus on it, but the fact he was playing blackjack rather than working told him how accurate that was. The truth was he didn’t have even a notion of how to begin.

Wiz knew from experience there was a hierarchy to working on a software problem. There was hacking, there was programming, there was playing, there was doodling and there was what a British friend of his rather inelegantly described as "code wanking." He had been reduced to code wanking days ago and now he had lost his enthusiasm even for that.

He sighed and looked over at the demon. The demon leered back and riffled the cards suggestively.

"Busy, I see." Wiz turned to see Malkin standing in the doorway.

"Not really. What’s up?"

"Message from Ol’ Droopy. He wants to know how you’re coming."

It took Wiz an instant to identify "Ol’ Droopy" as the mayor and somewhat longer to formulate an answer.

"Tell him things are progressing at a satisfactory pace."

"So I see. Anyway, you can tell him yourself. I’m not your messenger. He just stopped me on the way back here."

As she moved Wiz noticed a slight bulge in her tunic.

"Wait a minute! Did you steal his chain of office again?"

"Naw. Did that once, didn’t I?" She reached into her tunic and produced a wide leather belt with an ornate gemmed buckle. "I do wonder how far he’ll get before his breeches fall down, though."

Wiz groaned. "One of these days you’re going to get us all thrown right back in jail."

"That’s all right," Malkin said cheerfully. "I’ve still got the keys hidden away."

Wiz groaned again.

"Besides, you’re a fine one to talk. With your messing about with dragons and the Council you’re likely to get us staked out on The Rock."

"Well, why do you stay, then?"

Malkin smiled in a peculiarly sunny fashion. "I want to see what’s going to happen next. Hanging around here is more fun than a mummer’s show. Besides, it gives me a base of operations, so to speak."

Wiz thought about what that last meant. Then he decided he didn’t want to know. He also remembered why he had never had roommates. Then he thought of the rats in the psych lab. The more he thought about them the more sympathy he felt.

"Of course, if you want me to leave…"

"No, no. I need you for background resource. But try to be a little more discreet, will you?"

Malkin draped the belt over her shoulder, buckle resting on her breast. Wiz noticed it hung nearly down to her knees behind. "Oh, I’m always careful," Malkin said cheerfully. "You have to be in my business."

With that she was gone. Wiz sighed again and turned back to the demon, who raised a pair of scaly eyebrows and riffled the cards. Wiz dismissed him with a gesture. Somehow he’d lost all his taste for taking chances-any more chances.

Judith wasn’t the only one upset by the FBI raid. If she was annoyed, the mood in the Wizard’s Keep verged on panic.

Bal-Simba frowned when a breathless Jerry and Danny told him, in alternating choruses, what had happened.

"How serious is this?" the big wizard asked when his visitors finally reached a stopping place.

"Pretty serious," Jerry told him. "If thekeep.org goes off line we lose our communication link to Wiz." And probably all chance of finding him, he thought. But he saw the look on Moira’s face and he didn’t say that.

"Is Judith in any danger?" Moira asked.

"Danger? No. She’s probably not even in trouble, well not much. She’s not doing anything illegal. Wiz might be in trouble if they could catch him, but there’s not much chance of that."

"The Sparrow told me once that you keep records on these devices," Bal-Simba said. "Is there anything there which would arouse their ire?"

Danny grinned. "There aren’t any records on that machine. We keep all that at this end, just in case. As far as the domain is concerned, Judith’s system isn’t much more than a dumb terminal, even though it’s officially listed as the main server."

"That was Judith’s idea," Jerry reminded his younger colleague. "After she saw some of the stuff you’d been up to she didn’t want any record of it on her system."

"Anyway it was a pretty smart move," Danny said. "There’s no way they can pin anything on her. There’s even a complete set of domain software on her system."

"We’ve also got a backup way to reach Judith. We’re setting up a modem link over a regular telephone line. She just calls a phone number we give her and logs in."

"Can we give that number to Wiz?"

Danny frowned. "That’s going to be trickier. You can bet the FBI has a wiretap on the connection to thekeep.org. If we use the current Internet connection to tell Wiz about the new number we’ll be telling the FBI too. Since we, ah, weren’t completely aboveboard in getting that number it wouldn’t do to have them tapping that line too. We may be able to rig up a code or something, but it will take more time."

"Then how do we tell Judith about the number?"

"Easy. We call her, preferably at a friend’s house."

"Is this like the number we gave Major Gilligan when we sent him back to your World?"

"Not exactly. That was an 800 number." Danny made a face. "Big mistake. I found out the hard way they monitor those real close. They found us and shut us down in just a couple of weeks. According to some of the people I’ve been talking to on the net they’re not as careful about local numbers, especially the ones that don’t show long-distance charges."

"Meaning you’ve been hanging around with the phone phreakers again," Jerry said.

"Be glad I was," Danny shot back. "Otherwise we’d have worse problems."

Jerry didn’t have a good answer for that one, so he let it slide.

"But can they sever the link?" Moira persisted.

"They may think they have already since they don’t know we’re tapped into her line."

"Can they cut it entirely?"

"Yeah, by disconnecting the line. But they probably won’t do that. There’s no reason for them to do it." He sighed. "You know there was a time when government agents were pretty dumb about these things. I understand they’ve gotten smarter."

"But they still might cut us off from Wiz?"

"Theoretically," Jerry said. "But don’t worry. It would take an absolute idiot to do something like that."

It was not a good day for Special Agent Pashley. He had spent the morning interviewing Judith Conally with her lawyer present and he felt he was further behind than ever. After two hours of questioning and several very pointed inquiries by Judith’s lawyer as to the exact charge, he had turned her loose. The results from the examination of Judith’s computer and related material hadn’t helped any.

"Technicalities," he grumbled into his coffee cup. "Tied in knots by damn technicalities."

"I told you it was a mailbox," Ray Whipple told him.

"It’s a top secret government mailbox and these hackers are breaking into it!"

"Look," Ray said slowly and carefully, as if explaining something to a child. "We only know that some messages from that mailbox passed through her system. The messages we have were addressed to other accounts on that domain, she says she never got any messages from that account, there’s no sign of any such messages on her system and she doesn’t know where to find the people the messages were sent to."

"Yeah, but someone had to send the message in the first place and that person had to break into the mailbox."

"But she didn’t send mail to herself," the astronomer said patiently. "The messages weren’t for her and she didn’t know that address was some sort of government secret. Hell, she claims she didn’t even know those accounts were on her machine. That makes her as much a victim as the government. You can’t arrest her for that. Especially since the thing’s so secret you can’t admit it’s a secret in the first place."

"Hah!" Pashley said.

Whipple shrugged. "You can’t prove otherwise."

"Technicalities," Pashley repeated. "Picky little technicalities. They’re what’s ruining this country."

"Myron, she’s innocent."

Pashley snorted. "With a record like hers? She disappears, right out of a locked hospital ward, and no one knows where she’s gone, and she’s innocent?"

"She had a head injury. The hospital screwed up when she came out of the coma, she wandered around for a while before they found her. The hospital admitted they were wrong by settling with her, didn’t they?"

"For all we know she was kidnapped by aliens for experiments or something," Pashley retorted.

Actually Pashley was closer to the mark than Whipple, although neither of them would have believed the real story. Judith had been taken to Wiz’s World as part of the battle against computer criminal magicians at Caermort. She had been healed there and returned to our world when the situation was stabilized.

Suddenly Pashley brightened. "A brain probe! Maybe she’s jacked into the net directly through her brain. We can find out with an X-ray or MRI or something." He stood up and strode out into the main office. "Hey John," he called, "have we got an X-ray machine around here?"

Ray Whipple put his head in his hands and groaned.

By mutual consent, the programmers and Judith Conally kept word of the FBI raid from Wiz. So naturally Wiz kept sending e-mail and chatting with thekeep.org as if it was still there.

Which it was, of course. In spite of what it said in the paperwork, the real server for the domain had always been in the Wizard’s Keep in another world. True, there was now no computer in Judith’s apartment, but that didn’t matter to the signal. It was tapped off magically between the junction box and the apartment. First, however, it traveled through the local telephone office, where the FBI was monitoring the line.

Clueless Pashley looked at the surveillance report and slammed it down on the table. "We didn’t get it," he said disgustedly. "Someone’s still using that computer link."

"But that’s impossible," Arnold protested. "We got her computer."

"Well, she’s still on-line. Look at this. She must have another computer in there."

The other FBI agent went over the transcript and shook his head.

"But we got all the computer equipment in the apartment."

"Then it’s got to be disguised as something else." He riffled through the sheaf of pictures of Judith’s apartment. "What about that wall of electronic stuff?"

"That was a stereo system."

"Are you sure? You can disguise a computer to look like anything. These hackers are diabolical. Come on, let’s go back to the judge."

This time the agents carried off a complete stereo system, a big-screen television complete with video game console, and anything else in the apartment that looked electronic, including a clock radio. Again they gave Judith an itemized receipt with serial numbers. Then they departed as quickly and officiously as they came.

"This," Judith said to the bare wall where her stereo had been, "is bloody ridiculous."