was the guy behind the counter down at the pizza place, who he saw occasionally after work at one of the local bars near the airport. “Hey, man, what’s up?”
“Just wanted to let you know—” A pause, a clash of metal; it was the sound of an oven door being opened, then shut again. “The big guy’s in here for his lunch—”
“Yeah, he headed out a few minutes ago.”
“Yeah, well, thought you might want to know he’s on his second beer already, and he’s ordered two pies. Don’t think he’s gonna be back anytime soon.”
Danny breathed out a small sigh of relief. “Thanks, man, I owe you one. Do me a favor? When he walks out the door, gimme a call?”
A chuckle at the other end. “No problem, man,” said Jackie. Danny knew that Jackie wasn’t particularly fond of his own boss and almost certainly assumed—correctly—that Danny didn’t care much for his, either. Wage slaves knew each other on sight. “No point in having a good day interrupted by work.”
“You got that, man,” Danny said. “Thanks much.”
“I’ll be down with a bunch of the FedEx guys at the Smokestack on Sunday afternoon,” Jackie said, “if you wanna buy me that beer you owe me.”
Danny chuckled, mostly because he had no plans to be anywhere near here on Sunday. “We’ll see how it rolls, man,” he said. “Talk to you later.”
“You got it,” Jackie said, and hung up.
Danny hung up, made his way back to the desk, and sat down. The screen was still thinking about what to do next. Sometimes the cryptography took longer than usual for some reason or other—Ah, here we go. The browser window cleared, then went black. Danny waited for the text input window to come up. A few moments later, a word came up on the screen, all in caps. HI.
Hi there, he typed back. There were moments when it bothered him not to have even a handle to call the other guy by; it was strange, especially when your normal online-world dealings left you so used to having at least a fake name to grab hold of, if nothing else. But again, anonymity was key here. He’d sooner not have a name to use, especially if it meant making it harder for some cop here or in some other country to chase him down. Yes, they were all using anonymizers to conceal their locations—the address masker was built into this custom browser—but Danny knew that those could and would be broken by the people who’d eventually get onto their trail. By that time, Danny intended to be somewhere far away where he would never have to touch a computer again. He would be conducting his life on a cash-only basis in some country with friendly banking laws. In fact, he was still conducting the argument with himself about which country that would be. Switzerland was overrated, a spent force now, what with the new banking disclosure laws there that came along in the wake of the war against terror. But there were lots of other places to consider—newer, smaller, less cooperative. Some of them were in the Caribbean, some of them in sunny southern seas elsewhere.
GOT NEW TIMES FOR YOU, said the text on the screen.
Danny reached for one of the copy shop’s branded pads, tore a piece of paper off it—during one of the earlier security briefings, he had been warned about the readability of any notepad’s lower sheets—and started writing on the single piece of paper on the hard table. YOU READY? said the screen.
Danny put the pen aside. Go, he typed.
The screen spilled out a series of six letter and digit sequences, which Danny diligently and carefully began to copy. Each of these looked like one of the standard six letter and digit codes in hex that stood for a color that could be used in a Web page’s code to paint in a background or color a type font. But at home, Danny had a neatly-printed little codebook in which each of those 256 groups had been assigned a different meaning—most of them having to do with times. Each code group changed in meaning depending on which other code group it was near. Anybody who happened to be intercepting this message, and anyone trying to figure out later what it meant, would easily mistake it for a set of directions for the design of a loading Web page. But the codebook meanings were far different. Danny had laughed, just once,