The screen dimmed, then came up with gray World Wide Web page. The lights of his ISDN router flickered on. He clacked a few more commands.
"What are you working on these days?" I asked.
"Bastards running RNI," Garrett complained.
Every time Garrett talks about the company, he starts with that comment, even though he's been there so long and accumulated so many stock options he is one of the bastards running RNI.
"They've got me doing the GUI on an account management program. I make this piece of shit program look really slick, except it still crashes when it merges field data."
"So that's what they're paying you for," I said. "What are you really working on?"
Garrett smiled, not taking his eyes off the screen. "Bring the tequila from the kitchen and I'll show you. It requires tequila."
I'm not one to refuse a direct order. I got the bottle from the kitchen and poured some for both of us. My brother and I share an understanding about tequila—it should be Herradura Anejo and it should be drunk straight, no lime or salt, preferably in large quantities.
The parrot was perched on the edge of a bar stool, looking at the shot glasses enviously, his head cocked to one side.
"Sorry, no," I told him.
When I got back to the recliner Garrett had a new program up and ready to demonstrate.
"Okay," he said. "Say you've got some material that's too sensitive to store on your computer. What do you do?"
I shrugged. "Hide it on a disk somewhere. Use a read/write protect program on it."
"Yeah, but disks can be found, and if somebody's good they can break into them with a logic diagram of the disk drive. Or a password tumbler. Disks can also get destroyed."
"So—"
"So you boomerang it."
He selected a file called Garrett.jpg.
"Here's my sensitive data—my picture I want to keep but I don't want anybody to see.
So I don't keep it myself—I let the net keep it for me. I upload that sucker, encrypt it so it's invisible and innocuous, then program it to bounce around randomly, transferring itself from server to server so it's never in the same place for more than five minutes. It bounces around the net, impossible to find, until I send the retrieval code out for it.
Then it comes home."
He clicked on the file and we watched it disappear into the net, erasing itself from the hard drive as it uploaded. Then Garrett punched in a series of numbers. Two minutes later the file downloaded itself back into existence.
"See that?" he said. "The sucker was in Norway. By the time anybody noticed it was there, it'd be on its way to somewhere else."
The picture opened. It showed Garrett sitting in a bar somewhere with a woman on his lap. She had jeans and a motorcycle helmet and a HarleyDavidson Tshirt that she had pulled up to reveal some very ample breasts. Garrett was toasting the camera with a bottle of Budweiser.
"Family photos," I said.
"Biker women," he said fondly. "They understand there are some things only a man with no legs can do."
I tried not to use my imagination. Another shot of tequila helped.
A red light flickered in the corner of the computer and Garrett said, "It's soup."
He toggled back to the processor that had been giving Julie Kearnes' hard drive the Spanish Inquisition. On the screen now was a text document, mostly intact. Only a few nonsense characters attested to its trip through the cyber trash can.
"Names and social security numbers," Garrett announced. He scrolled down to the bottom. "Seven pages. Dates of hiring. Dates of—DOD, what's that, date of death?
Looks like several different companies, big Austin firms. This make any sense to you?"
"Company personnel archives—lists of people who died while employed or retired and then died and had their pensions closed out. Looks like about a decade worth of names for almost all the businesses where Julie Kearnes did temp work. She stole this information."
Garrett waved his fingers, unimpressed. "Amateur. Anybody could download these—no company is going to guard discontinued personnel records very seriously.
But why bother? And then why trash them?"
I thought about that. An uncomfortable idea started to form somewhere underneath the pleasant buzz of the Herradura. "Can I get a hard copy?"
Garrett grinned.
Two minutes later I was back in the easy chair with a refill of tequila and seven pages of deceased employee names from all over Austin.
Garrett closed down the computer, patted the keyboard like you would a puppy, then pushed himself away from the desk. He