The dead Roger Sherman Coe of Wilmington, North Carolina, had an electronic trail that went back to his Selective Service file.
The Roger Sherman Coe of the National Computer Crime Index was a ghost. Smith could find nothing about him. There was no IRS record, no listing in any motor-vehicle registry in any of the fifty states. His credit cards had all been overcharged and abandoned, the balances unpaid.
Yet according to his computer, these two men, sharing one name but utterly different life-styles, were one. They could not be one, Smith saw as darkness clamped down on Folcroft Sanitarium and the shaky fluorescent tights of his office automatically came on. Smith paused in his search to sip mineral water. It was after hours and his secretary had gone home for the day. The night shift had come in, and no one would disturb him while he was at his work.
At an impasse, Smith logged off his search and switched to monitoring other areas of CURE activity. Out there in business, government agencies and other walks of life, ordinary Americans routinely sent anonymous tips on ongoing or suspicious activities. They thought they worked for various government agencies-the FBI, the CIA, OSHA and many others-as paid informants. The checks came in the mail at the same time every month. And they filed their reports electronically.
Only Harold Smith received them. These ordinary citizens helped satisfy CURE's vast need for raw information.
Smith paged through the latest reports. They were unremarkable. A warning of a crooked state senator in the far west. A coal-mine owner who was routinely ignoring federal safety standards. Price-fixing among New England dairy farms. In the old days Smith would simply drop a dime on these people and hope the justice system did its job. Now it made just as much sense to tip off one of the proliferation of investigative-news television shows, trusting in the resulting broadcast exposure to coax the proper authorities into doing their jobs.
One report caught Smith's attention because it involved XL SysCorp, the computer giant that had manufactured the WORM arrays Smith now relied on.
It said that XL SysCorp was being picketed by a black special-interest group that accused the computer giant of discriminatory hiring practices. The matter did not fall under Smith's purview, so he passed on.
Another report emanated from within the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had already moved into the area of North Carolina struck by Hurricane Elvis. The complaint accused FEMA of not addressing the situation quickly. It was an old complaint about FEMA. Smith passed on.
In the end there was nothing CURE sensitive. But the respite had cleared Smith's stymied thought processes. He returned to the vexing Roger Sherman Coe conundrum.
Smith ran audit trails from every angle. Nowhere did the two Roger Sherman Coes intersect. As the night wore on, it became more and more obvious that they could not be identical.
That left only one possibility: that the criminal Coe had appropriated the identity of the other Coe. It was a not uncommon ruse. And in this computer age, anyone with access to the net or computer-generated mailing lists could compile the basic information on an individual through IRS and DMV records. Those alone were sufficient to allow a hired killer to create a shield identity called Roger Sherman Coe and, when it had been milked for all it was worth, drop it for another.
It made sense. It was logical. It explained Smith's error. He began to breathe more normally. The tightness in his ribs loosened.
It was only a matter of proving it.
Somewhere in the hours past midnight, Harold Smith's faith in a universe of logic shattered forever. Smith had just returned to his chair after a bathroom break. The sweat of his early-evening's toil had turned clammy, and his pants legs were sticking to his skin. His tie was on the desk now, and the top button of his shirt lay open.
A routine message came over the screen. It was a report from COMSUBPAC that the USS Harlequin, which had left San Diego Naval Terminal for Pacific manoeuvres, had declared radio silence.
Smith nodded to himself and returned to the task at hand. Only he and the captain of the Harlequin knew that the sub was in fact heading for the dangerous waters of the West Korea Bay, where, as scheduled for every year for the past twenty or so years, a cargo of gold siphoned from the federal emergency reserves would be off-loaded and left on the beach of the tiny fishing village of Sinanju.
By now it was a routine mission. The Harlequin commander had his sealed orders, his superiors were instructed to ask no questions, and nothing was ever said about it.
So Smith settled down to a final effort at finding the false Roger Sherman Coe.
The world of reason collapsed in on him when, frustrated at the interminable dead ends he kept reaching, Smith decided to log onto the National Crime Computer Index in the National Crime Information Center. It was routinely updated. It was a long shot, but perhaps in the handful of days since he had downloaded the massive data file, new information had been added.
Smith accessed the data base with the coded passwords he had on file and called up the Roger Sherman Coe file.
It would not come.
The glowing green read simply, mockingly, NOT FOUND.
"Impossible," Smith said tightly. "I have that file in my own data base."
On the theory that the file had been closed, Smith called up the inactive portion of the data base records. NOT FOUND, the screen read.
"Impossible," Smith repeated in a low, almost tremulous voice.
Smith tried again. He knew it would be a waste of time, but he tried again. A computer does not make logical errors, he knew. Ask it to find something, and as long as the operating system and its logic circuits were functioning, it would find the object of its search-this time, next time and every time, just as a calculator would always report the sum of three plus seven as the number ten. There was no room for error, uncertainty or what people like to call fuzzy logic these days.
NOT FOUND, reported the monitor.
Smith stared at the screen, oblivious to the drop of sweat being squeezed out of the tightening notch between his tired eyes. It rilled down the bridge of his patrician nose, slowed at the tip and clung by static tension until it fell on his unfeeling left hand.
A hand that trembled uncontrollably.
Smith hesitated. Less than a week ago, there had been a file on Roger Sherman Coe in the NCCI. Smith had downloaded it. It was now in his own duplicate of the NCCI data base. He had called it up just hours before. Read it with his own eyes.
Files do not uncreate themselves. Computers are not thinking, creative mentalities, he knew. A clerk had keyed the Roger Sherman Coe file onto the NCCI data base. Smith had merely vacuumed it up through the magic of fiber-optic cable and dumped it onto an optical WORM disk through the medium of laser writing. It was now permanently written onto a CD-like platter.
It was on his data base; therefore, it was on the NCCI data base. Such files are not erased, only moved into inactive memory or stored on tape drives for later referencing.
Smith pulled down a program of his own devising, initiated a brute-force search of the original NCCI data base and settled back into his chair for what he expected to be a protracted search.
In his concern he had forgotten the power of his new hybrid system.
The program executed in less than ninety seconds. It had scoured the NCCI data base for any file name that included the three component names in Roger Sherman Coe's name, in any combination, in any variant spelling and even allowed for the absence due to clerical error of any one of the three names.
Smith expected a long list of variants and a difficult night of culling out the variables.
Instead, at the end of ninety seconds he got a single name.
When it came up, he blinked twice, thinking somehow the system had made a mistake. The file had come up after all, impossible as that was.
Then Smith looked again. And he saw what he'd missed the first time.
A low groan escaped his tight lips. It might have been pulling his very soul out through his teeth. In a way it was. The cry of despair was Harold Smith's faith in life and, more importantly, in his own computer system, escaping forever.
On the screen glowed a name. It mocked Smith. Mocked his logic, his faith in the logic of mathematics, the reliability of computers and the subroutines and algorithms and binary codes that governed them.
The name was: ROGER SHERMAN POE.
Harold W Smith sat frozen in his chair, a stricken expression on his bestubbled, phosphorescence-spattered features, his red-rimmed eyes boring holes into the monitor screen as if by an act of sheer will he could change the one thing that mocked his trust in his computers.
The common consonant P.
The letter remained P. It was not C. The file name remained ROGER SHERMAN POE. Not ROGER SHERMAN COE.
A nervous laugh escaped Smith's parted lips. It was an impossibility. If he had seen a blue elf emerge from the screen to gulp down his tie, it could not have been more mind-boggling.
And because he was a logical man, Harold Smith downloaded the Roger Sherman Poe file onto the WORM drive dedicated to the NCCI data base. Once he had captured it, he set it off on the right-hand side of the screen with urgent keystrokes.
Then he called up the Roger Sherman Coe file from his version of NCCI.