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said.
    “It is now. That leaves the other two. But who knew our friend better than we did? That leaves the computer. If they tracked him by computer…”
    “I know one guy who knew him better than we did,” I said. “I was looking at some information from the big guys. There’s a memo that says he had a caretaker. The caretaker lives in Jackson. I’ve got his name.”
    More silence, and I heard a woman’s voice-Marvel, John’s wife-in the background saying, “It’s on right now,” and then John said, “I’m looking at the tape. We’ve got to talk to the guy in Jackson. Personally.”
    “Hate to go back there,” I said.
    “No choice-unless you can figure out how the asshole tracked him over the computer.”
    “I
can’t
figure it out,” I said. “I tried a couple of times, really carefully, and I’m pretty good at it. Our friend called me up and told me to knock it off. I tripped some alarms I never saw. I think he was amused-he seemed amused. I bet everybody on the ring, except you, went looking for him at one time or another.”
    “So either the guy who found him is a lot better than you ring guys are, or it’s somebody who knew him.”
    “That would be it-and I don’t think it’s somebody who’s better than us. That’s not vanity, it’s just that there are a limited number of ways that you can track somebody online, and there’s no way to know whether you’re stepping into a trap unless you step in it. In other words, if somebody was tracking him, even if it’s like… the really big guys… they’d still set off his alarms.”
    “Maybe some technological thing not having to do with computers?”
    “And somehow it falls into the hands of a fruitcake who uses it to cut up government bigshots? John…”
    “I know, I know. Can you get up here?”
    “If we had to,” I said.
    “Come on up, bag out here. You and I can go down to Jackson and talk to this friend.”
    “Ah, man.”
    “No choice.” Then he laughed. “I’m looking at this blackface thing. They are gonna stick this movie so far up the guy’s ass he’s gonna have videotape coming out of his nose.”
    “Hang on.” I turned to LuEllen, who was sitting on the end of the bed, watching the TV, and told her what John had suggested.
    She shrugged. “Always happy to see those guys.”
    I put the phone back to my ear. “We’ll be up,” I said. “Call you on the way.”
     
    WE packed up in a half hour and I carried the luggage down to the car. A quick check of the e-mail turned up nothing. As LuEllen was shoving the last of her stuff into a bag, she said, “Before you zip up your briefcase, why don’t you try the cards?”
    “Cards won’t help us,” I said.
    “Just try them,” she said. “For me. So I won’t worry.”
    “Or you’ll worry more,” I said.
    “Just try them.”
    There’s a word for what LuEllen can be, in Yiddish or Hebrew-Russian-English or whatever: the word’s
nudnik
. The best definition I’ve ever heard came from an Israeli professor of archaeology: “It’s a person who is like a woodpecker sitting on your head, all the time pecking you.”
     
    SO I got the cards out, my tarot cards, a Rider-Waite deck. I’m not exactly a scientist-I was trained as an engineer-but I’ve studied the philosophy of science, and I’m a true believer. The tarot, as a predictive system, is the same sort of superstitious nonsense as astrology. The deck
is
useful as a gaming device, though, and that’s how I use it.
    Like this: when we are forced to deal with complicated problems, when some of the facets of the problem are unknown or unreachable, we deal with them in terms of past experience. That’s almost inescapable. But approaches that are useful with some problems don’t work with others. The tarot deck, when used as a gaming system, pushes you outside past experience and encourages you to think of new ways to deal with it.
    Say, for example, you were involved in a complicated business transaction and