“I broke the lock. And they don’t have anything in there to wedge the door shut with.”
She said, “You’re pretty good at this.”
“Aw, shucks, not really. What’ve you got there?”
While Ellie worked, she told him about their good fortune.
“Everything’s coming up roses,” he said with only a half-note of sarcasm. “What’re you doing?”
“Through Mama, I’ve up-linked to Earthguard, the EPA satellite they’ve been using to track us. I’ve gotten into the core of its operating program. All the way to the program-management level.”
He whistled in appreciation. “Look, even Mr. Rocky Dog is impressed.”
She glanced up and saw that Rocky was grinning. His tail swished back and forth on the deck, thumping into the seats on both sides of the aisle.
“You’re going to screw up a hundred-million-dollar satellite, turn it into space junk?” Spencer asked.
“Only for a while. Freeze it up for six hours. By then they won’t have a clue where to look for us.”
“Ah, go ahead, have fun, screw it up permanently.”
“When the agency isn’t using it for crap like this, it might actually do some beneficial work.”
“So you’re a civic-minded individual after all.”
“Well, I was a Girl Scout once. It gets in your blood, like a disease.”
“Then you probably wouldn’t want to go out with me tonight, spraypaint some graffiti on highway overpasses.”
“There!” she said, and tapped the ENTER key. She studied the data that came up on the screen and smiled. “Earthguard just shut down for a six-hour nap. They’ve lost us — except for radar tracking. Are you sure we’re keeping due north and high enough for radar to pick us up, like I asked?”
“The boys up front promised me.”
“Perfect.”
“What did you do before all this?” he asked.
“Freelance software designer, specializing in video games.”
“You created video games?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, of course, you did.”
“I’m serious. I did.”
“No, you missed my inflection,” he said. “I meant,
“The way the world’s going, everyone’ll be living in one big video game eventually, and it’s sure as hell not going to be a nice one, not ‘Super Mario Brothers’ or anything that gentle. More like ‘Mortal Kombat.’”
“Now that you’ve disabled a hundred-million-dollar satellite, what next?”
As they had talked, Ellie had been focused on the VDT. She had retreated from Earthguard, back into Mama. She was calling up menus, one after the other, speed-reading them. “I’m looking around, seeing what’s the best damage I can do.”
“Mind doing something for me first?”
“Tell me what, while I nose around here.”
He told her about the trap that he had set for anyone who might break into his cabin while he was gone.
It was her turn to whistle appreciatively. “God, I’d like to’ve seen their faces when they figured out what was going down. And what happened to the digitized photographs when they left Malibu?”
“They were transmitted to the Pacific Bell central computer, preceded by a code that activated a program I’d previously designed and secretly buried there. That program allowed them to be received and then retransmitted to the Illinois Bell central computer, where I buried another little hidden program that came to life in response to the special access code, and it received them from Pacific Bell.”
“You think the agency didn’t track them that far?”
“Well, to Pacific Bell, sure. But after my little program sent them to Chicago, it erased all record of that call. Then it self-destructed.”
“Sometimes a self-destruct can be rebuilt and examined. Then they’d see the instructions about erasing the call to Illinois Bell.”
“Not in this case. This was a beautiful little self-destructed program that stayed beautifully self-destructed, I guarantee you. When it dismantled itself, it also took out a reasonably large block of the Pacific Bell system.”
Ellie interrupted her urgent search of Mama’s programs to look at him. “How large is reasonably large?”
“About thirty thousand people must’ve been without telephone service for two to three hours before they got backup systems on-line.”
“You were never a Girl Scout,” she said.
“Well, I was never given a chance.”
“You learned a lot in that computer-crime task force.”
“I was a diligent employee,” he admitted.
“More than you learned about helicopters, for sure. So you think those photos are still waiting in the Chicago Bell computer?”
“I’ll walk you through the routine, and we’ll find out. Might be useful to get a good look at the faces of some of these thugs — for future reference. Don’t you think?”
“I think. Tell me what to do.”
Three minutes later, the first of the photographs appeared on the video display of the computer in her lap. Spencer leaned across the narrow aisle from his seat, and she angled the attache case so they both could see the screen.
“That’s my living room,” he said.
“You’re not deeply interested in decor, are you?”
“My favorite period style is Early Neat.”
“More like Late Monastery.”
Two men in riot gear were moving through the room quickly enough to be blurred in the still shot.
“Hit the space bar,” Spencer said.
She hit the bar, and the next photograph appeared on the screen. They went through the first ten shots in less than a minute. A few provided a clear image of a face or two. But it was difficult to get a sense of what a man looked like when he was wearing a riot helmet with a chin strap.
“Just shuffle through them until we see something new,” he said.
Ellie rapidly, repeatedly tapped the space bar, flipping through the photos, until they came to shot number thirty-one. A new man appeared, and he was not in riot gear.
“Sonofabitch,” Spencer said.
“I think so,” she agreed.
“Let’s see thirty-two.”
She tapped the space bar.
“Well.”
“Yeah.”
“Thirty-three.”
Tap.
“No doubt about it,” she said.
Tap. Thirty-four.
Tap. Thirty-five.
Tap. Thirty-six.
The same man was in shot after shot, moving around the living room of the cabin in Malibu. And he was the last of the five men they had seen getting out of this very helicopter in front of the Hallmark card store a short while ago.
“Weirdest thing of all,” Ellie said, “I’ll bet we’re looking at his picture on
“You’re probably sitting in his seat.”
