such a thing might be worth, to the right customer? The power to drive
your enemies bonkers?'
'Damn,' Jay said.
'Yeah. I think we just might have found ourselves an even uglier can
of worms. As long as it is Morrison, we get him eventually. But what
if he passes it along to somebody else? Somebody we can't get so
easily?'
'That could be a problem.'
-'It already is a problem. Ours. As of now, this is your reason for
living. Hit the net. Get all the help you can get.
Find this guy. Jay. And find him fast.'
'Yeah.'
Michaels looked around.
'You seen Toni? I kind of lost track of her around lunchtime.'
'Uh, no. I haven't, uh, seen her.' He looked back at his computer.
Michaels said, 'I'm hoping to get her to come back to work. I think
she's considering it seriously.'
'Really. That's, uh, good. Boss.' Something on Jay's desk suddenly
seemed fascinating to him. And something in his tone of voice didn't
sound quite right.
'What?' Michaels said.
'What, 'what'?' Jay responded, still not looking up.
Michaels realized he was maybe not the most perceptive man in the world
when it came to reading people, but Jay Gridley wasn't one of the
world's great adepts when it came to hiding his feelings, either.
'You aren't telling me something I need to hear.'
'Boss, I--' 'I have a lot on my mind right now. Jay. How about you
don't add worrying the unknown to it?'
Jay blew out a sigh.
'All right. Last time I was in the feeb mainframe, I left myself a
couple of doors, you know, just in case we had problems like when the
Russian got into the government systems?'
'Skip the rationalizations, you're a hacker to the bone.
It's what we pay you for, remember.'
'Yeah, well, I kind of left myself a door in the director's office
subsystem.'
'And you found something J need to know but that you don't want to tell
me. What--am I going to get fired?'
'No, no, nothing like that. It's just that, well, Toni had a meeting
with the director today. At one.'
Michaels's immediate urge was to cover and say. Oh, sure, I knew about
that. But since he hadn't known, and since there seemed to be more, he
didn't say that. Instead, he said, 'And now you can drop the other
shoe.'
'You really ought to hear it from her. Boss.'
'Maybe so, but I'm going to hear it from you.'
Jay shook his head.
'The director just put in the e-forms for a new staff job in her
office. Special assistant. She was offering the job to Toni.'
Michaels blinked.
