time, waiting for their skin to clear up so they can get laid. They don’t want anything, so it’s actually no big deal, although nobody admits it. Sometimes companies even hire a few to test the locks and barriers. But everybody talks about the other ones, who aren’t kids. They’re theoretical, mostly: James Bond villains who want to launch a missile, or crash a plane, or shut down regional power grids and all that. Or robbers who are going to divert billions of dollars from banks. I heard stories, and went hunting. One night after a few months, I trapped Constantine Gochay.”
“What do you mean, ‘trapped’ him?”
“What he was doing was pretty harmless. He was reading bank statements in a big system in New York. The bank was one of our customers, so I was in there snooping, and noticed. I traced him backward and found out where he was. I went to see him.”
Walker frowned. “Why? Why would you do that?”
“Huh?” Her brows knitted.
He tried again. “Why didn’t you just call the authorities and get him arrested?”
She smiled. “Selfishness.”
“I don’t understand,” said Walker. “What did you want?”
“Reverse it,” she said. “What would I get by turning him in? He wasn’t in there stealing money. He was snooping, just as I was. He was probably just three boys from the chess team at Antelope Valley High School. But he was in a place that was very, very difficult to get into. I wanted to know what he knew that I didn’t.”
“You just went to that house and rang the doorbell?”
“Well, no,” she said. “I sent him a snappy message that appeared on his screen to tell him when I was coming. I figured that would make these three boys’ little hearts go pitty-pat. Then I drove up there. We talked.”
“What did he say?”
She looked at the pillow critically. “It was better than I expected. He had discovered a few technical things I didn’t know. Everything comes out fast—programs, chips, hardware. Often even the manufacturer doesn’t know all the capabilities or the vulnerabilities or the implications of something that’s on the market until it’s been used for a couple of years. He had all the technology, and all the techniques. But what he had that was most useful wasn’t machinery.”
“What was it?”
“Sneakiness. A lot of the useful stuff—how money moves through banks and credit companies, reservations for planes and hotels, personal customer profiles, personnel files—is in the big proprietary systems that are operated by giant corporations. They’re heavily protected. You can’t get in by brute force. Code breaking is not easy, and failing is dangerous. So what would Gochay do? He knows that these same giant corporations are heartless about layoffs. When two giant banks merge, and ten thousand people are dumped, how closely is the new management looking at each of them? Gochay would cruise the Internet looking for people posting their resumes. Once in a while he would find somebody fired from a big company who knew something—passwords, systems weaknesses—and had just been convinced for all time that his loyalty to the company was a joke. So he’d pay them.”
“And that’s all?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes they didn’t know much, but just getting something like the name of the systems controller was enough. Gochay had programs for that. They would generate every variant of their names, the birth dates of all members of their families, house numbers, phone numbers, and so on, and try them all as passwords in a millisecond. That kind of thing.”
“Did he hire you—make an arrangement with you—because of the company you left?”
She shook her head indulgently. “No. I knew some things that he didn’t, but the company didn’t know them either. And I wasn’t a disgruntled employee. I was doing fine.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“Why did I start a life of crime? You had to be there. At six one evening, I walked out of this absolutely sterile building filled with people just like the ones in engineering school. An hour and a half later, I was in that weird house, talking to this huge, bizarre man with wild black hair and crazy black eyes. He was doing something exciting and dangerous, and he wasn’t interested in me at all.”
“He wasn’t interested in you?”
“He was interested in money.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Walker. “Are these the reasons why you shouldn’t have done it, or why you did it?”
“I was twenty-two. I’d finally gotten out of school, and was going to have the great American adventure of going off to work, independent and free. After two months at it, I could see the future: all of it, from then until I turned sixty-five. It wasn’t that nothing exciting had happened yet, but that it could never happen.”
“So Gochay was an adventure.”
“Part of what an adventure is, is throwing in your cards for a reshuffle. It wasn’t that I wanted to stay with Gochay forever, but that if I was there, anything could happen. As for him, he had much more work than he could do. He didn’t think he could turn his best customers down. So he offered me a deal. I would pick the jobs I wanted to do. I would get seventy-five percent of the pay. He would get twenty-five to cover all of the overhead and his risk. I thought about it for a week, and then gave two weeks’ notice. I dreamed up the name Serena because it seemed to fit. You weren’t surprised that Constantine Gochay would have a girl around named Serena, were you?”
“No,” he said. “I guess not.” He thought for a moment.
“It was fun. Being in a school and then a job with mostly men was a lot of trouble. When I’d walk into a room, I’d feel stares like laser beams moving across various body parts. I guess in my own small way, I’m kind of an exhibitionist—but I like a limited audience. Working with Constantine, I wasn’t a girl, I was a revenue center. I could be anybody at all, and when I wanted to, I was anybody I felt like being.”
“Why did you terminate your agreement with him?”
She looked down at him, and he could see amusement in her eyes. “You want me to say it’s because I’ve changed my ways, my heart is in your hands, and I would crawl across the continent to nuzzle up to you in a cheap hotel, don’t you?”
Walker knitted his brows and made a thoughtful face, as though he were having trouble deciding. “It’s not so cheap.”
“Admit it.”
“Well, yes. I was hoping it was something like that,” he said. “It would be a sound basis for a relationship, certainly.”
“Did I say I wanted one?”
“Don’t you?”
She said carefully, “I left the company—decided to be a bad girl—because I never got to decide before. It felt good. When I met you that night, I thought, ‘Why not? What’s stopping me?’ and decided that whatever had stopped me before, I shouldn’t let it. That turned out to be a good idea, because it felt even better. Yesterday I left Gochay because what you’re doing seemed to be the most interesting thing that was going on.”
“But what you’re interested in isn’t really me?”
She shrugged. “You’re a man. What you do is look at somebody you find attractive, somebody you don’t know at all, and decide you’d like to have sex with her. You aren’t deciding you’re in love with her. You’re not thinking that far ahead, and you don’t feel guilty about it. You did that when you met me. Why can’t I do that with you?”
He said, “I guess I can’t think of a logical reason.”
“Well, if I had stopped being interested in you, I wouldn’t have come,” she said. “What I know so far, I like. I haven’t thought about more than that. I’m enjoying doing as I please.”
She flopped backward on the bed and lay still, staring at the ceiling. He crawled over and looked down at her, but she shut her eyes.
Walker said, “Well, that’s fun. But let’s get back to this nuzzling business. I liked talking about that.” He lowered himself and began to brush her neck with his lips.
She shivered and pushed him away. “That tickles.”
“I’m not sure, but I think that’s part of the point of it. Not much after your crawl across the continent, but
