Hal Brognola leaned back in the comfortable leather chair behind the desk in the president's office at Elwood Electronic Industries. He sipped black coffee from a mug and looked across the rim at Lao Ti. She was sitting in a chair in front of the desk, her legs tucked under her. There was a pot of tea on a side table close by and she held a handleless, Japanese teacup.
'What are Gadgets and Pol up to?' he asked.
'They're double checking my security arrangements. I don't think they quite trust me, yet.'
'They never fully trust anyone. It goes with the territory. They even check out each other whenever there's time. That's the way they stay alive.'
Ti nodded. 'Of course.
'It's rare, because the price is high,' Hal reflected. 'You see it only where lives are always on the line. I imagine Miyamoto Musashi understood it very well.'
Ti grinned at Hal's reference to the 'Sword Saint' of Japan.
Brognola took another sip of coffee and then got down to business. 'How ready are we for another terrorist attack?'
'An attack will be difficult for us to handle. We hold 'fire drills' to evacuate people quickly from the building, but I think everyone's figured out that they're attack drills. When someone asks what to do if the terrorists show up, I tell them everything is being taken care of. But truthfully, if we don't have at least a few minutes' warning, we're bound to have casualties. We're gambling with these people's lives.'
'We've substituted Justice Department employees wherever we can,' Brognola said, 'but we've had to hire some outsiders with creative potential to keep this company going. Here at Elwood we have a chance of stopping the terrorists. We have no chance of stopping them if they strike a new target.'
'But... ' Ti began.
She was interrupted by the beeping of a pager that she wore on the belt of her jeans.
'The computer has monitored some activity on the central WAR computer,' she said. 'Shall we check it out now?'
'Might as well.'
When Lao Ti did not have a portable computer, she breadboarded her own. Miscellaneous boards of chips and a riot of wires filled an entire workbench. The only items Brognola recognized were a monitor, a keyboard and a bank of floppy-disk drives.
'Wouldn't this be better pulled together in a cabinet?' he asked.
Ti shook her head. 'Not at the rate I've got the clock set. Too much heat. If I really get going, I turn some fans on the bench to move the air faster.'
She sat down at the keyboard. Her fingers would blur for a few seconds and then pause while the screen filled with a mishmash of symbols. She would take these in at a glance and then her fingers would start their frantic dance once again.
The messages on the screen were as impossible to follow as the arcane symbols that Ti was entering. Often there was nothing but long strips of ones and zeros.
'Do either of you speak English?' Brognola cracked.
Ti finished her high-speed rattling of the keyboard and then turned to Brognola with a smile.
'As a matter of fact, we both do, but not to each other. Machine language is more efficient.'
'I don't recognize any of the standard programming languages on that screen.'
Ti shook her head. 'Not programming language. Too slow. Machine language, the language the computer regulates itself with. Machine language is both stronger and faster.'
'I'll buy that it's faster. What's happening?'
'Just let me finish and the three of us will start speaking English.'
She scanned the screen and her fingers danced again. In another minute she had exchanged two more screens full of information with the computer. She then paused and thought for a moment, before starting back on the keyboard.
'I've separated out the everyday transactions from the ones we're interested in,' she said. 'Can Aaron join us? I think we'll need his help.'
Brognola went to the lab next door. There, Aaron 'The Bear' Kurtzman was at a more conventional computer terminal, directing the daily running of Elwood Electronic Industries. Brognola had insisted that Kurtzman join him in Atlanta. He knew the Bear was going stir-crazy in his new job at Stony Man Farm.
'You know, Hal, running a company can be fun,' the big man said. 'I think I'll take over some company when I retire.'
'That'll take a fair-sized investment.'
Kurtzman looked at Brognola and shook his head.
'Oh, no. I'll just use a computer like this and take over a company. They'll never quite figure out how it all happened.'
'Before you get your hand too deep in the till, Ti says we need your help next door.'
When they returned to Ti's lab, she had a bunch of pseudo words on the screen. She continued to study them while Kurtzman maneuvered his chair to where he could also see the screen.
'You recognize anything?' she asked, without looking up.
'Where'd you get that stuff?' Kurtzman demanded. His usually soft voice was gruff.
'Entry codes used recently by someone on the WAR computer. This computer is monitoring theirs.'
'Those codes reach all sorts of information, both restricted and classified.'
Ti pushed her chair back from the workbench.
'You better take over. I may trip one of the safety devices. We need to go in there and find what WAR got from those computers. Whoever did it was shrewd enough not to store anything. I have a record of the stuff sent, but it would take ages to go through everything in the order they did it.'
Kurtzman's hands moved over the keys. His eyes stayed on the screen. He never looked down to see what his hands were doing.
'Damn,' he spat after minutes of work.
'Damn,' Ti repeated.
They both sat looking glumly at the screen.
'The damn terrorists must have found the government access codes at one of the places they wiped out,' the Bear told Brognola. 'They've dug into the federal computers and gone straight for any grant money awarded that's blanketed by security. They now know where every research establishment that is important to the government is, and what they're working on.'
'Crap,' Brognola fired. 'I want a map with the location of every office and branch that WAR has and all the research that's going on within a thirty-mile radius of each branch.'
'You realize that their offices are near Silicon Valley, Bionic Valley, Route 128 and all the big research centres?' Kurtzman asked. 'You're talking about over half the computer research that's happening in the U.S.'
'If it's that big a job, you'd better get moving,' Brognola growled.
'Aaron,' Ti said, 'if you start pulling out names and addresses on your computer, I'll raid civil defense for computerized city maps. Then you batch your information over here, and I'll have my computer mark the locations on the maps. Give me an importance rating of one to five. We'll assign them colors. When we're through, we can batch the information onto the company computer and have the plotter print it six-color on eleven-by-seventeen paper.'
'You got it,' the Bear told her.
'Where are Louis, Rodrigos and Lobo?' Jishin demanded.
