The printer was set up to receive jobs via e-mail. Ordinarily, those tasks were stored in an onboard hard drive, which allowedfor a great many options for the printer’s operators. Many jobs could be queued, or they could be retrieved and reprintedif an error occurred. The code on the flash drive told the printer to bypass that system entirely. All incoming e-mails weresent directly to the printer’s buffer where they were held only long enough for the job to be printed, then erased.
He had assumed something like this would be the case when he first cracked the Oracle’s e-mail address. He’d expected a massivestorage system holding terabytes of data—all those e-mails, stored in a huge database. Instead, he’d seen something tiny—wellunder a hundred megabytes. That meant, probably, that the e-mails were being offloaded somewhere else, but the network trailhad stopped dead. So the e-mails were either being deleted, which didn’t make sense, or they were being transitioned to hardcopy . . . they were being printed.
Staffman didn’t know why the Oracle had chosen to set things up this way—he presumed that the Oracle, or his people, had intendedto clear away the printed e-mails on a regular basis, but obviously that plan had faltered in some way.
Not that any of this was useful, nor would it help him locate the Oracle.
He looked up at the Coach, who was giving instructions to her men. The woman paused and looked at Staffman. Her gaze was cold,sharklike. She held Staffman’s eyes for a moment, freezing him down to his spine, then turned back and continued talking toher team.
He knew how the Coach worked. Do what she asked, and you would be rewarded, comfortable for the rest of your days. Fail her,and even if she let you live, she would use her apparently endless levels of influence to ruin your life, so that the nexttime she came calling, you’d be so desperate that you would do whatever she wanted, without question.
Staffman turned his eyes back to his laptop, scanning through the code on the flash drive for anything that could help him—anyclue at all—but there was nothing. It was just two lines of incredibly simple programming.
But . . . no. There was more—a few lines of header text, the sort of thing many programmers inserted into their code as asort of signature, the same way e-mails might have a generic sign-off at the end of the relevant text. Staffman hadn’t evenregistered it at first—it was so common that he skimmed over it without thinking, looking for the meat of the program, thelines that actually did something.
But he looked now, and he saw that the signature consisted of a single phrase. A very particular phrase:
WOMEN, BY THEIR NATURE, ARE NOT EXCEPTIONAL CHESS PLAYERS: THEY ARE NOT GREAT FIGHTERS.
His eyes widened.
He knew that quote—Garry Kasparov had said it. He also remembered the woman who’d placed these words up on a little sign overher desk, from twenty-five years earlier when they’d both been working at PARC. She’d put up the sign, and she always insertedthe phrase into her code, too.
She had apparently thought she was making some kind of point. Well, good fighter or not, she’d just lost.
“Coach,” he said, looking up, relief flooding through him. “I know the woman you want. I can tell you all about her. Eithershe’s the Oracle, or she knows him.”
“Well, good,” the Coach said, smiling, her eyes suddenly warm again. “I’m sure we’ll be able to track her down without anytrouble. Good job, Dr. Staffman.”
She turned back to her men and gave them a significant look.
“Looks like the tech team’s done. Time for the field team.”
Chapter 29
Cathy Jenkins rinsed tiny, chamomile-smelling bubbles of soap off her hands. She shook the excess droplets of water into thesink and turned off the brass faucets.
She looked at her reflection in the mirror and frowned, placing her index finger on her cheek. She pulled down the skin underher eye, smoothing out the wrinkles. Tired. Or maybe just old.
Cathy fussed with her hair, thinking about lunch. Becky was down in the kitchen getting it ready. They would eat on the backdeck while watching the seagulls dive. She smiled at herself in the mirror, looking old but feeling young.
Nothing from her twenty-plus years of contented marriage to Bill Jenkins, nothing from the quarter century before that, hadever shown a glimmer that she’d end up in love with a fiftysomething fellow widow. But then again, she’d never expected tobe in love again at all after Bill died, so all things considered, Mrs. Shubman had turned out to be quite the wonderful littlesurprise.
Cathy opened the bathroom door and stepped into the upstairs hall. She looked critically at the slight patch of wear runningdown the center of the beige carpet as she walked toward the stairs leading down to the living room.
She was starting to think she might redo the rest of the house. Just do the whole damn thing. Why not? She had five millionbucks. She could afford it, thank you, John Bianco. Or Will Dando. Whichever.
She started down the stairs.
“Becky,” she called from halfway down the stairs, “is lunch ready? I’ll set the table out back, if you don’t need any helpin the kitch—”
Cathy stopped with one foot halfway to the next step, hovering in the air. Her hand tightened around the banister.
Six men, all in khaki pants and short-sleeved pastel dress shirts, stood looking up at her, waiting. Four of them carriedlong, black guns—shotguns, she guessed, and the remainder held pistols with elongated cylinders attached to the barrels thatshe recognized from movies as silencers. The shotguns were pointed directly at her, and the eyes of the men holding them werehard.
Turn. Run back upstairs. Lock a door. Find a phone.
Turn. Run back upstairs. Lock a door. Find a phone.
Cathy didn’t move. Slowly, she processed another piece of information that her eyes had been trying to feed her since shegot her first view of her violated living room.
Becky
