of the shower—her hair was wet, and she had a towel wrapped around her, covering her from the breasts down.
“Jay.”
“Captain Lewis.”
“Captain Lewis? Oh, come on, Jay, we are way past that!” She laughed and shook her head.
He should have made this call from his office, he suddenly realized. While the phone’s viewscreen wasn’t angled so Saji could see it from where she sat rocking the baby, she wasn’t deaf.
“What’s up?”
“I came across a piece of material, regarding the game. It looks as if somebody posted something on a university board a few years back, using similar tropes.”
“Yeah, I found that, too,” Jay said. “Joint MIT/CIT files, a couple years after I graduated. But it was posted anonymously and when I tried to backwalk it, I hit a dead end.”
“Me, too. But I found a link embedded in the software. Not in the credits, but in a line of code. An old URL. Long gone, but I got a copy of it from Antique Pages—we should check it out. Might mean something.”
“Great work.” Jay felt a sudden stab of . . . something. Irritation? That she had found something he’d missed? Well, he didn’t have time to run down every line of code in an old game, even if it was similar to the bug game. Probably it didn’t mean anything anyhow.
“We should get together and compare notes,” she said. She leaned back in her chair.
The towel wrapped around her chest came undone and all of a sudden Jay found himself looking at Rachel’s bare breasts.
Quite a spectacular view, pebbled and erect nipples and all.
It seemed to take a long time for her to collect the towel and wrap it back into place. “Oops,” she said. “Sorry about that.” She smiled. “Call me later, we’ll set up a meeting to go check out the page.”
After he discommed, Jay had trouble looking over at Saji.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, fine. Here, let me take the boy. I’ve missed him.”
Jay walked over to where Saji sat and lifted his son up to face level. “How’s the world’s best baby doing today?”
His son grinned at him, and chortled.
Jay smiled back. He had a beautiful, brilliant, loving wife and a gorgeous, happy baby. He didn’t need anything else. Certainly not anything that might cause any strain in his family life. No, sir.
But—Lewis was a smart and not-hard-to-look-at woman who obviously didn’t think Jay was all that hideous himself. It was flattering, to have a sharp and good-looking woman flirting with you. As long as you didn’t follow up on that, no harm and no foul, right?
Why, then, was his mouth so dry? Was it because that quick flash of Rachel’s breasts matched exactly the VR view of them he had seen when first they’d met? Right down to the little red mole next to the left nipple?
“Hey, sweet boy,” Jay said, putting his son’s face over his shoulder. “What say Daddy takes you for a little walk, hey?”
Yeah. Out in the nice, cool air, where Jay himself could let some of the heat in his face escape . . .
Lewis smiled as she broke the connection with Gridley. It had taken him long enough to return her call. She’d been sitting around in her apartment for almost two hours in a damp towel, going into the shower every thirty or forty minutes to re-wet her hair, so she’d look as if she had just stepped out to answer the phone. Not the most comfortable way to spend the evening, but effective for what she intended.
The flash of her boobs had been easy enough, the towel was rigged to fall if she inhaled deeply, and the look on Jay’s face as his eyes went wide was priceless. The seduction of Mr. Gridley was coming along nicely. Calling him at home and talking to his wife was part and parcel of it. The little mother and child, stuck at home, waiting for Daddy, bored, maybe, or just a tad jealous of his mobility? If it made Jay’s wife a little frosty toward him? So much the better.
The business with the college game was, she thought, very clever. She had written it, of course, and it was too good not to reuse—it couldn’t be traced to her. But the URL buried in the code? She’d done that last week. She’d expected he would find the old game on his own, and if he hadn’t, she would have pointed it out to him. Posting a revision and ex-post-facto-ing it would have been tricky, save that while she had been at school, she had managed to leave herself a back door in the school’s operating software. And it had been a brilliant piece of work, because she had allowed for updates in the OS and server, and rigged telltales to let her know when such things happened. It wasn’t so much a worm or a virus or even a Trojan horse, but a kind of one-time VR cookie that allowed her to access the upgrades as they came along, keeping her back door current. She would rebuild the cookie each time she updated her password, and was thus able to keep a line into the college’s system. From her hidden server, which nobody would be able to find, even if they thought to look. And anybody looking for problems from a hacker likely wouldn’t spot it, because it didn’t
Her giving it to Jay before he found it would have been a nice touch, but even so, finding a bit in it that he’d supposedly missed was just as good. The date was locked into the system, no way to tell it had been posted years after it was supposed to have been.
She laughed. It was good to be the Queen.
She stood, and went to get dressed. There were other fish to fry. She had to talk to Carruth again, and there was also the matter of the new operative she’d found to verify background information on possible buyers. She needed to test the guy, to make sure he was providing her with legitimate information. She’d give him something to run down that she already knew about, and see how well his answer tallied with hers. If he came up gold, that would be great.
So there had been a couple of setbacks; that was to be expected. By and large, things were going along just fine.
21
“Wow,” Kent said.
“I take that as a compliment,” Jen said.
They were lying side by side in her bed. Almiron, the cat—named, Kent had been told, for a famous woman classical guitarist who had been born in Argentina in 1914—lay sleeping next to his feet.
“Yes, ma’am, please do.”
Jen propped herself up on one elbow and smiled at him. “So, what took you so long to ask me out, Abe? You couldn’t tell that I found you attractive after that first lesson?”
“Well, no. I’m a little slow about such things.”
She laughed. “Better late than never.”
“Yes, ma’am . . .”
It was amazing how relaxed he was with her. Well, okay, at the moment being relaxed might not be so amazing, but . . . overall . . .
“In case you think I do this with all the boys, let me disabuse you of that notion. You’re the first man I’ve invited home for, well, for longer than I care to remember.”
“I’m honored.”
“You should be.”
“Why me?”
