couple of old dozers, their shovels heaped with snow. Beyond them was another small building that had served as Trewillen’s isolated home for the half decade he’d held his job at Marble Point. Beyond that building there was only the great sawtoothed jut of the Wilson Piedmont Glacier.
“You ought to hear the noises that glacier makes when it’s calving bergs,” Trewillen said. “It sort of pants and moans. I’m talking loud, deep moooooans.” He shrugged. “Sometimes
Granger smiled, clapped Trewillen on the shoulder. “You’ve been out here alone way too long, man,” he said, and started toward the computer hut.
Granger paused in the entrance to the air-heated Quonset, stamped caked snow off his boots, and unzipped his jacket. Then he sat at the desktop and tapped a key to erase its screen-saver — flamingos on a tropical beach, lush palms and turquoise water in the background.
The beach scene gave way to an e-mail application’s opening window. Granger dragged and clicked to the In-box, and saw Megan Breen’s message at the top of its queue — the single new one. Its title was simply his first name in caps followed by a string of exclamation marks.
Typical Megan, he thought.
The message itself was also characteristically brief and straight to the point:
Russ,
A colleague from San Jose has come down to find our missing people and he needs your assist ASAP. Hopes to borrow you from Mac for a flyby of B. Pass. Let me know when you can make it.
Best/MB
Granger fished a hard pack of Marlboros from his open jacket, put a smoke in his mouth, and fired it up with his disposable lighter. Given the extreme urgency of Megan’s request, he knew that clearing it with his bosses at McMurdo wasn’t anything to worry about.
He frowned, dragging on the cigarette.
No, it definitely wouldn’t be a problem.
The real problem was this “colleague” she’d mentioned, and the complications his arrival could bring about for the people who really padded Granger’s bankroll enough to make living in this stinking, abominable icebox worthwhile… and further down the line, the serious mess it could churn up for Granger himself.
He took another deep hit off the cig and its tip flared. It wouldn’t be much fun springing the bad news on the Consortium, but he’d have to get in touch with them, see how they wanted him to handle the situation.
Yeah, he thought. The thing was to contact Zurich directly, let the kingfish have it in front of him.
ASAP.
Nan Gorrie looked again at her watch and once more at the stove, where a fine piece of mutton sat in a soup of juice and rapidly coagulating fat. Her husband usually rang ahead the few times a year he might be late; he’d been awfully distracted this past week, and she preferred to hope that he had forgotten, rather than worrying something had happened to him. There had been a few occasions as a constable that he’d gotten into scrapes, but none that had risen to the level of what she might call actual danger. As a detective, his days ran at an even pace. His nature helped pour oil on the seas, smoothing the swells; if he felt apprehension, she had rarely known it.
But the way he’d been going lately, rising in the middle of the night, pacing and rocking, rocking and pacing… Frank Gorrie was not a pensive man — not a fool nor shallow by any means, but no brooder. Some men — James Fitz came to mind, the Irishman who lived in the next house but one — spent their time staring into space, contemplating the whys and wherefores of the universe. Frank was more a solid sort — a piece of mutton who knew what he was about, which had been a large part of their attraction.
She suspected the wee child at Eriskay had distracted him. The social worker had called him twice now to report on the infant’s progress.
She too had sympathy for the infant, but the matter went beyond that. They were well past their inability to have a child. She was. It had struck her hard but she had come to accept it, a decree from God. Artificial measures were not so commonplace fifteen years ago, and even now the idea seemed foreign.
The doorbell rang. Nan took a towel in her hands, wiping them though they weren’t wet as she walked through the front room to the door. As her hand reached the doorknob she felt her breathing grow quite sharp.
“Sorry to bother you, mum,” said a thin young man in a blue jumpsuit. He had a small box in his hand, an instrument of some sort. “Report of gas in the neighborhood.”
“Here?” she said, rubbing her hands together as her breathing relaxed.
“Trying to trace it,” he said. “Have you smelled anything?”
“Afraid not.”
“Well that’s a good thing then,” said the man, already heading next door.
The phone rang as she closed the door.
“I hadn’t realized the time, sweets,” said her husband when she picked up.
“Losh, Frank — where are ya now?”
“At the office. I have some calls to make — would you eat without me?”
“Well of course, if I’m hungry.” She glanced back at the stove.
He was quiet for a moment. Nan thought of saying something about the child, but couldn’t find the words.
“I may be here a bit,” Frank told her. “Some calls to make.”
“Well, be here by eight, would you? We have a guest coming round.”
“Not your brother, I hope — he’ll be asking for cigars.”
“Don’t you go encouraging him to smoke now.”
“Who’s the guest?”
“An American teacher. She’s been on holiday and today she came to the school to see our methods. Head- mistress brought her over. Very nice Yank.”
“You should have invited her for dinner.”
“And that would have been sweet, wouldn’t it, with you standing us up.”
Actually, she had, but the American had said she had another engagement. She had seemed charming, however. A little too enthusiastic — but that was a good fault to have when you were young.
“By eight,” she reminded her husband.
“Count on it, Sweets.”
In the red-lit room at UpLink’s satellite recording center in Glasgow, Glyn Lowry banged the space bar on his keyboard in frustration. For the past three nights, an intruder had been attempting to hack his way into one of the UpLink e-mail servers. The attempt seemed to be the work of an amateur, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t do considerable damage. Nor could it be allowed to continue. UpLink’s security programs easily kept the intruder at bay — but for some reason the powerful sniffers that Lowry launched to track him down had failed miserably.
It looked like the same story tonight. The sniffer pretended to allow access to the UpLink system, downloading a large graphic file. As the file loaded on the hacker’s computer, it activated a Trojan horse. That program would then give Lowry a complete rundown of the route back to the hacker. It would also give Lowry access to the hard drives on the hacker’s computer.
But as the seconds ticked away, it became increasingly clear that it had failed again. They were obviously being attacked by someone more sophisticated than the average thirteen-year-old.
Had to be fourteen at least.
His computer appeared to have hung, just as it had last night. Lowry picked up his cola and reached to reboot. Just as his fingers touched the keyboard, the cursor began running across the top of the screen.
ACCESS ACHIEVED. DUMPING DRIVES C:, D:, E:.
“No shit,” said Lowry. He leaned back in his swivel chair and gulped the last bit of the soda. Then he tossed
