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  She shook her head. “This isn’t just any bug. It keeps changing. I’ve been watching it come and go on the net and every time I think I’ve got its signature, it changes the handwriting, and I lose it again.”

  “You mean it changes the filenames it uses?”

  She laughed. “That’s just for starters. It changes where it goes in memory, how it moves over the net, how long it waits, even what it does to the disk.”

  Ray slumped back against the Honda’s headrest. He had to reach back and pull it up to its fullest extension to be comfortable. His eyes closed, but he continued speaking.

  “It must be big then, to do so much.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Brenda. “It’s usually about ten megs on the disk, but bigger in memory.”

  “Usually?”

  “Like I said, it changes everything, even its size.”

  “Bigger in memory... That might mean it uses dynamic memory allocation.”

  “Weird for a virus,” she said.

  Ray shook his head. “I’ve been going over a mental list of my students who might put such a thing together. It keeps getting smaller the more I hear of its sophistication.”

  “You’re right. It sounds to me like this is professional work, perhaps even the product of a team of professionals.”

  “Or the work of one twisted genius. In software, one such mind can outperform an army of competent engineers.”

  “This type of programming is a black art,” she agreed.

  “Exactly,” he said, lifting his head from the headrest and opening his eyes again. “It is that black art element of programming that doesn’t exist in any other science, the ability to fabricate these—these frozen pieces of thought, and actually make them do something. The power of it is intoxicating. You could never create a killer physical robot that would do much damage, people would just blow it up. But software is invisible, uncontrollable. It can instantly make perfect copies of itself. It’s not confined by physical realities. In a way, the entire World Wide Web doesn’t exist. It has almost no physical reality. That makes it easy to change or destroy very quickly.”

  She gave him a sidelong glance. “Hearing you talk like that won’t help your case with the feds, you know, Ray.”

  “Well, I’m trying to get into the mind of the perpetrator. He or she is out there, not too far from here, and I think they know what happened to Justin.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  “What?”

  “That’s why you ran from the feds.”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “Perhaps I’m fooling myself, thinking I can do something about Justin’s disappearance. But I’ve got to try. If I don’t, I’ll always wonder if I could have changed things.”

  She patted his shoulder awkwardly. The Honda dipped and jostled them as it swung into a parking lot. They rattled and lurched over a speed bump then pulled up to a dimly lit ATM. No one was near.

  Ray looked around the car and found a candy wrapper on the floor. He scooped it up. “Got a stick of gum?” he asked.

  She gave him a funny look, but dug one out of her purse. “This doesn’t seem like an appropriate moment to make jokes about my eating habits,” she chuckled, thumping her ample belly.

  Ray snorted and climbed out of the car. The gum snapped in his working jaws. “I’ve got a James Bond plan. Be right back,” he muttered.

  Holding his hand up to his face, he approached the ATM machine. These things always had cameras built into them, so he put his hand on it as soon as he reached the machine and found it. He took the gum out of his mouth, stuck the candy wrapper to it and then slapped the sticky side on the mirrored plastic dome that hid the camera.

  He smiled to himself as he withdrew his limit in cash on all of his credit cards and his bank accounts. He felt lucky that the thing didn’t run out of cash on him. When he was done he had amassed a little over thirteen hundred dollars in twenties.

  As he climbed back into the Honda, she looked at him strangely, “Gum and a candy wrapper? Did you do what I think you did?”

  “Yup. I kind of always wanted to do something like that. It was that or flip them off. Either way, the feds are bound to check this video to see if it was me at some point so I wanted them to feel they got a show out of it.”

  She shook her head. “You always joke around at the oddest times.”

  “It’s an occupational hazard. Programmers all have goofy senses of humor,” he replied. “Besides, it relieves stress.”

  He stuffed the cash into his wallet. It was so fat he could hardly fold it over and shove it into his pocket.

  “Brenda, I need an active account on the net,” he said. “Let me still use some of the dead student accounts. If you see something happening there, just ignore it.”

  “Can do. Where to now?”

  “I need some food, a few necessities and at least a change of underwear. Then I suppose you can drop me at a cheap motel somewhere.”

  “Well, I can do you for the food and stuff, but skivvies are going to be hard to find after 10:00 PM in Davis,” she laughed. She was quiet for a moment. “You know, you’ll need a car if you’re actually going to get something done.”

  “No, Brenda,” he said, “I can’t accept. You’ve done enough already.”

  “You can’t rent one, you would have to use a credit card, then the fed computers would trip on it.”

  “Well yes, I suppose that would be too easy to trace.”

  “And you can’t steal one, because that would kind of complicate the mission of proving your innocence.”

  He sighed. “But Brenda, you said you didn’t want to get any more involved in all this.”

  “Ahem,” she said, taking on the air of one reading a prepared statement. “You came to me and told me you wanted to borrow my car because you heard Justin had been sighted in San Francisco, and your own car had broken down. What could I do? I was overwhelmed by compassion and handed over the keys.”

  He thought about it and realized she was right. He didn’t like getting her involved, but he felt he had to take her offer if it could possibly help Justin. He wondered about her kindness for a moment. They had known each other for two years now, and had the bond that grows between techies who labor together late at night. Did she have a thing for him? He had to suspect it. His female students did often enough. He grimaced. Somehow, that made it all worse. He felt he was taking advantage of her. For Justin’s sake he could do it, but not without regrets. He hoped that after this was all over he could make amends.

  “Okay, you’re right. I need your car. How are we going to do this?”

  . . . 67 Hours and Counting . . .

  The Motel 8 was so close to the highway that it seemed like part of it, like a watchtower overlooking the endless stream of white and red lights. As a hideaway, it was far too obvious for Ray’s comfort. He all but expected the FBI to be doing a room-by-room search of the place in the predawn hours. But with Brenda’s name on the registry and her credit card on the bill, it would serve well enough to conserve his cash and provide him shelter to think and act. The room itself had that cookie-cutter look of all the roadside, fifty-dollar-a-night flophouses that dotted the nation’s highways. Headless, unstealable coathangers hung in the closet. A battered box with curled-up, unreadable directions pasted on top sat bolted to the TV. A TV remote matched the pay-per-view box, bolted firmly onto the nightstand. Brass-plated reading lamps on swinging stalks hovered over each of the incredibly hard-mattressed beds.

  None of these things interested Ray. Finding the room typically devoid of outlets, he had unplugged the TV and the box atop it in order to power his computer. He plugged his notebook into the wall to preserve the batteries. The motel had wireless internet service, but of course it was not free. It came up and asked for a credit card number. Ray didn’t mind paying, but he couldn’t use a credit card that would get him pinpointed on every fed map in the state. So he ran a few programs and hacked his way past the router.

  Sitting in his unde
rwear, he sipped a cup of fake coffee as he pecked at the keys and worked the mouse. He worked at the letter desk, staring intently at the flat screen of his notebook computer. The mouse he had attached to the port in the back. He had never been able to get used to those tiny, infernal touchpads.

  Clicking the mouse again, he noticed it took far longer than it should have to connect to the university servers. The internet had indeed slowed down. Logging in as Rita Hapgood, he slipped into the system unannounced. Rita was someone who had enrolled in one of his classes this semester, but who had never attended. The system had automatically created an account for her which had never been used and would be automatically deleted at the end of the semester.

  The password he would normally have given to Rita the first day of class worked like a charm. He allowed himself a sip of coffee and a grim half-smile. He was in.

  Clicking with the mouse and typing in occasional codes, he quickly gained operator permissions, which allowed him to do things that students normally couldn’t do. One of them included reading other people’s electronic mail. He also was able to identify programs that others had executed recently, and review conversations they had had via the computer system with one another. Most people didn’t realize how public their private matters could be when they used electronic media for communications.

  What he found in the files wasn’t anything incriminating. It was what he didn’t find that was interesting to him. Certain things seemed to be missing, or incomplete. He knew the system well, and knew what it tracked and didn’t track. Some of the tracks weren’t there when they should have been. To him, this was a clear sign of tampering.

  He sat back with this information and cogitated. He tapped his lips with a finger for perhaps a minute. Then he leaned forward again and searched the listing of accounts. Soon enough, he found a group of unfamiliar ones. Super-users that he had never heard of before. Only one was currently logged in, someone who had a login name of: HUNTRESS. He chewed his tongue, fairly certain who that someone was.

  “Very cagey, Agent Vasquez,” he said aloud. “My tax dollars aren’t wasted on you.”

  There she was, he felt sure, not out cruising the streets for him, but rather lying in wait for him where he was most likely to show up. He envisioned a lioness, choosing a shady spot to stakeout the waterhole. He considered initiating a conversation, but held himself back. Just such antics always seemed to get people caught, people who were too impressed with their own cleverness.

  He hoped, in fact, that he hadn’t already been spotted. His tracks were now as indelibly recorded upon the muddy electronic landscape as anyone’s. A few quick checks on Rita Hapgood’s account would instantly look suspicious. The commands he had been initiating simply didn’t belong in the realm of a student account, and certainly not one that had never been used and was supposedly dead anyway.

  For a moment his heart rate shifted up into high gear. Had they detected him already? A droplet of sweat tickled his armpits. Just the fact that the huntress was there, waiting for him, gave him pause. He envisioned her sniffing him out on the net and ordering his IP traced.

  He rubbed his chin. It had become stubbly. How long would he have before they sniffed him out? Difficult to say. He decided to get on with things and disconnect as quickly as possible. Typing fast, he set up a delayed, anonymous e-mail message and addressed it to HUNTRESS. In the message, he related his leads concerning Justin and the virus. Perhaps if he failed, they might be able to do something with his work. Then he logged off.

  He stood there in his underwear, hands on his hips, frowning at his computer. Had they managed to trace him? Were they as on-the-ball as that?

  The idea kept growing on him. He knew computer hardware very well, but it was hard to know what special gizmos the FBI had for such situations. Something that he had never read about in Wired Magazine. He decided he couldn’t take any chances. Moving around the room, he disconnected his equipment, dressed and gathered his few belongings together into the Walmart shopping bag that Brenda had left him with. Flipping off the lights on his way out, he left the room keys on the dresser behind him.

  As he walked across the parking lot, he realized that eventually he would be caught, or Justin would be dead and then nothing mattered anymore. He had to act quickly on whatever leads he had. The time for action was now. Breathing hard, he climbed into the Honda and revved the engine. Within minutes he was back on I-80. He headed west, toward the University part of town.

  . . . 66 Hours and Counting . . .

  “The connection is gone,” Vasquez said with a sigh. “I’m not sure what the IP trace will give us.”

  “What do you think? Was it him, Letti?” asked Johansen.

  A frown flickered across Leticia Vasquez’s attractive face. Johansen was her partner, but she didn’t really approve of his using her first name, much less her nickname. It didn’t seem professional for Bureau agents. Especially since she had noted that he only did it when they were alone.

  “I don’t know,” she responded. She moved the mouse, double-clicked on an icon to initiate a new utility, then typed a query into the system. They had been watching each arrival into the system for an hour, hoping that one of them would be Vance. There had been an annoyingly heavy level of traffic, six hundred and fifty-seven logins since they started, and she had feared that they couldn’t monitor them all. Even though the internet connection was slow, the University community could still connect with the system and interact with each other, and they did so with gusto. When one of the student accounts had jumped up its own access priorities so smoothly and dramatically, she had all but missed it in the hum of activity on the net. Girlfriends chatted with boyfriends, then with other girlfriends, comparing notes. Instructors entered, fired a flurry of e-mails, probably test results and responses to questions, then popped off almost before she could check them out. Initially, she had expected Vance to come in using another instructor’s account, possibly even Brenda Hasting’s account. The student account ruse had thrown her off until it was almost too late.

  Once Vasquez had isolated the rogue student, she had probed the database about her. Rita Hapgood’s address and phone number had flashed up almost instantly, as had the fact that she had dropped out of school entirely in late March. She had never attended the class that entitled her to this account, and, as far as Vasquez could determine, she had never even logged in prior to tonight.

  She had pulled up the IP list to get the right provider. She should have him located in minutes, despite the slow response of the net. She hoped Vance would hang around too long for his own good. Assuming, of course, that it was Vance and not just some midnight hacker using Rita’s account.

  “I bet it was him,” said Johansen over her shoulder. “I really think he’s our man. The stuff we dug up at his house and office looks too real to me.”

  “Too bad he didn’t leave the source code for this frigging virus behind,” she replied, rubbing her eyes briefly. “Is the L.A. team any closer to cracking the binary files that we got?”

  “They know the files are those used to build the virus program, but they haven’t been able to come up with a good defense yet. They say it’s very complex. But, it’s enough for a conviction, if you ask me. And that means our end of things will be wrapped up if we can just collar Vance.”

  “Call in and check out Rita Hapgood’s address,” said Vasquez, her tone making it a suggestion rather than an order. “For all we know, she’s Vance’s side dish.”

  Johansen nodded and pulled out his cell. She glanced at him briefly, then looked away. She did appreciate the way he accepted her leadership and greater experience. She had been worried initially when she had been assigned this hulking Norwegian-blooded young male for a partner that he wouldn’t take to the ideas of a small, bossy Hispanic woman. But, except for his occasional over familiarities, he had comported himself as a professional agent should. He had, in fact, taken on sort of a protective-bulldog attitude around her, which she fou
nd endearing. In fact, when all was said and done, he wasn’t a bad-looking guy. She was in her early thirties now, and his late twenties looked very good indeed. But, she told herself, such a relationship would interfere too much with her work.

  She straightened in her chair and glared back at the glaring screen. She chided herself for allowing her mind to wander while one of the biggest perps on the loose in the nation was even now escaping her grasp.

  Besides, she told herself, he was too tall. Way too tall for her five-foot-one stature. The last thing she needed, even while breaking established Bureau policy concerning such fraternization, would be to appear ridiculous at the same time.

  The trace came back moments later. “Vance is at the Motel-8 on I-80, not even five miles from here.”

  Vasquez smiled grimly. “Let’s go.”

  #

  One of the world-wide-web’s more accomplished spiders, Nog was watching the hunters even as they watched for Vance. A smile, taking the form of an odd, lop-sided leer, flickered across his features. He had gotten hold of a digital image of this Agent Vasquez and her dour partner which some of the local hackers had gotten from one of the university paper stills. They had spread across the school system like wildfire. He had done a bit of cropping and enhancing with La Placian transforms, and ended up with a nice portrait of the FBI’s finest pinned up over his computers with the others. Johansen, of course, had been edited out of his version of the picture. He had also made her image into a “wallpaper” mosaic on the background of two of his computer screens. Vasquez was quite pretty, he thought, in a butch sort of way. She had dark hair and big, almond-shaped brown eyes. The idea that she toted a gun about in her purse aroused him almost as much as her image did.

  The other image that haunted his computer screens, of course, was that of Sarah Vance. He worried at his tongue a bit until it twinged, paused, then continued fraying the tip until the stinging sensation grew too intense and forced him to stop. With a giggle that seemed out of place, he tackled the mouse and created a new mosaic, one which contained both Sarah Vance and Agent Vasquez. When he was done, he sat back and admired his artwork, popping open a green tennis-ball-like tube of sour cream and onion chips. He ate the chips, munching on six at a time.