She looked at him, too, and wondered if life would ruin his sweetness as he got older. She felt sure it would, and got up from the bed.
“What you’ve got to do is call the phone company first thing in the morning,” she advised him.
“Tell them you want Caller ID. This little box won’t do you a bit of good until they give you that service, okay?”
He watched her, saying nothing at first. Then it occurred to him, “Is it expensive?”
“You can manage it. Who’s been hitting on you at work?” she wanted to know as she moved closer to the door.
“Axel, a couple women back in composing.” He shrugged.
“I don’t know, don’t notice.” He shrugged again.
“Anybody able to get into your computer basket?” she said as more thunder cracked.
“I don’t see how.”
West looked at his computer.
“I’m going to move that to my apartment. I didn’t have room in my car the other day,” he volunteered.
“Maybe you could write your next story on it,” she said.
Brazil continued to watch her. He lay back on the bed, hands behind his head.
“Wouldn’t do any good,” he said.
“Still has to go into the newspaper computer one way or another.”
“What if you changed your password?” West asked, slipping her hands in her pockets and leaning against the wall.
“We already did.”
Lightning flashed, rain and wind ripping through trees.
“We?” West said.
W Brenda Bond was sitting at her keyboard in her room of mainframes, working on Sunday because what else did she have to do? There was little life held for her. She wore prescription glasses in expensive black Modo frames, because Tommy Axel looked good in his. She imitated him in other ways, as well, since the music critic looked like Matt Dillon, and was clearly cool. System Analyst Bond was going through miles of printouts, and was not pleased by whatever she was finding.
The general architecture of the newspaper’s computerized mail system simply had to be reconfigured. What she wanted was plain and not so much to ask, and she was tired of trying to convince Panesa through presentations that the publisher obviously never even bothered to look at. Bond’s basic argument was this: When a user sent a mail message for the UA to relay to the local MTA, the MTA then routed the message to the next MTA, which then routed it to the next MTA, and the next, until the message reached the final MTA on the destination system. With a Magic Marker, Brenda Bond had vividly depicted this in Figure 5. 1, with colorful dashed lines and arrows showing possible communication paths between MTAs and UAs.
Bond’s ruminations crystallized and she stopped what she was doing.
She was startled and confused as Deputy Chief Virginia West, in uniform, suddenly walked in at quarter past three. West could see that Bond was a cowardly little worm, middle-aged, and exactly fitting the profile of people who set fires, sent bombs by mail, tampered with products like painkillers and eye drops and harassed others with hate notes and anonymous ugly calls over the telephone. West pulled up a chair, and turned it backwards, straddling it, arms resting on the back of it, like a guy.
“You know it’s interesting,” West thoughtfully began.
“Most people assume if they use a cellular phone, the calls can’t be traced. What they don’t realize is calls come back to a tower. These towers cover sectors that are only a mile square.”
Bond was beginning to tremble, the bluff working.
“A certain young male reporter has been getting obscene phone calls,” West went on, ‘and guess what? ” She paused pointedly.
“They come back to the same sector you live in, Ms Bond.”
“I, I, I…” Bond stammered, visions of jail dancing through her head.
“But it’s breaking into his computer basket that bothers me.” West’s voice got harder, police leather creaking as she shifted in the chair.
“Now that’s a crime. Leaking his stories to Channel Three. Imagine! It would be like someone stealing your programs and selling them to the competition.”
“No!” Bond blurted.
“No! I never sold anything!”