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!”
“So you gave stories to Webb.”
“No!” Bond panicked.
“I never talked to him. I was just helping the police.”
For an instant, West was quiet. She wasn’t expecting this.
“What police?” she asked.
“Deputy Chief Goode told me to.” Bond confessed all, out of fright.
“She said it was part of an undercover departmental operation.”
The chair scraped as West got up. It was when she called Hammer’s home that she
learned the terrible news about Seth and felt sick.
“Oh my God,” West said to Jude, who had answered the phone.
“I had no idea. I don’t want to bother her. Is there anything at all I can do ?”