Anna even made a difference in the kitchen. Not only was it considerably cleaner after she arrived, it seemed brighter as well. Part of that was that the girl spent an afternoon whitewashing the walls-which earned Wiz an earful of Widder Hackett’s complaints about the younger generation and their new-fangled notions-but part of it was simply her personality. New-fangled notions or not, Anna fitted this house far better than Wiz or Malkin did.
Malkin was usually available when Wiz needed her, but the rest of the time she kept to herself. Anna was in awe of the tall thief, but clearly didn’t approve of her. Malkin clearly didn’t feel any kinship for Anna either. In fact both the women seemed to get along better with Wiz than they did with each other.
The one member of the household who really welcomed Anna was Bobo. For some reason the cat developed an instant bond with the girl and spent hours each day around her or sitting in her lap on the infrequent occasions when she sat down to rest. Considering that Anna also did the cooking and spent much of her time in the kitchen, Wiz reflected, that probably wasn’t so odd.
For his part Bobo had made himself at home as only a cat can. Which is to say with total disregard for the rights or feelings of the human inhabitants.
For one thing, Bobo had the typical cat criteria for a place to sleep. To wit, it should be warm, soft and inconvenient. The most inconvenient place of all was Malkin’s pillow because she was allergic to cats. After she threw him out several times, learned to keep her door closed always and to search the room before going to bed, Bobo transferred his attentions to Wiz. Since even in his current emaciated state the cat weighed nearly twenty pounds and since his favorite way of getting into bed was to take a running jump and try to land right in the middle of Wiz’s stomach, this was a less than ideal arrangement from Wiz’s point of view. However it suited Bobo fine and like most cats he had a strong sense of the proper order of the universe.
When Bobo wasn’t happy he complained and he had obviously taken voice lessons from his mistress. When he was happy he purred. Since Bobo’s purring had the volume and timbre of a Mack truck at idle, happy Bobo wasn’t much of an improvement over unhappy Bobo.
For all that, it worked somehow and life settled into a routine.
From the top of the mountain you could see for miles. Myron Pashley couldn’t see any further than his computer screen in front of the window.
Special Agent Myron “Clueless” Pashley, FBI, utterly ignored the vista of pine forests stretching down to the tan desert and the blue and purple mountains on the far horizon. Instead he hunched further forward in his swivel chair and ran his finger down the screen. His lips moved silently as he worked the elementary subtraction until he arrived at the final, fatal, number on the last line.
“Whipple, come take a look at this.”
Ray Whipple, Pashley’s office mate, pulled his head out of the latest copy of Astrofisicka. He made a show of reading the journal in the original Russian because he knew it annoyed Pashley.
“Look here,” Pashley’s finger stabbed down onto the computer screen.
Whipple sighed, put the journal down and looked over Pashley’s shoulder.
“What happened, get lost in the directory tree again?”
“No, I got something. There’s an error in the user accounting.”
“So what?”
“What it means,” Pashley growled, “is that a hacker’s gotten into the system.”
“What it means,” Ray shot back, “is that the accounting program screwed up again and the roundoff errors are accumulating.”
Pashley smiled a superior smile. “Look at the amount of the error. Eighty-seven cents! You read Cuckoo’s Egg didn’t you? You know what that means.”
Whipple, who had not only read the book but had helped the author in a small way during his hunt through the Internet for an international spy, couldn’t get his jaw back up in time to protest.
“We got us a hacker and we’re going to nail him.” With that he bent to the computer with a will, punching keys frantically.