This was getting stranger and stranger. A quick check of the mail queue showed a couple of messages with the right name in the “from” field that hadn’t yet been forwarded when the system went down. He called one of those up and scanned through it. Then he came to the routing.
“What the hell?” he exclaimed.
“What?” demanded Pashley, hurrying over to peer over his shoulder. “What did you find?”
The routing was absurd. It looked as if the message touched every continent, including Antarctica, and was routed through the weirdest collection of sites he had ever seen.
This was completely lost on Pashley, but he did pick up on something else.
“Look at the name,” Pashley said, jabbing his finger at the screen so it blocked most of Ray Whipple’s view. “Thekeep. One of those fantasy names is a sure tipoff that it’s a hacker site. I’ll bet we’ll find this is a major hacker nexus.”
Whipple, who had played D&D until he got into graduate school, kept quiet. He had learned that arguing with Pashley on one of these subjects was useless.
“Whatever it is, someone got into our system,” Whipple said.
“YES!” Pashley shouted in his ear. “I told you we had a hacker on the loose.”
Ray Whipple gritted his teeth. “It looks like you’re right.”
Meanwhile the programmers at thekeep.org pursued their own search for Pashley’s “hacker.” It was slow, tedious work. There were a lot of systems on Wiz’s routing list and not all of them were easy to plant a search demon in. A few were flat impossible so the programmers had to resort to other shifts. Fortunately Wiz was so homesick he e-mailed a message almost every day. Unfortunately it still took inordinate amounts of time and work.
“You know what I really resent?” Danny said one evening as the pair was hard at work. “All that work we put into dragon-slaying spells that we’ll probably never have the chance to use.”
“That is a consequence to be sought rather than mourned,” Bal-Simba rumbled from his extra-large chair where he sat reviewing a scroll with Moira and Arianne.
“Well, yeah,” Danny agreed. Then he added disconsolately, “But I’ve got such a good one.”
“I was even hoping to learn something,” Jerry said. “I have this theory about the black-body temperature of dragons.”
“Most dragons are not black,” Moira told him. “Why you should be interested in just the black ones, I do not know. Much less their temperature.”
“No, you don’t understand. See, a black body temperature is a physical property of all things, even dragons, no matter what their color. And . .
.”
“My Lord, if this is another one of your explanations I am in no mood to hear it.”
“But,” Jerry said plaintively, “it’s such an interesting question.”
“The only question I am interested in regarding dragons is how to get Wiz back,” Moira told him firmly.
Ray Whipple had an easier time of it. Being a legitimate system administrator at a legitimate site, not to mention being actually in this world and being able to invoke the name of the FBI, Whipple had resources Danny and Jerry didn’t. By using them and calling in a few favors, Ray was able to trace Wiz back to the system he had broken into very much faster than the people at the Wizard’s Keep.
In a matter of days he had a result to show the FBI agent.
“Cute,” Ray said as he displayed his find. “It’s a cutout using two mailboxes. Incoming mail goes into one, the script automatically transfers it to the other one and then it gets forwarded out of there. But if you trace it back the trail ends at this mailbox.”
“Cutouts huh? That’s an intelligence trick. And you thought it wasn’t spies.”
“A lot of people know how to do that,” Ray muttered into the screen.
“Now, how do we track him from here?”
“That’s going to take a little more work,” Ray said, ignoring the “we.”
“But what I can do is modify his script so that we can see his traffic.” The keys rattled under his fingers. “There. Now the script makes an extra copy of all messages that go through that mailbox and sends one to you.”