“Then how do we tell Judith about the number?”
“Easy. We call her, preferably at a friend’s house.”
“Is this like the number we gave Major Gilligan when we sent him back to your World?”
“Not exactly. That was an 800 number.” Danny made a face. “Big mistake. I found out the hard way they monitor those real close. They found us and shut us down in just a couple of weeks. According to some of the people I’ve been talking to on the net they’re not as careful about local numbers, especially the ones that don’t show long-distance charges.”
“Meaning you’ve been hanging around with the phone phreakers again,” Jerry said.
“Be glad I was,” Danny shot back. “Otherwise we’d have worse problems.”
Jerry didn’t have a good answer for that one, so he let it slide.
“But can they sever the link?” Moira persisted.
“They may think they have already since they don’t know we’re tapped into her line.”
“Can they cut it entirely?”
“Yeah, by disconnecting the line. But they probably won’t do that. There’s no reason for them to do it.” He sighed. “You know there was a time when government agents were pretty dumb about these things. I understand they’ve gotten smarter.”
“But they still might cut us off from Wiz?”
“Theoretically,” Jerry said. “But don’t worry. It would take an absolute idiot to do something like that.”
It was not a good day for Special Agent Pashley. He had spent the morning interviewing Judith Conally with her lawyer present and he felt he was further behind than ever. After two hours of questioning and several very pointed inquiries by Judith’s lawyer as to the exact charge, he had turned her loose. The results from the examination of Judith’s computer and related material hadn’t helped any.
“Technicalities,” he grumbled into his coffee cup. “Tied in knots by damn technicalities.”
“I told you it was a mailbox,” Ray Whipple told him.
“It’s a top secret government mailbox and these hackers are breaking into it!”
“Look,” Ray said slowly and carefully, as if explaining something to a child. “We only know that some messages from that mailbox passed through her system. The messages we have were addressed to other accounts on that domain, she says she never got any messages from that account, there’s no sign of any such messages on her system and she doesn’t know where to find the people the messages were sent to.”
“Yeah, but someone had to send the message in the first place and that person had to break into the mailbox.”
“But she didn’t send mail to herself,” the astronomer said patiently. “The messages weren’t for her and she didn’t know that address was some sort of government secret. Hell, she claims she didn’t even know those accounts were on her machine. That makes her as much a victim as the government. You can’t arrest her for that. Especially since the thing’s so secret you can’t admit it’s a secret in the first place.”
“Hah!” Pashley said.
Whipple shrugged. “You can’t prove otherwise.”
“Technicalities,” Pashley repeated. “Picky little technicalities. They’re what’s ruining this country.”
“Myron, she’s innocent.”
Pashley snorted. “With a record like hers? She disappears, right out of a locked hospital ward, and no one knows where she’s gone, and she’s innocent?”
“She had a head injury. The hospital screwed up when she came out of the coma, she wandered around for a while before they found her. The hospital admitted they were wrong by settling with her, didn’t they?”
“For all we know she was kidnapped by aliens for experiments or something,” Pashley retorted.
Actually Pashley was closer to the mark than Whipple, although neither of them would have believed the real story. Judith had been taken to Wiz’s World as part of the battle against computer criminal magicians at Caermort. She had been healed there and returned to our world when the situation was stabilized.
Suddenly Pashley brightened. “A brain probe! Maybe she’s jacked into the net directly through her brain. We can find out with an X-ray or MRI or something.” He stood up and strode out into the main office. “Hey John,” he called, “have we got an X-ray machine around here?”