Spyware

At this point Johansen quietly returned and sat back down on the couch. The two agents blinked their eyes and squirmed a bit.

“The truth is, Mrs. Vance, the FBI won’t get involved in the disappearance of your son until the local Sheriff’s office declares the case to be a kidnapping. Right now, it’s still being investigated as a possible run-away.”

Sarah stared at them in disbelief. “He’s only six years old.”

“Yes, well, this is an unusual case. There’s been no ransom note, no witnesses, no contact of any kind other than the 9-1-1 call. However, I believe the FBI will be called in today. I think the local authorities have been overwhelmed by the virus and all the publicity about it.”

“So you’re telling me that they have simply forgotten about my son? Is that why that detective hasn’t been back to see me?”

Vasquez looked down, embarrassed. “The good news is that we have a new suspect in the virus case.”

“Who?”

“A Mr. John Nogatakei.”

“Nog? Why that fat bastard,” Sarah breathed. “Yes, yes, he might do something like this. I’m surprised I didn’t think of it myself.”

“So you see, Mrs. Vance, your husband’s flight may be totally unnecessary.”

“I’m still not going to turn him in,” she snapped back. “Does Nog have anything to do with my son?”

Vasquez thought of Nog’s apartment. To her, it appeared that Nog could easily be unbalanced. His background didn’t help him, either: An anti-social loner who associated with hookers and had a lot of money and time on his hands. Perhaps he really had taken the kid.

“What would get you to contact your husband?” she asked. She said it easily, hoping Sarah wouldn’t think about the implications of her answer.

“I’ll tell you what would do it,” said Sarah, grabbing up her photo of Justin. “Bring my son back to me. Help me get him back instead of hassling me.”

Vasquez sucked in her lips. It had partially worked, Sarah hadn’t said that she couldn’t contact Vance. But her answer left things unclear.

“What if we offered to take on Justin’s case,” asked Vasquez. She could feel Johansen’s surprise even as she said it. “I mean us, personally.”

Sarah opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked out the window at the unkempt lawn. “My son or my husband, eh?” she muttered. “Bitch.”

“That’s not it at all, Mrs. Vance.”

“Yes it is,” said Sarah with tears welling up in her eyes. “Yes it is, you want information or you won’t do your jobs properly. Well, you can just get the fuck out of here.”

Awkwardly, they stood up and left. At the door, Vasquez turned back. “I’m going to see if we can take the case on for you anyway. If we can get our people back at the San Francisco office to see it all as one case, there should be no problem.”

“Great!” Sarah said. She slammed the door behind them.

The two of them drove the car around the block, then rolled it quietly back up to the corner where a well-placed hedge provided cover. With binoculars to his eyes, Johansen watched the front door of the house. Vasquez fiddled with the wiretap equipment, trying to eliminate the background squelch.

“Are you sure you planted the thing right?” asked Vasquez, looking annoyed. The sun was hot and the headphones weren’t helping.

“That phone she has a death grip on is bugged, I guarantee it,” he said. He glanced away from his binoculars and gave her a look. She knew that he had detected her mood, and understood it.

“You stretched things a bit back there,” he said.

“Yes, I know. Have you seen anything?”

He turned back to watching the front door. “If she’s contacting Vance, I’ll be damned if I know how. Maybe she has a CB radio in there.”

She made an exasperated sound as she fiddled with the signal. The NSEC had power, you had to give them that. The moment they contacted them, the federal wiretap warrant was burning in their hands. This case was bigger than anything she had ever handled before, and she felt certain that her progress was being closely monitored. Other teams were now involved and the higher-ups were riding everyone hard.

“Did you mean what you told her?” asked Johansen, keeping his eyes to his lenses this time. She glanced at his broad back. There had to be three square yards of white fabric in the man’s shirt.

“Yeah, I guess I did.”

“You might have told me first.”

“You’re right. But I didn’t know it first.”

“Sounds like she got to you as much as you got to her.”

“Sometimes it’s like that. Part of the job.”

“May I point out that we aren’t a kidnapping detail? That we’re strictly a high-tech unit?”

“Well, there’s nothing low-tech about this case.”

“So you want to do it, if we can get the assignment?”

“Yes. Are you in?”

“We’re partners, aren’t we?”

“Yeah.”

They fell silent for a time. The front door didn’t open. The phone didn’t ring, nor was an out-going call made.

“I expected her to go for it right away,” she said.

“Maybe Vance was smart and didn’t even give her a way to contact him,” Johansen commented. “He had to have left in a big hurry, after all. You know-Whoa, hold on a sec.”

She leaned up and craned her neck. She touched his shoulder, and cursed herself for feeling a tingle in her fingers. “What is it?”

“She’s coming out. She’s out. She’s walking toward us?”

“Damn! Does she see us?”

Johansen was silent for several seconds. She cursed his back and smelled the slight taint of sweat that an entire stick of deodorant couldn’t completely erase.

“It’s the Trumble’s,” he said at last. “She looked both ways, walked quickly and snuck next door to knock on their door. She looks like as guilty as a junior high shop-lifter.”

She laid her head back against the headrest. She couldn’t stop smelling him for some reason. She rolled her eyes at herself. She was the guilty junior-high kid here.

“We’ll have to bug the Trumble’s.”

“That means another warrant.”

“Let’s get to work.”

Without another word, they shut down the surveillance and started up the car. She blessed the air conditioner when it came on. It pushed back the California afternoon heat. It also killed Johansen’s hot smell.

… 53 Hours and Counting…

Ray had a problem. He needed electrical power and anonymity. He couldn’t go to the college or a friend’s house. And motel rooms seemed too obvious, he didn’t want to be where anyone would expect to see him. He finally decided that the public library would have to do. The odds weren’t too high that he would meet a student or a colleague there, he reasoned, as they would normally use the campus library. Just in case, he bought a baseball cap and a pair of gasoline-colored glasses that were advertised as ‘driving shades’. He had once read somewhere that the best disguises were simple ones that made a person look as if they came from a different walk of society. With this in mind, he had bought a plaid shirt, worn levis and a pair of old work boots at the thrift shop downtown.

Feeling a bit silly, he approached the glass doors of the ski-chalet style building. It had been built in the seventies, when bonds for library construction had been easy to come by. Now, with cut-back hours and a mostly volunteer staff, it had turned into a hangout for elderly people and the homeless.

He walked past a row of unwashed, sleeping men in the carrels. Most slept with their heads cradled on their folded arms. Ray felt sorry for them. He supposed it was better than sleeping out on the grass. Here it was quiet and air-conditioned. Perhaps they spent the nights wandering the streets. The elderly patrons were mostly clustered around the newspaper and magazine racks. There, they quietly ran out their lives. Occasionally they flipped a page or cleared a throat. For them, he supposed, it was better than sitting home alone watching TV. One thing was clear: few of the patrons studied here anymore.

He headed to the back of the library and sat in one of the reserved rooms that was unlocked. Flipping on the light as if he owned the place, he quietly plugged in his computer and set up the cell phone modem. He wondered how long it would be before his pursuers would find out about that purchase.

In no time he dialed No Carrier. There followed a few tense minutes as he had trouble getting access. At first, all he could get was a busy signal. But he kept trying and finally got in. Logging onto the system, he typed in: foghorn‹enter› leghorn‹enter›.

The system came back with a cryptic message, then a question. Ray was immediately on guard; Jake had said nothing about additional security.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? the system asked him.

He was at a loss for what to do. His hacker days were long ago and far away. He simply hit the enter key and hoped for the best.

Actually, it was the rooster! printed on his screen. He groaned quietly. It was a joke. Jake must have set up this account to automatically fire a bad joke at you when you logged on, like a dirty fortune cookie.

Next, he ran his eavesdropping software. The program watch the connections and listed three private conversations that were currently in progress. Ray clicked on one of them, just to see if it worked.

Zelda: can’t tell you that. it would ruin everything!

WhiskeyDick: give me a break, sylvia.

Zelda: YOU give ME a break.

WhiskeyDick: i don’t care what you else you did with him, I just want to know about what happened in the car.

Zelda: ‘-)*wink**wink*

WhiskeyDick: I’m getting really tired of your shit.

Zelda: OH COME ON!

There was a lot more like this, but he quickly lost interest and broke the connection. The two chatters continued typing to one another without a clue that he had listened in. The software worked. He made a mental note to give Jake an A for the semester-even if he had to fill out the grade sheet from behind bars.

It was time to set his plan in motion. He typed in a private message and addressed it to Santa. When he was done, he sat back and rubbed his eyes. He sighed and settled into his chair. He had no idea how long this stake out might last.

… 52 Hours and Counting…

The van broke down just outside of Davis. At first, Spurlock had planned not to drive through Davis at all, it made him nervous to return to the scene of the crime, that wasn’t his style at all. He was a highway-flier, a man who hit a place, did his deed, whatever it was, then was back on the freeway and cruising before the local cops had even been alerted. He stayed small-time and he stayed close to the highways. It had worked like a charm and kept him out prison with only two six-month exceptions. Up until now, that was.

But in order to cross the Sacramento Delta, one almost had to use the I-80 causeway. He could have detoured up through the side streets for miles in either direction hunting for another bridge, but that would have eaten up time, gas and increased the risk of something going wrong. All he wanted to do right now was blow right through Davis and make it to the other side.

He had reached the mid-point in the long, low causeway when white smoke suddenly exploded from the rear of the van in a great, looming cloud. Spurlock’s first thought wasn’t of his engine. What worried him was the smoke. All he needed now was another over-zealous cop out to clean up the environment by giving him a fix-it ticket. That would mean checking his plates, which would bring up his record, then this morning’s incident would be played out all over again.

“You bitch!” he yelled, beating the steering wheel. “You whore!”

It was right then that the headache struck him. An ice-pick drove itself into his skull directly behind his right eye. He screwed it shut and drove with his left for the time being. He had gone too long without a fix, and his body was close to a revolt. It couldn’t take on a new source of stress, a new frustration. It was rebelling like a lathered horse. He knew the headaches would get worse later, far worse. By tomorrow they would be like a pounding herd of horses, galloping through his head, throwing up soft pink clumps of tissue and leaving crescents of pooling blood behind them.

Signaling to switch from the center lane to the right lane, he watched the signs for the next exit. The first exit after the causeway was Milton. It would have to do. A young couple in an Audi pulled up to look at him and his explosive van curiously. Spurlock flipped them off.

He felt his skin crawl with the scrutiny of every driver on the narrow two-lane causeway. In his mirrors, every car looked like a black-and-white. It was harder to tell these days, the cops were buying all makes and models it seemed. He’d even seen a Camaro cop car once, down in Modesto. What bastards they were. Who would ever think to slow down because there was a Camaro in your mirror?

He made it to the Milton exit and rolled into a Chevron station. The engine still ran, but it chugged out smoke like a mother. He switched off the ignition.

“You whore,” Spurlock muttered again as he slammed down the stubby, weird-looking hood that vans always had. A blown head gasket, he figured, or a cracked block. Either way, he was through with this thing. Even if he had the money, fixing it would be a real pain. He didn’t have the tools to do it himself and mechanics just might become curious about the kid in the cage.

He thought about hoofing it, right then and there. Sure, after a half-hour or so the kid would get up the balls to beat on the wall of the van. Then, maybe tonight before quitting time, somebody would check it out. By that time he could be over to the bus station and out of this shit-eating burg. Sure, the kid could ID him, but he looked like a thousand other losers in this state, and he knew it.

Although it was no more than eighty degrees, he mopped sweat from his brow. His hand shook while he did it. The flaw with this plan, of course, was that it didn’t get him his money. He hated leaving money behind, especially when he needed it so badly.

He eyed the phone booth at the edge of the gas station’s blacktop. Growling to himself, he walked over to it and dropped a quarter.

This time, the phone picked up right away.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Santa,” he said, “I’m back in town and I’ve got a problem.”

“Did you lose the package yet?”

“Nope, but I’m about to, and I’m about to spill the beans all over the evening news.”

“What are you talking about, are you crazy?”

“No shit. I’m a fucking one-hundred-percent loon, bud,” he said, his voice rising. Santa sounded scared, and that gave Spurlock the first happy feeling in his gut he’d had all day.

“What’s going on?”

“What’s going on, Mr. Cringle sir, is a powerful plowing of your back-forty,” said Spurlock. He began toenjoy himself a bit. “Here’s how it is: I’m fucked, and I’m not going down alone. This thing has gotten too frigging big. I’ve made CNN-FUCKING CNN, MAN-and I never even make the local news. I make it my trademark not to have a trademark, and here you’ve gotten me into something that is completely insane.”

“You won’t give yourself up just to screw me. You don’t even know who I am.”

“Ah, but I’ve got your number, don’t I? And your operating handle.”

Santa chuckled. Spurlock thought that the fucker actually did sound a bit like Santa. “The number is useless. It’s quite untraceable.”

“Bullshit.”

“My technical people are the best,” Santa assured him.

“Are you sure about that? Are you sure that when the crap hits the blades, you won’t be the one chopped into a fine brown spray, my friend? Because, let me tell you, money and fear speak hard words. This case is big, and on TV, and that means the cops will actually give a shit. They’ll be all over you with gangs of feds you’ve never even heard of before.”

“Look, you can have your money, if that’s what this is all about.”

Spurlock smiled, he had him on the run now. It was time to push harder. “I NEED MORE THAN THAT NOW!” he screamed into the receiver, not finding it difficult to flash into a rage. What was difficult at this point was controlling himself at all.

“What do you need?” asked Santa cautiously.

Spurlock smiled more broadly, and his headache eased a bit. He was able to open his right eye now. Not all the way, but it was a start.

He told Santa what he wanted for Christmas.

… 48 Hours and Counting…

Like so many before him on stake-out duty, Ray found himself nodding off when the moment finally came. He had had little sleep for the last three days, and it was catching up with him. His eyes closed, then opened, blinking, then closed again. Half-aware, he watched as another user logged on, Turtledove, this time. Then another, Vader was the handle. Vader logged off and Turtledove struck up a conversation with Whiskeydick, who seemed to have no life other than to chat-up anyone on this popular board.

After Whiskeydick and Turtledove got into an argument and broke it off when someone called Snowflake came onto the scene. It was a new user: ‘noob’ said the status line, rudely. Ray looked at the screen with one, half-open eye. His arms were crossed over his chest and he had sagged down into his chair. He wondered vaguely as he dozed if he was indistinguishable from the homeless crowd in the carrels.

Earlier a librarian volunteer had come around and asked if she could help him. That meant, he knew, she didn’t really want him back here in the side rooms, which were reversible, but normally kept locked. Leaning forward to hide his notebook computer, he had leered at her and told her he was doing just fine. Fortunately, she was the timid type. She had nodded, blinking rapidly, and hurried away. He had not been disturbed again, but he felt sure that he was under casual scrutiny now and then. Falling asleep on the job put him in the exactly the category he wanted to be in.

But it wasn’t finding Justin any faster. Using that thought and a deep breath to wake himself up, he touched the mouse. He clicked on Snowflake and brought up a window of more detailed information on the user. He watched as Snowflake performed several scanning commands of his or her own. Snowflake was reading mail, and since this was a new user, that meant Snowflake was reading the mail of others. Ray sat up, fiddled with the mouse further. The mail messages flashed up. Snowflake skipped directly to Santa’s mail and read it.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” muttered Ray, sitting up. Could this be the one?

Snowflake read the message Ray had sent hours ago to Santa. Two other patrons logged on, Foobar and Budha. Ray ignored them, watching Snowflake intently. All thought of sleep was gone now. His heart pounded as he watched the screen.

Budha moved to open a back-channel with Snowflake. Ray sucked in his breath. He glided the mouse up to the SNOOP button and he clicked on it.

Budha: I’m here.

Snowflake: Someone else is, too.

Budha was silent for perhaps ten seconds.

Snowflake: You still there?

Budha: How do you know?

Snowflake: I know. Someone’s made me on this system.

Budha: What’s the deal with the kid?

Snowflake fell silent.

Budha: hello?

Snowflake: fat fucking idiot

Budha: screw you too, man

Snowflake: Keep your typing neutral

Budha: You’re getting paranoid. I don’t think anyone is listening.

Snowflake: All right. We have to talk.

Budha: We ARE talking, man.

Snowflake: About your little software surprise.

Budha: Oh, that. I don’t think they’ve figured out about the eggs it’s been laying yet.

Snowflake: At least not publicly.

Budha: When do WE go public and save the net?

Snowflake: Maybe never. Things have gotten too hot.

Budha: Never? But the countdown is half-gone.

Snowflake: Don’t you think I know that?

Budha: It’s changing so much. The progression out on the open net… it isn’t the way I thought it would be.

Snowflake: Are you saying that you can’t stop it?

Budha: Maybe yes, maybe no. Depends on how far it’s mutated. The longer we go the worse it is.

Snowflake: All right then, put it out on the net here and there, anonymously if you want.

Budha: With no profit, then? Mission aborted, huh?

Snowflake: Right. Mission Aborted.

Budha: But if it’s too hot, I don’t want them somehow tracing me back.

Snowflake: Then do nothing, it’s the safest course for both of us.

Budha: But what about the net?

Snowflake: Let the whole thing burn. Nobody will trace anything after that.

The two of them broke the channel after that. Ray hurried to sat the log file of their conversation on his disk. Then he sat back in shock, rubbing his chin. There were so many unanswered questions. Budha logged off. Ray realized he was about to lose them both, not knowing what else to do, he jumped forward in his chair and clicked on Snowflake. He requested a private connection. He did it with his heart in his mouth, knowing that he had just revealed himself and his Foghorn handle.

Perhaps two minutes passed. Ray’s heart pounded. He watched Snowflake carefully, but the other didn’t log off. He knew that at some other computer somewhere, a blinking request was on the screen, like a phone that just kept on ringing and ringing. Finally, the request was accepted.

Snowflake: Who’s there?

Foghorn: Another user who’s too hooked on chatting to stop just ‘cause the big net is down.

Snowflake: Bullshit. Who’s there?

Ray paused, unsure how to proceed. At first, he thought he should pose as a student and try to chat-up Snowflake. Maybe he could garner a hint as to the other’s true identity. But now, he didn’t think that would work, Snowflake was too wary.

Snowflake: Scared, Vance?

Ray compressed his lips. This was challenge now, and he knew it. Snowflake felt invunerable, and was showing off. That was a clue in itself. He decided to take on a more aggressive stance. He would take on the personna of a hacker, a snoop to be sure, but not Dr. Ray Vance. The net was like a masquerade party where everyone’s costume was as perfect. The only thing that could give away a person’s true identity was in what was said.

Foghorn: I’ve been watching you for awhile, fellow hacker. Snowflake/Santa/elf-boy, whatever your handle of the day is, I like your predatory style.

Again, Snowflake fell silent. Ray would have crossed his fingers, but he dared not take them from the keyboard. He decided to prod further. Ray tried to think like Jake, to sound like him. It had only been ten years ago, and he had been Jake. Funny, how quickly time changed someone. He went on the attack.

Foghorn: Come on, Snowman! Are you scared? Do you think you’re the only one who ever talked big on the net? I know all about you already.

Snowflake: What do you think you know?

Foghorn: You’re male, for one thing. Too willing for a confrontation. Not playful enough for a female.

Snowflake: Your attempts have been commendable, but think I must go now.

Foghorn: Scared, Santa?

There was another pause.

Snowflake: Yes. And you should be too, Vance. Remember that ugliness, like beauty, is also in the eyes of the beholder.

The connection was broken. Snowflake had logged off. Ray sat back in deep thought. Now that he had played out his only firm lead, he felt near despair. Surely, Santa would never log onto this bulletin board again.

He didn’t even notice when the lights were flicked off and on again, signaling to all the patrons that the library was closing. It wasn’t until a single, light finger tapped his shoulder that he noticed the timid librarian. She snatched back her finger and furrowed her brow. She looked at him with the eyes of a postman who has found a big dog on the wrong side of its master’s fence.

“You’ll have to leave now, sir,” she said.

Ray nodded, gathered up his equipment, and walked out into the fading light of day with a stream of sleepy, homeless men.

… 45 Hours and Counting…

There were more National Security staffers hanging around now at the operation’s makeshift headquarters. They had taken up temporary residence in the Yolo county meeting hall. There wasn’t even a school district board meeting until next week, so the space was available. Phones, desks and grim-faced suits had sprouted seemingly from the very walls themselves. There were even some people around from the California State Emergency office in Sacramento. That made her smile, this was no earthquake or flood, but the feeling in the air was similar.

“You know what gets me?” asked Johansen, moving up behind her. He was always at her side, like a big, protective shadow.

“How quickly we’ve lost control of this investigation?”

“No, that’s not surprising, really. What gets me is how quickly the net has become indispensable to this world of ours. It’s part of the infrastructure of our nation now, like the highways or the phone system.”

She nodded slowly. “It’s like some giant has come along and kicked over an anthill.”

Then some of the higher-ups in the more expensive suits noticed them. Italian shoes clacked on the tile as they approached. Introductions were made and a quick briefing was asked for, which she delivered. Gray heads nodded in approval of her play with Sarah Vance. Vasquez could tell that they were being given free rein for now, but if things didn’t move quickly enough, they would be tossed aside in an instant.

Less than a hour later they were walking out into the fresh spring evening. Everything was hot and still. The Delta breezes that normally cooled the region at night were peculiarly absent. The trees stood motionless. Only the chirruping insects seemed happy and full of life.

She looked down at the writ in her hands. She hefted it, then put it into her purse. Beside it was a letter, giving her written permission to investigate the disappearance of Vance, Justin, minor age 6.

“That was really something, wasn’t it?” she asked Johansen.

“The powers that be have taken notice of us lowly mortals,” he replied.

“Wiretap warrants are supposed to be hard to get. And they didn’t even balk at giving us the missing persons case.”

“Not today. There’s a blue-light special in aisle five.”

“You know, I think that if we had gone in there with a request to tap the whole block, we would have gotten it without even a raised eyebrow.”

Johansen nodded as they reached the car. “Some of those guys have a judge in each pocket.”

She looked at him sharply, not liking that kind of talk. “Let’s hope that you’re wrong about that.”

He shrugged and they climbed into the car.

… 44 Hours and Counting…

“Just burying the kid’s body would’ve been a lot easier,” muttered Spurlock to himself. He hadn’t worked so hard since the joint. Come to think of it, the joint had been less work than this.

Santa had left the backhoe right where he said it would be. The keys were in it, and there were almond trees everywhere, providing cover. Spurlock had learned to operate these things almost ten years ago when he had tried a rare spurt of honest work. The trend hadn’t lasted, but the skill was still there. It took him only a minute or two to prime the old engine and fire it up. Working the levers carefully, he began to dig. With less than another hour’s work, he would have a hole big enough to bury the van.

The big diesel grunted and strained, farting so much blue smoke that the cloud reached forward into the bright cones lit up by the headlights. Black-trunked almond trees stood in guardian rows, and somehow they made Spurlock feel more at ease, more hidden. Overhead, a green canopy covered his deeds from the prying eyes of the stars.

It was a warm spring night that hinted of the blazing Central Valley summer that was to come. The air was absolutely still. He sweated over the controls, wiping his forehead often with a filthy red bandana he’d found tied to the steering wheel. He’d learned all too well why the bandana was there. Each time he wiped he also drank a shot from his squirt-bottle of water. The van was parked on the side of the road, about a hundred yards behind him. Laying beside the growing wound in the earth were two eight-foot lengths of white PVC pipe and a giant roll of duct tape. All he had to do was drive the van into the hole, put the PVC pipe through the little pop-up dome on the top of the van, then bury the whole fucker. The pipe would provide fresh air and allow him to drop food into the van. The duct tape was to seal the pipe so dirt wouldn’t fill the van’s interior.

Spurlock had gotten this idea from an old crime he had read about back in the early eighties. Down in the southern half of the Valley, in a town called Chowchilla, some players had hi-jacked an entire school bus loaded with kids and buried the lot of them in a hole for safe-keeping. They had demanded a ransom, but had eventually blown it and gotten caught. The crime had always impressed him with its simplicity and sheer balls. Spurlock, of course, had no intentions of demanding a ransom. All he wanted was to get the kid out of his hair for awhile so he could move without being hampered.

Running the big scoop up the side of the hole to widen it, he heard the engine strain and rev-up as something resisted the blade. Another big root, he figured. The root snapped and the whole rig rocked a bit. A shower of almonds and twigs fell from the disturbed tree, pelting the cab and Spurlock in discriminately.

“The crazy shit I go through to avoid Murder One,” complained Spurlock, scowling back toward the van. He dragged the filthy bandana across his forehead again and lowered the scoop for another bite of earth.

… 43 Hours and Counting…

Brenda sucked in her breath suddenly and gave little yelp of surprise and fear.

“It’s okay, Brenda,” Ray whispered into her ear. “It’s just me.”

He felt her relax, but only slightly. He had grabbed her from behind in the dimly lit hallway just outside of the women’s restroom. He felt bad about the tactics, but he couldn’t chance running into anyone else.

“I need your help again, Brenda.”

He felt her relax further as the shock subsided. Then she turned on him. “If you ever try that James Bond shit on me again, you asshole, I’ll ram my knee so far up your crouch you’ll need a kidney transplant!” she hissed at him.

Ray chuckled and look sheepish. “Sorry to scare you, Brenda,” he said. Despite himself, he smiled. It was good to see a familiar face again. Brenda, having a flash of anger, was a very familiar sight. Somehow, it made things feel almost normal again.

“Asshole,” she muttered, “you shouldn’t have come, Ray.”

“Why not?”

She tilted her head toward the glass doors at the end of the hall, indicating the parking lot beyond. “They still come by here every few hours, checking for you.”

“Look, Brenda,” he began, “I haven’t got time to explain it all, but need your help one more time.”

She frowned and turned away from him. She headed toward the lab. Her keys jangled in her hand. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to work in the lab.”

“Yeah.”

She stopped and looked back at him, eyebrows raised. “So that’s it, eh? Just shut old Brenda out? What insanity are you up to now?”

“I’m looking for a reference. I’ve got the handle of the person who I believe has Justin.”

Brenda looked down again, apparently studying her keys. He frowned, knowing that she could have found the right key in a second in a snowstorm. She was stalling. He felt a moment of unease, then it passed as he chided himself for not trusting Brenda. She was just being cautious, that’s all. He was just getting paranoid from being on the run. How odd it all was, he reflected for a disembodied moment. How odd it was to be a fugitive, on the run from the law and looking for other criminals. His quiet, absolutely stable life had turned into a rollercoaster in such a short time.

While his brain wandered, Brenda finally saw fit to locate her key. She stuck it in the lock and twisted. She snapped on the lights and they went to the back where her office and the operators’ stations were.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

“Any reference to the name Santa, or Snow,” he said. “I want to see if anyone at this campus uses that type of handle.”

She stared at him for a second, then pursed her lips and nodded. He flicked on the monitors and they slowly came to life. The computers were already on, of course. They were never turned off unless there was a hardware failure or a scheduled maintenance shutdown.

He went right to work, first running a series of utilities to search the users for signs of the Huntress, or some other unusual super-user. He saw nothing that indicated that Agent Vasquez was laying in wait for him. She probably figured he was too smart to come back to the college. The thought made him smile. Maybe he was dumber than they thought.

Brenda watched him for a while without helping. She had her hands on her hips.

“What is it, Brenda?” he said without looking up.

“Ray, have you considered giving yourself up?” she asked quietly.

He looked at her. “I’ve got to find my son, Brenda.”

“But the authorities are looking for him. One man running around on the streets of Davis has got to be just distracting the police, rather than helping them. Maybe…” she trailed off.

As satisfied as he could be that no one was watching for him, Ray worked with a utility program to search each of the server hard drives for suspicious handles. Snower, Saint, Snelling and Snowman came up. He clicked on each handle in turn, reading the bio on the person that used the handle. They all turned out to be students, all of them female except for Snowman, who had dropped out of school as a psych major two semesters earlier. Ray had never met any of them to his knowledge. He sighed. What if Santa had nothing to do with the campus? It stood to reason that he was local, otherwise he would probably use a different bulletin board, and wouldn’t have met up with Nog. But what if he was just part of the community, or someone from the coast who Nog had met while making his millions in the gaming industry? A feeling of hopelessness swept over him, but quickly receded as he fought it back. He had to try anything and everything.

Finally, he noticed that Brenda was talking to him again. “They could really use your help Ray, with the virus,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Are you listening?”

“Ah, no. I was just thinking that it’s too bad that the search engines have broken down. I could really use the wider search utilities.”

“Everything is pretty much up again.”

“What? It is?” he asked.

“You’re out of touch. The NSA gave the all-clear two hours ago. That’s why I’m here in the middle of the night on a Friday. Even I have some life, you know.”

Two hours ago. “Then I’ve been wasting time,” he said. He immediately fired up a web-browser and the University homepage snapped into view. The University system was directly hooked to the net with an optical-fiber T-3 connection. With only a handful of users late Friday night and working on an operator’s station, the net was lightning fast even with all the virus problems.

Ray clicked into Gigablast, one of the less popular internet search engines. He quickly formed up a query and let it rip. It pulled up no less than sixty-two million possible web-pages to investigate. It listed the first twenty for him. Would he like to see the next twenty? At least it asked politely.

Ray sighed. He had to narrow the search. References to Santa were everywhere on the net.

Brenda grabbed his shoulder. He looked up.

“Aren’t you listening to me at all, Ray?” she demanded. Suddenly, he realized that she had been talking for some time.

“I’m sorry, but I’m really under pressure now,” he told her. “If Justin is out there somewhere, trapped somewhere, then he might not make it much longer,” he said, his voice cracking slightly. “Of course, they might of… might of…” he swallowed. “They might have killed him already. I know that, but I have to work on the assumption that he is still out there and he needs my help.”

“Ray,” said Brenda, sitting beside him. “I know this is a very hard time for you. But I think you need to let the professionals work on this one.”

He finally looked at her and heard her words. His brow furrowed. “Look, they have twice as much manpower out to get me, the supposed virus-writer, as they do to find my son. I’m not letting anyone do this for me. If they can do it, fine, but if they can’t then I’ll have killed myself trying to do it where they failed. I’m not giving myself up until Justin is found.”

“But I can’t help but thinking that you’re digging a grave for yourself, Ray,” she told him. “If you’re innocent, that will come out in the investigation. You’re just making it all look worse by running.”

“If?” he asked. “Brenda, I am innocent.”

“Of course you are,” she quickly amended, not looking at him.

He turned back to the screen and started another search. “You know, it’s funny. Whenever someone is accused of something, people right away assume that there must be a grain of truth to it.”

“It’s not like that, Ray,” she said.

“The hell it’s not,” he said, turning back to her after he had clicked in another search. “Look, Brenda, are you my friend? Are you in this with me or not?”

Brenda was silent for a moment. She looked at him, then back toward the lab doors. “I suppose I’m with you, Ray,” she said quietly.

“It’s just that the virus is so advanced, and it came from here, and you really know about viruses, Ray,” she said to her hands.

“Yeah, I know it looks bad.”

“They say you’re on record for having released a virus before, Ray.”

“It was a stupid prank.”

“They found files at your house, Ray,” she told him.

He glanced at her, opened his mouth, then shut it again. He nodded to himself. “That’s it,” he said. “That must be why they took him. Justin must have seen them planting that stuff.”

“Ray?”

“What?”

“They say other things, too. Terrible things, Ray. About what you might have done with Justin. About why you are running and searching for him so frantically.”

Ray looked at her. She looked small and scared and it all made him feel sick. He didn’t say anything because he couldn’t.

Brenda stood up. “You won’t give yourself up, will you?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“I’ve got to go to the restroom again, Ray,” she said.

Four thousand search results. Still way too many. Ray nodded his head to her and started another search. While the search engine was working on it, he quickly dialed Mrs. Trumble’s number. He glanced back at the lab doors, but Brenda was still gone. When a sleepy Mrs. Trumble answered, he told her to write down Santa, Snowflake and the word ‘handles’ on a note for his wife. She began to tell him about her day, but he quickly begged off. When he hung up on her, she was still talking about something. He felt a bit bad about it, but he couldn’t chance anymore time on the line. After he hung up, he dialed 4–1 — 1 and immediately hung up again. That way, if someone tried the redial later, they would get nothing useful. He knew he was being paranoid, but figured that it couldn’t hurt.

Sometime later the lab doors opened again. Ray heard a different set of footsteps approaching. His stomach dropped away into a vast void that had opened up at his feet. Brenda had betrayed him. He should have expected it, but he hadn’t, not from her. He turned, fully expecting to see Agents Vasquez and Johansen, guns drawn.

Instead, he saw Dr. Ingles. He had his cigarette in his left hand and his right was stuck in the pocket of his jacket, where doubtlessly it tightly clutched his lighter.

“Ingles?”

“Hello, Ray,” said the other. He approached and seemed completely at ease in the presence of a federal fugitive.

“What do you want?”

“Ray, I’m here to help Brenda talk you into giving yourself up,” said Ingles. He fondled his cigarette thoughtfully, and for once Brenda didn’t seem to care. Her eyes were careworn and they were focused solely on him.

Ray cocked his head and sat back from the terminal suddenly. Ingles jumped, just a bit. Seeing that there was no threat in the move, he covered by putting his elbow on the high counter at the lab aide’s station.

“Did you call my colleague for help, Brenda?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “He was here tonight. Before you even came. He seemed to know you were coming here tonight.”

Ray nodded. “You make a habit of knowing my habits, Ingles.”

“It’s part of my personal philosophy to try and predict the behavior of others, Ray. Of course, I’m wrong as often as right, but it always seems to be the cases when I guess correctly that people recall most vividly.”

“Yes, you do seem to have a knack for it,” said Ray. On a hunch, Ray typed a new search command into the system. He hit the enter key and a thousand packets of electronic data flashed all around the country and the world. Some of them went all the way to England and came back, all in the space of thirty seconds or so.

While the machine was still working, Ray turned back to the two of them. They had stepped closer now. Ingles had pulled the lighter out of his pocket, except that it wasn’t a lighter after all.

It was a pistol with a slim black barrel. He held it nonchalantly, the way he usually held a cigarette. It wasn’t aimed directly at Ray, but it wasn’t aimed away from him, either.

Ray nodded coolly. “I see.”

“Yes, well, I thought I should make a citizen’s arrest for the good of society, don’t you know?” said Ingles.

“I understand,” said Ray. He glanced back at the computer screen and nodded again at the results. “You knew I would be here tonight.”

Ingles shrugged. “It was only a hunch.”

“Yes, like the hunch that the FBI would think I released the virus. What did you say? ‘Don’t leave anything out that would look bad later?’ Good advice, as it turned out, but not good enough to clear me. Not by a long shot.”

“I only wish I could have done more,” said Ingles. He smiled, and Ray noted that his teeth were indeed stained yellow by tobacco.

“I’m calling the police,” said Brenda.

Ingles waved her away from the phone with an unlit cigarette. “There’s time enough for that,” he said. “I want to hear what Ray is getting at.”

“‘Remember that ugliness, like beauty, is also in the eyes of the beholder.’” quoted Ray.

Ingles smiled. For the first time, Ray thought to see a glint of the wolf in his intelligent eyes.

“That’s Frost, I believe,” said Ingles.

“Frost?”

“Robert Frost.”

“Ah yes, of course. And what’s your handle, Ingles? I mean on the local campus net?”

“Frosty, they call me,” he said. As he spoke he tapped at his cigarette and lit it. Blue smoke wafted into the lab. Brenda seemed too overwrought to argue about it.

“Because you like Frost?”

“I’ve been known to quote him, from time to time,” replied Ingles evenly. “But there’s nothing unusual about that, after all, I am an English Professor.”

“Of course,” said Ray. “Come over here and look at this you two.”

“I think you’ve had enough chatting, Ray.”

Ray waved them forward to look at the screen. Brenda glanced at him, then Ingles, then the gun. She stepped forward and looked at the screen. Ray had pulled up the quote, which was indeed by Robert Frost.

“Don’t you see, Brenda?” he asked her. “He’s Santa, he’s Frosty, he’s Snowflake and whatever else takes his fancy. When the cops come and haul me away, you must tell them about this, get the investigation turned in the right direction.”

“Okay, Ray, time to get up and step out to the parking lot.”

“Listen to him, Ray,” Brenda said urgently.

Ray was saddened that he couldn’t even convince Brenda.

“Yes, listen to me,” said Ingles, making circles with the barrel of his gun. Ray stood up, but made no move toward the parking lot. He focused on the gun. He looked from Ingles’ hands to his eyes, and then back to the gun barrel. Nothing else mattered.

“You can give yourself up,” urged Brenda. “You don’t have to let him get any glory. Sure, he’s an asshole, Ray. But don’t give up your life for this.”

“Santa,” said Ray. “What a poor choice of names for you, Ingles.”

Ingles shook his head, as if saddened by Ray’s delusions. He clucked his tongue. “Santa, eh? Interesting handle, Ray. But no one really believes in Santa anymore. No one but you. I doubt if even your kid believes in Santa anymore.”

Ingles gave Ray a look and chuckled. Ray stiffened at the mention of his son and met Ingle’s eyes for a full second. He knew, right then, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that this bastard knew what had happened to his son. Perhaps he had even had a hand in it. Quite possibly, he had enjoyed himself.

His mind went into a small box then. It was a very tight fit, but he could squeeze it all in. It felt good inside this mental box, where thought and speech were unnecessary.

He quickly found that there were peepholes drilled in the walls of his box. They afforded a limited view of the real world. All he saw through those peepholes was Ingles’ eyes, and the gun. The moment Ingles moved his eyes to one side to tap out his cigarette ashes onto Ray’s desk, Ray sprang out of the box and attacked him.

In two steps, he collided with the man. With an insensate howl, he smashed his head and body into him, wanting to hurt him, wanting to do anything he could to him. He felt the man’s nose against his lowered forehead. It crunched, then splattered wetly. The gun popped once, but Ray didn’t feel anything. The bullet may have gotten him, or it may not have. It didn’t matter.

They were on the floor then, scattering computer printouts and rolling, swiveling chairs everywhere. It was an animal fight. They hammered fists, rammed in knees, gouged with stiff fingers. Ray’s ears rang and it felt as if some of his fingers were either missing or simply didn’t work anymore. Then there was an explosion in his ribs and he couldn’t breathe. But he kept on hammering and jabbing with no thought to defending himself. He just wanted to hurt Ingles, the man who had hurt his son.

Brenda screamed at them both. He saw a flash of her as he rolled to the top. He had a sense that he was winning the struggle. Then she brought the paper-cutter down on top of his skull.

The old, green-painted metal instrument had been made in the 60’s. Back then, they had built such things to last, and had used real metal in them. Lots of it. His consciousness imploded. He slid to the floor atop Ingles and it seemed to him that he could feel his mind running out of his ears and onto the dusty lab tiles.

“Thank you, Brenda,” he heard Ingles’ distant voice say. Then the gun popped three times. At least, he thought it was three times. Afterwards, he was never sure.

Then his mind climbed back into that very small box and closed the door behind him. The world vanished entirely.

… 36 Hours and Counting…

Ray’s head felt like a cracked egg. Sticky stuff ran out of his nose, mouth and hair. He couldn’t open his left eye. His right eye opened, but only half-way. The brilliant scene of the lab glared into his brain. He closed his eye again. Just breathing was difficult. He laid there for a time, touching his head, feeling for the wound. A patch of hair and scalp had been removed from the back of his skull.

Gradually, he became aware that he was lying across something hard and painful. Feeling it with the groping fingers of his left hand, he vaguely recognized the paper-cutter that had dropped him earlier. Groaning, he rolled away from it and struggled to his elbows. He forced himself to open both eyes, then he closed them again, squinching them tightly against the brilliance. How could the lab fluorescents be so damnably bright? They had always been a flickering, bluish glow that failed to completely illuminate the place. Many of his students called this lab The Cave.

This light seemed different, it was more like… His eyes snapped open, and despite the glare, he looked to the high row of windows that ran the length of the lab’s north wall. Daylight flooded in and drove a fist into his skull, but he struggled not to close his eyes again. It was morning, of that he was sure. Straining, he turned to look at the big clock on the wall. It was nearly seven. It was Saturday, so only a few people would be coming in, but it didn’t matter. There were people on the campus by now, and it was daylight outside and he needed to get out of here.

It was when he climbed to his knees that he noticed the gun in his right hand. He paused to look at it stupidly. Ingles’ pistol, it had to be. He gripped it in his bloody hands. He looked around the lab now, and finally saw Brenda.

She lay face down beside him with her hand draped over the paper-cutter. He dropped the gun and reached out to her, and made an odd, gurgling sound in his throat. Moving stiffly, he rolled her over onto her back. Three holes punctured her blouse. There was dried blood soaked in circles around the wounds, but not much of it. The bullets must have stopped her heart quickly. Ray felt her carotid for a pulse, but he had little hope. She was dead.

Breathing through his mouth, he looked at the gun in his hand, then at Brenda’s body. He nodded his head. Ingles’ hadn’t needed to make a citizen’s arrest. Instead, he had set them up and done away with both of them. Ray could see the logic clearly, despite his aching head. Shooting them both would have resulted in proof of a third party. Instead, Ingles had removed Brenda directly and hung yet another crime around Ray’s neck.

He looked at Brenda again, at the shocked, blank look on her face. He closed her eyes with his clumsy fingers, sure that he was making a mistake, but not caring at that moment. He wondered if tears would come, but they didn’t. He was too stunned even to grieve for her. That would have to wait until later. He and his son were still among the living, so they came first.

Then there came a rattling at the lab doors. Ray’s eyes flicked to the clock again. It was seven now, straight up. It had to be the janitor, Charley Tai. Lab aides and grad students didn’t get up this early.

Ray heaved himself up and went into Brenda’s office. He stumbled into the desk, closed the door behind him and locked it. Inside, he flicked off the lights. Like many of the faculty and staff offices, Brenda’s office door had a tall glass window in it. Ray watched from the darkened interior of the office. The main lab doors swung open. Charley walked in, kicked down the doorstop and began emptying trashcans. Ray looked around and noticed the door at the back of Brenda’s office. She rarely used it and always kept it locked for security reasons. He fumbled in his pocket and felt the master key that had helped get him into all of this in the first place. He found his baseball cap, part of his disguise-how absurd that all seemed now-and pulled it down over his head wound. The pain he felt from just brushing the bloody gash made him wince.

He pushed junk out of the way of the outside door and worked at getting the key in the lock. Out in the lab, Charley Tai was cranking up the vacuum now, providing cover noise. The janitor had yet to make the grisly discovery that awaited him.

Ray paused at the door. On impulse, he stepped to the Brenda’s terminal and typed a message to Agent Vasquez. With each keystroke he left a bloody fingerprint, but he figured it didn’t matter. He looked guilty as hell anyway.

Agent Vasquez — Shooter = Santa = Snowflake = Frosty = Ingles.

He hit the enter key and then unlocked the door. Behind him, he heard a shout of dismay and horror. He threw open the door and rushed out into the blinding sunlight.

… 35 Hours and Counting…

Spurlock awakened earlier than usual. He found himself sprawled across the front seats of the van. His back ached and he groaned when he tried to get up.

The Colt 45 malt liquor bottle slid from his grasp and rattled on the floor of the van. The sound shattered his glassed-over mind. He moaned and lay back, hurting in a hundred places. The big forty-ounce bottles had done their job well, all three of them. At two bucks each on special, they had to be one of the cheapest drunks in town. He was sick. Like the guns they were named after, the Colts had blown fist-sized chunks out of his brain. Last night, this had been a pleasant thing, the first real relief from the withdrawal symptoms that had begun ravaging his body in earnest.

Now, however, he regretted everything. He thought to himself that, ironically, he would have rather worked an honest month at an honest job for the money that he had yet to squeeze out of this mess. He chuckled and groaned again. He farted wetly, then heard the kid stir in his cage.

“You’ve got a surprise ride waiting for you today, punk,” he told the kid. “Just as soon as I’m able to move, that is.”

After dozing for perhaps another ten minutes, Spurlock managed to rouse himself again. He had to either get up or piss his pants. There had been mornings past when he had taken the latter option, but not today. Today, he needed to do slightly better than that. Resolved to facing the sun that he knew blazed just outside, he kicked open the van door and staggered out into the orchard.

He pissed on a black-trunked almond tree and then doubled over. His belly felt tight and sick. His gut gave him a wrenching pain that couldn’t be relieved by urination alone. Without hesitating, he shoved a filthy finger down his throat and gagged. The foamy contents of his stomach splattered the dirt.

“Oh shit,” he slurred and fell back against the van. He panted for a time, then felt better. It was time to get moving.

He struggled back into the driver’s seat and fired up the engine. At least the bitch still started properly. In fact, if it wasn’t for the billowing white smoke he might have tried to beat it to death all the way to San Francisco. But he knew a cop would have gotten him before he made it as far as Fairfield. So, the van had to go.

Seen from the edge the hole was incredibly deep. He had tried to dig a ramp down into it, but that had taken more time, and in the heat of the night and he had skimped. All he had wanted last night was to get to those three bottles of amber bliss. Now, as he drove the shaking machine to the brink, he was daunted.

“Holy shit, we’re in for a ride, kid,” he said aloud. On impulse, he threw open the curtains that divided the front seats from the cargo section. He looked over his shoulder and leered at the kid in the cage. He noted the kid’s big, hungry eyes and the fingers which gripped the bars. Those fingers should not be loose. The kid had untied himself.

“So, you little fuck, you got loose last night, eh?” shouted Spurlock. “Well, you won’t find it so easy to slip out of this one!”

With that, he eased the van into drive and they rumbled, shook and dipped over the edge.

“Next stop, Hell’s Kitchen!” roared Spurlock.

The black earth of the orchard swallowed the van whole. Only a foul cloud of exhaust was left behind. It lay in a spreading mass on the floor of the orchard like the devil’s own stinking breath.

Inside his tiny cage, Justin began to scream.

… 34 Hours and Counting…

“Damn,” said Agent Vasquez. That was all she could think to say.

“I know, I didn’t want to think it was all him, either,” said Johansen.

Vasquez glanced up at him then turned back to the murder scene. She frowned. She knew Johansen was lying for her sake, he had always counted Vance as the sole perpetrator. Still, she couldn’t find it in herself to be angry with him for patronizing her a bit. When faced with death, in all its ignominy, she always found it difficult to be angry with anyone who was on her side. Usually, she felt closer to them. Somehow, the working relationship with a partner helped to reassure her that she was still alive, that death wasn’t close at hand.

She felt, rather than saw, Johansen raise his big hand up. It hovered for perhaps two seconds over her shoulder. He wasn’t sure, she knew, if he should comfort her or not. She tensed up, but tried not to show that she knew the hand was there. She herself wasn’t even sure how she would react if he did touch her. It wasn’t something they normally did. But then, they didn’t normally work cases like this. The best thing about working the clean stuff, like electronic crimes, was that you didn’t have to face blood and death. Usually, the worst one saw of humanity was something like Nog’s apartment.

Johansen withdrew his hand. She breathed deeply, realizing only then that she had been holding her breath. The spell was broken.

“Vance has just put himself on the Most Wanted list,” said Vasquez. She stepped over the corpse and away from her partner. She moved about the scene, looking, but not disturbing things. “I’m putting him down as our number one suspect for the virus, his son’s disappearance and the murder of Brenda Hastings. What’s more, he’s now to be considered armed and dangerous. Do you agree?”

Johansen nodded. He flipped out his cell phone and made the call. Soon every squad car in Northern California would be getting the message.

Vasquez moved over to the terminal with the bloodstained keyboard. She checked the message on the screen. Santa? Frosty? She made sure her notes had every detail down, then shook her head. She would check it out, of course, but it seemed like the work of someone delusional, someone looking for clues that would erase the unthinkable truth.

“I guess Sarah Vance was right,” said Vasquez. “This case is all related.”

Johansen finished his call and nodded. “Just not the way she hoped it was.”

… 33 Hours and Counting…

It had taken Ray more than an hour to get from the campus to Brenda’s place. She lived on the outskirts of town, in one of the more recently developed areas of Davis. In Davis, that meant that the houses had been built in the sixties and seventies. Unlike most California towns, Davis carefully controlled and restricted its growth. The University and the kind of people who liked to live near it didn’t want the run-away strip-malls and cracker box land development that personified most of the Valley. Instead, the city council doled out building permits like scotsmen with rusty purses.

Under normal circumstances, Ray would have enjoyed the walk. The sky was clear, the delta breezes had returned, and it seemed like a perfect Spring day. As it was, his head rang and his legs felt like rubber crutches. Brenda’s dead eyes haunted his thoughts. The sights and sounds of Spring were lost on him.

Brenda’s car he had left in the parking lot. Driving her car around, he figured, wouldn’t be a very good idea anyway. It couldn’t but make his case harder if he was apprehended while driving the car of the woman he was accused of murdering. It was bad enough that he had the murder weapon shoved into the front pocket of his faded jeans. His only precaution had been to pull out his plaid shirt so that the tails hung down over the gun butt.

He reached Bovine and took a left turn onto Starling Lane. Overhead, the sun tried to hurt him. The morning sun had that blue glare to it, not the softer yellows and oranges of the late afternoon that he would have greatly preferred. Like a thousand hung-over people that day, he swore the sun was brighter and crueler first thing in the morning than any other time of the day. For him, of course, it wasn’t a hang-over but a concussion that tortured his skull. All in all, he thought he would have preferred the hang-over.

He had decided to go by Brenda’s on the way to Ingle’s place, which was out in the country beyond the city limits to the north. He wanted to go by Brenda’s on a hunch. Sure, the police might be there, but he doubted they would stay too long. At least, he hoped they wouldn’t. What he hoped to do was beat the police and run into Ingle’s. He was fairly sure that the bastard would try to plant something to further implicate him, the way he had planted disks related to the virus at his home. Maybe, just maybe, Ingle’s would be too smart for his own good this time. Maybe he would try a little too much finesse. Ray had always believed that the simplest plans were the best plans, and he was about to try and make the theory pay.

Besides his reasoning, he just didn’t know what else to do. He had identified the virus’ author and the man pulling the strings, but still had no clue as to Justin’s whereabouts. Except for one thing: Ingle’s knew the truth.

So, logically, Ingle’s knew he would come looking for him, and that Ray couldn’t afford to wait around. All he could hope was that Ingle’s expected him to drive straight to his quaint ranchette. He would be ready for that. But possibly, he wouldn’t be ready for a man on foot to visit Brenda’s. Ray’s only plan was to make fast, simple, unexpected moves from here on in.

He stopped at Raven Court. He looked down toward Brenda’s place. He saw no evidence of cops or Ingles. A few cars and people were about, mostly kids. It was Saturday, which meant that several children were out riding their bikes around in an endless circle at the end of the court. The rest were probably watching morning cartoons while their parents filled dishwashers and fired-up lawnmowers. It hurt him to see such a normal, painless neighborhood. It made him homesick.

Deciding not to stand there staring like a homeless drifter for too long, he walked across the court, but didn’t enter it. He went instead to the park at the end of Starling Lane. He crossed a line of chained cement posts and approached Brenda’s place from the park side. He had to count chimneys to make sure he had the right house.

Throwing caution to the wind, he vaulted the redwood fence. It hurt more than he thought it would. Ten years ago he would have sailed over it, but now, with his woozy head, it was all he could do to fall in a panting heap on the far side. His stomach went into the spin cycle on him, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten anything in more than twelve hours. He struggled up and checked the painful lump in his pocket. The gun was still there, and had yet to blow his nuts off by accident, a thought that now haunted him as he headed for the sliding glass door.

His mind felt as glassy as the door. Why was it that every California home built in the last century had at least one sliding glass door in the back? He wondered about it vaguely.

The slider was locked and had a broomstick in the track. Brenda had been security-conscious. A shitload of good it had done her last night, he thought.

He walked around the yard, checking the windows. He stopped when he got to the garage side door that led into the backyard. It was hanging open. Gouged wood showed where it had been forced open.

… 32 Hours and Counting…

There was someone inside the garage. Ray heard something go over, something big, like a box full of books, maybe. There was a whump, then a luffing, skittering sound. A muttered curse followed.

Taking a deep breath, Ray closed his eyes to the count of five, then pulled Ingles’ pistol out of his pocket. He half-hoped he would be forced to shoot the bastard, although he doubted that it would help his case any.

He stepped around the corner like a cop in any good crime movie. He stood with both hands on the gun, his legs spread apart. He had no more training with a gun than what he recalled from childhood, plinking endlessly at birds with his daisy. After the initial rush of victory, he had felt bad the few times he had actually hit one. He couldn’t help wondering at that moment how it would feel to kill a man.

The sight that greeted him was unexpected. Instead of cool, calm Ingles, his cigarette thrusting from his mouth, he saw Nog. Or rather, he saw Nog’s hindquarters. The man was doubled over, digging through boxes in the garage. There was an air of frantic energy about him that Ray had never seen before. He wore a striped tee-shirt, yellow rubber kitchen-gloves and a vast blue stretch of cloth that served him as shorts.

Brenda had always been something of a packrat. The garage, like much of her house, was stuffed with junk. Books, disks, dolls, paint cans, tools, broken furniture, garden implements and towering stacks of magazines were strewn about in wild profusion. Nog went through the disks more carefully, than the rest, but still, everything he touched was soon tossed aside as if in disgust.

Ray watched him dig for perhaps a minute. Every so often Nog lurched up and gazed about him, checking the window that gave a view of the front porch. He didn’t look directly behind him, however, and so missed Ray’s presence at the doorway. After a quick, furtive look around, he put his hand on his flabby back and moaned as if exhausted and strained. Then he doubled over again, rummaging through yet another box that he had pulled down from Brenda’s dusty shelves.

“What’cha looking for, Nog my man?” Ray asked him casually.

The effect was electric. Nog straightened from a large box of cords and computer parts. He half-whirled, half-fell as he turned to face Ray. Junk flew from his gloved fingers. A ribbon cable dangled from his left hand like a scrap of uneaten spaghetti.

“Oh shit,” breathed Nog. “You almost gave me a heart attack Vance, you asshole.”

“That makes twice in one week,” acknowledged Ray.

“You should just get the fuck out of here while you can, man,” said Nog, breathing hard.

“What are you doing here?”

“Look, you stupid mother-” here, Nog halted. He seemed to notice the gun for the first time. Ray had loosened up his cop stance and now held it nonchalantly.

“Oh, hey man,” stammered Nog. He shuffled back a step and almost fell into a stack Vogue magazines as high as his waist. “I didn’t do Brenda, man. That’s not why I’m here.”

“Let me ask you again, Nog,” said Ray earnestly. He let his fingers work at the grip of the gun while he spoke. “Why are you here?”

“I’m just looking for-stuff.”

Ray took two steps forward. He watched the other’s reaction as Nog noticed the bloodstains that ran down his neck from his head wound. “What kind of stuff?”

Nog worked his tongue nervously. “Stuff like, ah-disks and chips.”

“Incriminating stuff?” asked Ray, he nodded, taking Nog’s shrug as evidence enough. “So why would it be here? Was Brenda in on all this then?”

Nog snorted. “Of course not,” he snapped.

“No, no, of course not. She was no hacker,” said Ray, “In fact, she hated your kind, didn’t she? The festering spiders out there on the web. The ones that dream up ways to lure teens to bus stations and vandalize the honest work of others.”

“You going to shoot me or what, Vance?” asked Nog.

“You have more balls than you know, asking that question,” said Ray.

Nog opened his mouth. His ancient braces glinted, but he shut up again, saying nothing.

“Good. All I want to hear from you is answers. Let’s see now, you came here to find evidence. The evidence must incriminate you, or you wouldn’t bother to leave your lair. Besides which, I’ve never seen you work so hard in your life. With me so far?”

Nog wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his yellow glove. He nodded and glanced out the front window again. “We have to get out of here, Vance,” he said.

“All I can think of is the source code of the virus, something linking you to it. Am I on the right track?”

“Yeah, you’re a regular no-shit-Sherlock, man. I couldn’t find it, and I’ve been at it all night. We have to get out of here now though, man.”

“Why’s that?”

Nog pointed out the window. Ray sighted along the rubber finger. He saw a small black plastic box. It sat outside the window in the branches of a small liquid amber tree. On the top of it, a red light blinked.

“What the heck is that?”

“A cop-detector,” explained Nog. “It detects radio emissions on the cop bandwidths. Any car that transmits inside of a half-mile is picked up.”

“So, you’re telling me that the cops are coming.”

“Bingo,” said Nog, heading for the side door he had forced.

“I’m coming with you,” said Ray.

“What if I don’t want company?” asked Nog.

“Then I’ll have to blow your guts out.”

“In that case,” said Nog with a snort, “be my guest.”

… 31 Hours and Counting…

Spurlock was exhausted by the time he finished burying the van. The PVC pipe stuck up about two feet above the mound of sandy earth. It looked like some kind of drainage system for the orchard, however, not like the tip of a tomb. As an afterthought, he shoved a half-eaten bag of cheetos down the hole. The bag stuck part way down, but he followed it up with his water bottle and the weight of it forced both of them down. He laughed, then called down the tube to the kid.

“Don’t eat and drink everything at once, kid! Otherwise you’ll be eating the vinyl off the car seats before I get back here with another little snack for you.”

“Mister,” he heard faintly come up the tube. Spurlock raised his eyebrows, the kid had rarely spoken. “Don’t leave me! It’s dark down here!”

Spurlock looked down the tube into the earth. He could see nothing. It was indeed as dark as the devil’s own eyeball down there.

Spurlock hawked a big one and fired it down the pipe. He couldn’t tell if the kid caught it in the face or not, but he hoped so. “See now, you don’t want to be calling up this pipe, boy. You never know what might come down to get you. Snakes would love this pipe, if they hear you. So, you just keep quiet until I bring you more food. If you’re real good, I might even let you out. If you’re not, I’ll cover up this last hole and you’ll suffocate down there in the dark. Now, shut up.”

With that, he walked back toward the road. There was still plenty of business to be done today.

#

Nog had plenty of snacks in his white Lincoln Town Car and Ray was so hungry that he couldn’t help himself. He felt vaguely ill to eat from the same bags of corn chips and boxes of cellophane-wrapped cakes that Nog had been pawing. Listening to Nog wasn’t helping his stomach, either.

“Where to?” asked Nog.

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, you’ve got the gun, Vance.”

“Right,” said Vance, feeling dazed. So much had happened today. He ate another chip, trying to think. “Let’s get out of here before the cops come. Just drive, Nog.”

Nog did a wide sweeping U-turn to get out of the dead-end circle. The big white car heeled over like a boat. The thought of Moby Dick, the great white whale, came unbidden to Ray’s mind. Kids on bikes scattered before their wake. Nog stomped on the pedal and they rolled quickly and quietly away from Brenda’s.

“I guess I can tell you some stuff, since you seem so convinced that I created this beauty,” said Nog, driving the car out of the neighborhood. “The virus is really a sophisticated piece of software. I can’t say that I completely understand what it’s doing now myself.”

“What do you mean?” mumbled Ray around his chips. He snorted quietly to himself; here was another nerd, telling him how cool a nerdy program was. They didn’t have many people to brag to, so he had always been a prime target during his office hours. He wondered vaguely what was happening to his students. Had they found a substitute for him? He hoped it wasn’t Waterson. The guy had his heart in the right place, but he couldn’t teach. He felt an odd pang of guilt for abandoning his classes.

“The virus is a real piece of work,” continued Nog, warming to his topic. “I always get a chuckle out of the news flashes-I’ve started watching CNN since your last visit-I love how they call it: adaptable. They have no clue.”

“Uh-huh.”Ray barely listened. Much of his attention was devoted to feeding his face and watching for cops. He wished there was something to drink. The only thing in sight was Nog’s sun-warmed, half-empty can of diet soda. He wasn’t that thirsty.

“A lot of the ideas in it come from your teachings, Vance. Particularly in the study of neural networks.”

Ray frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“Neural nets, my man. That’s what this virus is built from.”

Ray looked at him in surprise. Neural nets were software imitations of the human mind. They were currently a hot area of research in the artificial intelligence field, but few practical applications had yet been found. They were often found to be too large and complex for most projects. “They said the virus was big, but not that big.”

Nog nodded proudly. “I worked hard to shrink the neural nodes. They are both general problem-solvers and yet specialized to their task. But, that’s not the best part.”

Ray waited. Nog finally had his full attention.

Nog basked in it. “The worm is a fully-function learning system. It copies itself with both logical and random mutations. And it shares data on successful mutations with others of its kind, sort of cross-breeding.”

Ray thought about that for a moment. “That is some piece of software.”

“It’s more than that, Vance. It’s alive.”

“It’s just a bunch of bits set a certain way, Nog,” replied Ray. “It’s not going to pass the Turing test.”The Turing test, first described by Alan Turing in the fifties, defined a test which no computer had yet passed. Turing argued that if one could hold a conversation with a computer in another room and couldn’t tell its responses from those of a human, one had to admit it showed some degree of intelligence.

“No, no,” said Nog, “You miss my point. I didn’t say it was intelligent, Vance, I said it was alive.”

Ray was silent for a moment. “So, this thing makes copies of itself with variations in the copies?”

“Yes, logical mutations that stem from what it has learned. They vary greatly, too. I have no idea anymore what the virus has become. It mutates very quickly. Out on the open net, with a thousand conditions, it has turned into a thousand different viruses doing a thousand different things.”

“How many different moves does it know how to make? I mean, is it created to destroy data, hardware, what? What’s its trick?”

“You aren’t getting it, Vance. The thing is rewriting itself, adapting. I have no idea what it might do. There is one main trick that remains to be seen. What other moves might it make? Who knows? Whatever works best.”

“You mean the thing evolves, experiments?”

“Yes, the same way that organic microbes do,” Nog beamed. “Actually, I modeled it after HIV. That biological monster is particularly hard to cure, because the outer coating of the virus resembles sugar, which is food for cells. It is really hard to teach our cells not feed themselves. My virus is like that, it pretends to be valid data from a valid source.”

“Spoofing,” said Ray, providing the term used for computer programs that tried to trick their way past firewalls.

“Right. But better spoofing than you’ve ever seen. The new computer accepts it and zap, it is infected. Just like HIV, mine has many strains and it mutates so fast that people might never figure out how to stop it. One copy might try to erase hard disks and copy itself using e-mail. Another might use VPN to other servers. Another might try to hide, lying dormant on disks everywhere until a certain time or date. Whichever works the best, that one will make more copies than the others. Some of the new copies will have mutations, which continues the cycle.”

“What if it chooses a bad strategy?” asked Ray, feeling a bit sick. Had he helped create this thing by teaching Nog the basics?

“That happens all the time. You ever see one of those nature-shows, where about a thousand baby shrimp explode out of their eggs at once? All the fish come and feast on them, but a few get by. Defective ones and unlucky ones die off, but many live.”

Ray nodded, overwhelmed. “Only the fittest survive.”

“Exactly.”

A flash of anger hit Ray. His head injury throbbed and his frustration reached a sudden flashpoint. He pointed Ingles’ pistol at Nog. “What’s to keep me from taking you right to the cops, Nog? Why shouldn’t I give us both up and let them grill you until you spill your fat guts on this virus?”

“Only one thing, Vance,” said Nog.

Ray sighed. Justin. Nog knew he couldn’t give up yet. Things had gotten crazy, but he felt that he was close, and he still had to try.

“Okay,” he said. “Just tell me why you were trying to dig up evidence at Brenda’s.”

Nog shrugged. “I didn’t want the same thing to happen to me that happened to you. That Santa-bastard planted something there to incriminate me as well. That’s his way.”

“You mean Ingles?”

Nog glanced at him. “So that was you listening in on No Carrier.”

Ray allowed himself a grim smile. At least he had done something right.

“Yeah, well, in later communications that you must have missed, Santa indicated that he was going to screw me too.”

“It did seem like a crazy way to try to make a million bucks.”

“You know, I don’t think that ever was his real motivation,” said Nog. “He had something else in mind.”

“Do you think he just wanted to burn the net? Is he paranoid? Does the net watches him while he sleeps?”

“Maybe,” said Nog, “he uses the net all the time, but he doesn’t seem to value it.”

“Well, whatever it is, I need to talk to Santa privately.”

“Yeah well, I guess this is the end of the line, then,” said Nog. He slowed the car on a country road and pulled over to the dirt shoulder.

Ray looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“Look around, Vance. This is the back of Ingle’s place. You didn’t want me to drive you right up to the door, did you?”

Ray eyed the surrounding army of black-trunked almond trees. Far down one of the rows, he thought to see a house of white clapboards. Ingles owned a large ranch out here, it must have covered around a hundred-plus acres, mostly of trees. He recalled having been out here years ago for a faculty mixer. Sarah hadn’t come with him that day, he suddenly remembered. He had to wonder now if she had a special reason to not want to go to Ingles house.

Pushing that thought out of his mind, he opened the car door. He paused and looked back at Nog. Was this a set-up? He couldn’t tell.

“You’re one odd sociopath, Nog,” he told his ex-student.

Nog shrugged and didn’t meet his gaze. Ray could tell he was worrying at his tongue again.

“I’ll take that cell phone,” he said, disconnecting it from the dashboard power outlet. “I might need it.”

“Hold on,” said Nog, he reached behind his seat and pulled out a backpack. “Take this one,” he said, tossing another cell phone on the seat. “It’s got a longer range and a better, fresher battery.”

Ray nodded and took up the offered phone. He thumbed the power button. Digits flashed up on the display. It made a tone as it reached out and connected with another computer several miles away.

Ray climbed out of the car and looked back. Nog glanced at him.

“Good luck, Ray,” he said.

“Thanks.”

Then he drove off. Ray watched the big Lincoln roll smoothly away. It occurred to him that Nog had never called him by his first name before.

… 30 Hours and Counting…

Johansen snapped the cell phone shut and brought his fist down on the steering wheel. “Damn.”

“What?” asked Vasquez. She put down the headphones and turned off the player. The sound of Vance’s voice cut off. She wondered how many times she had replayed that conversation between the foggy-minded Mrs. Trumble and Vance. It had to be at least thirty times.

“The squad car they sent over to Brenda Hastings place reported a break-in,” he explained. “It looks like Vance forced his way in and ransacked the place. If we’d just been more on the ball, we could have caught up with him there.”

“That might have been a bad call on my part. I just wanted to listen to the recordings,” she said. “At least we know now that he has fixated on Ingles, his colleague. He left that message for Sarah and for me, putting the blame on him. Clearly, he needs us to believe it too, maybe to assuage his guilt.”

Johansen swung left onto Bovine. They were near Brenda’s place now. Starling Lane was just ahead. “What I don’t get is why he spent the night in the lab with her body.”

“It looks like Brenda got in a blow before he shot her. That paper-cutter looked pretty solid. Maybe he was out cold for the night on the floor.”

“Hmm. But how to you hit someone with three rounds in your chest? And how do you shoot someone when you’ve just been conked on the head?”

“I know,” she said. “The whole thing looks odd. We’ll have to wait for the forensics team to give us their version. It’s not really our field.”

“Okay, let’s go over the time line then. We need to catch Vance on his next move.”

Vasquez nodded. “Brenda’s car was in the parking lot, so it looks like he was on foot. That means he would have to walk for about an hour to get there.”

“I don’t get that either,” he said. “Why did he leave the car? He’s already killed her, so who cares about a wrap for car theft?”

Vasquez frowned. “Well, California law does allow the death penalty only in the case of an additional crime committed in junction with the murder. I don’t think car theft is on the list, but Vance might not know that.”

“You think Vance was trying to avoid the gas chamber?” Johansen shook his head. “No, I don’t think in his state of mind that he would be thinking that clearly.”

“Maybe not,” she admitted. “We don’t know. But we do know enough to pinpoint the time he had to be at Brenda’s place. The janitor came in and surprised him at seven. Let’s say it took till eight to get to Brenda’s. Maybe eight-thirty. Then he wrecks the place, let’s say that takes an hour or so, that puts us up to ten. Now it’s noon. That means we are only two hours behind him, max.”

“I agree. Should we hit Brenda’s place now?”

“Okay,” she said. “Then we’ll talk to Ingles.”

Ray worked his way around the house, staying in the green shadows of the orchard. The gun was in one hand now, the cell phone in the other. Now that he was so close to Ingles, his body tensed up. His neck ached when he turned his head, to say nothing of his head itself. After he had completed a circle around the place and had seen no activity, he crouched down behind the thickest black trunk he could find. There, about a hundred yards from Ingles’ house, he inspected the gun he had been carrying for hours now.

He looked at the gun carefully, with new eyes and new concerns. It was a vastly different thing to look at a weapon when he knew his life might depend on its performance. He marveled now that he had come into Brenda’s garage and surprised Nog with a gun that might have been empty, for all he knew. Why should he assume that Ingles would give him a gun that worked at all?

He looked it over carefully and hefted it in his hand. It was a heavy chunk of steel. The black-painted surface was worn down to the shiny metal in places. The grip was textured so that it wouldn’t slip in a sweaty palm. He looked down the slim barrel, but without aiming it directly at his head. The muzzle was a black eye that stared back at him. His father had been in the Navy, and had taught him a minimum of safety about firearms.

He recalled that the caliber of a gun was a measurement of the diameter of the barrel in inches. A. 38 caliber bullet was 0.38 inches in diameter, a little more than a third of an inch. It was hard to tell, but to his untrained eye it looked about that size, maybe a little smaller. It might be a nine millimeter gun, he figured. That was a popular size.

Whatever the size, what mattered was getting it to rip a hole in a man’s body, and to do that you had to have bullets and the ability to aim. Aiming was up to him, but was this thing loaded? He examined it anew. It had no revolving chamber, so he figured it had to have a clip inside the grip. He hunted for a catch, found one and immediately a clip of bullets fell into the dirt. There were seven rounds in it. He continued fooling with the gun, feeling like a kid in his dad’s closet, until he managed to pull the slide bolt and get a round into the chamber. Then he found the safety button. He pushed it into the firing position.

With all that done, he decided to call Mrs. Trumble and leave another message for Sarah. Whatever happened next, she needed to understand what he was doing.

He flipped open the phone and pressed the buttons. To his surprise, it actually worked. He had expected Nog’s phone to require some kind of password to be used. He knew that Brenda’s was like that. She had always been paranoid about the wrong things.

“Mrs. Trumble? Hello,” he began. He told her he was outside Ingles’ house and that he was going to look for Justin inside. He told her to call his wife and police if he didn’t call back in a few hours.

Ray stood up then and looked at the house. It was time to act. He put the cell phone into a dusty pocket, wondering if he had just written his epitaph with it.

Sarah got both of Ray’s latest messages at the same time. She hadn’t checked recently, as her mother had come over to comfort her. When she finally managed to slip away from Mom, (who had, of course, been the one who needed the comforting most) she headed for Trumbles’ house. At the door, Abner Trumble appeared. He had an odd look of wariness on his aged face. He invited her in with a hand-gesture. Sarah hesitated, not looking forward to a formal visit. Their house was always dark and dank inside. The house belied the dry, dusty climate of the Central Valley, like a tropical oasis in a desert. The humidity was such that water droplets condensed on the inside of all the windows and Sarah knew she would sweat immediately upon entering. She had long suspected that they kept the shower running twenty-four hours a day.

She sighed and followed him into the living room. She supposed that she owed them the courtesy. The classic sunken living room had frozen in time during the sixties. It was all there: The green shag carpet, the fireplace of painted brick with the sunburst clock over the mantle, all of it matched by furniture of ochre velour. A planter full of redwood chips with a half-dozen plastic inhabitants guarded the archway entrance. Next to the coffee table sat a large ceramic fish with gold-painted eyes and no clear purpose. The fish had a huge open mouth that aimed upwards, as it were gulping air from the surface. Or possibly, Sarah thought to herself, swallowing a duck whole. Sarah avoided the thing as one might a strange, sleeping housepet.

Abner waved her to a couch and took up a velour armchair himself once she had been seated. He reminded Sarah of her own grandpa, recently departed. He wore a white tee-shirt over his sagging body. A black leather belt held up his baggy trousers. A tiny, flesh-colored plastic knob was embedded in his right ear. He stared at her intently.

Right away, Sarah thought to herself that they had finally figured it out. They had finally heard about Ray, and the virus, and the fact that he was now considered to be Justin’s murderer. They had not learned the truth from CNN, not these two, but rather on AM radio, or from one of their bridge club friends.

“Is there something you wanted to talk about, Mr. Trumble?” she asked.

He looked at her oddly, then stared suspiciously about the room. His eyes alighted on his hands and stayed there. Sarah frowned, wondering if he had perhaps a touch of some grim disease named after a dead physician. Alzheimer’s perhaps, or Parkinson’s.

Mrs. Trumble finally made her appearance. She seemed nervous and apologetic. She worked her hands and sat down on the couch beside Sarah. The ceramic fish sat on the floor between them and both of them glanced at it.

“Would you like coffee?”

“Ah, no thank you,” said Sarah.

“It’s a newspaper bin, you know,” said Mrs. Trumble.

“What?”

“The fish. He holds rolled up newspapers, you see, in his mouth. Herman, we call him. Everyone asks about Herman, so I thought you might like to know what he is.”

“Oh,” said Sarah, feeling surreal. What were they thinking? Were they going to cut off her only communication path with Ray?

“Abner wants to tell you something,” said Mrs. Trumble.

Sarah glanced at him and found that he was no longer studying his hands. He was staring at her intently. She looked from one of them to the other. “What? Have you heard from Ray?”

They both fidgeted. “Abner was in the war, you see. He was an intelligence officer. He knows about these things.”

“What things?” asked Sarah. And what war? Korea? Vietnam? she wondered, but didn’t ask.

“He wants to tell you that someone is- listening.”

“Listening? What do you mean?”

“On the phone lines, and with tiny microphones, maybe even with devices aimed at your windows and ours,” she said.

Sarah’s mouth fell open. She glanced at Abner, who watched them intently. She wondered if he could speak, or if he had written all of this down for her.

“Well, thank you for the warning. I’ll keep it in mind. But have you heard from Ray?”

Mrs. Trumble glanced at Abner again. He was back to studying his hands. “Yes, we have. Twice in fact. It seems that he believes a certain Mr. Ingles has taken little Justin. He is on his way to his house now, I believe.”

Sarah’s eyes widened in shock. “Dr. James Ingles?” she asked.

“Um, possibly. I didn’t get his complete name.”

Sarah’s stomach fell away below her. In a moment, she knew that Ray was right. She should have thought of this before. Ingles had taken Justin. Of course he had. And she knew why.

She felt dazed. She looked at her own hands and some distant part of her mind wondered how soon they would be as old and careworn as Mrs. Trumble’s. All the lotion in the world couldn’t really stop the years. Deep down, all women knew that, but they kept trying anyway.

Sarah felt a touch. “Are you all right, Sarah?”

She looked up. “Yes,” she said, standing. “I’ve got to go now.”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Trumble. She stood as well. “I’ll see you out. You must come by more often.”

“I will,” Sarah said, almost running for the door.

When she reached it, she flung it open and marveled at the brightly colored world outside. Before she could step out, however, a hand closed on her shoulder. It had a surprising strength in it and it stopped her dead. She sensed the warmth of a man’s breath on her neck.

“Remember, this line has been compromised,” Abner’s voice hissed in her ear. She had never heard him speak before. Perhaps he only knew how to whisper.

The hand released her. She stumbled out onto the porch. She looked back to see eyes glinting in the dark interior of the house. The eyes retreated and the door quietly shut.

She shivered. Pulling her keys out of her purse, she headed for her car.

Ray walked up to the back door, took a breath and aimed the 9mm pistol at chest-level. He checked the safety one last time. It was still ready to fire. He tried the knob. It wasn’t locked. He opened it and stepped inside.

The back porch was a screened-in affair. Laundry baskets decorated the tiled floor and two white Kenmore machines sat quietly by their feeding pipes. A door led deeper into the house, into the kitchen. It was ajar. Ray looked through the crack.

The kitchen was full of rich oak cabinets. A white tile countertop bordered two of the walls. Embedded in the tiles were a sink and a gas stove. The stove had a steaming teapot shaped like a white swan on the front burner. An island topped with matching tile sat in the middle of the kitchen. A hundred pots, pans and implements hung from a rack suspended over the island.

Ray watched the teapot. He decided to wait to see who came when it started to whistle.

The wait seemed incredibly long. Gas stoves burned hotter? Ray began to doubt that piece of ancient wisdom. His whole body ran with sweat, despite the cool waft of air conditioning that came out of the kitchen. His wet palms gripped then regripped the pistol. Now he knew the true foresight of its makers. If it hadn’t been for the textured handgrip, he might have dropped it.

The swan-shaped teapot began to warble, then whistle, then finally scream with abandon. It fired a two-foot plume of vapor that licked the oak cabinets like a dragon’s breath. Still, no one came.

Ray’s breathing became erratic. He began to doubt the wisdom of his plan. Had Ingles spotted him? Was he outside, starting up his car even now? Was his only chance at finding Justin fleeing the scene even while he stood motionless, staring at a fucking teapot?

He turned to peer through the screens out toward the driveway. He saw no sign of a car or Ingles. He turned back to the kitchen, and his breathing stopped altogether.

Ingles was there, pulling two mugs from the cabinets. He popped in two Lemon-Lift teabags and poured hot water over them. Ray paused, looking at the two mugs. Who else was in the house?

Screwing up his courage, he told himself it didn’t matter, even though he knew it did. He pushed open the door and aimed the pistol at Ingles’ back.

#

Vasquez followed the sheriff’s deputy into Brenda’s house. Johansen followed her like a silent shadow.

The place was a wreck. The cabinets had been pulled from the walls in the kitchen. The living room cushions had been torn apart. Everything in the bedrooms had been overturned, slashed open and gutted. Books, smashed lamps and piles of clothing were everywhere. A spilled collection of rare CDs lay in a broken pile near the stereo. A pair of suntan queen-size pantyhose lay across them.

“Anything obviously missing?” asked Vasquez.

“Not a burglary,” replied the young deputy. He was a short man with broad shoulders and a tight crew cut. He sported a yellow scarf and black shades. Vasquez tried not to smile at his get-up.

“Not necessarily just vandalism, either,” he told them. “Seems to me that they were searching for something. See how the pictures on the walls aren’t slashed? Only the big cushions were opened up.”

Vasquez followed his pointed finger and his reasoning. He may look like a webolos boy scout with that scarf on, but he seemed to know his business. “Any prints yet?” she asked.

“No, must’ve been wearing gloves.”

“Where did they break in?” asked Johansen over her shoulder.

The deputy led them to the garage. “Pried open the doorway here.”

“Where did Vance get a crowbar?” asked Johansen as he took notes.

“More importantly, where did he get the time to do all this? This would take too long to do. Every piece of furniture has been smashed and gone through. Every box in the garage has been emptied. Besides, why did he do it?” she asked.

The deputy shook his head. He had no more answers. He headed back into the kitchen where the fingerprint crew was dusting and taping the countertop and some water glasses.

“Maybe she had something on him,” suggested Johansen.

“Possibly,” she said. “Hypothetically, then, he could have done this last night, then Brenda came home and surprised him.”

“Right, so then he takes her to the lab, they fight and she gets shot?”

“Hmm. We’re not seeing the whole thing yet,” she said. She stood in the garage, looking around in a circle. It was then that saw a light flash outside the window. It was a red light.

“What’s that?” she asked.

Johansen squinted through the dirty window, but the light had stopped blinking. “What?”

“There was a flashing red light out there, in that tree,” she said. Quickly stumbling and sliding her way through the destroyed house, she reached the front door. She headed outside and examined the trees in the front atrium. In one of them, a liquid amber, she found a box of black plastic.

“Is that it?” asked Johansen over her shoulder. He startled her a bit. He always managed to move more lightly on his feet than she did, even though he was twice her size. Sometimes, it was disconcerting.

She reached for the box.

“Don’t,” said Johansen, “it might be a bomb.”

Just then, it flashed again. Both of them backed away. Out on the street, they heard the deputy calling in on his car radio to the dispatcher. The red light stopped flashing while he waited for the response. It came crackling across the radio, and when he responded: “Ten-four,” it flashed again.

“It’s no bomb,” said Vasquez, reaching for it.

Johansen frowned down at her and the device. She glanced back and up at him. There he was, hovering over her protectively again, she smiled to herself as she peered at the little box in her hand. It was about the size of a pager.

“It’s too small to be a bomb,” she said. “Besides, I think it’s just here to detect police radio transmissions. To detect us.”

She flipped it over and could clearly see the batteries and the circuitry. “See this? Someone has built this thing with parts of a radio receiver and a pager.”

“Vance?”

“Maybe, I don’t know,” she said. “But it seems unlike Vance. This whole thing does. Maybe we should be looking for a third party.”

“Like who?”

“Well, where have we seen a mess like this before?” she asked. “Who is the type to make gizmos?”

“That Nog guy?” suggested Johansen, wrinkling his nose as if catching wind of something bad.

Vasquez turned back to the gizmo. “A third party. Someone who could have made that bashing-shooting mystery at the lab make sense.”

“Let’s hit the neighborhood kids and see what they know.”

She nodded and followed, pocketing the gizmo.

“You took your time in getting here,” said Ingles. He turned around and faced Ray with a knowing smile. “I was beginning to suspect the police had caught up with you after all.”

Ray kept the gun leveled. He wondered if he would shoot Ingles today. Perhaps in the next ten minutes. He felt there was a very good chance that he would. It was a cold thought. He knew he was ready to do it. The very smugness of the man, that was enough of a reason.

“Why did you do it, Ingles?” he asked.

“Why? Why did I do what? I’m not the one the police are after, Vance.”

Ray was almost beyond words. He drew in a breath, and remembered why he was here. “Who else is here?”

“No one,” said Ingles. “I assure you, we are quite alone. Ah! You are wondering about the two cups. The second is for you.”

If it had been anyone else, Ray would have thought he was lying. But Ingles always made an art of such things. “Into the other room,” he ordered.

Taking both teacups with him, Ingles walked calmly into the living room. Ray followed, careful not to get too close. He checked every direction as he walked through the entryway into the living room. At any moment he expected Nog or Agent Vasquez or some other accomplice to show up and bash him again.

The living room was decorated with ducks. Mallards, mostly, in many forms. There were duck-images woven into the couch upholstery amid patterns of cattails and ponds. The wallpaper boasted of more ducks. Strewn about the room and the walls were the heads and bodies of more ducks: some were plastic, some porcelain, others were real, stuffed corpses. One green-headed corpse eyed him with black beads from its perch on top of the big-screen TV.

“Have a seat,” said Ingles, setting the teacups on either side of the coffee table. He placed cork coasters under each of the cups. In between them sat a porcelain coaster holder with a proud mallard’s head on it.

Ray remained standing. “I want to know where my son is. I want to know now. If you bullshit me, I’ll shoot you.”

“Well, well,” said Ingles, leaning back on the couch with his cup. He spooned in two cubes of white sugar from a jar on the table. The jar was hand-painted with a pond scene. “This stance is a trifle more aggressive than I had hoped for. Don’t you want to know what this is all about?”

“I only want to know about my kid.”

“No, no. You want more than that,” said Ingles, calmly stirring sugar into his tea. “You want to know about Sarah, and the fate of the internet.”

Ray thought about smashing the gun into his face. He almost did it. He held back, deciding that since Ingles was in a talking mood, he should let him talk.

“You always loved to talk, Ingles, so talk.”

“That little bit about Sarah surprised you, did it?”

“No,” said Ray in a dead voice. By now, he had figured she was involved somehow. He kept pushing that thought away. Justin came first. But it was hard not be curious.

Briefly, Ingles explained his love for Ray’s wife. It had been a lingering thing for him, Ray gathered. Ray stood silently the entire time. He was relieved to learn she had not been cheating on him. At least, not since they were married. It still hurt, somehow, despite everything.

“So for that, you burned down the net and pinned it on me?” asked Ray giving a bemused snort. “You are crazier than I would have believed.”

Ingles waved his words away. “No, no. I’m destroying the net because I hate it. I pinned it on you, however, because I hate you. Some people decide to go out by taking a gun to work. This is simply my way. I think if a man is going to make his mark on this world, he might as well make an impressive one. Don’t you agree?”

“So, why do you hate the net?”

Ingles frowned and steepled his fingers. “You remember that old joke about a million monkeys and a million typewriters eventually reproducing the works of Shakespeare?”

Ray nodded. He eyed the clock and wondered if Ingles was stalling. Could this all be bullshit to waste time? Justin wasn’t getting saved with all this. He had to either call the cops in, or get something useful out of Ingles. He checked the gun again, and it was loaded. The little button showed red, meaning the safety was off.

“That’s what the net is, Ray. Don’t you see? It is our new Tower of Babel. It’s destroying the works of real value by burying them in a billion videos of cats on toilets and nude women doing mirror-shots. If there is another Shakespeare out there today, no one will ever know it. That’s why I hate the net.”

“Okay, I get it, you are an elitist dick,” Ray said, “but I’m done listening. You are going to lead me to my kid. Now.”

“Look Ray,” began Ingles in the slightly patronizing voice that he reserved for students who complained about their poor grades. He put down his tea cup. “Let’s put our cards on the table. Or rather, I will, because you don’t have any.”

Ray breathed deeply, trying to clear the rage from his mind. Ingles simply wouldn’t give up on bantering. Ray believed that if he had simply shot him, the man would still be admonishing him even now.

With a smooth motion, Ray aimed the gun at the TV set and fired. It imploded nicely. Shards of glass and plastic shot out in a flash of sparks. A few of them sprayed far enough to leave glittering chips on the coffee table.

“I always wanted to do that,” Ray said, “and now I know that this thing works.” He leveled the gun on Ingles’ chest again. “Talk,” he repeated.

Ingles didn’t look up, but Ray could tell he was rattled. It felt great to do something the bastard hadn’t calculated an hour ago.

“You are trying to convince me that you will kill me if I don’t help you,” said Ingles. His tone was no longer patronizing, it had shifted into his reasoning, philosophizing mode. “But what if I can’t help you? What if I don’t care about dying? How will that help Justin? Another murder on the list?” he shook his head and took a sip. “No, another murder makes no sense.”

“You’re logic is flawed, Ingles,” said Ray, enjoying the raised eyebrows this evoked, “I didn’t say I would kill you. There are six more bullets in this gun. They will serve to cause a great deal of pain.”

A look of concern crossed Ingles’ features. Ray grinned upon seeing it. Ingles stirred his tea. “Perhaps we could come to some kind of arrangement, then,” he said.

“Yes, certainly. I’d like to know which foot you use the most, Ingles. The right, I believe? I will be kind then, and begin with your left. Please be so good as to place your left foot on the coffee table.”

Ingles made no move to obey. He frowned and seemed to be thinking.

“Here,” said Ray, pulling one of Ingles’ ties from the back of an armchair. He tossed it to Ingles, who finally looked up at him. “You will want that to tie off your ankle. I don’t want you bleeding to death on me. I need you lucid and alive.”

Ingles picked up the tie. He dusted some of the glittering chips of glass from the table. “You are proving to be a poor houseguest, Vance.”

Ray laughed. “You have no idea.”

Ingles cocked his head. Ray had the strange feeling that his soul was being examined. Ray realized right then Ingles was a genius, but it didn’t matter. Ray had the gun, and Ray had nothing left to lose.

“You’ve changed,” said Ingles at last. “I suppose I should have foreseen that.”

“Correct on both counts.”

“I’ll strike a bargain with you, Ray. I don’t know exactly where your son is at the moment, but I can get that information.”

Ray gripped and regripped the pistol. He felt a new tickle of sweat under his arms. “You’re saying that he is definitely alive?”

Ingles looked him in the eye. He inclined his head in a faint nod. Ray couldn’t tell whether or not he was lying.

“You’ve already killed Brenda, so why not Justin?”

“Saying, for an absurd moment, that I was a murderer, what would stop any man from committing more such crimes?” he asked rhetorically. “Bodies. Human bodies are incredibly hard to rid oneself of, Ray. People have buried them, dropped them into rivers, they’ve slathered them in concrete and even fed them into wood-chippers. But they are often unsuccessful in hiding them. Oh, for a few years, perhaps, but not forever. I’m a meticulous man and such loose details would be intolerable.”

“What about Brenda then?”

Ingles snorted. “ You killed Brenda, Ray. And every court and cop in the land knows it by now. Why, you’re brandishing the murder weapon even now! If you hadn’t shot out my set, I could have shown you your own unsmiling, murderer’s face on CNN.”

“How exactly would do you propose to free my son then?”

“I will anonymously e-mail his location to you later today. That will give me time for other… priorities.”

“How can I trust you?”

“You can’t. You can only trust logic, which as you know, I will follow implicitly. It is a trade, Vance. You will take the fall for the virus and Brenda. There’s nothing you can do about that now, anyway. In turn for this service, I will arrange to release your son unharmed.”

“Why would you keep your part of the bargain?”

“As I said, Vance: Bodies. I have no interest in becoming a murderer in the eyes of the state. There is no reason for me to kill your son. Therefore, I won’t do it.”

“So I’m supposed to just give myself up, is that it?”

“Exactly. If you had been caught and put up on charges earlier, your son would have been freed by now.”

Ray and Ingles eyed one another for some time. Finally, Ray shook his head. “If it was anyone else, I might do it,” he said, “but I simply don’t trust you.”

Ingles pursed his lips. He nodded. Moving slowly, he took a last sip from his cup before placing it back on its coaster. Then he removed his left shoe and sock, and placed his bare foot on the coffee table.

“Let’s get on with it, then,” Ingles said, tying his tie around his lower calf.

“You have no better offer?”

“No. As I said, I don’t have the information you request as yet. If you are hell-bent on adding to your list of crimes, I had best cooperate.”

“You think that I’m bluffing, don’t you?”

“I sincerely hope so, but in any case, I have no other options.”

Ray stepped forward and aimed the pistol at his bare foot. He noted that Ingles’ big toe was actually shorter than the next one in line. Some part of his mind wondered vaguely if that particular genetic trait was recessive or dominant.

He moved even closer and sat down on the loveseat opposite Ingles. He placed the muzzle of the pistol within inches of Ingles’ foot. He glanced up and noted that Ingles watched the muzzle too, with the fascination of a petshop rat watching an approaching snake.

Then there was a sound behind him. Before Ray could turn around, someone pushed something cold under his jawbone on the right side of his neck.

“Hold it right there, cowboy,” said a stinking cloud of breath. “I’ve got a hangover, so don’t go and make this my first Murder One.”

Ray froze. “I’ll shoot him,” he said flatly.

“Go ‘head,” chuckled Spurlock. “But you’ll have to take a number, cause old Santa-Frigger here is about to answer to me, too.”

Ray blinked and breathed quickly, his mind freezing over. What should he do?

“Blow a few toes off, if you’re in the mood!” urged Spurlock, ramming the pistol harder into Ray’s throat. “I won’t stop you. But don’t kill him, ‘cause he knows things that both of us want to learn.”

Ray glanced up at Ingles. He still seemed fascinated by the muzzle pressed against his flesh. Ray considered it. This was his chance to hurt this man who had caused him such grief. Quite possibly, he would never get another chance.

The pink bulbs of flesh rested against the muzzle. They seemed so soft against the black metal.

“I’ve already done it, Ray,” said Ingles quietly. “I’ve already sent the e-mail message. However, now that Mr. Spurlock has joined us, I doubt that it will matter.”

Spurlock jostled Ray as he moved to gain a better hold on him. The pistol under his neck slid down to his larynx. The 9mm went off in Ray’s hand. A wet, red spray hit Ingles’ pants.

“Ha!” shouted Spurlock. He grabbed Ray’s hair in a hard fist. “Now drop it, boy! You had your fun!”

Ray watched Ingles crumple into a ball on the couch. He dropped the gun.

Spurlock twisted his head around by his hair. Standing behind the couch, he leered down at him. “You got balls! I’ll say that for you, Vance!” he laughed. “You blew two of this fucker’s toes clean off!”

Then he brought his pistol down on Ray’s head. Methodically, he pistol-whipped him. Ray lost consciousness as the third blow faded into the fourth.

As he passed into oblivion, he realized that today was Justin’s birthday. How odd, he thought hazily, that he remembered only now.

… 27 Hours and Counting…

Justin celebrated his birthday alone. He did it by pretending the buried van was a submarine and the white pipe was his periscope. For a short time, the game kept his mind off of his predicament. All too soon, however, he found he was unable to ignore the dark, dank prison he was trapped in. He sighed and looked around his tiny world. He thought that he really should be doing something for himself, instead of waiting for others to do it for him; his mother always told him that. But what to do?

He thought about the trip they had taken to the primitive campsites around Donner Pass last summer. There had been no toilets there, either. His father had set up a small shovel with a roll of toilet paper slipped down over the handle. The idea was to go off into the trees and dig a hole when you had to go. Deciding that was a good idea, he set up one corner of the van with a pile of loose, sandy earth. That would serve him for a catbox, of sorts. The idea made him giggle in the darkness. His food he placed in an empty box at the opposite corner of the van, far from his sand pile. He didn’t eat all his food at once, either, although he was ravenously hungry. Instead, he ate only half of the remaining cheetos and drank six swallows of water.

It was hot up above, he could feel it in the fresh air that came down the pipe, but it stayed cool down in the darkness. He thought about it, and decided that all in all, he liked being down in the van more than being on the highway with Spurlock. At first, he had been scared of the dark, but then his eyes had adjusted to the gloom. Now the circle of light at the bottom of the pipe seemed like a glaring beacon from another world. At times, he felt he was suffocating. To relieve the feeling, he laid down under the bottom of the long pipe and breathed in the infrequent puffs of air from the surface. Occasionally, the earth that entombed him shifted, sending a cascade of pebbles and sand skittering down the skin of the van and sifting into his hair. He had already become accustomed to that, too.

The only thing that worried him now was his lack of food and water. Instinctively, his young mind knew he needed a supply of both. But how to get them?

He raised hunger-sunken eyes to the pipe in the ceiling. Everything he needed was out there, somewhere. Freedom, his mother and father, all the food and soda he wanted, it was all above him.

He picked up the coffee can, dumping its load of stale cigarette butts onto his cat box pile. He looked up the pipe again, listening for any sign of the van man. He heard nothing.

All he had to do, he knew, was dig.

Sarah arrived at Ingles’ place with her heart fluttering in her chest. She stopped in the driveway, climbed out of the car and headed for the back porch. Everyone always went in through the back door, as the house was situated so that the driveway and garage met there. She raised her knuckles to rap on the screen door, but hesitated. She walked inside instead. Calling Robert’s name, then Ray’s, she walked from room to room, terrified of what she might find. In the living room, on that couch with the duck pattern she had always hated, she found splattered blood.

She sucked in her breath and headed back out the way she had come. Agents Vasquez and Johansen met her on the porch.

“How in the hell did he find you?” asked Spurlock. He glanced back into the bed of Ingles’ silver Ford Ranger. There Vance was sprawled, head lolling and thumping loosely when the Ranger bounced over a pothole.

“He’s a gifted man,” said Ingles.

“Huh,” grunted Spurlock, “he’s gonna be the only man in the state gifted with a headache bigger than mine tomorrow. If he sees another tomorrow, that is.”

“He will,” said Ingles firmly.

Spurlock glanced at him. He had already taken a strong dislike to the cocky bastard, and he had only just met him in person. He was even worse in person than on the phone. Spurlock had always disliked foppish, over-educated types that figured they were the only ones in the world with any brains. He figured he could probably shark his weight in pants off these snooty university-types, given the chance.

“Just give him to me, with transportation, and I know people who will take care of the rest,” he repeated. He knew people who specialized on making people disappear in L.A. They would have preferred the boy, but that was a done deal now.

Ingles made no response.

“What are you planning?” Spurlock asked again. As he asked, he reached into his front jeans pocket and touched his little metal squirt gun. He wondered if he would ever do anything more than beat peoples’ heads in with it.

“You’ll see,” said Ingles in that maddening tone of his. “There, it’s right up ahead.”

They were barreling along through the almond orchards. Off to the left of the dirt track (Spurlock hardly considered it a road) was a canal. The canal had sun-bleached concrete walls and a slimy trickle of water at the bottom. Spurlock looked ahead, and spotted a small building of concrete blocks. It sat near the canal and had thick rusted pipes that spread out from it like tree roots.

“It’s a pump house,” explained Ingles, seeing his blank look.

“I know what the friggin’ thing is.”

Ingles shrugged.

“I saved your ass back there, you know,” Spurlock told him. “Or rather, the rest of your toes.”

“I believe I’ve already expressed my gratitude in that regard.”

“Gee, fucking thanks a fucking lot,” snapped Spurlock. “I want that locker number, not a pat on the head, man.”

“As I said,” Ingles replied evenly, “we’ll discuss that when we’ve solved the current crisis.”

“He’s not my problem.”

“Oh no, you are quite incorrect there, my friend. He is your biggest problem. And mine.”

“Crazy fucker,” muttered Spurlock. Even he wasn’t sure whether he meant Ingles or Vance. Quite possibly, he thought to himself, he meant both of them.

Ingles squealed the Ranger’s brakes to a bumpy stop. He got out and limped to the pump house door. Somehow, he had quickly stopped the bleeding and even managed to get a shoe over his bloody bandaged foot. Spurlock watched him work on the rusty padlock. As soon as his back was turned, Spurlock automatically checked the ignition. The keys were gone.

As if in answer to Spurlock’s silent observation, Ingles waved the jingling keys over his shoulder at him. “Need them for the lock,” he said.

“Crazy psychic bastard,” muttered Spurlock. He hated when Ingles did shit like that, predicting your thoughts and actions. It was a good trick, but it got old fast. It made you want to surprise him somehow.

Ingles disappeared inside the pump house. Spurlock had worked in such places, and knew that inside were exposed heavy voltage lines. They ran these pumps on 440 volts AC, which was a lot of power. They could fry a man right down to his boot-stumps in a few minutes. He hoped Ingles, for all his brains, would make a mistake in there. While he waited, he climbed out of the truck and eyed Vance. Bruised, but alive. Murder One had, as yet, been avoided. But then, the day was young.

Soon Ingles came out with three huge rolls of silvery duct tape.

“What’s that-” began Spurlock, then he got it. “Ah, I see you are a man of learning. We’re gonna gift-wrap him! My buds in L.A. will like that. The Arabs do this all the time in Israel, you know.”

Ingles gave him a questioning glance, as if surprised that Spurlock knew there were people called Arabs and such a place as Israel. Spurlock ignored the look.

Quickly, they set to work taping up Vance. Soon, he looked like a silver mummy.

… 26 Hours and Counting…

“And what are you doing here, Sarah?” asked Agent Vasquez. Sarah looked at her with red-rimmed eyes. Tears ran down her face.

“One of them must be dead,” she said. She pointed in to the living room at the blood-splattered couch.

Vasquez pushed past her and examined the couch. Johansen stood near her, watching.

“It’s fresh. Tacky, but not dry yet. It’s not my field, but this can’t be more than an hour old.”

“Any sign of the cause?” asked Johansen. He stood watchfully near Sarah. He made it look innocent, but Vasquez could tell by the tension in his shoulders that he was keeping a tight eye on her. Vasquez smiled to herself as she continued to examine the couch. He was always the watchdog.

“Yes,” she said. “There appears to be a hole in the cushion. It goes right through into the wall behind the couch. It’s got to be a bullet hole.”

Sarah fell back against the kitchen wall and closed her eyes. “What’s happening?” she asked. “My whole life is falling apart. Can’t you people do anything but follow the trail? Can’t you stop anything?”

Vasquez approached her. “It’s time that you helped us too, Sarah,” she said. “What more do you know?”

“I know that Ray believed Ingles is the one. And I think he’s right.”

“The one?” asked Johansen. “The one what?”

“The one who kidnapped Justin. The one who released the virus and made it all seem like Ray did it.”

“And what about Brenda,” he asked.

“That too.”

“Hmm,” said Johansen. He arched his eyebrows. “It all seems a bit easy to blame someone else without any proof of anything.”

“Well what about this blood?” she demanded. “Here is some more evidence of violence.”

“All we know is that everywhere your husband goes crimes keep happening.”

Sarah dropped her face and bit her lip. Her hair hung in her eyes. Vasquez gestured to Johansen that he should get lost.

“I’ll go outside and look around,” he said, he caught her eye and gave her a look that said he didn’t think the woman-to-woman chat was going to fix anything. Vasquez just repeated her get lost hand-motion. He let the porch screendoor slam behind him.

“What else is up, Sarah? Why are you so sure that Ray is right about Ingles?”

“Because we had an affair. Ingles and I, I mean.”

Vasquez crossed her arms and nodded. Sarah looked up and then quickly dropped her eyes to the floor again. Vasquez waited, knowing that often the best way to get information was to simply listen.

“It was a short thing, a fling, I suppose people might call it.”

“When?”

“Before Ray and I married. Almost eight years ago now.”

“Nothing happened while you were married?”

“No, he tried to communicate for awhile, sent flowers, left notes on my car. But we never saw each other.”

“Sounds like old news. So why would they be ready to kill over it?”

“Robert,” she snuffled, dug a Kleenex out of her purse, then continued, “I mean Ingles-he got all weird about it. He freaked out and scared me, that’s partly why I dropped him. Besides, things became more serious with Ray then.”

“Were you ever seeing them both at the same time?”

Sarah hung her head. Her pretty hair hid her face. “It ended sometime after Ray and I got engaged.”

Vasquez nodded. She toed the floor between them. “So, you left him for Ray.”

Sarah nodded.

“Does Ray know any of this?”

“No. At least, I don’t think so.”

“I wish you had told us this earlier, but I’m glad you did now, at least,” said Vasquez. She walked over to the stove and touched the teapot that sat there. It was still warm.

Johansen came back in. “I’ve got the sheriff’s unit on the way to check out the bloodstains and the bullet hole. I can’t find any sign of a struggle outside. All the cars are gone and everything looks peaceful.”

He looked from one to the other of them. “Did I miss something?”

“I’ll tell you later,” said Vasquez.

Out in the orchard, less than a mile from the house, Spurlock and Ingles worked to rid themselves of Ray.

“All right, now we’ve got him all trussed up like a chicken,” said Spurlock. He laughed. “A big, foil-wrapped chicken. Now what?”

“We’ll put him back in the pickup and cart him away from here,” suggested Ingles.

“But what-” Spurlock began then broke off as a car passed by beyond the almond trees. He watched its blurred shape cautiously. He pointed toward the car. “Is there a road just over there?”

“Yes, but there’s never much traffic,” said Ingles. “It’s a dead end. Only goes down to a few farms and then stops.”

“Okay, back to Vance,” said Spurlock, “I can’t drive him far in the back of this pickup. Even if we cover him, he’ll flop around when he comes to and attract attention. He might even be awake now, faking us. I didn’t hit him that hard.”

“I’ve got a camper shell back in the garage. My plan is to put it on the truck and that should solve the problem.”

Spurlock shook his head again. “No, I don’t think so, I don’t want to go back to the house right now. The place seems too hot to me. I want to get out of here.”

Ingles opened his mouth to continue the argument, but then the big car out on the road came back by again, traveling more slowly this time. It was the same large, white vehicle. Ingles and Spurlock watched it slow to a stop, then begin backing up.

“Cop,” said Spurlock with certainty. “C’mon, let’s get King Tut here into the back.” Heaving together, they lifted Vance over the edge and rolled him into the bed of the truck. Ingles limped into the driver’s seat and Spurlock scrambled into the cab on the passenger side.

“Give you a dollar to a pound of shit that he’s comin’ down this dirt track of yours to see what we’re up to. Told you this place was too fucking hot to hang around.”

Ingles didn’t bother to argue, but rather fired up the Ranger and ground the gears. Every time he shifted, more sweat popped up on his forehead. He pulled the Ranger off the canal bank and bounced down into the green gloom of the almond trees. Spurlock watched him and he knew something about wounds. That foot was going to get worse. It was going to get to where Ingles couldn’t walk and probably couldn’t drive. That meant Ingles was fast becoming useless, as far as Spurlock was concerned.

“I don’t see any lights on it,” said Spurlock, craning his neck to look out the back window.

“Maybe it’s unmarked.”

“He’s coming down the track, I think he’s reached the pump house. Huh.”

“What?”

“The car, it’s a Lincoln. A real big one. They don’t give those to cops.”

Ingles looked at him. “A Lincoln Towncar?”

“Yeah.”

Ingles stomped on the brakes and did a tight U-turn in between the trees. He headed back to the pump house.

“What the hell are you doing?” demanded Spurlock. “It might be FBI or some other kind of Fed.”

By then it was too late, as the guy in the Lincoln had to have seen them by now. Spurlock had visions of Feds and bars and filthy toilets without lids. The Lincoln was trying to turn around, but the trees and the vast, boat-like length of the car were inhibiting him. Sand and gravel spit out from the beneath the car.

“Huh. Looks like he’s trying to run from us. You know this guy, Ingles?”

“Indeed, I do.”

By the time the driver had gotten the car turned around and pointed back toward the main road, the silver Ranger pulled out of the trees and blocked his path. A very surprised John Nogatakei climbed slowly out from behind the wheel of his Lincoln.

Ray awakened groggily. A thousand aches and pains assaulted his senses. The most irritating of which happened to be a left shoulder. It seemed bent and locked in an uncomfortable position, almost dislocated. He squirmed, but was only partly able to relieve the pain. Something resisted his every movement. It was difficult to get air into his lungs, the feeling of suffocation was horrible. It sat on his chest like a living thing. Panic reared its leering head and he had to fight to control himself. He believed for a few moments that he was in a sleeping bag, or perhaps a blanket. But it was much tighter than that. Even his face was wrapped up, leaving only a hole or two over his nostrils and a narrow slit over his right eye. He heard conversation, but couldn’t turn his head toward it.

He lay back, tried to breathe evenly. At least he was still alive. He rolled his one eye this way and that, taking in what he could. He seemed to be laying on hard, ribbed surface under the open sky. He smelled dust, oil and hot engine. The bed of a pickup? He could only guess.

A door crumped. Then second one followed. Ray felt a shimmer run through the truck bed beneath him. “If that’s a cop, he needs to lay off the donuts,” remarked the voice of the man who had pistol-whipped him. What had Ingles called him? Spurlock.

“Ingles, I’m glad I found you,” said Nog’s voice with a nervous laugh. Ray tried not to react. He appeared to have awakened into a meeting of conspirators. Instantly, Ray suspected that Nog had led him into all this. But then, if it had all been a setup, why had Ingles let two of his toes get blown off before calling in Spurlock?

“You know this geek?” demanded Spurlock.

“Indeed. Spurlock, meet John Nogatakei, otherwise known as Nog. Nog, Mr. Spurlock.”

“Who is this guy?” asked Spurlock.

“Nog is the brilliant creator of the virus that started this whole adventure.”

“Then I ought to blow his ugly face off right now,” complained Spurlock. “So Nog, if you’re our buddy, how come you tried to take off when you saw us?”

“I–I wasn’t sure who you were,” stammered Nog. “I came down this back road to avoid running into anyone.”

“Nog, we weren’t to have any further contact,” said Ingles. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

“We have to talk, Ingles,” replied Nog, “privately.”

“What we have to do,” growled Spurlock, “is get the fuck out of Dodge, man!” Ray thought he heard the men grapple one another briefly. There was a scuffling sound in the dirt and someone fell against the side of the pickup, making it rock on its springs.

Nog’s voice came next, and it sounded closer and higher pitched, perhaps on the edge of panic. Ray surmised that Spurlock had grabbed him and thrown him against the pickup.

“Wait a minute, man! I’m on your side! I-” he broke off here as a series of thudding sounds commenced. Nog shrieked and Ray quailed as a shadow loomed over his limited field of vision. Nog’s face, twisted in pain, doubled over the side of the pickup bed. Nog and he made eye contact-Ray’s one wide, staring eye meeting Nog’s own grimacing glance. Nog registered the shock of recognition, then pain as more blows sounded behind him.

“I’ll find your kidneys in all this blubber somewhere, punk,” growled Spurlock.

“That’s quite enough, Mr. Spurlock,” said Ingles.

“Well, what the fuck are we supposed to do with this whale? For all we know he’s just led the posse right to us! We’ve got to get out of here, man!”

“Beating our co-conspirator serves no purpose, Mr. Spurlock,” said Ingles. “He has after all, provided us with an answer to our dilemma concerning Vance.”

“You mean the Lincoln?”

“Precisely. That trunk will provide ample room for transporting our mummified cargo.”

“Huh,” said Spurlock. “I suppose you’re right, but I still don’t trust this frigging nerd.”There came another thump that shivered the truck again. Nog lurched in pain and Ray figured he had just been kicked in the rear. Ray realized right then that Nog must have come back to look for him. He must have wondered what had happened. He felt a pang of regret for Nog’s predicament, despite everything.

More sounds of doors crumping open and closed came to Ray. Nog looked down at him. Ray watched the man worry at his tongue, and somehow, this time, the sight didn’t sicken him.

“I’m sorry, Vance,” Nog whispered.

Ray blinked his eye. It was all he could do to respond.

Nog looked over his shoulder, then back down at Ray. “I’ll do what I can,” he hissed.

Then he was gone, and all Ray could see was the blue sky with drifting clouds of gray and white.

… 25 Hours and Counting..

Spurlock and Ingles had no sooner loaded Vance into the trunk of the Lincoln and slammed down the lid than they heard the big car thrum into life.

“What the fu-?” demanded Spurlock, but his voice was drowned out by the roar of the big white car’s engine. It spit a cloud of dust and gravel into their legs and half-bounced, half-rolled off the canal embankment.

“He’s running!” shouted Ingles as he limped for the open door of the Ranger. As Nog skimmed past the pickup, the Lincoln scraped the rear bumper with a screech of metal on metal. The car plunged into the almond trees like a submerging whale.

Ingles had the pickup going in seconds. He almost backed over Spurlock, who grabbed the open passenger door as it flew by and swung himself into the cab.

“I’m gonna kill that fat bastard!” he screamed at Ingles. “Don’t even get in my way this time!”

Ingles saved his breath for driving. He barely missed a thick black trunk as he swung the Ranger around and popped it into second. They both rammed their heads into the ceiling as he revved it over the uneven ground.

“Get out that popgun of yours,” suggested Ingles.

“I can’t hit anything from a distance,” shouted back Spurlock.

“Just try to nail a tire when we catch up. He can’t outrun us on rough ground.”

Spurlock nodded and rolled down his window. He slipped his pistol into his hand.

Nog surprised them all, however, by pulling a U-turn in the middle of the orchard. He chose a spot for the manuever where three trees were missing. Only dark wounds showed where the trees had been uprooted and removed like rotten teeth. The open sky showed above; a brief streak of bright blue that tore through the otherwise seamless green canopy.

“A storm blew those out last winter,” remarked Ingles unconcernedly, even as he hand-over-hand whipped the steering wheel around and back again. Spurlock frowned at him, unsure how he could be so cool in such a situation.

“He’s trying to get back to the main road, where he can pour it on,” shouted Spurlock.

The chase doubled back to the canal embankment. It was there that Nog made a fatal error. He tried to cut a sharp turn just as he crested the embankment. The car lurched up and veered right, toward the main road, but didn’t make the turn. Instead, it slid sideways toward the canal and over the edge. The big white Lincoln rolled over like a dying whale and crashed down into the slime and filth at the bottom of the concrete walls.

Ingles and Spurlock pulled up in the Ranger and walked to the edge.

“He’s been thrown out and crushed,” said Spurlock, panting, “smashed like a bug under that big boat. Splat! Ha! Ha! Game over, Nog!”

“Should have worn his seatbelt,” commented Ingles. The two of them returned to the idling Ranger and climbed in.

“What now?”asked Spurlock.

“It seems that Nog has mistakenly handed us a golden opportunity.”

“How’s that?”

“He had written a virus, which Vance discovered,” began Ingles with the air of one relating a news story. “Upon being confronted, Nog struck Vance unconscious, taped him up and prepared to flee the area. Unfortunately, he took a bad turn into the canal.”

“What about Vance? He’s probably alive in there.”

“Possibly, but not for long.”

“Are you saying you want me to pop him?” asked Spurlock, hefting his pistol doubtfully.

“No, no. Bullet wounds are too hard to explain. I was thinking of the irrigation of the local fields. If I, or another local grower, were to place an order for water tonight…”

“Ha! He’ll drown in that trunk like a boxed rat!”

“Exactly,” said Ingles. He put the truck in gear and they headed for the main road.

When they reached it and began driving, Spurlock heaved a sigh and began thinking. His head started hurting again, worse than before. Coming down from an adrenalin rush left him low again, lower than ever.

“Shit,” he said, pushing his thumb into him temples, then against his brow.

He glanced over at Ingles. The guy was a cool customer, there was no doubt of it. He was sweating and pale and everytime he worked the clutch pedal with his damaged foot, he winced, but otherwise you would never know the guy was in agony. Spurlock knew from experience that wounds always got worse when they had enough time to swell up and throb.

“Where are we headed now?” Spurlock asked.

“I plan to drop you at the bus station with enough cash to make it out of town.”

Spurlock blinked back his pounding head and tried to think. “Okay, what about my money? Give me the locker number.”

Ingles inclined his head. “Locker number 4393,” he said evenly. He passed over a key with an orange plastic handle on it. Stamped on the key were the digits 4393.

Spurlock looked at it, then slid his eyes back to Ingles. “Where are you headed?”

“The Sacramento airport, of course. Delta flight 953 to Salt Lake City is waiting for me.”

Spurlock nodded. “You’re sure that this key goes to airport lockers in San Fran?”

“American Airlines terminal, lower level,” said Ingles.

“How ‘bout you drop me off in San Fran, and maybe even come in with me to find the locker?”

Ingles shook his head. “Your paranoia is admirable, sir, but I don’t have the time. My flight is leaving. As it is, I need to see a doctor friend about this foot of mine.”

Spurlock looked down at the foot. A thread of dark blood had oozed out of the shoe to stain the truck’s dusty carpet.

“Oh yeah,” he said, “You mean this foot?”Then with a quick motion he reached out and brought his boot heel down on Ingles toes. Or rather, where his toes had been.

Ingles whooped and the car lurched wildly. Spurlock was ready for that. He grabbed the wheel and kept the truck on the road.

He threw the locker key at Ingles and shoved the gun into the man’s cheek. “Why are you trying to fuck me, man?”

Ingles gargled and blinked, still recovering from the shock of pain.

“Why? Huh? What is this, everybody hump Spurlock week?” he demanded. His head throbbed, but the burning almost felt good.

“What is the — ” croaked out Ingles.

“What’s the matter?” asked Spurlock, “I’ll tell you what the fucking matter is, you piece of shit! There is no locker 4393 at that airport. I checked ahead of time.”

“How do you know-” began Ingles.

Spurlock rammed the gun harder against the other’s head. Ingles was pushed against the truck’s doorframe.

“Because I called them, you asshole! I wanted to know if you were gonna pull any funny shit. They use a five-digit code, with a letter. Where’s this key from, Ingles? Huh? Tell me, I really want to know.”

Ingles glanced at him over the gun without moving his head. Spurlock saw something in his eyes, something that wasn’t quite right. They had eye contact for only a half-second, but Spurlock knew he was in there, still scheming.

The truck, in the meantime had rolled almost to a halt. Ingles pulled it out of gear to keep the engine from dying. He grimaced as he used his injured foot.

“It’s a locker from a ski resort. Dodge Ridge, I believe. It’s up in the Sierras on highway forty-nine.”

“I don’t give a shit where it is!” roared Spurlock. “Where is my DAMNED MONEY?”

Ingles put the car painfully into gear again, then soon shifted into second. “There isn’t any money.”

It was Spurlock’s turn to register shock. “What?” he laughed in disbelief.

“There never was. I’ve been a bit strapped lately, which is partly why I did this whole operation. Primarily, however, I did it all for love,” Ingles snorted. “I suppose it all seems foolish now. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

Spurlock’s mouth sagged. “You did it all for love?” he echoed in disbelief. “You’re telling me you’re some kind of college faggot with a thing for some freshman boy you can’t have? What, did you have a boner for Nog? What man? Tell me before I blow you away.”

“I assure you, she was female and quite attractive,” replied Ingles. He shifted smoothly into third.

“Stop the truck, man,” Spurlock ordered.

Ingles shifted into fourth.

“Stop the fucking truck man, before I blow your brains out!”

Ingles floored the truck. The engine revved and whined in protest. He turned to Spurlock. “Jump now, or I’ll kill us both,” he said evenly.

“What?” screamed Spurlock. He grappled the wheel, but he didn’t have the leverage, and Ingles just kept accelerating. He tried to force it out of gear, but without the clutch being in, the transmission held firm. He shoved the gun into Ingles’ face.

“Man, I don’t want to do this,” said Spurlock. Ingles looked at him and then back at the road.

“See that telephone pole down the road?” Ingles asked him coolly. “We’re going to hit that in about thirty seconds.”

Hating himself for it, Spurlock squinted through the windshield. The telephone pole grew perceptibly on the horizon. He glanced at the speedometer. They were pushing ninety. A stop sign came and went in a blur. Someone in another pickup honked at them, but it was only a flash of sound and gone.

“Slow down,” said Spurlock. “I can’t jump at ninety.”

Ingles slowed to fifty, but still the telephone pole continued to loom. “That’s it,” he said flatly. “Jump now or die with me.”

Spurlock looked at him. He meant it, that was clear. He thought of bashing him with the pistol, but the rigid way he held the wheel he could swerve hard and roll them right over.

“You dumb fucker,” he said.

Ingles looked at him, and their eyes met a second time. Both of them knew the truth in that moment.

Spurlock pulled the trigger.

Squirt-squirt-squirt.

… 24 Hours and Counting…

At the bottom of a shallow ravine, a great white mechanical whale lay upside down in a patch of crushed sagebrush. The tires were flat and the roof had sunken as if a giant had sat upon it. Silent and unmoving, Nog’s body stretched out from beneath the driver’s side. His black hair fluttered in the breeze that ran down the canal.

Locked inside the trunk of the car, Ray wondered how hot it would get by noon the next day. It was broiling hot now, and he could tell by the dimming light that leaked through the cracks into his metal tomb that it was evening outside. Soon, it would be dark, and the odds of anyone spotting the wreck would drop to almost nil.

His chances of getting out by himself he calculated at precisely zero. The car was a new model Lincoln, but still made with real steel, not the flimsy aluminum of most econoboxes that dented when you kneed the door shut. Not only was he locked upside down in a steel box that could have withstood a determined attack with a crowbar, but he was mummified with duct tape. The bastards had taken no chances with him. He could hardly move. He knew he must have looked like a big silver slug, wrapped from head to foot in fresh tape. Parts of him were going numb and he knew he might never feel with those nerves again. Vaguely, he wondered how many rolls it had taken the pricks to cover him.

Lying there in the darkness, breathing through the slits they had left over his nostrils and mouth, there was a lot of time for thinking. Vance wondered what would get him: would he suffocate first, or die of heatstroke, or possibly dehydration? He recalled the cadet some years back who had been getting a rough hazing and had died in the process, drowning in his own blood because his “buddies” had done a lousy job while gagging him. At least drowning would have been relatively quick.

He snaked out his tongue to wet and push back the edges of the tape. They had softened and frayed a bit, but it might take a week to lick his way out. This thought made him chuckle, which kicked up dust that had sifted into the trunk. The dust made him sneeze, and he began to choke. He became alarmed, and alarm almost shifted into panic. Breath was life, however slim his odds were now. He fought for calm, and controlled his body by force of will. Two more desperate urges wracked him to sneeze, one after the other, but he resisted. He simply refused to die from such an absurd cause.

When he had regained his composure he relaxed somewhat. He tried to sleep, figuring he would last longer that way, should he later get lucky enough to be rescued.

It was there, at the very edge of sleep, that he remembered Justin. He had to make it for his son’s sake. At this point, however, he wondered if his son might have fared better than he had. He hoped so. He held back a sob. His welling tears wet the inside of the tape over his eyes and he passed into a hazy form of sleep.

Only two miles away from his trapped father, Justin was hard at work. He had the coffee can in both his grimy hands. He tossed another load of soft sandy earth onto the growing pile as he continued working. The start had been easy, all he had needed to do was roll down the passenger side window. Dirt had flooded in, all but burying Justin and the window handle in the first few seconds. Yelping, he had managed to push enough away to keep lowering the window. The gears and glass squeaked and scraped against the rocks and loose earth. More earth flooded in, but finally he thought he had it open far enough to climb out.

Then he had begun the digging. At first, the shaft held. The walls, although only loosely packed, kept their place against his small, filthy hands. Justin’s seven-year-old mind had no more experience with tunneling than any kid who had dug in the neighborhood sandbox at the park. He knew enough to watch out for cat lumps, and he knew that the further down you dug the wetter and harder the dirt became. But Justin knew nothing of cave-ins. He had no experience with deep holes, ones that require bracing and careful progress.

Already, he was thinking of which toys he would play with first when he got home. Probably his Micro Machines, he figured. He missed them the most. He could have really used a few of them down here to keep him company.

Each coffee-can load of dirt that he scooped up raised his spirits. At first he counted them, but soon he lost track. The mound of earth on the floor of the van just grew and grew. Dirt now filled the front cab area of the van and just kept going.

Soon, he had to climb right out of the window and into the dark space he had created beyond it to get another scoopful of earth.

It was as he was climbing out the window that the ground gave way. From above, it appeared that a giant gopher had undermined a spot in the orchard. A sudden sinkhole appeared and a great wad of earth sloughed down into the van. Justin was swept with it, a helpless swimmer on a wave of wet sand and rocks.

His head struck the dash and he lost consciousness. The dirt didn’t cover his head, but it did cover his pitiful supply of food and water, and the bottom of the PVC pipe.

Far from freedom, Justin had plunged himself into utter blackness.

… 23 Hours and Counting…

Spurlock had managed to grab hold of the wheel and work the Ranger to a stop after he squirted three rounds into Ingles’ head. That was the only good news of the day, as far as he could tell. He’d dumped the body, but it was only a matter of time. The cops were usually lazy and good-for-nothing, unless it came to uncovering his crimes, he lamented. Then, they were fucking wizards.

“Murder One,” muttered Spurlock as he cruised down a residential street. “I finally did it, I’m in the big time now, and the bastard leaves me out of gas.”

The Ranger’s needle hovered over the E.

“E” is for empty, thought Spurlock. He had to get gas, but he was penniless, and-guess what? That crazy fucker Ingles had not one dime in his bloodstained pockets.

That brought his fortune to exactly one quarter, three dimes and two pennies: fifty-seven cents in all. There were, of course, Ingle’s credit cards. Those he had already ditched miles away from the body. He wanted it to look like a robbery-a robbery and murder that Tom Spurlock hadn’t committed. Using the credit cards had been out of the question from the beginning.

Even the Ranger was very hot, too hot, but he needed wheels to get out of town. This whole thing had gone badly, it had gone so badly that he still didn’t quite believe it. He had come out of a list of crimes and a gauntlet of grim abuses with nothing.

Spotting another likely-looking house, Spurlock pulled the truck over about a hundred yards down the street from the front door and climbed warily out. He didn’t like petty con-jobs like this, but it was all he could think of short of just robbing someone. He walked up to the porch of a fairly new suburban home. The shrubs had hardly had a chance to grow in yet. As he walked up, he tugged his wallet from his back pocket and made an effort to smooth back his unkempt hair. It was still damp from his quick clean-up at the corner gas station restroom. Ingles’ blood had clouded the water as it spiraled down the drain. A fitting end to the bastard, thought Spurlock.

It wasn’t killing Ingles that really bothered him. It was the idea of paying the price for it. America’s prisons were nice places, relatively speaking. Especially in California. Lots of inmates had their own color TVs in their cells and plenty of workout equipment to keep themselves busy. They didn’t take you out and work you to death in the hot sun, either. Folsom did a bit of that, but not most of the others.

No, it wasn’t the prisons themselves that he feared. It was the other inmates. All the TV sets and weights in the world didn’t matter when you were caged with a pack of animals. The inmates were your true jailors and they had their own rules. Very harsh ones.

Even more than the inmates, he feared the ultimate penalty. The big one, the state’s grinning reaper. In California, it was the hiss of gas pellets. He always wondered if people tried to hold their breath to gain a few more seconds of life, or if they welcomed a quick end and just breathed deeply.

He shuddered and was startled as the door opened. He almost couldn’t recall having pressed the doorbell. The woman who answered it was pretty, if a bit on the chunky side. She had a baby on her hip and the clamor of cartoons in the living room behind her suggested that more children were present. She gave Spurlock a wary look.

“Hello ma’am,” he began, grinning, but not so widely as to show his worst teeth. “I’m your neighbor, from just three doors down.” Spurlock waved vaguely behind himself. “I was wondering if you could help me out.”

She tried to smile but it came off as a grimace. “What can I do for you?”

“Lovely kid you’ve got there, ma’am,” he said. “I’m expecting one myself this month. Is it a boy?”

“Yes,” she said, softening a fraction. Spurlock smiled back. Women always went for it when you complemented their brats.

“You see, ma’am, I hate to bother you like this, but I’ve got to pick up my brother and his kid in Livermore. There’s a baseball game there today. And, well anyway, they went off leaving me with an empty tank and no cash. Can you believe it?”

“I see,” she said, stiffening. They always did that as soon as you mentioned cash. A Frisbee lost in the backyard? Sure, no problem. Ten bucks? Different story. Sometimes he thought it was easier to get into a woman’s pants than it was to get a few bucks off her.

“I’m real embarrassed to have to ask like this, ma’am. I just need a small loan, see, until I get back. Just two hours, then you’ll have your money. If you want to ask my mother about it, I could take you over there. She’ll back up my story.” Spurlock didn’t even sweat the ‘meet my mother’ line. When he had first come up with it a couple of years back he had figured on taking them to an empty house where he had previously knocked and play some bit about mom not wanting to get out of bed. These days, he didn’t even worry about it. He had learned that no one wanted to follow you down the street to meet your old mom. They would give you the cash or they wouldn’t, but they wouldn’t follow you down the street.

“I don’t know,” she said.

On cue, he pulled out his wallet and showed it was empty. “See ma’am? If you could see your way to helpin’ your neighbor, I would really appreciate it.”

Reluctantly, she lifted her purse from a side table and slowly dug into it. She shifted the brat’s weight from one hip to the other. Spurlock watched her and fantasized about doing her. It had been quite a while since he had had a nice clean housewife like this one. Too bad he was on the run.

She looked back up at him and she must have seen the leering glint in his eye. She looked flustered. “Here,” she said, shoving a five at him.

Normally, he would have taken it and left. But this was the fifth house he had hit. He needed more than five friggin’ bucks.

He took the five and conjured a look of vast disappointment. He chewed his lower lip. “My truck gets good mileage, ma’am, but there’s no way I can make it to Livermore on a five.”

She was silent and so was he. He didn’t look at her. He let the tension build. She had already sprung for five to get rid of him, so why not ten?

“I’ll have to ask my husband,” she said, “that’s all I have.”She left the door ajar behind her.

Spurlock waited with mild trepidation. He slipped the five into his front pocket and looked back at the Ranger. He thought about bolting, but that might lead to a call to the police. He didn’t need that right now.

Men required a slightly different touch. As the door opened again, he put back his grin and shoved a hearty hand at the guy. He was a fairly big, blond guy in shorts and a tank top. He ignored the offered hand and frowned. Spurlock knew right away he was screwed.

He began his story again, but could tell it wasn’t working. The guy listened in stony silence.

“Look,” Spurlock finally said. “I can tell that I’m bothering you folks and maybe I should just be on my way. I don’t want to be a bad neighbor.”

The blond guy seemed not to hear him. He slowly pulled out his wallet and flipped it open. “So, you’re looking for a little loan, eh?” he said.

Spurlock looked down at the wallet and his heart fell away into his shoes and died there. A big flashy badge all but filled the guy’s wallet. He was a cop, and Spurlock knew he had been caught. Still, the beauty of this scam was that it was very hard to prove any wrong-doing. He took a breath and pasted his smile back into place. He would bluff it through.

“Yes sir, if you could spare a five, that would do it for me. You’ll have it back in two hours-three tops.”

The cop glanced at him as if surprised he was still going for it. The bastard looked a bit off-balance and it made Spurlock sing inside to see it.

“Forget it,” he said, snapping his wallet shut.

So, the prick had been just baiting him. Spurlock nodded and smiled some more. “I’ll be on my way, then. And thanks for your time. I’m sure I’ll see you around soon.”

“Hold it a moment, please,” said the cop.

Right then, Spurlock could see the door of his Ranger. It was just a hundred yard dash away. It seemed like a mile. He kept walking, with a curt wave of the hand over his shoulder. The best was to play that he was a bit pissed and done talking.

“I said hold it a moment, sir,” said the cop. He had followed him out onto the driveway.

Spurlock whirled around and put on a slightly annoyed look. “Yes?”

“I’d like to meet this mother of yours.”

“Why? Look, if you don’t believe me, that’s fine. I’ll have to find some other way to get there. Here, here’s your wife’s money back.”

The cop looked down at the five in mild surprise. For just a second, Spurlock thought that he had him. Then his pig-instinct took back over and he refused the money. “Let’s go meet mom.”

Spurlock looked at him as if he was a nut. “Look man, I’m really in a hurry here. If you don’t want to help me out, then please take back your money and let me find some other way to solve my problem.”

The cop set his jaw. “I don’t buy it. I don’t buy any of it. I don’t recognize you and I know this neighborhood.”

Spurlock laughed in disbelief. “Look man, I’m new here, that’s all. I’m staying with my mom and looking for work, that’s all.”

“Let’s see the address on your ID, then.”

“I told you, man: I’m new here. ”

“I’m off-duty, so I’m going to make a citizen’s arrest here until I can get back up.”

Spurlock argued and reasoned until his throat hurt, but the cop bought none of it. He got the cell phone from his wife’s and called in a car to come pick them up. While they waited Spurlock thought about bashing the guy, but he was pretty tough-looking and he decided that he’d rather take his chances with the system. For exactly this kind of emergency, he had no ID on him, and he had already buried the gun.

With luck, he’d just get released on the street within hours as a transient with a court date for panhandling. Davis was a liberal town. He’d have to trust to his luck.

… 21 Hours and Counting…

“We needed a break, this was a good idea,” sighed Johansen.

Vasquez glanced up at him without moving her head, then returned her attention to the report in her hands. Despite her bad mood, she allowed herself a private smile. Johansen was always complimenting his own ideas. It had been his idea to go to Black Angus for a prime rib dinner and she had consented after token complaints. Underneath it all, of course, she had to admit to herself that he was right. They both needed a break. In police work, you could drive yourself for days and weeks to exhaustion, and it was often counterproductive. Always, she had to remind herself of her instructors’ words in Quantico: “Better to sleep for eight hours and solve the case in one, than to stay up all night and be unable to think at all.”

Around them, the activity in the restaurant was subdued. It was after nine now, and most of the dinner crowd had already left. They sat together in a darkened private booth that would have been romantic if she hadn’t been in such a sour mood. They had lost track of three suspects now-Vance, Ingles and Nog-and still the internet was burning. Johansen ordered two margaritas without asking her if she wanted one. When the drinks arrived, she stared at hers for a moment, then took a gulp. The frozen slush pained her sinuses at first. Then it tasted good.

“This report is grim,” she told him. He watched her expectantly. His margarita was half-gone, but she knew from experience that alcohol had little effect on his bulky body.

She spoke in a hushed tone. “The internet has sustained significant damage. Approximately forty percent of the known servers have suffered some form of attack and it is estimated that most of the rest have a latent form of the virus hiding on disk, waiting to strike.”

Johansen nodded and leaned back a bit in his chair. “It’s like we’re fighting a thousand viruses at once, rather than just the latest one of the month,” he said. His hand slid down to his waist, and-although she couldn’t be sure-probably popped open the top button of his pants. Immediately after this move, he faked a cough and touched his hand to his mouth. There were a lot of large dishes stacked on his side of the table, and he had cleaned them all. Vasquez smiled down at her report.

“Let’s go over tomorrow’s checklist,” she said.

“Again?”

“Again,” she replied firmly.

Nodding, he produced a notepad. Even from across the table, she could see his neat, dark strokes of pen and pencil. The man really knew how to take good notes, and that had always impressed her. Vaguely, she wondered if that made her an obsessive-compulsive. She supposed that it did, but argued with herself that such a trait was often an advantage for a cop.

“Nog has been pinpointed at Brenda’s residence shortly before the police arrived. Witnesses noted his distinctive appearance and his Lincoln Towncar-” Johansen looked up from his notes with a grin, “- a fat guy in a huge white whale of a car must’ve impressed the kids.”

She nodded and smiled vaguely, hinting with the incline of her head that he should keep going. He caught the look and must have realized that she was doing some real thinking, because he snapped back to the notebook and dropped the levity from his voice.

“The presence of the police-band emissions detector-” here he lifted a small black box from his pocket and placed it on the table, “- seems to support the idea that Nog had recently been present,” Johansen paused for a moment to finger the box. “This is a nice piece of homebrew work, the electronics techs told me. It seemed like they were impressed, almost like they wanted to hire this Nog guy when we caught up with him.”

Vasquez nodded. “He’s clearly a genius.”

“It almost lends credibility to Vance’s claims.”

Vasquez looked at him. “You think Nog released the virus?”

“I’m beginning to wonder.”

She nodded. “Pray continue.”

He did, detailing the possible presence of Vance at Brenda’s and ending with their odd collision with Sarah Vance at Ingles place and Ingles’ disappearance.

“We have put an APB out on Ingles now as well, but so far have come up with nothing,” he said, closing the notebook and downing the rest of his margarita. “There’s still no sign of Vance’s kid, either.”

She took another sip of her drink. It was half-gone now, and she was starting to feel the tingling, relaxing effects of the first drink she had had in weeks.

There it was. It was everything and it seemed like a big nothing. She knew now that other teams were on this investigation. There were the national security people, an FBI homicide team and possibly another team from the military. Still, though, she felt the pressure to succeed. It had started out as their case, and they had made progress, but without tangible results. They still had no arrests and they still had done nothing to halt the electronic plague that continued to damage the nation’s newest growth industry.

She closed her eyes and settled back in her chair. She ran the whole story through her head and sought an angle, an answer that might break the case like a magic shoe-size in a Sherlock Holmes story. But there was nothing, or at least she couldn’t see it. She opened her eyes again and found that Johansen watched her intently.

She glanced at him, pursed her lips and shook her head. He sat back in disappointment. He had such faith in her that it hurt to see that she had let him down. She smiled at him. He had actually believed she was about to come up with some stroke of genius, some witty connection that everyone else had missed. Such faith made him more endearing.

She sighed and drank more. The whole thing had grown too big. She had even begun to believe that they themselves were being followed by agents, with orders to jump in when something broke. That was both reassuring and disturbing. It meant the brass trusted them to birddog the quarry, but not to make the collar themselves. She supposed that their superiors were just being cautious, as there was too much at stake to let one team’s pride get in the way.

“You know,” she said, running her finger around the top of her margarita glass and knocking the crust of salt off as she went, “I don’t think we’re going to solve this one tonight.”

He laughed. “In that case, I’ve got just the thing.”

She looked up then, with eyebrows raised. She caught something in his eye-a twinkle you might say, she thought to herself-but then she chided herself for having such ideas. She turned her eyes back down to her drink. Her finger still ran around the top of the glass. It was beginning to make a singing, moaning sound now that she liked.

“Tell me,” she said quietly.

Johansen grinned and opened his mouth, but snapped it shut again as two men appeared at their booth. Their haircuts and their suits said it all: They were government agents, through-and-through. Neither man was smiling.

“Agent Vasquez? Agent Johansen?” asked the taller of the two. He was a black man with a mustache and a set of large rings on his fingers.

“Yes?” Johansen answered. He automatically put his hands on the table and chair back, as if ready to throw himself to his feet.

“I’m Agent Verr out of Virginia,” he said, flashing his ID and badge. “I’m here to tell you that my team is taking over this investigation. Here are my orders, and yours.”

He presented them with piece of paper. Vasquez eyed it, realizing it was a fax, of all things. How many years had it been since she had seen a fax? With the internet problems, they had gone back in time twenty years overnight.

Johansen took the fax somewhat reluctantly. Vasquez followed Verr’s eyes as they swept over the dinner table, pausing at the margaritas and possibly Johansen’s popped-open pants. She felt a flash of hot embarrassment. It was a sickening feeling that she wasn’t used to.

“I would appreciate it if you could provide a briefing in the morning,” continued Verr after a short silence. His eyes ran over the table again and pointedly looked at the drinks. “At say, ten o’clock? We could meet you at the police headquarters.”

“Make it seven,” snapped Vasquez. “We’ll be there.”

Verr pursed his lips and nodded. “Seven it is, then.”He left without offering to shake hands.

“What a prick,” said Vasquez, staring after his back. “He did that just to show us he could.”

“What?”

“Coming in here like that. Showing us that he could find us at any time, like it was nothing for him. He could’ve waited until we reported in tomorrow, but he just couldn’t wait to tell us he had taken away our assignment.”

Johansen sighed. “We just took too long, that’s all. The brass got nervous and decided to make a change. Any change would do, we can’t take it personally.”

“Well, I do,” growled Vasquez.

Johansen read the fax. They both glanced at them and grimaced.

“It’s true. We’re relieved,” said Johansen. “Funny word, that. Relieved. Hmph. More like: ‘found incompetent’, or ‘summarily forgotten’, or ‘discovered to have screwed pooch’.”

Vasquez gulped the last of her drink and sat back in her chair. Maybe the word was right. Maybe it would be a relief to give up on this case. She pursed her lips, not liking the idea. Then she looked back at Johansen and a new idea formed.

“What were you about to suggest before they arrived?” she asked him.

He glanced at her and blinked for a moment in confusion. “Oh, that maybe we should go to the bar for another drink.”

“An excellent suggestion,” she smiled.

His face slowly melted as they eyed one another for several quiet seconds. Then she felt another hot flash of embarrassment over what she was thinking. She got up and headed for the bar. He picked up the bill and followed her.

Events flowed smoothly and naturally for the rest of the evening. First, they had more drinks. They stuck to margaritas, and by the time she had finished her third he was done with his fifth. She didn’t drink much, and as she was small, the effects left her floating somewhere just above the surface of her barstool.

Together, without any planning conversation, they headed across the street to the Ramada where they were currently staying. The flowing river of white headlights and red taillights that formed I-80 looked surreal and almost magical. Johansen stood beside her as they looked down the grassy embankment at the roaring swooshing cars. A breeze came up and ruffled her hair, which had somehow come down and now hung all around her face in a soft circle.

She looked at him, smiled and put her finger to her lips. He smiled back, looking mildly perplexed and curious. She knew this was absolutely not like her, but she didn’t care. She thought that Johansen must be all but baffled at any kind of playfulness, and the thought made her smile.

She took his hand and led him up the concrete steps to her room. After a few seconds of fumbling with the key and giggling, they slipped into the room and shut the door behind them.

In the dark room he reached for the light switch, but she put a hand on his to stop him. At that moment-at that touch-she felt a real electric tingle. It was strong, almost magnetic. There, in the dark, her fingers felt incredibly small and delicate against his blocky hand. She took his hand away from the light switch and guided it up to cup her left breast. That one was slightly larger than her right and she hoped like a high-schooler that he would be impressed by the weight and firmness of it. She could hear his breathing now. It had grown heavy with desire.

Johansen needed no more encouragement. He swept her up for their first kiss. It was hot, wet and suffocatingly long. When it was over, she wondered how they had possibly held out for so many months.

After that, things progressed quickly. Soon he was on the bed with her, and she was glad she was still on the pill, despite nearly a year’s worth of abstinence. As gently and delicately as he could with his great weight and strength, he ravaged her.

They kissed hotly for a time, still saying not a word. It was much better that way, she knew. To hear his voice might ruin everything, might make her freeze up and realize what she was doing, how crazy it was.

She learned that his belly wasn’t flabby. It was as rock-hard and ribbed as his back. Years of habitually working out in the gym had given him a body beneath those ill-fitting suits that was a pleasure to her senses.

When she finally realized that her panties were off and he was entering her, she gave a gasp of surprise and mild pain. He was big, even bigger than she had expected. She was a small woman, and out of practice. She knew that if he thrust with abandon it was going to hurt a lot.

He seemed to sense this and proceeded to move his bulk over her slowly and probed only shallowly at first. Only when she began to moan and clutch at him did he allow himself the luxury of sinking in more deeply.

He came quickly, but she beat him to it. She surprised herself, as she rarely had an orgasm during just straight intercourse without additional stimulation. It felt wonderful.

After he sighed and slid off of her, she spooned herself up against him and finally felt fully relaxed. She grunted as she checked the alarm. It was set for six, which would have to do.

She feared that he would want to begin pillow-talking, that he would want to know what this all meant, and many other questions that she had no answers to. She was greatly relieved when he kept up their pact of silence.

For the first time in years, she fell asleep without fussing with her hair nor brushing her teeth.

Her last thought was of a single word: Relieved.

… 12 Hours and Counting…

The time for “the talk” didn’t come in the morning, either. Sex again, instead. Even before the alarm went off, she found him gently touching her back and leaving tiny cold spots with his kisses. He entered her again and soon she was clutching the sheets and thrusting herself back onto him with an animal rhythm.

He went back to his room later to dress, leaving her only with a long kiss at the door. She smiled after him, letting her head loll to one side. She couldn’t believe a man could be so smart. He had said nothing. Nothing at all. There was simply nothing for her to attach her fears to, nothing to worry about all day. He had voiced no expectations or concerns. The warm glow of the night was complete, and it was up to her to decide when she wanted to talk.

She concluded that the man was a genius. Chuckling to herself as she showered and dressed, she wondered if she might be in love.

After a gulped breakfast, they headed for the police station, not wanting to be late. They beat Verr and his partner by a long shot. At first, she was pleased when they didn’t show up right away. Better that the other team should be late, that gave them an advantage.

By the time the eight o’clock shift of cops arrived and they were still waiting in the conference room, however, she was furious. Uniforms walked by the open door with their coffee and donuts and casually gave them a look of mixed amusement and pity.

She saw two of them nudge one another and rudely point their way. One of them raised his eyebrows as he delivered a punch line. The other guffawed so violently that he coffee dribbled onto his pants. Setting the white Styrofoam cup on a desk, he continued to laugh as he brushed off his pants.

She got up and slammed the conference room door.

“This is intolerable. They plan to screw us good with this one.”

“Yep,” said Johansen. He leaned back in his chair and watched her stalk about the room. She noticed that he was leering and underneath she enjoyed it, but was too pissed off to let that come to the surface.

“What exactly does that relief order say?” she demanded for perhaps the twelfth time in the last hour.

He somehow had managed to keep from becoming ruffled throughout this entire affair. She knew it had a great deal to do with last night, with her. He positively looked like the coyote that had finally caught and eaten that damned road-runner. It both gratified her and slightly irritated her to know this.

“We are summarily relieved of this case,” he greatly paraphrased.

“What case?”

“The location and apprehension of suspects in the release of a new, hitherto unknown virus upon the internet.”

She paced again, nodding. “Okay, okay.”

“Okay what?”

“It didn’t say anything about the missing kid case.”

“So?”

“So they missed the meeting. We’re going to do something,” she said, grabbing up her purse and briefcase.

“What?”

“Screw them instead.”

… 8 Hours and Counting…

Ray knew the end was near when the water entered the trunk. It was cold, but it actually felt good as it soaked his back. He had managed to roll onto his back so that he wouldn’t drowned immediately. He thought seriously about trying to get a drink. He had been raging with thirst all night long, but he dared not turn his face into the water lest he slip and die writhing like a slug that inches too close to the edge of a swimming pool and drowns.

Perhaps, he thought, as the water filled his tiny prison, it would soak into the tape and loosen it somewhat. He didn’t bet on it, though. Duct tape wasn’t made with paper, and the adhesive didn’t loosen immediately either when it came in contact with water. It was designed to hold things together, and it did a damned good job. There were rips in his tape cocoon now, places that he had managed to rub up against sharp edges of the metal trunk, but the tape still held him firmly.

At least the water keeps the dust down, he thought to himself. He wanted to chuckle, but that might be a fatal move.

Lifting his legs together like a mermaid in a bad movie, he kicked the side of the trunk three times. He had found a spot, through a night of experimentation, that was bowed and hollow like a drum. It made a loud sound that probably annoyed a few crows in the orchard, but had little other effect. Still, it was all he could do.

Then he lay back in the cool water that covered much of his body now. His greatest regret was that he had been unable to help his son.

Another few minutes passed. His body grew adjusted to the cool water and he floated in it somewhat. Soon, however, there would be no space to breathe between the surface of the water and the carpeted floor of the overturned Lincoln’s trunk, which now formed the ceiling of his coffin.

He kicked again, and this time the sound was greatly muffled. The water had risen to where it was dampening any sound he could make. That, almost more than anything, made him give up. If no one could possibly hear him, then he was truly doomed.

He listened to the water as it lapped and gurgled over and around the car. Distantly, he could hear the drone of the big pump house up on the bank nearby. It grew even darker in his prison as the light from outside was cut off. He thought it would be even more grim if the water rose just high enough to cut off his air supply-but not enough to drown him. He wondered if he could suck in a breath from the cracks in the wheel wells.

He wanted to do something — anything. Just to wait calmly for death was maddening. He decided to savor his last moments of life with a farewell drink. At least he need not die thirsty. He squirmed to one side a bit and sucked in a refreshing draught of cool, gritty water. It tasted like the coldest beer on the hottest day of his life.

He slipped and went in too deeply. For a panicky second, he became that silver slug, thrashing its last in the swimming pool.

Then he had control of himself again. He grunted and heaved himself safely onto his back again. An absurd rush of pride coursed through him as he licked at his tape-burned lips. He had gotten a drink and managed to cheat death for another few minutes. He felt an odd elation at the success. Even though it was hopeless, he kicked the trunk wall again. The sound was that of a great bell tolling at the bottom of the sea.

When he was done kicking, he lay back in the frothing water, sucking air deeply, but it seemed that he couldn’t get enough. He felt exhausted all of a sudden. Could he be running out of air? Panic gripped him, and he kicked more.

This was it, he felt sure. Things were quieter now, sounds were more muffled. He sensed that the water had crested over the top of the car, that he was surviving in an air pocket that couldn’t last as the water deepened further and the oxygen depleted.

He lost himself to panic for a time. He kicked in a frenzy at the trunk wall. He gasped for air, almost blacked out, then felt sick and faint. He fought not to vomit and drown ignobly in his own puke.

He fell back to rest, at the point of exhaustion. It was then that he noticed the water seemed a bit lower than before. He waited, trying to control his gulping of the air. It was so hard to tell what was going on in his cold dark tomb. Several minutes passed, and then a wonderful thing happened.

The lights went back on in the trunk. Daylight shimmied a finger of greenish, reflective light into the trunk again. He would have whooped if he could have. Then he listened closely, but realized he couldn’t hear the pump anymore. It had been shut off.

He relaxed and all but drifted off into an exhausted slumber. Something kept him awake though, something nagged at him.

What was it?

Then it came to him. Who had shut off the pump?

Adrenalin shot through him. It could be anyone. It could be Ingles, coming back after drowning him to check on the status of the job. It could be Farmer John, just noticing the white Lincoln wallowing in his back forty.

He had to take the chance.

Finding the sweet spot on the trunk wall again, he began to beat it like a drum.

… 7 Hours and Counting…

Ray heard the most lovely of sounds: muffled voices mixed with splashing. Someone was coming. Someone had heard. Would it be Ingles? Would it be Farmer John? He thought of remaining quiet, but that would be crazy. He had to take this chance to get free. Another might never come.

He kicked the wall of the trunk again. This time the voices cried out to one another. He was sure that he had been heard. He lay back and relaxed as the water slowly drained from the trunk. It felt good to know that he would see the sun again-at least briefly.

Someone knocked on the trunk lid. He tried to cry out, but only a muffled moaning fluttered his lips. He kicked again. This was a good sign. Ingles wouldn’t have knocked, knowing that he was in there.

There was a long delay. Perhaps a minute, perhaps five. He was impatient. Voices spoke to him, but he couldn’t make out the words through the layers of metal and tape.

Then suddenly, without warning, the trunk lid fell open and he was rolled out into the canal. There was only about two feet of water in the bottom of the canal, but it was more than enough to cover his head. He thrashed about at the feet of his rescuers, drowning.

He was grabbed like a fish in two powerful hands and hoisted up out of the water.

“He’s alive anyway,” said a deep male voice, the owner of the hands that roughly held him upright.

“Who is it?” asked a female voice.

A face came into his limited field of view. The face was wreathed with concern and surprise. Ray recognized her: it was that she-bitch who had chased him for days now-Agent Vasquez.

Right then Ray thought she was the prettiest woman in the world. His cheeks strained to grin against layers of silver tape.

“Vance!” said Vasquez in some surprise as they worked and cut the tape away from his body. They had decided to remove it right there in the canal, before hoisting him out. Even Johansen felt that Ray was too great a burden to carry up the slippery wet walls wearing leather-soled shoes. Good shoes that had been ruined, along with a good suit, by the canal water.

“Should we call in an ambulance?” she asked. Ray struggled to answer, but the tape around his mouth still restrained him.

Soon, his mouth was free. “I don’t need an ambulance, I don’t think. What I need is help in finding my son. Ingles might have left some clue in the house. Justin might even be on the property somewhere.”

Vasquez and Johansen exchanged glances.

“Ah!” said Ray. “Still trying to figure out how I taped myself up and threw myself to the bottom of a canal, eh?”

“It’s not that,” said Vasquez. “Ingles is dead. His body was discovered out along the main road.”

“Shit,” said Ray dully. His resurgent hopes of finding Justin fell greatly. “What about Nog and the other guy?”

Johansen jerked his head toward the front of the car as he worked to free Ray’s upper body. Ray craned his neck to follow the gesture. Nog’s flabby dead arm floated from the driver’s side window. Ray wanted to puke all over again when he thought he had been greedily drinking the canal water directly downstream from poor Nog’s body.

“Poor bastard,” he said. “He tried to save me, you know. Almost killed me in the process, of course, but still… He tried to help.”

“What other guy?” asked Vasquez.

“What?”

“You said, ‘Nog and that other guy.’”

“Oh, yes,” said Ray. “There was a third man. I never saw his face.”

“Do you know his name?”

“Um. No, I don’t think so. But maybe I could recognize his voice if I heard it again.”

“Great,” said Vasquez. “Look, Dr. Vance. You’ve been less than fully up front with us all along.”She began to question him on recent events, and he answered as best he could. He was heartened to see the believing look in her eyes. She might not have liked his story, but she was willing to believe him now.

“I must admit that Nog now seems like an even more likely suspect than you in the virus case,” she concluded.

Johansen was working on his legs now, and with his free, numb hands, Ray tried to help.

“So, am I under arrest or what? I’ll cooperate in any way that I can. All I want to do is find my son, and you can see that I’ve come close. Will you help me?” he asked, without much hope. Surely they would at least want to drag him to a cell. He had resisted arrest too long and there were simply too many unexplained bodies around.

Vasquez and Johansen glanced at one another. “It is true, there are many mysteries here, with only your story to go on… for now,” she said. “Any thinking agent would drag you back to a cell without a qualm.”

“But, we do need your help with our case,” added Johansen.

“With the virus?”

“That would be nice, but that’s not our case any longer,” said Vasquez. “We were- relieved from that case. Our case now is the search for your son.”

Ray’s eyes got big and he grinned as he worked one foot free of the sticky mass of tape. “I can’t tell you how good it feels to be out of that damned tape.”

He looked from one to the other with a new perspective. “You’ve got Justin’s case?”

“Yes, your wife asked that we take it on,” smiled Vasquez.

Soon, they were all struggling up the canal embankment. Johansen helped Ray, who could hardly walk after spending a night with his legs taped together.

Vasquez slipped even though she was wearing flats. Johansen darted a hand down to steady her. “You okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said.

When they all reached the top, they took a moment to dust themselves off and strip the last bits of tape from Ray.

“I think the key angle is to find this third man,” said Johansen.

“Right, but there is another possible answer,” said Ray.

“What?”

“Ingles told me he sent me an e-mail message. A message that would release my boy.”

Vasquez frowned at that. “I don’t know. Even if that message was sent, the entire internet is failing. I doubt it could have been delivered.”

Ray stared at her. The enormity of what she had just said sunk in. Had Nog really managed to do it? He hardly noticed as Johansen snapped a set of handcuffs on his wrists.

… 6 Hours and Counting…

“Can we at least try Ingles’ machine?” asked Ray.

Vasquez nodded, following his logic. “Right. Even if the message was lost on the net, a copy should still be on his hard drive.”

“As long as he didn’t erase it,” added Johansen.

“All right,” sighed Vasquez. “Look Vance, I’ll give you an hour, then we have to take you in. There have been two murders and what looks like a third. Johansen, phone in for back-up would you? Someone has to get Nog and that car out of that canal and do all the forensics on it.”

Johansen nodded and snapped open his phone. They all climbed into their car and drove down the dirt road toward the house.

“The virus is still raging on the net then?” asked Ray.

“Nothing seems to stop it. And if you’re right, and the author is now smashed in the bottom of the canal, then it’s going to take even longer to piece together a solution. The damned thing keeps changing its profile. It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen.”

“Nog was truly a genius,” agreed Ray. “He told me something of his work before he died.”He related to her what Nog had told him about the self-evolving software he had written.

“If it’s true, then he’s created a new nightmare we’ve never encountered before,” said Vasquez thoughtfully. “And I, for one, am ready to believe it. There will be a number of federal agencies that will want that source code. We’ll have to put in some special court orders concerning national security issues on Nog’s computers.”

“That’s Verr’s case now,” said Johansen gently.

“We’ll ask for the court orders anyway,” snapped Vasquez. “No one will bitch if we help make sure no foreign power gets their hands on this bomb.”

Johansen nodded without smiling.

Vasquez sighed. “Sorry for snapping,” she said without looking at him. Johansen nodded again and visibly relaxed.

From his vantage point in the back seat, Ray slid his eyes from one of them to the other. He wondered vaguely about their relationship. They seemed closer somehow, more concerned.

When they reached the house they all got out of the car. Johansen half-lifted Ray out of the backseat and the doors crumped behind them. Ray’s legs were so stiff from his ordeal that he could barely walk.

“I’m really grateful that you guys are giving me this chance,” said Ray. “I realize that it must not be easy for you.”

“We should have already gone through Ingles machine,” said Vasquez.

“Won’t Verr be pissed if we do it now?” asked Johansen.

“It’s a valid lead in both cases. Including the one we’re on now,” she said.

“He’ll still be pissed. I bet he’ll report it.”

“Like I said: Screw him,” replied Vasquez with a smile.

“You two will feel and look good if this somehow leads to my son’s freedom,” said Ray. He felt the moment of hesitation and discomfort that his words caused them. He could tell they already counted Justin as dead and gone. Well, he thought to himself, screw them too.

Still in a fog of uncomfortable silence, they entered and the screen door slammed shut behind them. The sound made them all jump a bit. Ray shuffled into the den, heading for Ingles’ computer. He paused when he got there and gestured to Johansen impatiently with his cuffed wrists. Johansen looked at Vasquez, who nodded. He produced a key and unlocked one of the cuffs, swung it around Ray’s body and cuffed it in front of him.