“We already did.”

Lightning flashed, rain and wind ripping through trees.

“We?” West said.

Brenda Bond was sitting at her keyboard in her room of mainframes, working on Sunday because what else did she have to do? There was little life held for her. She wore prescription glasses in expensive black Modo frames, because Tommy Axel looked good in his. She imitated him in other ways as well, since the music critic looked like Matt Dillon and was clearly cool. Systems Analyst Bond was going through miles of printouts and was not pleased by whatever she was finding.

The general architecture of the newspaper’s computerized mail system simply had to be reconfigured. What she wanted was plain and not so much to ask, and she was tired of trying to convince Panesa through presentations that the publisher obviously never even bothered to look at. Bond’s basic argument was this: When a user sent a mail message for the UA to relay to the local MTA, the MTA then routed the message to the next MTA, which then routed it to the next MTA, and the next, until the message reached the final MTA on the destination system. With a Magic Marker, Brenda Bond had vividly depicted this in Figure 5.1, with colorful dashed lines and arrows showing possible communication paths between MTAs and UAs.

Bond’s ruminations crystallized and she stopped what she was doing. She was startled and confused as Deputy Chief Virginia West, in uniform, suddenly walked in at quarter past three. West could see that Bond was a cowardly little worm, middle-aged, and exactly fitting the profile of people who set fires, sent bombs by mail, tampered with products like painkillers and eyedrops, and harassed others with hate notes and anonymous ugly calls over the telephone. West pulled up a chair and turned it backward, straddling it, arms resting on the back of it, like a guy.

“You know it’s interesting,” West thoughtfully began. “Most people assume if they use a cellular phone, the calls can’t be traced. What they don’t realize is calls come back to a tower. These towers cover sectors that are only a mile square.”

Bond was beginning to tremble, the bluff working.

“A certain young male reporter has been getting obscene phone calls,” West went on, “and guess what?” She paused pointedly. “They come back to the same sector you live in, Ms. Bond.”

“I, I, I. . .” Bond stammered, visions of jail dancing through her head.

“But it’s breaking into his computer basket that bothers me.” West’s voice got harder, police leather creaking as she shifted in the chair. “Now that’s a crime. Leaking his stories to Channel Three. Imagine! It would be like someone stealing your programs and selling them to the competition.”

“No!” Bond blurted. “No! I never sold anything!”

“So you gave stories to Webb.”

“No!” Bond panicked. “I never talked to him. I was just helping the police.”

For an instant, West was quiet. She wasn’t expecting this.