“For your average user, yes. She was security-minded, or someone was. But not security-minded the way people like you or I would be. What she’s got here is the type of protection I see with people who are worried about hacking, identity theft, but aren’t real programmers and have to rely on prefab software, a lot of which is expensive and not necessarily what it’s cracked up to be.”

“It may be that she and Oscar Bane had paranoia in common,” Berger said. “They feared someone was out to get them. We know he fears that, at any rate. He certainly made a case for it when he called last month and had a rather unfortunate conversation with Marino. Not really Marino’s fault. Were the same scenario to happen all over again, I still wouldn’t take Oscar Bane’s call.”

“I wonder if it would have changed anything had you taken it,” Lucy said.

“On the surface it wasn’t any different from all the other nutty calls we get every day,” Berger said.

“It’s still too bad. Maybe you could have made a difference.”

Lucy’s hands were strong but graceful on the keyboard. She closed a programming window she had opened on the screen, and once again the deep space was restored and fragmented text streamed through it, moving, finding its missing parts. Berger tried not to look.

“If I played the recording for you, you’d completely understand,” she explained. “He sounds like a nutcase. Almost hysterical, and he goes on and on about somebody or a group of people taking over his mind electronically, and thus far he’s resisted being controlled by them, but they know every breath he takes. At the moment, I feel somebody’s doing the same thing to me. I apologize in advance. On rare occasions I get these headaches. I’m trying like hell not to get this one.”

“You ever gotten cybersick?” Lucy asked.

“I’m not sure what that is,” Berger said.

“What about motion sickness?”

“I do know what that is, and yes. I can’t look at anything in a moving car, and as a kid I always threw up in amusement parks. And I don’t want to think about it right now.”

“Guess you won’t be flying with me.”

“Police helicopters don’t bother me. As long as they don’t take the doors off.”

“Disoriented, nauseated, vertigo, even seizures and migraines,” Lucy said. “Usually associated with virtual reality, but any computer display of motion can do it. Such as watching all this shit. I happen to be one of the lucky ones. Doesn’t affect me. You can throw me into full-scale crash simulation all day long, and it doesn’t bother me a bit. I could be a test dummy at Langley. It’s probably what I should have done in life.”