The Wizardry Consulted (Wiz, #4)(31)

“But the man’s an idiot!” Ray protested.

“I know. So does his supervisor. She asked us to keep him here as a ‘special favor’ to the Bureau.”

“He’s chasing all over the net looking for some imaginary ‘hacker’ he thinks he’s found and he’s dragging me with him!”

“He’s not breaking down any doors or shooting people, is he? It’s safer for everyone if he stays here where he’s out of the way and mostly harmless.”

“But I’ve got to deal with him,” Ray groaned.

“Look,” the director said sympathetically, “I know this is hard on you. I’ll tell you what. When this is over I’ll make it up to you. How would you like some extra observing time? How would you like to get your project up on Hubble next year?”

Ray’s eyes widened. Time on the Hubble Space Telescope was somewhat more precious than gold in the astronomical community. “You could do that?”

“Just keep our agent happy and keep him out of everyone’s hair.”

In the event, Clueless Pashley kept himself out of everyone’s hair for the next three days. He was so busy tramping through the Internet in pursuit of his master hacker and screwing up his account that he was only an electronic pest for everyone but Whipple.

Pashley’s performance on the Internet was reminiscent of the old saw about a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters, which is to say it was nearly random and mostly produced garbage. However, as in the case of the monkeys, there is always the element of blind chance and sheer, dumb luck. Pashley’s original error was, as his office-mate surmised, an accounting glitch. But in the course of his thrashing around, Special Agent Myron Pashley stumbled and fell face-first into a heap of gold.

Not surprisingly it started with a total disaster.

Like most astronomers, Ray Whipple was used to working at night and sleeping during the day. Even though his current job was “temporary system administrator for administrative support services” (or, as he put it, “computer janitor”) he saw no reason to change his habits.

Pashley, on the other hand was an early-to-bed, early-to-rise type who was in the office religiously at 7 A.M. This particular day he managed to be in the office all of thirty minutes before he did something especially stupid and crashed the entire system. Which of course resulted in Ray having to drag himself out of bed and drive back up the mountain at an ungodly-o-clock in the morning to fix what Pashley had done.

To add insult to injury, Whipple had to listen to Pashley the entire time he was trying to bring the system back up.

“I almost had him,” Pashley kept insisting. “I was onto something and the hacker crashed the system to cover his tracks.”

Ray knew damn well what had caused the crash almost as soon as he sat down at his terminal, but yelling at Pashley wouldn’t get him any closer to time on the Hubble. To try to shut out his office-mate, he kept his attention glued to the screen as the system booted back up.

Because he was concentrating so intently on his workstation he actually read the list of demon processes as it scrolled up. The last one was one he didn’t recognize.

Whipple frowned. He should have known all the demons on the system and here was one he’d never seen. He called it up and found it was a perl script that scanned for incoming traffic with a particular name in the “from” field and forwarded information about it to a site he’d never heard of, thekeep.org.

This was getting stranger and stranger. A quick check of the mail queue showed a couple of messages with the right name in the “from” field that hadn’t yet been forwarded when the system went down. He called one of those up and scanned through it. Then he came to the routing.

“What the hell?” he exclaimed.

“What?” demanded Pashley, hurrying over to peer over his shoulder. “What did you find?”

The routing was absurd. It looked as if the message touched every continent, including Antarctica, and was routed through the weirdest collection of sites he had ever seen.

This was completely lost on Pashley, but he did pick up on something else.

“Look at the name,” Pashley said, jabbing his finger at the screen so it blocked most of Ray Whipple’s view. “Thekeep. One of those fantasy names is a sure tipoff that it’s a hacker site. I’ll bet we’ll find this is a major hacker nexus.”

Whipple, who had played D&D until he got into graduate school, kept quiet. He had learned that arguing with Pashley on one of these subjects was useless.

“Whatever it is, someone got into our system,” Whipple said.

“YES!” Pashley shouted in his ear. “I told you we had a hacker on the loose.”

Ray Whipple gritted his teeth. “It looks like you’re right.”

Meanwhile the programmers at thekeep.org pursued their own search for Pashley’s “hacker.” It was slow, tedious work. There were a lot of systems on Wiz’s routing list and not all of them were easy to plant a search demon in. A few were flat impossible so the programmers had to resort to other shifts. Fortunately Wiz was so homesick he e-mailed a message almost every day. Unfortunately it still took inordinate amounts of time and work.

“You know what I really resent?” Danny said one evening as the pair was hard at work. “All that work we put into dragon-slaying spells that we’ll probably never have the chance to use.”