The Wizardry Consulted (Wiz, #4)(42)

“That’s all right,” Malkin said cheerfully. “I’ve still got the keys hidden away.”

Wiz groaned again.

“Besides, you’re a fine one to talk. With your messing about with dragons and the Council you’re likely to get us staked out on The Rock.”

“Well, why do you stay, then?”

Malkin smiled in a peculiarly sunny fashion. “I want to see what’s going to happen next. Hanging around here is more fun than a mummer’s show. Besides, it gives me a base of operations, so to speak.”

Wiz thought about what that last meant. Then he decided he didn’t want to know. He also remembered why he had never had roommates. Then he thought of the rats in the psych lab. The more he thought about them the more sympathy he felt.

“Of course, if you want me to leave . . .”

“No, no. I need you for background resource. But try to be a little more discreet, will you?”

Malkin draped the belt over her shoulder, buckle resting on her breast. Wiz noticed it hung nearly down to her knees behind. “Oh, I’m always careful,” Malkin said cheerfully. “You have to be in my business.”

With that she was gone. Wiz sighed again and turned back to the demon, who raised a pair of scaly eyebrows and riffled the cards. Wiz dismissed him with a gesture. Somehow he’d lost all his taste for taking chances-any more chances.

Judith wasn’t the only one upset by the FBI raid. If she was annoyed, the mood in the Wizard’s Keep verged on panic.

Bal-Simba frowned when a breathless Jerry and Danny told him, in alternating choruses, what had happened.

“How serious is this?” the big wizard asked when his visitors finally reached a stopping place.

“Pretty serious,” Jerry told him. “If thekeep.org goes off line we lose our communication link to Wiz.” And probably all chance of finding him, he thought. But he saw the look on Moira’s face and he didn’t say that.

“Is Judith in any danger?” Moira asked.

“Danger? No. She’s probably not even in trouble, well not much. She’s not doing anything illegal. Wiz might be in trouble if they could catch him, but there’s not much chance of that.”

“The Sparrow told me once that you keep records on these devices,” Bal-Simba said. “Is there anything there which would arouse their ire?”

Danny grinned. “There aren’t any records on that machine. We keep all that at this end, just in case. As far as the domain is concerned, Judith’s system isn’t much more than a dumb terminal, even though it’s officially listed as the main server.”

“That was Judith’s idea,” Jerry reminded his younger colleague. “After she saw some of the stuff you’d been up to she didn’t want any record of it on her system.”

“Anyway it was a pretty smart move,” Danny said. “There’s no way they can pin anything on her. There’s even a complete set of domain software on her system.”

“We’ve also got a backup way to reach Judith. We’re setting up a modem link over a regular telephone line. She just calls a phone number we give her and logs in.”

“Can we give that number to Wiz?”

Danny frowned. “That’s going to be trickier. You can bet the FBI has a wiretap on the connection to thekeep.org. If we use the current Internet connection to tell Wiz about the new number we’ll be telling the FBI too. Since we, ah, weren’t completely aboveboard in getting that number it wouldn’t do to have them tapping that line too. We may be able to rig up a code or something, but it will take more time.”

“Then how do we tell Judith about the number?”

“Easy. We call her, preferably at a friend’s house.”

“Is this like the number we gave Major Gilligan when we sent him back to your World?”

“Not exactly. That was an 800 number.” Danny made a face. “Big mistake. I found out the hard way they monitor those real close. They found us and shut us down in just a couple of weeks. According to some of the people I’ve been talking to on the net they’re not as careful about local numbers, especially the ones that don’t show long-distance charges.”

“Meaning you’ve been hanging around with the phone phreakers again,” Jerry said.

“Be glad I was,” Danny shot back. “Otherwise we’d have worse problems.”

Jerry didn’t have a good answer for that one, so he let it slide.

“But can they sever the link?” Moira persisted.

“They may think they have already since they don’t know we’re tapped into her line.”

“Can they cut it entirely?”

“Yeah, by disconnecting the line. But they probably won’t do that. There’s no reason for them to do it.” He sighed. “You know there was a time when government agents were pretty dumb about these things. I understand they’ve gotten smarter.”

“But they still might cut us off from Wiz?”

“Theoretically,” Jerry said. “But don’t worry. It would take an absolute idiot to do something like that.”

It was not a good day for Special Agent Pashley. He had spent the morning interviewing Judith Conally with her lawyer present and he felt he was further behind than ever. After two hours of questioning and several very pointed inquiries by Judith’s lawyer as to the exact charge, he had turned her loose. The results from the examination of Judith’s computer and related material hadn’t helped any.