'How long have you known?'
'As soon as the weird messages started, I knew.'
'So you just had to play the game with him,' I said, upset. 'Do you realize how dangerous this game is?' I asked.
She began typing. 'He tried it four times. God, we were close.'
'For a while you thought Carrie was doing this,' I said.
'She set it up, but I don't think she's the one getting in.'
'Why not?'
'Because I've been following this intruder day and night. This is someone unskilled.' For the first time in months, she spoke her former friend's name. 'I know how Carrie's mind works. And Gault's too narcissistic to let anyone be CAIN except him.'
'I got a note, possibly from Carrie, that was signed CAIN,' I said.
'And I'll bet Gault didn't know she mailed it. And I'll also bet that if he found out, he took that little pleasure away from her.'
I thought of the pink note we suspected Gault had spirited away from Carrie at Sheriff Brown's house. When Gault placed it in the pocket of the bloody pajama top, the act certainly served to reassert his dominance. Gault would use Carrie. In a sense, she always waited in the car except when he needed her help to move a body or perform a degrading act.
'What just happened here?' I said.
Lucy did not look at me when she answered, 'I found the virus and have planted my own. Every time he tries to send a message to any terminal connected to CAIN, I have the message replicate itself on his screen — like it's bouncing back in his face instead of going out anywhere. And he gets a prompt that says Please Try Again. So he tries again. The first time this happened to him, the system icon gave him a thumbs-up after two tries, so he thought the message was sent.
'But when he tried the next time, the same thing happened, but I made him try one additional time. The point is to keep him on the line long enough for us to trace the call.'
'Us?'
Lucy picked up the small beige remote control I had seen her grab earlier. 'My panic button,' she said. 'It goes via radio signal straight to HRT.'
'I assume Wesley has known about this hidden modem since you discovered it.'
'Right.'
'Explain something to me,' I said.
'Sure.' She gave me her eyes.
'Even if Gault or Carrie had this secret modem and its secret number, what about your password? How could either of them log on as a superuser? And aren't there UNIX commands you could type that would tell you if another user or device was logged on?'
'Carrie programmed the virus to capture my username and password whenever I changed them. The encrypted forms were reversed and sent to Gault via E-mail. Then he could log on as me, and the virus wouldn't let him log on unless I was logged on, too.'
'So he hides behind you.'
'Like a shadow. He's used my device name. My same username and password. I figured out what was going on when I did a WHO command one day and my username was there twice.'
'If CAIN calls users back to verify their legitimacy, why hasn't Gault's telephone number shown up on ERF's monthly bill?'
'That's part of the virus. It instructs the system on callbacks to bill the call to an AT amp;T credit card. So the calls never showed up on the Bureau's bills. They show up on the bills of Gault's father.'
'Amazing,' I said.
'Apparently, Gault has his father's phone card number and PIN.'
'Does he know his son has been using it?'
A telephone rang. She picked it up.
'Yes, sir,' she said. 'I know. We were close. Certainly, I will bring you the printouts immediately.' She hung up.
'I don't think anyone's told him,' Lucy said.
'No one here has told Peyton Gault.'
'Right. That was Mr. Wesley.'
'I must talk to him,' I said. 'Do you trust me to take him the printouts?'
Lucy was staring at the monitor again. The screen saver had come back on, and brilliant triangles were slowly slipping through and around each other like geometry making love.
'You can take it to him,' she said, and she typed Prodigy. 'Before you go… Wow, you've got new mail waiting.'
'How much?' I moved closer to her.
'Oops. Just one so far.' She opened it.
It read: What is gold foil?
Lucy said, 'We're probably going to get a lot of that.'
Sally was working the front desk again when I walked into the Academy lobby, and she let me through without the bother of registration and a visitors' pass.
'
Sally was working the front desk again when I walked into the Academy lobby, and she let me through without the bother of registration and a visitors' pass. I walked with purpose down the long tan corridor, around the post office and through the gun cleaning room. I will always love the smell of Hoppes Number 9.
A lone man in fatigues was blasting compressed air into the barrel of a rifle. Rows of long black countertops were bare and perfectly clean, and I thought of years of classes, of the men and women I had seen, and of the times I had stood at a counter cleaning my own handgun. I had watched new agents come and go. I had watched them run, fight, shoot and sweat. I had taught them and cared.