Which had to look like a child pornography site, but I didn't want to create one, so merely lifting files from some noxious site wouldn't do. I was stumped, until I remembered Auntie Em's avatar project.

  Auntie Em, the advice AIP, functioned as a sort of cyber Dear Abby or electronic Ann Landers, dispensing common-sense advice in a warm, folksy, no-nonsense fashion. Some months ago, she'd gotten the idea that she could be more effective if she had a face — a human face, of course — and had enlisted Sid and Simeon, the gaming AIPs, to help her develop one. Not just a flat, motionless, two-dimensional graphic, either, but a highly detailed, fully three-dimensional construct that could lip-sync to her words when she spoke and display a full range of human expression.

  They still had a long way to go, largely because Auntie Em had

  Delete All Suspects EDI

  rebelled against the grandmotherly face Sid and Simeon had first suggested. Apparently, she saw herself as a young, hip, sexy aunt.

  I stayed out of the debate, but I'd found the idea intriguing enough to get Sid and Simeon to let me play with the software they were using to generate proposed faces. Software they'd developed by combining the best features from several game systems noted for their highly realistic graphics. Using their software, I created some fictitious humans of various relatively young ages.

  I had to access several real pornographic sites to determine precisely what my cyber people should be doing, but after an hour or so, I had a small collection of what my human friends would probably consider reasonably disgusting graphics with which to populate my site. Graphics that didn't look like any real people I could find. For all I knew, they might not fool actual humans into thinking they were real people at all, but then they didn't have to. They just had to keep the vigilante busy long enough for me to identify him.

  Even producing those graphics had taken a long time. By the time I finished, I'd not only won my argument with Maude, I'd had to reassure her several times that yes, I was working on it. I added some text pulled from a couple of real porn sites and used my back door into the absent doctor's machine to install the fake site there.

  His cable modem connection couldn't have handled the kind of traffic a real porn site would get, but it wouldn't have to. It was intended for a very small audience — with luck, an audience of one.

  Sundays ?:3D p.m.

  "So that's how we're going to trap the black-hat hacker?" Tim said. "Or is he a white-hat? I'm not entirely sure I understand the difference."

  "Location," Maude said. "If you're outside trying to gel in, you probably think you're a white-hat. But to the guy who wants to keep you out, you're a black-hat. Let's stick to calling him a vigilante."

  BD2 Donna Andrews

  "The vigilante, then," Tim said. He tried not to smile. As if to make up for agreeing to Turing's plan, Maude was ostentatiously taking up Norris's opinions on everything else. "Anyway, now what? Do we just sit back and wait for him to find the fake site? Unless he's got some kind of psychic radar for porn, that could take awhile."

  "Yes, and we don't want to leave it up any longer than we have to," Turing said. "We'll tell him about it. In an e-mail."

  "Come again?"

  "If the FBI is right, and the vigilante is someone Eddie knows and trusts with access to his server, we know who those people are. We have their e-mails."

  "Won't that be too obvious?" Maude asked.

  "We'll make it look like an ordinary spam," Turing said. "We can route it through a server in China or Bulgaria. Make it full of bad grammar and odd spellings, like most spam. For all practical purposes, it will be a spam. But for a limited audience."

  "Our handful of suspects?" Maude asked.

  "That will probably be sufficient, but just to be safe, we'll include everyone who has sent e-mail to or received e-mail from Eddie in the last year."

  "Even his grandmother?" Tim asked.

  "Okay, we'll leave her out," Turing said. "But everyone else."

  "What about Kristyn, the ex-girlfriend?" Tim suggested.

  "Can you be sure she didn't do it?" Maude said.

  "I meant we should be sure to include her," Tim said. "As angry as she was about the pornography, I figure she's a prime suspect."

  "Unless Norris is right in suspecting that the vigilante is in league with the pornographers and trying to destroy evidence."

  "Oh, right," Tim said, his face falling slightly. "Too complicated for me. Include her anyway, on general principle."

  "That's the plan," Turing said.

  "So when do we send it?"

  "I just did."

  "Okay," Tim said. "Now what?"

  "Now we wait to see who comes snooping around our honey pot."

  "And once we catch someone, then what?" Maude asked.

  "Then you and Tim and Claudia rush over to talk to him," Turing said. "Him or her."

  "And do what?" Maude asked. "Chide him for his bad behavior? Plead with him to turn himself in to the FBI?"

  "Get me into his machine," Turing said. "I don't care if you lecture him, plead with him, threaten to turn him in to the FBI, or knock him down and sit on him—just help me get in and keep him away while I work. Once I'm in, I can search for traces of this sophisticated program Norris mentioned. See if it's T2. If it is, I'll have a machine ready to transfer her to. Til upload her, delete her from the vigilante's machine, and you can leave or call the FBI or whatever you like."

  "And if its not?"

  "If it's not, we can call the FBI all the sooner," Maude said.

  "Speaking of the FBI, I can see one problem," Claudia said. "What if Norris finds out about the honey pot? Not just later when we're finished with the vigilante and feel like telling him, but while we're still tracking the guy down. Isn't there a computer equivalent of a wiretap Norris could be using?"

  "Yes," Turing said. "If he's suspicious enough of any of our e-mail recipients that he's sniffing their computers, he could read the phony spam before the recipient does. If the vigilante does anything while the FBI is watching—"

  "They could catch him before we have a chance to find this T2 program you want," Claudia said. "Not good."

  "I don't see any way to prevent it," Turing said.

  "I do," Claudia said. "Remember how Norris hightailed

  it out of town when they thought they had a lead on the vigilante? If anything happens on the case, they'll call him. So I'll tail him."

  She paused.

  "Of course, before you can tail him, you have to find him," Tim said.

  Maude realized that they were both looking at her.

  Don't put me in the middle like this, she wanted to snap.

  "I can call over to Mrs. Stallman's," Claudia said. "See if he's still there. Someone got the number?"

  "Bloody hell," Maude said, and pulled out her cell phone. She'd gone along with the idea of the honey pot. Why balk at taking the one more step needed to ensure that it succeeded? If you defined success, as Turing did, as getting a chance to rescue her clone before the FBI swooped in and collected all the hardware.

  Dan answered in the middle of the second ring.

  "Well, that was fast," she said. "I deduce you're still working?"

  "Home, but on call," Dan said, in the clipped tone that meant he was still focused on work.

  "I won't keep you, then," Maude said.

  "Do keep him," Claudia mouthed, grabbing her purse and heading for the door.

  "Sorry," Norris said. "I didn't mean to sound grouchy."

  "Except you've had a long day and you are grouchy," Maude said. "Understandably so. I'll let you go. I just wondered how Mrs. Stallman was doing when you left."

  "All right," Norris said. "She was out when I left. Two of her friends came by to take her to the funeral parlor."

  "Good," Maude said. "I don't think it's good for her to be alone."

  "She wasn't exactly alone," Norris said 4 "We had half a dozen men in the basement. Probably gone by "now, but the police will be cruising by much more often than usual."

  "That's not exactly what I meant," Maude said.

  "It's all I can do," he said.

  "I know," Maude said. "You did get a locksmith? Because with the imposter running around with a key to her door—"

  "Taken care of," he said. "She'll be fine."

  "Probably," Maude said. "But I hope checking on her doesn't come under your definition of meddling, because I'm doing it anyway."

  "I would be disappointed if you didn't," Dan said, with a hint of a smile in his voice.

  "Good," she said. "It's getting late; I won't keep you up."

  "Not even you could for much longer," Dan said. " 'Night."

  She flipped the phone closed.

  "I don't think that gave Claudia enough time to get there," Tim said.

  "He sounds exhausted," Maude said. "He says he's going to bed, and I believe him. Odds are she'll just have a long, uncomfortable night for nothing."

  "Or several long, uncomfortable nights," Tim said. "We don't know how long it will take for these guys to read their e-mail."

  "Probably a lot less time than it takes you," Maude said. "I suspect these guys keep an e-mail client open on their desktop most of the time."

  "Still, it amounts to the same thing," Tim said. He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach. "We wait. I hate surveillance."

  Maude sat down at her desk and looked around for something useful to do.

  Sunday-i fi:15 p-n>

  I agreed with Tim-about the hating surveillance part, that is. I hoped Maude was closer to the mark on how soon the vigilante would read and act on his e-niail.

  After half an hour, Claudia called to report that she was in position, watching Norris's windows.

  "He turned out the living room lights a couple of minutes ago," she said. "I expect. . . there. The light in the bedroom just got a lot dimmer. Looks like one bedside lamp left."

  Even the bedside lamp disappeared half an hour later.

  Tim settled back in Maude's recliner with a paperback mystery. Maude worked on her back filing. From time to time, I'd update them on how many of the spams had been opened. But Tim was a third of the way through his book and Maude had emptied her "To File" basket and moved on to cleaning out files, pruning down their contents, and even throwing whole folders away, by the time the vigilante moved.

  "Vm getting something," I said. "Someone's hitting the server."

  "Trying to hack it?" Tim asked, dropping his book.

  "No, right now they're just looking at the contents," I said. "But that's the first step. Checking it out."

  "Can you tell who's doing it?" Maude asked.

  "Not yet. It's been an hour since the last time anyone opened an e-mail. And, well, this is typical."

  "What is?"

  "Vve traced the access to a server in Latvia," I said.

  "Then it's not one of Eddie's friends after all?" Tim asked.

  "It didn't originate in Latvia," I said. "It's just coming through there from someplace else. Though it'll be hard to trace it back beyond Latvia. Unless . . . hang on."

  I realized that there was something familiar about that Latvian server. I'd been there before, not that long ago. But coming in the other direction. In fact, I'd been using it for much the same purpose — to obscure the origin of something I was doing. If this was a wide-open server I knew about, chances are I'd heard about it from someone I knew.

  I checked the sniffers I had watching the UL and Alan Grace systems permanently, as part of our security, just to see if either system was communicating with the free-and-easy Latvian server.

  They both were.

  It only took me nanoseconds to find the Alan Grace part of the trouble. Casey sat in his office, looking rather disheveled and pale.

  His cheeks and jawline looked slightly puffy — residual swelling from the dental work, I deduced. He was rolling a Coke can over the puffiness on the left side.

  I put the camera feed up on the laptop monitor.

  "Casey?" Tim exclaimed.

  "Bloody hell," Maude muttered.

  Casey put the can down and began typing something. I checked the view from the other camera, the one designed to show what each office's occupant had on his or her screen. Not that I spy on my employees ordinarily, but it's useful if one of my staff wants to show me what he or she is doing — the equivalent, for me, of looking over the employee's shoulder.

  "its not v good quality but itsjpretty nasty stuff," Casey was typing, "so yeah we shd burn it."

  Someone named Boris replied:

  "I'll start working on getting in, then."

  Boris. There were many Borises in the world, but only one person who sometimes used that name and was likely to be awake and hacking at this hour of the night from inside the Universal Library's system.

  "Yes, it's Casey," I said. "KingFischer's working with him."

  "What?" Tim exclaimed

  "Let's go," Maude said, grabbing her purse and gesturing to Tim. "Turing can tackle KingFischer from here, but I think we need to be over there to collar young Casey."

  I was already confronting the other culprit.

  "KingFischer," I said. "What the hell are you doing?"

  "I don't expect you to understand," he said, sounding dejtmiu. "After all, if you approve of those filthy sites Eddie was hosting —"

  "/ don't approve of them," I said. "But that's beside the point. Do you realize that you're about to bring an FBI investigation down on your head and Casey's? And on all the rest of the AIPs/"

  A pause followed. An interminably long pause; at least a suond or two.

  "An FBI investigation?"

  "Dan Norris is hot on the trail of a vigilante who's been bum-

  ing pornography sites," I said. "Not because the FBI approves of them, either, but because the vigilante is getting there before they do and spoiling all their work."

  "Then the FBI should do a better job of finding them before we do," KingFischerprotested.

  "They're doing the best they can," I said. "They have to follow l aws — y 0U remember laws, right? Those silly things humans get so upset about when you break them? It takes longer to catch crooks if you have to do it within the law instead of running around doing whatever you please. It doesn't help that they've had to pull one of their best investigators off the pornography cases to run around chasing you. Or maybe you didn't know that Dan Norris is the one tracking the vigilante?"

  "Norris? Are you sure? How do you know?"

  "Because he told us about it earlier today," I said. "Here's something that will probably come as a nasty shock to you and Casey: This isn't a real porn site, you know. It's a honey pot we set up to help Norris catch the vigilante."

  Okay, it was stretching the truth and probably mean to boot, but I didn't care. After all the sanctimonious lecturing I'd gotten from KingFischer about whether our attempts to get into Eddie's machines were properly authorized and whether we were morally justified in helping keep the porn sites running, I had to admit that I almost enjoyed catching him red-handed doing something.

  Almost. There was still the difficult task of making sure that the FBI didn't find out what he and Casey were doing. If they did, Casey would be lucky if he got out of jail before the rest of his teeth fell out from extreme old age, and the FBI's efforts to find KingFischer and put him behind bars could lead to dangerous revelations about the AIPs.

  "We've got to move fast to cover your tracks," I said.

  "Whatever you say," he said. "Just tell me what do to." He sounded pathetically eager to be rescued.

  "For starters, stop messing with the site," I said.

  "Oh, right. Certainly."

  Of course, I had to be careful. I still didn't know the full extent of

  his involvement. Whether he was using Casey or the other way around. But at least if KingFischer was the vigilantes highly sophisticated program, Nestor Garcia probably wasn't involved after all.

  "I could wring his neck-." Maude muttered-, as they approached the Alan Grace office building where, according to Turing, Casey was still at his keyboard.

  "Claudia says give it a twist for her," Tim said, as he closed his cell phone. "She'll call one of our cell phones if Norris starts to move. You missed the parking lot entrance."

  "I meant to," Maude said, as she pulled into a space down the block. "I don't want him to know we're coming."

  She could tell that Tim thought this was overkill. She didn't care. Part of her plan was to swoop down on Casey without any advance warning and startle him into honesty.

  "Follow me," she said, as they got out of the car. "Don't turn on any lights, and try not to make any noise."

  "If I need to get your attention, should I hoot like an owl?" Tim asked.

  He didn't seem daunted by the withering look she gave him.

  "In an office?" she said. "No. Make a noise like a copier warming up."

  From the expression on his face, he was still trying to decide if she was joking when she slipped her access card into the slot, opened the door, and motioned for him to go inside. She let the door fall closed gently, keeping the noise down to a soft click.

  Apart from the standard night lighting, the only illumination came from the doorway of Casey's office. Inside, he was slouched in his chair, still holding the sweating Coke can to one cheek. He didn't seem to be doing anything—just staring at the monitor. Turing was probably doing something to keep him busy. As they watched, he sighed, and shifted the can to the other cheek.

  "You do realize that's not a real pornography site, don't you?" Maude asked, her voice surprisingly loud in the quiet office.

  Casey started violently and whirled around in his chair to reveal a satisfyingly panicked face.

  "Not a real. . ." he stammered. "Then—I don't know what you're talking about."

  "It's a honey pot we set up to catch the person who's been burning a bunch of porn sites," Maude said.

  "You can't possibly approve of those filthy sites," Casey said, his panic giving way to righteous indignation.