The Wiz Biz II: Cursed & Consulted (54 page)

The way she said it left Wiz with a sinking feeling she was speaking from experience.

There was a knock at the door. Wiz whirled and jerked it open.

"I told you I can't do anything about your damned . . . chickens," he finished weakly.

There was an angel on the doorstep. An angel in a drab brown dress.

"I beg your pardon, My Lord," the angel said in an angelic but timid voice. "I, I heard you are looking for a housekeeper."

Wiz realized his angel was actually a girl, perhaps eighteen years old. The plain brown homespun dress concealed a trim figure. Her skin was creamy white with just the right touches of pink. A fringe of wheat-gold curls peeked out from her bonnet. Her eyes were wide and blue as Wedgewood saucers.

Wiz finally managed to get the circuit from his brain to his mouth working again and closed his jaw. "Uh, well, yes," he said. "What's your name?"

"Anna, My Lord."

"Well, I'm Wiz. Wiz Zumwalt. Come in, won't you?" He stepped aside and managed to keep from bowing as the girl ventured over the threshold.

Wiz suddenly realized he had never interviewed anyone for a job other than a programming position and he wasn't quite sure what the etiquette of hiring servants was.

"Ah, nice day isn't it?"

Anna gave him a wide-eyed stare. "Of course, My Lord." The way she said it made him look a little closer. Not only were those eyes as blue as a Wedgewood china plate, Wiz realized, the owner possessed about as much intelligence as a china plate.

"My Lord . . ." Anna ventured tremulously. Then she stopped and gathered her courage. "My Lord, I know I am not very clever, but I will work hard."

"Oh, let her stay," Widder Hackett's voice grated in his ear. "She can't make more of a mess than the pair of you."

Wiz looked at the forlorn beauty and sighed. The first rule of successful housekeeping is you've got to be smarter than the dirt. Looking at her, Wiz figured Anna was probably brighter than the average dust bunny. They'd just have to live with the intellectually superior dust bunnies.

Besides, there weren't any other applicants, and Wiz wasn't going to get anything done with Widder Hackett complaining in his ear.

"All right," he sighed. "You've got the job."

"Oh thank you, My Lord!" Anna's smile made her even more angelically beautiful. "You will not be sorry, I promise you."

"Uh, you're not afraid working for a wizard?"

"Oh no, My Lord," Anna said innocently. "My granny was a witch. I've grown up around the craft, you see."

"That was Old Lady Fressen," Widder Hackett informed Wiz. "Child's her only grandchild and she tried to teach her the Craft." Widder Hackett snorted. "And her with not the sense to come in out of the rain. Not that Old Lady Fressen was any great shakes when it came to brains, mind you." With that the ghost was off on a long, rambling, and none-too-favorable reminiscence about a dead former colleague.

In their own ways and in their own times all of the occupants of the house settled in. Even Widder Hackett complained less once Anna set to work.

As if by magic the dirt and dust disappeared from the house. The sheets came off the furniture in the front rooms and light streamed through the newly washed windows. The wooden floors developed a mellow glow and the odors of dust and age were replaced by the scents of furniture oil and sweet herbs that hung in bunches in all the rooms. The beds were less lumpy and the bedding fresher.

Wiz knew it wasn't magic, of course. The girl worked from morning until night with a fierce concentration and a single-mindedness that he found a little awe-inspiring. If Anna was no mental giant, she knew how to keep house and she had the energy of a dynamo to boot.

Anna even made a difference in the kitchen. Not only was it considerably cleaner after she arrived, it seemed brighter as well. Part of that was that the girl spent an afternoon whitewashing the walls—which earned Wiz an earful of Widder Hackett's complaints about the younger generation and their new-fangled notions—but part of it was simply her personality. New-fangled notions or not, Anna fitted this house far better than Wiz or Malkin did.

Malkin was usually available when Wiz needed her, but the rest of the time she kept to herself. Anna was in awe of the tall thief, but clearly didn't approve of her. Malkin clearly didn't feel any kinship for Anna either. In fact both the women seemed to get along better with Wiz than they did with each other.

The one member of the household who really welcomed Anna was Bobo. For some reason the cat developed an instant bond with the girl and spent hours each day around her or sitting in her lap on the infrequent occasions when she sat down to rest. Considering that Anna also did the cooking and spent much of her time in the kitchen, Wiz reflected, that probably wasn't so odd.

For his part Bobo had made himself at home as only a cat can. Which is to say with total disregard for the rights or feelings of the human inhabitants.

For one thing, Bobo had the typical cat criteria for a place to sleep. To wit, it should be warm, soft and inconvenient. The most inconvenient place of all was Malkin's pillow because she was allergic to cats. After she threw him out several times, learned to keep her door closed always and to search the room before going to bed, Bobo transferred his attentions to Wiz. Since even in his current emaciated state the cat weighed nearly twenty pounds and since his favorite way of getting into bed was to take a running jump and try to land right in the middle of Wiz's stomach, this was a less than ideal arrangement from Wiz's point of view. However it suited Bobo fine and like most cats he had a strong sense of the proper order of the universe.

When Bobo wasn't happy he complained and he had obviously taken voice lessons from his mistress. When he was happy he purred. Since Bobo's purring had the volume and timbre of a Mack truck at idle, happy Bobo wasn't much of an improvement over unhappy Bobo.

For all that, it worked somehow and life settled into a routine.

From the top of the mountain you could see for miles. Myron Pashley couldn't see any further than his computer screen in front of the window.

Special Agent Myron "Clueless" Pashley, FBI, utterly ignored the vista of pine forests stretching down to the tan desert and the blue and purple mountains on the far horizon. Instead he hunched further forward in his swivel chair and ran his finger down the screen. His lips moved silently as he worked the elementary subtraction until he arrived at the final, fatal, number on the last line.

"Whipple, come take a look at this."

Ray Whipple, Pashley's office mate, pulled his head out of the latest copy of
Astrofisicka
. He made a show of reading the journal in the original Russian because he knew it annoyed Pashley.

"Look here," Pashley's finger stabbed down onto the computer screen. Whipple sighed, put the journal down and looked over Pashley's shoulder.

"What happened, get lost in the directory tree again?"

"No, I got something. There's an error in the user accounting."

"So what?"

"What it means," Pashley growled, "is that a hacker's gotten into the system."

"What it means," Ray shot back, "is that the accounting program screwed up again and the roundoff errors are accumulating."

Pashley smiled a superior smile. "Look at the amount of the error. Eighty-seven cents! You read
Cuckoo's Egg
didn't you? You know what that means."

Whipple, who had not only read the book but had helped the author in a small way during his hunt through the Internet for an international spy, couldn't get his jaw back up in time to protest.

"We got us a hacker and we're going to nail him." With that he bent to the computer with a will, punching keys frantically.

Ray retreated to his chair and his journal. He had a sinking feeling he wasn't going to make the deadline for this year's computer Go competition.

Myron Pashley had been born to be an FBI agent, but he was born too late. He belonged in the Bureau in the days of narrow ties, short haircuts and J. Edgar Hoover; the days when a straight-arrow personality, a gung-ho attitude and a suspicious mind could substitute for intelligence and judgment.

After graduating next-to-last in his class at the FBI academy, Pashley had pictured himself on the streets of urban America, fighting crime that was poisoning the nation's body politic. Instead he was assigned to computer fraud and copyright violations. Not the best use for a technological idiot, his superiors admitted privately, but at least he wasn't likely to get shot or blow an important organized crime investigation. Keep him there for a couple of years, they figured, and eventually he'd get fed up with the Bureau and quit.

His superiors had reckoned without Pashley's zeal. Assigned to combat computer crime, Pashley convinced himself this was the new plague sweeping through America and he threw himself into the battle with the boundless enthusiasm—and the brains—of an Irish setter. He began hanging out on computer bulletin boards, running up huge phone bills as he trawled for the evil "hackers" who were insidiously spreading through the nation's computer networks, committing all sorts of nefarious deeds.

He quickly discovered that hackers were as subtle and devious as they were dangerous. The fact that he could find absolutely no trace of any illegal activities on the bulletin boards he frequented was tangible proof how devilishly clever these "hackers" were.

He would have been more effective if he hadn't needed someone to untangle his electronic screwups on the average of once every fifteen minutes, but he persisted.

Finally his patience was rewarded. On an obscure computer bulletin board in the Southeastern United States he found his master criminal. The messages Pashley had collected were enough to convince his boss that he really had something and a full-scale investigation was launched.

Three months later a daring and well-coordinated dawn raid on the North Carolina hideaway seized nearly a million dollars' worth of computer equipment plus over fifty firearms. At the press conference that morning Pashley had cheerfully posed in front of tables loaded with seized items while brandishing what he called "a blueprint for techno-terrorism."

That brief shining moment was the high point of Pashley's career.

Unfortunately it was immediately followed by the low point. It turned out his "master hacker" was actually a science fiction novelist who wrote for computer magazines on the side and collected guns as a hobby. Not only were all the weapons the FBI had seized perfectly legal, but the "blueprint for techno-terrorism" turned out to be the notes for the author's latest novel.

Needless to say the author was not happy. He also had a considerable talent for invective and a pen dipped in vitriol which he used to lambaste the Bureau and Special Agent Pashley in several national magazines. For one awful week even Jay Leno had been making jokes about him. Somewhere in that terrible period he had been dubbed "Clueless" Pashley and the name had stuck ever since.

It wasn't as bad as the DEA agent in the gorilla suit, but at least the DEA agent got a solid arrest out of it. All Pashley got was a multi-million-dollar lawsuit, naming him, "John and Jane Does 1 through 999," and the Bureau as defendants.

It hadn't helped matters when Pashley's superiors found he had been rather selective in the bulletin board messages he had shown them. The full message base proved "to anyone but an utter idiot" (in his boss's memorable phrase) that the computer bulletin board was merely a way for fans to communicate with their favorite author.

His boss was demoted, his section chief took early retirement and his chief's supervisor was transferred to a job in the Aleutian Islands. But Pashley, whose head should have gone up on a pike over the main entrance to FBI headquarters, wasn't even reprimanded, thanks to the multi-million-dollar lawsuit pending against the Bureau. Instead he was given an "independent assignment" and sent to this observatory in the desert southwest to continue his fight against computer crime.

Thus, on this brilliantly sunny afternoon, Pashley was sharing a cubbyhole office with the rather bewildered astrophysicist who had been assigned to "coordinate" with him. After three months in the same office Ray knew all about what Pashley had done, but he still wasn't sure what
he
had done to be punished like this.

For preference Ray Whipple didn't deal with anything closer than about five light years. People were especially difficult for him and riding herd on Pashley was straining his skills at interpersonal relations.

Putting the magazine in his lap Ray decided to try one more time. "Look," he protested, "it doesn't work that way."

"You mean you don't know how to make it work that way," Pashley said. "These kids are geniuses."

"But," Ray repeated feebly. "But . . . but . . . but . . ."

"Don't worry. You hold up your end and we'll nail these hackers yet." He hit a few keys and looked at the results on the screen. "Uh, could you get this untangled for me? Computer's screwed up again."

Never Let Them See You Sweat.

—Consultants' Slogan  
 

Normally a consultant presented a proposal in writing. These people preferred a face-to-face approach.
Like making a presentation to the prospective client,
Wiz thought,
only I've already got the job.
 

Something over a dozen councilors had assembled in the Mayor's office for the meeting. In addition to Mayor Hastlebone and Dieter there was a distinguished-looking man in a tasteful blue tunic whom Wiz remembered vaguely, one or two other sharp-looking characters and a few old codgers who looked like they had come because they didn't have any place better to be.

Dieter was off to one side with a couple of other council members hanging at his elbows, talking to a slightly taller, younger man who managed to be handsome in a beefy blond sort of way and still look like Dieter. The councilor was punctuating his words with short, sharp hand motions and the other was focusing on him intently and occasionally nodding to show he more or less understood.