The Wiz Biz II: Cursed & Consulted (56 page)

"It's what comes from consorting with them low-class demons," Widder Hackett added as Wiz pounded up the stairs to rescue Anna.

He came into the room and found a hysterical maid facing off with a very determined scaly green demon.

"What's going on here?"

"I, I was just trying to . . . and it, it . . ." Anna was hyperventilating and for a minute Wiz thought she was going to faint on him.

Wiz recognized the demon. It was the one he had set to guard his desk and it manifested if anyone tried to touch his papers or equipment. Apparently Anna, not knowing better, had tried to clean off the desk.

He put his arm around her shoulders to comfort her, and to catch her if she did faint. Anna was trembling like a leaf and she pressed her face into his shoulder so she wouldn't have to look at the demon.

"Hey, it's all right. He won't hurt you if you don't try to touch anything on the desk."

"But he won't let me leave!"

Wiz looked around and realized that to get to the door they would have to pass the desk. The demon wouldn't attack unless someone tried to touch the things on the desk but it would certainly come alert if anyone but Wiz got close.
I'll have to turn the sensitivity down on the spell,
he thought.

Malkin stuck her head in the door to see what the commotion was, saw Wiz and Anna, and disappeared before Wiz could say anything.

"He won't hurt you if you don't touch what's on the desk," he told her. "Look, I'll dismiss him, okay?" A quick gesture and the demon vanished, looking smug. "There, it's fine." He gently pried her face out of his shoulder and turned her toward the desk. "See? No more demon." With his arm still around her shoulder he walked her past the desk to the door.

"Now, you don't have to clean around the desk, all right? That's not part of your job anyway and I'm sorry I didn't tell you that before. Are you okay now?" Anna sniffled and nodded.

Wiz drew a line on the floor in softly glowing blue light. "Look, anything inside this line I will take care of, okay? Just don't touch any of it and I'll make sure the demon doesn't bother you."

Bobo sauntered into the room, looked at the line and sniffed.

"Now just go on down to the kitchen and rest for a while. You'll be okay?"

Anna sniffled and nodded.

"I'm sorry to be so much trouble My Lord, it's just that . . ."

"I know," Wiz said encouragingly, "it wasn't your fault. Now go on."

Still sniffling, Anna made her way downstairs toward the kitchen.

"Malkin," Wiz called, "can you come in here a minute?"

"What's up?" the slender thief asked as she strode into the room. Malkin showed no fear but Wiz noticed she kept just far enough away from the desk to keep from triggering the demon. For an instant he wondered how she knew the distance so exactly.

"Uh, about what you just saw. It wasn't really what it looked like."

Malkin waved a lazy hand. "Forget about it."

"But I wanted to explain . . ."

"No need," Malkin said. "The child's safe with you."

The way she said it, Wiz wasn't sure whether to be relieved or insulted.

"You'd better be careful though. The little ninny doesn't have the sense to be afraid of magic. She's likely to blunder into something you'd rather she didn't."

"I'll take extra precautions," Wiz assured her. "What about you? Aren't you afraid of being around all this magic?"

Malkin laughed. "Afraid? Not hardly. I respect it is all." The way she said it, and the way she smiled, left Wiz with a slightly uneasy feeling in the bottom of his stomach. He decided at the same time he turned down the demon's sensitivity he was going to increase the protection.

Just because someone is hard-working and ambitious doesn't mean that person has the least idea what is going on.

—The Consultants' Handbook 
 

It was another sunny day in the desert. Of course, it's almost always sunny in the desert, which is why this particular desert mountaintop sprouted telescopes like lawns sprout toadstools. With telescopes come astronomers, naturally, and just now this particular astronomer's mood was anything but sunny.

"You," Ray Whipple said, "have got to do something about that FBI agent."

There was a pause while the observatory director took his artfully scuffed ostrich-skin cowboy boots off the corner of his desk. "What's the problem?" he asked mildly. Actually he had a pretty good idea what the problem was and he was only surprised it had taken this long to happen.

"He found an eighty-seven-cent error in someone's account and now he's convinced he's on the trail of the mother of all conspiracies."

The director made a show of lighting his pipe. "That's his job after all."

"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."

"That is a consequence to be sought rather than mourned," Bal-Simba rumbled from his extra-large chair where he sat reviewing a scroll with Moira and Arianne.

"Well, yeah," Danny agreed. Then he added disconsolately, "But I've got such a
good
one."

"I was even hoping to learn something," Jerry said. "I have this theory about the black-body temperature of dragons."

"Most dragons are not black," Moira told him. "Why you should be interested in just the black ones, I do not know. Much less their temperature."

"No, you don't understand. See, a black body temperature is a physical property of all things, even dragons, no matter what their color. And . . ."

"My Lord, if this is another one of your explanations I am in no mood to hear it."

"But," Jerry said plaintively, "it's such an
interesting
question."

"The only question I am interested in regarding dragons is how to get Wiz back," Moira told him firmly.

Ray Whipple had an easier time of it. Being a legitimate system administrator at a legitimate site, not to mention being actually in this world and being able to invoke the name of the FBI, Whipple had resources Danny and Jerry didn't. By using them and calling in a few favors, Ray was able to trace Wiz back to the system he had broken into very much faster than the people at the Wizard's Keep.

In a matter of days he had a result to show the FBI agent.

"Cute," Ray said as he displayed his find. "It's a cutout using two mailboxes. Incoming mail goes into one, the script automatically transfers it to the other one and then it gets forwarded out of there. But if you trace it back the trail ends at this mailbox."

"Cutouts huh? That's an intelligence trick. And you thought it wasn't spies."

"A lot of people know how to do that," Ray muttered into the screen.

"Now, how do we track him from here?"

"That's going to take a little more work," Ray said, ignoring the "we." "But what I can do is modify his script so that we can see his traffic." The keys rattled under his fingers. "There. Now the script makes an extra copy of all messages that go through that mailbox and sends one to you."

"Hot dog!" Pashley breathed, visions of reinstatement dancing before him, "I told you we'd get this hacker." He stopped. "But wouldn't it be simpler just to ask the people at that site to track where the other side mailbox leads to?"

"I tried that," Whipple told him. "But I didn't get anywhere. I think there's something funny about that site."

If you can delay solving a problem long enough, one of three things will happen: The problem will become so large that it destroys the organization, everyone gets so used to living with the problem that it ceases to be a problem, or the problem solves itself. In cases two and three you win. Meanwhile you don't make enemies by rocking the boat.

—The Consultants' Handbook 
 

It was a bright muggy morning in Washington, D.C. The kind of morning that finds legions of bureaucrats hard at work in their air-conditioned offices and trying not to think about what the drive home will be like.

The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was hard at work in her air-conditioned office, but she wasn't worried about the drive home. For one thing she probably wouldn't go home until well after sundown. For another she was deep in a review of industrial espionage activities in the United States, trying to decide how much of the report represented a legitimate danger and how much was eager beavers pumping for a bigger share of the department budget.

The Phone rang.

Not just any phone, The Phone. Popular legend to the contrary it was not red. It was a very ordinary looking tan telephone with a funny mouthpiece and an unusually thick cord connecting the handset to the base. It was the director's main link to the White House and the higher echelons of the Justice Department and the national security apparatus.