Spyware

She tilted her head toward the glass doors at the end of the hall, indicating the parking lot beyond. “They still come by here every few hours, checking for you.”

“Look, Brenda,” he began, “I haven’t got time to explain it all, but need your help one more time.”

She frowned and turned away from him. She headed toward the lab. Her keys jangled in her hand. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to work in the lab.”

“Yeah.”

She stopped and looked back at him, eyebrows raised. “So that’s it, eh? Just shut old Brenda out? What insanity are you up to now?”

“I’m looking for a reference. I’ve got the handle of the person who I believe has Justin.”

Brenda looked down again, apparently studying her keys. He frowned, knowing that she could have found the right key in a second in a snowstorm. She was stalling. He felt a moment of unease, then it passed as he chided himself for not trusting Brenda. She was just being cautious, that’s all. He was just getting paranoid from being on the run. How odd it all was, he reflected for a disembodied moment. How odd it was to be a fugitive, on the run from the law and looking for other criminals. His quiet, absolutely stable life had turned into a rollercoaster in such a short time.

While his brain wandered, Brenda finally saw fit to locate her key. She stuck it in the lock and twisted. She snapped on the lights and they went to the back where her office and the operators’ stations were.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

“Any reference to the name Santa, or Snow,” he said. “I want to see if anyone at this campus uses that type of handle.”

She stared at him for a second, then pursed her lips and nodded. He flicked on the monitors and they slowly came to life. The computers were already on, of course. They were never turned off unless there was a hardware failure or a scheduled maintenance shutdown.

He went right to work, first running a series of utilities to search the users for signs of the Huntress, or some other unusual super-user. He saw nothing that indicated that Agent Vasquez was laying in wait for him. She probably figured he was too smart to come back to the college. The thought made him smile. Maybe he was dumber than they thought.

Brenda watched him for a while without helping. She had her hands on her hips.

“What is it, Brenda?” he said without looking up.

“Ray, have you considered giving yourself up?” she asked quietly.

He looked at her. “I’ve got to find my son, Brenda.”

“But the authorities are looking for him. One man running around on the streets of Davis has got to be just distracting the police, rather than helping them. Maybe…” she trailed off.

As satisfied as he could be that no one was watching for him, Ray worked with a utility program to search each of the server hard drives for suspicious handles. Snower, Saint, Snelling and Snowman came up. He clicked on each handle in turn, reading the bio on the person that used the handle. They all turned out to be students, all of them female except for Snowman, who had dropped out of school as a psych major two semesters earlier. Ray had never met any of them to his knowledge. He sighed. What if Santa had nothing to do with the campus? It stood to reason that he was local, otherwise he would probably use a different bulletin board, and wouldn’t have met up with Nog. But what if he was just part of the community, or someone from the coast who Nog had met while making his millions in the gaming industry? A feeling of hopelessness swept over him, but quickly receded as he fought it back. He had to try anything and everything.

Finally, he noticed that Brenda was talking to him again. “They could really use your help Ray, with the virus,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Are you listening?”

“Ah, no. I was just thinking that it’s too bad that the search engines have broken down. I could really use the wider search utilities.”

“Everything is pretty much up again.”

“What? It is?” he asked.

“You’re out of touch. The NSA gave the all-clear two hours ago. That’s why I’m here in the middle of the night on a Friday. Even I have some life, you know.”

Two hours ago. “Then I’ve been wasting time,” he said. He immediately fired up a web-browser and the University homepage snapped into view. The University system was directly hooked to the net with an optical-fiber T-3 connection. With only a handful of users late Friday night and working on an operator’s station, the net was lightning fast even with all the virus problems.

Ray clicked into Gigablast, one of the less popular internet search engines. He quickly formed up a query and let it rip. It pulled up no less than sixty-two million possible web-pages to investigate. It listed the first twenty for him. Would he like to see the next twenty? At least it asked politely.

Ray sighed. He had to narrow the search. References to Santa were everywhere on the net.

Brenda grabbed his shoulder. He looked up.

“Aren’t you listening to me at all, Ray?” she demanded. Suddenly, he realized that she had been talking for some time.