Howling Dead

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2ONE MONTH LATER

It’s too hot, man, time to bug out, Lizard said.

Spaz stared at the message on the palm top and felt a trickle of sweat run through his close-cropped straight hair and down his brown skin. He wiped his forehead and shivered slightly — the cold breeze from the plane’s air vent chilled him. He closed his eyes and tried to relax. The receivers worked best when his thoughts were clear.

Not quite Asian, and not quite African, Spaz had inherited his Japanese features from his father and his coloring from his African American mother. He had also inherited his father’s ability to crack just about any machine out there…

Spaz could see the pathway if he focused properly. The Forest was like that — you needed to be focused if you used it. Spaz pulled the data once again. At that moment, he saw Lizard’s avatar appear. It was a green gecko, reminiscent of the car insurance ads.

Knock, knock, Spaz Boy, said Lizard.

Go away, Spaz said. You’ll lead the werewolves right to me.

They’re already circling, Spaz Boy, Lizard said. I’m just here to watch the fun.

Wrong, said Spaz and began rerouting the links. Maybe you’ll give in, but I won’t. His fingers flew over the PDA pad faster than he could realistically form his thoughts into the right algorithm. That was the problem with prototype interfaces — as gee-whiz and Buck Rodgers as the public would like to think they were, the reality was that they had to compensate for an enormous amount of human frailties. One of them was the lack of ability to stay focused in a logical way. The human mind naturally made associations — associations which boggled even the biggest supercomputers. Spaz slammed the door on the Lizard and began to establish a secure session with the Denver database. He pulled up the whois files and started looking for a name.

They can’t find me if you can’t, he thought smugly.

One record popped up. Kira Walker, age 32, blonde hair, blue eyes, stared back at him from the photo. Damn, you’re looking good, Spaz thought. When he had looked her up previously, he had half-expected that she’d be married with three kids and settled down somewhere in Iowa. Instead, he found her in the most unlikely place — at Intermountain Telecom and right where he needed her to be. He only hoped she wasn’t a stik.

He pulled up Susan Baker’s photo. Susie-Woozy, he remembered teasing her back in college but he couldn’t remember a time when she ever got woozy. Susie was 32, brunette, and miss-goody-two-shoes. Where Kira had a bit of a wild streak in her, Susie was all no-nonsense. She hated Spaz and hated when he called her Susie.

Susie, Susie, Susie, Spaz told the photo. The interface replied that the command was invalid. He needed to reprogram it to have a sense of humor.

“Excuse me, Mr. Barnes?” A flight attendant was staring at Spaz. “We need all electronic devices turned off or put in plane-safe mode for take-off.”

It took Spaz a few seconds to look up. He had already forgotten his identity. What was it again? Jeremy Barnes from Chicago. Not that his current identity really mattered to him. It might matter to Jeremy though — once he got the bill.

Spaz muttered something noncommittal and put the palm in plane-safe. He took the headset off and stared out the window. The transmissions might interfere with the plane’s communications and even if they didn’t, he didn’t want to draw any more attention to himself than he already had, ordering first class seats off Jeremy’s platinum American Express.

It was probably best he was no longer online. If the werewolves had found Lizard and shut him down, they’d be looking for him. Then again, it might not be werewolves after all, but the stiks from the FBI. Regardless, it paid to lay low for a while, at least until the FBI stiks or wolves moved on. There were plenty of other targets out there besides him.

His mind drifted back to Kira again. Now that his operative within Intermountain had turned wolf, he needed another. He had one backdoor — all good spiders did, when the s**t hit the proverbial fan — but he wasn’t sure if it could be trusted. Intermountain was a lynchpin for the Forest, and at the moment his operative was leaving it open. But for how long?

That was where Kira and Susie came in.

They were working right in the Forest, only Spaz would bet they hadn’t noticed. Kira might, if she found something non-sequitur with the network, but that was Cathal Murphy’s department and Spaz doubted Cathal would let her sniff around. Still, the computer layout probably looked a little strange, and Kira might question it — or might simply think it was one of the myriad bad attempts by an inept administrator to maintain job security.

Spaz wondered how much of a stik Kira had become. Susie was a stik and it was bound to rub off, but Kira was no doubt a spider at heart. All Spaz had to do was play to Kira’s curiosity.

In the meantime, he had gotten a piss-ant job at a cybercafé called Axioms. The pay wasn’t much more than minimum wage, but it gave him a good enough cover that no one would question unless they looked closely. But that was the role of a spider — you crawled between the cracks and spun your little webs, and for the most part were unseen and unnoticed. You didn’t do much damage, either.

He sat back and ordered a scotch straight up, snaked the iPod into his ears and turned on some tunes and relaxed in the first class seat. It was going to be a long trip and he’d have a lot of work once he got to Denver.