“Phone call,” she told him.

They were on the phone for a long time, maybe twenty minutes, with Shaw doing almost all the talking. Duran sat with his eyes closed and every once in a while, said, “Ummmhmmm,” or “Yessss,” his voice low and indistinct. Finally, he put the phone down, and heaved a huge yawn.

“Adrienne? I think Dr. Shaw would like to talk to you now.” His voice sounded normal, if sleepy. “I’m really tapped out,” he explained, handing her the phone. “I think I’m gonna crash.” With a yawn, he turned, and made his way to the bedroom.

Adrienne was astounded, watching him as he disappeared down the hall. “What did you do?” she asked, her voice in an urgent whisper.

“I hypnotized him,” Shaw replied.

“Over the phone?”

“Yes. It wasn’t that hard. He was already in a trance.”

“And—”

“I gave him a couple of posthypnotic suggestions—did he go to bed?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he’ll be fine in the morning. Refreshed, and feeling pretty good about himself.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

“If he gives you any more trouble—and I don’t think he will, but if—the best thing to do is just: walk out. Play it safe. Give me a call, and I’ll take it from there.”

When they’d said good-bye, Adrienne went into the kitchen for a glass of water, then wandered back to the dining room to take another look at the plastic sheet that she and Duran had been struggling over.

Removing the sheet from the computer handbook, she saw that it was embossed with a grid, almost like graph paper, although the spaces were rectangles rather than squares. There were two- or three-hundred of them, she guessed, and judging by its size, it was obviously meant to fit over the screen of Nikki’s computer.

Which it did. Perfectly. Indeed, there were small holes in each corner of the sheet that corresponded to markings on the monitor’s frame. Placing the sheet over the markings, she saw that it created a precise, transparent overlay.

With the sheet in place, she turned on the computer, signed onto AOL and went to the Web site.

Unknown Host

Just like before. But the grid revealed nothing at all, it spidery lines crisscrossing the error message. She sighed. Duran must have gone to another Web site, while she’d been in the bathroom, brushing her hair. Then she remembered the trick Duran had shown her earlier and, with a little experimenting, she found the icon for the “Temporary Internet Files.” What she wanted, of course, was to identify the site Duran had visited—the interactive one with the Hello, Jeffrey message. It should have been the second site on the list, but, no: the first and second sites were the same.

http://theprogram.org

http://theprogram.org

Which was frustrating because that was the nonsense site, the one Nikki had gone to, the one with the error message. She stared for a while at the letters, wondering what they meant, thinking, Maybe Duran erased the address… But no, he hadn’t. She’d watched him sign off AOL, and close the computer. Then they’d argued. So…

She needed a nerd. And she knew where to find one.

Carl Dobkin was famous for sleeping four hours a night, so if she could get him on the phone, he might be able to talk her down. It was unlikely that he’d be at work, but you never knew with Carl. So she tried Slough, Hawley, punching his name into the voice mail system—which then patched her through to his extension. He wasn’t there and she didn’t leave a message. She knew Carl lived in Potomac with Caroline Stanton, a partner in the firm. Bette had been there once for a cookout and (cattily) described the place as “E-nor-mous! Faux Tudor. No landscaping.” Adrienne got the number from Information, and called it.

She hoped Caroline wouldn’t answer. She didn’t want to be grilled about where she was. And she got lucky.

“Hello, Hello.”

Relief darted through her. “Carl! Hi, it’s Adrienne Cope.”

“Hey, Scout. What’s up? I suppose you know: they’re taking your name in vain down at work.”

“I’m sure they are.” There was a long pause that she made no attempt to fill.

Finally, Dobkin asked, “So what can I do for ya?”

“You could be a genius for me.”

Carl laughed, his lazy chuckle. “No problem. It’s what I do best.”

She described her attempts to investigate Nikki’s travels in cyberspace. “And I got to this one site that she seems to have visited almost every day—sometimes, several times a day—and it won’t boot up.”

“What do you mean, ‘it won’t boot up’?”

“I get an error-message. ‘Unknown host.’”

He thought about it for a moment. “Were one of you using Unix? Maybe there’s a compatibility problem.”

“I’m using the same computer she was. And it’s pure vanilla. She had an AOL account—nothing exotic.”

“Tell you what—can you get online and talk to me at the same time?”

“No,” she replied. “I’ve only got a single line.”

“Lemme put you on hold. I’ll go into my study.” A little later, he came back on the phone. “You there?”

“Still here.”

“Okay, now we’re cruisin’.” She heard the clack of the keyboard, Carl typing at warp speed. “Let me log on here… okay, give me this site’s address.”

She spelled it out for him. “The program—one word—dot org.”

“Hang on. It’s bootin’.”

“It’s always bootin’. Then it doesn’t go anywhere.”

“Hunh!” Dobkin exclaimed. “You’re right. Look at that!” He was silent for a moment.

“Carl?”

“The weird thing is, it’s loading that page.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not an error-message,” Dobkin explained. “It’s the actual Web site. You go there, and that’s what you get.”

The two of them sat on the phone for upwards of a minute, saying nothing, thinking about the problem.

Finally, Dobkin asked: “Was your sister into anything… ummm, kinky?”

Adrienne thought of the gun. And lied. “I don’t know—why?”

“Well, there are some locked and hidden sites on the Web, sites you can’t get into without a password or key.”

“You mean, like—one of those porno sites?”

“No, because with those, you know what they are. I’m talking about sites that put up an innocuous front—”

“Like what?”

“Like a quote from the Bible—or an error-message. You just have to know how to get behind it.”

Adrienne considered what Dobkin was telling her. “But… why would someone do that?” she asked.

“Could be a joke. Could be hackers, screwing around, doing it because they can do it. Or it could be something illegal.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know… child pornography.” As Adrienne began to protest, he hurried on, “Hey, I’m just throwing things out. I don’t know what it is.”

She was quiet for a moment, then told him about the overlay. “Could that be something?” she asked.

“Yeah! Sure, it could. You play with it at all?”

“A little. But I didn’t get anywhere.”

“Well, you might want to give it another ride,” he suggested. Then he thought for a moment, and asked: “Would it help to know whose Web site it is?”

“What?”

“The Web site,” he repeated. “Would it help if you knew where it was, and who it’s registered to?”

She couldn’t believe he was asking that. What did he think? “Well, yeah!” she said. “I mean—that would really float my boat.”

“Well, maybe I can help you with that,” he told her. “We’ve been getting a lot of spam at work, and I’ve gotten pretty good at tracking them down. I’ve got a program that runs a high-speed graphical trace route, working backwards from one computer to another, pinging the nodes—”

“Uhhh, Carl—you’re beginning to break up.”

“I’m… what? Oh, I get it—very funny. Tell you what: how long are you going to be awake?”

“I don’t know… an hour?” The truth was, she wasn’t at all sleepy.