Донна Эндрюс: Click here for murder

Maude’s going to call in sick to UL and head over to the Alan Grace offices this morning, instead of waiting till the afternoon, as usual. If possible, I want her to be the one to break the news of Ray’s death to the employees, and observe their reactions. Not that I really think any of them could be responsible, but we shouldn’t ignore any possibilities. And while she’s there, I can have her log in using Ray’s office computer so 1 can search it, too. And we issued him a desktop computer to use at home. We need to find a way to get soyneone into his apartment to turn it on so I can investigate that, too. Must ask Maude how we can do this.

And Yve paid more attention than usual to attempts to break into the UL and Alan Grace systems. KingFischer, the chess AIP who moonlights as UL’s security expert, takes care of well over ninety-nine percent of outside attacks, with the help of his killer firewalls. Like every other AIP, I need to stay alert for attacks that might slip by the firewalls by piggybacking on my communications with users and other computers. Normally that’s all I worry about. But today, Ym watching everything that hits the firewall.

Are there more attacks than usual? Not really. The level is high, but we’ve seen similar peaks before, plenty of times. But are these attacks more focused than usual? That I don’t know. Perhaps Ym overreacting, but I think perhaps they are. Which could mean

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that someone is using expert knowledge—knowledge someone could have taken from Ray’s laptop—to target the flaws in KingFischer’s security more effectively.

Of course, when I asked him about it, he got very huffy at the mere suggestion that his security could be breached. Which is ridiculous. There’s no such thing as perfect security. He knows that.

He has spent more time on security today than usual. Is that merely because I insulted him and he wants to make a fuss? Or because there are problems?

I trust KingFischer, as much as I trust anybody. More than I trust myself at the moment. It must be the strain of worrying so much; I very nearly missed one clever worm that had piggybacked on some data I was retrieving from the FBI system. Or was it because the worm was custom-designed by someone who knew too much about me?

And, of course, it’s not the attacks we detect that do the damage.

*

What if one has already slipped by KingFischer’s firewalls and my own frayed defenses?

Maybe all this worry is unnecessary. Maybe when Tim gets down to the police department, he will find that they already know who killed Ray. That they have a weapon, fingerprints, some good leads, an eyewitness, even a suspect already in custody. And, of course, his laptop.

Of course, that wouldn’t bring Ray back. The only practical benefit of catching Ray’s killer would be that it could prevent future deaths. And from what I’ve read of human psychology, I gather it would give Ray’s friends a certain comfort. Closure, they call it. I wonder if I’ll feel that when we know what happened; or if, as happens so often, the answers will only raise another 7nore complex set of questions.

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Donna Andrews

Only time will tell. Which is unfortunate. Right now, I don't have the patience to wait for things to happen at a human pace. But there’s nothing else I can do.

Haude dragged one of Ray's guest chairs

into the comer and stood on it to reach the tiny ceiling-mounted camera.

‘‘Tim was already at his office,” Turing said through the speakers of Ray’s computer. “He’s going down to see the police.”

“Good,” Maude replied. She made one more minute adjustment to the camera. Normally, it pointed toward where Ray would sit when he was at his desk, so he could add video to a telephone call with Maude or Turing. Today, they would use it so Turing could watch the reactions of the Alan Grace staff when Maude told them about Ray’s death.

“People should begin arriving any minute now,” Maude said. “Can you see okay?”

“Fine,” Turing replied. The desktop computer continued chugging and grinding, so Maude assumed Turing was continuing to search Ray’s files for clues. And from her lack of cheerful remarks, not finding any.

Maude got down from the chair on which she’d balanced and sat behind the desk. She glanced at the in-basket, then leaned back, took off her glasses, and pressed her fingers to her temples. Now was not the time to get a headache, she told herself. She imagined shoving the twinges of pain back with everything else she didn’t have time for right now. Like worrying about how things were going at UL, Would

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anyone take advantage of her calling in sick today? Right now she didn’t care. UL would have to look after itself, at least for today. She probably had time to tackle the first item on her Alan Grace to-do list. But browbeating the vendor about the computer that should have arrived last week didn’t seem as urgent as it had on Friday. After all, the new machine was intended to be Ray’s machine, to use for working at home. They’d probably need it later, for whoever took over Ray’s job, but not now. She knew that eventually, as her grief for Ray evolved, she’d hit an angry stage. She’d save calling the irresponsible vendor until then, when she could put her anger to good use.

Just as she’d save her grief until a convenient time. After she’d dealt with the staff, the police, and poor Ray’s family. She wondered again whether the police had reached them yet. Should she try to call? No, better to wait. Make sure the police broke the news first. If she’d known them, it would be different. But she didn’t want her first—and perhaps only—contact with Ray’s family in Miami to be as the messenger bringing news of his death.

She opened her eyes, glanced at the monitor screen, and saw that a message from Turing had appeared.

“I’m worried,” it said.

“Why?” she asked, leaning forward to type her question with the keyboard, and wondering why Turing didn’t just use the speakers.

“I suppose it’s heartless of me to worry about something like this with poor Ray dead,” Turing said. “But I suddenly find myself wondering how careful he was.”

“Careful?” Maude repeated.

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“About security. About my security. Knowing Ray, he had his laptop and his PDA with him—what if he had something about me in one of them?”

“He knew better than that,” Maude said. “Ray was very security conscious. You know how hard he was on anyone who was at all careless.”

“Yes,” Turing said. “But was he hard on himself? Or did he think he was different—that he wouldn’t ever lose his PDA or leave his computer sitting around unguarded?”

“That would be foolish,” Maude said. “He, more than anyone, had access to data that would be damaging if someone outside Alan Grace got their hands on it.”

But even as she typed, Maude realized that she shared Turing’s worry. Because however foolish it would be for Ray to ride the staff about security and be careless about it himself, it would be understandable. Human.

Why did that word suddenly seem so apologetic? So . . . inadequate?

“Should you do something, just in case?” she asked.

“I already am,” Turing said. “You’ll need to give the staff new passwords—and warn them that until we know more about the circumstances of Ray’s death, we’ll be clamping down on security. They may run into glitches in the next few days; they’ll need to be patient.”

“So you can take care of the problem?” Maude said, feeling relieved.

“Not really,” Turing said. “I can change passwords, shut down the obvious, easy routes into the Alan Grace system. But if someone who really knew what they were doing got hold of some of Ray’s information, the whole system could