Byte Me

Chapter 1-3

She seemed relieved at the distraction, rather than annoyed as she took it. “It’s an Internet address for a MUD.”

Jake blinked. “A mud?”

Bryn smiled with a decidedly superior air. “A multi-user dungeon. A place on the Internet where people meet to play games. Looks like home is in Colorado.” She gave at Jake with a tense look. “Dewey and his friends like to play games.”

As if on cue, Jake heard a humming sound. A small airplane flew across the computer screen dragging a banner that had written on it: You’ll have to do better than that, darling.

Bryn choked and banged on the keyboard with her fists. The airplane did fly out of sight, but it wasn’t over. A small Yugo putted across the bottom of the screen with the words Love, Phagan on a sign on the roof.

Jake opened his mouth, but Bryn’s look shriveled the words in his throat. He took a careful step back, avoiding eye contact with Mac. His elbow bumped a pile of evidence bags, starting a small avalanche that spread to the other side of the desk and continued onto the floor. He bent to pick them up.

Bryn looked at Mac, her eyes scary and her smile steely. “I don’t want anyone but you near this computer, until this person,” she scribbled a name on the back of her card and handed it to him, “comes to pick it up. Don’t show that name to anyone. Don’t tell it to anyone. You, yourself, bring the guy here to pack it up, and stay with all the way back to the airport. Understand?”

He nodded. “But...”

“We might still be able to pull something off the hard drive.” She stood up and stepped close to him. “No mistakes. I’d hate to have to come back and rip your heart out.” She stared at him for a long beat. “And eat it.”

Mac gulped twice before he managed to say, “No, ma’am, I mean, yes, ma’am. Whatever you say, ma’am.”

Jake started to dump the bags of evidence back onto the desk when he saw what the bags had been hiding. An answering machine, with a blinking message light.

“Looks like somebody has a message.” Jake crouched down and studied the machine, then looked at Bryn.

Bryn turned to stare. “Somebody wouldn’t be that stupid, would they?”

Mac craned to see. “It wasn’t doing that before.”

Jake still had on surgical exam gloves, so he tilted the machine. Fingerprinting powder fell off it in a mini-shower. He found the volume at zero on both ringer and recorder. With the volume turned up, he rewound the tape, then pushed play.

A tinny voice came out of the speaker.

“If you’re there, pick up.” A pause, then a sigh. “Call Pathphinder ASAP. And if you see Phagan, tell him the egg’s in the nest—should hatch right on schedule. If we still have a schedule. You know where to reach me.”

A hesitation. Then a click.

“Well, I’ll be—” Bryn looked at Jake in awe. “Pathphinder is a woman.”

“What was that about an egg?” Mac asked, the effort of trying to keep up written in neon across his face.

“A cuckoo’s egg.” She hesitated, as if she’d like to stop there, but Jake arched his eyebrows for more. “In cyberspace, an ‘egg’ is a computer program laid in a host machine where it will ‘hatch’ at some later time or from some specific action.”

“Laid?” Jake frowned. “To do what?”

“Anything the cuckoo wants. Give unauthorized access. Crash, maim or destroy. Phagan’s used them to disable security systems and to download sensitive data. Like the Trojan horse, they’re bad news for the ‘nest’ computer.”

Jake nodded then looked at the phone. “I wonder…”

He lifted the receiver and punched in the callback code. In a few moments it was ringing. He held the phone out so Bryn and Mac could hear a voice with a decided Texas accent say, “JR’s in Estes Park. What can I do you for?”

Jake replaced the phone without answering and then grinned at Bryn whose jaw had dropped.

“It couldn’t be that easy, could it?” she asked.

“If the bad guys were sensible, our job would be harder.” He looked at his watch. “Just enough time to catch the last flight to Denver.” He grinned at Mac. “Thanks for the assist.”

“No problem.” The detective looked at Bryn gathering her stuff up. “No...problem.”

Jake held the door for Bryn. “Ladies first.”

She grinned, looking like the easygoing farm girl her parents had hoped for. “Let’s go catch us some bad guys.”

“Who was on the phone?”

Mert Mentel, lead singer in Cattle Call, slung the pay phone’s receiver back on its cradle and turned to find Phoebe leaning against the office doorjamb. She leaned real good. Had the best rack in town and a waist he could span with one hand even falling down drunk. Which was the only time to make a run at the girl. Something in her brown eyes stopped him in his sober tracks. Her eyes had always been sad, like grief had a permanent home there. And her smile was usually wry, as if life were a joke only she understood.

“Dunno. They hung up.”

He strolled closer because, sad or wry, she didn’t seem to mind displaying her bounty. Her brief denim shorts and briefer white lace top were the perfect frame for her breasts and curving hips. Even better, the shorts left her long legs bare until all the way to her boots. Her hair was a straight fall of dark silk that curled under a stubborn chin on either side, her skin was tanned satin.

Her mouth—well, a guy could take half a day thinking of ways to kiss her mouth. Maybe longer if his big brother didn’t come along and kick his ass back into the real world.

Mert sighed and reached out to smooth some of the hair back from the chin, wishing he could smooth the sad from her eyes with some hot s*x. “Some asshole break his promise to call you, girl?”

Phoebe grinned up at Mert, aware of, but unaffected by, his signature Mentel charm. “Like I’d believe any man’s promises. Last time I checked, sucker wasn’t listed on my resume.”

“Think I’ll go kick Jesse’s butt for ruining you. Or you could let me heal your broken heart.” He gave her a hopeful smile.

Like those of all the Mentel boys, Mert’s mouth had been made to smile and placed in a face too pretty for anyone’s good. Even worse, his body was long and taut, with a vaguely designer air despite his country leanings. Blond hair tumbled halfway down his back; wicked green eyes and too much charm were given dangerous fuel by his honest worship at the shrine of the female body. A religion made easy to practice, since women loved to worship him back. The lacing of Texas in his deep smooth voice completed a formidable arsenal.

Luck Phoebe had received an early inoculation against the Mentel charm at the hands of his big brother, Jesse.

“I don’t have a heart,” Phoebe said. She didn’t glory in knowing this. She even missed it, but before becoming “Phoebe,” before this life Phagan had helped her create, she’d placed that heart in her sister’s dead hands. Now it was buried with her six feet under the Georgia soil. And there would be no resurrection until the man now known as Peter Harding paid for his crimes.

What she’d learned as Phoebe, what she’d learned from working with Phagan, made it possible for her to smile at Mert even though her nerves were stretched as tight as the strings on her guitar. Just like her ears told her when her guitar was out of tune, her senses were telling her the game was out of sync.

Where was Phagan? He sometimes dropped off her cyber-map, but never when a game was running. Ollie and Dewey were MIA, too, though that wasn’t so unusual. A lot depended on where Phagan had them deployed.

Too bad her senses hadn’t been online when she placed that phone call. Hadn’t made a mistake like that since she first started playing Phagan’s games. Might as well put a neon arrow in the sky, pointing to the bar. To her.

Mert’s grin turned wry. The change didn’t lessen its impact. “Then why not just use me for s*x?”

“Because I respect you.” Phoebe patted his cheek and in doing so caught sight of her watch. She cussed. “Look at the time.”

“Don’t need to with you around. Could take a whiz, though.” He headed toward the john.

Phoebe, heartless but not blind, watched him walk away. He had a great butt, and a girl had to get her pleasure where she could, while she could. He disappeared into the john, leaving her to turn her attention to the upcoming set. She fingered the buttons of her Daisy Mae shirt. It had only four, so she’d done up all of them. Now she wasn’t so sure. The trick was to show just enough cleavage to keep attention off her face. She’d changed what she could, short of plastic surgery, but she knew the wrong people could recognize her if they got a close enough look.

Leg, youngest Mentel and boy behind the keyboards, poked his head in the door that separated the hallway from the bar. From under his mustache he gave her a toothpaste-ad grin.

“Your groupie’s back.”

Phoebe made a face. “Not Earl?”

“The one and only duke of.”

“Great.” She sighed. “Thanks for the heads up, even if you are enjoying it.”

Leg laughed and disappeared. Smart boy.

It was a public bar. Couldn’t kick out her most ardent fan. Maybe if she kept her buttons closed, he’d only drool tonight. She frowned. Who was Earl? He looked harmless, but she couldn’t afford to assume he was harmless. Not when she was a shining example of the hide-in-plain-sight school of thought.

She studied her cleavage. If the doughy and disgusting Earl was other than what he appeared to be, maybe she ought to make sure his blood flow headed south. She undid two buttons. The push-up bra did the rest.

Mert came back from the john still zipping his jeans. His eyebrows shot up when he saw her. “Taking show time to a new low, aren’t you, girl?”

“Earl’s here.”

Mert grinned. “And you’re gonna kill him with kindness.” He studied her “kindness” with a connoisseur’s eye. “What about collateral damage?”

“You’ll heal,” she said.