Chapter Thirteen

Alex absently strummed his guitar,the instrument feeling like an old friend in his hands. He hadn't played in a while, not since his band's bass player had gone into treatment for colon cancer, if four computer geeks could even be called a band. Toni had given him this guitar for Christmas years ago: a handmade mahogany/spruce Sorbera acoustic. He'd just about killed her for going so over budget that year, but she'd wanted to encourage his music, seeing real talent in what to him had just been another rebellion: his electric guitar rocker phase.

He picked out the first few chords of Hotel California as he gazed at his computer with enough force to bore a hole through the screen. He was seated stiffly on the edge of the couch in his office, the light of a dying sun filtering in through the west facing window, coloring the room a mellow gold. The ice in an untouched gin and tonic chinked softly on the table next to him. On the computer monitor, the mouse cursor blinked where he'd left it stalled out on Toni's latest email, or actually the email from whoever was pretending to be her.

He was absolutely sure now that whoever was sending those emails wasn't his sister. The emails sounded almost like her to anyone who didn't know Toni as well as he did, but it all came down to the fact that over a week had gone by and Toni still hadn't called or given him any contact information. No way would Toni keep him out of the loop this long. He and his sister were just too close these days. They'd always been tight, even as kids, but in the last few months – hell, years – with neither of them dating much or going out with friends, they'd really come to rely on each other for big time sanity checks. For companionship. A couple of days without calling was pushing it. A week was…impossible.

Alex and Detective Waterson had been working the fake Toni theory together, but the detective wasn't having any luck running down information. Neither was Alex, for that matter; just as he'd predicted, that forged IP address was proving impossible to trace.

He'd been attacking the problem with his best stuff, too. The moment Waterson and his partner had driven off seven days ago, Alex had brought his no-no hacker programs out of mothballs and reinstalled them: sniffer, crack, malicious logic, cryptographic checksum, DNS and IP spoofing, daemons. He'd been sending emails to Fake Toni ever since, with various Trojans attached to try and probe out system information, but whoever was working on Toni's end had access control encrypted tighter than a virgin's honey pot. Just when Alex would manage to follow a signal a few steps, the footprints would cross a stream, so to speak, then just vanish. He knew they were there, but hell if he could see them.

Damn, but he was so friggin' sick of feeling helpless. Bowing his head, he switched from the Eagles on his guitar to Eric Clapton, gently plucking out Tears in Heaven, a song he only played when he was mega depressed. A sudden rush of tears startled him, and he stopped playing to press his eyelids. "C'mon, sister mine," he whispered, "where are you?" God, this sucked. He had to do something, man.

He glanced at his closet door. What was hidden inside there could…

No, don't even go there, Alex. Using the "piggy-backer" was a bad idea.

The program, called a piggy-backer for its ability to ride any signal undetected, was too unpredictable. On a good day, it was a brilliant device, allowing him to hack into a system he had no business messing with. Fabulous on the surface, yes, except that when he'd invented the software back in his Berkeley days, he hadn't had the time or the talent to rid the thing of all its bugs. So on a bad day, his piggy-backer had a nasty habit of spazzing out and obliterating everything within the very system it'd breached. A real downer. In fact, it was such a serious negative that if he used the program to hunt down Fake Toni, he could just as easily end up slamming shut the only open door he had into information about her. He'd spent this entire last week avoiding the damned thing, even though time was rapidly ticking by while his sister remained missing. Possibly in serious danger. Or dead.

"Ah, hell," he breathed, anguish burning into his temples like a soldering iron. Screw it. Surging to his feet, he carefully set the Sorbera on its guitar stand, then crossed to his office closet. Hunkering down on his hands and knees, he rummaged through the junk inside, cursing and grunting. The small chest was way in the back, purposely buried under a crapload of stuff to keep it away from easy reach. With a final huff, he pulled the chest out, flipped open the lid, and… just about fell back on his ass.

Holy Christ, The Book.

He'd all but forgotten about the thing. He hadn't opened it in years because … well, whenever he did, it was kind of a bizarre-o trip-out for him; for several nights afterward, his dreams would be filled with strange, fantastical pictures.

It was an amazing book, though. The cover itself was striking, sandy-colored and grainy in texture, the center decorated with a dark blue crescent moon and star that shimmered almost supernaturally. On the pages inside were wondrous and detailed drawings of dragons, fairies, kings and queens, labyrinths, and … a people so magnificently stunning, he couldn't quite figure out who they were. Or what they were. Because he had a strange sense beauty like that didn't come without a mystical element attached to it.

He'd originally thought The Book was a fairy tale written in some extinct language. The lettering looked like a mixture of ancient hieroglyphs, Runic markings, and, hell, something J.R.R. Tolkien might've invented. But when he'd taken it to the language department at UCSD for analysis, the linguist had told him it was utter gibberish, nothing at all readable. Although the thing was … he could read it. Sometimes, at least. Or more like, "see" pictures in the lettering, although he didn't know how. And, well … it was no fairy tale, he'd figured out that much. More like a history of sorts, a prophesy, maybe, somehow a commentary on his own life, which was the really freaky part.

Temptation pulled at him to open The Book, but he forced himself to set it aside. He didn't need that kind of distraction right now. He rooted deeper in the chest and found the piggy-backer. Sitting back on his heels, he stared at the disc. Maybe he should try fixing it first …. But beta testing generally took a long time, and time was exactly what he didn't have right now. No, that precious commodity was rapidly ticking away.

He crossed to his desk and sat down, pulling the piggy-backer out of its sleeve. He filled his lungs with a long, deep breath, then slid the disc into his computer tower.

Time to set a trap.