10 Safe House by Diane Duane

Author:Diane Duane [Duane, Diane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Six thousand miles away the major was sitting in business class on a domestic flight to Vienna, from which she would have to catch yet another flight to Zurich, the nearest spaceplane port. She much disliked having to pass through Switzerland, but at the moment it was unavoidable. Speed was of the essence, and she had other things than the wretched Swiss on her mind.

“He has not left the house, Major,” said the voice down the hushed and scrambled Net link she was using from the booth at the back of business class.

“Good. A small blessing, if nothing else. What are his hosts doing?”

“Having a quiet day at home, it would seem. The mother has been working in the garden. The father has been in the household Net mostly, not out in the public Nets at all. The daughter and the boy are in the Net as well.”

“In the boy’s accounts?”

“No. Though they could be at any time. His father had his son’s account information installed on a North American server.”

“Well, that should hardly be a problem for us. Break into the accounts. I want them completely searched.”

“Unfortunately,” said her contact, “the server is not the one to which they were originally moved. The new server is one which is used by several U.S. government agencies…and it is regrettably extremely well protected. We cannot get at it.”

She muttered something rude under her breath. “Well, at the very least I want the boy watched and listened to wherever he goes in the public Nets. He’s likely enough to drop some useful information where it can be heard.”

“But, Major, except for the Greens’ household Net, he has been nowhere except in a proprietary system—and that as a guest on the professor’s daughter’s account. And the proprietary systems routinely have top-flight filters which keep outside access limited to registered subscribers—”

“Well, subscribe!”

“We did. But it takes twenty-four hours to approve the credit. And besides, our country’s domains are blocked. We had to go in through a Transylvanian domain address, and for that we had to get the usual clearances—”

Bureaucracy, she thought in anguish and covered her face with one hand. It had its uses, but most of them rarely did her any good.

“Just do it,” the major said. “Once inside the proprietary system, you should find a fair amount of information about the girl—her habits, how often she uses the system, and so on. I want a complete report on that. Meanwhile, how is the search for the father doing?”

“There is good news there, Major. The techs working on one of his research associates have produced some results. They said he had gone north for holidays several times in the last year, even though as far as they knew, he had no family or friends up there. His excuse was that he had been fishing.”

“I daresay he had…though I think it more likely that the kind of fish we have in the lakes up there were not what he had in mind.”

“Perhaps not. He made some mention of the places he had gone.

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