Dark Rivers of the Heart

the home office. In seconds, the connection was made, and the familiar security litany began with three words that appeared on his screen: WHO GOES THERE?
        He typed his name: ROY MIRO.
        YOUR IDENTIFICATION NUMBER?
        
        Roy provided it.
        
        YOUR PERSONAL CODE PHRASE?
        
        POOH, he typed, which he had chosen as his code because it was the name of his favorite fictional character of all time, the honey-seeking and unfailingly good-natured bear.
        
        RIGHT THUMBPRINT PLEASE.
        
        A two-inch-square white box appeared in the upper-right quadrant of the blue screen. He pressed his thumb in the indicated space and waited while sensors in the monitor modeled the whorls in his skin by directing microbursts of intense light at them and then contrasting the comparative shadowiness of the troughs to the marginally more reflective ridges.
        After a minute, a soft beep indicated that the scanning was completed.
        When he lifted his thumb, a detailed black-line image of his print filled the center of the white box. After an additional thirty seconds, the print vanished from the screen; it had been digitized, transmitted by phone to the home-office computer, electronically compared to his print on file, and approved.
        Roy had access to considerably more sophisticated technology than the average hacker with a few thousand dollars and the address of the nearest Computer City store. Neither the electronics in his attache case nor the software that had been installed in the machine could be purchased by the general public.
        A message appeared on the display: ACCESS TO MAMA IS GRANTED.
        Mama was the name of the home-office computer. Three thousand miles away on the East Coast, all her programs were now available for Roy's use, through his cellular phone. A long menu appeared on the screen before him. He scrolled through, found a program titled LO(:ATE, and selected it.
        He typed in a telephone number and requested the street address at which it was located.
        While he waited for Mama to access phone company records and trace the listing, Roy studied the storm-lashed street. At that moment, no pedestrians or moving cars were in sight. Some houses were dark, and the lights of the others were dimmed by the seemingly eternal torrents of rain.
        He could almost believe that a strange, silent apocalypse had transpired, eliminating all human life on earth while leaving the works of civilization untouched.
        A real apocalypse was coming, he supposed. Sooner than later, a great war: nation against nation or race against race, religions clashing violently or ideology battling ideology. Humanity was drawn to turmoil and selfdestruction as inevitably as the earth was drawn to complete its annual revolution of the sun.
        His sadness deepened.
        Under the telephone number on the video display, the correct name appeared. The address, however, was listed as unpublished by request of the customer.
        Roy instructed the home-office computer to access and search the phone company's electronically stored installation and billing records to find the address. Such an invasion of private-sector data was illegal, of course, without a court order, but Mama was exceedingly discreet.
        Because all the computer systems in the national telephone network were already in Mama's directory of previously violated entities, she was Ible to enter any of them virtually instantaneously, explore at will, retrieve whatever was requested, and disengage without leaving the slightest trace that she had been there- Mania was a os in their machines.
        In seconds, a Beverly Hills address appeared on the screen.
        He cleared the screen and then asked Mama for a street map of Beverly Hills. She supplied it after a brief hesitation. Seen in its entirety, it was too compressed to be read.
        Roy typed in the address that he'd been given. The computer filled the screen with the quadrant that was of interest to him, and then with a quarter of that quadrant. The house was only a couple of blocks south of Wilshire Boulevard, in the less prestigious "flats" of Beverly Hills, and easy to find.
        He typed POOH OUT, which disengaged his portable terminal from Mama in her cool, dry bunker in Virginia.
        The large brick house-which was painted white, with hunter-green shutters-stood