Dark Rivers of the Heart

big straw purse even as she entered the elevator, but the two thugs could see only her boobs stretching the low neckline of her sweater. Because they might have been quicker than they looked, she didn't risk taking the Korth.38 out of the handbag, just shot them through the straw, two rounds each. They hit the floor so hard that the elevator shook, and then the money was hers.
        The only thing she regretted about the operation was the third man.
        He was a little guy with thinning hair and bags under his eyes, squeezing into the corner of the cab as if trying to make himself too small to be noticed. According to the tag pinned to his shirt, he was with a convention of dentists and his name was Thurmon Stookey. The poor bastard was a witness. After stopping the elevator between the twelfth and eleventh floors, Eve shot him in the head, but she didn't like doing it.
        After she reloaded the Korth and stuffed the ruined straw purse into the canvas book bag with the money, she descended to the ninth floor.
        She was prepared to kill anyone who might be waiting in the elevator alcove-but, thank God, no one was there. Minutes later she was out of the hotel, heading home, with one million bucks and a handy Mickey Mouse tote bag.
        She felt terrible about Thurmon Stookey. He shouldn't have been in that elevator. The wrong place, the wrong time. Blind fate. Life sure was full of surprises. In her entire thirty-three years, Eve Jammer had killed only five people, and Thurmon Stookey had been the sole innocent bystander among them. Nevertheless, for a while, she kept seeing the little guy's face in her mind's eye, as he had looked before she'd wasted him, and it h un about what had happened to him.
        Within a year, she would not need to kill anyone again. She would be able to order people to carry out executions for her.
        Soon, though unknown to the general populace, Eve Jammer would be the most feared person in the country, and safely beyond the reach of all enemies. The money she socked away was growing geometrically, but it was not money that would make her untouchable. Her real power would come from the trove of incriminating evidence on politicians, businessmen, and celebrities that she had transmitted at high speed, in the form of supercompressed digitized data, from the discs in her bunker to an automated recording device of her own, on a dedicated telephone line, in a bungalow in Boulder City that she had leased through an elaborate series of corporate blinds and false identities.
        This was, after all, the Information Age, which had followed the Service Age, which itself had replaced the Industrial Age. She'd read all about it in Fortune and Forbes and Business Week. The future was now, and information was wealth.
        Information was power.
        Eve had finished examining the eighty active recorders and had begun to select new material for transmission to Boulder City when an electronic tone alerted her to a significant development on one of the taps.
        If she had been out of the office, at home or elsewhere, the computer would have alerted her by beeper, whereupon she would have returned to the office immediately. She didn't mind being on call twenty-four hours a day. That was preferable to having assistants manning the room on two other shifts, because she simply didn't trust anyone else with the sensitive information on the discs.
        A blinking red light drew her to the correct machine. She pushed a button to turn off the alarm.
        On the front of the recorder, a label provided information about the wiretap. The first line was a case-file number. The next two lines were the address at which the tap was located. On the fourth line was the name of the subject being monitored: THEDA DAVIDOMTZ.
        The surveillance of Mrs. Davidowitz was not the standard fishing expedition in which every word of every conversation was preserved on disc.
        After all, she was only an elderly widow, an ordinary prole whose general activities were no threat to the system-and therefore were of no interest to the agency. By merest chance, Davidowitz had established a shortlived friendship with the woman who was, at the moment, the most urgently sought fugitive in the nation, and the agency was interested in the widow only in the unlikely event that she received a telephone call or the woman's dry chats with other friends and neighbors would have