The Witness

don’t agree with. I’ll take my lumps on this if I have to, but I hate taking them on behalf of those two dicks.”
    “I can’t blame you a bit. So here’s the deal, before the lawyer gets here. Go away, Roland. I don’t just mean leave town—though as I said you come back to visit with your wife, we’ll be happy to see you. I mean go away from this. It’s upsetting my friends, it’s upsetting my lady. And you’re wasting your time, because Justin Blake isn’t going to slide his way out from this one. I don’t blame anybody for doing a job they’re hired to do—on the right side of the law, that is. But this can go pretty hard on you, and I can make it so your firm takes a hit. Maybe it’s not much, considering, but I don’t know why they’d want the bad publicity.”
    “I have to turn in my reports.”
    “You go right ahead on that. You didn’t find anything on me, on Abigail, on the Conroys, because there’s nothing to find. But if you keep poking at us, I’ll find out, and it’ll go different. You got far enough in this to know computers are Abigail’s playground.”
    “There’s a threat buried in there.”
    “I’m not burying a thing. I’m giving you the facts as I see them. I can let this go. You keep your clean record, you turn in your reports, and go home to your wife. Your lawyer’s not going to cook you up a better deal.”
    “Why are you?”
    “For the reasons I just gave you, and one more. I don’t much want to lock you up, Roland, that’s another fact. If I’d gotten a different sense of you, if I thought you were the kind who enjoys working for a man like Blake, who’d edge over more than crossing a property line or going into a locked room to take a look around, you’d be in a cell right now. I’d work to keep you there.”
    “I’d like to call my boss, give him the status.”
    “Go ahead.” Brooks pushed off the desk.
    “I met your mother.”
    Brooks leaned back again. “Did you?”
    “I walked down—getting that sense, like you said. That house, it’s amazing.”
    “We’re partial to it. Go ahead and make your call,” Brooks told him, and strolled out.

26
     
    A BIGAIL PUT EVERYTHING ELSE ASIDE AND FOCUSED ENTIRELY on the creation of the virus. She’d made numerous attempts to piggyback it on the worm she’d already constructed, but the results weren’t satisfactory.
    She could do considerable damage with the worm, but with the worm boring openings into the Volkov network, the virus that followed, spreading through those openings, would devastate.
    To accomplish everything she needed, it had to be very fast, very complete, and trigger no alerts.
    She’d always considered the project a kind of hobby, one she’d hoped would one day pay off.
    Now it was a mission.
    If she had time to build more equipment, or the luxury of hiring another skilled tech, or two … But she didn’t, so speculating proved useless. This was only for her.
    In any case, over time she’d developed her own programming language—the better to thwart anyone who attempted to hack into herfiles—and even if she could hire on, she’d have to teach someone her language and techniques.
    Faster, more efficient, to do it herself.
    She ran the next test, watched her codes fly by, and thought, No, no, no. It remained too unwieldy, too separate, took too long.
    She sat back, her hair twisted up off her neck and secured with a pencil. As she studied the screen, she drank iced green tea for clarity of thinking.
    The tea, the two yoga breaks she’d made herself take, the absolute quiet, didn’t appear to help.
    When her alarm sounded, and Bert went on alert, she checked her monitor. She hadn’t expected Brooks so early, she thought, as she spotted his cruiser, then glanced at the time.
    She’d worked straight through the morning and into the middle of the afternoon.
    Six hours, she thought, with no appreciable progress.
    Maybe it was beyond her after all.
    She started to get up, to unlock the doors for him, then remembered she’d given him keys and the security codes. An uneasy step, she admitted, but the advantage right that moment was she didn’t have to stop to let him in.
    Still, there would be someone in the house, in her space. How was she supposed to concentrate on something this complex, this delicate, unless she was alone?
    Which tore apart her fantasy of a state-of-the-art computer lab and a team of highly skilled techs. But that was only fantasy, because she always