Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon

I peered carefully out of the cube. I'd seen someone in the computer lab. During the daytime there were always people in the lab, of course; even at midnight, which it very nearly was, seeing someone working late would not be odd – but this someone was sitting in the dark.

I'd never found out why, unlike the rest of the office, the computer lab had floor-to-ceiling glass walls. I didn't find the view of a large room full of hardware that aesthetically pleasing, but maybe I wasn't the intended audience. Maybe to the technically oriented, it was a symphony in plastic, metal, and silicon, a tone poem in black, white, gray, and beige.

Or maybe it was a security measure, so no one could easily get up to any kind of sabotage. Anyone who walked down the north corridor could see everything that was happening in the lab.

And anyone in the lab could see anyone who walked down the corridor.

I peered carefully out of the cube where I was hiding. My eyes were more adjusted to the dark now, and the flicker from several monitors gave enough light for me to recognize the occupant of the lab.

It was Roger.

He was making CD-ROMs. “Burning“ them, as the guys said. Mutant Wizards had several CD burners in the lab, so the programmers could make a small quantity of CDs when they wanted to get people to test new versions of the game. As I watched, Roger punched a button on one of the CD burners. The drawer slid open. He removed the CD inside and put it on top of the inch-high stack of CDs beside the burner. Then he took a fresh CD from a stack to his left, placed it in the holder and pushed the drawer back in. His fingers flew over the keys for a few minutes, and then he sat back, clasped his arms behind his head, and went back to watching the various monitors and CD burners.

Of course, it was always possible that he had some legitimate reason for being there. Doing some urgent task related to the new release. And that he hated the fluorescent lights and preferred to sit in a room lit only by the glow of the monitors. And found it more convenient to sneak in the back door, rather than through the front door, where I'd have seen him. But still…

I ducked back into a cube and looked around. Luis's cube, I noticed. I rifled the papers by his phone and, as I'd hoped, found a copy of the emergency contact list. Roger was on it, and, more important, his work, home, and cell phones were listed.

I called his cell phone. After a couple of rings, he answered. “Yeah?“

“Roger!“ I exclaimed. “Thank God someone's got his phone on; I've been ringing people for fifteen minutes. Listen, you live pretty near the office, right?“

“Right,“ he said.

“Is there any chance you could do me a big favor and drop by the office really quickly?“

“Why?“ he asked. Not mentioning, of course, that he was already at the office, which anyone who was here for any honest reason would have said right away.

“I left Spike in his cage in the downstairs hall,“ I improvised. “Rob was supposed to pick him up, but I can't reach Rob – I'm beginning to worry that the police have taken him in again, and I don't want to abandon Spike there all night if Rob didn't have a chance to pick him up. Could you go over there and take a quick look?“

“Yeah, I guess so,“ he said. “Hang on.“

I heard some tapping noises through the phone, and then a door opening and closing as he left the computer lab. I waited until I heard the same noise again, this time from the reception area, and then I ran back to the computer lab, carefully opened the door, and tiptoed over to where I could see his monitor.

“Okay,“ I muttered. “I see why you're slinking around in the middle of the night.“

From the looks of it, Roger was being a very bad boy. One monitor showed a pornographic Web site. Not, as far as I could tell, a very good one. But perhaps the visitors didn't much care about the bad lighting and composition of the photos, or the fact that the women in them weren't particularly beautiful or enthusiastic about what they were doing. And I was sure no one else cared that the text – what there was of it – was poorly spelled and hideously ungrammatical. I was probably the only person who'd ever tried to read the text, aside from its author.

And, turning to a second monitor, I was pretty sure I knew who that author was. The screen was covered with unintelligible code. But if I glanced back and forth between the two monitors, I could see some of the text from the porn site on the second screen, interspersed with lines and lines of unintelligible gibberish pocked with brackets.

Apparently I'd interrupted Roger in the middle of updating his site. The cursor blinked right after the phrase “completely nekkid and reelly…“ – I restrained my impulse to correct his spelling, and I didn't particularly want to know what adjective he'd been about to type.

Was this how he normally spent his evenings? I wondered. Or just the evenings when his inept attempts at connecting with real live women fizzled?

I turned back to the first monitor. Something about the site looked familiar. I grabbed the mouse and scrolled up to the top of the page. Red and yellow words flashed at me, just as they had done on the site I'd seen at home – the site whose address I'd found in Ted's cache. Different words, but same style – which means, unless all porn sites had the same graphic look, it was probably the same site.

I glanced at a third monitor, which seemed to be tracking the progress of Roger's CD creation. He was copying vast quantities of files onto the CD. File titles flashed briefly across the screen as they were copied, and from the titles, I deduced that he was copying porn files. Backing up his site, perhaps? Adding new material to it?

I didn't know enough to tell, and didn't really care. Whatever he was doing, it shouldn't be happening on Mutant Wizards property, with Mutant Wizards hardware. Tomorrow, I'd look for someone who could figure out what was happening. I grabbed a slip of paper and wrote down the address of the porn site, in case whoever I enlisted needed that to track it down.

“Meg?“

I jumped, and then realized that Roger's voice was coming from my cell phone.

“I'm in the lobby. The dog's not here. Anything else?“

“No,“ I said. “Thanks a million, Roger. Sorry to drag you over there at this time of night.“

If I were Roger, I'd at least have pretended to allow enough time to walk over to the office, I thought, with irritation. Was he too stupid to think of that, or did he think I was? Either way, I needed to leave, now. But I wanted some evidence. I slipped a CD from the middle of Roger's completed stack. And then, in case he was keeping count, I tiptoed across the lab, grabbed a blank CD from the box where they were stored, and slipped it back at approximately the same place.

The lab itself seemed relatively soundproof – perhaps that explained why Roger had not emerged to check on any of the earlier events of the evening. But as I opened the door to the corridor, I heard the front door open and close. Clutching the contraband CD with my left fingertips, I eased the lab door slowly closed and slipped back down the hall and into a nearby cube.

Just in time. I saw Roger's shadowy figure pass by, and then I heard the computer lab door open and close.

I peeked out and peeked through the glass walls again. Roger was settled back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, staring impassively at his monitors.

Time for me to disappear.

I tucked the CD into my purse and sneaked the long way back to the reception area. Even though I didn't think Roger could hear it, I made sure to open and close the office door as quietly as possible. And I knew better than to wait for the geriatric elevator; I tiptoed down the stairs and eased the door closed. And breathed a sigh of relief. Unless Roger left the windowless computer lab, I'd be undetected. I was safe.

Or maybe not, I realized as I turned and stepped out into the parking lot. Which was still almost empty. Aside from Frankie's van, my blue Toyota was the only car in the parking lot. And apart from me, the only person in sight was the huge biker who'd been lurking in our parking lot. At the moment, he was lurking beside my Toyota.

As I watched, he leaned down and peered under the car.

His back was to me, so I decided to sneak a little closer to see what he was up to.

He was at least six feet six inches tall, and remarkably broad. Aside from a slight potbelly, he seemed mostly muscle. He wore enormous canvas boots, greasy jeans, a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped out, and a denim vest with a florid painting of a winged ferret on the back. Chains jingled merrily from various parts of his outfit, and his arms sported a remarkable collection of tattoos, though his thick body hair made it hard to appreciate any of their details. Except for one: on a thinly forested patch of bulging bicep, I could decipher the words born TO LOSE. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the skull inserted between the o and the s of “lose.“ Although a miniature work of art in its own right – one eye-hole sported a rose, and the other a writhing worm – the skull was so nearly identical in size and shape to the o that it was clear that the tattoo artist hadn't been the world's best speller, and had originally inscribed “Born to Loose.“ You had to give the arm's owner points, I decided. He was at least literate enough to consider fixing the typo worth additional pain and possibly more money.

But literate or not, he wasn't the sort of person one wants to find hovering over one's car in a deserted parking lot at – good grief! – 1:05 A.M. Perhaps if it had been earlier, I would have gone back inside to wait him out or call the police. But 1 was tired, cranky, and, I suppose, a little reckless.

Assailants aren't looking for opponents, I said to myself, recalling the words my karate instructor had always used. They're looking for victims. Don't look like a victim.

I slid my purse down to where I could use it for a purse fu block if needed, made sure my weight was balanced evenly, took a deep breath, stood up as straight as I could, and prepared to project fierceness and self-confidence as I strode forward.