Shadow Puppets Page 0,39

the keystroke doesn't get read twice."

Peter and John Paul both made the same gesture-hands to the forehead, covering the eyes. They understood at once, of course.

Keystrokes came in and got processed by Ferreira's snoopware or by John Paul's-but never by both. So both keystroke logs would show nothing but random letters, none of which would amount to anything meaningful. None of which would ever look like a log-on- even though there were log-ons all over the system all the time.

"Can we combine the logs?" asked John Paul. "We have all the keystrokes, after all."

"We have the alphabet, too," said Ferreira, "and if we just find the right order to arrange them in, those letters will spell out everything that was ever written."

"It's not as bad as that," said Peter At least the letters are in order. It shouldn't be that hard to meld them together in a way that makes sense."

"But we have to meld all of them in order to find Achilles's logons.

"Write a program," said Peter "One that will find everything that might be a log-on by him, and then you can work on the material immediately following those possibles."

"Write a program," murmured Ferreira.

"Or I will," said Peter. "I don't have anything else to do."

That sarcasm doesn't make people love you, Peter, said John Paul silently.

Then again, there was no chancc. given Peter's parents, that such sarcasm would not come readily to his lips.

"I'll sort it out," said Ferreira.

"I'm sorry," said John Paul.

Ferreira only sighed. "Didn't it at least cross your mind that we would have software already in place to do the same job?"

"You mean you had snoopware that would give me regular reports on what Achilles was writing?" asked John Paul. Oops. Peter's not the only sarcastic one. But then, I'm not trying to unite the world.

"There's no reason for you to know," said Peter.

Time to bite the bullet. "I think Achilles is planning to kill your mother."

"Father," said Peter impatiently. "He doesn't even know her."

"Do you think there's any chance that he didn't hear that she tried to get into his room?"

"But ... kill her?" asked Ferreira.

"Achilles doesn't do things by half-measures," said John Paul. "And nobody is more loyal to Peter than she is."

"Not even you, Father?" asked Peter sweetly.

"She doesn't see your faults," lied John Paul. "Her motherly instincts blind her."

"But you have no such handicap."

"Not being your mother," said John Paul.

"My snoopware should have caught this anyway," said Ferreira. "I blame only myself. The system shouldn't have had that kind of back door"

"Systems always do," said John Paul.

After Ferreira left, Peter said a few cold words. "I know how to keep Mother completely safe," he said. "Take her away from here. Go to a colony world. Go somewhere and do something, but stop trying to protect me.

"Protect you?"

"Do you think I'm so stupid that I'll believe this cockamamy story about Achilles wanting to kill Mother?"

"Ah. You're the only person here worth killing."

"I'm the only one whose death would remove a major obstacle from Achilles's path."

John Paul could only shake his head.

"Who else, then?" Peter demanded.

"Nobody else, Peter," said John Paul. "Not a soul. Everybody's safe, because, after all, Achilles has shown himself to be a perfectly rational boy who would never, ever kill somebody without a perfectly rational purpose in view."

"Well, yes, of course, he's psychotic," said Peter "I didn't mean he wasn't psychotic."

"So many psychotics, so few really effective drugs," said John Paul as he left the room. That night when he told Theresa, she groaned.

"So he's been getting a free ride."

"We'll put it all together soon enough, I'm sure," said John Paul.

"No, Johnny P. We aren't sure that it will be soon enough. For all we know, it's already too late."

CHAPTER NINE

CONCEPTION

To: Stone%[email protected]

From: Third%[email protected]

Re: Definitely not vichyssoise

I don't know who you are, don't know what this message means, He is in China. I was a tourist there, walking along

a public sidewalk. He gave me a folded slip of paper and asked me to post a message to this remailing site, with the subject shown above. So here it is:

"He thinks I told him where Caligulo would be but I did not."

I hope this means something to you and that you get it, because be seemed very intense about this. As for me, you don't know who am, neither does he, and that's the way I like it.

"It's not the same city," said Bean.

"Well, of course not," said Petra. "You're taller"

It was Bean's first return to Rotterdam since he left