"She's holding more than sealeds under her hands. She knew who I was and pretended not to."

"How do you know she knew who you were?"

"She watches 75 routinely. You watch 75 routinely, you're going to see me. You sure as hell saw me this morning-during the report she admitted watching-when I did the one-on-one. She played it a little too cautious not mentioning that."

Eve swung west, barely missed nipping the bumper of a Rapid Cab. "Clarissa Price goes to the top of the short list."

CHAPTER NINE

Jamie was working hard to act cool. Everything he wanted in his life had fallen so unexpectedly into his lap he was terrified he'd do something to blow it away again. As far as Jamie was concerned electronics made the world go around. There was only one thing he wanted more than to work with them. That was to work with them as a cop.

Thanks to Roarke, he was getting that chance. Sort of. And on a homicide investigation that was baffling the premium ult cop.

It didn't get better.

Well, it would've been better if he'd had a badge and rank. But tech assist to the expert consultant was an air-boot in the door.

He was going to make it count.

He dug on working with Feeney, that was for sure. Uncle Feen was the total e-cop, with all kinds of stories about shit that went on before therewas an EDD.

And McNab was totally iced. He talked a lot of trash, but he knew his 'Ironies. Jamie thought he was pure hero stuff now that he'd been wounded in the line. Here he was half-frozen and pushing on with the job.

That's what cops did.

That's what Dallas did. Nothing stopped her. No matter what, she stood up. Like she had for his grandfather, and for Alice.

It still hurt, thinking about his sister. He knew his mother was never going to get over it, not all the way over it. Maybe you weren't supposed to.

Sometimes when he looked back to everything that had happened last fall, it was like a dream. Especially the end of it. All the smoke and the fire in that horrible room where that bastard Alban had taken Dallas after he'd drugged her.

Smoke and fire and blood, and the bitch Selina lying dead on the floor. Roarke and Alban fighting like wild dogs, and Dallas yelling at him to get the knife, get the knife to cut her loose from where Alban had strapped her naked to some kind of altar.

He'd cut the bonds, but he'd felt cold. Cold all over in spite of the smoke. And naked, still groggy from the drugs, Dallas had leaped right off the slab onto Alban's back.

Dreamy, it was all so weird and dreamy. He'd seen Roarke's fist fly up, knock Alban unconscious. He'd heard the sirens coming, he'd heard Roarke and Dallas talking-not words, just sounds. The fire crackling, the smoke stinging.

And the knife in his hand.

She'd shouted when she'd seen what he was going to do. But it was too late. She couldn't have stopped him. He couldn't have stopped himself.

The bastard who had killed his family was dead, and his blood hot on Jamie's hands.

He couldn't remember actually doing it. Not the moment, not the instant when he'd plunged the blade into Alban's heart. It was like some time blip, and he couldn't remember.

But it had happened. It hadn't been a dream. And Dallas had told Feeney and Peabody and the other cops who burst in that Alban had been killed during the struggle. She'd grabbed the ritual knife from him, put her own prints on the handle, and lied.

Because she'd stood for him, too.

"Jamie. Stay focused."

He blinked, blushed, and hunched his shoulders at Roarke's brisk order. "Yeah, sure. Right."

He was working on a virus simulation, his third since they'd started.

"These sims aren't going to generate hard data without results of a diagnostic on one of the infected units."

"So you've said, in a variety of ways, six or eight times already."

Jamie swiveled away from his workstation. Behind him Roarke worked on filter construction. He was doing most of the programming manually, with fast flicks and taps of his fingers. In Jamie's estimation, any e-man worth his chips had to be able to do manual as well as voice and should know when one method suited the job better than the other.

Roarke was the ultra mag e-man.

"It'd take me five minutes, tops, to run a diagnostic," Jamie continued.

"No."

"Give me ten and I can locate and isolate the virus."

"No."

"Without an identification on-"

He broke off when Roarke held up a hand and shut his mouth.

He finished the sim, input the resulting data, then started the next program. He let it run on auto as he got up to dig out a tube of Pepsi from the full-sized cooler.

"I'll have one of those," Roarke said without looking around.

Jamie pulled out a second tube. Across the room Feeney and McNab worked on filter analysis. Jamie had never been in a house that boasted its own fully equipped e-lab.

Then again, he'd never been in any other house like this one. What it didn't have, hadn't been invented.

The floor was a steel gray tile. The walls were a pale green and covered with screens. The light came from sky windows, a half a dozen of them, all tinted to cut the glare and heat that could play havoc with the equipment.

And that equipment was so cutting-edge, the edge hadn't even been cut yet. There were a full dozen data and communication centers, including one of the RX5000Ks that he'd seen tested in R and D. It wasn't scheduled for release for three months, maybe six. There were three VR stations, a sim tube, a holo unit, with d and c capabilities, and a global and interstellar search-and-scan navigator he was itching to get his hands on.

He glanced toward his own screen, checked the status of his sim run, then sat beside Roarke. He scanned the codes jammed end to end over the screen, calculated.

"If you filter out the sound, blank all frequencies, you won't get the ID or source."

"You've missed something. Look again." Roarke continued to work while Jamie rearranged the codes in his head.

"Okay, okay, but if you flipped this equation, see? And this command. Then-"

"Wait." Roarke's eyes narrowed as he read his own program, considered the direction of Jamie's suggestions.

The boy was good.

"That's better. Yes, that's better yet." He made the adjustments, and with them in mind began on the next series of commands.

"Roarke."

"There's no point in asking me again. Answer's still no."

"Just listen, okay? You always say a guy should be able to make his pitch."

"Nothing more irritating than having your own words tossed back at you." But he stopped, sat back, and took the tube of Pepsi. "Pitch then."

"Okay. Without a diagnostic, with direct data from one of the infected units, we're blind. You can come up with filters, with shields, but no matter how good they are you can't be a hundred percent that they'll shut out the virus. If itis a virus, which we don't know without a diagnostic."

"We'll be a great deal more certain of operator safety once we have shields in place. If it's a subliminal, which is the highest probability, using either visual or audio to infect, I've dealt with something similar before and am constructing a series of shields to filter it out."

"Yeah, but similar isn't a hundred percent. So you're still going to be playing odds."

"Son, playing odds is a kind of religion to me."

Jamie grinned, and because he wasn't being dismissed, dug in. "Okay, odds are good, given the log time Detective Halloway had in when he first showed symptoms-and factoring in how long the other bad guy dudes were on-that it takes a couple hours, maybe more to hit the danger zone. Logically, Halloway had the brain eruption faster because he had all this time on at once. Straight computime instead of on and off, tasking, surfing, whatever. And he wasin the unit, not just working on it."