“Can I access it remotely?” Andy Radcliffe said.

Then he tilted his head to hold the phone to his ear. With both hands on the keyboard, his fingers flew. The Internet browser window with the image of the newspaper then shrank to fit on only the left eight TVs. A new browser window opened on the right eight flat-screens.

The new window was mostly blank. There was a single box in the middle. He moved the cursor to it.

“Okay, I got it,” Radcliffe said, and began typing as he said “uh-huh, uh-huh.”

In the box a string of asterisks appeared, clearly obscuring the password’s string of letters and numbers.

Radcliffe hit RETURN and the box went away. Another flashed ENTRY SUCCESSFUL, then it went away and a new page appeared in the window. It was a tree of coded hyperlinks, the blue-colored links a series of alphanumeric file names.

“I’m in,” Radcliffe then said into the cellular phone. “I’ll call you back.”

He broke off the call. Then he typed some more, and the second browser window shrank to fit only the top right four sixty-four-inch flat-screens. Another new window opened on the four panels beneath it.

“What sort of browser is that?” Payne said. “I’ve never seen one quite like it.”

Radcliffe looked at Kerry Rapier, then at Payne. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

Byrth and Harris chuckled.

Payne looked at Andy and saw he was grinning ear to ear.

“It’s a custom-built browser,” Radcliffe then said. “Comes from a skunk works at MIT. The code was written basically to strip out all the commerce parts you find on junk like Explorer and instead concentrates on making the program super-secure.”

“It looks pretty bare-bones.”

“Looks are deceiving.”

“You might want to write that down, Sergeant Payne,” Byrth said with a big grin.

“It’s one robust browser,” Radcliffe said, concentrating on his work.

They watched the cursor move to the window with the newspaper articles. And then they saw that when he floated the cursor over a headline, one of the tree’s hyperlinks in the browser window on the upper right became a brighter blue.

“The upper right browser shows the meat of the newspaper, all the files and such, stripped of the coding that makes the GUI so pretty.”

“ ‘Gooey’?” Byrth said.

“GUI, for graphical user interface. It basically means what makes a computer page look nice.”

“So how’s it going to be possible to do the trace?” Payne said.

“Yeah,” Ratcliffe said. “ICANN.”

“You can what?” Payne said.

“No, ICANN. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN.”

“You’re making this up,” Payne said.

Byrth put in, “I think you may be right, Marshal.”

“I’m not making it up. Hey, can I call you ‘Marshal,’ too?”

Payne didn’t respond.

Radcliffe explained, “ICANN is a private nonprofit corporation out in Marina Del Rey, California. It was started in 1998, and tasked to assign and track every website, et cetera.”

Radcliffe moved the cursor into the new browser window. He typed in a website address and hit ENTER.

A pleasant blue page filled the browser. It had the ICANN logotype-it looked like a stylized pound symbol inside a circle meant to resemble a globe-and line after line of hyperlinks. Radcliff clicked on SITE MAP at the top of the page. And a new page appeared with an eye-crossing number of additional hyperlinks. He went immediately to the one he wanted and clicked.

“Okay. A unique numerical identification, what’s called its logical address, is assigned to every device-every computer-so it can join the network and communicate with another computer. If IP addresses were not unique, there’d be all sorts of conflicts. It’d be chaos. Once we have the IP address, we go to ICANN and find out where the address is registered.”

He moved the cursor to the left browser window.

“Okay, now we go back to the newspaper and find those comments you’re hunting.”

He flipped to the printout with the first comment. Then he clicked around in the left browser, working his way through the newspaper until he found the article. The others noticed that the blue hyperlinks in the upper right browser brightened and dimmed as he went through the various pages.

“The two pages are connected,” Payne said aloud. “Interesting.”

One blue hyperlink then stayed brightened.

He moved the cursor over to it and clicked.

Up popped a window. In it was:

From Death.Before.Dishonor (9:52 a.m.):

F**k you pendejos! Dudes sell drugs because people (are you paying attention?) because people want to buy them! Look at the ads on this page-booze, gambling (and where there?s gambling there?s hookers)… Something for everyone. What?s the difference with drugs? And you know what? Sometimes we even clean up the rats from the gutters-like those in this motel!

Recommend [0] Click Here to Report Abuse “Well, I’ll be dammed!” Payne said. “There it is! The missing jewel.”

At the top of the pop-up window was: IP ADDRESS X.173.57.92.234.

“Now we take that”-he put the cursor over the address, copied it, then put the cursor in the bottom right browser window-“and feed it to ICANN.”

He clicked.

Another pop-up window appeared. It not only had a street address with city, state, and zip code, but there also was a small street map with an arrow pointing to the exact address.

“Amazing!” Jim Byrth said.

“Anchorage, Alaska?” Payne said. “The guy’s way the hell up there?”

Andy Radcliffe shrugged.

“Let’s check the other one,” he said.

When it came up, Payne said, “Jesus Christ! That one says he’s in the Florida Keys.”

Andy Radcliffe looked in deep thought. He clicked around and double-checked a couple links.

“That’s just not possible,” he then said. “Both of those comments were typed in the same day-yesterday. No way someone could’ve traveled from Alaska to Florida. And there’s no way for two people to have the same screen name; the software that sets up the screen names only allows for unique ones. For obvious reasons.”

Radcliffe thought a bit. “There is one possible explanation. If this guy had some way to mirror another computer, he could create confusing IP addresses. And mirroring computers is easy. It’s just that generating an artificial IP address, in essence an alias, can cause havoc. But it is the electronic equivalent of a shell game. And that’d work.”

Payne sighed.

“Looks like we’re at what’s known as a dead fucking end,” Payne said.

Then he saw Radcliffe staring at him with a look of dejection.

Andy looks like he’s truly sorry this went nowhere.

Like it’s his fault.

“Hey, it happens, Andy,” he said.

Harris offered, “Maybe he will write again, and we can draw him out.”

Payne turned to Byrth. He saw that the Texas lawman not only appeared to be in deep thought but that he had that dry white bean tumbling again across his left fingers.

“What’re you thinking?” Payne said seriously. “You look damned introspective.”

“Thinking about Plan B,” Byrth said. “We let your cat out of the bag.”

Payne nodded.

Harris said, “I can call Lee Bryan at the paper and give him the story he can write and post.”

Payne felt his phone vibrate, and he found himself in what he realized was a Pavlovian moment. He was grinning, and it was because he’d already conditioned himself to associate the phone vibration with a text message from Amanda Law.

But then it vibrated again. And when he picked up the phone, the smile quickly went away.

The cellular telephone instead had been ringing. The color LCD screen flashed: SOUP KING-1 CALL TODAY @ 0902.

Well, I’ve put him off long enough.

Now certainly qualifies as “later.”

“Hey, Chad,” Payne said into the phone after hitting the keypad. “What’s new?”