River Pointe, Ohio

IN THE MIDDLE-CLASS CLEVELAND SUBURB, the bell in the tower of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church tolled midnight. The wide streets were drowsy and quiet. Dead leaves skittered in the gutters, rustled along by a gentle night breeze, and somewhere in the distance a dog barked.

Only a single second-story window was illuminated in the white clapboard house that stood on the corner of Church Street and Sycamore Terrace. Beyond the window — locked, nailed shut, and covered by two layers of heavy curtain — lay a room whose every corner was stuffed full of instrumentation. One floor-to-ceiling rack held tier-one, high-density blade servers; numerous layer-three, forty-eight-port gigabit Ethernet switches; and several NAS devices configured as RAID-2 arrays. Another rack held passive and active monitoring devices, packet sniffers, police and civilian scanner-interceptors. Every horizontal surface was littered with keyboards, wireless signal boosters, digital infrared thermometers, network testers, Molex extractors. An ancient modem with an acoustic coupler sat on a high shelf, apparently still in use. The air was heavy with the smell of dust and menthol. The only light came from LCD screens and countless front-panel displays.

In the middle of the room sat a shrunken figure in a wheelchair. He was dressed in faded pajamas and a terry-cloth bathrobe. He moved slowly from terminal to terminal, checking readouts, peering at lines of cryptic code, occasionally firing off a machine-gun-like series of typed commands on one of the wireless keyboards. One of the man’s hands was withered, the fingers malformed and shrunken, yet he typed with amazing facility.

Suddenly he paused. A yellow light had appeared on a small device situated over the central monitor.

The figure quickly rolled himself to the main terminal and typed in a volley of commands. Instantly the monitor dissolved into a chessboard-like grid of black-and-white images: incoming feeds from two dozen security cameras placed in and around the perimeter of the house.

He quickly scanned the various camera feeds. Nothing.

Panic — which had flared up in an instant — ebbed again. His security was first-rate and doubly redundant: if there had been a breach, he would have been alerted by half a dozen movement sensors and proximity triggers. It had to be a glitch, nothing more. He’d run a diagnostic in the morning — this was one subsystem that could not be allowed to…

Suddenly a red light winked on beside the yellow one, and a low alarm began to bleat.

Fear and disbelief washed over him like a tidal wave. A full-scale breach, with hardly any warning? It was impossible, unthinkable… The withered hand reached toward a small metal box fixed to one arm of his wheelchair, flicked away the safety toggle covering the kill switch. One crooked finger hovered over the switch. When it was pressed, several things would happen very quickly: 911 calls would go out to police, fire officials, and emergency paramedic units; sodium vapor lights would come on throughout the house and grounds; alarms in the attic and basement would emit earsplitting shrieks; magnetic media degaussers placed strategically throughout the room would generate targeted magnetic fields for fifteen seconds, wiping all data from the hard disks; and finally, an EMP shock pulse generator would fire, completely disrupting all the microprocessor circuitry and electronics in the second-floor room.

The finger settled onto the button.

“Good evening, Mime,” came the unmistakable voice from the darkness of the hallway.

The finger jerked away. “Pendergast?”

The special agent nodded and stepped into the room.

For a moment, the man in the wheelchair was nonplussed. “How did you get in here? My security system is state-of-the-art.”

“Indeed it is. After all, I paid for its design and installation.”

The man wrapped the bathrobe more closely around his narrow frame. His composure was quick to return. “We had a rule. We were never to meet face-to-face again.”

“I’m aware of that. And I deeply regret having to break it. But I have a request to make — and I felt that, by making it in person, you would better understand its urgency.”

A cynical smile slowly broke over Mime’s pale features. “I see. The Secret Agent Man has a request. Another request, I should say, of the long-suffering Mime.”

“Our relationship has always proceeded on a — how shall I put it? — symbiotic basis. After all, wasn’t it only a few months back that I arranged for a dedicated fiber-optic line to be installed here?”

“Yes, indeedy. Allowing one to bask in three hundred Mbps goodness. No more purloined sips from the T-3 soda straw for me.”

“And I was instrumental in having those troublesome charges against you dropped. You’ll recall, the ones from the Department of Defense alleging—”

“Okay, Secret Agent Man, I haven’t forgotten. So: what can I do for you this fine evening? Mime’s Cyber-Emporium is open for all your hacking needs. No firewall too thick, no encryption algorithm too strong.”

“I need information on a certain person. Ideally, her whereabouts. But anything will do: medical files, legal issues, movement. Starting from the time of her presumed death and going forward.”

Mime’s sunken, strangely child-like visage perked up at this. “Her presumed death?”

“Yes. I am convinced the woman is alive. However, there is a one hundred percent certainty she is using an assumed name.”

“But you know her real name, I assume?”

Pendergast did not answer for a moment. “Helen Esterhazy Pendergast.”

“Helen Esterhazy Pendergast.” Mime’s expression grew more interested still. “Well, dust my broom.” He thought for a moment. “Naturally, I’ll need as much personal data as you can provide if I’m to fashion a sufficiently girthy search avatar of your… of your…”

“Wife.” And Pendergast passed over a thick folder.

Mime reached for it eagerly, turned over the pages with his withered hand. “It would appear you’ve been holding out on me,” he said.

Pendergast did not reply directly. Instead, he said, “Searches through official channels have turned up nothing.”

“Ah. So M-LOGOS came up dry, did it?” When Pendergast did not answer, Mime chuckled. “And now Secret Agent Man wants me to try it from the other side of the cyber-street. Lift up the virtual carpet and check what’s beneath. Probe the seamy underbelly of the information superhighway.”

“An unfortunate mix of metaphors, but yes, that is the general idea.”

“Well, this may take a while. Sorry there isn’t a chair — feel free to bring one in from the next room. Just don’t turn on any lights, please.” Mime gestured toward a large insulated food container that sat in one corner. “Twinkie?”

“Thank you, no.”

“Suit yourself.”

For the next ninety minutes, not a single word was spoken. Pendergast sat in a darkened corner, motionless as a Buddha, while Mime wheeled himself from terminal to terminal, sometimes typing in a rapid-fire volley of commands, other times poring over lengthy readouts scrolling down one of the innumerable LCD monitors. As the minutes slowly passed, the figure in the wheelchair grew more sunken and discomposed. Sighs grew more frequent. Now and then, a hand slapped against a keyboard in irritation.

Finally, Mime wheeled back from the central terminal in disgust. “Sorry, Agent Pendergast,” he said in a tone that sounded almost contrite.

Pendergast glanced toward the hacker, but Mime was facing the other way, his back to the agent. “Nothing?”

“Oh, there’s a great deal — but all before that trip to Africa. Her work at Doctors With Wings, school records, medical evaluations, SAT scores, books borrowed from a dozen different libraries… even a poem she wrote in college while babysitting some kid.”