Chapter 9 – Tango on the Catwalk (Part II)

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Elaine shook her head. “If someone is spying on him by leaving bugs in his office,” she said. “It would take some intense training and habit changes for him to address his own personal security.”

“Still have your mind on that bug we found in his office?” Frog caught the pillow, set it to the side, and tapped idly at the tablet.

“Yes,” she said. “By now, the people who left it are probably aware that it’s been compromised. None of the e-mails from the dean suggest that the FBI agents have returned. It’s too late to contact him anyway.”

Elaine felt weary from the long day and a yawn crept up on her. She stretched her aching muscles and gently shook an empty can of Mountain Dew that rested next to her keyboard. She’d spent the last two hours debugging a spellcode application for the Enoch that would enable her to detect the presence of improbability engine magical programming in other people. The quick compile within the virtual Enoch ran fine the last three times and it was ready for a dry run. However, a fully linked, optimized compile that would fit on the Enoch would take several hours.

She decided to make the best of it and catch some sleep.

“Mind if I played some WoW?” Frog asked, gesturing to the looming hulk of Elaine’s gaming rig sitting on the desk next to her programming workstations. “The guild has been wondering where I’ve been for the past few days.”

“Sure,” Elaine said sleepily. She pulled her spectacles and goggles off—her glasses fit snugly within the goggles and a plastic cover clipped over to hold them fast. She slid one arm under her Han Solo pillow and clutched the other, with her goggles in grasp, against her chest. “You don’t really need to ask.”

“Just checking,” her friend said. “I’ll catch some Z’s of my own in a bit on the other bed. See you in the morning.”

As she started the launcher for World of Warcraft, Frog noticed a familiar handle appear in one of Elaine’s chatrooms in the background. The name read “Tagger444” and Frog recollected her friend’s mention that her stalker, Tango, had a penchant for handles that started with the letter ‘T’. Elaine’s chat software flagged the nickname as well based on the IP address it came from as a possible Tango sockpuppet as higher than fifty percent probability. The person behind Tagger444’s keyboard decided to break lurker mode and entered into the discussion of cheating, databases, and statistics.

Tagger444 submitted his own ideas to the conversation but did so amidst asking questions about how people came to the subject. She watched him (or her) skillfully manipulate the conversation towards asking questions about Elaine’s handle, Carmina, without giving much information about himself. It seemed pretty bold. He’d wandered directly into the lion’s den, with one of Elaine’s chatbots watching, and started casting his net.

Frog made sure the bot had started recording the conversation before she clicked Warcraft into full screen and plugged her headphones in.

* * *

Special Agent Ellis Warren rubbed at the ache that had settled directly above his left eyebrow as he adjusted the focus on his binoculars for the umpteenth time since he’d taken up position in the car to watch the Dean of Engineering in his office. ASU campus didn’t make it easy to see into offices near the middle, like the Engineering complexes, but a few surveillance points existed that matched little-known parking lots. At this time of night, so few students left their cars behind that it made it trivial for him to slide into one of those vacancies and use it as a cramped base of operation.

The passenger-side door of his Bureau assigned Prius opened and the smell of a mint latte blew in with the dry desert air as his partner slid into the seat next to him. He winced as the cheap plastic upholstery scraped against her sidearm holster—she quickly adjusted herself and let her suit coat catch up to buffer between it and the seat. Special Agent Kathy Toller went out for coffee and doughnuts over an hour before on a run that shouldn’t have taken her more than twenty minutes.

She patted her coat to check the jingle of her keys as she pulled the door closed and then turned in the seat towards him. The weirdly contoured seats came too small for him, he mused, but they fit her tight fame extremely well. In fact, she was so compact that she could rotate in the seat legs and torso. If Ellis Warren attempted the same maneuver he would get his feet tangled together. It was he curse, he surmised, a little bit on the tall side, with a lot of legs and very little torso.

He lowered the binoculars to give her a piece of his mind but the headache above his eyebrow bit him sharply and settled for a grimace.

“Sorry that too so long,” she said as she withdrew one of the Starbucks cups from a Styrofoam holder and handed it to him. “I brought you a peace offering.”

“I hope you brought some Tylenol with that,” he said. “I might be the first agent to fall in the line of duty from sheer boredom.”

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