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　"Or we make a deal."

　"What kind of deal?" The German had heard stories about the corruption in the Spanish Guardia Civil.

　"You have something I want," Becker said.

　"Yes, of course!" the German effused, forcing a smile. He went immediately to the wallet on his dresser. "How much?"

　Becker let his jaw drop in mock indignation. "Are you trying to bribe an officer of the law?" he bellowed.

　"No! Of course not! I just thought..." The obese man quickly set down his wallet. "I... I..." He was totally flustered. He collapsed on the corner of the bed and wrung his hands. The bed groaned under his weight. "I'm sorry."

　Becker pulled a rose from the vase in the center of the room and casually smelled it before letting it fall to the floor. He spun suddenly. "What can you tell me about the murder?"

　The German went white. "Mord? Murder?"

　"Yes. The Asian man this morning? In the park? It was an assassination--Ermordung." Becker loved the German word for assassination. Ermordung. It was so chilling.

　"Ermordung? He... he was...?"

　"Yes."

　"But... but that's impossible," the German choked. "I was there. He had a heart attack. I saw it. No blood. No bullets."

　Becker shook his head condescendingly. "Things are not always as they seem."

　The German went whiter still.

　Becker gave an inward smile. The lie had served its purpose. The poor German was sweating profusely.

　"Wh-wh-at do you want?" he stammered. "I know nothing."

　Becker began pacing. "The murdered man was wearing a gold ring. I need it."

　"I-I don't have it."

　Becker sighed patronizingly and motioned to the bathroom door. "And Rocнo? Dewdrop?"

　The man went from white to purple. "You know Dewdrop?" He wiped the sweat from his fleshy forehead and drenched his terry-cloth sleeve. He was about to speak when the bathroom door swung open.

　Both men looked up.

　Rocнo Eva Granada stood in the doorway. A vision. Long flowing red hair, perfect Iberian skin, deep-brown eyes, a high smooth forehead. She wore a white terry-cloth robe that matched the German's. The tie was drawn snugly over her wide hips, and the neck fell loosely open to reveal her tanned cleavage. She stepped into the bedroom, the picture of confidence.

　"May I help you?" she asked in throaty English.

　Becker gazed across the room at the stunning woman before him and did not blink. "I need the ring," he said coldly.

　"Who are you?" she demanded.

　Becker switched to Spanish with a dead-on Andalusian accent. "Guardia Civil."

　She laughed. "Impossible," she replied in Spanish.

　Becker felt a knot rise in his throat. Rocнo was clearly a little tougher than her client. "Impossible?" he repeated, keeping his cool. "Shall I take you downtown to prove it?"

　Rocнo smirked. "I will not embarrass you by accepting your offer. Now, who are you?"

　Becker stuck to his story. "I am with the Seville Guardia."

　Rocнo stepped menacingly toward him. "I know every police officer on the force. They are my best clients."

　Becker felt her stare cutting right through him. He regrouped. "I am with a special tourist task force. Give me the ring, or I'll have to take you down to the precinct and--"

　"And what?" she demanded, raising her eyebrows in mock anticipation.

　Becker fell silent. He was in over his head. The plan was backfiring. Why isn't she buying this?

　Rocнo came closer. "I don't know who you are or what you want, but if you don't get out of this suite right now, I will call hotel security, and the real Guardia will arrest you for impersonating a police officer."

　Becker knew that Strathmore could have him out of jail in five minutes, but it had been made very clear to him that this matter was supposed to be handled discreetly. Getting arrested was not part of the plan.

　Rocнo had stopped a few feet in front of Becker and was glaring at him.

　"Okay." Becker sighed, accentuating the defeat in his voice. He let his Spanish accent slip. "I am not with the Seville police. A U.S. government organization sent me to locate the ring. That's all I can reveal. I've been authorized to pay you for it."

　There was a long silence.

　Rocнo let his statement hang in the air a moment before parting her lips in a sly smile. "Now that wasn't so hard, was it?" She sat down on a chair and crossed her legs. "How much can you pay?"

　Becker muffled his sigh of relief. He wasted no time getting down to business. "I can pay you 750,000 pesetas. Five thousand American dollars." It was half what he had on him but probably ten times what the ring was actually worth.

　Rocнo raised her eyebrows. "That's a lot of money."

　"Yes it is. Do we have a deal?"

　Rocнo shook her head. "I wish I could say yes."

　"A million pesetas?" Becker blurted. "It's all I have."

　"My, my." She smiled. "You Americans don't bargain very well. You wouldn't last a day in our markets."

　"Cash, right now," Becker said, reaching for the envelope in his jacket. I just want to go home.

　Rocнo shook her head. "I can't."

　Becker bristled angrily. "Why not?"

　"I no longer have the ring," she said apologetically. "I've already sold it."

　CHAPTER?33

　Tokugen Numataka stared out his window and paced like a caged animal. He had not yet heard from his contact, North Dakota. Damn Americans! No sense of punctuality!

　He would have called North Dakota himself, but he didn't have a phone number for him. Numataka hated doing business this way--with someone else in control.

　The thought had crossed Numataka's mind from the beginning that the calls from North Dakota could be a hoax--a Japanese competitor playing him for the fool. Now the old doubts were coming back. Numataka decided he needed more information.

　He burst from his office and took a left down Numatech's main hallway. His employees bowed reverently as he stormed past. Numataka knew better than to believe they actually loved him--bowing was a courtesy Japanese employees offered even the most ruthless of bosses.

　Numataka went directly to the company's main switchboard. All calls were handled by a single operator on a Corenco 2000, twelve-line switchboard terminal. The woman was busy but stood and bowed as Numataka entered.

　"Sit down," he snapped.

　She obeyed.

　"I received a call at four forty-five on my personal line today. Can you tell me where it came from?" Numataka kicked himself for not having done this earlier.

　The operator swallowed nervously. "We don't have caller identification on this machine, sir. But I can contact the phone company. I'm sure they can help."

　Numataka had no doubt the phone company could help. In this digital age, privacy had become a thing of the past; there was a record of everything. Phone companies could tell you exactly who had called you and how long you'd spoken.

　"Do it," he commanded. "Let me know what you find out."

　CHAPTER?34

　Susan sat alone in Node 3, waiting for her tracer. Hale had decided to step outside and get some air--a decision for which she was grateful. Oddly, however, the solitude in Node 3 provided little asylum. Susan found herself struggling with the new connection between Tankado and Hale.

　"Who will guard the guards?" she said to herself. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. The words kept circling in her head. Susan forced them from her mind.

　Her thoughts turned to David, hoping he was all right. She still found it hard to believe he was in Spain. The sooner they found the pass-keys and ended this, the better.

　Susan had lost track of how long she'd been sitting there waiting for her tracer. Two hours? Three? She gazed out at the deserted Crypto floor and wished her terminal would beep. There was only silence. The late-summer sun had set. Overhead, the automatic fluorescents had kicked on. Susan sensed time was running out.

　She looked down at her tracer and frowned. "Come on," she grumbled. "You've had plenty of time." She palmed her mouse and clicked her way into her tracer's status window. "How long have you been running, anyway?"

　Susan opened the tracer's status window--a digital clock much like the one on TRANSLTR; it displayed the hours and minutes her tracer had been running. Susan gazed at the monitor expecting to see a readout of hours and minutes. But she saw something else entirely. What she saw stopped the blood in her veins.

　TRACER ABORTED

　"Tracer aborted!" she choked aloud. "Why?"

　In a sudden panic, Susan scrolled wildly through the data, searching the programming for any commands that might have told the tracer to abort. But her search went in vain. It appeared her tracer had stopped all by itself. Susan knew this could mean only one thing--her tracer had developed a bug.

　Susan considered "bugs" the most maddening asset of computer programming. Because computers followed a scrupulously precise order of operations, the most minuscule programming errors often had crippling effects. Simple syntactical errors--such as a programmer mistakenly inserting a comma instead of a period--could bring entire systems to their knees. Susan had always thought the term "bug" had an amusing origin:

　It came from the world's first computer--the Mark 1--a room-size maze of electromechanical circuits built in 1944 in a lab at Harvard University. The computer developed a glitch one day, and no one was able to locate the cause. After hours of searching, a lab assistant finally spotted the problem. It seemed a moth had landed on one of the computer's circuit boards and shorted it out. From that moment on, computer glitches were referred to as bugs.

　"I don't have time for this," Susan cursed.

　Finding a bug in a program was a process that could take days. Thousands of lines of programming needed to be searched to find a tiny error--it was like inspecting an encyclopedia for a single typo.

　Susan knew she had only one choice--to send her tracer again. She also knew the tracer was almost guaranteed to hit the same bug and abort all over again. Debugging the tracer would take time, time she and the commander didn't have.

　But as Susan stared at her tracer, wondering what error she'd made, she realized something didn't make sense. She had used this exact same tracer last month with no problems at all. Why would it develop a glitch all of a sudden?

　As she puzzled, a comment Strathmore made earlier echoed in her mind. Susan, I tried to send the tracer myself, but the data it returned was nonsensical.

　Susan heard the words again. The data it returned...

　She cocked her head. Was it possible? The data it returned?

　If Strathmore had received data back from the tracer, then it obviously was working. His data was nonsensical, Susan assumed, because he had entered the wrong search strings--but nonetheless, the tracer was working.

　Susan immediately realized that there was one other possible explanation for why her tracer aborted. Internal programming flaws were not the only reasons programs glitched; sometimes there were external forces--power surges, dust particles on circuit boards, faulty cabling. Because the hardware in Node 3 was so well tuned, she hadn't even considered it.

　Susan stood and strode quickly across Node 3 to a large bookshelf of technical manuals. She grabbed a spiral binder marked SYS-OP and thumbed through. She found what she was looking for, carried the manual back to her terminal, and typed a few commands. Then she waited while the computer raced through a list of commands executed in the past three hours. She hoped the search would turn up some sort of external interrupt--an abort command generated by a faulty power supply or defective chip.

　Moments later Susan's terminal beeped. Her pulse quickened. She held her breath and studied the screen.

　ERROR CODE 22

　Susan felt a surge of hope. It was good news. The fact that the inquiry had found an error code meant her tracer was fine. The trace had apparently aborted due to an external anomaly that was unlikely to repeat itself.

　Error code 22. Susan racked her memory trying to remember what code 22 stood for. Hardware failures were so rare in Node 3 that she couldn't remember the numerical codings.

　Susan flipped through the SYS-OP manual, scanning the list of error codes.

　19: CORRUPT HARD PARTITION

　20: DC SPIKE

　21: MEDIA FAILURE

　When she reached number 22, she stopped and stared a long moment. Baffled, she double-checked her monitor.

　ERROR CODE 22

　Susan frowned and returned to the SYS-OP manual. What she saw made no sense. The explanation simply read:

　22: MANUAL ABORT

　CHAPTER?35

　Becker stared in shock at Rocнo. "You sold the ring?"

　The woman nodded, her silky red hair falling around her shoulders.

　Becker willed it not to be true. "Pero... but..."

　She shrugged and said in Spanish, "A girl near the park."

　Becker felt his legs go weak. This can't be!

　Rocнo smiled coyly and motioned to the German. "Йl querнa que lo guardara. He wanted to keep it, but I told him no. I've got Gitana blood in me, Gypsy blood; we Gitanas, in addition to having red hair, are very superstitious. A ring offered by a dying man is not a good sign."

　"Did you know the girl?" Becker interrogated.

　Rocнo arched her eyebrows. "Vaya. You really want this ring, don't you?"

　Becker nodded sternly. "Who did you sell it to?"

　The enormous German sat bewildered on the bed. His romantic evening was being ruined, and he apparently had no idea why. "Was passiert?" he asked nervously. "What's happening?"

　Becker ignored him.

　"I didn't actually sell it," Rocнo said. "I tried to, but she was just a kid and had no money. I ended up giving it to her. Had I known about your generous offer, I would have saved it for you."

　"Why did you leave the park?" Becker demanded. "Somebody had died. Why didn't you wait for the police? And give them the ring?"

　"I solicit many things, Mr. Becker, but trouble is not one of them. Besides, that old man seemed to have things under control."