by Rick Cook
"Very good. Now if you gentlemen will excuse me I need to go find my new assistant."
Wiz found Llewllyn in the hall looking like he couldn’t decide whether to bolt or brazen it out.
"How did you do that?" Llewllyn asked. "Interfere with my spell, I mean."
Wiz just smiled.
"Come now. Fellow professionals and all that."
Wiz thought that Llewllyn’s racket had more in common with a bunco game than magic. Then he remembered what line of work he was in just now. "Oh it’s quite simple really. I guess the Sparrow forgot to tell you that."
The young man’s eyes widened. "You know the Sparrow?"
"Well enough," Wiz told him.
"Oh," he said in a small voice, eyes shifting left and right. Then he straightened and his voice firmed. "I wonder that I never met you when I was with him," Llewllyn said. "But you must tell me about him sometime-ah, about your experiences with him, I mean."
"Oh, it wasn’t very interesting," Wiz said. "You know the Sparrow. Dull as dishwater, really."
"Well, yes, of course, but…"
"That wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about. I’m afraid your performance just now offended several rather powerful members of the council."
Llewllyn looked even more apprehensive. "Oh, but surely…"
"I know you didn’t intend to, of course. But, you know how clients, ah, councilors are. So very, very petty about things like results.
"Now," Wiz went on, "in spite of that I managed to convince them that you have potential. That given supervision and a little guidance you could be an asset to the operation here. So as an alternative I got them to agree to let me take you on as a junior assistant."
Llewllyn was more apprehensive than ever. "Alternative?" he asked faintly.
Wiz smiled. "Why dwell on unpleasantness? Especially when it need never happen?"
"Of course. Assistant you say?"
"Junior assistant, but still a consultant with all the rights, privileges and duties thereof." He smiled even more broadly. "I’m sure the Sparrow would advise you to take it, were he here."
The young man’s eyes widened. "You don’t mean he is likely to come here, do you?"
"Llewllyn," Wiz said sincerely, "I can guarantee the Sparrow will never get any closer to this place than he is right now."
"Oh." The young man sighed. "I mean, what a pity."
"I know what you meant," Wiz said. "Now let’s get on with it, shall we?"
"Uh, a moment, My Lord. What about my remuneration?"
Wiz did a quick calculation in his head, based on what junior consultants in his world made versus what the consulting companies charged. "Okay," he said, "I’ll pay you one gold piece a week. You’ll work in the office here under my supervision. Your primary job will be client contact and low-level problem solving. Be in the office for at least four day-tenths a day, five days a week. You can set your own office hours, but keep them."
Llewllyn’s nose wrinkled. "That sounds like a clerk, not a magician."
"It’s a consultant. And the less magic you use the better."
"I don’t know…"
Wiz shrugged. "Consider the alternative."
Llewllyn’s face fell. "The alternative?"
"Dieter thinks you sold him a bill of goods. As my assistant you are under my protection. Otherwise…" Again the shrug.
Llewllyn swept a graceful bow to Wiz. "My Lord," he said grandly, "you have a new assistant."
Wiz tried to look happy.
Anna was upstairs cleaning when Wiz got back, but Malkin was in the kitchen, brewing a pot of herb tea.
"What do you know about a magician named Llewllyn?"
"Never heard of him," the tall woman said cheerfully, cocking one leg over the corner of the table and sitting on the freshly scrubbed surface.
"Slender, long blond hair, really white teeth. Handsome and a born con man."
"Oh, him." Malkin said. "He’s from around here. Used to hold himself out as a bard but I never heard of anyone who paid him for his singing. I’m kind of surprised he showed his face in these parts. Here, you want some of this? It’s a mixture Anna made up."
"Thanks," Wiz said and poured himself a mug of the tea. It was mostly peppermint with a lemony-orangey overtone. A little weak but not bad, he decided. "I take it he had a good reason for leaving."
The thief gave a snort of laughter. "Only a due regard for his own skin. Seems he’d been stealing old man Colbach’s chickens and bouncing his daughter at the same time." She grinned and shook her head. "I don’t know which made him the madder."
Wiz took another sip of tea. "I’m surprised he came back at all."
"Well, thinking on it, he’s safe enough. The girl’s married respectable now and the first child looked like her husband, so no one much cares on that score. Farmer Colbach probably still harbors a grudge about the chickens but he don’t come to town much. Besides, he’s not likely to push it because it would just remind folks about his daughter." She took another sip from her cup. "I guess you ran into him."
"Actually I hired him as my assistant."
Malkin looked down at him hard. "Then you’ve got mighty strange tastes in your assistants."
Wiz looked back very deliberately. "I know," he said.
Sixteen: Black Bag Job
Forget what you read in the papers. These are not very bright guys.
Deep Throat to Woodward
All The President’s Men
Another morning, another surveillance report. By now Pashley was beside himself.
"Look at this!" he shouted. "She’s still on the net."
"Take it easy," Arnold said. "Just simmer down and let’s think." Pashley paused and took a deep breath. His face turned a lighter shade of red.
"Now, how is she doing it? We got every piece of electronic equipment in the place."
"You’re sure she hasn’t brought a computer back in?" Ray Whipple asked. He was spending a lot more time than he liked at the FBI office and was even discovering he had common interests with some of the agents.
"No way," Arnold said. "We’ve been watching."
"What has the van turned up?"
"Absolutely nothing. If there’s a computer in there it’s got Tempest-class emissions security. We know there’s no computer in there."
Pashley was frantically thumbing through the eight-by-ten glossy color photographs of Judith’s apartment the agents had taken on the first raid. Suddenly his head snapped up.
"Wait a minute! There is another computer in here." He stood up so fast he nearly knocked the chair over. "Come on, let’s go back to the judge."
"You want a warrant to seize what?" Judge David Faraday said in an utterly bewildered voice.
"A toaster," Special Agent Pashley repeated confidently. "We believe it is a vital piece of evidence in this hacker case."
"But it’s a toaster!" Judge Faraday almost wailed.
"Yes, Your Honor, but there’s a computer hidden inside." He stepped up to the desk and held out a repair manual. "As you can see here there is a microcontroller-that’s a computer-in the toaster. Further," he pulled out a couple of clippings, "this is the exact make and model which hackers at a hackers’ convention actually connected to a communications network, like a telephone system."
"This happened in 1990," Judge Faraday said as he glanced at the clipping.
"Yes, sir, at a secret hackers’ convention called InterOp, which was held not far from here."
"This clipping is from the San Jose Mercury."
"Yes, sir."
"So this secret convention of," he ran his finger down the clipping, "ten thousand or so computer criminals was covered by the local newspapers."
Pashley was oblivious to the change in Judge Faraday’s voice. "Yes, sir. There were some television stories, but we couldn’t get the tape as evidence. But you can see it talks about the toaster oven right here."
"Mr. Pashley," Judge Faraday said mildly.
"Yes, si
r?"
"Get out of my sight." The judge’s voice rose. "Get out of this courthouse!" His face got red and a vein began to throb in his temple. "Don’t ever let me see you again. On anything." Judge Faraday was screaming now. "IS THAT CLEAR?"
"But do we get the warrant?" Pashley asked over his shoulder as Arnold hustled him out of the judge’s office.
Ray Whipple shifted nervously on the chill vinyl seat. There was something going on here but he wasn’t sure what.
Uncharacteristically, Pashley had sought him out to offer him a lift back to the hotel. Instead of driving him nuts with innane chatter while he drove, Pashley wasn’t saying anything. Whipple didn’t find that to be much of an improvement.
Ray’s knowledge of the city was minimal and his sense of direction useless for finding anything smaller than a star, but eventually even he realized they were heading in the wrong direction.
"Where are we going?"
Pashley didn’t take his eyes off the road. "I’ve got a little errand to run."
Two more turns in quick succession brought them into a neighborhood the astrophysicist recognized vaguely. Then another turn and Whipple went cold as he realized where they were. By that time Pashley had turned off the headlights and pulled over to the curb less than a block away from Judith’s apartment.
"What are we doing here?"
"We’re here to get that toaster," Pashley said.
Whipple went even colder. "I thought the judge denied the warrant."
Pashley thrust out his jaw and gave the astronomer a steely stare. "There are issues of national security at stake. I’m not going to let a technicality stop me."
"That’s burglary!"
"No sweat. It’s what we call a ’black bag job’ in the FBI."
It occurred to Ray that that was also what the Watergate Plumbers called it at the Nixon White House.
"What if she’s home?"
"She isn’t. She’s off playing games with some friends. You just wait here and if you see her coming honk the horn, okay?"
"I dunno about this."
"Look," Pashley said in the voice exasperated mothers use on small children, "just sit here and blow the horn if she comes. Nice and simple. What can go wrong?"
Ray’s suddenly overheated imagination came up with dozens of possibilities. "Leave the keys in the ignition, okay?"
Pashley shook his head. "Sorry. You’re not a government employee. You can’t legally drive this car."
Whipple decided to pass on that. "I don’t want to drive it, I just want to be able to honk the horn."
Pashley tossed the keys on the seat. "All right then, but don’t go anywhere." He got out of the car and started up the sidewalk, his trench coat flapping against his knees.
"I wonder how big the astrophysical library is at Folsom Prison," Whipple muttered and settled in to wait.
Clueless Pashley was muttering too as he turned into the apartment complex. "Damn pissants and their technicalities! Ruin the damn country."
There was another problem Pashley hadn’t mentioned to Whipple. Since Judge Faraday had turned him down for the warrant the mood at the local FBI office had turned decidedly chilly. The surveillance team had been withdrawn and the electronic listening van was back in the government garage. Pashley suspected it had something to do with the fact that AIC Weinberg was almost ready to come back to work. For some reason Weinberg didn’t seem to like this investigation.
Actually the incident with Judge Faraday had pushed Janovsky to visit Weinberg in the hospital and tell him what Pashley had been up to. Weinberg hadn’t been able to fully brief his second-in-command on Pashley because he was still hooked up to a cardiac monitor when Janovsky told his story, and the monitor thought Weinberg was having a heart attack. The emergency team hustled Janovsky out of the room before Weinberg could get out anything coherent, but Janovsky got the drift.
Pashley skulked by the gate for a couple of minutes, oblivious to the way the street lights highlighted him. It wasn’t quite 10 P.M. but the court was deserted and most of the porch lights were off. The apartments had their drapes drawn tightly against the chill evening and he could faintly hear the sound of a television yammering out some game show at the top of its electronic lungs.
Judith’s apartment was on the ground floor about halfway back. Her porch light was on but the tall bushes to either side of the door gave him some cover. With a final look around Pashley dropped to one knee and produced a black vinyl case containing a dozen lock picks. He selected one, put the tension wrench in the keyhole and went to work.
If Pashley wasn’t smart, he was clever with his hands. He also knew how to pick locks. Unfortunately lock picking is not like riding a bicycle. You need to keep doing it to keep in practice and Pashley hadn’t practiced for a couple of years. It took him longer than he expected to tickle the tumblers and get the lock to turn.
Meanwhile Ray Whipple was getting more nervous by the minute. "Think about the Hubble," he breathed, like an acolyte reciting a mantra. "Think about time on the Hubble." He thought about it. He thought hard about that observing time. Then he thought about doing time-three-to-five as an accessory to burglary. Somehow he thought about that time more than he thought about the time on the Hubble Space Telescope.
Judith’s drapes were drawn and her apartment was dark. Pashley had forgotten a flashlight, so he groped blindly toward the kitchen. The first thing he found was a coffee table loaded with magazines. He found it by tripping on it and knocking the coffee table completely over, making an unholy racket in the process. His further progress was somewhat impeded because he kept stepping on magazines and nearly slipping on their slick pages.
After a few more bumps and stumbles Pashley found the doorway to the kitchen. He made his way through, kicking over the trash can and strewing garbage all over the floor. He felt his way along the counter and after knocking off a box of corn flakes, a stack of dirty dishes and two glass canisters, he finally found the toaster. He yanked the cord out of the wall, sending an array of cans, jars and bottles crashing to the floor and made for the door with his prize.
The police car at the end of the block made Ray Whipple’s heart pound. Then a helicopter came over, low and without lights. Ray knew a losing cause when he saw one. With a twinge of regret he silently bid farewell to time on the Hubble. Then he started the car and slowly, carefully drove away.
Pashley saw the policemen as soon as they saw him, which was as soon as he stepped out of Judith’s apartment. They were just coming in the front gate so he whirled and ran for the back gate, toaster tucked in the crook of his elbow like a quarterback running for daylight and the policemen pounding after him.
Without breaking stride Pashley straight-armed the gate, knocking it open, and sprinted into the apartment parking lot. He was nearly blinded by the sudden glare of the police helicopter’s spotlight, but he ran on, dodging between parked cars. There was a six-foot concrete block wall at the back of the parking lot and Pashley scrambled over, almost into the arms of two more policemen.
"Drop that toaster!" Pashley whirled and found himself with his back to the wall facing two cops with drawn guns. Reluctantly he set the toaster down and raised his hands.
"You don’t understand," Pashley shouted over the noise of the helicopter. "I’m an FBI agent on a secret mission."
One of the cops was short, chunky and Asian. The other cop was tall, lean and black. Neither of them looked the least bit friendly. "Turn around, spread your legs and put your hands against the wall." As Pashley complied the black cop moved toward him cautiously, well to one side and out of his partner’s line of fire. Keeping his eye on Pashley he nudged the toaster away with his foot.
"Be careful with that. It’s vital evidence in a national security matter."
The cops just looked at each other.
"Man," the Asian muttered to his partner, "these designer drugs are bad stuff."
Things got a little complicated once they got Pashley back to the statio
n. While the police definitely had him on burglary, the dwelling was unoccupied. That bumped the offense down to something one step above a misdemeanor. The value of the toaster was less than a hundred dollars so it didn’t even qualify as grand theft. For a while the police thought they had Pashley on a charge of impersonating an FBI agent. Then they found out he was an FBI agent. Pashley’s urgent insistence that the toaster was vital evidence in a national security case didn’t help.
True to his word, the mayor found an office for Wiz and Llewllyn in the town hall. Granted, the room was so small the rough trestle table practically formed a barricade across it, but it was conveniently located just inside the main entrance. Both the location and the row of pegs for hanging cloaks and hats hinted at its former use. With Llewllyn sitting in the rickety chair and Wiz standing beside him the place was decidedly claustrophobic. Still, it would do.
Word had obviously spread about the new consulting service. A man was waiting for them when they arrived that morning. Wiz had wanted to spend a few minutes briefing Llewllyn, but obviously he wasn’t going to get the chance.
Llewllyn, however, seemed to have no doubts at all. "Come in," he called to the man waiting in the hall. "Never mind my associate here," he said, with a dismissive wave of his hand at Wiz. "What is the nature of your problem?"
"I’ve been hexed is my problem," the man declared. "Werner the Butcher, he put a curse on me."
It took Wiz a minute to realize that "butcher" was the hexer’s occupation, not a nickname.
"How do you know?" he asked.
The man looked at Llewllyn and he nodded for him to answer Wiz’s question.
"Me business is gone to blazes, that’s how I know. Hardly a customer since that black-hearted miscreant cursed me. Worse, I can’t get to sleep no more. I toss and turn through the night. I want that curse lifted."
"When did you notice you were having trouble sleeping?" Wiz asked.
"After I was cursed, of course!" The man looked at Llewllyn. "He simple or something?"
"No," Llewllyn assured him, "merely an assistant."