by J. M. Hayes
Mrs. Kraus didn’t take off her heavy coat when she sat at her desk and picked up a phone. The dial tone was back. That was why she’d abandoned their temporary headquarters at Doc’s office. The phone company never had managed to switch the sheriff’s calls over to Doc’s. That meant someone had to be here. There were lots of loose ends still out there, waiting to be cleaned up.
She fired up her computer. It came on, none the worse for the explosion except for a dusty screen. She got a cloth out of her drawer and wiped it down. The little blue bar at the bottom of her monitor told her it was 7:51 a.m. Hell, she wasn’t even supposed to be in the office yet and she’d already put in at least half a day’s work. And not slept a wink.
Sheriff English was out with Doc and the volunteer fire department, pulling the remains of Billy Macklin and Dana Miller, and pretty much every member of the Benteen County Board of Supervisors, out of the wreckage of the ethanol company’s corporate jet. Just for the hell of it, she logged back onto War of Worldcraft.
Mad Dog’s character was right where she’d left it, standing over the corpse of the once mighty Fig Zit. Recalling the host of upgrades the WOW tech had piled on this character, she decided to take a stroll through the waterfall trees. She soon found an epic fire demon in the mouth of a nearby cave. He hit her with a fire bolt the moment she stepped out of the mist. She charged, swinging the new infinity ax Madwulf had been given. One blow and the demon went down. And there, behind him, was a treasure chest. She dropped her ax and picked up the chest as a familiar voice sent a chill arcing down her spine.
“Good morning, Mrs. Kraus.”
She worked her keyboard and made Madwulf whirl. There was Fig Zit, huge and threatening, blocking the entrance to the cave.
“We haven’t met,” the monster said, “but Heather and Mad Dog will know who I am. If they wonder how I got on your computer tell them I hired another internet firm to hack into Fick’s. They told me how Billy Macklin and his friends have been using this game to mess with you and Mad Dog and they got me access to this character.”
Mrs. Kraus was too frightened to understand a thing he was saying.
“Tell Heather and Mad Dog I got my wish. I used my contacts to bribe my way through a border gate into Mexico, though we didn’t get everyone paid off. After the shoot out, the car they gave me was a flaming wreck. I traded it for an idling three-quarter ton truck that someone abandoned during the gunfight. And I seem to have gotten clear with. It’s equipped with everything, including a computer with a satellite link. That left me wondering what was back in the enclosed bed. U.S. Federal Reserve Notes. Counterfeit, though, and useless to me, but the face value should be…. Well, Mad Dog already knows that.”
His words refused to register right then. She’d let go of her ax to pick up the treasure chest and left herself defenseless.
“They may be interested to know what Fick means. It’s more than a play on words—you know, Fig Zit, Fix It, Fick’s I.T. And it’s not just a naughty word in German. It’s an acronym. Billy Macklin called his fake internet technology company FICK for Frank, Isaac, Colin, and Kevin. Get it?”
Not a word. The monster was back and it had trapped her. She did the only thing she could think of. She threw the chest at him. He dodged it and smiled.
“But none of that has anything to do with why I decided to pay you a visit, Mrs. Kraus. I’ve had time to think about what happened this morning. Tell Heather she’s the closest I’ve ever come to matching myself against an equal. The idea of doing that again, once she’s ready…. Well, it excites me. So, tell her to continue preparing herself. When the time is right, I’ll be back.”
The Fig Zit figure began to come apart in front of Mrs. Kraus like some cartoon character. Which, come to think of it, he was. He broke into thousands of pieces and they ran around like crazy, making whistling noises as the air rushed out of them and they shrank away to nothing until she was alone with the waterfall forest and the cave and the newly empowered Madwulf. Alone for now, but he’d said he’d come back.
How could…? Just in case, she logged off. It was cold in the sheriff’s office, but her forehead was beaded with sweat.
She sat, for a few minutes, trying to remember all the stuff he’d said. Nonsense, or was it? She reached for a phone to call the WOW tech and find out how Fig Zit had turned up on her screen again. There was no dial tone when she put the handset to her ear. Instead, a familiar voice she was only too happy to hear said, “Hello? Hello? Anybody there?”
“Heather English. Is that really you? Are you all right, child?”
“Fine, Mrs. Kraus. I’m fine. Mad Dog, too. And Hailey. None of us are hurt. We’re at Tucson police headquarters and it’s finally over. We’re all safe. How about there? Is Daddy okay?”
“Sure is, honey.”
“I’ve been trying to get him on his cell but I keep getting his voice mail. I was starting to worry so I called you.”
“His batteries ran down. He forgot to put it on the charger last night and he’s been using it since Mad Dog’s place got bombed.”
“Is Dad there? Can I speak to him?”
“No, I’m sorry. He’s still working the case. Not that there are any bad guys left for him to chase down. They made a run for it and their plane crashed and the rest of them turned out to be just kids. Nobody left for him….” Mrs. Kraus trailed off long enough to wonder who had just told her about the boy’s names. Who was Fig Zit if Englishman really had them all? Who was the ghost in her machine?
“Can you get word to Daddy? Ask him to call me as soon as he can. I’ll tell him everything that happened down here. It got pretty wild.”
“They catch that hit man who was after you?”
“No, he sort of got away….” She tapered off and muffled voices made happy noises in the background.
“Heather, honey, you still there?”
“You know, I think Uncle Mad Dog was right.”
Mrs. Kraus snorted. “Mad Dog is a lot of things, but right ain’t usually one of them.”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Kraus. Pam just ran through the door and threw herself in his arms. That’s something he’d wish for.”
Mrs. Kraus was not prepared to comment on Mad Dog’s love life. Besides, she was still puzzling over this latest Fig Zit appearance. Maybe she should tell Heather about him.
“And,” Heather said, “I just decided. Captain Matus can have that new officer he said he wanted.”
“You lost me. What are you talking about, honey?”
What Heather said next did nothing to enlighten Mrs. Kraus.
“Maybe that should be Officer Honey. Tell Daddy I said that. Tell him his little girl is going to carry on a family tradition.”
Afterword & Acknowledgments
War of Worldcraft is a thinly disguised (and modified for my convenience) version of World of Warcraft (WOW), a massive, multi-player, online, role-playing game It’s an amazing place, populated by more than ten million players around the world. I’ve been running characters there, purely as research for this novel, you understand. Playing is much like watching a high-quality animated movie in which you’re one of the characters. Most players are far younger than Mad Dog, Mrs. Kraus, or yours truly, but I suspect more than a few people of a certain age pass among us, unnoticed.
WOW, and games far more violent, are part of the world in which young people grow up today. I don’t gank (ambush busy or injured enemies) or corpse sit (wait for recently killed characters to revive at half strength so I can kill them again more easily), yet I’ve still amassed more than 10,000 kills on player vs. player battlefields (where you earn honor to buy better equipment). To score 10,000 kills, I’ve probably died at least 30,000 times. At my age, I have no problem understanding the difference between WOW’s fantasy world and the real one, but I was young and immortal once. I wonder, if we’d been exposed to so many adventures in which we couldn’t die, it might not have led my generation to even more foolish real-life risks than we managed wi
th only books, radio, TV, comics, and movies to inspire us. We took too many, anyway, though most of us survived them. Still, it seems to me the lines are less clear, and families less available to explain things like reality and fantasy to recent generations. I wonder, too, how much longer my research will continue, now that this novel is written. In any case, thanks to a couple of amateurish avatars I abandoned long ago, then to the pair I took to level 70, Borgward and Originalcyn. And to the many helpful avatars and the real people behind them I met along the way—except gankers and corpse sitters, of course.
There actually are allegations that a Pima County election was fixed. Tucson is the county seat. That election was held in May 2006 to establish a regional transportation authority (RTA) and fund it with a half-cent sales tax. To date, nothing is certain, though there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence that indicates a fix may have taken place. Election integrity activists sued when the county refused to release public records—databases the county defined as computer programs. The county lost and recently turned over the largest collection of election databases anywhere in the United States. They are under investigation but have yet to yield a smoking gun.
In case you aren’t aware of it, in our rush to fix Florida’s hanging chads, we saturated the United States with a series of proprietary software programs that count ballots secretly. The idea of a secret ballot is a hallowed concept in American democracy, but that’s voting in secret, not counting in secret. As admitted by experts for both sides in Pima County’s RTA election trial, none of the secret election-counting software programs available in the United States are remotely secure. Hacker friendly, is a common term for them—most easily hacked from the inside, which is what is alleged to have happened in Pima County. The simple solution would be to recount the ballots. Nearly everyone on both sides now advocates that. By Arizona law, however, ballots can be physically counted only when an election is decided by 1/10th of 1% or less, or when a criminal investigation takes place. There are two prosecutorial agencies in Arizona with the right to conduct such an investigation. The Pima County Attorney’s office, which has been acting as defense attorneys for the accused, is one. The other is the Arizona Attorney General’s office. Trouble is, the AAG’s office already conducted a careless investigation and cleared the county of wrongdoing. That they did so in a cooperative effort with Pima County (the accused) makes the results suspect. Especially when the outside investigator, hired and partially paid by Pima County, qualified their finding with the following statement: “During testing it was discovered that the GEMS [Global Election Management System] software exhibits fundamental security flaws that make definitive validation of data impossible due to the ease of data and log manipulation from outside the GEMS software itself.” In other words, we’ve got a mess here.
By the time you read this, we may know whether the RTA election was stolen. To find out, use a search engine and enter as key words “Pima County” and “RTA election.” If you find the case still hasn’t been resolved, I’d suggest keeping a very close eye on the way your own jurisdiction counts votes. It’s probably not remotely secure. Or check my website for updates. I’ll post status reports between making aluminum foil hats and watching for black helicopters.
In any case, though I loosely based the election hack in this novel on the one alleged to have occurred in Pima County’s RTA election, none of the characters in the book should be confused with real people or situations. That goes for the rest of the story as well. With the exception of Hailey, of course.
When you’re writing suspense novels, introducing law enforcement officers who can’t be trusted is a powerful device. In my own experience, the worst Tucson policeman I’ve encountered showed me some attitude—good-guy-having-a-bad-day sort of stuff. The rest, the vast majority, have been exemplary public servants, doing a tough job and doing it well.
Phi Beta Kimba, to whom this book is dedicated, was one of the Nisimons I’ve been lucky enough to share my life with. Nisimon is a Cheyenne term for a personal spirit helper—a familiar, a Hailey. Kimba was part of our German Shepherd herd, the brilliant one who sometimes seemed to think more deeply about life than I am capable of doing. I owe a tremendous debt to all the dogs in my life. I hope I’ve been worthy of them.
Singer/songwriter/legend John Stewart died while this book was being written. It always felt as if he were writing the lyrics to my life. That’s why I’ve quoted him for epigrams to every book in this series. I can’t imagine a world in which he won’t continue sharing his astonishing insights. Not that he didn’t leave enough to keep me in epigrams as long as I live.
This book would not exist without the immense help and support of my critique group, Elizabeth Gunn, Susan Cummins Miller, William Hartmann, and Margaret Falk (by whatever pen name she may be using). Thanks too, to Jeff Budd, Dr. Karl H. Schlesier, and Maj. Gen. (Ret.) R. James Fairfield, Jr. for reading the manuscript and offering insights. Without Poisoned Pen Press, I would be writing, if at all, for an audience unlikely to include more than a handful of friends. Finally and especially, thanks to Barbara, my personal editor, publicist, and child bride. But for her, the words would not exist.
For insights into Tucson politics and election integrity issues, special thanks to John Brakey, co-founder of Audit-AZ; Attorney William Risner, who won the release of all those election databases; and former Campbell/Grant Northeast Neighborhood Association President, Ken O’Day. I can’t say that what they’ve taught me made me happy, but it’s been an education.
For errors, I alone am responsible.
JMH
Tucson, by way of Hutchinson, Partridge, Darlow,
Manhattan, Wichita, Sedna Creek, et Tabun,
Albuquerque, and a yellow brick road
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