Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [52]
“With a place to look for answers.” He yanked on her foot, and she slid out of the chair with a startled yelp, landing on her ass on the floor. Before she could recover, he had unfolded himself and stolen the chair.
“Where’re we going?” she asked, recovering enough to stand and lean over his shoulder. Sergei accessed a Web site with a .gov suffix and then dove deeper, past a flurry of password demands and allegedly invader-proof protections. He wasn’t a hacker any more than she was, so Wren assumed that meant Stephen had given him the details. Tsk. Bad Stephen. Then she blinked as names, addresses and taxpayer ID numbers scrolled by. “Whoa. Is that…gimme that.” He fended her hands away with ease. “Hey, it’s my computer, I’m the one going to jail they trace you back. At least let me have the fun of it.”
He found the information he was looking for, and clicked on the link to access the file. Wren practically danced behind him, aware that he found her impatience amusing but unable to stop herself. When he printed out the information and then closed the window, she whined in disappointment.
“Serrrrrgggggg…”
“God. Never do that again.” She just grinned, pleased to discover another thing that could put his teeth on edge, and filed it mentally under “just in case,” sub file “extreme measures.” In some ways it might be easier to work with someone who didn’t know you so well—fewer buttons for the pushing—but what was the challenge in that? He stood up and gestured her back to her seat. “Stephen took a risk, and gave me that information for a specific use. I’m not going to abuse his trust. Not without damn good reason, anyway. You have your road map. Follow it.”
Wren lifted the printout off the printer feed and scanned it as she sat down. “Okay, yeah.” Now they were in her territory, more interesting than having government reports. She clicked the mouse, bringing up the browser and scrolling down to a bookmarked page. The header read Anything for a Price. In smaller letters the webmaster advertised “Information for the Discerning Seeker.”
Typing one-handed, Wren entered her access code, then the information off the printout. Hitting enter, she turned to hand the paper back to her partner. “See what you can dig up on that company, the ones who set up the alarms. Start with their bonding licenses, work from there. I want to know who they work with, if there are any contacts at all to anyone in the Cosa.”
Sergei nodded. Dealing with the Cosa Nostradamus—especially but not limited to the Council—was very much like dealing with the mob in the nonmagical world, in several ways. The first and foremost was that you gave them respect. For retrievers, that meant asking permission before hitting something that belonged to them. They had done the equivalent of due diligence earlier, clearing the background with the Council. But now that they had a target, every p and q had to be lined up before Wren went in.
The computer screen had changed to an expectant cursor blinking in the middle of a plain dark-red screen. It hurt the eyes to look at it directly for more than a moment at a time. Cracking her fingers like a concert pianist with pretensions, Wren held her hands over the keyboard, focused her inner current, and began to type. The red screen flickered, and an odd, four-dimensional effect seemed to stir within the monitor. Sergei, taught by experience, looked away until it had flattened into something a little more bearably two-dimensional. Wren held the tip of her tongue between her teeth and coaxed the swirling display to form and hold the proper connection.
Using current on electronics was, putting it mildly, stupid, and possibly dangerous. Certainly to the electronics in question, probably to the person using it. But the system didn’t seem to have suffered any aftereffects from Max’s visit, and she’d protected it as best she could figure how, and it was just so damned useful. And the unknown person who had set up this Web site didn’t accept any other key. Tricky bastard.
Taking a deep breath, she rested a hand palm down over