Talia laughed and patted my shoulder. “You don’t need to whitewash it for me, Paige. I knew my son was never going to lead a quiet life working in an office. In some cases, biology really is destiny. He has power. Better he should use it for good. Or, at least, that’s what I keep telling myself.”

“He’s got a first-rate defense system,” I said.

“Exactly. He’ll be fine.” She exhaled and nodded. “He’ll be fine. Now, Paige, go find what you need to stop this guy, and if you need our help, just ask.”

I’d hacked into this credit card company’s files before—the last time being only a few weeks ago when Lucas needed information for a case. They hadn’t changed any of their security parameters since then, so I popped into the system easily. Within twenty minutes I had Weber’s credit card transaction records. Nothing on them indicated that he’d visited any of the target cities in the last six months. That, however, might only mean that he was smart enough not to make hotel reservations or dinner purchases with his credit card. Or he might have used a different card.

Lucas slipped into the study as I finished. When I told him I’d struck out, he decided to make some phone calls and see whether we could find another way to place Weber out of town on the days of the attacks. These calls were best made from a pay phone, so he took Adam and left. Did he really need Adam to chauffeur him around Santa Cruz? No, but if he’d left him, I’d have spent the next hour with Adam breathing down my neck as I tried to crack Weber’s data files. So Lucas took him along.

It took me about thirty minutes to determine the encryption program Weber had used on his files. Once I knew what he’d used, I downloaded a cracking program and translated them into text. For the hour I waded through the boring detritus of an average life: e-mail jokes, online dating postings, bill payment confirmations, Christmas card address labels, and a hundred other mundane bits of data raised to the value of top-secret information by a paranoid mind and a shareware encryption program.

At ten-fifty, my watch alarm went off. Time to check in with Elena. I phoned her, talked to Savannah, then returned to my work. The rest of the files on the disk appeared to be work-related. Like most professionals, Weber’s day didn’t end when the clock struck five, and for contract employees, the drive to translate that contract into a full-time job often means bringing work home to impress the company with your throughput. He had plenty of data files on his computer, and a folder filled with programs in SAS, COBOL, and RPG. The mind-numbing side of programming: data manipulation and extraction.

I looked at the lists of data files. There were over a hundred on the disk and I really didn’t want to skim through each one. Yet I couldn’t just put them aside based on assumptions about the content. SoI whipped up a simple program to open each file and write a random sampling of the data into a single new file. Then I scanned the new file. Most of it looked like financial data, not surprising given that Weber worked in the accounting division of a Silicon Valley company. Then, a third of the way down the file, I found this:

Tracy Edith McIntyre

03/12/86

shaman

NY5N34414

Race Mark Trenton

11/02/88

sorcerer

YY8N27453

Morgan Anita Lui-Delancy

23/01/85

half-demon

NY6Y18923

Now, Silicon Valley companies may employ some pretty young people, and some pretty strange people, but I don’t think teenage supernaturals made up a significant proportion of their staff. I found two other similar lists farther down. Three files with information on the teenage children of supernaturals. Three Cabals had been the victims of a killer targeting their youth. Definitely not a coincidence.

My sampling program had pulled off only the first eighty characters in each record, but the information in those records extended well over that. As with most data files, though, all you saw were strings of numbers and Y/N indicators, meaningless without a context. To read and understand these files, you needed a program that extracted the data using a record key.

Ten minutes later, I’d found the program that read the Cabal files. I ran it, then opened the file it created.

Criteria A: age<17; living with parent(s)= N; current location city NOT blank, current location country = USA

ID

Name

Age

Cabal

P. Race

State

01-645-1

Holden Wyngaard

16

Cortez

shaman

LA

01-398-04

Max Diego

14

Cortez

Vodoun

NY

01-452-1

Dana MacArthur

15

Cortez

hd/witch

GA

02-0598-3