996, he'd made a TDY visit to Nellis AFB with Captain Margaret Adams
of Air Force Intelligence.
On the last weekend of the visit, she'd wanted to check out downtown Las
Vegas. Some time during that Saturday night he'd seen the woman in the picture,
but something about her was different. Her hair? Maybe she hadn't been a blonde.
Using his art program, Cade darkened her hair a few shades, then darkened it
some more. There was still something not quite right. Had she been wearing
glasses? No, he didn't think so. Something else. Colored contacts, maybe.
Laptops and hard drives are like any other machines; they'll usually break
down only at the worst possible times. Cade couldn't burn a backup CD on the
lappie, so he decided to take other precautions against losing the pictures.
Using the room's phone line, he signed onto the internet and opened an
account at a free web host as 'ABC Products', created a directory for the
pictures on the server, made a picture-list web page and titled it
'productimages', and sent everything up to the site. He then made a dummy index
page that said, 'Under Construction' and contained no links.
After adding a 'no robots' text file to the root directory to keep search
engines out of the website, he tested the pages by viewing a couple of the
sequentially-numbered pictures.
It occurred to Cade that -- once WNN used the pictures on the news -- both
Jeremy and WNN would be questioned at length, and Cade's involvement would be
discovered.
In order to wipe away all traces of his recent web activities, Cade moved
the laptop's 'cookie' files and cache files to a temporary directory, then
rebooted to DOS and deleted that directory and all the 'index.dat' and history
files using 'wipe.exe', which overwrote files with garbage code before deleting
them.
He then backed up his 'favorites' list, uninstalled and reinstalled the
browser so it would look as if he'd had to fix problems with the program, and
very briefly visited several common websites to create new cache and history
files.
When the coffee was gone, Cade checked his watch, put the computer away, and
put his thoughts and speculations about the woman on a mental shelf as he
brushed his teeth, put on a clean shirt, and tossed his convention guides in his
backpack.
He had less than an hour to get to the first of four writer's conferences
listed in the program guide -- a discussion about