In a nest of luxury high above Wilshire Boulevard, where the tall windows present a sky afire above a city settling toward the pleasures of day’s end…
Although he isn’t at the moment acting on behalf of Volunteers for a Better Future, Jason Alan Drucklow cannot resist using the back door into the NSA’s ten-thousand-room castle of data to satisfy his curiosity about Jane Hawk. He wants to know what happened at the abandoned factory, but also whatever else she has done that Marshall Ackerman and his many associates have been sharing with one another by phone and in their various encrypted messages. She fascinates Jason, not as Cammy fascinates him—no need for the lovely Ms. Newton to be concerned—but rather as fate fascinates him, as the possibility of strange alien intelligences elsewhere in the universe fascinates him.
Hawkwoman, as they have taken to calling her, is no less an interest of Cammy’s than of Jason’s. As he uncovers each new morsel of information about what she has done, he shares it with his best girl.
Indeed, Cammy is the one who compares Hawkwoman to one of those computer viruses that changes its digital footprint each time it replicates, which makes it undetectable to most antivirus software. As she pours a glass of Caymus cabernet sauvignon for each of them, here on the cusp of night, she says, “Wow! She’s like a polymorphic virus, huh?”
This sobers Jason before he’s taken a sip of wine. “Polymorphic virus? Maybe we better hope not. Don’t want anything to happen to this cushy job.”