Pashley was frantically thumbing through the eight-by-ten glossy color photographs of Judith’s apartment the agents had taken on the first raid. Suddenly his head snapped up.
"Wait a minute! There is another computer in here." He stood up so fast he nearly knocked the chair over. "Come on, let’s go back to the judge."
"You want a warrant to seize what?" Judge David Faraday said in an utterly bewildered voice.
"A toaster," Special Agent Pashley repeated confidently. "We believe it is a vital piece of evidence in this hacker case."
"But it’s a toaster!" Judge Faraday almost wailed.
"Yes, Your Honor, but there’s a computer hidden inside." He stepped up to the desk and held out a repair manual. "As you can see here there is a microcontroller-that’s a computer-in the toaster. Further," he pulled out a couple of clippings, "this is the exact make and model which hackers at a hackers’ convention actually connected to a communications network, like a telephone system."
"This happened in 1990," Judge Faraday said as he glanced at the clipping.
"Yes, sir, at a secret hackers’ convention called InterOp, which was held not far from here."
"This clipping is from the San Jose Mercury."
"Yes, sir."
"So this secret convention of," he ran his finger down the clipping, "ten thousand or so computer criminals was covered by the local newspapers."
Pashley was oblivious to the change in Judge Faraday’s voice. "Yes, sir. There were some television stories, but we couldn’t get the tape as evidence. But you can see it talks about the toaster oven right here."
"Mr. Pashley," Judge Faraday said mildly.
"Yes, sir?"
"Get out of my sight." The judge’s voice rose. "Get out of this courthouse!" His face got red and a vein began to throb in his temple. "Don’t ever let me see you again. On anything." Judge Faraday was screaming now. "IS THAT CLEAR?"
"But do we get the warrant?" Pashley asked over his shoulder as Arnold hustled him out of the judge’s office.
Ray Whipple shifted nervously on the chill vinyl seat. There was something going on here but he wasn’t sure what.
Uncharacteristically, Pashley had sought him out to offer him a lift back to the hotel. Instead of driving him nuts with innane chatter while he drove, Pashley wasn’t saying anything. Whipple didn’t find that to be much of an improvement.
Ray’s knowledge of the city was minimal and his sense of direction useless for finding anything smaller than a star, but eventually even he realized they were heading in the wrong direction.
"Where are we going?"
Pashley didn’t take his eyes off the road. "I’ve got a little errand to run."
Two more turns in quick succession brought them into a neighborhood the astrophysicist recognized vaguely. Then another turn and Whipple went cold as he realized where they were. By that time Pashley had turned off the headlights and pulled over to the curb less than a block away from Judith’s apartment.
"What are we doing here?"
"We’re here to get that toaster," Pashley said.
Whipple went even colder. "I thought the judge denied the warrant."
Pashley thrust out his jaw and gave the astronomer a steely stare. "There are issues of national security at stake. I’m not going to let a technicality stop me."
"That’s burglary!"
"No sweat. It’s what we call a ’black bag job’ in the FBI."
It occurred to Ray that that was also what the Watergate Plumbers called it at the Nixon White House.
"What if she’s home?"
"She isn’t. She’s off playing games with some friends. You just wait here and if you see her coming honk the horn, okay?"
"I dunno about this."
"Look," Pashley said in the voice exasperated mothers use on small children, "just sit here and blow the horn if she comes. Nice and simple. What can go wrong?"
Ray’s suddenly overheated imagination came up with dozens of possibilities. "Leave the keys in the ignition, okay?"
Pashley shook his head. "Sorry. You’re not a government employee. You can’t legally drive this car."
Whipple decided to pass on that. "I don’t want to drive it, I just want to be able to honk the horn."
Pashley tossed the keys on the seat. "All right then, but don’t go anywhere." He got out of the car and started up the sidewalk, his trench coat flapping against his knees.
"I wonder how big the astrophysical library is at Folsom Prison," Whipple muttered and settled in to wait.
Clueless Pashley was muttering too as he turned into the apartment complex. "Damn pissants and their technicalities! Ruin the damn country."
There was another problem Pashley hadn’t mentioned to Whipple. Since Judge Faraday had turned him down for the warrant the mood at the local FBI office had turned decidedly chilly. The surveillance team had been withdrawn and the electronic listening van was back in the government garage. Pashley suspected it had something to do with the fact that AIC Weinberg was almost ready to come back to work. For some reason Weinberg didn’t seem to like this investigation.
Actually the incident with Judge Faraday had pushed Janovsky to visit Weinberg in the hospital and tell him what Pashley had been up to. Weinberg hadn’t been able to fully brief his second-in-command on Pashley because he was still hooked up to a cardiac monitor when Janovsky told his story, and the monitor thought Weinberg was having a heart attack. The emergency team hustled Janovsky out of the room before Weinberg could get out anything coherent, but Janovsky got the drift.
Pashley skulked by the gate for a couple of minutes, oblivious to the way the street lights highlighted him. It wasn’t quite 10 P.M. but the court was deserted and most of the porch lights were off. The apartments had their drapes drawn tightly against the chill evening and he could faintly hear the sound of a television yammering out some game show at the top of its electronic lungs.
Judith’s apartment was on the ground floor about halfway back. Her porch light was on but the tall bushes to either side of the door gave him some cover. With a final look around Pashley dropped to one knee and produced a black vinyl case containing a dozen lock picks. He selected one, put the tension wrench in the keyhole and went to work.
If Pashley wasn’t smart, he was clever with his hands. He also knew how to pick locks. Unfortunately lock picking is not like riding a bicycle. You need to keep doing it to keep in practice and Pashley hadn’t practiced for a couple of years. It took him longer than he expected to tickle the tumblers and get the lock to turn.
Meanwhile Ray Whipple was getting more nervous by the minute. "Think about the Hubble," he breathed, like an acolyte reciting a mantra. "Think about time on the Hubble." He thought about it. He thought hard about that observing time. Then he thought about doing time-three-to-five as an accessory to burglary. Somehow he thought about that time more than he thought about the time on the Hubble Space Telescope.