Boys were tongue-tied in her presence, but they lined up for the chance to be rumble-mouthed, and eventually she realized that to most of them, she wasn't a real person, but a trophy — to be pursued, captured, then displayed. Looky here, guys, look what's hanging onto my arm. Don't you wish she was yours?
She was smart, she did well in school, stacked up well against objective academic standards, but nobody seemed to care about that. Being pretty was more important than being smart to everybody. Everybody except Joanna Winthrop.
Being pretty got old. Too many people couldn't see past it — or didn't want to see past it.
She tossed the damp paper towel into the trash can and glanced back at the mirror again. The first boy she'd slept with, at seventeen, had been the president of the science club, not any of the dozens of jocks who had chased her. He was intelligent, soft-spoken, and handsome, in a consumptive dying-poet kind of way. A sensitive, caring, bright young man who respected her for her mind. That was what she had thought.
He'd bragged about sleeping with her to his friends the next day. So much for his sensitivity, his caring, his respect for her mind. It had broken her heart.
Most of the girls she knew were jealous of her looks, especially the pretty ones, and they were resentful and catty. Her only real friend in school had been Maudie Van Buren, who had been plain, fifty pounds overweight, and addicted to black sweatsuits and running shoes. Maudie didn't care about looks — hers, Joanna's, anybody's — and she didn't understand why Joanna was so upset about being popular. She'd love to be on anybody's list for anything, she always said.
They'd gone off to different universities, Winthrop to MIT, Van Buren to UCLA. But they kept in touch. And each year, they got together for a week at Maudie's uncle's mountain cabin outside Boulder, Colorado. During the break between their junior and senior terms, they had managed one of their best ever conversations. Maudie had gone on a diet, started working out, and in six months had dropped her excess weight, tightened up, and emerged from her sweatsuit-fat-chrysalis stage as a slender — and beautiful — butterfly.
Over bottles of silty, home-brewed beer that Maudie's uncle had stocked the fridge with before he left, the two young women had talked.
"I think I finally get it," Maudie said. "About the pretty thing."
Winthrop sipped at the cloudy brew. "Uh-huh."
"I mean, when I was a big tub, anybody who bothered to spend time with me did it because of my personality, such that it was, and it wasn't as if I had to carry a stick to clear myself a path through my admirers when I went out. Now, I get calls from guys who thought I was invisible when I was a whole helluva lot bigger than I am now. It's like I suddenly got rich and everybody wants to be my friend." She took a big slug of the beer. "I mean, the depth of a guy who is only interested in you because of your looks is about that of a postage stamp, isn't it? Kind of hard to feel a lot of trust for somebody like that. ‘Oh, baby, I love you for your mind!' sounds a little hollow when he's fumbling to unsnap your bra strap."
Joanna grinned around another swig of beer. "Tell me about it, sister."
Maudie looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time.
"You've had to deal with this your whole life. How did you finally get past it?"
"Who got past it? I bump into every day I go out. You learn to live with it."
"I may start eating again," Maudie said. "Who needs the stress? Maybe it's better to be fat and sure of my friends than skinny and suspicious."
"No, I think the best thing is to find somebody who can get past your face and boobs, who doesn't care too much about either. It's okay if they think you look good, that's fine, as long as they realize that isn't all there is to you."
"You got somebody like that?"
"I got you, babe."
"I mean somebody male."
"Well, no. Not yet. But I'm ever hopeful. He must be out there somewhere."
"Better be careful. I might find him first."
Both women laughed, and drank more of the malty home brew—
Winthrop's virgil cheeped, and she pulled it from where it was clipped onto her belt. Incoming call. The caller ID showed it was Commander Michaels. It must be important if he was calling her from just down the hall.
"Yes, sir?"
"We have a situation here, Joanna. If you could come to my office, I'd appreciate it."
"Be right there," she said.
She discommed, stuck the virgil back on her belt, gave herself a final glance in the mirror, and started for the door.
Michaels looked at the three leaders of his computer team, as good a group of people as he'd ever worked with. They all looked back at him with anticipation as he finished laying out the scenario.
"All right, folks, there it is. CIA is justifiably upset and they'd like us to do something about it. Forty years of work is going down the tubes, and more might follow that any second. Let's have some risk assessment and scenario building here. Jay, what do we have so far?"
"I wish I could say it was good news, Boss, but so far, zip city. I don't think we're dealing with some kid hacker. What little I've found is a little rougher than the Russian we just dealt with. The guy snuck in and out, but he didn't track a lot of mud — I haven't found his footprints yet."
"Toni? How is he getting this stuff?"
"Three possibilities," she said. "One, he's cracking his way into secret files and stealing it; two, somebody who knows it is feeding him — or three, he knows it himself."
"So he could be almost anybody," Joanna said. "Somebody outside the walls, or inside them."
"How do we find him?" Michaels asked.
They all looked morose, and Michaels knew why. If the guy hadn't left an obvious trail, and if he didn't come back and blunder into a hole and break his leg or something, finding him would be iffy at best.
"All right, skip that. How do we stop him?"
Again, Michaels already knew the answer, but he wanted to get his team cranked up to full alert.
Jay said, "We've already put out the word to all federal agencies to harden systems, change passwords, reschedule downtimes from periodic to random, all like that."
"Which will help if he is by himself outside and looking in," Toni said, "but not if he's a cleared employee."
"Or being fed by somebody who is," Joanna added.
"We set some rattle cans up on real obvious targets," Jay said. "Squeals, squeakers, telltales, like that, but if he was dumb enough to blunder into those, he probably wouldn't have gotten in in the first place."
Michaels nodded. It wasn't their fault, but they had to catch this guy before more people started dying. He had to be hard here. "Folks, this guy, whoever he is, has caused at least one death we know of, and maybe more, and is likely to cause more. He's compromised our national security, pissed off our friends and enemies alike, and way down at the bottom of the list, he's also making Net Force look bad. There are people who will use this against us, and that's a problem, but that's the least of our worries. I want to see some contingency plans, some operational scenarios that will nail this bastard and get him off the net. Use whatever Cray time you need, spend what you need to spend, call in favors, whatever. This is critical, priority one. We have other business, sure, but this sits on top of the pile, understood?"