"I just had the same thought. The other races as well. I wonder what we're going to find if we start cross-referencing our list of recent murders, with MAEBE races. Why don't you start on the West Coast and I'll start on the East. Let's see what we come up with."
Mark Howard jumped to his feet. "Dr. Smith, I've got a new routine that I think can get it done faster than our old searches."
Smith raised his eyebrows. "We need a database on MAEBE membership before we do anything else."
"The system can make it in real time," Howard said in a rush. "There will be press releases appearing on the wires and online media outlets across the country. I can set up a routine to index them and cross match them as they hit the Web and the wires. It'll take two minutes to get it started."
The sour-lemon, bloodless gray face of Dr. Harold W. Smith seemed to blossom in surprise. He had been hacking the global networks since Mark Howard was in diapers. Hell, he had almost single-handedly created a sort of global Internet years before the university researchers at Stamford University ever conceived of the unique idea to share data over telephone lines using their room-size, number-crunching computing machines. But he had never allowed himself to fall behind the state of the art in terms of data compilation or networking technology. Still, at this moment he didn't clearly understand how Mark Howard intended to create a cross-referencing applications when there was nothing yet to cross-reference to.
Mark Howard was more than a little surprised when
Harold W. Smith got up and gestured at the chair. "Please. I'd like to see how you go about it."
Mark Howard walked behind the desk and sat in Dr. Smith's chair. He put his fingers on the keyboard, tested their tactile response and suddenly he was quite comfortable.
He typed furiously fast, as if he were beating the commands out of the keys. Smith was disappointed when he saw where the young man was headed. The online edition of the Runoff Gazette from Runoff, New Mexico. It had to be a small town since Smith had never heard of it, and the newspaper didn't look like his first choice for vital intelligence.
Before Smith had time to ask about it, Howard had a second window open and brought up a script from the store of custom applications stored in the CURE mainframes. Howard sped through the code, typed in a few extra commands, then hit the return key.
He sat back, folded his arms, and smiled.
"Mark?"
"" Runoff Gazette" the young assistant director said.
"I see that."
"The Folcroft Four are hacking it. The Gazette's got one of those systems to alert readers when there is an update. Lots of Web sites have them."
Smith was sure he was missing something. "So you're signing us up to get updates from the Runoff Gazette!'
"Yeah. Yes. But the system isn't too secure and it's piggybacked on the Gazette's internal LAN, so I've got the Folcroft Four reprogramming the system to feed all electronic documentation generated in the newspaper offices into a hidden Web page." Mark looked up at his boss and saw the heavy lines of concern. "You see what I've done, Dr. Smith? I've got the newspaper server dumping all its content into Web pages only we know about, indexing it and sending us the results if and when they match our search terms. MAEBE. If somebody in the vicinity of Runoff, New Mexico, becomes a part of MAEBE, we'll get the news, official and unofficial."
"In Runoff, New Mexico?"
Mark Howard smiled, sat up, and his fingers snapped so viciously against the glass that Smith was sure the young man had to be bruising his fingertips. The screen filled with chaos.
"It multiplying," Mark explained. "The script can hack the systems used by ninety-five percent of the media outlets in the United States. They're all a lot alike. Thousands of them, and they'll all be doing CURE'S work for it. We don't have to go to them. They send the intelligence we want to us as soon as it is generated."
Smith was getting that wide-open look on his face again as he watched the streaming data of successful hacks and plants of the invasive application. "Yes," he said. He sounded almost, but not quite, excited. "Mark, this could be a tremendous tool if it..." He looked embarrassed suddenly. "I mean, have you tested it? What kind of results are you getting?"
Mark grinned again, and Smith thought he looked like a six-year-old boy who just rode a skateboard for the first time without falling off. With a few more frantic keyboard strokes, the windows vanished behind a new window displaying a digitized map of the country. There were three green dots on it.
"I haven't given the system a lot of parameters to rank the search results. It's basically looking for the word 'MAEBE' along with a reference to an independent political campaign that is nearby geographically. When it finds it, we get a green, and we can assume there's probably a campaigner in the vicinity that's joined the new party."
There were six greens on the screen now, and one of them changed to yellow.
"It's cross-referencing them to our list of suspicious deaths," Smith said. "That's a yellow?"
"Yes. There's also a check for a match between the victim in the death and the position the MAEBE party is campaigning for. If MAEBE is trying to fill a seat that is vacant because of a suspicious death, then we get an orange dot. That data is part of the self-search function being performed for us by the newspaper servers, but the Folcroft Four are also doing some searching on their own of the election committee records in all the local jurisdictions. I haven't got those systems to do our work for us. So there's a delay. But when the margin of error is low enough, we'll get an orange."
"Or two. Or five." Smith was as pleased as Mark Howard had ever seen him as he watched the United
States map sprinkle itself with green dots, some of which became yellow. Five, now six, were orange.
Another dot appeared. It didn't start out green like the others, then change to yellow and orange. It just appeared, scarlet and more brilliant than the others, as if a drop of bright blood had just plopped onto the desktop.
Mark Howard became stiff, leaning close to the red dot shining at the tip of West Texas.
Smith had been trying to figure it out. "What does red mean? Multiple murders?"
"It means no murder at all," Mark said. "Yet."
Harold W. Smith was in his own chair again when Mrs. Mikulka entered.
"Are you feeling okay, Dr. Smith?" she asked, setting down the tray from the hospital cafeteria.
"Fine," Dr. Smith said.
"I bought you tea," she said, which, of course, was obvious. She looked at Mark Howard, sitting uncomfortably on the old couch in the rear of the office. "Oh, dear, is something wrong?"
"What?"
"Has someone died?"
Mark Howard looked up with hollow eyes and swallowed his first words, then said, "No, Mrs. Mikulka."
She didn't believe him for a moment, but she knew better than to probe, and she left the office and closed the door behind her, thinking to herself that the directors of Folcroft Sanitarium were just a little too paranoid when it came to the security of the place.
After twenty years she was getting a little sick of it all.
As soon as the door closed behind his secretary, Dr. Smith touched the switch that brought the monitor back to life and looked at the map of the United States with a growing dread. His amazement and delight at Mark Howard's powerful new data collection tool was forgotten as the vivid results blossomed before their eyes.
Mark Howard stood at Smith's side and watched the screen as more colored spots appeared. Several greens, two or three yellows and maybe two hundred oranges. Two hundred murders that were tied, almost without doubt, to MAEBE.