Left with staff, she set them in the cafe and joined Roarke at a private cube. The monitor of the unit was, like every other she'd seen, swimming with chaotic colors and strange symbols. Beside it was a tall mug of some fancy coffee mixture.
"Is this the source?" she asked him.
"It is, yes. I'll need to – "
"Don't touch anything!" She grabbed his wrist. "Don't – touch – anything," she repeated, then signalled a uniform. "I need a CS kit."
"We've only got minis in the patrols."
"That'll do. Then, Officer Rinksy," she added scanning his nameplate, "you can inform the guy in charge around here that this joint is closed by order of the NYPSD until further notice."
"Won't that be fun?" With surprising cheer, Rinksy walked off to get the kit.
"I wasn't," Roarke said when she turned back to him, "going to touch anything. This is hardly my first day on the job, Lieutenant."
"Don't get pissy. And it's my job, not yours. How do you know this is the source?"
He circled his fingers, examined his manicure. "I'm sorry." He smiled absently. "Did you say something? I'm just biding time, waiting to take my lovely wife home when she finishes work."
"Jeez. Okay, okay, sorry I jumped on you. I'm a little tense. Would you tell me, since you're so brave and strong and smart, how you know this is the source?"
"That would've sounded better if you hadn't had your lip curled, but it'll do. I know this is the source because by tracking through the central system, I traced the virus to its starting point. This unit was the first infected, and the virus was programmed to self-clone and, I suspect, slither into central, spread to all interfaced units, then erupt in a nearly simultaneous burst. It's very clever."
"Great."
Rinksy stepped up beside her again. "Your kit, Lieutenant."
"Thanks." She took the kit, opened it. She coated her hands with Seal-It first, then passed the can to Roarke. "Don't touch anything yet." She took out a wand, shined its pencil-thin beam and washed cool blue light over the coffee mug. "Gotta good thumbprint. Yeah, partial index finger. You got your palm unit on you?"
"Always."
"Can you access the casefile? I need to compare these latents."
While he did as she asked, Eve shined the light over the table surface. Too many prints, she mused, most of them smeared.
"Lieutenant?" Roarke held out a small printout of the casefile prints.
She grunted, then held the printed copy against the latent on the mug. "That's our boy. Hold on." Using the wand she picked up the mug, balanced it with a sealed finger on the base, then poured the coffee mixture into an evidence bag. "Why do people screw up perfectly good coffee with all that froth and flavors?" She sealed the bag, then tipped the cup into a second, sealed that. "Question."
"Ask it."
"How did he know we were coming? He had to know. That's why he uploaded the virus. We were here minutes after notification, but he tagged us, dumped the germ and danced. How?"
"I have a theory, but I'd prefer exploring it a bit first."
She shifted her weight. "Exploring how?"
"I need to open this unit."
She debated. Strict procedure meant she could, and likely should, roust either Feeney or McNab and haul them over to check out the unit on site. Or she could call in another EDD tech.
But Roarke was here.
If he'd been a cop, he'd have been commanding EDD by this time.
"Consider yourself field drafted as an expert consultant, civilian."
"I've always liked the ring of that." He slid a small case out of his inside pocket, then wiggled his sealed fingers. "I'm touching things now."
He used a micro-drill and had the casing removed in seconds. Then he let out a littlehmmm and began to probe. "There are three system levels in this club," he said conversationally. "This is the highest level and costs from one to ten dollars a minute depending on the number of functions utilized."
Her stomach sank. "Is this your club?"
"It is, yes." He continued to work, hooking his PPC to the unit with a hair-thin cable. "But that's neither here nor there. Unless you consider that you'll have no bitching and moaning from the owner about tonight's little adventure – or the impounding of this unit as evidence." He glanced up once, just a sweep of her face with those amused blue eyes. "Less paperwork for you."
"You know how those right-wing bureaucratic demigods are. They feed on paperwork."
"You've a bruise gathering on your jaw."
"Yeah." She rubbed her thumb over the ache. "Shit."
"Hurt?"
"I bit my tongue. That hurts more. You?"
"Nothing major. This system is corrupted, and very thoroughly. Clever boy," he reflected. "Clever, clever boy. You'll need to run a full diagnostic, but it appears you have a top-level tech on your hands, and one who believes in being prepared. It isn't a simple matter to rig a public unit to notify a user of a search on his account. He had a portable scanner, highly sensitive, I'd say, interfaced it. Very cautious, very smart."
"Can you get around it?"
"Eventually. The units in this club are designed quite well to shut down and lock at any attempt at contamination. There's an internal detector and filtering system as backup. Despite that, he managed to upload a virus that wiped this unit, and every other in here. And it did it in minutes, after detecting a shield notification."
She leaned back. "You sound impressed."
"Oh, I am. Considerably impressed. Your man has a brilliant talent. A pity, really, that he's as corrupt and worthless as this unit."
"Yeah. Breaks my heart." She stood up. "I'm going to spring the staff, have the unit impounded and sent to EDD. Once we're cleared out, I want a look at security. Let's see what he looked like tonight."
He looked, Eve decided, smug. She caught it in the way his eyes drifted over the crowd – dismissing, smirking even while he kept a pleasant, inoffensive smile on his face.
He walked through the crowd, kept himself removed from them. No contact, no casual greetings. And moved directly to the cube that put his back to the wall, and kept his view of the room unobstructed.
"He's been here before," Eve noted.
None of the staff had been able to confirm that. Then again, the manager had been so flustered – not by the police intervention, not even by the near-riot, but, she remembered, by the realization that Roarke was in the club – that he'd had a hard time sputtering out his own name.
The unit and cube had been reserved under the name R. W. Emerson. An alias, she had no doubt, and the name, she'd learned after a quick run, of a long-dead poet.
His hair was a smooth, warm brown mane tonight, and he wore square-framed glasses of tinted amber. She supposed his attire was casual trendy with the dark pegged pants, the ankle boots, the long, hip-swishing shirt in the same amber hue as his lenses. There was a gold cuff bracelet on his right wrist and a curve of winking studs along the shell of his ear.
He ordered the coffee first, made a call on his pocket 'link. Then he drank a little while he continued to watch the room.
"He's making sure the environment's stable," Eve said. "And he's hunting. Tracking the women, considering them. You can message to any other unit in the club, right? Isn't that one of the deals why people go instead of just staying home and scoping the 'net in peace?"
"Another way of socializing," Roarke confirmed. "Excitingly anonymous, even voyeuristic. You message a unit across the room, can watch their reaction, decide if you want to take it to the next step and make personal contact. Units are equipped with a standard privacy shield for those who don't want to be disturbed. Or hit on."
She watched her suspect log on, and choose manual instead of voice mode.
"There." Roarke touched her arm, then ordered the screen to zoom in, to enlarge a sector. "The scanner."
She saw what looked like a small, slim, silver business card case. He drew a thin, retractable cable out of the corner, plugged it into the side port of the unit.