From Potter's Field by Patricia Cornwell

hasn't been instructed to send. Something strange has been going on for a while, but so far I've been unable to track it. It's as if he's thinking for himself.'

    'I thought that was the point of artificial intelligence,' I said.

    'Not quite,' said my niece, who had a genius IQ. 'These are not normal messages.'

    'Can you give me an example?'

    'Okay. Yesterday, the British Transport Police entered a case in their VICAP terminal. It was a rape that occurred in Central London in one of the subways. CAIN processed the information, ran details against its database and called back the terminal where the case had been entered. The investigating officer in London got the message that further information was requested on the description of the assailant. Specifically, CAIN wanted to know the color of the assailant's pubic hair and if the victim had had an orgasm.'

    'You aren't serious,' I said.

    'CAIN has never been programmed to ask anything remotely similar to that. Obviously, it's not part of VICAP's protocol. The officer in London was upset and reported what had happened to an assistant chief constable, who called the director at Quantico, who then called Benton Wesley.'

    'Benton called you?' I asked.

    'Well, he actually had someone from ERF call me. He's heading back to Quantico tomorrow, too.'

    'I see.' My voice was steady and I did not show I cared that Wesley was leaving tomorrow or anytime without having told me first. 'Are we certain that the officer in London was telling the truth - that maybe he didn't make up something like this as a joke?'

    'A printout was faxed, and according to ERF the message looks authentic. Only a programmer intimately familiar with CAIN could have gotten in and faked a transmission like that. And again, from what I've been told, there is no evidence in the audit log that anyone has tampered with anything.'

    Lucy went on to explain again that CAIN was run on a UNIX platform with Local Area Networks connected to Greater Area Networks. She talked about gateways and ports and passwords that automatically changed every sixty days. Only the three superusers, of which she was one, could really tamper with the brains of the system. Users at remote sites, like the officer in London, could do nothing beyond entering their data on a dumb terminal or PC connected to the twenty-gigabyte server that resided at Quantico.

    'CAIN is probably the most secure system I've ever heard of,' Lucy added. 'Keeping it airtight is our top priority.' But it wasn't always airtight. Last fall ERF had been broken into, and we had reason to believe Gault was involved. I did not need to remind Lucy of this. She had been interning there at the time and now was responsible for undoing the damage.

    'Look, Aunt Kay,' she said, reading my mind. 'I have turned CAIN inside out. I've been through every program and rewritten major portions of some to ensure there's no threat.'

    'No threat from whom?' I asked. 'CAIN or Gault?' 'No one will get in,' she said flatly. 'No one will.

    No one can.' Then I told her about my American Express card, and her silence was chilling. 'Oh no,' she said. 'It never even entered my mind.' 'You remember I gave it to you last fall when you started your internship at ERF,' I reminded her. 'I said you could use it for train and plane tickets.'

    'But I never needed it because you ended up letting me use your car. Then the wreck happened and I didn't go anywhere for a while.'

    'Where did you keep the card? In your billfold?' 'No.' She confirmed my fears. 'At ERF, in my desk drawer in a letter from you. I figured that was as safe as any place.'

    'And that's where it was when the break-in occurred?' 'Yes. It's gone, Aunt Kay. The more I think about it, the more I'm sure. I would have seen it since then,' she stammered. 'I would have come across it while digging in the drawer. I'll check when I get back, but I know it's not going to be there.'

    'That's what I thought,' I said.

    'I'm really sorry. Has