Lexicon was maintaining pretenses as well. He quickly hurried around to open Nancy's door for her. His unaware prisoner rotated her legs out of the Mercedes' door and stood up. Lexicon used the opportunity to kiss her deeply. Nancy put her best effort into enjoying it through her fear. How could she get control back?

"Let's get inside shall we," she said.

"Yes, let's."

Lexicon pushed the romantic game again in the elevator on the way to his top floor office suite. He was enjoying Nancy's predicament as much as he was the actual physical aspects of his subject. Nancy was beginning to suspect this but couldn't allow herself to believe it. If it were true she was in deep trouble.

As they arrived in Lexicon's executive office, he continued with the pretense of their visit. He showed Nancy the panoramic view of the Lexicon Industries facility from his window and then powered up his workstation.

"But we did come here to show you the latest Lexicon Industries project effort didn't we?"

Nancy was glad to hear him remembering that. The bad-girl act was getting hard to continue. It was hard to concentrate on prying information out of Lexicon while she was desperately trying to think of an escape plan. At least having him show the project would get some information and buy some time.

"Yeah, I want to see what you've got going. And don't leave out the evil part."

What Nancy could not know was that as Lexicon's workstation came on-line, Spike noticed the node on the network and moved to examine it. Anything was better than the voice mail search. He plugged himself into both the video camera and microphone data streams. To his amazement he saw and heard Nancy McGill in John Lexicon's office. His heart might have skipped a beat if he had one. When he saw that it was Lexicon himself in the office with her, his anxiety went up another three notches. Getting himself under control, Spike waited to see what was going on.

Lexicon had moved to the wall safe hidden behind a painting. He was removing the CD-ROM as he explained: "This single CD-ROM contains the only copy of our project. In fact, it is the only copy that will ever be made."

"Doesn't that make it hard to sell a lot of them?"

"We won't be selling any," he said as he inserted the disk in his computer.

Lexicon's workstation brought up the three dimensional, interface to the drone control program.

"What is it, a game or simulator program?" asked Nancy.

"This is no game, Ms. McGill. This program links me into the locations of dormant network assault drones that I've placed on over 2800 Internet hosts all over the country. This CD is the single location of the unique activation and deactivation codes for each and every drone. It assigns them their missions, roles, and targets."

That's good news thought both Spike and Nancy. It meant that Lexicon's control-oriented personality had left him as the single point of failure for his scheme. No instructions issued, no missions, roles, or targets for the drones.



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