At this point though, Hank and his new friends were not in much trouble from Roger Tango's efforts. Hank had shut him down hard and gave him no opening for further attempts to get inside Lexicon Industries.

Roger got to his car after thanking the health club's fine representative and called in to Nancy's office to give her and Spike a quick status report. As Roger was leaving a message Spike came on the line. Spike then called Nancy's home number to conference her into the call. As she answered the phone, she was half dressed and in preparation for her night's activities. She was glad this was a voice-only call.

Both Spike and Roger summarized their conversations and their conclusions for each other and Nancy. She of course, was not surprised by their relative failures but resisted rubbing their noses in it.

"I got some bad news from Tom Barnett while you two were pussyfooting around with Lexicon Industries. Apparently it's been a busy afternoon for our friends. They launched another preprogrammed process onto the net this afternoon. This one the FBI is calling a drone. The drone machine-gunned network packets through one of the bottlenecked nodes for a few minutes. And get this, it was running from one of the FBI's own host systems. The FBI system manager said the program was origin unknown, but they do know it was on board as a stowaway for at least a few weeks."

"They're not going to take out nodes with explosives, they're just going to make them useless by giving them more traffic than they can handle." said Roger.

"We have no way of knowing how many little time bombs they setup," continued Nancy. "There could be thousands of sleeping drones waiting to wake up and start broadcasting. The message said they want $10 million electronically transferred within two days or the drones go off with no mercy. That means we only have until Friday at noon!"

"The FBI will have a copy of the drone program on their backup tapes," said Roger. "They should be able to find out what the drones are capable of by looking at that one."

"Something tells me that Lexicon didn't hand over a free copy of the smartest drone they have. I'll bet they have some that multiply and some that migrate and some that send for reinforcements," said Spike.

"Tom had another good point, Spike," Nancy added. "He told me we're going to have to talk to the FBI soon and tell them what we know. I don't think I can hold him off through the day tomorrow. He's worried about the position he's in for withholding information. How are we going to deal with that?"



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