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case of something like this. I ripped the towel off my favorite monitor—the towel kept the light down—and plopped my sorry butt into the chair too fast. I hardly felt it.
    "Boys! What are you doing? The neighbors will hear!" Miss Alexa, our USIC live-in nurse, shouted up the stairs. That would be a bad thing. We kept the curtains drawn. I was supposed to be living somewhere else, and the house was supposed to be rented to an elderly couple while my mom sat in federal prison.
    I didn't bother answering Miss Alexa.
OmarLoggi is online.
Ho ho. Omar is a former professor of marine biology in Hamburg who designed the germ that infected Trinity Falls. VaporStrike is not a scientist but an officer of some sort. He's a trained assassin.
    There wasn't a lot more chatter to catch. Omar was talking to a log-in named Pasco, not familiar to me, so I dog-leashed him to track later. Hamdani got the IP address of where Omar was chattering from. He came in my room to do the translation of their last two exchanges before they exited. He whipped the towel off the terminal next to me.
    "Sit on that towel!" I warned him. I don't like the possibility of sitting my butt pustules where his butt pustules have been, if you'll pardon me. He calls me on my obsessive-compulsive behavior daily, but now he looked peaceful and gratified.
    "You need me to translate?" he asked.
    "Yes, but don't toy with me," I said. "What's going on?"
    Hamdani's smile is forever with his eyes and not his mouth. It keeps his face from breaking open like mine just had.
    He said, "Omar is in Cancún."
    Well, well. We'd been placing bets for weeks. Sydney, Australia. Beijing, China. The Polynesian Islands. Pakistan. Omar's whereabouts was huge. Cancún boiled my blood, because it is a beautiful Mexican place where people slurp margaritas on the beach and get twenty-buck massages and snorkel.
    I moved my chair down so he could move his toweled ass into place. He can identify the language pretty quickly if I can't, and then we have translation programs to do most of the work. After that we have to fill in with whatever English words are missing so USIC can understand it. The initial translation is usually clunky, but I let him fill in:
Pasco: What were their last calculations before the arrest?
    OmarLoggi: The dog died in two minutes and twenty-nine seconds and deteriorated in three hours and fifty minutes. This is a vast improvement over our trials in Mexico City.
    Pasco: May I share this with our friends in Colony Two?
    "Whoa ... whoa..." I think I said it first. Trinity Falls had been known as Colony One. This was the first mention of any new colonies.
    Miss Alexa was now behind us. Because USIC employs her, we didn't bother sending her away from our soon-to-be-classified secrets. "Boys. You know what Hodji has told you over and over again."
    "We're not boys," I snapped. Or if we are, maybe USIC ought to consider hiring boys. "In the world of computers, boys are the men and men are—"
    "Yadda yadda, young men. You're supposed to be using your computers to play chess and download e-books. To fully recover, you need sleep." She marched her girth out while Hamdani translated the last line.
OmarLoggi: Tell no one in Colony Two yet. I want to kill my monkeys first. Their circulatory components mirror humans more closely than dogs.
    Exits followed. The top of my head broke into a sweat, and Hamdani said nothing. As happy as we used to get in March, back when we were capturing chatter like crazy, I had forgotten there were moments like this. When you get excited over some ShadowStrike chatter, there's obviously some puke factor attached.
There's a Colony Two. Omar's got some disgusting new mutation of what had gotten us that is powerful enough to take apart a dog in four hours.
    I tried to focus on the good:
Omar had just used an Internet café server in Cancún.
Hamdani put it all in an e-mail to Hodji and simply wrote, This is an anonymous tip from a friend. He attached the