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while Duplex B listed a “J. Srinivasan.” Van had rushed headlong to California to find his grandfather mysteriously replaced by two immigrant families. And he had no other address for Elmer Vandeveer. Van dismally pondered his next move. It was past eight o’clock on the East Coast. He might call his mother in Georgia, and ask her if she knew anything about his grandfather’s strange disappearance. Van’s mother was long-divorced from his father. She had settled down with a gentlemanly Southern dentist, who spared her the impossible treatment she had gotten from Van’s father. Van had never liked explaining difficult things to his mother, on the phone or off of it. Van and his mother were from two very different worlds. Van’s world was serious and technical, while her world was just plain messy. Even though his mother meant well and tried to listen, she always ended up taking offense. For Van to call his own father was completely out of the question. Van never knew his father’s phone number, or even if his father had a home or a phone. Not only did they not talk, they had nothing to say to each other.
    Van certainly wasn’t going to call the local cops in Burbank and ask around for Missing Persons. The cops would page the NCIC database, and even twenty years into retirement, a top-secret engineer who built spy planes was not the kind of guy who ought to just go missing. That situation could get ugly fast. Van might, conceivably, ask Jeb for help. In the world of federal databases, Jeb knew everybody who was anybody. Jeb had been there on the ground floor, literally laying the pipes. But Jeb would be ticked-off that his star recruit had lost his own grandfather—and lacked the smarts to find him. Van decided to case the joint. That was risky and probably dumb, but at least it was practical. It didn’t feel much worse than raiding some teenage hacker punk’s house as the family snoozed. It was dawn, birds were twittering, and the place looked quiet and sleepy.
    Van opened a rusty wrought-iron gate thick with bougainvillea. He tiptoed warily down a narrow, weedy brick path, clustered with wet pink blooms. Was there one loose doorknob around here, maybe?
    Just one window left open to the California breezes? Any open entrance around here? Any system vulnerability where a nearsighted computer scientist, six feet one and putting on weight, might illegally break-and-enter the home of some total strangers? Had he gone completely insane? What the hell was he thinking here? At any moment Van expected the white flick of a motion-sensor light. The frenzied barking of a Doberman. The cocking of a shotgun.
    Van peeked warily through a barred window and around an untucked curtain. The Srinivasan home featured brightly patterned carpets, a sandalwood screen, a wicker couch with thick colorful pillows, and a silent TV. Dusty yellow garlands hung around a dead man’s framed portrait on the far wall. Battling his sense of despair, Van cleaned his glasses on his shirttail. Then he sidled around the house. He heard a voice.
    Van edged closer and peered through another window, this one damp and grimy, with rusting iron bars and a warped sill of cheap aluminum. He had found a kid’s room, a boy’s, to judge by the cheery sports wallpaper and the sky-blue ceiling. The ceiling was hung with a dozen dusty airplane models, dangling on stout black threads. They were World War II fighters: a snarling P-51 Mustang, a Messerschmidt with the Iron Cross, a red-dotted Zero.
    A kid’s wooden desk had a full set of modeling tools. Testor’s enamels, brushes, tweezers, a big square magnifying-glass lamp, and a very odd kind of glue gun. A half-completed model was pinched by alligator clips in a jointed metal armature.
    The voice came from a gumdrop-colored Macintosh computer. Van disliked Macintoshes. First, because they were cute toys for artists rather than serious computers. Second, the female Macintosh voice that read error messages aloud