AZOTUSLAND Chapter Sixty-Six

Maugham slumped into bed at 4:30 a.m. and Martine nuzzled him.

Jim fell asleep on the air mattress at 2 a.m. and had no dreams at all.

*********

Two hours later, Maugham, bleary-eyed got into a cold shower and dosed himself but good. He howled under the merciless cold and Martine stirred, then he got out and toweled off and crouched down beside her sweet face, stroked her cheek and said "Time to get up honey. We got a full day."

"No," she protested, "come back to bed and make love to me."

How about a date tonight?' he said. I'll take you out for Thai food, and I'll even dress up."

"What about work?"

"I'll get folks to cover us for tonight."

Then he kissed her gently on the forehead, rose and slapped her feet on the way out. "Get up!"

"Ass!"

********

Down in Silo 1 Maugham was making progress. He had a string of chat room messages, two Blog posts and he had turned to the dating sites and was feberishing playing all three towers like like an expereinced grandmother on a bank of slot machines.

Hundreds, then thousands of pictures....blaster, bambaster, alacandacter, alabaster7, candibaster, dicemaster, alabamamaster,baster37, etc....then searched for age ranges, hair type, body type, regions, etc...

Deadly woman in a sea of haystacks.

Then he hit it.

RCane

There was her picture on the screen on a rather explicit adult site. Her long blond hair flowed over her shoulders. They next picture was of her in a shower showing all her curves. The last was just a shot of her eyes, mouth and large full breasts and long stomach.

"Gotcha!" Maugham said. Then his shoulders slumped.

Location? Northern California
Occupation? Personal

Then the rest of the questions said "Ask me later."

But he noted her last sign on had been 3 days ago. he bet she got a lot of responses, particularly because her profile said she liked older men, and had the sex drive of two men combined.

Maugham conferred with Jim and they set out a plan. Maugham would route all of his work through old friends of Jim's. One was a software executive in Atlanta; the second a genius machinist in Colorado; the third his friend Spence in Maine, and lastly Gabriel in Seattle. They would only use each one when needed and start one at a time

In all cases the profiles Maugham setup would be masked as they were run through other servers. Maugham asked about a possible location in Sacramento and after a call to Jim's friends JJ and Charles, that too was setup with actual hands on immediate capability as if they were there.

Now they hunkered down and started to work on scripting a plan. The core of Jim's approach was to make use of Candice's utter lack of conscience. That was her strength but also her blind spot. "You could drive a car through that blindspot" Jim had said and Maugham thought back to that night with her trying to draw him in and he muttered, "yeah.... a car. Sounds about right."