Nantucket Five-Spot Read Online Free

sentence and a transfer to Leavenworth, where they’d never be heard from again. It meant taking a beating, but hopefully not much of one. Timing was everything here. No margin for error. Once those boys started it wouldn’t take them long to do permanent damage.
    Zeke looked at his watch—a few minutes before noon. They’d be hustling him inside for lunch soon. You never had a moment to yourself at Miramar. Or at least, you weren’t supposed to. Dooley and his pals shouldn’t have been able to jump him, but they had obviously worked something out, which meant they had to have at least two or three guards on the payroll. The most likely prospect was Boatswain’s Mate 2nd Class Brad Liddell, a thin balding kid from Jersey with acne scars and giant teeth. Rumor was the originals had been knocked out and the Navy had fitted him with dentures a size too big. Liddell walked Beaumont from the brig commander’s office to his cell every night, after he was finished with the inventory spreadsheets on the computer, or the requisitions or the payroll…whatever busy work they had loaded him up with that day. Of course he did his own work, too.
    He was on the List of Users—someone had changed it to Lusers in the old days. The old ITS system was a Smithsonian exhibit now, but the jargon remained. It suited him. He was a loser—and a cracker. That was the hacking term for crooks. Beaumont was born in South Carolina, but he had only been a real cracker, the kind people respected, since high school, when he’d used that crude system’s buffer overflow to launch his first format string attack—one simple code injection and he was a straight A student.
    The brig system incorporated a program that attempted to track private computer use, a Jedgar they called them at school, after the FBI director. But the Navy was using the same Unisys MCP he had played with in the old days. The tracking program was easy to dike, just two lines of code.
    He changed the schedules and posted two additional guards in the last long stretch of corridor that led to his cell. He posted their duty call for 8:15, just as the attack should be starting.
    He was setting up a print run for the immediate distribution protocol when Angela said, “What are you doing?”
    He looked up. She was smiling.
    â€œJust checking on the bed linen inventories.”
    â€œAnd I thought my job was boring.”
    Was she flirting with him? “I’m sure there are lots of things you’re good at, Angela. I bet you have some hidden talents. And quite a few that are…right there in plain sight.”
    She actually blushed. “Zeke!”
    â€œFor instance—I bet you knitted that sweater yourself.”
    â€œHow did you know that?”
    â€œWell, you don’t see that kind of workmanship in store-bought clothes. And my sisters knit—I know a homemade grafting stitch when I see one.”
    She pushed her hair back from her forehead, stood up a little straighter. “My, my. You are full of surprises.”
    She had no idea how accurate that comment was. Startling people into a vulnerable moment of contact, an intimacy he could exploit—that was Zeke’s real talent, his most valuable one, and it didn’t show up on the IQ tests. He absorbed facts and details and archived them and used them for leverage. He had overheard two women talking about knitting on a cross-country bus. Ten years later he could convince a prison secretary of a whole fictional family full of handcraft minded siblings with one telling detail.
    He could teach a class in the technique if he wanted to give away his trade secrets. He even had a name for it—the tip of the iceberg theory. If you could construct a plausible jagged three-foot chunk of ice and float it in the right spot, people would naturally assume there was a whole iceberg underneath. You couldn’t sink a ship with your little decoy, but you