Chastity Flame Read Online Free PDF Page A

Chastity might have put her age at about 50, but ten years
ago she would have guessed the same. Perhaps she was aging
backwards.
    "Have I ever failed?" Chastity said,
trying not to think of the card sitting in her pocket even as her
fingers crept around its edges.
    "There will come a time that you do,"
Monitor answered evenly. Chastity knew it was true, but she chose
not to think about that. Life was made up of things you had to
notice and things you could avoid. It made things simpler. "What
did you find out?"
    "He was a moron," Chastity said with a
sigh. "He was ready to sell out his company and had no idea what it
was he had sold, just allowed access to a hacker who did know what
he was looking for and found it. They can patch that, right?
Problem over now."
    "Hardly," Monitor snorted. "We need to
know to whom he sold that information."
    "He didn't know the guy, who clearly
did know exactly what he was doing."
    "You might have gotten a description
from him."
    "It wasn't even likely the guy
himself. He sent in a clone." But she cursed her haste
anyway.
    "But we might have found something,
anything that might have helped. Be thorough. You know better than
this." Monitor looked entirely too much like her mother when she
was cross. It irritated Chastity considerably. "We have to know if
it was just a lucky strike or whether the person in question knew
they were handling data for us. Security depends upon
it."
    "Understood."
    "Dig deeper next time," Monitor
continued. "If we have a breach, we need to root it out as soon as
possible."
    "What's next for me?"
    "You'll know in a few hours," came the
curt reply. "Out."
    Chastity took it in her stride. Just
another day in the office, wasn't it? She pulled the headset off,
laid it on the desk and sighed. Well, time to cruise the net and
update her status. It seemed like a bad idea somehow, even though
she used a fake persona. Still, who would know? A fantasy life
about a normal woman who worked a nine-to-five job: who would
suspect it was a cover?
    Just then the doorbell rang. Chastity
looked at the time in the upper right hand corner of the screen and
grinned. It must be the post. She clattered down the steps to open
the door.
    "Good morning, Miss World. Looks like
you have some mail." The smiling postman handed her a bunch of
advertising circulars and a local newsletter, as usual. She never
got personal mail. There was never anything that couldn't have gone
through the letter slot. But that would have been no
fun.
    "Hello, Mr. Postman. Busy
day?"
    "Always," he said, pretending that his
bag was weighing him down. "A postman's job is not a happy
one."
    "I thought that was a
policeman's."
    "What did Gilbert and Sullivan know
anyway? Have you any letters for me? Postcards from exotic locales
with saucy cartoons? Manifestoes for the papers?"
    "Nothing, sorry. I never do anything
interesting or have anyone to write to."
    "Oh, not true, not true! Just give me
the word, I'll kiss the kiddies goodbye, tell my wife to stuff it
and we'll travel the world together, sipping champagne, eating
caviar and sending postcards to everyone we know."
    "Maybe next week," Chastity laughed,
closing the door as he went whistling away. Chastity had just
dropped the mail into the recycling bin when the doorbell rang
again. When she opened it, she found it was not her postman but a
gum-chewing delivery boy. Emphasis on boy: he had a nasty rash of
pimples across his forehead and a big stain on his brown uniform.
She didn't dare think what it might be. Signing for the package as
the kid leered at her chest, Chastity couldn’t wait to get the door
between them.
    Although the return address read,
"Prews, Magoo, Targetts and Benmen", she knew it was from Monitor.
All the levels of subterfuge were tiresome at times. She tore it
open. A mobile phone? Great. She had been able to avoid them so far
because of the security risk. Why now?
    As if on cue, the computer
pinged again. Upstairs once more, Chastity found a