"So if your wild guess about this being a MITI disk is right, and the first two letters of the three-letter alpha part are still MX, that means there are exactly, what—twenty-six letters in the alphabet times a million numbers—twenty-six million combinations. We're looking for one number in twenty-six million? So if it takes, say, five seconds to type one in and try it, we're talking roughly a hundred and thirty million seconds to go the course." I glanced again at the door. "Besides which, we get kicked off after every third try. Working around the clock, we ought to have it sometime about, what, 2001?"
She glanced back at the screen, then suddenly whirled around, a funny look on her face. "What do you have in your office?"
"What do you mean?"
"Don't you have a PC downtown?"
"Just a little IBM AT, 512K. And also a Mac, a toy I use to draw cutsey-poo pictures now and then and do covers for reports."
"How about a telephone modem?"
"Built in. How else could I handle all that trading?"
"And it's up?"
"The IBM? Never turn it off. Little twitch left over from playing the Hong Kong exchanges. Habits die hard."
"Okay, I'm going to try and use it to crack the code in DNI's mainframe."