EricCWelch

Deputy Chief of Detectives Polly Kelly has a difficult case. Someone with a great deal of technical knowledge has kidnapped Danni, the three-year-old only child of famous singer Maggie McKittredge and her husband senator Neal Gaston. The child was taken from a Catholic Mass by someone disguised as a priest. The police were notified almost immediately, but within a matter of minutes the child's live picture appears on an Internet web site for all the world to see. She is locked in a room with no food, only a water bottle. As usual, there is the bumbling supervisor (why this seems to be a staple of detective fiction might make an interesting sociological investigation sometime) and the obnoxious and occasionally incompetent feebees (FBI) to cause Polly grief and interference. The kidnapper always seems to anticipate the authorities, leaving little snide notes behind ("You Think You're So Smart"). It soon surfaces that Senator Gaston had quite a few enemies. He was chairman of a senate committee on hate-groups, and his personal manager, Todd Haralson, was a member of a fundamentalist church called the Redeemer Returns. They opposed very little except anything that messed with the human genome, believing that the human germ plasm was part of creation and anything that tinkered with its continuity was evil. Maggie and Neal had visited a fertility clinic in order to conceive, and Danni was the product of a technique that Todd's church believed to be morally reprehensible. Finally, the kidnappers contact them by displaying their demands on the floor of the room where Danni is being held: Free Johnnie Raft. Raft was the incarcerated leader of Bandwidth, a group of cyber terrorists who wanted to take over control of the world by displaying their superior technological intelligence. Believing that people should be chosen for office based on a meritocratic system, they had designed and implemented numerous terrorist activities by controlling computerized communications. In the meantime, Polly has asked her detectives to look for any bizarre crimes or events, in addition to normal police investigations related to the kidnapping, and she discovers that three people had been killed under unusual circumstances. By tracking down what links them together, she pieces together the clues that lead ultimately to discovery of the building where Danni has been held. She also discovers that Bandwidth might not be be led by Raft.