Summary

Leila is at Heathrow Airport. She thinks about the little owl icon that has been deposited on her laptop’s desktop by Ding-Dong.com. She is met by a dark-haired American beauty who identifies herself as Paige Turner. Paige quickly gets to the point, saying she is part of a group called Dear Diary opposed to a cabal of business people and powerful figures called “The Committee” who are planning an electronic coup where they will control, store, and transmit all information in the world. Paige explains that Leila’s jungle run-in was with men who were implementing the system, and based on her mass e-mail, they retaliated. Paige explains the Committee’s members control 70% of the bandwidth in Asia, have access to men, material, resources, security groups, infrastructure, and so on, on a scale that is unheard of. They are extremely powerful...