Sarah Layton cuts in, her voice like a scalpel. “There’s nothing in your report to warrant it.”
“Not everything’s in my report,” I tell them. “I didn’t have time to bring it up to date.”
“Well?” That from hound-dog McMartin.
“The Star’s penetrated.” I say it flatly, for maximum effect. “Your data integrity’s compromised.”
The three exchange glances, and by the way their eyes move I realize Layton and Drummond are in the same room, while they’re talking to McMartin by phone. Their faces and eyes don’t show any shock, but all three are hardened professionals who won’t let emotion mar their unshakable façades.
“How?” Layton wants to know.
So I tell them. I've already described the delegation from the Tir corp in the report, but I add Nicholas Finnigan’s mysterious visitors from my “IrreleCorp.” I don’t have to point out the significance of the fact that IrreleCorp (or whoever) knew about Finnigan and guessed I’d turn to him for help—I can see it in the combined gaze of six very steady, very perceptive eyes.
When I’m finished there’s silence for a moment, then McMartin wants to know, “You’re sure you didn’t tell anybody else?” From the glances the other two shoot him, it’s obvious they consider even this amount of confirmation redundant. Pros—definitely pros.
But I reassure him on the point anyway. “Like I said, nobody. Just you, in one of my regular reports. You’ve been penetrated.”
“Yes,” Layton says slowly.
And realization strikes like a bullet. “You know,” I blurt out.
I can almost hear the steel shutters slam shut behind three pairs of eyes. Faces go expressionless, like robots.
They know. What I’m telling them is yesterday’s news. If anything, it’s confirming something they’d hoped wasn’t true ... or maybe proving that the penetration they’ve already discovered is more far-reaching than they initially feared. Frag. I want all the details, but I know better than to ask for them. These three are very much into need-to-know, and I don’t or they’d have told me already.
So I set the whole thing aside, and come back to my main reason for calling. “I want to come into the light.” (A hundred years back, I’d probably have said “in from the cold.”)
There’s no exchange of glances this time, there’s no need
for it. A brain-dead trog would have figured it out from the drek in my report. The White Flash nods his head slowly, and I see that he’s the spokesperson for this part of the conference. “That is . .. understandable,” he allows. “Understandable, but impossible at the moment.”
“Why?” I ask. Not chill, not pro, but by frag I want to know.
If anything, his face goes even more cold-fish. “You know I can’t discuss that with you,” he tells me.
Frag this need-to-know bulldrek! That’s what I want to say, but I keep it buttoned. What I actually say is, “I find that hard to accept,” in a chill, steel-hard voice that sounds scary to my own ears.
But old Drummond isn’t fazed in the slightest. “Acknowledged,” he says with a curt nod. “Yet the facts are the facts. We can’t be seen reacting to .. . certain events ... in any way.” that’s enough of a clue for me to fill the rest in mentally. The Star has big trouble of some kind, and these three know it. Maybe it’s limited to the data penetration I thought I was cuing them to. But maybe the penetration is only a little piece of a bigger picture (charming thought). Whatever, the corp’s senior suits—including Layton, Drummond, and McMartin, but almost certainly not limited to them—are doing everything they fragging can to keep the lid on. They can’t let out the slightest hint that anything at all is out of the ordinary.
Hint to who? Lots of people, chummer—there are lots of people interested in finding chinks in the Lone Star armor, for whatever reason. Start with the Cutters themselves—and every other gang in the city. Ditto the yaks, the Cosa Nostra, the Seoulpa rings, the triads, the tongs ...
Toss the megacorps into the mix, too, for diverse reasons. Most corps view Lone Star as an enemy or rival. If they’re into illegal drek, they’d be thrilled to find a weakness or other kind of lever against the cops chasing them. And even if some corps aren’t into illegal drek, they’re still in competition—in one way or another—with the big business combine that is Lone Star Security Corporation (Knight Errant comes immediately to mind).
Now check out the political ramifications. The Star holds a contract with the Seattle metroplex government to provide police services to the city, neh? How would the government—in the person of cranky Governor Marilyn Schultz, for example—react to information that the Star has some big fragging hole in its data security or anywhere else? It’s business, omae. I don’t know what the metroplex government pays the Star each year for services provided, but if said government can shave a couple of points off the contract because it knows the Star's hurting, it'll sure as drek do it.
Besides, Governor Schultz is a politico, and politicos have enemies. What kind of edge would it give one of Schultz’s rivals if he found out—and could prove—that good old Marilyn had put the policing of the entire metroplex in the hands of a corporation that’s fundamentally fragged-up? You got that, omae, a
big
fragging edge. If word of that got out, how might Schultzy react? By coming down hard and showing she’s got jam, by re-negotiating the contract with the Star, or axing it once and for all.
Yeah, I think I get why Drummond and the rest of the suit squad are trying to keep the lid on the garbage can bolted down real tight. But it doesn’t make me feel any better at the moment.
“I scan it,” I tell Drummond, “but that doesn’t mean you can’t bring me in. Frag, my cover’s blown, that’s reason enough, isn’t it? There doesn’t have to be any connection— any connection at all—with the data penetration or any other drek. I’m hung out to dry out here.”
For an instant I think I see something that might almost, maybe, be empathy and understanding in the White Flash’s steely eyes. Then it’s gone. “Acknowledged,” he says again, “but still unacceptable. For reasons I’m not going to discuss on a non-sterile line. Think it through, Larson. You’ll understand.”
I nod slowly. I think I do understand, and that understanding makes the creeping feeling down my spine even colder and stronger.
I jumped to a big conclusion, didn’t I? That Mr. Nemo made me, and that’s why my cover’s blown and the Cutters want my cojones for paperweights. Make sense, sure it does. And if that’s the case, the White Flash has no reason not to pull me in.
But look at it from another angle, and try this on for size. My cover was blown, yes, but not by Mr. Nemo. Sure we recognized each other, but it was because he was standing in line waiting to get in the last time I got tossed out of Club Penumbra or some fragging thing. He didn't tell Blake I was a Star op, because he didn’t know.
So, apart from someone who recognizes me and knows I'm with the Star, who could hose my cover? Why, someone rifling through the Lone Star secure database with his ghostly electronic fingers, that’s fragging who. Makes perfect sense ... I think. Or am I missing something here?
Frag, I’ll worry about that later. Worry about all the little paranoid twists and intrigues when I’m not walking the streets waiting to see who it is who eventually gets to geek me. The fact of the matter is that the Star isn’t going to bring me into the light, not right now, and I’ve got to work around that fact.
So, “Acknowledged,” I spit back at Drummond. Understanding his reasoning doesn’t mean I have to like it, or him. “When?”
Again the three suits exchange glances, and it’s Layton who replies. “Thirty-six hours at the outside,” she tells me. “More likely twenty-four.”
“Things’ll be stable by then?” I want to know.
Maybe it’s a smile that quirks her lips a fraction of a millimeter, or maybe it’s a bad bit in the datastream. “Stable enough,” she says flatly. Okay, so they’ve got some counter-op going to combat the penetration, that’s what it’s got to mean. Go to it mightily and with a fragging will, say I.
“Keep in touch,” Drummond says (like I’m not going to). “Make it every six hours, give or take five minutes.”
I glance at my watch—1134—and mentally log the next callback for 1730. “Got it," I tell them. “This relay?”
Again the exchange of glances, then McMartin gives me the LTG number and security code for another relay and cutout. “It’s a priority override,” he tells me. “Your call will reach us no matter where we are or what we’re doing.”
“Got it chipped,” I tell them. “Later.” And I break the connection.
* * *
Six hours, from 1130 to 1730. A blink of an eye, priyatei, right? Just kick back and drink a couple of soykafs. Hit a bar and get blasted. Get a fragging massage, maybe. The afternoon’s gone like
that.
Except when you know the Cutters have every fragging asset on the street out looking for you, not to mention some unidentified corp with lines deep into the Star’s data fortress. That changes the situation pronto. Every fragging move turns into a brain-buster: Do the Cutters know I’ve got a tendency to hang in a certain kind of place? Does my Star personnel file mention I’ve had contacts with thus and so fixer? If the answer is “yes,” forget it. Someone could be on the spot watching and waiting, ready to blow my brains out. Makes for one long fragging afternoon, omae.
I end up spending most of the early part tooling up and down Highway 5, on the theory that the odds are real fragging slim that somebody’s going to spot me there. Gives me plenty of time to think, but it feels like my brain’s stuck in a groove, going around and around a limited cycle of thoughts. Like, for some reason I can’t shake the thought that Mr. Nemo—the whole Tir-corp delegation thing—is an important piece of the puzzle. Frag knows why, but my gut keeps telling me that’s the way it’s got to be. If I can find out more about what’s going down there—which corp it is, why they’re interested in the Cutters, what the deal is, that kind of drek—I might better understand just what the frag is going on. That’s the way it feels, at least, and I long ago learned to trust my feelings.
But how the frag do I dig up that kind of scan? I’m no technomancer—I’m more at home on the physical streets of the sprawl than the virtual highways and byways of the Matrix. Oh, sure, I can use a ’puter, who can’t? But logging onto UCAS Online, instructing a telecom to transfer calls, or using a pocket ’puter or a phone with a data port to buy Seahawks tix is very different from digging up covert dirt on corp activity, trust me on that one. It takes very special talent. Since I don't have it, I’ve got to hire it or acquire it elsewhere.
Check the biz listings under “Research Consultants” next time you’re online, and you’ll find a drekload of people who claim to have that talent. Phone up one of these slags, tell ’em what you want to know, transfer cred, and just wait for them to come up with something, null persp. Works just great if what you’re digging for is stuff that nobody wants to keep secret—like the current, up-to-the-minute population of Seattle, or the price of tea in China, or whatever. Hire a competent researcher and let ’em rip.
It gets more fun when the data you’re after is more on the
shadowy side of the street. Obviously, that kind of drek is
tougher to find and takes a more talented datasnoop to snag in the first place. (Like, say, the same slag who got you a current quotation on Chinese tea futures might get himself brain-cooked trying to dig up deep background on MCT’s exec veep.) Plus you’ve got to start worrying about the reliability and motives of the datasnoop you hire. I know for a fact that Lone Star has “personal agreements” with an indefinite number of datasnoops out there, and every other corp worthy of the name has got to be doing the same thing.
What do these personal agreements entail? It varies, probably. Some datasnoops will, as a matter of course, provide wrong answers to anyone asking questions about the corp that’s got them on the string. Others will simply stall while they pass the word back to the corp that someone’s asking prying questions about them. I can’t believe that every registered datasnoop is on every corp’s string, and there might even be one or two out there not on anyone’s string, but finding someone who will give you straight answers and not rat you out to the corp you’re interested in becomes a real crapshoot.
That’s why personal relationships are so important in this kind of deal. If it’s “black” data you’re after, you don’t just go to the LTG listings and pick a name at random. You go to a decker or datasnoop or researcher or whatever who you know and trust—somebody you’ve got a relationship with, a relationship you’ve built up over time. If you don’t have a relationship with a decker, you go through a fixer you trust. Networking, omae, it all comes down to networking.
I’ve got a network, a good one: a couple of fixers, a fence or two, a decker, even a shadow doc. Or, more like it, I
had one.
Some of them I met through the Cutters, the others through the Star. And that means that one or another of the two “agencies” out to get me—the Cutters and my IrreleCorp—know about every single fragging one of them. I might get answers to the questions I ask, but is somebody paying the people giving me answers big cred to lie to me? The conclusion’s simple, no matter how much it sticks in my craw: I don’t have a network I can trust. Frag this paranoia drek, it’s bad for the health.
But, as I rumbie back and forth along Highway 5, I’m getting more and more obsessed with the idea of tracing the Tir connection. Time seems to be moving even more slowly than before. If the span from 1300 to 1330 felt more like a couple of (subjective) hours, then 1730 seems a fragging lifetime away. I can’t shake the conviction I’ve got to do something.