Who Hunts the Hunter Read online

Page 10


  “So says another one of your contacts?”

  O’Keefe nods."Quite.”

  The small red and black figure in the dark gray cage lifts its head, growling hoarsely, and begins slapping angrily at the bars of the cage. Whistle whistles soft and long, as if favorably impressed."Hey, Tang,” she says, looking to O’Keefe."Forty-five seconds this time.”

  Unfortunate. O’Keefe had been hoping that this latest mixture of barbiturates and opiates might provide a longer-lasting effect. He’ll have to try something else. If worse comes to worse, he knows of a gas that can be used, though only under controlled conditions.

  “Good going,” Whistle says."With tranqs like this, taking Striper’ll be a glide.”

  O’Keefe shakes his head. From what he’s learned of Striper he knows better than to joke."You’ll remember my instructions,” he says pointedly, “and you’ll follow them to the last decimal.”

  Whistle whistles.

  “You said you’d have a tranq that would work,” Shaver growls.

  “Focus on your own concerns, and leave my problems to me.”

  “Sure, Tang. Whatever.”

  “Good.” O’Keefe turns to check his bed. The coming days will be trying. If his plans unfold properly, the payoff will make his efforts worthwhile, but in the meantime he needs some rest.

  Nights spent on the road are long and tiring, and sharing space with two biffs, even a pair like this, soon gets rather old.

  20

  Amy slips the lead into the jack behind her right ear, and spends a moment hanging in the nothingness of interface wash, then finds herself sitting in the virtual node of her palmtop.

  The node looks more or less like a regular office, complete with pictures and plants, except that everything’s yellow or gold. Amy rolls her iconic hiback armchair in against the back of her virtual desk and the touch-sensitive keyboard of the desktop comes glowing to life. To her left and right are racks of microcassettes containing various programs. On the walls facing her are three large display screens. The screens themselves are a pastel shade of canary yellow. Data displayed on the screens comes up a bright, distinctive shade of gold.

  Amy glances down at herself, then grunts with wry disbelief. She’s spent odd moments playing with different master persona control programs, changing her persona icon in an attempt to make herself more comfortable with the virtual world of the Matrix. Today, her iconic self, one of the less likely ones she’s tried, takes the form of the Voluptuous Swede. She’s got long blonde hair down to there, a swimsuit smaller than heck, and a golden-tan body with dimensions way out of proportion to anything approaching reality.

  Her breasts are the size of ... of ...

  Well, forget it.

  The Sniffer program has unearthed something like 400 megapulses of data with enmeshed references to the 148 items Mr. Audit-Kurushima Jussai is questioning. Marvelous. Amy slots a scanner subroutine into her desktop and starts wading through the data, armed with a trio of language interpreters and a wordchecker boasting several thousand synonyms and buzzwords with any relationship to terms like used, consumed, expended, and so on. Unfortunately, most of the datafiles are proprietary research text files that can only be analyzed, and analyzed with some hope of accuracy, by the primitive art known as reading.

  Thumbnail definitions pop up on the left-most display screen for words with more than six syllables or ten letters, or anything particularly obscure.

  Hours pass like instants. Noon has come and gone by the time Amy’s found definite indications that a mere twelve items have been consumed. It’s almost five p.m. before she’s reconciled the consumption records for a total of sixty-two items. At midnight, she’s gone through every last record the Sniffer prog unearthed and she’s still got twenty-seven items worth almost eight million nuyen unaccounted for.

  It’s impossible.

  She jacks out.

  Not impossible ... nothing’s impossible. She tells herself that, popping a cap for her headache, sitting for five minutes with her eyes closed and the throbbing behind her eyes slowly subsiding. She’ll just have to extend her search. The Metascience Group’s databases are organized into clusters. Everything, both research and administrative records, revolves around specific group sections and research tracks. Obviously, the Sniffer prog missed some dark, dusty corners in the datastores where the missing twenty-seven items are mentioned.

  Again, Amy jacks into her virtual office. She compares the list of datastore directories the Sniffer prog checked against a swiftly compiled list of all the directories on the network, and—ah-hah!—several small ones were indeed bypassed.

  One of them isn’t regular.

  Datastore directories are named to identify the specific group section and research track of the data they contain. One directory isn’t named like that. It’s called, “Special.”

  What the frag is that?

  Special?

  Some administrative aide’s idea of a joke, most likely. Someone’s been using the network for playing electronic games again, or for viewing Live! Action! Porno! or God knows what else. Still, she should check it out, leave no byte unturned. Amy taps her desktop to bring up the Special directory and suddenly her virtual office disappears. She finds herself standing, not sitting, all but surrounded by utter blackness, and facing a massively constructed oval-shaped door. The door is orange. Standing before it, facing her, is a blazing red man, tall as an elf, but equipped with enormous wings. Above him, in bold red caps, sizzles the word, SPECIAL.

  Great. A glitch in her palmtop? No. You idiot. She realizes she hit the wrong key. She’s autoexeced herself right into the electron fantasy of the network, apparently right to the address of the directory she wanted to examine. Usually, she leaves this kind of thing to the people who really know what they’re doing, the gurus in Systems Engineering. Tonight, though ...

  Oh, what the hell.

  “You. Open up,” she tells the Winged Man, wondering if that will work. That is what you do on the inside, right? Talk like it’s real? She’s done this before, enough to be practiced at it, but it always seems so foolish.

  “Identify,” the Winged Man replies.

  “Amy H. Berman, Resource VP, Priority Five.”

  “Your SecCode.”

  “Four-eight-two-nine-nine-one.”

  “Executing.”

  The Winged Man turns and flies away, right through the big orange door, which immediately clanks like a bank vault clanks, and swings open, revealing the broad panorama just beyond ...

  Amy steps onto a sun-drenched beach, like something from a Carib League travel promo: golden sun overhead, powder-blue sky, near-transparent water stretching away to an infinite horizon, virgin white sand extending off to her left and right as far as the eye can see. She feels something wobbling and shaking and looks down and realizes it’s her big bouncy-breasts—not hers, the Voluptuous Swede’s.

  To her rear, a sun-bronzed, muscle-bound giant with an enormous bulge in a too-brief g-string is pointing a camera at her and snapping pictures. Naturally, she must turn, lift her hair up atop her head and smile, posing.

  This is what she gets for fiddling with persona programs.

  Enough.

  Two steps away lies another sun-bronzed-muscled monster with another giant bulge, sunning himself on the sand.

  Amy steps over and pulls off his mirrorshades. There’s a viewscreen where his eyes ought to be. A text file starts scrolling by even as she first looks. Nothing interesting there. She moves on to the next one, the next in the series of tanned, muscled superstuds lying there in the stand, and the next one and the one after that. The datafiles she’s looking at seem no more significant than secretarial notes. She’s onto her fortieth hunk when something stops her cold. When suddenly, she’s looking at nuyen.

  Or maybe ...

  No, the file has the format of an accounting spreadsheet. Rows and columns, titles and dates and amounts. She’s seen enough spreadsheets to recognize one, even if all t
he entries in the file are scrambled, encoded in some way so that she can’t read it. Which is ridiculous. One of the reasons the Metascience Group’s computer network was originally isolated from the greater world of the global matrix was to negate any need for special codes and other security measures, all of which consume network resources and impair network performance.

  She should be able to read this file! Unless it’s written in Ztech programming code ...

  Amy pulls out her mirrorshades—from out of her cleavage of course. The shades bring her programming interpreters online. She takes another look at the file. It’s not in Ztech, that’s for sure. Still scrambled, encrypted. Still unreadable. But why?

  The golden electron sun overhead begins seeming very hot, and Amy feels droplets of perspiration slipping down from her underarms, and a worried, queasy sensation rising into her stomach.

  This is not right.

  21

  Ivar Grubner belches.

  “You fragging jack!" Novangeline exclaims.

  Ivar can’t quite restrain a grin, or another belch, a real deep gargley one, like maybe came all the way up from his lower intestinal track. Naturally, Novangeline shrieks and hops off his hips, off the side of the bed, then leans toward him to beat him on the chest.

  “You’re so disgusting! Why do I even try, try ... !”

  “Watch it. I got some wind coming.”

  Novangeline shouts and sobs, and storms out of the bedroom, but not quite in time to miss the bloated bombshell of a fart Ivar realized was on the way. A real blockbuster of a blubby bomb—smelly, too. But, hey, this is what the biff gets for feeding him all her gaseous manufacturing food.

  Abruptly, she’s back, standing in the doorway, with a weird look in her eyes and one hand at her mouth like she’s afraid of what might come out. She gonna belch, too?

  “There’s someone on the telecom ...” she says, voice trailing off.

  Ivar grunts."I didn’t hear no bleep.”

  “I picked up and the call was just there. I guess before it had a chance to bleep. It’s a smoothie, some woman. She says she’s from work. Your work. Amy Berman?”

  “Who?”

  “Amy—”

  The name hits home—hearing the first name threw him off."Fraggin’ squat!” Ivar exclaims, tumbling out of bed, then running for the bedroom door. They couldn’t have a bedroom extension like everybody else in the world! No, he’s gotta run on his stunty dwarf legs all the way to the living room, then grab the phone, and say, half out of breath, “Yeah, uhh ... Ms. Berman! Hi there! I mean, hello?"

  A roundish smoothie of a norm face gazes at him from the telecom display. That’s Ms. Berman all right. Something seems amiss, though. Her eyes are pointing kind of low."Heh ...” Ivar glances down, grabs a pillow off the sofa and covers his lower parts."What, uh, what a surprise, Ms. Berman! Caught me just outta the shi ... er, shower. Sorry ’bout that. Kinda forgot the ole clothes, you know!”

  The round eyes in the face on the display blink a few times, then Ms. Berman says, “No, I’m sorry, Ivar. Excuse me for calling so late. I need to ask you a favor. It’s important.”

  “Sure, whatever,” Ivar says eagerly. Ms. Berman’s one of the movers and shakers at Hurley-Cooper, where Ivar works. VP of some fragging thing or other. Got to keep people like that singing your praises all right, all the time, as loudly as possible, especially with chipface Tokyo auditors on site, snooping around.

  “Always aim to please, Ms. Berman,” Ivar adds hastily, just so it won’t seem pretentious."Something to do with the comps?”

  Ms. Berman nods."Yes, in fact it’s a small datafile. It’s encrypted, but I’m not sure how. I’m hoping you can decode it for me.”

  “Sure. Pipe it through.”

  “Oh, umm ... hold one moment.” Ms. Berman leans out of sight, moves around, then says, “All right, I’m ready to transmit.”

  “Fire away.”

  The file’s in his queue in no time. Not even a megapulse of data. Should be no problem. The really dangerous encryption progs that wipe your deck bone clean, and maybe your brain besides, all take at least a few pulses of code to ... well, to execute their code. To do whatever. This file ain’t big enough.

  “Got it. Hang on.”

  Ivar hustles into the kitchen to get his cyberdeck, the Cruncher, which he created from Fuchi and Fairlight spares and so can call any damn thing he wants. It’s got combat-hardening, more memory than elephants, an IO rate like the speed of light, and a master persona control program that just can’t be beat, or at least not very often, unless he really pushes his luck.

  He jacks the Cruncher into the telecom, but not into his head. Why waste the time? One touch of a key and he’s got the datafile in memory. One more touch and the file’s decoded. Nothing to it.

  Kid stuff.

  “All set, Ms. Berman. I’ll shoot it back to you.”

  “Oh, you’re ... you’re done?” she says, sounding surprised."I didn’t realize you could do it so quickly. Go ... go ahead.”

  One tap of a key."Got it?”

  Ms. Berman spends a few moments leaning out of sight, checking things, Ivar guesses. Smart lady, but no comp jockey."Yes, it’s here,” she says, then she leans back into the screen and looks out at him."There’s just one thing, Ivar,” she says in a sober sort of way."This file is rather proprietary. I... probably shouldn’t have transmitted it over an unsecured line. Can we keep this just between you and me?”

  “Hey, null sheen, Ms. Berman. You know that.”

  “Yes, I know,” Ms. Berman replies, in a real serious sort of way."And I’m very grateful, Ivar. If I can ever help you in any way, I want you to let me know. Don’t hesitate. I mean that.”

  “Well, hey ... thanks a load, Ms. Berman.”

  “You’re very welcome.”

  And then they close the call. Ivar scratches his beard, then scratches the itchy spot on his butt, then taps a key on the Cruncher to clear Ms. Berman’s file from memory like it was never there.

  “What was that all about?” Novangeline asks.

  Ivar grunts."Can’t tell ya ... It’s proprietary.” Novangeline curses.

  But, hey, that’s life in the corps.

  22

  A trio of spotlights casts a murky orange glow over the parking lot of the Van Cortlandt Industrial Park’s one and only Nathan’s Gourmet Express restaurant. Amy switches on her Harley Roadraider, then stares blindly through the technical readouts that briefly appear on the inside of her helmet’s visor. Unfortunately, staring blindly doesn’t help. Worrying won’t help. And sitting here like a statue won’t get her closer to home or to bed.

  She puts the Harley in gear and drives to the Thruway. She’s tempted to go straight to New Bronx Plaza, jack into the headquarters mainframes, and check things out further, but it’s too late, and she’s too tired. Her brain feels like mush.

  Out on the highway, she stays to the right-hand lanes and keeps her speed down. She’s not used to riding the cycle at night, and her mind’s so full of questions she can hardly focus on driving. She keeps trying to tell herself that there must be some absurdly simple explanation for the file she found on the Metascience Group network, but something deep inside rebels every time. She knows the kinds of files the group keeps and how those files are organized. The group’s master budget is clearly labeled “MASTER BUDGET” and it resides in its own directory along with related datafiles, and none of those files are encrypted because there’s no reason for them to be. The group’s two ranking scientists, Dr. Liron Phalen and Dr. Benjamin Hill, have their own sets of files related to the budget in their own personal datastores, clearly labeled.

  The mystery file, by contrast, was hidden away and encrypted. To Amy, that suggests something improper, perhaps even illicit. It demands her attention. Calling on her favorite guru from Hurley-Cooper’s Computer Engineering Department was simply the quickest way of getting the file decoded.

  One look at the decoded file was about all she could take.<
br />
  The file has no proper headings or anything to identify who created the file or made the various entries, but the rest seems obvious. One column contains a list of names, probably corporate names. The next column contains dates, some going back as far as five years. The column after that contains numbers, all with two digits to the right of the decimal place. It looks like a record of payments.

  Amy did all the standard Management Science courses in school. She knows that numbers can be deceptive. She also knows that implicit assumptions can play games with one’s perceptions. Still, there are two points she can’t get past no matter how she tries to rationalize: there’s a nuyen amount in the mystery file that corresponds exactly with each of the twenty-seven items she’s been trying to account for; and, the date for each of those figures corresponds with payment dates in her purchasing records.

  What do not correspond are the names, and that is the point that worries her. If this file is a record of payments, the names aligned with the dates and nuyen amounts represent payees. Yet, those payees do not agree with the payees in her purchasing records, and that at least suggests the misdirection of funds, which suggests the possibility of fraud.

  Worse, the mystery file includes more than twenty-seven items. The bottom line total approaches thirteen million nuyen.

  Is this file part of someone’s online game? Or is an employee using the Metascience Group network to evaluate their personal finances? Amy can’t accept that. Two columns out of three in the file could have been copied directly from her own records. The correspondence between dates and nuyen amounts is exact. Why do the payee names differ? There must be a reason. Why can’t she think of any legitimate explanation that makes sense? In fact, the more Amy mulls it over the more worried she becomes that her Purchasing records may be wrong, that someone in Metascience is making fraudulent use of Hurley-Cooper funds, possibly by diverting payments to the payees named in the mystery file.

  This could be very bad. And not just for Hurley-Cooper.

  If it really is fraud, and if the people from Tokyo should decide that Amy shares the responsibility for fraud, she could lose not just her job, but her career. And of course she would be held fully responsible. The entire executive board would be held responsible, and her most of all, because Purchasing is her area.