by Tom Clancy
Leif didn’t care what anybody in Net Force thought, as long as they made the environment around David Gray too hot for any foreign spy to come near. Maybe the captain had gone all the way, telling David to pull out of Hardweare before things really got nasty.
That would be the best all around, Leif told himself. David would be annoyed if he found out that I sicced Winters on him —
Leif scratched out that thought. Nobody can know what I did, he told himself. There can’t even be a whisper about it. If Cetnik suspected I was responsible, he ‘d make Ludmila ‘s life a living hell.
He took a deep breath, trying to calm his suddenly racing heart. I’ve never felt like this, he thought, sick with misery. / can 7 even think straight because of this never-ending, unrelenting fear… .
He glanced longingly at his computer setup, especially at the holo pickup. Maybe he should make a call to David, see what was going on. Had Winters talked to him yet? David had called Leif for advice when this whole thing started.
Maybe I should offer to advise him now, Leif thought. I’ll tell him to get out of there, beg him if I have to.
Just as quickly, he turned away. He’d have to be crazy to try that. For all he knew, Cetnik could have a tap on his communication lines. More likely, he—and maybe a lot of other people—were listening in to David’s voice and data traffic.
No, Leif told himself grimly, I’ll just have to sit here and sweat it out until David calls me with any information. And then I’ll have to sound shocked and surprised, not just for David, but for anybody else who’s tapped into the line.
He allowed himself a long, slow smile. I hope Cetnik is listening in. It will help convince him I had nothing to do with it.
Unless … what if Winters mentions my call to David? What if David calls me to let me have it if he loses his job?
Then all his effort would be for nothing. Ludmila and her mother would suffer the worst vengeance Cetnik could come up with.
Like a mouse on one of those little exercise wheels, Leif’s mind went back to his conversation with Captain Winters. Could I have told the captain to keep my name out of it?
Not without making the already suspicious Winters really start digging into why you were calling, another part of Leif’s mind cynically answered.
Leif realized he was rocking back and forth in his seat.
Ill make it up to you, he mentally promised David. Dad must have some kind of job you could do. He’s still a little mad at me over what happened at the Post, but who knows? Having me go to bat for you might surprise him enough to clinch the job. Hell think I’ve gotten less self-absorbed. He pushed away the personal thought. I don’t care what Dad thinks. Just don’t call up complaining that I lost you your job. Not for me. For Ludmila.
When the system gave off the tone for a holophone connection, Leif’s overstrained nerves nearly sent him flying from his chair.
He didn’t even bother with voice commands, stabbing at buttons with his fingers. Leif’s gut tightened when he saw David’s face in the display.
“We’ve got stuff really cookin’ tonight,” David said abruptly. “Winters decided to bring Net Force into the Hardweare thing, and guess who was spotted making up to the Forward Group? Nicky da Weasel!”
David’s surprise news made it easier for Leif to hide his relief that his plan had worked. The captain obviously hadn’t mentioned who had put the idea of digging deeper into Hardweare into his head.
But David wasn’t finished with the evening’s surprises. “My dad called with some weird news, too. I almost wonder if it’s connected, somehow. Remember that C.A. spy we came across in Hollywood? He was in Washington for some reason. I guess we’ll never know why. Anyway, he took a twelve-story tumble out of his hotel room window. The manager called the cops, and the case was turned over to the homicide squad. Dad’s looking into it as a suspicious death—probably murder.”
When the Net Force agents took Cetnik into custody after the Great Race thing blew up, they got both.”
David looked a little sick. “Since Dad knew that I knew the guy, he showed me a photo of the deceased. It was Cetnik, even though he didn’t look too good.”
David stared at Leif. “What’s going on with you?”
Leif s eyes were shut as he sank back in his seat. “He was working this alone.” The words gusted out like a sigh. “She’s safe.”
“Who’s safe?” David wanted to know. “Who’s alone?”
“Ludmila Plavusa and Slobodan Cetnik, respectively,” Leif replied. “I’ll tell you everything.”
He explained about being accosted by Cetnik in New York. Then he went on to describe the agent’s seemingly unbeatable extortion scheme. Leif didn’t actually use the words heartless or fiendish, but David got the point.
“What a scum-sucking dog,” he said briefly.
“Yeah. But he had his teeth in my leg, and it was obvious he wasn’t going to let go.”
“You should have come to me,” David complained. “Or better yet, gone to Captain Winters.”
“What could either of you have done?” Leif demanded. “Cetnik would just have gotten his claws into you. Or, if Winters stepped in, Cetnik might have been neutralized—but we couldn’t be sure about Ludmila.”
“Unless Cetnik was dead,” David agreed. They both stared at each other in total silence.
“Hey, I know I didn’t do it,” Leif insisted. “And it couldn’t have been Net Force. That’s just not the way they operate. If agents had gotten on to Cetnik, they might have arrested him—that’s what I was afraid would happen. But this isn’t the Carpathian Alliance. Inconvenient people don’t simply drop dead on command.”
“Unless they get in the way of the Forward Group,” David suddenly said.
Again, the two boys’ eyes met. But they didn’t say a word. A shudder went through Leif’s body, as if a blast of cold air had invaded his usually comfortable room.
Finally Leif sighed. “Do you want to call Winters?” he asked. “Or should I?”
“Maybe you should arrange a joint connection,” David suggested, “so we can both talk to him at once.”
Captain Winters was still at his office. His hands turned to fists on top of his desk as he listened to what David and Leif had to tell him.
“Well, isn’t this nice,” the captain said sarcastically. David could see the effort he put into unclenching his fingers and laying his hands flat on his blotter. “I guess I should thank you for the early warning, David, although I’d probably have gotten a report sooner or later.”
David nodded. “Dad said the feds would definitely be moving in on a case involving the death of a foreign agent.”
Winters turned to Leif. “As for you, Anderson, I don’t quite know what you thought you were doing. Have you been reading old Spyboy comics and decided to be a superhero? Knowing your background, I can’t believe you let yourself be put in that position—”
“I didn’t let myself be put anywhere,” Leif protested. “Cetnik confronted me with an impossible set of choices. If I tried to do anything, someone would be hurt.”
“You allowed him to put the squeeze on you, to control your options—and your thinking. From the sound of it, you weren’t even thinking, just reacting emotionally. That let Cetnik take control.”
“I did the best I could when I talked to you.” Leif’s voice sounded helpless. “If Cetnik saw Net Force agents swarming around Hardweare—and David—he’d have to give it up. As long as he couldn’t blame it on me, nobody would get hurt.”
“But somebody did get hurt,” Winters pointed out. “Cetnik was murdered.”
“It could have been an accident,” Leif tried to argue, but his voice sounded weak.
“Or Cetnik could have suddenly become convinced he could fly,” the captain said coldly. “Spies rarely die natural deaths .. . especially when they’re operating undercover in an enemy country. That’s what the U.S. of A. is to the Carpathian Alliance.”
Leif went pale. “You
can’t be saying—”
“No, this wasn’t a sanction, hit, liquidation, or whatever catchy phrase the spy novelists are using nowadays.”
“Deletion,” David blurted out unthinkingly. He quickly shut up, almost shriveling under the glare Winters directed at him.
“Mr. Cetnik was not deleted—at least, not by agents of the U.S. government,” Captain Winters assured them.
And he ought to know, David thought.
“But we’re obviously not the only players in this game,” the captain went on. “Before you told us about our late foreign visitor, we had no idea of any C.A. involvement in this situation. There may be other national governments with an interest—not to mention terrorist groups or companies.”
The captain’s face went completely stony. “What worries me is the timing of this killing. Somebody—some person or persons unknown—eliminated a competitor for a potential bonanza of information leaks presently associated with Hard-weare and its wearable computers.”
He paused for a second, then said, “If I sound like a lawyer, that’s because the existence of this supposed treasure trove of data hasn’t been proved—it’s just rumor, extrapolated from a few leaks which have appeared on the Net.”
Like David, however, Leif had seen past the legalese. His face, already pasty after Winters’s scathing words, went gray. “You think Cetnik got killed because of me—because I maneuvered Net Force into taking a harder look around Hard-weare.” He swallowed loudly—more like a gulp, David thought. “Whoever killed Cetnik did it now, before investigators found him.” Leif looked even more sick. “And to do that, they had to know that Net Force would be looking. Which means either they tapped into my call, or your office … or they’ve got a mole somewhere in Net Force.”
Winters responded with the barest of nods. “Whatever the killers meant to do, they’ve just upped the odds drastically. We’ll be looking into the Hardweare matter as a possible national security breach instead of a corporate nuisance.” He sighed. “I wouldn’t want to say anyone’s death had a good side, but that is a benefit. Then, too, Cetnik’s removal gets you out of the fire.”
The captain stabbed a holographic finger at Leif. Then he turned worried eyes to David. “I can’t say you’re in too deep—at least, not yet. But I’m not easy in my mind about you working for Hardweare.”
“I’m not even out there,” David protested. “All I do is work to scrunch down their coding and leave the occasional E-mail.”
“Even so, Cetnik saw you as the magic key to open the information floodgates,” Winters pointed out.
David shook his head. “From the looks of it, they should be after Nicky da Weasel instead.” He hesitated for a moment. “How much can I tell the folks at Hardweare about all this?”
“You can tell them everything,” Winters replied. “Their lawyers know most of it, anyway. They’re currently stonewalling federal warrants. Net Force has already begun its investigation.”
Shortly afterward, David found himself in another three-way conversation. But this time his listeners were together in the same room—the luxurious parlor of the MacPherson mansion. Luddie sat on—or in—the self-adjusting couch. Sabotine had chosen a wooden stool that had been hand-carved into a work of art. Brother and sister stared out of the holo display at a diffident David Gray.
“When I took the job, I warned you that I’d tell Net Force if I came across anything that merited their attention. Well, I feel that should work the other way, if possible, and I’ve gotten Net Force approval for this. You know they’re investigating Hardweare in connection with this wholesale leak problem.”
Luddie nodded. “My lawyers have been busy, demanding that the government show cause. At the worst, the lawyers tell me, we might have to give a couple of depositions.”
“It will be worse than that,” David told him. “This has become a national security case. A foreign agent was found dead in what can only be called suspicious circumstances. He was trying to put the screws to a friend of mine, to force me to find the supposed Hardweare access to people’s secrets.”
“Suspicious circumstances,” Sabotine said slowly. “You mean this person was … murdered?”
“I never really believed it would go this far.” Luddie struggled off the sofa and began pacing back and forth. “In any kind of communication, there’s a varying ratio of garbage to information.” His face twisted. “Nowadays, the Hardweare name has so much garbage plastered to it, we’re drawing flies. Does Net Force know where this spy came from?”
“The Carpathian Alliance,” David said.
“Those idiots barely have computers!” Luddie burst out. “Of course they’d believe this—this crap that’s being spread about us!”
“The government is saying things that are just as crazy,” Sabotine spoke up. “They’re saying that Nick D’Aliso is working for the Forward Group.”
“I don’t know if they’d go that far without more investigation,” David said. “But I was told Nick was spotted going into the Forward offices.”
“That makes no sense!” Sabotine burst out.
Luddie nodded, his face grim. “Of all people, Nick should know that these rumors about getting stuff through our vests are all bull. Hey, I hired him initially to check security—and he wasn’t able to break into Hardweare! He’s the best, and he found the vests were uncrackable.”
He stalked back and forth, talking to himself as much as to David and Sabotine. “This whole thing is an attempt to force us to open up the system architecture on the vests so some Mexican manufacturer can make them cheaper, or some corporate colossus like Forward can switch around a couple of doohickeys and break my patent. Those scumballs specialize in that, you know.”
Luddie stopped and took up a defiant pose, the heavy muscles in his shoulders straining the seams of his jacket. “Well, it’s a free country—my competitors can give it a try. And Nick D’Aliso is especially at liberty to play it any way he wants. If he wants to suck up to Forward, he doesn’t need a job here.” He turned to his sister. “I’ll tell the guards he’s no longer welcome here. Sabotine, revoke his access codes—including any personal ones. Arrange for someone to pack up whatever nonbusiness stuff he has in his room—we’ll ship it wherever he wants.”
Sabotine stared at her brother as if she’d been slapped. “Luddie—” she began in a trembling voice.
Luddie MacPherson may have been in the same room with his sister, but they might as well have been on distant moun-taintops. “I didn’t say anything about how you two spent your time together,” Luddie said, though David could see Luddie hadn’t been happy about it.
“That was personal, but this is business. If Hardweare fails, everything we’ve got here”—his gesture took in the elegant salon with its one-of-a-kind artworks—“is gone. Until we get this straightened out, I can’t trust Nick D’Aliso—and I can’t trust having him around you.”
“You never liked Nick,” Sabotine raged. “I think you’re listening more to the garbage than the information when it comes to him!” She stormed out of pickup range—probably to the other side of the mansion, David thought.
Luddie turned to David, a big, capable-looking guy with a helpless expression on his face that soon changed to disgust and embarrassment. “I don’t know why you’re so lucky, David,” he said. “But you somehow always manage to catch us at our best.” He glanced off after Sabotine. “Almost as good as a HoloNet soap, and no commercials.”
And all the bedroom scenes have taken place offstage, David thought, but he kept his mouth shut.
“There’s also more boring stuff, like real life,” Luddie went on. “I’ve been following your progress at compacting the code on our programming. The work you’ve done has been nice and tight. You should expect a new download, probably this evening.”
David was a little surprised. “There’s a bet I wouldn’t have won,” he said. “I figured after this conversation, I’d be finished at Hardweare.”
Luddie shook his
head. “For being honest? I wish all of our people were like you.”
He didn’t say any more, but David could hear Luddie’s thought as clearly as an echo. Especially Nick D’Aliso.
Later that evening David sat in his virtual workshop. He’d finished with the last of the coding still on hand from Hardweare, and went to check for downloads. Had the promised programs from Hardweare appeared yet?
David checked his virtual in-box and sighed—empty.
Then he squinted. No, there was something in there. He’d been expecting to see a big, clunky, makeshift program icon— who wasted time and energy crafting an icon for a work in progress?
Instead, this icon was tiny, a miracle of miniaturization, a work of art. For some reason David was reminded of Sabotine MacPherson.
Maybe this is what Hardweare’s finished products look like, he thought. This is Sabotine’s taste exactly — except a bit on the morbid side.
The icon was a tiny gravestone, made up of even tinier human bones. Probably some sort of horror sim for bored executives.
David picked up the icon, intending to run it through his disassembler, then go to work on the naked code.
Instead, the workshop around him shifted, becoming a bleak, garbage-strewn alleyway.
David scowled. Great, he thought. The stupid program’s gone and activated itself. But he had to admit he was curious.
“Run simulation,” he called out. At first nothing happened—then he began running down the dark alley.
David tried to take over his veeyar character. But nothing he did moved the action from an apparently preprogrammed track. He had absolutely no control over the simulation. How do you work this thing? He shouted the usual computer commands. None of them had any effect. He just kept running, his lungs starting to burn, panic struggling to take over his brain.
He recognized the sensation—it was just like the sudden onslaught of terror he’d felt when he’d dropped from the clouds in Luddie MacPherson’s introductory sim.
Nick D’Aliso said he’d been working to introduce intense emotional triggers into Hardweare’s entertainment programs, David suddenly recalled. Was this another example of Nick’s work?
