by Tom Clancy
“That I don’t know,” Leif admitted. “Although, according to what I’ve read, the police technicians gave it a clean bill of health when they finally saw it.”
“After how many trips through the car wash?” Andy asked.
“The found no blood or tissue residues, and that sort of stuff is harder to wash away than you’d think,” Leif said. “The medical examiners estimated that Priscilla Hadding had fallen — or was pushed — from a moving car. Her leg got hung up on something — probably the car door — and she was dragged for a bit.”
Megan shuddered. “Ugly.”
David nodded. “But it absolutely would have left traces of evidence on the car.”
“So why is the question being asked?” Megan demanded. “Our new virtmail pal seems to think it’s important.”
“‘Deep Throat,’” Leif muttered.
She whirled on him. “What?”
“Just a name from another old scandal — but political instead of social this time. Somebody was troubled by the way an old President had gotten himself reelected and passed on some information to a couple of journalists. It worked. The president had to resign. And the reporter’s nickname for the leak—‘Deep Throat’—became a part of history.”
“Well, our version of ‘Deep Throat’ would have to be pretty old to be troubled about something that happened forty years ago,” Megan said.
“Maybe his conscience finally started getting to him,” Andy suggested with a grin.
Leif shook his head. “More likely, this is the hacker, rubbing our noses in what he’s found.”
“Weren’t we just saying that we thought Knox was the hacker?” David asked.
“Virtmail from beyond the grave,” Andy said in a hollow voice.
“I don’t know who this is, but he or she is certainly playing with us,” Matt growled. “If two of those questions could be answered just by looking in books about the case—”
“How about the last one?” Megan cut in. “What did happen to Walter G.’s car?”
“It was a classic Corvette—1965,” Leif said. “A lot of people were turning to older cars in the 1980s because government regulations were adding all sorts of antismog equipment to the new ones. It took awhile before the technology got good enough so that the power drain wasn’t noticeable.”
“What a terrible idea! Antismog devices!” Megan said sarcastically.
“It wasn’t much fun at the time, if you wanted to drive a fast car,” Matt said.
“Shouldn’t be too hard to track down what happened to the Walter G.-mobile,” Leif said. “All we need is the vehicle identification number—”
He shut up when he saw Matt shaking his head. “I may not know about scandals, but I do know about cars. The V.I.N. system didn’t come into play until 1981. We won’t be able to trace the car that way.”
“That means a quiet visit to the dead files of the D.M.V.,” Leif began, then cleared his throat. “Oops, I didn’t say that. And nobody needs to hear about it from anybody in this room.”
“No witnesses,” David agreed.
“So we’re batting.500 in the ‘Deep Throat’ trivia game,” Andy said. “We had answers to about half of the questions.”
“Your ear’s blinking again,” Megan announced.
Matt activated the program again. A similar message to the previous one appeared.
Since you picked up my first message so quickly, I suspect you’re still linked in. Here’s an additional clue.
As the kids watched, an image began to appear under the words. It was a reproduction of a faded flatfilm color photograph — a young man sitting behind the wheel of a low-slung antique car, grinning through the convertible’s windshield.
“Computer!” Matt shouted. “Can you find the original source of that message?”
The computer displayed the name of a big and anonymous commercial remailing firm.
“Never mind, then. From the details available in the displayed image, can you project the make of the car?”
The computer was silent for a moment, then responded, “Probability, eighty percent or better.”
“Then enlarge the image, restore the colors, and add the car.”
Beneath the driver’s smiling face, a quick procession of ghostly cars flickered into and out of view. Matt’s hobby was virtual automobiles, and his computer had a vast collection of makes and models in its databases.
Finally the ghost car began to solidify. The faded colors grew more vibrant. The grinning young man now sat in a bright red sports car.
“Closest match — model 1965 Corvette Stingray,” the computer announced.
“Callivant’s car?” Andy asked. “Is that Callivant in the driver’s seat?”
“No.” Megan leaned forward. “Put on forty years of weight and wrinkles, take the hair away…and you’ve got Clyde Finch.”
“Finch!” Leif took a harder look, then began to nod. “You’re right. You know, we really do need to find out more about him.”
“Maybe,” Matt said. “But that’s not the person who interests me right now.”
“Who, then?” David asked.
Matt reached out as if he were trying to catch the image projected from the computer console. Of course, his fingers simply slipped through the hologram. “I want to know who the frack sent us this picture. Right now I have about as much chance of getting hold of him as I have of grabbing this image with my bare hands.”
14
“Your problem,” Leif Anderson told Matt, “is that you were thinking of the wrong tools. You don’t capture images with your hands. You use a carefully targeted computer program.”
“And you have a computer program that will catch Deep Throat for us?” Matt asked skeptically.
“I have one that will make a good try at tracing Deep Throat, if he or she virtmails you again,” Leif replied. He didn’t mention that the program would also alert him that such a trace was in progress.
In the end everybody had a job. Leif would get the tracing program to Matt — and it was unspoken but expected that he’d also try a raid on the D.M.V. records. Andy would take a whack at Clyde Finch and his background. Matt would get in touch with Mrs. Knox to arrange a look at her late husband’s computer. And he, Megan, and David would do the looking on Saturday.
Leif cut his connection, returning to his own virtual workspace, an Icelandic stave house. Wind-driven snow howled past the windows, but Leif ignored the show outside. He went to a set of floor-to-ceiling shelves, shallow ones, broken up into small niches. Each open box held a program icon.
Reaching the center of the shelves, Leif searched for and found an icon that looked like the carving of a Chinese demon in a very bad mood. Rather than picking it up, Leif hooked a finger behind it and pulled. A whole section of shelving swung away, revealing a hidden set of niches set into the wall. This was Leif’s combination treasure chest and armory. It held the tracking program he was going to lend Matt, and several tools that might make his visit to the Delaware Department of Motor Vehicles much simpler — and untraceable.
Leif’s first choice was an icon shaped like a fishhook. That was the program that would catch on and leave a line to the mystery virtmailer. Then he got one that looked like a miniature hand at the end of a stick, another that looked like a tiny statue of Dracula peeking over his cape, and last, a tiny gold badge. That one was a last resort. It was supposed to contain police codes for demanding information. That would get Leif in real trouble if somebody found it in his possession.
However, he’d have to be caught first, and he’d do his best not to be. Closing the door on his secret hideout, he went to the living room couch. Composing a virtmail message for Matt, he gave an order, holding out the fishhook. A second later there were two in his hands. He put one down, sent off the message with another order, and the icon in his hand vanished.
That was the easy part of the job. Next Leif commanded his computer to contact the long-term record storage system of the Delaware st
ate government. “Maximum confusion,” he added, bracing himself.
The light show of the Net was hallucinatory enough when visitors traveled through it using their normal visualization techniques. Leif’s “Maximum confusion” order implemented a program designed to frustrate any attempts to backtrack his visit to the state government’s computers. To do that, the program bounced him at high speed from Net site to Net site to Net site, sending his connection randomly among millions of data and holographic transmissions. The experience was like participating in a really garish pinball game with a thousand paddles — as the ball.
Just when he thought he couldn’t take it anymore, Leif’s virtual journey ended — right outside yet another of those blank-sided boxes where old, computerized information went to die. Leif didn’t want to try going in yet — if he had, his connection would have been tagged and recorded. Acting more on instinct than on any plan, Leif moseyed away from the front of the construct, heading around to the left side.
It was blank, of course — you weren’t supposed to come in this way. Leif got out the hand-on-the-stick icon. It represented a universal handshaking program, which he now inserted into the glowing neon wall in front of him. It sank in, and then so did Leif. The plan was to blend in with any regular information traffic and make his way to the records he wanted.
Along the way Leif activated his vampire program, which was supposed to make him invisible and help him suck up any information he wanted.
Now came the difficult part. Would there be any protection for information relating to the Callivants? Leif could imagine guarding sealed court records. But forty-year-old car registrations? It seemed safe enough. Still, the body count on Matt’s sim was getting awfully high — it might pay to be careful. And he’d hate to get caught hacking — it would get him booted out of the Net Force Explorers, at the very least.
The Callivant compound apparently was home to a fleet of cars at any given time. Tracking back through the old records, he came across a 1965 Corvette registered to Walter G. Callivant in 1981. Nothing in 1980. Nothing in 1982. No, wait — there was the transfer of registration — to Clyde Finch. A month later the car was junked.
That might explain the picture of Finch in the car, Leif thought. But it raises another question. If you were the proud owner of such a hot set of wheels, happily photographed showing them off, why would you get rid of them?
Friday afternoon came, and Matt felt pretty pleased with himself. He was still alive, and none of the other sim participants had had any trouble. He’d aced a history quiz this morning, and during lunch he’d made the necessary plans with Megan and David for their visit tomorrow with Mrs. Knox.
The widow had sounded pretty harassed when he called. She’d answered on her wallet-phone, but what Matt had mostly gotten was an earful of wailing baby. On hearing that he was calling for Father Flannery, however, the woman had nearly broken down herself.
“It would be such a help,” Mrs. Knox said. “The bank won’t do anything over the phone, and with two kids, it’s hard to get down there. I don’t like computers, but we really need the stuff that was trapped in there.”
She eagerly agreed to having Matt and his friends over on Saturday afternoon. “You know where it is, right? I’ll take the kids out so there’ll be no distractions.”
Most people would be more worried about having near-strangers alone in the house than about the noise level distracting those near-strangers, Matt thought. I guess Mrs. K. figures we’re already digging through all the family secrets in the computer, so she can trust us with the good china.
If there was any in the house.
Matt pushed that downer of a thought away, determined to hold on to his good mood. Dismissal finally came, and he walked to the corner, ready to cross and wait for the autobus home.
A car pulled up at the intersection and honked at him. It was the bronze Dodge concept car. The driver wore oversized sunglasses. This time, however, Nikki Callivant had a khaki cotton hat crammed down on her head.
The horn sounded again, and Nikki beckoned to him. Sighing, Matt went round to the passenger side and climbed in.
“Where to this time?” he asked. “The park again?”
“I thought I’d give you a lift home,” Nikki Callivant said.
“How nice. Would it ruin the mood if I asked why?”
The girl slipped off her shades and gave him a look with those incredible blue eyes. “If you think it’s because I can’t keep my hands off you — you’d be very wrong.”
“A lot of guys think that around you?” Matt asked.
“Too many,” she said curtly. “Maybe it’s a rich-guy thing.”
“Yeah,” Matt said. “I hear their feelings get hurt very easily. In fact, it happens with rich kids in general. Look at the way Priscilla Hadding stormed off on your grandfather, or vice versa.”
“Have you found out any more about that?” It was lucky they’d stopped at a red light. Nikki was staring at his face instead of the road.
“If I found out anything, you’d be the last person I’d tell,” Matt finally said.
A horn sounded behind them, and Nikki had to turn her attention back to traffic. “Why?” she asked as they started moving again.
“Flattered as I am by your attention, you’re the enemy,” Matt told her. “Your family is threatening me and everyone else connected with a dopey little mystery sim with nasty legal stuff for showing any interest whatsoever in what happened in Haddington forty years ago.”
“More than forty years now,” Nikki corrected. She sighed. “Why can’t people let the past be?”
Matt bit his tongue to hold back the traditional P.I. answer—“There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”
“From what the senator — my great-grandfather — says, the media people were actually a bit more decent back then. They still knew some shame and weren’t quite as intrusive.”
“Oh? News feeding frenzies weren’t quite as frequent in the good old days?”
“It’s easy for you to laugh. You don’t spend half your life with your face in someone’s viewfinder. As long as I can remember, I’ve had people poking at me, training me how to behave in public. Don’t show too much emotion. Don’t get into fights. Before you do anything, think how it would look to eighty million people seeing it on a holo display. I can’t even go out on somebody’s yacht without being shadowed by some cameraman in a boat or copter, his telephoto lens at the ready, just hoping I’ll take off the top of my bathing suit.”
“Must be awful, trying to get a tan.”
“See? You just don’t understand!”
“I understand this much about celebrity,” Matt replied. “For fame, fortune, or public service — which is another way of saying power — people court public attention. They hire people to get them news coverage, they dream up publicity stunts. Then, when whatever they do is sure to be deemed newsworthy, they complain about the invasion of their privacy. If your name was Nikki McGillicuddy and you wanted to break into Hollywood, your manager would probably be telling you to drop the top of your bathing suit wherever you went.”
Dull red glowed on the tops of Nikki’s cheekbones. “I never asked—”
“No, previous generations have set up the publicity apparatus for you,” Matt cut in. “But you’re ready to use it — didn’t I hear you talking about being the first female Callivant in the family power-brokering business?”
“You make it sound — I’m a Callivant!”
“And what’s that?” Matt demanded. “A brand name in American politics? Somehow the republic got along for more than a hundred years before a Callivant appeared in Washington. Do you think civilization will collapse if one of your relatives isn’t running things?”
“You dare—”
“Normally, I wouldn’t dare to talk to a Callivant this way,” Matt cut in. “The fact that you’re letting me get away with it, throwing only a mild huff, makes me suspect you want something from me.”
&nbs
p; He stared at her finely chiseled profile while she kept her eyes on the road. “The problem is, I’m not all that sure what it is you want.”
“I wanted to see why your friends went out of their way to help you,” Nikki snapped. “What was there about you that inspired such loyalty?”
“And?”
“Frankly, I don’t see it.”
“Well, you know, we children of the lower classes get prickly when our betters take an interest in us,” Matt said pointedly.
Nikki’s voice got soft. “It’s just that you were in trouble, and your friends — no one would do that for me.”
“What are you talking about? You’ve got a house full of security guards to make sure trouble never comes close.”
“Mercenaries,” Nikki said bitterly. “They get fired if people think they’re getting too close.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way.” Matt thought of the stories Leif told about his father’s chauffeur/security guy. Thor Hedvig had been almost as much of a father figure for Leif as Magnus Anderson. “Wait a minute,” he said, “your great-grandfather is in charge of all those mercenaries.”
“Grandpa Clyde.” Nikki’s voice was still soft, but there was a subtle shift…a hardening. “His loyalty is to the family—” her breath caught—“not to me.”
However she’d learned that, it must have been a pretty severe lesson.
Nikki Callivant pulled over to the side of the road. “I wanted you to have this,” she said, passing him a card with her name and a Net address. “I thought that maybe I could help you — or at least talk to you.”
“Yeah,” Matt said, ripping out a notebook page and scribbling his communications code. “Maybe it’s a good idea if we kept in touch. At least this way, you won’t have to honk at me.”
That got a ghost of a smile from her. They sat in the parked car in silence for a while. For Matt, it was a weird feeling. He felt as if he’d really communicated with the rich girl at last, but they weren’t saying anything.
Finally he said, “It’s getting late, and you have a trip back to Haddington.”
