Who Hunts the Hunter

by Nyx Smith

  “She needs a doc!” Whistle declares.

  “Don’t make me force the issue.”

  “You fragging bastard.” Obviously furious, Whistle presses back Shaver’s hair and softly whistles one note. A reddish light radiates from beneath her open hand, stroking across Shaver’s face. Shaver stirs, head lolling.

  O’Keefe kneels down, asks, “What did you tell Striper?”

  Shaver is several moments working up to an answer. She draws a deep breath, moans, and murmurs, “Your name ...”

  “What else?”

  “The cub ... It’s at Brogan’s ...”

  O’Keefe hesitates, then smiles.

  Impressive.

  38

  The subway runs him straight across the Bronx to the Pelham Bay Projects, a crowded cluster of concrete blocks each rising up forty stories. A mini mall leads directly from the subway station to the Projects’ entrance. Ivar cools his heels and stares into space while the crowd ahead of him moves slowly inside. Must be evening shift change. A couple of uniformed trolls from NitroSec, gripping SMGs and grinning, keep watchful eyes out for anyone with ideas about cutting ahead of the queue.

  When Ivar’s turn finally comes, he puts his palm to the printscanner at the entrance, then steps briskly ahead. Door Number Six gushes open half a step before him and gushes shut at his back. That puts him in a mantrap—door ahead, door behind, both closed. Blank walls to left and right. Mirrored ceiling above probably concealing a bank of security scanners, not to mention the things those scanners ignite if the wrong sort of personal goods are detected.

  “Identify,” says a honey-toned female voice.

  “Ivar Grubner.” He recites his ID code, then adds his personal password, “Hurry up.”

  The door ahead snaps open, and Ivar steps into a wonderland free of offensive weapons, theoretically, not to mention a lobby unmarked by laser burns or bullet holes: simulated marble flooring, pastel-colored walls, and a couple of simplas decorative plants. It ain’t much, but it’s better than most places one might find in the killzone known as the Bronx. A consortium of corps, including KFK International, owns the place.

  The elevator runs him up seven stories. Two doors down the pastel-shaded hallway, he steps into the chrome and mirror-plated haven of his living room. Novangeline’s sitting on the black neovuelite sofa in a silver Mercurial tee and shorts. She looks kind of anxious. Sitting next to her in a dark gray executive suit is Amy Berman.

  Ivar stops, staring, almost gaping.

  “It was very nice meeting you,” Novangeline says to Ms. Berman, and then she’s up and walking briskly to the bedroom, just flicking a glance at Ivar before disappearing behind the bedroom door, which, for once, closes without a sound.

  Ms. Berman looks back and forth.

  “Uh ... heh,” Ivar says."Want a beer?”

  “Thank you, no,” Ms. Berman replies."Novangeline made tea.”

  “Ah.” Ivar nods."Good.”

  “I apologize for intruding like this—”

  “No, no,” Ivar interrupts."No, it’s ... nothing like that. Not at all. I mean, what a pleasant surprise! What’s tox? Well ...”

  “Ivar, I need your help again.”

  “Hey, sure. Whatever. You name it.”

  Whatever it is, it must be serious. Berman’s got that kind of look on her smoothie face. She opens her executive briefcase and takes out a sheet of hardcopy, and says, “I need to check on some people. I can’t tell you why, but I wouldn’t ask something like this if it weren’t very important."

  "Sure.” Whatever."Check ’em how?”

  “Well, I need as detailed a credit history as I can get.” Ms. Berman seems really determined."In particular, I need to know if any of the people listed here have recently come into large sums of money. There may be illicit activity involved, so the money, if it’s there, may be in hidden accounts. That’s why I need an expert like you.”

  “Null sheen. Of course, it could be kinda risky.”

  “In what way?”

  “You know. Running the Matrix.”

  “I thought—” Abruptly, Berman stops, stares, then turns her head and looks away."No, you’re right. I didn’t think ...”

  “Hey, it’s no big deal.”

  “Yes, it is a big deal!” Berman insists, looking back at him. Abruptly, she’s on her feet."I was wrong to approach you about this. I don’t know—”

  “It’s not like I never ran the Matrix before.”

  “No,” Berman says adamantly."I will not allow it. This is my problem. There’s no reason why you should risk, risk anything. I’ll have to go to some other quarter—”

  Ivar hesitates a moment; then, with one quick hop he’s near enough to snatch the hardcopy from Berman’s hand.

  She sways back, wide-eyed with obvious surprise, then glares at him angrily, but by then of course he’s got the sheet."Give me that.”

  “You got a problem, I can help.”

  “Ivar—”

  “You gave me a job when no one else would, Ms. Berman. I don’t forget squat like that.”

  Frag, he made his first run when he was just a kid, just for the chuckle of penetrating system security. He used a Sony deck that’s ancient history these days, and he didn’t even snatch any data. When he got his first Fuchi deck ... well, then he snatched data. In fact, he went a little nutty. Busting code-red mainframes. Scamming the P’s, paydata, the kind of proprietary yak that corps and even the military get all kinds of stroked about. He made maybe a couple of million nuyen and was living high in the trons, only then Telecom Security came down on him like a high-yield nuclear weapon—with multiple warheads, of course—and he spent a few years digging graves at the Dannemora graybar hotel.

  But, hey, nobody has to hit him twice with a mallet. He learned his lesson. The corps always win. Why fight ’em if joining works out just as well? Once he got out of slam, he made about a thousand applications, only none of the corps were interested in ramjammers unless they came up through the corporate system. Too much of a risk. He got just one call and that was from Berman. She took a chance. Sure, he had to go through all the usual tests and interviews, pledge his allegiance to the corporate logo, but that was just a formality. Berman made the decision. She sat him down in her office one afternoon for almost two hours and just talked and listened. Like she really wanted to know this fraggin’ dwarf halfer, know more than if he was just “reformed.” It’s time he paid some more of his tab.

  “Ivar, I’m ordering you to give me that sheet.”

  “You’re just being considerate, Ms. Berman, and that’s wiz. I know what I’m doing. Probably better than you do. Have a seat.”

  “I don’t believe this,” she says, but then she sits again on the sofa. Definitely not the type to try making a grab for the hardcopy. In fact, she leans forward and cups her face in her hands. She seems a little upset."Ivar, please don’t take any risks.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  “Yes, but this is on my conscience,” she says quietly."I know why you’re doing this, and it’s not necessary. You don’t owe me or Hurley-Cooper anything.”

  Ivar doesn’t doubt for an instant that she sees it that way, but there’s another side to the chip that she’s not mentioning."Way I figure, Ms. Berman, if the names on this here list got you worried enough to come to me like this, on the sly, then it must be serious, and it must be a problem for ole HC, which means it’s my problem, too.”

  “No.” Berman shakes her head."You’re wrong."

  "Maybe. Maybe not.”

  It’s probably open to debate, but Ivar ain’t debating. What’s the point? He’s got the list and a brainwave that’s set in motion, and that’s all he needs.

  Ivar gets the semiplas toilet plunger from under the kitchen sink and uses that to suck a pair of tiles out of the kitchen floor. The hidden space below, now revealed, is where he hides the Cruncher and related hardware, such as his toolbox. He wouldn’t bother hiding things except the parole boar
d doesn’t like him keeping cyberdecks around, and now and then they send somebody around to check. Of course, nobody glued his datajack shut, or, for that matter, messed with the tech inside his head, such as his expanded memory module and advanced data manager, so the parole board couldn’t have been too serious about wanting him to “stay away from computers.” More like, do what you have to, chummer, but don’t do anything bad. Guy’s gotta make a living, don’t he? Well ... anyway.

  Comps is what he knows, that and not much else. Running the Matrix is probably not a good thing for him to do, but keeping Ms. Berman happy, repaying his debts, and doing what he can for good ole Hurley-Cooper, to which he pledged allegiance, seem like compensating factors.

  He carries his tech back to the living room, to the SoloFendi recliner next to the telecom. As he starts hooking and plugging things up and in, Berman says, “I hope this won’t encourage you to fall into old habits. You’ve earned a lot of respect. You’ve got a career now. A real future."

  "Sure, I know that. Don’t worry about it.”

  Hey, he’s reformed already. He knows to stay outta trouble. And anyway he spends most of his time at Hurley-Cooper HQ inventing new and faster ways for the mainframe progs to chew on data. Maybe when he’s got a few minutes to spare, he pulls out the Cruncher and blasts off into the trons just to see what’s going on. Gotta keep rubbing the ole iron or things get rusty, or develop kinks, or whatever ... But he’s a solid citizen now. No question. The old days are gone for good.

  “Any last-minute instructions?” he asks.

  “I still don’t want you to do this.”

  “Well ... I know that.”

  They’ve had that discussion already. Ivar slots his black wire lead into the jack behind his right temple, gets comfortable in his SoloFendi, and punches INIT.

  The Cruncher winds up.

  He’s suddenly in the gleaming rainbow cockpit of his virtual Boeing-Federated Death Eagle 2, the Iron Dog, streaming down the datalines, blasting through the Projects’ node, and going to afterburners, hurtling like lightning out across the glaring starlit night of the LTG. Acceleration keeps him nailed to his seat. The cyclone roar of his engines rises to a banshee scream. It’s, ahh ... heh. Quite a rush.

  Ivar thrusts his joystick forward and plunges down, down, down, into the infinite electron abyss between the soaring cubes and towering towers of computer clusters. A certain LTG address comes up quick. He jinks to his right.

  The white wall of a node flashes around him and suddenly he’s standing in the blazing blue neon virtual office of Nuyen Now! Mr. Service himself, chief bottlewasher of this very legit but rinky-dink loan operation, is sitting right there with his iconic feet up on his iconic desk. Mr. Service’s iconic self looks like an investment banker. Just another Matrix fantasy.

  “Yo, Conan,” Service says.

  “Need to borrow the wire,” Ivar says.

  “Be my guest. Fifty cred.”

  Ivar, now two meters tall and built like a Viking barbarian, dressed like one too, greatsword and all, pulls a coin from his belt pouch and tosses it to Mr. Service. The coin winks “¥50.” Service snatches it out of the air and slaps it down on the desk. The coin bongs like a bell slapping down.

  “Double or nothing.”

  “Ask me later.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Ivar turns and stalks like a real barbarian hunk to the door at the back of the office. The floor trembles beneath his massive stalking weight. At the center of the door, winking on and off, is the logo, TRW CredCorp. Beyond the door is the infinite black depth of a fiber optics dataline. Ivar draws his huge silver-gleaming ruby and dragonhead-adorned great-sword, and, with a shout, a war-cry—which is part of his style, not to mention this particular aspect of his master persona control program—he steps through the door.

  A direct link to TRW CredCorp.

  He’s blasting down the line in the cockpit of the Iron Dog, then something flashes, a node, and he’s standing in a brilliant gold reception room decorated with gleaming red plants and a purplish waterfall. A gray and white-framed window opens right in front of his face and the giant disembodied eyeball of a Watcher 7K stares at him, blinks once, and disappears.

  Hey, he’s a legitimate user coming in on a direct optical feed. Of course the eye disappears.

  He stalks between a pair of glaring chrome knight-in-armor guards and pounds on an orange vault door. The door snaps aside. He stalks into a bare neon-yellow room. An androgynous figure in a pink and white kimono bows, “CUSTOMER SERVICE” winking above its head. The figure says, “How may I serve you, sir?”

  Ivar pulls an amulet from his pouch and hands it over. Inscribed on the amulet, in binary code of course, are the names of Amy Berman’s list."Gimme everything you got."

  "A complete credit history of these subject-attribute names?”

  “And make it pronto.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  A few nanoseconds pass, more or less. Ivar smoothes back his flaming yellow mane, brushes at his massive bulging biceps, then also at the barbarian hides he has for clothes. The customer service icon mostly just stands there, swirling hexadecimals racing across its face, then it holds out the amulet and says, “Search complete. Thank you for referencing TRW CredCorp.”

  Back to the Iron Dog.

  While he’s blazing back down the datalines, going nowhere in particular at a hellacious velocity, he offs his heads-up combat display and brings up the data from the TRW CredCorp scan. That shows him what he takes to be complete credit histories on the names from Amy Berman’s list: names, SINs, addresses, salaries, loans, ratings, everything. All that really stands out, as far as Ivar can see, is that everyone on the list has their credit accounts with the First Corporate Trust of New York. But that’s no surprise. F.C.T. of N.Y. is one of those cooperative ventures. KFK International is a principal shareholder. Probably every employee of every KFK subsidiary in the New York-New Jersey megaplex has their cred accounts at that particular institution.

  Good corporate etiquette, you might say.

  All except this one slag, who’s got accounts elsewhere. Benjamin Alan Hill. Might as well follow that up.

  So what has he got in his online storage that might sleaze him inside the local branch of the UCAS Bank?

  Something good, of course.

  39

  Amy sits and waits for almost an hour. Ivar sits in his recliner like a corpse, cyberdeck across his lap. Once, his fingers come alive and tap rapidly at the deck’s touch-sensitive keys, then nothing. Motionless. Amy hears a thump and a bang from beyond the bedroom door, but the door stays closed and Ivar’s lady friend stays out of sight.

  Abruptly, Ivar’s eyes are open and he’s pulling the jack out of his head. Amy exhales deeply with relief."You’re all right.”

  “Sure,” Ivar says."Just had to crash a bank or two."

  "Please ..Amy lifts a hand—she’d rather not know the details. It’s bad enough that Ivar’s violated his parole out of some misguided sense of loyalty. She’d never have forgiven herself if something had gone wrong."Can you download what you ... ?”

  Ivar’s already taking a datachip from a slot in his deck and bringing it to her."Think I got what you need. Only unusual stuff involves this one guy Hill, so I tracked down everything I could without getting crazy.”

  Amy frowns."What kind of stuff?”

  “Sort of like what you said. He’s got a lot of cred and he doesn’t keep it at the First Corporate Trust.” Ivar hesitates. The sober look on his face shows that he is well aware of the implications of what he just said."It’s, uhh ... Well, it’s all on the chip. What I got. I can go a whole freak of a lot further if you want ...”

  Shaking her head, Amy takes the chip."No, absolutely not. You’ve done enough, Ivar. Too much. You mustn’t ever do this again.”

  “Course not.”

  Amy forces a smile, and says, “It would be best if you keep everything about this strictly confidential.”

&nb
sp; “Hey, null sheen. It never happened.”

  Five minutes later, Amy’s sitting in her Toyo Arbiter GX. Orange floodlights fill the parking field with a hazy glow. Rain patters against the windshield. Amy slots the chip from Ivar into her palmtop and quickly scans through the data.

  There’s a fairly extensive datafile on Dr. Benjamin Hill and it shows that he not only has an account hidden away at the UCAS Bank, but that he has nearly three million nuyen in that account, and the account record shows large infusions of cash going back several years. The deposits do not coincide exactly with the dates and nuyen amounts of payments made by Hurley-Cooper on behalf of the Metascience Group, but of course that doesn’t really mean a thing.

  Surely, someone embezzling money would be careful to muddy their tracks, to confuse dates and amounts; and he or she would certainly have expenses, such as to pay accomplices, or to maintain phony shell corporations, or just to transfer money, and so on.

  Groaning, Amy switches off her palmtop and stares into her lap. She tells herself that the money in Dr. Hill’s account could have come from anywhere, but she has trouble believing that. Every employee of a KFK subsidiary is told very clearly from day one where they’re expected to do their banking, and there’s no reason to disregard corporate expectations. Employees of Hurley-Cooper get very favorable rates at First Corporate Trust, and not just on interest-bearing accounts, but on loans and all other services. And there’s an A.T.M. in the lobby of every HC facility that banks direct to F.C.T. There’s no reason in the world to use any another financial institution, unless you’ve got something to hide.

  Ivar didn’t track down the source of the funds in Dr. Hill’s account. Amy’s glad he didn’t. For one thing, the risk would be too great. For another, she’d never be able to look Dr. Hill in the face if she had obtained incontrovertible proof that the man was stealing.

  She’s gone too far. She sees that now. She let feelings of desperation get to her. She’s approached this like she works for the despots of Fuchi or the iron-fisted masters of Mitsuhama, and that’s wrong. If her beliefs mean anything, she should go to Dr. Hill openly, point out the irregularities she’s discovered, and listen to whatever explanations he might offer. That’s what someone who really cares about people would do, and that’s what she’s going to do, first thing tomorrow morning.