Forests of the Night

CHAPTER 15

Stephie sat on the recliner as Nohar searched the boxes in the attic for something to wear. Nohar's mind had drifted back to MLI, Binder, Hassan, and the Zip-heads. Somehow they were connected and he still had no easy way of fitting the pieces together.

"The answer has to be in those financial records."

Stephie sighed. "I know. That's the third time you said that."

Nohar pulled out a relic of his gang days, from before he'd left school—and Manny. It was an old denim Hellcats jacket. It still fit and it was big enough to hide the Vind when he wore it. "Are you sure that you never saw or heard anything that would help me?''

She shook her head. "I don't care what they wrote down on my job description. They never let anyone near those records. It was a tight little group, the five of them. Even though Derry trusted me, no one got into the inner circle who wasn't there back in '40."

"Trusted you?"

"Yes, not to screw up the campaign machine. He knew me from my radical phase at Case. It's a tight little community, even for the ones who are still in the closet. I managed to convince myself that I was helping him out. Found out it was Binder's idea much later. By then I was used to the life-style."

"Why didn't Binder just let Johnson go?" The potential for a media explosion was even worse with Johnson in the campaign, than if he left under a cloud.

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of Binder, but he also never gave any indication of ever being willing to resign. Believe me, I tried to talk to him about it. He was always evasive about why he stayed."

"What about Young and Thomson?"

*' Young was never willing to talk about anything but business. I think he resented me. Thomson, I don't know, he's slick and never says an ill word about Binder or the campaign—but he acts like he knows some joke the rest of the world doesn't."

Still batting zero for hard information.

Nohar pulled out a T-shirt. It was the only black one, but it had a yellow smile-face on it. Stephie repressed a giggle.

Nohar frowned as he pulled out the most intact set of jeans. They'd still been using the human model for morey clothes when they'd made it. The seams on the legs were split so his legs could move, and there was a slit in the ass for his tail. He pulled them on. "And nobody ever discussed Midwest Lapidary, or morey gangs?"

"You must be kidding." Stephie had reached over and pulled the Hellcats jacket off of the bed. The denim covered her legs like a blanket, and she ran her fingers over the embroidery. "How come you get to ask all the questions?"

Nohar pulled the shirt over his head. It ended up twenty centimeters short of his waist. "What do you want to know?"

Stephie looked up. Her fingers still traveled over the demonic feline form that graced the back of the jacket. "Well, you called Bobby your first and only pink—"

Nohar felt like he'd gotten blindsided by a baseball bat. "No. That's not—I mean . . ."

She laughed. "I'm sorry. I didn't want to sound accusatory." Stephie stood up, leaving the jacket on the chair. "I was just wondering who Bobby was."

Nohar was still recovering. "Bobby, Bobby Bit-

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trich. I met him when I was trying to make it through high school. We were both sort of misfits— Though as we got older, he fit in more and more, and I fit in less and less ... "

He lapsed into silence.

Stephie walked up and put her hand on his arm. "Are you okay? Did I hit another bad memory?"

He shook his head. "No, not at all."

He grabbed the jacket and hobbled down the stairs. He was wondering why he hadn't thought of it sooner. Stephie was following. "Where are you going?"

"I have to call Bobby."

"Are you sure it's the time to look up old friends—"

Nohar didn't answer until he got down to the comm. "I think he might be able to help me."

He switched off the news. "Move it, Angel—"

Angel said something unkind in Spanish as she moved off the couch. "Damnit, Kit, you could ask."

She stalked off to the kitchen, probably to take out her aggression on some poor vegetable. Nohar ignored her as he called the number for Robert Dittrich. It buzzed once, then he got a test pattern as the home comm forwarded the call.

"Budget Surplus, can I help—" Bobby displayed a rapidly growing smile of recognition.

Nohar was happy to see a friendly face. "Christ, what's going on with you? The Fed is looking for you—"

"I need your help as a prime hacker." "You know I never engage in illegal activity—"

Bobby winked. "Can you help?" "Come down, we'll talk."

Stephie's car was out of the question. Everyone—the cops, the Zips, MLI—everyone would know it on sight. Nohar called a cab.

Angel didn't object when Nohar left. She seemed a FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

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little resentful. Nohar supposed he'd been a little too curt with her, but he had other things on his mind.

The cab that showed up in front of Manny's house was an anachronism. It was a prewar Nissan Tory. The thing was almost as big as the Antaeus, but the huge hood covered batteries and a power plant that took up nearly half the car's volume. Nohar got into the back of the cab before he realized it had a driver. A black human woman, her hair dyed red and strung into dreadlocks, was staring at Nohar with a wide-eyed expression. Nohar decided it had been too much to ask them to send a remote into this neighborhood.

"Shee-it." She was articulate, too.

"Don't tell me, you've never given a ride to a morey before."

"Dispatch didn't tell me no—"

Nohar slipped his bank card into the meter and tapped out his ID on the keypad. In addition, he typed in one hell of a tip. He could afford it. "Well, I didn't tell them. Is there a problem?"

She saw the numbers come up on her display. She spent a few seconds composing herself. "Sorry Mr. Rajas than, didn't 'spect someone like you 'sail. Where you going?"

Money was a great equalizer.

Budget Surplus was a dirty little marble-fronted warehouse that hugged a nook between—really under—the Main Avenue bridge, and one of the more obnoxious mirror-fronted towers of the West Side office complex. It took more than a little creativity to find the grubby dead-end street that was the only access to the building.

The cab pulled up and Nohar typed in a hundred, on top of the tip. ' 'Will waiting for me be a problem?''

The cabbie shook her head. "No problem at all. Take your time."

Nohar stepped out of the yellow Tory and felt like he'd been abandoned at the bottom of a well. One side was the warehouse, one side the black-dirt underside

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of the bridge, the other two sides flat sheets of concrete forming the foundation of the office building— whose doors would open on more wholesome scenery. When Nohar entered the building, it no longer seemed small. The interior was one huge room. Windows made from dozens of little square panels let in shafts of bright sunlight. Despite the sun, the corners of the building were covered in darkness. Standing in the light, Nohar found the shadows impenetrable. Endless ranks of metal shelving dominated the space, tall enough

to barely give clearance to the slowly rotating fans hanging from the corrugated ceiling.

Nohar heard the slight whine of an electric motor. Then Bobby's wheelchair made a sudden appearance through a gap in the shelving that was invisible from Nohar's vantage point. The shelf Bobby rounded held nothing but oscilloscopes ranging in age from the obsolete to the archaic. Bobby wheeled forward and thrust his hand in Nohar's direction. Nohar clasped it. He released Nohar's hand and maneuvered the chair around. "Let's talk in my office."

Nohar followed the chair as it wove its way through the acres of shelving. He smelled the omnipresent odor of old electronics—a combination of static dust, ozone, transformers, and old insulation. Shelves held dead picture tubes, keyboards, voice telephones, spools of cable—optical and otherwise—and rows and rows of nothing but old circuit boards. Mainframes were stacked against the walls like old footlockers filled with chips and wire.

Bobby's office was defined by four shelves that met at right angles with a single gap in one corner that would have been difficult to detect if Nohar wasn't looking for it. The shelves of electronics tended to camouflage themselves, any open space looking over more of the same. The illusion was of endless parallel rows, when the reality—demonstrated by their erratic maneuvering—was anything but. His suspicions of the eccentric layout were con-FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

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firmed by a rank of four monitors behind Bobby's desk. The monitors were connected to security cameras looking down on the floor. The arrangement of shelves resembled nothing so much as a hedge maze.

Bobby whirred behind his desk—a rusty cabinet trailing optical cable, it had the Sony logo on it—and motioned to a chair that was another chunk of techno-flotsam. Nohar sat down. It was hard to get comfortable, buttons in the armrests dug into his elbows.

"We shouldn't be bothered here. Now you can tell me what's going on."

Nohar told Bobby what was going on.

An hour later, Bobby leaned back in his wheelchair and shook his head. "I thought the shit had hit the fan with Nugoya. I guess there's shit, and then there's shit."

Nohar had almost forgotten about his run-in with Nugoya.

"You picked the right politico to involve in this." Bobby whirred around the desk toward one of the shelves. The shelf he picked was dominated by a large bell jar-looking thing; it sat on a sleek black box. Nohar recognized the box as an industrial card-reader. "Even though all politicians are slime."

"Why the right one?"

Bobby parked himself next to the bell jar, and drew a metal cart from another invisible gap in the shelving. Three different processor boxes rested on the cart. There was an ancient Sony that was held together with duct tape. On top of it was a more compact Tunja 2000, On a shelf, by itself, was a huge homemade box. Frozen rainbows of ribbon-cable snaked from box to box.

"Can't get more right than Binder—" Bobby snickered. "Hate Binder. Wish you were investigating his absence from the mortal coil."

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political view on anything before. Legislation had always been irrelevant to Bobby.

"Need a license to hate a politician? Give you just an example—last session in the House, he led a vote to scuttle NASA's deep-probe project."

Ah, the space program.

Bobby pulled a small blue device from a shelf. No-har got up and walked over. The device had AT&T markings on it, a pair of LCD displays, and a standard keypad. It could have been a voice phone, but there was no handset. Instead it had five or six different jacks for optical cable. "Those probes have been

sitting on the moon—would you plug this in?"

Bobby handed him the end of a coil of optical cable and indicated a small plate on the floor. The plate had old East-Ohio Gas Company markings. Nohar reached down and lifted it. Under the plate was a ragged hole in the concrete. Half a meter down was a section of PVC pipe running under the concrete floor of the warehouse. A hacksaw had cut a diamond-shaped hole in the pipe, and a female jack had been planted amidst the snaking optical cable. Nohar knelt down and made the connection.

Something Bobby was working on, probably the blue AT&T box, made a satisfied beep.

"Thanks, I have trouble getting down there myself. Where was I? Oh, yeah, Binder's shortsightedness. His group of budget nimrods in the House have been stalling the launch for nine-ten years. Finally decided maintenance was too expensive, so they're going to dismantle the project. Forget the fact they would have saved money in the long run by launching on schedule, and we would be getting pictures back from Alpha Centauri by now, and the Sirius probe would have started transmitting already—"

Nohar shrugged. "My concerns lie closer to home." "Yeah. My friend, the pragmatic tiger." Bobby snapped home a few more connections. "Worst bit is, he started as a liberal."

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"You're kidding."

"Nope, kept running for the state legislature as a civil libertarian, government-for-the-people type guy. Lost. Kept losing until he shifted to the far right and got elected. Never looked back. Children—can we say 'hypocrite'? "Enough of that—The Digital Avenger is now online."

Bobby flipped a switch and a new rank of monitors came to life with displays of scrolling text. Inside the bell jar, lasers were carving the air into a latticework of green, yellow, and red light. "Now what kind of system do we want to run our sticky little fingers through?"

First things first. "Any information on MLI you can dig up."

"As you wish—" Bobby pulled out a keyboard and rested it across the arms of his wheelchair.

He paused for a moment. "Another thing about Binder. With just a little tweak of government finances, we might have caught up to the technology that got wasted with the Japs—"

"I thought you were an anarchist."

"Don't throw my principles at me when I'm drooling over bio-interfaces nobody this side of the Pacific knows how to install. Besides, the engineering shortage is degrading the quality of my stock."

There was hypnotic movement in the bell jar as the holographic green web distorted and a blue trail started to snake through the mass. Bobby noted his interest. "Like the display? You ever hear a hacker refer to the net? That's it. My image of it, anyway. The green lines are optical data tracks, the yellow's a satellite uplink or an RF channel, red's a proprietary channel—government or commercial—the few white ones are what I and the software can't figure out—whoops, close there, someone's watching that one." The blue line took a right fci angle away from a sudden pixel glowing red. "Nodes 770

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are computers, junction and switch boxes, satellites, office buildings, etcetera. Jackpot!"

Bobby smiled. "Anyone ever tell you credit records are the easiest things in the world to access?"

The blue line had stopped at a node, which was now glowing blue and pulsing lightly. Text was scrolling across three screens as Bobby's smile began leaving his face. "You gave me the right name?"

"Midwest Lapidary Imports."

Bobby sighed. "Never as easy as it looks." He typed madly for a minute or so, then he typed a command that faded the blue line back to the neutral green. Bobby shook his head. "MLI doesn't exist."

"What are you talking about?"

"No credit records—"

"Check my credit. Someone is making deposits to my account."

More mad typing and colored lights. Bobby ended with a whistle. "You want to loan me some money?"

"Did you find anything?"

"Just daily cash deposits to your account, untrace-able. Thirty kilobucks, plus . . ."

Nohar was speechless. He hadn't had the time, lately, to check the balance on his account. After a while, he said, "Check somewhere else,"

"If you say so. I have an in at the County Auditor's mainframe." The blue trail snaked out again, and headed straight for a small nexus of red pixels and lines in a corner of the bell jar. Just before the blue line hit the nexus, it turned red itself. "Isn't that neat? But I am telling you, you can't have a company without a credit record. Economically impossible. Even the most phony setup in the world is going to be in debt to someone, you can't—"

Bobby paused as the new red line pulsed and text scrolled across one of the screens. "Okay, I'm wrong, you can."

"What?"

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"I just downloaded the tax info on MLI." The scrolling continued. "Shit."

Bobby remained silent and the scrolling eventually stopped. The new red line faded. Bobby hit the keyboard again and numbers scrolled across another screen, and stopped. Bobby was looking at the display with his jaw open. Nohar looked at the screen. No more than columns of numbers to him. "What're you looking at?"

"The third line. The net assets they reported to the County."

"Eighty thousand and change, what's so great about—"

"Those figures are in millions."

Time for Nohar's jaw to drop. Eight—no, eighty— billion dollars in assets. Bobby started scrolling through the information. "And forty thousand mega-bucks in sales and revenue— With no credit record? Someone is playing games here."

These guys were having billion-dollar turnovers from gemstones? Maybe he was in the wrong line of work. This was one set of rich franks.

"And Christ is alive and selling swampland in Florida—these guys have never been audited."

"So they play by the rules."

Bobby shook his head. "You dense furball. That has nothing to do with it. The Fed assigns auditors for anything approaching this size. And those auditors aren't paid to sit on their hands. They're paid to dig up dirt—"

"So why hasn't MLI been audited?"

"Beats me." Bobby studied the screen. "It ain't normal. For some reason, MLI hasn't raised a single flag in the IRS computers. They don't pay too little, or too much—and that is damn hard to do. They even have this little subsidiary, NuFood, to dump money into so they can smooth out their losses. Know what I think?"

"What?"

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"It's all a fake and they have a contact in the Fed telling them what their tax returns should look like."

Nohar shrugged. "So what are they spending their money on?"

"I can give you a list of real estate from the property taxes." This was accompanied by a few keyboard clicks and scrolling text on one screen.

"There's records of withholding, I can give you a list of employees and

approximate salaries." More clicks, another scrolling list, "That and a few odd bits of equipment they depreciate. Not much else, sorry."

Nohar was looking at the names scrolling across one of the screens. He was hoping he might glimpse a name he'd know. No luck on that score.

"The main thing I want to know is how they were paying Binder—"

Bobby shrugged. "Public database at the Board of Elections, no sweat. But there's a solid limit on the amount of individual and corporate contributions, even for a Senate race. I can itemize the public record, but all the illegal shit ain't gonna be there."

The blue trail began snaking its way through the net.

Bobby had just raised another question in Nohar's mind. The cops had at least one look at the finance records that told them that the three million was in Johnson's possession. However, Smith said all the money was from MLI—and that wasn't legal. Nothing in the police report he'd read had mentioned it. From the campaign end of things, the money had to have looked legitimate—to the cops at least.

More names were scrolling past Nohar on the last screen. Again, Nohar watched it for names he knew— and, suddenly, he got lucky. Nohar stared in widening fascination at the scroll. It was almost too fast to read at all. He was only picking up about every tenth name, but that was enough.

Except for the label on it, he was looking at a copy of MLI's employee list. Bobby stopped clicking and in the periphery of NOFORESTS OF THE NIGHT

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har's vision, the blue line faded. The room was silent for a moment. The only noises were the slow creaking of the ceiling fans, the buzz from the holographic bell jar, and the high-frequency whine of the monitors.

"What do you see?"

Nohar was smiling. "Can you cross-reference the MLI employee list with the Binder contributors?"

"Sure thing, compare and hold the intersections." Tap, tap, tap.

"Why don't you have a voice interface on this thing?"

"Silly waste of memory. My terminal smokes about twenty megahertz faster than anything else because I don't bother with the voice. Besides, some of the shit

I pull with this thing is best conducted in silence-Bingo!"

A third list was scrolling by on the last monitor. "Hell, I missed that. Good thing you were paying attention. The intersection set is the entire MLI payroll. Every single one of MLI's employees made a contribution close to the limit. ..."

Bobby had stopped talking. Nohar was beginning to smell anger off his friend. "What is it?"

"The contributions from Midwest Lapidary cover sixty-five percent of Binder's treasury. These guys own Binder. I knew he was corrupt, but this—"

Now it made sense. Binder's finance records held the key—but it now made even less sense for MLI to be behind the killing. Their investment in Binder was incredible. MLI was probably going to lose all that hard-bought influence. Then, Nohar remembered what Smith had said— MLI's connection with Binder was to be severed. That was right before the attempt on Stephie. He still didn't believe in coincidence, and sever was a sinister verb. Nohar wondered if the other people in the Binder campaign were all right.

"You've got a rat's nest of innuendo here."

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of each was shown on their screens. On the left was the list from the public contribution records. In the center was the withholding list from the County Auditor. To the right was the list of the names that intersected the two other lists. Something bothered him—

"How many people are on the withholding list?"

"Eight thousand, one hundred, and ninety-two."

The employee list had finished with an endless list of T's—Tracy, Trapman, Trevor, Troy, Trumbull, Trust, Tsoravitch . . .

"This alphabetical?"

"Yes, you seeing something?"

"There's something about this list of names. It seems unnatural somehow. I can't put my finger on it."

Bobby hit the keys again. "Perhaps if I ran some pattern-analysis software on it—"

A brief summary replaced the list on the screen. Bobby read a couple of times. "Blow my mind! There are—get this—exactly 512 names for sixteen letters of the alphabet. 512 starting with A, 512 starting with B, same thing for C, D, E, F, but no G's, 512 H's, 512 I's, no J's or K's. There's L, M, N, O, P, no Q's, R through T, then nothing till the end of the alphabet. Talk abut unnatural patterns—"

"It'sail fake."