Private Lives

10

The virtmail message hung in holographic projection over Leif’s computer system. It was just a Net address, with a typed message: “Meet, eight-thirty.”

Leif spent a long moment looking at the glowing letters, but they didn’t tell him anything new — like who had sent the anonymous message. He could start hacking to try and track down where the message originated, but he doubted he’d get the job done before the time set for the meeting.

Could it have something to do with his attempts to clear Captain Winters? Maybe it would turn out to be a shadowy figure, like that guy who broke the Watergate scandal. What did he call himself? Deep Voice? No, Deep Throat.

But should he go? It might be the faceless enemy who was trying to engineer the captain’s doom….

Leif shook his head in disgust. He must be getting a little nuts on this case if he was thinking that way.

Of course he was going to keep the meeting! He had to find out who was behind the message — even if it was only a dumb joke.

A few steps took Leif to his computer-link couch. He sank back into the comfortable padding, although his muscles were a little tense. That always happened when he prepared to link into the Net these days. Leif had suffered trauma to the nerves around the circuitry implanted in his head. Whenever he synched in to the circuits in the chair, he could expect some measure of agony.

Leif flinched through the pain and mental static that now marked his transition to the Net, and opened his eyes to his virtual workspace. He sat on a New Danish Modern sofa in a wooden-walled room. Through a large window he could see a pale blue sky towering over green fields.

But he wasn’t interested in the virtual view. Leif got up and turned to the wall behind him, facing a complicated set of shelves. In another house it might have been called a curio cabinet. But the most curious thing about it was that it covered the whole wall, floor to ceiling, and was completely filled with icons.

Leif could have directed his implant circuitry to take him directly to the meeting site. But he thought it might be better to go armed with a few programs. He picked up a small figurine that looked like a lightning bolt — the program icon for communications protocols. He picked up another, which looked like a man shrouded in a hooded cloak. And after a second’s thought he reached for yet another figure which looked like a particularly ugly Chinese demon.

It didn’t come free when he touched it. Instead, an entire section of shelving swung out — a secret panel, revealing another set of shelves hidden in the wall. The icons in here represented programs which Leif didn’t want borrowed, lost…or, in some cases, found.

He hesitated again over the shelf he considered his arsenal and finally took a program icon that looked like a small knife.

Closing the outer shelf, he placed the knife program in his pocket and stood with the other two icons in each hand. Leif held out the lightning bolt and thought of the Net address he’d been given.

An instant later he was flying through a neon paradise — or nightmare, depending on your point of view. Virtual constructs in eye-searing colors competed to put on the best show in cyberspace. It was part funhouse, part kaleidoscope. And no matter how much some people might complain, it was an unavoidable part of life here and now.

He flew on, leaving the more heavily trafficked sections of the Net, zooming off to what he considered the “suburbs”—sites put up by lesser companies, or constructs which allowed even smaller businesses or individuals to maintain a Net presence. Several hacker acquaintances of Leif’s operated out of locations like that, moving through a succession of cheap, anonymous virtual offices.

Could one of them have shifted his base? Leif tried to remember his most recent credit charges. If a professional hacker had information, it wouldn’t come cheap. He’d hate to redline his credit accounts. It would bring unwelcome questions from his parents.

But Leif continued on, entering the bleak outskirts of the Net. Nobody bothered with eye candy out here. The constructs were all the same: low, plain, utilitarian warehouse-like structures, marching off to the virtual horizon like chips on a circuit board — or mausoleums in a cemetery. This was deep storage, the home of dead — or at least deeply archived — data.

Leif knew some people who hacked into this inactive memory, erasing hopefully worthless records to create virtual party rooms, or secret rendezvous sites…or places to mousetrap people who poked their noses into the wrong secrets.

This was like entering the virtual equivalent of a dark alley. And, while there were all sorts of safeguards in place to keep people from getting hurt in veeyar, Leif was living — and hurting — proof that there were a few people who could program around some of those blocks.

Leif looked at the program icon in his other hand and activated it. The hacker he’d bought it from had described it as the computer version of a shroud of invisibility. Lots of people surfed the Net in proxies, false semblances to hide their true identities. This program took that idea further, turning Leif into the little man who wasn’t there, blanking out all indications of his presence. He’d tried it out a couple of times at parties and such, and it seemed to work well enough.

This time it would be useful rather than amusing. He wanted to see who was waiting for him before they saw him. And he wanted to know what this mystery person had up his or her virtual sleeve.

There was the address. Leif spiraled down to settle on the roof — and pass through it.

The interior was apparently unused, a big, echoing space about the size of the virtual hall that housed Net Force Explorer meetings. But there was only one person in sight, a pretty girl with brown hair and hazel eyes. Megan O’Malley.

Leif cut his invisibility shield and dug out the knife icon. That was a little item guaranteed to mess up Net programming. Leif hoped it would deactivate any booby traps — and, if necessary, put a little hurt on anyone who might try to attack him.

“I sure hope you’re the one who called me here,” he told Megan. “Otherwise, we both might be in trouble.”

Megan nearly jumped out of her virtual skin at his sudden appearance.

“Did you have to do that?” she snapped. Then, after a deep breath, she said, “You can put away whatever you’ve got in your other hand. I sent the message.”

Leif relaxed slightly. “Nice place you’ve got here.”

“I…found it not too long ago,” Megan said. “Apparently it was set up for storage but never used.” She hesitated for a second. “I thought it would be good for a private talk.”

“About?”

“What do you think? The weather?” she flared again, then shook her head. “We’ve seen how the official world is completely willing to shaft Captain Winters. And the people who want to help him…well, they’re either too bent on revenge to do anything useful, or they’re like Matt Hunter.”

“A little too goody-goody for their own good sometimes?” Leif asked.

“He means well, but it’s like that petition thing he did. Really nice, but not terribly effective. He won’t go far enough.”

“And then he gets co-opted by the powers that be,” Leif went on. “If you can consider Agent Dork a power.”

Megan nodded grimly. “Matt’ll try very hard, but he’ll play strictly by the rules. And he’ll probably break his heart trying to disprove a very cleverly constructed frame job.”

“Yeah. Don’t get me wrong,” Leif said. “I admire Matt’s straight-arrow approach. It gets him pretty far a lot of the time.”

“But it’s not going to work in this case,” Megan insisted. “So it’s up to us.”

“To do what?”

She leaned close to Leif. “To do whatever has to be done. It’s not as though we never did it before. And we didn’t even have as good a reason then.”

“We also nearly got thrown out of the Net Force Explorers for that excess of…initiative,” Leif pointed out.

Megan gave him a look. “Yeah. And that’s really worried you, considering some of the stuff you’ve pulled since. You’re not about to let some idiot rules get in your way.” Her face twisted. “I keep wondering how you got all that information about HoloNews and Tori Rush. Probably charmed it out of some airhead intern. What did it take? A few dances? A couple of drinks? What else?”

Leif could feel the color rising on his face. Sometimes Megan could be downright uncanny. Or had she somehow been checking up on him? Either way, she was giving him a great case of the guilts. Megan had to know he was attracted to her. Was she using that in proposing this partnership?

He took a deep breath. “Okay, so sometimes well-meaning people can cross the line for something they believe in. Going by that reasoning, why couldn’t Winters break the rules and kill off Alcista?”

Megan looked as if he’d slapped her in the face. “If that’s that way you feel—” she began.

“That’s not the way I feel,” Leif spoke over her words. “I bend rules, skate on thin ice, push my luck — but I know there’s such a thing as right and wrong. And in my own way I try not to go over the line, to stay on the side of right. Well, James Winters is one of the rightest people I know.” He took a deep breath. “I absolutely know he’s innocent. If he wanted Alcista out of the way, he’d try to do it through the court system, not with Semtee. Of course I’ll help you. From the looks of things, we’ll have to push the envelope further than guys like Matt or David would be willing to go.”

Leif stabbed a finger at Megan. “But I hope we both learned a few useful things in our last little adventure. We’ve got to be straight with each other. This isn’t a job for the Lone Ranger here. The person behind this is a killer, and one willing to frame an innocent man in the process. We could be in real danger if we aren’t careful. We have to keep in touch. And we back each other up — information-wise, and physically, if necessary.”

Megan looked mutinous, but she nodded.

“Fine,” Leif said. “Now, you tell me what you’ve been holding back, and I’ll do the same.”

Matt paced back and forth across his room, swinging close to his computer system, then turning away again. He’d done his best to destroy the Internal Affairs case against Captain Winters, but it was like pounding his head against a brick wall. He could bring up objections and contradictions, but it was all vaporware compared to the solid evidence and supposed facts Steadman had assembled.

Yes, someone could have broken into the captain’s garage and planted traces of plastic explosive on his workbench. A very competent hacker might get into the Net Force computers and mess around with the phone logs. Someone even could have gotten hold of James Winters’s fingerprints, lifted them, and put them on the fragments of the practice bomb. Admit the means existed for one bit of black-bag work, and you could allow them all. But if you couldn’t come up with evidence to prove those activities took place, all you had was a theory. Hot air.

A smart lawyer might use that hot air to confuse the issue in court. Matt remembered a pretty infamous Hollywood murder where an old flatfilm star-former athlete had gotten out from under a murder charge that way. But his career — and his life — were ruined ever after.

Matt couldn’t wish that on Captain Winters.

There has to be some way to poke a hole in the I.A. case, he told himself. Where can we begin? Could they canvass the captain’s neighborhood, asking if there had been any suspicious characters hanging around during — what? The past month?

Maybe they should take aim at that so-called practice bomb. Hit anyone who lived near the blast site to find out if they’d heard the explosion and if they remembered anything useful….

Matt scowled. Weeks had gone by. Would people remember the details after that much time? And even if they did, which he doubted, would potential witnesses trust their hazy memories? Or would they simply accept what the media had already told them and repeat it?

Running his fingers through his hair until it stood up like some horrible modern sculpture, Matt continued pacing back and forth. Maybe they should cut right back to the beginning and find someone else with a motive, both for the murder and for the frame-up.

Tori Rush still led the pack for smearing Winters. She wanted a big, fat, juicy scandal. Attacking the honesty and integrity of Net Force would ensure her a lot of attention, maybe even a promotion. But still — to accuse an innocent man of killing someone just to get a network show…Matt had a hard time accepting that as a motive for murder.

Could there be a personal motive in the mix? Someone who hated James Winters for some reason? Hated him enough to kill to frame him? It was possible, of course. Finding out if somebody fit that mold would likely mean getting hold of Net Force records to find out who the captain had put away. Neither Steadman nor Agent Dorpff was likely to share that information.

And, as for hacking it out, well, it was illegal, though he knew some Net Force Explorers with the expertise to do it.

Matt jammed his hands into his pockets. It was way illegal. It would probably get someone caught and sent to jail. He couldn’t be responsible for that.

On the surface of things it seemed as if there was only one person who was angry enough at the captain to try framing him for murder. Unfortunately, Stefano Alcista didn’t seem the kind for subtle vengeance — and he really wasn’t the type to blow himself up.

Unless…maybe the mob boss faked his death! It would give Steve the Bull a chance to retire while sticking it to the man who’d put him in prison. After all, Alcista had been ready to blow Winters up. Why not ruin his life instead of taking it?

It didn’t even have to be a faked death, Matt thought. We should go after Alcista’s medical records. Suppose the guy was sick, didn’t have long to live…

He shook his head to clear it of such ridiculous thoughts. That level of brilliant deduction usually turned up at the end of really lame detective shows.

I might as well blame it on the saucer people, trying to discredit the captain because he’d seen a UFO.

What he needed — what everyone on Winters’s side needed — was some solid proof that Winters was never near Alcista’s car when Steadman and company said he was.

Matt went back over Captain Winters’s story. He’d gotten a call from an old informant, requesting a face-to-face. How to prove that? Tackle the informant? But the call didn’t necessarily have to come from the real informant. It could have been a computer-generated lure, designed to get Winters away from his office for the crucial time period.

In that case, if the files were right, the captain would have been standing on the corner of G Street and Wilson Avenue waiting for his snitch to arrive. Maybe he could find some way to prove that?

For a second. Matt had a disheartening image of himself standing on the corner, showing Winters’s picture to passersby and asking if they remembered seeing him on the corner two weeks ago.

Then inspiration struck. There might actually be a witness with perfect memory — and the ability to prove that the captain was where he said he was. An unshakable witness whose testimony would have true mechanical precision. Wilson and G was a downtown location, and a lot of the buildings around there were protected, at least in part, by security cameras. In the old days of videotape the recording medium might have been changed by now. But digital cameras deposited their images directly into computer memory. Maybe, just maybe, somewhere in a computer downtown, there was an archived image of an annoyed Captain Winters cooling his heels with a nice, convenient time and date stamp on it.

Of course, hacking into those computers would be considered somewhat illegal….

Matt turned to his computer and began snapping orders before he lost his nerve. Somehow, this didn’t seem quite as bad as trying to get into the secure files of Net Force.

Besides, Matt told himself, you can’t just hang back and do nothing because of a few stupid rules if you can do something that might really help….