Private Lives

7

Leif sat at the breakfast table, frowning. He’d volunteered to find out more about I-on Investigations. But his Net search had turned up very little — just a scattering of news articles about a new CEO and some expanded business.

Right, Leif thought. They went into show business.

His father poured himself a cup of coffee. “You look deep in thought today,” Magnus Anderson said.

“And I’ve got very little to show for it,” Leif replied. Then an idea hit him. “Dad, when you went out with Deborah Rockwell, did she ever talk about business?”

“Back to that, are we?” Magnus shrugged. “She tended to keep whatever she was working on under wraps. Why?”

“What do you think she’d say about a newsperson who hired private investigators to dig up information for a story she was working on and then didn’t bother to double-check it before broadcasting news based on it?”

“I imagine Deborah would have to doubt the competence of that newsperson,” Magnus said slowly. “The networks have staff people — researchers, fact checkers, and so forth — to develop the background for the stories the reporters dig up. But, in the end, it’s up to the journalist to get it right — he or she makes the judgment calls in creating stories. Hiring outside assistance — that doesn’t strike me as good judgment for a reporter. Not double-checking such information strikes me as career suicide.”

“Well, Tori Rush is in the process of committing it, then,” Leif said. “She’s apparently working with an outfit called I-on Investigations to trash Captain Winters. I thought it might be a good idea to check those people out—”

“You, and a couple thousand of your Net Force Explorer friends, no doubt,” his father said with a laugh.

Leif nodded. “Maybe. The part that’s not funny is that my friends think I know what I’m doing. Sometimes I even do — but this time I’m in over my head, and it’s frightening. This might be important, Dad. Captain Winters’s career, maybe even his freedom, could depend on what we find out. But I don’t seem to be getting anywhere on the Net.”

“Perhaps that’s because you’re not a professional investigator,” Magnus said gently. “You have some sources that even network research types might envy. But this job seems to require a serious attack. Luckily, I think we can handle it in-house.”

Leif knew that his father didn’t mean the answer was inside their home. His dad was referring to the company he had founded — Anderson Investment, Multinational. It was a large and very profitable concern, a brokerage house that was an investor’s paradise, with investigative resources Leif could never hope to access on his own. Just as he’d planned, his dad had taken the ball and run with it.

Now, Leif thought, it’s just a matter of time until Captain Winters is cleared.

Two days later Leif visited his father’s offices, hoping that his dad had come through, and that all Captain Winters’s troubles would be over. Leif was conducted to a conference room, where Magnus Anderson met him at the door. There was an attractive woman seated at the table in the center of the room.

“Anna Westering, this is my son Leif,” Magnus said in introduction. The woman who rose from her seat at the big shiny walnut table looked rather petite beside Magnus Anderson’s Viking-chieftain physique. But Leif noticed that she had a firm grip when she shook hands with him — a very firm grip, and some odd calluses.

“Karate, Ms. Westering, or one of the more esoteric martial arts?” he asked.

“How observant you are,” she replied with a slight smile. “Karate it is.”

Leif shrugged. “Net Force Explorers are expected to learn a bit in the way of self-defense. I’ve noticed that many of the Marine instructors they bring in have similar ridges of callus on their hands.”

Anna Westering cocked her head to the side, then glanced at Magnus. “There’s more to your son than meets the eye. There’s potential there.”

See, Dad? I’ve always told you that, Leif thought but wisely didn’t say.

“Ms. Westering is the company’s new head of security,” Magnus explained.

Leif glanced at her in surprise. Old Thor Hedvig, the last head of security, recently retired, had been about as big as Leif’s father. He’d started out as a driver-bodyguard and had risen through the ranks of the company as Anderson Investments had grown.

“I asked Anna to take a look into I-on Investigations,” Magnus Anderson went on.

“Which I did,” Anna said. “Of course, we don’t use outside agencies for our investigations here at Anderson Investments. We prefer to utilize long-term hires — people who’ll know our company and our needs.” Anna Westering shrugged. “And who will be far less inclined to talk about anything we don’t want talked about. Of course, we do occasionally utilize a few contract operatives to handle out-of-the-ordinary technology, or sometimes urgent circumstances.”

Hackers and corporate spies, you mean, Leif thought. Aloud, he asked, “Do you see a problem with agencies like I-on?”

“From my point of view, yes,” Westering replied. “I don’t object to what they do, of course. I’m in much the same business myself. My problem with outfits like I-on is with security. You can’t win an agency’s unswerving loyalty, the way you can a corporate employee’s. And you can’t check an agency out exhaustively, the way you can with a single contract operative. There are too many people tied into an organization like I-on for a real background check to be effective.”

“So what is it that they do better than an investigative reporter?”

Anna Westering gave him a half-smile. “Investigative reporters are trained to investigate and to report what they discover in an interesting manner to the public. A good security person, or investigator, investigates and reports, but only to the person paying for the investigation. And the buyer doesn’t care about ratings, only about results. Journalistic researchers can investigate the public record, and, if they’re good hackers, they might know how to penetrate some more private datafiles. Private detectives — at least the better kind — are aware of more avenues to get information than a typical reporter or researcher. Of course, many of those routes are neither public nor legal, but investigators usually have connections in place to help them get what they need to get the job done.”

She spread her hands. “I’ll give you an example from a typical HoloNet mystery. How often do you see the detective hero enter the local Net node, claim to be a police officer, and find the name connected with a particular phone number? I assure you, Leif, that particular trick won’t work in real life. But there are published databases — national and international reverse directories — that list phone numbers in a searchable form with their associated information. You can use those databases to do a search based on phone number and come up with the name and address of the person who has that phone number. The typical person in the street wouldn’t know how to get that information without a bit of research. A trained investigator, whether a reporter or private eye, would not only know, he’d have such a database handy. And that’s legal investigation. I leave the picture of the illegal avenues of investigation available to various detectives to your imagination — your father assures me it’s a very active imagination. I wouldn’t want to corrupt such a promising mind.”

“So tricks like that are how Tori Rush was able to assemble so much information on the captain in such a short time,” Leif said. “It’s just basic info-crunching on an exalted scale.”

Westering nodded. “Yes. She’d probably apply the same kind of methods used by the low-end private investigative outfits that advertise their services all over the Net for searching out lost friends and loved ones. Given a few sketchy details — full name, date of birth, Social Security number — they can grind through all the public datafiles, state and federal, to find a match. But there’s far more and far better data held in private by companies and individuals. Successful investigators know how to tap into that secret sea of information, whether the database holders want them to or not.”

Leif couldn’t help himself. “And then they spy into people’s private lives.”

Westering looked at him in silence for a moment. “You’re awfully quick to judge, even while you’re demanding information from that very same sea.” Her eyes challenged him. “Is it so different from what the agents of Net Force do? Or what you do yourself when you need to know something about someone? For the record, I did the same sort of work for Interpol before I went into the private market.”

“Perhaps you can tell us what you found this time,” Magnus Anderson interjected, trying to head off any argument.

Anna Westering nodded. “The basic information is pretty run-of-the-mill. I-on Investigations started up about seven years ago. It’s what’s known in the trade as a ‘cop shop,’ founded by several retiring police detectives.” She shrugged. “Happens often enough. Most states require that anyone applying for a private investigator’s license should have prior experience in the field. Police detectives are, of course, trained in basic investigative procedure…although they may not be up on the latest techniques.”

Anna’s lips twisted. “Ex-cops would also expect to get a lot of work because of their former employment. That doesn’t always happen. It didn’t for I-on. The company was frankly floundering until it was taken over by new management.”

“I knew they’d been taken over,” Leif said. “That much I found in the business datafiles.”

Magnus Anderson looked interested. “What sort of people take over a failing detective agency?”

“Foreign money, sir,” Anna said.

Leif noticed that the woman showed his father considerably more respect than he got. His dad had probably earned it the hard way — and it was certainly deserved.

“What kind?” Leif asked.

“I haven’t succeeded in pinning that down.” She frowned. It clearly bothered her that the shell game hadn’t yielded to her inquiries. “The new CEO is a Marcus Kovacs. The name is Hungarian, but his background—”

“Is lost in one of the Balkan wars, I’ll bet,” Magnus Anderson finished for her. “A lot of people have that sort of cloudy past. Some of those clouded pasts are even legitimate.”

Westering nodded again, this time more cautiously. “I-on has done considerably more business — and made more profit — since the new management came in. A lot of new blood has been hired — hackers. And they’ve gotten a certain…reputation.”

“What kind?” Leif and Magnus Anderson both asked.

Anna Westering shrugged unhappily. “My father had a phrase he used to use as a joke: ‘You lie, and I’ll swear to it.’ Some people say that I-on takes that saying seriously — and that they take it further than that. You lie, and they won’t just swear to it, they’ll even create the evidence to back up your story.”

“She said what?” Megan demanded after Leif made his report. They and the rest of the D.C. crew were floating again in Matt Hunter’s virtual workspace, sharing information — and attitude, Megan had to admit.

“This is just great,” she went on. “We’ve got newspeople who think they’re defending democracy while breaking their own rules, and detectives who succeed by lying and cheating.”

“‘Quis custodiet ipso custodes?’” David Gray quoted.

“If that’s something about custodians, I don’t want to hear it,” Andy Moore cracked.

Matt and Andy had recently saved their school from being blown up by a spy disguised as a custodian. Megan didn’t find the reference particularly funny, under the circumstances. She steered the conversation back to the subject at hand.

“It means ‘Who will guard the guardians?’” she said.

“More like ‘Who will watch those very same watchmen?’” Leif spoke up unexpectedly. “In the original source material, the Latin poet Juvenal was making a joke about keeping wives faithful.”

That got a stare from Megan and everybody else in the room.

Leif shrugged. “Just another symptom of an expensive but generally useless education,” he said.

“Let’s get back to the point,” Megan said. “Where does this new information get us?”

“It gets us a bunch of new questions,” Matt said.

“Like?” Megan challenged.

“Like,” Leif said, “if Tori Rush had I-on Investigations create a case against Captain Winters…why did she do it? Why him? What has she got against the captain?”

“If she had them do that?” Megan glared at Leif. “What’s that supposed to mean? Are you starting to think Captain Winters is guilty of all this crap?”

“I think that either the captain is suffering from the lousiest series of coincidences in all of history, or he’s being set up,” Leif said flatly. “Going by the ‘Motive, Opportunity, and Means’ stuff fed to Matt by Agent Dork, what have we got?”

“We have an organization with a rep for creating evidence.” Matt held up a finger. “That gives us means, I guess.”

“And there were days between the Alcista killing and Net Force I.A. searching the captain’s house,” Maj Green said. “That has to be a window of opportunity.”

“But we still have no motive,” Leif said. “The other guys who got put under the microscope had at least done something to catch Tori Rush’s interest. The ballplayer had extra wives. The corporate guy was juggling his company’s money. All Winters did was go on TV and get sand-bagged.”

“Maybe this Rush babe is a friend of Jay-Jay McGuffin’s,” Andy suggested.

“That almost sounds serious,” David said in mock amazement.

“I didn’t think to ask that,” Leif admitted. “Guess I’ll have to get back to people and check.”

“I’ll take another run at The Fifth Estate,” Megan said. “If my new friend Professor Wellman can’t think of a possible connection between Rush and McGuffin, he’s sure to have a lot of people he can check with.”

She thought for a second. “I’ll also hit him with I-on’s reputation. He should know about that if he’s doing a story about them being in bed with Tori Rush.” Megan shrugged. “Be interesting to see what he’s gotten on this Kovacs guy and the people who bought the company.” She grinned at Leif. “Maybe we’ll see if the media research types manage to beat out A.I.M.’s investigators. It might interest your dad, anyway.”

“You’re all forgetting something,” David Gray pointed out. “That so-called test blast Hangman Hank Steadman’s guys discovered in their Net Search.”

He looked seriously around at the other kids floating in space. “That happened after Tori Rush first plastered Captain Winters’s face around the Net — but before Alcista was blown up.”

“Coincidence,” Maj tried to bluster. But her voice sounded shaken.

“It’s marked with the same chemical tracers as the IA techs found in the captain’s workshop — and in the bomb that killed Alcista.” David’s voice was inexorable. “That’s one hell of a coincidence. In fact, the more I think about it, the more it scares me.”

Calm, cold David Gray never gets scared, Megan thought. At least he never talks about it. Now I’m scared.

But she could see why this sudden insight would upset him. It upset her.

Ever since she heard about the Alcista bombing, she’d figured it for an organized-crime hit which someone had twisted to attack Captain Winters.

But if the false evidence trail was being planted before the bombing, that meant whoever set out to frame James Winters also blew up Stefano Alcista.

It would take a really sick puppy to commit a murder just to create a news story.

“Net Force I.A. got that bombing report through a Net Search,” Matt offered. “What if someone tampered with the date — or even inserted the report after creating a phony crater and bomb?”

“What-if and maybe,” Leif grumbled. “This is Net Force we’re talking about here. They should be able to detect if anyone was screwing around with those records. We can’t just wish evidence away. Otherwise, we’re not going to have any solid facts to work with.”

We’re got one solid fact, Mr. Smart-ass Anderson, Megan told herself. We know that Captain Winters is innocent.

At least, she amended, I do.