The Barsoom Project

Chapter Twenty-Five

Down the corridor, down the long, dark hall framed with steel bars and steel doors, punctuated with steel windows peering out onto a steel courtyard, Tony McWhirter heard screams.

Likely it was a wirehead in need of his juice. It probably wasn’t a beating. It probably wasn’t a rape.

Not tonight. Not again.

For the ten millionth time, Tony cursed his stupidity, cursed the day that an olive-skinned woman tempted him with an unusual proposition.

One bad, stupid decision could twist a life completely out of true.

It had started out as a lark… as a hack, a theft of information, a bit of industrial espionage committed in a deeper reality… like Dream Park’s Games.

And Tony McWhirter, would-be soldier of fortune, was sent to Chino Men’s Prison to pay his debt to society.

The words and symbols on the computer screen blurred out. He stopped, rested his head against the keyboard, tried to find a little breathing space.

Two more years. God in heaven. Two more years of this place if he didn’t make parole.

At first he had been able to con himself into looking at it as another great adventure, filled with sinister secrets and a certain noble romanticism.

Then Acacia stopped writing.

Because of Alex Griffin!

Tony rubbed his wrists. They were numb, often felt cold. The doctors said that it was in his mind, that there had been no nerve damage-no permanent nerve damage caused by the jagged chunk of glass and the frantic midnight attempt to take his own life. The cold was just an externalization of the emotional void within him.

Hang on! Two more years. Maybe less, if you can get this, he reminded himself. Hell, you’re Tony McWhirter, boy genius, soldier of fortune, hacker supreme. You can get through any defense system in the world. Alex Griffin knows that. That’s why he comes to you with the tough problems. That’s why he’s done things to make Chino tolerable.

Tony forced himself to concentrate. These moments were so sweet. Normally he had access to a computer only three hours a day, and even then he was denied access to outside lines. He could program, and run programs, but they weren’t going to give him a chance to tie into the Bank of New Caledonia and transfer a zillion or so into his legal defense fund.

Right now, his only goal was to penetrate the defensive shields of a man or corporate entity named Kareem Fekesh.

The routing was standard. Dream Park had an executive line, which automatically allowed it to talk to the computers of other companies on a more intimate basis. It was like knowing the address of your intended victim, and having enough grease to get past the guards at the front gate. You still had to have the chutzpah to get through the guard at the front door, con your way up to the bedroom, find the combination safe, and crack it.

But he was in the front gate!

Dream Park’s computer called one of Fekesh’s subsidiaries. There were over two hundred. In spite of his general misery, McWhirter had to whistle. This man was loaded.

Oil, gold, entertainment, and transportation were the very least of it.

Entertainment…

A tiny light went on in the back of his mind. Tony McWhirter had a private obsession, and part of his mind traced back over it even as he was probing the defenses of an autoteller system that served a merchant bank. He was tinkering, teasing the system, trying to understand its protocols and methods.

And while he did, he thought back.

Over the years, every time Griffin opened Dream Park’s communications systems to him, Tony had taken a little of his time, not enough so that anyone could notice, to investigate the structure of Dream Park and Cowles Industries. He knew just about everything that there was to know about Alex Griffin.

Tony even knew how many times Acacia had visited him at Cowles Modular Community. He knew that they had gone skiing together twice in Aspen. He didn’t want to know any more than that; he forced himself to be satisfied knowing that they had last communicated by phone, eighteen months ago.

This was only self-flagellation. Other probes were more practical.

Seven years ago. A dark-skinned woman named “Madeleine” offered him twenty thousand dollars for a special job.

During trial proceedings, Dream Park’s artists had asked for a complete description of Madeleine, to be made into a computer-built Identifax portrait. Tony had given them everything he could remember. They had searched; he had checked; they had found no trace of the mystery woman.

Later he had fished the composite out of Dream Park’s memory banks. Every time he penetrated the security system of a company having anything at all to do with chemicals or entertainment, he entered their personnel files and looked for Madeleine. No luck. Over seven hundred major companies and subsidiary lines had given him nothing at all.

Still, he looked.

The automatic program had wormed its way through the exterior defensive shields. More involved ones would be coming up. Tony bore down for an hour, testing “doors,” looking for a way into Fekesh’s system.

He found it in their accounting department. He couldn’t transfer funds, not at this level of sophistication, but he could look into files which had been set aside for a tax audit. There he found a coded key which got him up to the next tier.

He ran around the edge of the tier, and then found a bridge to enter the core system. He was in. Just looking, but in.

And while he was in…

He began to co-process the personnel files, looking for Madeleine.

Oh, yes, Fekesh was into everything, and everything was into Fekesh. There were no direct financial ties to what Griffin was looking for, but beyond a shadow of a doubt, Fekesh had invested heavily in Cowles Industries eight years before…

Tony wondered about something and took another look, this time at the current investment portfolio.

Interesting. There were tens of millions of dollars invested in entertainment, and none of it was headed for Cowles! He instigated a side search program, looking for corporate shells… and something snagged in his peripheral vision, a little red flag in the lower left corner of the screen.

For a moment he didn’t realize what it meant. He hadn’t seen it in this context in over seven hundred attempts. Now, cautiously, he opened the flag and studied what came through.

The name “Madeleine” wasn’t mentioned. The face which matched Dream Park’s Identifax belonged to a woman named Collia Aziz. She had accompanied Kareem Fekesh to a company picnic, and was described as “attractive.”

The man who had written that line could never have been close enough to touch her, or smell her perfume, or watch her moving lips and changing posture and the signals they sent, across a room or the width of an oil mattress… Tony clamped down hard, shutting out the memories. That way lay madness.

Collia or Madeleine or Eleanor Roosevelt she could call herself, but Tony McWhirter would never forget. She’d cost him Acacia, she’d cost him seven years of life and counting, and it was her.

And wasn’t it interesting that the woman who had destroyed his life had connections to a company Griffin was interested in right now.

The other processing job finished itself. Routed through a half-dozen corporate shells and off-shore accounts, over this past year Fekesh had put together an investment company which had bought 128,000 “sell” orders of Cowles Industries.

Now, why would Fekesh be expecting the price to drop?

Tony sat back, feeling muscles relax throughout his body. His success had the taste of new threats. Fekesh was planning something. He’d tried to destroy Dream Park once; maybe twice. This time, would he succeed?

Why was Tony McWhirter feeling protective of Dream Park? Fekesh’s machinations had put him in Chino. Thwarting Fekesh would be appropriate.

And hey, he’d done it, he’d found his ticket out! Griffin was going to shit bricks.