The Empress File

CHAPTER 1

The computer alarm went off at four in the morning. When it started buzzing, I'd been asleep for half an hour. The alarm sounds like an off-the-hook telephone, and it took a minute to penetrate.

"Jap phone?" Chaminade Loan made a bump under the sheet across the bed. Her voice grated like old rust.

"Zwat?"

"Jap phone?"

"Yeah." The cat was curled at the foot of the bed and looked up as I rolled out and padded down the hall toward the front room. When I passed the study door, a message was running down the blue screen of the Amiga 3000, and I realized I was hearing the computer alarm, not the phone. A dozen small computers and dumb terminals are scattered around the study, three or four of them plugged in at any one time. Several people knew how to call and dump data to the Amiga's memory. Only one knew how to tap the alarm.

Bobby Duchamps.

Bobby wouldn't be calling to chat. The alarm sounded as soon as the data came in and repeated one minute out of every five until I turned it off. The message on the screen was straightforward. After the sign-on stuff, it said:

Call Now.

When Bobby said now, he meant now. As far as I know, he sits in front of a computer around the clock; Bobby doesn't have a workday and always answered personally when I called his private board.

I yawned, sat down naked at the machine, tapped a key to kill the alarm, switched the modem to send and punched in a number for East St. Louis. The number rang eight times, and I pressed the "a" key. It rang twice more and was answered with a twenty-four-hundred-baud carrier tone. A few seconds later a "?" flashed on the upper left corner of my screen. I typed Hivaoa, my code name on Bobby's system. It's taken from Gauguin's 1902 painting The Magician of Hivaoa, which hangs in the Musz d'Art Moderne in LiŠge. As a password Hivaoa may seem pretentious, but it fills the two main requirements of any computer code word: It's easy to remember, and you don't have to worry that somebody will stumble on it by accident. Bobby came back instantly:

Friend bad-needs face-to-face ASAP.

When/Where?

Today/Memphis.

Short notice.

Asking favor.

I'll check airlines.

Already booked 4:47 Northwest Airlines Minn-St. Paul-Memphis arrive 7:20.

Booking the plane was presumptuous, but Bobby's a computer freak. Computer freaks are like that. Besides, he was virtually a full-time resident of the Northwest reservation system, so it probably didn't cost him anything.

Bobby and I had met inside a GM design computer back in the old days and had enlarged our friendship on the early pirate boards, the good ones that the teenyboppers never saw. Over the years we'd dealt a lot of data and code to each other. I'd never met him face-to-face, but I'd talked to him on voice lines. A black kid, I thought, still young, early to mid-twenties. A southerner. He had a hint of a speech impediment, and something he said suggested a physical problem. Cerebral palsy, like that. A while back he helped me out of a jam involving the mob, several murders, and a computer attack that wrecked a defense contractor. I still flash on it from time to time, like visitations from an old acid trip. In return for his help, I sent a bundle of cash Bobby's way. So we were friends, but only on the wires. I went back to him:

Where go Memphis?

He meets plane.

OK.

After Bobby signed off, I went back to the bedroom, reset the alarm for eleven o'clock, and crawled into bed. Chaminade smelled of red wine and garlic sauce, a little sweat and a tingle of French scent. She's a large woman, with jet black hair and eyes that are almost powder blue; both her genes and her temper are black Irish. She does electronic engineering, specializing in miniaturization. She was one of the first to crack the new satellite-TV scrambling system and makes a tidy income on pirate receivers.

She was lying on her side, facing away from me. I put my back against hers; the cat turned a couple of circles at my feet. Chaminade said, "Wha?" one time before we all went back to sleep.

I live in a paid-off condominium apartment in St. Paul 's Lowertown, a few hundred feet up the bank from the Mississippi River. The building is a modern conversion of a redbrick turn-of-the-century warehouse.

I have a compact kitchen, a dining area off the front room, a bedroom, a painting studio with north windows, and a study jammed with small computers and a couple of thousand books. I keep a brand-new seventeen-foot Tuffy Esox fishing boat and an older Oldsmobile in a private parking garage up the block. There's another place, quite a bit like it, also paid off, in New Orleans.

When I say the apartments are paid off, I'm not bragging. I'm worried. I screwed up. The run-in with the mob generated quite a bit of cash. I'd never been rich before, and when the money came in, I managed to ignore the annoying buzzing sound in the background. The buzzing sound was my accountant, of course, and she was trying to remind me that I lived in Minnesota, that 40 percent of every dime I earned went for income taxes, either state or federal, plus a couple of more percentages for Social Security and etc. The etc., I suspect, is something I don't want to know about.

Looking back, I shouldn't have paid off the houses. And the trip to Paris and the C“te sometimes seems a tad excessive. I spent a lot of money on food, booze, and women and thoroughly field-tested a faulty baccarat system on the tables at Monte Carlo and what was left, I wasted.

When I got back from France, I was still fairly complacent about the state of my finances. Then the IRS and the Minnesota Department of Revenue showed up. Neither exactly had hat in hand. Tch. I didn't have holes in my socks, but I could use some cash. Soon. Very soon. Like before the fall quarterly estimate was due.

"So what's in Memphis?" Chaminade asked during breakfast, spreading marmalade on her English muffin.

" Beale Street," I suggested.

"Last time I was in Memphis " – she rolled her eyes up and thought about it – "must have been ten or eleven years ago."

"A mere child."

She ignored me. "I went over to Beale Street, you know, because of the blues. I'd been listening to a Memphis Slim tape; it had this great piece called 'He Flew the Coop.'. I don't know. Anyway, I went over to Beale, and the whole street was boarded up for urban renewal. I found a big goddamned statue of? Who? Guess."

"W. C. Handy?"

"Nope. Elvis. Right there at the top of Beale. They had a bust of Handy stuck away in a little park. Those Memphis folks got style." She popped the last bite of muffin into her mouth, licked her fingers, split another muffin in half, and popped it into the toaster.

"I don't know the place very well. Seems kind of trashy, in a likable way. The food's good," I said.

I pass through Memphis twice a year, eat a pile of ribs, and move on. From St. Paul to St. Louis is a brutal day's drive. From there you can make it to New Orleans in another day if you don't fool around in Memphis.

When the muffins popped up, Chaminade spread a gob of butter on them, not looking at me. "When you get back."

"Yeah?" But I knew what was coming. I'd been brooding about it for a couple of weeks.

"I'll be out of here." She said it in such a conversational way that we might have been talking about grocery shopping or new wallpaper.

"We were getting along," I said tentatively.

"We were. Wonderfully. Up to a point. Then it stopped. The problem is, I'm something between number four and six on your list of priorities. The way I see it, there's not much prospect of moving up."

"If you could wait until I get back."

"You could go to Memphis some other time."

"I've got to go today."

She shrugged. "See?"

"Obligations. A friend," I said defensively.

"I'm a friend, too," she said.

"You don't need help."

"See?"

Chaminade looked down the room at the cat, who was daintily picking his way across a radiator to a window. He saw us watching and posed, as cats do, one front foot frozen in midair. Sunlight rippled across his orange coat; there was a potted geranium sitting on a board at the end of the radiator, and the orange fur against the green leaves, all framed by the window, made a nice composition. Beyond the cat, through the window out on the river, a towboat pushed a rust red barge full of coal upstream toward the power plant. Pigeons wheeled overhead, little impressionist smudges against the faultless blue sky. It was quiet and beautiful.

"I'll miss the cat," she said sadly. "And the river."

I carry a small wooden box from Poland in my overnight bag. On the flight between St. Paul and Memphis, I got it out. Inside, wrapped in a square of rough silk, were seventy-eight cards, the Waite-Rider tarot deck. I did a couple of spreads. The Empress dominated both of them.

There's nothing supernatural about the tarot. Not the way I use it, as a gaming system. Formal game systems, the kind developed by the military, were intended to force planners out of habitual modes of thinking and to test new theories. The tarot is less structured than the formal systems, but it still forces you outside your preconceptions.

So I had the Empress dominating two separate spreads. In my interpretive system the Empress represents women, new enterprises, new creations, new movements. There's an overtone of politics and a suggestion of sex. That's roughly parallel to the "magic" interpretation, but I don't believe in that superstitious shit.

I sat back and thought about it as the river unwound two thousand feet below. The Empress.

Chaminade? Or someone I hadn't yet met?

Memphis from the air looks like any other city from the air, except greener. Just before we landed, the pilot said the ground temperature was ninety-three and the humidity was 87 percent. A Turkish bath.

When I came through the gate carrying an overnight bag and a portable computer, a tall, balding black guy, forty or so, was leaning on the railing that separated the passenger and waiting areas. With his round gold-rimmed glasses, thin face, and high cheekbones, he might have looked like Gandhi. He didn't. He brought to mind a mercenary who had been blinded by a white phosphorus grenade in Biafra, a long time ago and far, far away. This guy wasn't blind, though. He was looking the passengers over, one by one, and finally picked on me.

"You Kidd?" he asked. His voice was tough, abrupt.

"Yeah. Who are you?" He was already walking away, and I trailed behind with my bags.

"John," he said over his shoulder. "You got a suitcase? Besides that stuff?"

"No. John what?"

He thought it over, but not very hard. "Smith."

If he didn't want to talk, I wasn't going to worry about it. He led the way to a two-year-old Chevrolet, one of the bigger models in a nondescript green. We were halfway downtown, sitting at a red light, before Smith said another word.

"I'm not sure we need you." He was staring straight out over the steering wheel.

"I don't know if I want to join up," I said.

"Bobby says you're some kind of complicated computer crook." He still wouldn't face me. "You don't look like a computer crook. You look like a boxer."

"I'm a painter," I said. "I've been hit in the nose a couple of times. The docs never got it quite right."

Now he turned, vertical lines crinkling the space between his eyebrows. "A painter? That's not what Bobby said."

"I do computer work to make a living. That's the only way Bobby knows me."

"Huh." The light changed, and we were rolling again. "Can't make a living at painting?"

"Not yet. Maybe in five years."

"You paint ducks?"

"No. I don't paint ducks, barns, sailboats, lighthouses, pheasants, rusty farm machinery, sunsets, jumping fish, birch trees, or any kind of hunting dogs. And I don't put a little pink glow of the setting sun between groups of warm nineteenth-century farmhouses with hay sticking out of the lofts of the barns in back."

"Eakins painted hunters. Homer painted fish."

"Damn well, too."

"So who do you like? Artists?"

"Rembrandt. Ingres. Degas. Egon Schiele. Like that. Guys who could draw. People who like color. Gauguin. Living guys, maybe Jim Dine. Wolf Kahn. A couple of personal friends. Why?"

"I do some. art." He said it reluctantly, almost as a confession.

"Painting?"

"No, no." He slowed for a moment, letting a woman in an old canary yellow Ford Pinto squeeze in front of us. Traffic in Memphis is usually tangled, especially when you get close to the water. The heat didn't help, and the people who weren't sealed in air-conditioned cars were driving with an air of desperation. "I make things. Out of wood and glass and rocks and clay, from down along the river."

"Sell it?"

"Shit," he said in disgust.

"I'd like to see it."

He looked over at me for a moment. "Maybe."

We lapsed back into silence. Ten minutes later we were on a narrow two-lane highway lined with recapped tire joints and motels with signs that said TRUCKERS WELCOME. Memphis was disappearing in the rearview mirror.

"Where're we going?" I asked.

"Downstream," he said. We were running along the river in the gathering evening twilight. "It'll take a while. Town of Longstreet."

"What's in Longstreet?"

He didn't answer. Instead, he braked and turned into a roadside convenience store. When we'd stopped, he said, "I want to get Cokes and ice. I've got a cooler in the trunk."

"Get a six-pack of beer, too," I said. I took a five-dollar bill out of my pocket, passed it to him, and asked again, "What's in Longstreet?"

"A problem. Maybe some trouble. A lot of hate."

"A garden spot," I said.

"It's in the fuckin' Delta," he said, as if that explained everything. "There could be some money in it."

"That sounds interesting," I said.

"Yeah. Bobby thought it might."

While he was in the store, I considered the possibility that Bobby had dipped into my IRS files. I hadn't decided one way or the other when John returned. He stashed the cooler on the backseat, and we each popped a can of Coke. It was a small piece of camaraderie and seemed to loosen him up. He started answering questions.

"Where's Bobby?" I asked, as John barely beat a tractor-trailer onto the highway. "In Longstreet?"

"I don't know. I never met him," John said, sounding a little puzzled. "I thought you'd know."

"No. I've never met him face-to-face."

"Huh. I wonder if anybody's ever met him face-to-face."

"Somebody must have. He's got to eat. You're a computer jock?"

"No. I work for a legal services company, investigations. The company's got a computer system, with electronic mail. One day I got a piece of mail from Bobby. About a case I was working on – he'd read about it in the papers, developed some information from data bases. He gave me a number to call on the computer gizmo-"

"Modem."

"Yeah. I called, and we've been going back and forth ever since. Five years. I even got my own computer so I could talk to him. privately. He can get anything. Crime reports, credit records, secret research you'd never see. I don't know where he gets it, but it's always right."

"Data bases," I said. "He's a genius with them. But that still doesn't tell me about Longstreet."

There'd been a kid named Darrell Clark, John said, fourteen and computer smart. A friend of Bobby's. Knew his math. Knew his logic. At least, that's what Bobby said. Bobby sent him a book called A Primer for the C Language along with a pirated copy of a C compiler. Darrell came back three days later with a sophisticated Mac II program. Sent him Assembly Language for the Mac II. Talked to him in a month and got back an assembler program of breathtaking complexity.

"The kid was smarter than Bobby. That's what Bobby says."

"You keep saying was," I said. "What happened to him?"

"Longstreet cops killed him." John tipped his head for a mouthful of Coke. "They say Darrell came at one of them with a knife and the other one had to shoot. Everybody knows it's bullshit. What really happened was, they thought Darrell was a purse snatcher and they shot him by mistake. In the back. With a machine gun."

"Jesus. A mistake?"

"They had this new toy, this machine gun. The cop had to try it out. Blew the kid all over the railroad tracks."

"So what happened to the cop?"

"Nothing. That's why we're going down there," John said. He glanced over at me. "Darrell Clark won't get justice. His family won't. The town is sewn up tight by an old-time political machine. The cops are near the center of it, and they won't let their man get taken down."

We lapsed into silence again. He seemed to be waiting for a comment, but I had none to offer. The problem with dead people is simple enough. They're dead. There's no point in getting revenge for a dead man because the dead man won't know and can't care.

John was waiting, though, so I eventually gave him a question. "What do you want me to do?"

He was driving easily, one-handed. "We needed somebody who knows about politics, about information, and about security. Bobby says you've done a lot of computer work for politicians, that you're good at planning, and you know about security."

"So you want me to figure out how to get these cops? Why don't you find an NAACP lawyer, get the kid exhumed, and file a federal suit?"

"Because we don't want the cops," John said. "Fuck the cops."

"What do you want?"

"We want the machine. In fact, we want the town," he said, his voice gone low and tight. "That's what we want you to do, Kidd. We want you to take down the whole fuckin' town."