Freedom Incorporated (33 page)

Little of
interest turned up during the remainder of the meeting and Jackie
was almost relieved when the chairman announced the closure of the
meeting. Resembling schoolchildren released from class after an
intensely boring
day,
a wave of WEF invitees shuffled for the portals, Jackie among
them. She wasn’t in the mood for hobnobbing and she’d already
registered her presence
.
She’d
even participated in several votes and
that was what counted. Participation was a vital component to
acceptance in the
WEF
community
.

It was a
relief to get back to San Francisco, but a drain on her patience at
the same time.
Paul
Savage ambushed her as soon as she stepped from the
portal.

“
Ah, there you
are.” Paul smiled affably, turning on his cheap charm. “I wanted to
talk to you about, uh, the shareholder meeting.”

“
Good.” Jackie
was already looking forward to the end of the conversation, but the
meeting was in less than three hours and she had to set things
straight in Paul’s muddled mind before then. “Now’s perfect. My
office?”

“
Sure.” Paul
meandered unsteadily through the corridors, frustrating Jackie that
she had to slow her pace on his behalf. “I’ve been reviewing, uh,
the figures.” He paused to rub a hand across his face once he was
occupying the seat opposite Jackie’s desk. “I think the
shareholders will be pleased.”

Jackie nodded
for the benefit of their work relationship, inwardly itching for
the opportunity to replace him. She didn’t want the limelight for
herself,
but
she
had to select his replacement carefully and time the transition to
perfection
.
S
hareholders were finicky. If their
feelings were even slightly out of tune, they’d dump UniForce stock
with joyful abandon
. Jackie attributed
it
to their mental
in
stabi
lity
. That was why Paul Savage was so
important; he had a certain quality that shareholders loved. He was
a harmless-uncle figure with which they would trust their
hard-earned investment Credits. Jackie hated shareholders even more
than she hated Paul. Her ideal company had unlimited capital and no
shareholders. A dream. A pleasant dream that left her warm and
fuzzy inside, but reality always came crashing through like a pail
of cold water, rather rudely she thought. “And you’re comfortable
answering questions about our new direction?”

Paul’s bushy eyebrows
twitched, announcing that he had no such comfort, but he nodded
regardless. “Uh, yes. I think we’ll do well to reinforce the theme
of our return to, uh, grassroots.”

What a stupid
thing to say.
Jackie had to bite the inside
of her cheek – hard enough to draw blood – to stop from saying the
flood of venomous things that popped to mind.
Grassroots? Our grassroots are in criminal apprehension, not
private security.
She
lean
ed
back in her
inflate-a-gel cushioned chair while she thought of how to tell Paul
he was an idiot. “Maybe instead you should say we’re heading in a
brave new direction. Tell them we’re poised with the opportunity to
raise UniForce to the next synergetic level.” She would have
offered him a sour smile if it didn’t stretch her skin like a
mannequin. “I don’t think people are interested in grassroots
anymore. The past is over and people are
dusting
their palms and looking to the
future for salvation.” She leant forward, placed her elbows on her
desk, and stared into his puppy-dog eyes. “And that’s what we can
sell, an image of UniForce providing the salvation they’re so
desperate to find.”
Didn’t I set up a
marketing department to
come up
with
this crap?
It
sickened her to think they were employing an entire floor of
marketeers and this pathetic scrap sitting in front of her hadn’t
consulted them about the shareholder meeting. She couldn’t fathom
that the marketeers would recommend the grassroots approach. It was
extinct. It hadn’t been successful for over a decade. The marketing
department, not a true company branch since it lacked a
co-ordinator, was being woefully underutilised. She planned to fix
that at the next co-ordinators’ meeting.

It took Paul a while to
process the idea. “Uh, yes… I suppose that could work.” He flipped
open the folder on his lap and scratched away with a chewed pencil,
which Jackie thought was unbecoming of the company’s public
CEO.

Her temper-thermometer
was so hot it was melting. “I’m glad you like the idea,” she said
between clenched teeth, as though she had icicles in her veins.
Little wonder she didn’t trust herself in the same room as the
shareholders. If one of them asked a stupid question she was liable
to chew his or her head off, and shareholders always asked the
dumbest things.

She was
relieved when Paul went to prepare for the meeting, leaving her
alone in her big, empty office.
Maybe I
need a holiday?
She promised herself one as
soon as she found a solution for her staffing issue, and she jotted
in her calendar the date by which she intended to be in her little
cabin in the mountains.

*

Thursday, September 16,
2066

UniForce
Headquarters

14:48 San Francisco,
USA

James felt
fresher after his three-hour nap. It’d revitalised his mind, which
he now reapplied to the problem. He’d contacted his wife at 7:30 in
the morning, the time she normally woke up, and she’d told him he
sounded drunk. Tired, yes.
Drunk?
No.
James wished he were.
Drunk is more fun.
She
hadn’t been angry though, which was surprising. He wondered
why.

The critter in
his network was still there. He was sure of it. The constant blip
from his implants warned of the anomaly, but it was nothing his
systems could collar. It was unspeakably frustrating and his legs
ached from a night of sitting. He was too scared to think about his
back, every time he did it sent a spasm of dizzying pain past his
lumbar region and into his hips. So he focussed on his network
instead, like a dedicated employee. He hoped the overtime would
entitle him to something special.
Like a
week’s vacation, or a bonus.
Sure, it was
his job to protect the network from outside – and inside – attack.
But he was putting in at least 200 percent.

He checked Echelon’s
central nervous system, pleased to find it ticking over as usual.
It purred in his implant, like the rumble of an idling V8. He
remembered the deep-throated growl of powerful engines from his
sojourns to the motor show Detroit City put on every December to
bask in their glorious history. He’d pestered his wife for three
weeks before she’d agreed to go with him, not that she’d
appreciated the fine automobile specimens on display.

At least they
haven’t gone for Echelon.
It provided little
comfort, for all he knew they were scheming a way to shatter it
now. He’d find them if they tried, but by then it might be too late
to prevent the damage
. And Echelon was
UniForce’s
most precious system. He’d
naturally be able to repair whatever they did, but his pride would
take a beating – and his arse a chewing – if that
happened.

He felt
godlike, having direct control over the most devastatingly powerful
system in the world.
And it’s mine… all
mine.
Sure, he took his orders from above,
but they never knew whether he modified their search terms or
filtered Echelon’s catches. In a sense he had even more power than
the CEO, despite her WEF contacts. Jackie Donald’s pitiful
technological experience wasn’t a tenth of what she would need to
maintain Echelon
.
That was why she always ensured James was happy and under
control.
He snorted.
A rogue system administrator could cripple a network-dependant
company.

His euphoric
feeling of ultimate power brought his arduous years at university
into focus
.
Ever
since accepting the position of
information technology co-ordinator, life had actually made
sense.
This is why I studied so
hard.
And his years of meticulous study
enabled him to crack the shell of his current problem. He found
evidence to conclude the hacker had penetrated
the last
barrier.
Shit. He’s good.
He tracked the
entrance hole and sniffed through his roster of logs to see what
the intruder had been doing.

But this
doesn’t make sense.
James screwed his eyes
shut in confusion, concentrating harder on the information stream
in his head.
He spent days hacking in and
then stopped as soon as he got inside.
It
posed a number of troubling questions.
Has
he gone already? What was he here for? Did he copy
files?
He initiated a consistency scan of
UniForce’s database. It usually took five to ten minutes, depending
on network traffic and the current compaction of the
database
,
so he left
it running in the background. In the meantime, he began plugging
the hole in the network’s inner layer. It wasn’t difficult. He
simply shut down an application, restored a file from backup, and
then restarted the application. Of course, nothing was ever
that
easy on a UG7-rated
network, not even for the system administrator. There were another
six layers to mend, but he intended to save them for later. First
he wanted to ascertain how much damage the hacker had
inflicted.

Nothing.

The database
scan came back clean. No tampering. No copying. A few data
accesses, nothing more. It was therefore impossible to determine
where the hack had originated. The hacker could have even been
somewhere inside
the UniForce
network,
such as a
bounty hunter or
an
assassin using
a valid
data access
code.

The fatigue was getting
to him. He needed a decent sleep. Instead, he reached into his top
drawer and popped three Xantex-prescribed stimulant tabsules, which
he used for short bursts of intense activity. He always kept a
water bottle on his desk, one with a cyclist’s cap. He pulled on
the plastic nib with his teeth and squirted water into his mouth
before tossing the pills to the back of his tongue and swallowing
the lot.

Right
then,
he thought,
a
manual scan.
He searched the logs for
suspicious timestamps. Nothing.
I need
help,
he thought with a snort of disgust.
Asking his team for assistance would mean leaving his office for
the first time in 28 hours, other than for food or urination. His
team had the good sense not to disturb him when he’d been slogging
away at something important all night.

But then he
found something in the last log.
That’s
strange…
It was the in mail system, which
wasn’t business-critical and therefore explained why he’d taken so
long to examine it. With a surge of excitement and drug-induced
energy, he bounded through the network and scanned the mail servers
for anything unusual, delving into the logs with a scowl of
concentration.

His heart
skipped a beat when he dug the hacker’s message out of a backup
server
that h
e’d
installed to resurrect e-mail for anyone foolish enough to delete
important messages.

Oh my
god…

He jerked to his feet,
desperate to spread the warning and prevent a tragedy. But in his
haste, he forgot about his implant and the wires connecting him to
the computer snapped taut. The leads wrenched on the fragile
plastic socket that surgeons had delicately connected to his brain.
It roughly yanked the clip from his head and splintered his mind
with an instant migraine. Then the welcome relief of
unconsciousness engulfed him and his limp body collapsed to the
floor.

*

The Raven
snarled menacingly at the cityscape. He glimpsed it matrix-like
through the grate against which he was pressing his nose. He was
horizontal, tucked into the cramped space between floors, built for
laying cable and air-conditioning ducts. The air smelled stale and
musty, something that
further
soured his mood. His target was just below,
pottering around his desk – a sheep unaware of the wolf that was
stalking it.
Or in this case, the
Raven.

He laced a
hand around his sickle, its razor-sharp blade more than enough to
slice a throat from ear to ear. In the Raven’s hands it could lop a
target’s head clean off. He’d done that only thrice and each time
he’d enjoyed the thud of a human head hitting the ground and
watching as the decapitated body twitched in shock before
obediently lying down next
to
it.
Why don’t I use the
sickle more often?
he wondered. The
nanotoxin from his Redback didn’t leave such a gory mess, but the
result was smelly.