Freedom Incorporated (38 page)

James paid him
little heed; his head still hurt too much for Esteban to drawn him
into an energy wasting argument. He loosely
wonder
ed
how
Esteban’s office would smell if
he
spent 36 hours there sweating over a
difficult problem.

He’d requested
his best three administrators to stay back and he’d delegated to
them the tiresome task of sorting out the mess on the network. Only
two had agreed. One said she had a prior engagement she couldn’t
break.
Fine.
James
mentally chalked an ugly mark next to her name, one that meant
she’d get no interesting projects or promotional
opportunities.
You have to make sacrifices
if you expect to get anywhere.
James’s mood
was several shades darker even than Esteban’s. He’d already been
slogging away for a full night and the prospect of another was
painful to consider.

He switched on the
videophone and adjusted the camera before dialling home. Susan
answered, “You’re not calling to say you’re stuck at work again are
you?”

James nodded,
irritable and profoundly sad. “Yes.” He lowered his voice to a
whisper and added, “Our CEO was assassinated
today and t
hey’ve declared a state of
company emergency.
” He lowered his voice
even further. “It all happened because someone
hacked
the network
.
”

Susan sighed. “You spend
too much time-”

“
I know, I’m
sorry,” James said, cutting her off before she could finish. “It’s
not like I
want
to
stay here, especially two nights in a row.”

Susan studied him on her
display. “You have company.”

James shifted so she
could see Esteban and Michele in the background. “Yeah, they’re
using my office as a command centre.” He smiled bravely for her.
“Look, I have some good news, but I’ll save it for when I get home,
okay?”

She smiled broadly,
showing her dimples. “A surprise?”

“
Yep. A good
one. You’ll love it, I promise.”

He heard Lillian crying
in the background and Susan turned away from the camera. “Lillian’s
hungry, I’d better go.”

“
Okay, I love
you.” James kissed two fingers and held them up to the
camera.

“
Love you too.
Just do whatever you have to and hurry home, okay?” She waited to
see his confirmation nod, said, “Bye,” then hung up and the display
went black.

“
Bye.” James
replied into the dead receiver.

“
That your
woman?” Esteban’s gruff voice asked from over his
shoulder.

“
Yes.”

“
Good
looking.” Esteban always measured females that way. He had two
lists, the first filled with people he’d gleefully fuck, the second
with people that shrivelled his manhood. He added James’s wife to
the first.

“
Thanks.”
James wasn’t sure how to accept the compliment coming from a
barbarian such as Esteban. In truth, it frightened him. He didn’t
want monster Esteban thinking of his wife that way. He soothed
himself with the thought that he’d soon be home.
I just have to sort this out
first.
It was a powerful motivator and he
gingerly plugged the leads into his tender implant before throwing
himself at the problem with renewed gusto that bordered on
insanity.

So much
ground to cover.
He changed tack. Instead of
examining the network’s inner barrier, he skirted along the outer
ring. There was always a chance that David Coucke – if Coucke was
the hacker –
had
meticulously covered his tracks inside the network but had
been careless on his initial approach. It was worth a try. Besides,
blundering into a perforation in the outer ring would bring him one
step closer to isolating the attack origin.

Then he
launched a second thread. He needed to closely monitor the Raven’s
progress and feed from whatever morsels of information he might
discover. To do that, he’d have to hack the cyborg’s brain. It was
dangerous, though others had succeeded in the past and thoroughly
documented the process. Anonymous pioneers had printed a
groundbreaking article about cyborg hacking and
all
the popular computer magazines had
followed the case. An entire ‘net community had dedicated itself to
the art of forcing entry into hybrid computer-human brains. Some
cyborgs were privacy paranoid and had erected insurmountable
defences – nobody could get through without the appropriate key.
Others were lax, either through ignorance, incompetence, or
naivety. Some thought it would never happen to them despite the
growing cult of cyborg hackers who shared
the necessary
tools.
Hardcore cyborg hackers believed themselves to be intrepid
psychologists and anthropologists, ruthlessly examining the
human minds that a cocktail of doctors and
engineers had generously placed online.

The Raven was
easy to find. His connection to the UniForce database perpetually
drew information about an array of targets.
H
e
didn’t have
the space
to store all the data
locally,
and even if he
did,
he would still
require
constant
contact
to benefit from the frequent data
updates. What was the point in chasing a false lead?

“
What’re you
doing?” Esteban demanded at the worst possible moment.

James had
forgotten to switch off his monitor to conceal his activities from
prying eyes. He would have preferred to work in private but it was
a bit late for that now. He slowed his pace to free enough mental
resources to formulate an answer. “I’m isolating, or
trying
to isolate the
hacker’s data stream. If I can do that, I can tell you where they
are.”

“
Yeah, but
what are you doing there?” Esteban pointed to the second
application.

James snorted like an
angry pig and said, “Hacking the Raven’s mind.”

“
You can do
that?”

“
Sure. It’s
just the same as any ‘net connected computer, it’s vulnerable to
attack.” James massaged the bruise around his implant and
refocussed on his work.

Esteban sensibly left him
in peace and returned to drafting his first contract. It didn’t
take long; he just opened the appropriate form and filled in the
blanks. The difficult part was deciding to whom he should send it.
Assassination contracts usually tendered for millions of Credits.
One million was the smallest fee any quality assassin would demand.
Two million was common, but five was exceptional.

He
reviewed
the
list
of assassins that weren’t presently on assignment and selected the
top performer. He had an immaculate record – nobody had ever traced
him and he had a 100 percent success rate.
And he’s quick.
Most assassins
wouldn’t make the hit for at least two weeks, and frequently
demanded more money if told the matter was urgent. Shadow, as this
particular assassin called himself, had an average kill time of
five days.

Esteban put
the contract in Shadow’s pigeonhole, as standard procedure
dictated. Good assassins always demanded total anonymity. The
system would send Shadow a notification and he would thereby know
he had mail waiting for him. He alone could access the message,
using an unreproducible electronic key. For security, reasons
h
e used each
pigeonhole no more than once. The system generated a new lock
and key combination at the successful completion of each
assignment.

Shadow would
have 24 hours to accept or reject the
offer
. But Esteban rarely had to deal
with rejections. Most assassins understood that UniForce didn’t
tolerate such impudence. One rejection would substantially reduce
the frequency of future offers. Rejecting UniForce twice was
tantamount to retirement.

Michele was
busy reading bounty hunter records, one by one. She was yet to
discover the search feature built into the database engine. Esteban
watched her, pitying her in his own way.
Should I show her how to search?
He
watched as she opened and closed another two files.
Nah, she looks happy.
He
made a pact with himself: if she were still going at midnight, he’d
show her how to isolate the cyborgs from the enormous
list.

“
How long
until you know where they are?” Esteban asked, keen to get moving.
He was tired of sitting at a desk. He was a man of action; it was
in his blood.
If I can’t have poker then,
come hell or high water, I’ll have my own fun.

James snorted in
annoyance. “It depends.” He couldn’t say which method would be
faster, finding them on his own merit or poaching their whereabouts
from the Raven. There were too many variables to give an accurate
answer.

Esteban
frowned.

The trickle of
data feeding into the Raven’s computerised brain suddenly surged
into a torrent and James seized the opportunity to launch his
trojan. It was similar to the method David Coucke had used to
penetrate UniForce’s network: hollow out a legitimate file and
insert a tiny program inside the empty shell. Upon reaching the
destination, the virus-like file would activate and reconstruct its
host so that any subsequent file scans would report normal. But by
then it would be too late, the program would already be inside. It
would poke several inconspicuous holes in the target’s firewall,
allowing the hacker to delve into the bowels of the target’s
network. It was simple, in theory. Practical execution was a
different matter, especially on a cyborg. Cyborgs tended to be more
aware of their computer’s activities. It wasn’t just a machine – it
was an extension of a human mind. That’s why it was so important
for James to wait for a surge in the data stream. He needed the
Raven to be crunching through so much data that he wouldn’t notice
the loss of a few clock cycles to
the
trojan
.

He held his
breath as the Raven swept the modified file up with his data
stream. A few seconds later a port sweep revealed the trojan had
opened ports 5,000 to 5,005.
It
worked.
“I’m in.”

“
You’ve found
them?” Esteban leapt from his chair and slapped a hand roughly on
James’s shoulder.

“
No.” He
winced, his shoulder smarting. “I’m inside the Raven’s
computer.”

“
Oh.” Esteban
wasn’t impressed. Nobody had ever explained to him the significance
of hacking a cyborg. “Is that all.”

“
Maybe he
knows where they are.”

Esteban rolled his eyes.
“Yes, but if he gets his grotty little mittens on them first it’ll
be too late, won’t it?”

“
Too late for
what?” James didn’t follow.

“
For me,
stupid.”

Michele spun
from her arduous task and interjected, “
You’re
going to kill them?”

He puffed out his chest.
“And why not? Jackie said to use our top assassin.”

“
You?” James
asked incredulously. “I thought you’d retired.
Been
retired –
involuntarily.”

Esteban’s gaze narrowed.
His expression darkened as though a thundercloud passed beneath his
skin and his eyes went icy. “That wasn’t permanent. Now it’s time
for my second debut into the professional circuit.”

Second debut?
How can you have a second first-appearance,
moron?
James wished he had someone
intelligent in the room to converse with. “Okay, whatever floats
your boat.”

“
I’m sharing
the workload,” Esteban admitted. “Our
second
best assassin will deal with
the Raven. That cyborg might be a freak, but he won’t be expecting
it. Second best will be good enough for him. But
I
will deal with
Sutherland and the others.”

“
And collect
the reward.” James understood, or thought he did. Esteban’s
ulterior motive would have sickened him to the core, so perhaps it
was better that he didn’t know.

Esteban shrugged and
said, “Honest pay for honest work.”

James snorted and
entwined his mind around the Raven’s crystal-core. He downloaded a
snippet of data, not enough to make the bounty hunter suspicious,
just enough to sample the data structure. The hardest part about
cyborg hacking wasn’t gaining access; it was decoding the bizarre
storage structures. The difficulty varied depending on the
intelligence of the specimen. Dopy cyborgs stored data and memories
in arrays that resembled old hard disk platters. Intellectually
superior cyborgs used fascinating crystalline structures that
rivalled the Stanley Encryption Algorithm for complexity. One thing
was certain, every cyborg had a unique way of arranging their data
and it was going to take time to decode.

He gently
probed the sample and turned it over in his mind, trying to find a
pattern or anything he could define as a starting point.
Hmm…
James rubbed a hand
across his tired eyes.
This is going to
take longer than I thought.
He copied more
data during the next deluge. The Raven was busy examining video
feeds from around the world, testing millions of faces for a match.
It was a daunting task even for the latest generation supercomputer
running the
most advanced
face recognition software
.
I
t generated
copious overhead processing and taxed the Raven’s link to the
nano-net. It was therefore the perfect cover for James to
stealthily download analysis material.
If
I could just find a pattern…
James wondered
what the Raven might have modelled his structures on. Psychologists
who’d entered the cyborg-hacking debate usually pointed out that
cyborgs preferred personally meaningful structures. Once, a cyborg
had joined the discussion and said she used a stellar map of her
star sign to plot data locations in her crystal-core.
What could possibly be meaningful to a man who
calls himself ‘the Raven’? Sheep? Decaying flesh? An eyeball ripe
for plunging a beak into?