The Scarab (15 page)

I didn’t have the firepower to
finish him off, but the Elite did. I initiated spin shutdown to make the cloud
last longer, conserve power, and duck any incoming fire. Then I played with the
Minos interface till I found the way to broadcast from my external speakers at
maximum volume. I reeled off the coordinates of the North Korean’s fuel tanks
followed by the phrase “Tail rockets—one-meter spread.”

After I repeated the coordinates, I
had about forty-five seconds left. I pushed the copier over against the overturned
table for more shielding, and so I would have something to stand on. I grabbed
the nearest stapler and started whacking away at the halon fire-suppressant
nozzles on the ceiling. I had no luck by the time I passed the thirty second
mark. Then I lost patience and grabbed the fax. In a desperate over-hand smash
I took out first one nozzle, then another. After a brief sputter of rust, halon
gas came pouring out of the nozzles. I lost my balance trying to get out of the
way. Halon sinks to it’s lowest level and blankets the area so that the fire
has no oxygen to burn. It does the same thing to human beings if you’re not
careful. While a burn-proof gas filled the bowl-shaped depressions above the
disk silos and the floor area I had boxed in, I plummeted off the copier. I
bounced off the roller chair, and slammed into the trashcan. It took all the
time remaining for me to get my wind back. Pain shot through my right arm when
I tried to prop myself up on it.

The timer read two seconds when I
rose, clasping my crippled arm against my bruised ribs. I heard a click, but
the grenades never erupted. I took advantage of my luck to gather more evidence
and look for a way out.

I pulled the mice and keyboards
from all the computers in the room and dumped them into the metal waste basket.
I had to do this with my weak hand, but it was worth it if we could find any
good fingerprints or DNA. As I passed the game screen, I noticed that the
Charon program had activated itself. The North Korean tank had been tagged as
dead, and I saw progress reports as the GEVSIM tabulated his score and
performed the remaining tests. Meanwhile, the Charon task was downloading files
from the deceased and transmitting them to an outside phone number. As the
final step, his log was sealed, and an official death certificate was posted.
Immediately thereafter, my vehicle began the journey to the other side. Kali
wasn’t going to claim my soul, if you’ll pardon the mixed mythos. I ripped out
every fragile cable I could find from the spider webs of wire emanating from
the backs of the phone cabinets. This probably wrought havoc with every player
remaining, but I didn’t care. Nobody scored the Scarab and won!

I’d find out where all this data
was going and stop her. Opening the Charon module in programmer mode, I poked
around, hampered by my bad right arm. The first thing I did was slow the
default transmission and processing rates down to the lowest speed possible so
that I could find the leak before it closed. The code was written in the same
language as the game. The style was brilliant and bold but didn’t handle all
the details. I’m a details man, and sooner or later, I’d find Kali’s mistakes.
At some point during all this, the halon must have shut off, because I don’t
remember hearing it over my frenzied key strokes. Eventually, I got stopped at
a high-security interface. Somehow, Charon was an integral part of the
communication system the hotel had provided for everyone. I was just about to
confirm the conditions that allowed the security hole and discover the
destination of the information.

I heard scratching at the hallway
door. Someone was unraveling the cable I had looped there.

“Stay back!” I shouted. “Don’t open
the door!”

I saw the light turn green on the
card reader display and dove for the gap between the phone cabinets, dragging
the trash can with me. A shredder round blew the lock off the door to the
manager’s office. Since this was only an arm’s length above me, I was deafened
for the moment. Even so, there was a disturbingly quiet explosion when Federal
agents opened both doors and the breeze blew off the halon blanket. The disk
silos instantly turned into incandescent piles of slag.

Fortunately, I only lost some
eyebrow and hair on the left side of my head as I tumbled into a room full of
guns and flack vests. I managed to put the flames out by rolling. Mare was
shouting, “Don’t shoot!”

I answered questions on this fiasco for two and a half hours
while a doctor tended to my injuries. The burns were barely noticeable, but the
smell of burned hair followed me everywhere. Although I could still move my
fingers easily, my right arm hurt to move. Certainly, it looked much worse than
it really was. I bruise quite flamboyantly. The doctor worried about bleeding
in the elbow joint, so I humored him and wore the sling. It turns out that the
Feds were already collecting a hostage response team for Playfair when Mary’s boss
called them with another objective. These guys normally don’t work on
Saturdays. The Feds were fairly convinced that I was just lucky but
incompetent, not a criminal. After repeated grilling on the same questions,
they eventually decided to trust me.

Since they sealed off the hotel as
soon as they arrived, Kali still had to be around. She wasn’t the type to give
up. If she still had access to the game, she might be greedy enough to try for
another score. It was my job to help lure her in. To make sure I didn’t end up
with a toe tag, they assigned a shadow to me by the name of Whitaker. He was
black with hair so short, it was almost fuzz. Whitaker had the obligatory suit
and earphones, but he went beyond professional. He never looked directly at a
person; rather, he watched a room like a kid watched an aquarium. It was eerie.
He never said a word or blinked.

On the way down to the first floor,
I noticed his college ring and tried to make conversation for the tenth time.
For just an instant, his veneer cracked. “Please, sir, do not talk to me while
I’m on duty. It distracts me, and you don’t want that. If you must address me,
please do so in private. You may address me as Whitaker or Whit if you are in a
hurry. In college, I started out wanting to be a jazz musician, but I am not a
circular breather. That meant I could never be the best in that field. I was
also a wide receiver on the football team, but I never made it past second
string. The only thing I’m the best at so far seems to be keeping people alive.
I haven’t lost a witness in eight years, but they told me you’d be a challenge,
sir. One favor, please avoid further public confrontations where possible.”
Then he shut up as suddenly as he had started. Anything I could have said would
have been anticlimactic, so I took his advice and went about my business as if
this happened every day.

At around four, I paid a visit to a
lounge full of very nervous, very puzzled judges. I heard several quiet
accusations from people convinced that I’d caused this game outage as well. “You’re
probably wondering why the FBI has gathered you all together here.” Kali also
had accomplices we wanted to smoke out. I had been selected to leak certain
information to them. I only hoped I was up to it. Mare was the actor, not me.

“I admit. I triggered the fire
alarm, but we were faced with gun play and incendiary grenades in the halls,
and I didn’t want any innocent people to get hurt.” I wiggled my right arm in
its sling by way of demonstration. I had cleaned off Mark’s makeup job, but my
face looked rough enough without it. Mark got credit for rounding up the thug
in the stairwell, and they arranged for an outstanding civilian law-enforcement
certificate for him to hang on his office wall. “The city Fire Marshall has
already cleared me of charges on that account. I also caused the phone line
disconnection to Sandia. The Feds have cleared me of that charge and have
restored service to the outside world. However, the Sandia network is expected
to remain down till tomorrow morning.”

That kicked the hornet’s nest into
full buzz. I just said the words that would cost them millions. “What right do
you have to come in here and ruin our event?” shouted the hotel liaison, who I’ll
call Holstein to protect the not-yet-convicted.

He was my primary target.

“Any one of you worth his or her
oath would have done the same thing. Game security had been subverted and
proprietary information was being transmitted off-site. It was the only way to
stop them clean,” I explained. I was using my best, Saturday-in-front-of-the-garage
folksy manner to soothe them.

“Impossible,” said Gertrude. “Sandia
security is the best. That’s why we picked this location.”

Most people didn’t know what that
word meant. I wish they’d quit using it. Gertie may have been a great businesswoman,
but she hadn’t programmed in about thirty years. I took it easy on her because
she’d been easy on me.

“Normally you’d be right, but they
didn’t have to crack security at Sandia; they just had to do it here. They’ve
subverted the hotel’s telephone switching system. All calls to the flight
recorder system pass through their computers on the seventeenth floor. This
data is recorded, and the signal relayed unchanged to the Sandia supercomputer
net. I first noticed a delay in the system during the Piccadilly chase. Later I
found out all contestants were being monitored. Sometimes fire and turn
commands just wouldn’t make it to the phone lines on time. It made eliminating
players or fixing the point spread easy.”

Most of the judges were stunned,
one MIT alumnus rushed to his terminal and began countermeasures immediately. Holstein, the hotel liaison, remained unconvinced. “I assure you all that no such Hogan’s
Heroes antics are going on here. The man is grasping for an excuse for his own
behavior. And any way, what good is the data gained in this fashion? I’m sure
whatever wasn’t encrypted was patented.”

I refused to let him irritate me,
and remained diplomatic. “For a legitimate business, I’d be inclined to agree
with you. But employees of the hotel who kidnap or kill their guests hardly
qualify as ordinary businessmen. The hotel provided most of us with the
communications crypto keys we’re using. It would be simplicity itself for these
criminals to bribe a judge to get them copies of the keys.” Mr. Holstein was
getting mighty defensive, and the guards were looking around the room, trying
to decide who they should believe. “Any US firm they sold this data to could
crack it within the month, and a foreign government could do it within a day.
Patents are useless if you can analyze the hardware, and produce a cheap
imitation that does exactly the same thing for half the price. Ask IBM about
that one.

“Besides, the passwords for several
accounts were broadcast over the phone lines and captured by the moles. And at
least one of them got away.” The MIT guy stopped typing, and picked up his
phone.

“Hello, Myron? Disconnect!
Disconnect from the Net. Use an ax if you have to!” Several other judges
excused themselves to run to a phone.

“Why the rush? The game’s shut
down, nobody could log in at Sandia now if they wanted to,” said Holstein.

The MIT grad answered for me. “Who
wants to remember another password for just a week? Everybody just uses the
same one as they do for all their machines at work. This gives them a key to
half the contractors in the country. It’s like discovering that 30 percent of
all men pick G-O-L-F for their bank card PIN.”

Holstein’s eyes got larger for a
moment. “Really? But this still in no way implicates the hotel.”

I had a seat on the table in front
of the sole defender of the hotel policies. The other judges were shifting from
shock and outrage at the violations to a need to find a scapegoat. “The way I
hear it, TSM showed a certain Las-Vegas-based hotel and casino chain how easy a
rigged game would be. TSM employees were brought in as security consultants and
were the only ones allowed on the seventeenth floor so that the hotel chain
could maintain plausible deniability if things went south.” To their credit,
the owners of the Windsor never counted on the real agenda of treason.

“Why would TSM go through all this
trouble to lose?” asked Gertrude.

I liked that lady, sharp as a tack.
“I asked the same thing. The specialists are still sifting through the evidence
they left behind, which wasn’t much. We suspect the disk drives that have been
crashing recently did so to hide TSM’s tracks. I do have a guess, though. In
addition to the money they were getting from Las Vegas and the other players
for game rigging, the TSM family car division has been siphoning off funds for
years with no results. Current estimates show that they’ve also sold at least
three times as many stock shares as they have outstanding. They couldn’t delay
another year, but they also couldn’t afford to succeed. They needed a failure
so big that it would close the division and eliminate all chance of
resurrection. TSM needed the books buried, with no questions as to why. There
are also allegations of money laundering for organized crime, but I could care
less about that. As soon as they killed a government investigator and kidnapped
my co-pilot, they stepped over the line.”

Holstein was sweating. The guards
looked nervous, too. One went so far as to remove his cap and badge. “You still
have no evidence that there was a murder. The police ruled it a suicide. The
rest is supposition without the phone records. For that, you’ll need a warrant.”

“They got it two hours ago, chum. I’m
just here keeping you guys busy while the FBI guys dissect it. They seem to
think your friends would try to destroy evidence. Especially the record of a
certain tapped long-distance phone call to Washington that got cut off
unexpectedly. As for my co-pilot, she’s helping the Feds compile a list of
charges, which were made longer by the fact that she’s a Federal police
officer. If I were you, I’d make a deal now and sing, because after she gets
through, they could bury you in the transcript.”

“I can show you where we keep the
video monitor tapes,” volunteered the still-uniformed guard.

I had carefully avoided mentioning
the fact that they could only steal untraceably from the dead with the Charon
function. All that would come out to the appropriate people later. I still had
one more piece of information to leak. “By the way, the Feds wanted to know if
they can access a log without the player being dead?”

Gertrude made it plain that nobody
could. “Why do you ask?”

“There’s an error in the score
board. The Ghedra pilot could not have died from poison gas. It had no pilot.
Since Mary had been kidnapped and I was chasing after her, I had the vehicle in
remote control mode. Since the log file never recorded my death certificate,
according to the rules, I’m not really dead. The Feds are disappointed, though,
because when I used someone else’s terminal I accidentally saved some Swiss
Bank Account numbers from the screen. If they can’t get the evidence yet, no
big deal. They’ll get it in a few hours any way, win or lose.” I said loudly.

“If the data structures are as
inconsistent as you say, I’m not sure we could justify letting you resume play,
Mr. Hayes,” said Gertrude, genuinely sorry.

“No sweat. Mary Ann already talked
with President Sanders about this ruling. Since I was the victim of foul play,
I deserved a chance. But he couldn’t afford to bring back every victim of these
criminals, or we’d have to do the whole race over again. We’d all like to avoid
that much publicity. He said the consortium worked by the will of the members.
If half of the ten remaining vehicles voted for my re-entry, I would be
reinstated. He said a tribunal could give me any further restrictions by
tomorrow morning.”

She nodded slowly. “I’ll gather an
official one, but I defer to Mr. Sanders’ judgment. To be fair to everyone, you’ll
need to retrieve your pilot from the last documented manned location before you
can score another distance point.”

My smile dimmed. “That’s clear back
at the Liechtenstein checkpoint.”

“I quote: a player may not cross
that day’s finishing line unless it has a registered pilot on board (page three
paragraph seven).”

The smile returned. “Done. I’ll
have the signed petition to you by midnight, and you can give me the rest of
the rules then.” I was so happy I kissed her on the cheek on my way out.

God, I was having fun. Now I had to
go see a man about returning from the grave.