Who Hunts the Hunter (14 page)
She should be able to read this file! Unless it’s written in Ztech programming code ...
Amy pulls out her mirrorshades—from out of her cleavage of course. The shades bring her programming interpreters online. She takes another look at the file. It’s not in Ztech, that’s for sure. Still scrambled, encrypted. Still unreadable. But why?
The golden electron sun overhead begins seeming very hot, and Amy feels droplets of perspiration slipping down from her underarms, and a worried, queasy sensation rising into her stomach.
This is not right.
Ivar Grubner belches.
“You fragging
jack
!" Novangeline exclaims.
Ivar can’t quite restrain a grin, or another belch, a real deep gargley one, like maybe came all the way up from his lower intestinal track. Naturally, Novangeline shrieks and hops off his hips, off the side of the bed, then leans toward him to beat him on the chest.
“You’re
so
disgusting
! Why do I even try,
try
... !”
“Watch it. I got some wind coming.”
Novangeline shouts and sobs, and storms out of the bedroom, but not quite in time to miss the bloated bombshell of a fart Ivar realized was on the way. A real blockbuster of a blubby bomb—smelly, too. But, hey, this is what the biff gets for feeding him all her gaseous manufacturing food.
Abruptly, she’s back, standing in the doorway, with a weird look in her eyes and one hand at her mouth like she’s afraid of what might come out. She gonna belch, too?
“There’s someone on the telecom ...” she says, voice trailing off.
Ivar grunts."I didn’t hear no bleep.”
“I picked up and the call was just there. I guess before it had a chance to bleep. It’s a smoothie, some woman. She says she’s from work. Your work. Amy Berman?”
“Who?”
“Amy—”
The name hits home—hearing the first name threw him off."Fraggin’
squat
!” Ivar exclaims, tumbling out of bed, then running for the bedroom door. They couldn’t have a bedroom extension like everybody else in the world! No, he’s gotta run on his stunty dwarf legs all the way to the living room, then grab the phone, and say, half out of breath, “Yeah, uhh ... Ms. Berman! Hi there! I mean,
hello
?"
A roundish smoothie of a norm face gazes at him from the telecom display. That’s Ms. Berman all right. Something seems amiss, though. Her eyes are pointing kind of low."Heh ...” Ivar glances down, grabs a pillow off the sofa and covers his lower parts."What, uh,
what
a
surprise,
Ms
.
Berman!
Caught me just outta the shi ... er, shower. Sorry
’bout that. Kinda forgot the ole clothes, you know!”
The round eyes in the face on the display blink a few times, then Ms. Berman says, “No, I’m sorry, Ivar. Excuse me for calling so late. I need to ask you a favor. It’s important.”
“Sure, whatever,” Ivar says eagerly. Ms. Berman’s one of the movers and shakers at Hurley-Cooper, where Ivar works. VP of some fragging thing or other. Got to keep people like that singing your praises all right, all the time, as loudly as possible, especially with chipface Tokyo auditors on site, snooping around.
“Always aim to please, Ms. Berman,” Ivar adds hastily, just so it won’t seem pretentious."Something to do with the comps?”
Ms. Berman nods."Yes, in fact it’s a small datafile. It’s encrypted, but I’m not sure how. I’m hoping you can decode it for me.”
“Sure. Pipe it through.”
“Oh, umm ... hold one moment.” Ms. Berman leans out of sight, moves around, then says, “All right, I’m ready to transmit.”
“Fire away.”
The file’s in his queue in no time. Not even a megapulse of data. Should be no problem. The really dangerous encryption progs that wipe your deck bone clean, and maybe your brain besides, all take at least a few pulses of code to ... well, to execute their code. To do whatever. This file ain’t big enough.
“Got it. Hang on.”
Ivar hustles into the kitchen to get his cyberdeck, the Cruncher, which he created from Fuchi and Fairlight spares and so can call any damn thing he wants. It’s got combat-hardening, more memory than elephants, an IO rate like the speed of light, and a master persona control program that just can’t be beat, or at least not very often, unless he really pushes his luck.
He jacks the Cruncher into the telecom, but not into his head. Why waste the time? One touch of a key and he’s got the datafile in memory. One more touch and the file’s decoded. Nothing to it.
Kid stuff.
“All set, Ms. Berman. I’ll shoot it back to you.”
“Oh, you’re ... you’re done?” she says, sounding surprised."I didn’t realize you could do it so quickly. Go ... go ahead.”
One tap of a key."Got it?”
Ms. Berman spends a few moments leaning out of sight, checking things, Ivar guesses. Smart lady, but no comp jockey."Yes, it’s here,” she says, then she leans back into the screen and looks out at him."There’s just one thing, Ivar,” she says in a sober sort of way."This file is rather proprietary. I... probably shouldn’t have transmitted it over an unsecured line. Can we keep this just between you and me?”
“Hey, null sheen, Ms. Berman. You know that.”
“Yes, I know,” Ms. Berman replies, in a real serious sort of way."And I’m very grateful, Ivar. If I can ever help you in any way, I want you to let me know. Don’t hesitate. I mean that.”
“Well, hey ... thanks a load, Ms. Berman.”
“You’re very welcome.”
And then they close the call. Ivar scratches his beard, then scratches the itchy spot on his butt, then taps a key on the Cruncher to clear Ms. Berman’s file from memory like it was never there.
“What was that all about?” Novangeline asks.
Ivar grunts."Can’t tell ya ... It’s proprietary.” Novangeline curses.
But, hey, that’s life in the corps.
A trio of spotlights casts a murky orange glow over the parking lot of the Van Cortlandt Industrial Park’s one and only Nathan’s Gourmet Express restaurant. Amy switches on her Harley Roadraider, then stares blindly through the technical readouts that briefly appear on the inside of her helmet’s visor. Unfortunately, staring blindly doesn’t help. Worrying won’t help. And sitting here like a statue won’t get her closer to home or to bed.
She puts the Harley in gear and drives to the Thruway. She’s tempted to go straight to New Bronx Plaza, jack into the headquarters mainframes, and check things out further, but it’s too late, and she’s too tired. Her brain feels like mush.
Out on the highway, she stays to the right-hand lanes and keeps her speed down. She’s not used to riding the cycle at night, and her mind’s so full of questions she can hardly focus on driving. She keeps trying to tell herself that there must be some absurdly simple explanation for the file she found on the Metascience Group network, but something deep inside rebels every time. She knows the kinds of files the group keeps and how those files are organized. The group’s master budget is clearly labeled “MASTER BUDGET” and it resides in its own directory along with related datafiles, and none of those files are encrypted because there’s no reason for them to be. The group’s two ranking scientists, Dr. Liron Phalen and Dr. Benjamin Hill, have their own sets of files related to the budget in their own personal datastores, clearly labeled.
The mystery file, by contrast, was hidden away and encrypted. To Amy, that suggests something improper, perhaps even illicit. It demands her attention. Calling on her favorite guru from Hurley-Cooper’s Computer Engineering Department was simply the quickest way of getting the file decoded.
One look at the decoded file was about all she could take.
The file has no proper headings or anything to identify who created the file or made the various entries, but the rest seems obvious. One column contains a list of names, probably corporate names. The next column contains dates, some going back as far as five years. The column after that contains numbers, all with two digits to the right of the decimal place. It looks like a record of payments.
Amy did all the standard Management Science courses in school. She knows that numbers can be deceptive. She also knows that implicit assumptions can play games with one’s perceptions. Still, there are two points she can’t get past no matter how she tries to rationalize: there’s a nuyen amount in the mystery file that corresponds exactly with each of the twenty-seven items she’s been trying to account for; and, the date for each of those figures corresponds with payment dates in her purchasing records.
What do not correspond are the names, and that is the point that worries her. If this file is a record of payments, the names aligned with the dates and nuyen amounts represent payees. Yet, those payees do not agree with the payees in her purchasing records, and that at least suggests the misdirection of funds, which suggests the possibility of fraud.
Worse, the mystery file includes more than twenty-seven items. The bottom line total approaches thirteen million nuyen.
Is this file part of someone’s online game? Or is an employee using the Metascience Group network to evaluate their personal finances? Amy can’t accept that. Two columns out of three in the file could have been copied directly from her own records. The correspondence between dates and nuyen amounts is exact. Why do the payee names differ? There must be a reason. Why can’t she think of any legitimate explanation that makes sense? In fact, the more Amy mulls it over the more worried she becomes that her Purchasing records may be wrong, that someone in Metascience is making fraudulent use of Hurley-Cooper funds, possibly by diverting payments to the payees named in the mystery file.
This could be very bad. And not just for Hurley-Cooper.
If it really is fraud, and if the people from Tokyo should decide that Amy shares the responsibility for fraud, she could lose not just her job, but her career. And of course she would be held fully responsible. The entire executive board would be held responsible, and her most of all, because Purchasing is her area.
She’s got to find out what’s going on, who created this file and why. If it is fraud, she’s got to expose the culprit, present the auditors with a fait accompli—the whole story— proof as to what happened and who did it and maybe a signed confession as well. Otherwise, her career and everything she’s worked to accomplish will turn to so much static.
By the time she gets home, she’s considering going to the Executive VP first thing in the morning in hopes of getting the power of that woman’s office behind the investigation.
That makes sense, doesn’t it?
Still wondering, Amy turns toward her bedroom, but stops abruptly, looking into the living room. The room is dark and Hannan’s sitting in there on the sofa, and what’s he doing sitting there in the dark? She steps toward him and he stands up and suddenly it’s not Hannan ...
“It’s . . . It’s . . .
“Scottie?
Oh,
my
god?"
It’s a shock, a slap in the face, a brutal punch to her stomach. Her helmet and backpack drop from her hands. Something clutches at her chest, squeezing the breath right out of her. Suddenly she feels weak enough to faint and her head’s pounding and her throat’s gone dry.
The figure rising from the couch is her younger brother, Scottie, the first she’s seen of him in years, the first proof she’s had that he’s still alive. He comes a step toward her. She hesitates a moment, then takes three quick steps toward him and wraps her arms around his neck."Scottie,” she gasps, struggling to breath."Huh ... how ...”
She’s so close to breaking down she can’t get the words out of her mouth. She draws back to look at him and can hardly see for the tears washing through her eyes. She knows it’s him, though. He looks just as she remembers: just a little taller than her, trim build, narrow face. The impassive features that always made him seem like he’s a million kilometers away, or just not paying attention. He’s cut his hair very short in one of those slash-cut styles. He’s wearing a long dark duster and has something, a flute, slung behind his shoulders.
He presses something into her hand.
“You lost this,” he says.
It’s a burgundy wallet, just like the one she misplaced earlier in the week. No, it
is
the one she misplaced! How could Scottie have found it? And who cares! With everything that’s been happening ... and now this ...
She throws her arms around his neck and sobs.
Her little brother ... she can’t believe it.
Meddler.
From her office window on the second floor of the Metascience lab building, Germaine Olsson watches the skinny figure in the bright yellow jacket and helmet mount the bright yellow motorcycle down by the front lobby, and, after a moment, ride off. Germaine had been wondering if the slitch was ever going to leave. Amy Berman. The big deal VP. The meddler. Good riddance.
Germaine shakes her arms to loosen the fists her hands have bunched into, and grunts, exasperated.
Just what everyone needs: another meddling corporate bureaucrat, another suit. Another smoothie who can’t mind her own business. As if Hurley-Cooper hasn’t got enough of them already. And Berman’s one of the worst. Always sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong. She isn’t happy diddling data in her nice, shiny headquarters office. Oh, no. She has to come around here and jack into the research network, too. If she isn’t changing things just to change things, or inventing new ways to make more work for everybody, she’s just snooping, trying to get things on people, if only to impress them with her authority and make herself look good. As if she hasn’t got better things to do. And probably she doesn’t.
