“He said he’d pay for up to twenty of us to march,” said Mosley. “Not everyone is scheduled every day, though, what with doctor’s appointments and grandchildren to visit. Sometimes knees or hips are bothering folks, too, and they can’t handle the walking so I adjust the roster.”
I tapped my foot inside my boot where he couldn’t see it.
“But the checks come in the mail as regular as clockwork,” he said. “I signed up my friends and some of their wives. They all say the same.”
I knew without asking that he meant paper checks and snail mail. The post office was down to only delivering twice a week these days, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Finally I gave up and asked.
“Did you catch this person’s name?”
“Of course I did, Jack,” said Mosley. Please, I thought, just get to it.
“He was nice young man, a sharp dresser in a gray suit,” said Mosley. “He looked like a lawyer—said his name was Cornell.”
Ding! Ding! Ding! This time my cartoon character face would feature my eyes spinning until they came up with “Jackpot!”
I thanked Mosley for his help and complimented him on his printing setup—I always like learning something new—then washed my hands in the sink using powdered borax soap that was great for removing the small amount of ink that had gotten on my fingers. I let myself out since Mosley seemed happy and much less paranoid puttering in his workshop and headed for my van.
When I got to the mailbox out front I glanced back at the house then opened it. Success! There was one window envelope letter inside just the right size to hold a check. I photographed both sides of the envelope with my phone then used a hand-warming app to soften the glue and loosen the seal. I removed the check, photographed it on both sides as well, then replaced the check in the envelope and the envelope in the mailbox. With luck, Mosley would never know. I’d just broken at least one federal law but didn’t expect him to turn me in even if he was watching.
Cornell, you sly devil, you. I was already thinking about the questions I’d ask him next time we met.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Chapter 15
“Follow the money.” — Deep Throat in All the President’s Men
It was getting close to lunch time but early enough so that I wouldn’t have to stand in line anywhere if I decided where to eat soon. I needed to spend an hour doing Galnet research and it made sense to multitask, fueling my body and my curiosity at the same time. The weather was as nice as it ever gets in Atlanta with the temperature in the mid-70s, the sun shining and a light breeze to keep the pollen from settling so I turned south on Peachtree Road and had my van drop me and my laptop off at Fellini’s, a pizza place on Peachtree with a patio. The van would find a parking place—always a challenge in Buckhead—so that I could get food before the lunch rush started. Fellini’s has been around for nearly fifty years. They have decent New York style thin crust pizza and delicious giant salads. Instead of giving customers numbers when they place their orders, Fellini’s provides plastic signs with photos of old movie stars. I hoped it wasn’t a bad omen, but when I ordered a slice, a salad and a medium Starbuzz I got Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones being chased by the giant boulder.
I took my laptop, my customer identification sign and my Starbuzz out on the patio and found a seat at a two-top under the shade of a striped awning. Laptop screens have improved a lot since I was a kid, but glare is still a problem so I preferred being out of the sun. At least I didn’t have to worry about finding a Wi-Fi signal since congruent technology made that concern a thing of the past. I put on a bone-conductance v-tooth headset and sub-vocalized to my phone to pull the bank routing numbers from Mosley’s check and find out as much as it could using publicly available resources. I’d circle back later and find out more using a few back doors I had available. I used the bone conductance headset for security even though the patio was still mostly empty, because information security is an art that requires constant practice. More of my clients had lost sensitive information over loose lips at lunch than from deliberate cyberattacks and I wanted to set a good example.
Eternal paranoia is the price of freedom from industrial espionage, unfortunately. One corporate executive I’d worked with had cut her forearm on an intentionally sharpened piece of workout equipment at her gym and didn’t realize that the Band-Aid her duplicitous trainer had given her included a tiny microphone and transmitter. Her company almost lost several million when they were underbid by less than a thousand dollars for a large government contract. I found the Band-Aid stuck to the side of her office trash can and we used it to track back and discover which competitor had set her up and stolen sensitive information. The Department of Planetary Security blacklisted the competitor for three years and hit them with a huge fine, too. My client’s firm got the contract and she’s now one of my best references. Who would have thought the market for centimeter-sized surveillance drones was so competitive? I even had a dozen samples in my backpack tool bag I used as sales tools when trying to win new clients.
I should have just enough time to see if Tomáso was using the security systems in the Ad Astra complex to spy on me before my order arrived. I didn’t have to exercise my hacking skills to do so, either, since I’d designed and installed those systems myself. I checked the logs for recent access to the sensors in my apartment and was surprised to see that I was a much more popular person than I’d thought.
Three different Galnet addresses were monitoring my living space. One, fairly obviously, was Tomáso’s. He wasn’t even trying to hide his tracks. Since I’d worked with him on designing the security for the Dauushan consulate he knew very well that I could tell he was snooping. I tracked back the second Galnet address and saw that it came from a Pâkk-standard apartment on an upper floor of the Ad Astra complex. For now, I’d assume that was Shepherd. The third address was a mystery, however. It wasn’t local and routed through several layers of congruencies. I traced it up seven levels and was able to determine that it routed back to an Atlanta area subnet but couldn’t learn more without spending quite a bit of time separating false leads from true ones. I made a mental note to do more research into the third address just as the waiter arrived with my generous portion of salad.
While I dipped forkfuls of lettuce and green olives into my balsamic-on-the-side I turned my mind to a certain gray pinstripe suit-wearing operator named Cornell. I wasn’t sure about the best way to track him down. Unless he’d tried to enter the network control room in the sub-sub-basement of the Georgia Capitol building there wouldn’t be any visual records of him I could access easily. Tracing the details of the bank account that paid the senior citizen Earth First marchers might get more information about him but I’d bet putting anchovies on my pizza that there would be several layers of cut-outs between that account and Cornell himself. By the way—I hate anchovies. I felt a vibration in my belt holster and heard a buzzing sound on my headset. I tapped the ear piece.
“Cellphone,” said my cellphone.
“Jack,” I said, playing the say-your-name game right back.
“No,” said my phone. “Cornell’s cellphone. You asked me to remind you.”
It always pays to surround yourself with people and devices smarter than you are. At that point, between bites of salad, I felt like I’d be surrounded by people smarter than I am at an idiots’ convention. Ouch. I reached into my pocket and found Cornell’s cellphone next to my Swiss Army Knife tech support model with wire strippers, four different types of screwdrivers and a punch-down tool. I put the stun phone on the table next to my nearly empty salad bowl. It was probably too late, given how much I’d handled the device, but I grabbed my phone, took pictures of Cornell’s phone from all angles, and asked my phone to try to identify any prints on it that weren’t mine. That should take a few minutes.
From what I could see by examining it closely, Cornell’s phone itself was a standard 6-inch iPhone 21m with a petabyte of RAM and dual congruencies tuned to terrestrial an
d off-planet portions of Galnet. It was covered by a black insulated rubber case that held the stunning mechanism. I turned it on, put it in off-network mode and pushed the slider on the back of the case. As I’d seen before, two metal electrode “fangs” came out. An app auto-opened on the phone’s screen. I saw with some concern that the stun gun function had been set to deliver a charge more appropriate to stop an adult male Dauushan than a 97 kilogram adult male human. I was glad Cornell hadn’t used the stun gun on me and now understood why he was so concerned about the possibility of me using the device on him. He was playing rough—and clearly he had played me yesterday outside the network room. I adjusted the device to a much lower setting and continued.
The stun-gun case came off easily enough with a little help from my Swiss Army Knife and I repeated the scan of the naked device with my own cell phone. I’d made sure not to touch any surfaces so there was a decent chance of getting some of Cornell’s prints. As Murphy would have it my waiter picked the moment when I was most focused on removing the stun gun case to bring my slice of pizza so I had him put it on the far side of the table and kept working.
Cornell had used his thumbprint to unlock his phone. It was trivial to use UV-light from my phone to capture and reproduce the ridges and whorls necessary to wake up the unit. I started by opening his contacts. Most seemed to be women. Many had notes about where he’d met them, where they lived and how he rated them in bed. He appeared to have a set of codes using asterisks, plus-signs, pound-signs and exclamation points for the women he’d slept with that I had no interest in trying to work out. Other contacts included a barber, a florist, a free clinic, a Mercedes dealership, a hovercar rental agency and more than a dozen upscale Atlanta-area restaurants. Several entries were just listed as initials or combinations of letters and numbers. I thought I knew who OM1776 was and my phone confirmed that was Oscar Mosley’s number.
I forwarded Cornell’s contacts to my laptop and phone so they could work on cross-referencing the numbers without associated names then opened up his call logs. Two numbers were called most recently—I assumed those were Penn and Princeton to set up yesterday’s ambush. My belt holster and headset buzzed again. I answered.
“Pizza,” said my cellphone.
“Thanks,” I said and hung up. It was nice to have something looking out for my welfare. I reached over and grabbed the paper plate and slice. It was still warm and I sprinkled oregano and Parmesan cheese on it. I skipped the garlic salt since I had a client meeting at two o’clock and there are some things even galtech can’t counteract.
I moved from call logs to text logs while I ate. As I expected I didn’t find any Earth First Isolationist scripts or offers of fifty thousand galcreds. I did see several messages from a sender identified only as GEN asking Cornell for status reports. One of Cornell’s replies from early yesterday morning read “tport inn anti-santa a go.” Santa is a pejorative name for Nicósns. Could this be referencing the incident with the Nicósn Supreme Prelate that Poly and I prevented last night? Was Cornell involved in the Earth First Christians as well as the Earth First Isolationists? He didn’t seem like an evil mastermind—more like a competent henchman.
My belt holster and headset buzzed yet again. I took a quick sip of my Starbuzz in case my phone was going to warn me about impending dehydration.
“Yes,” I said.
“Preliminary results are available on Oscar Mosley’s check,” said my phone.
“Shoot.”
“Bang,” said my phone. I cleared my throat in a cut-the-crap manner.
“Oscar Mosley’s check is being paid through several layers of obfuscating entities,” continued my phone. “One of them is Earth First Isolationist Headquarters in Fort Collins, Colorado.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “It’s easy to understand why the Isolationists’ HQ might fund local protesters. Who’s funding Isolationist headquarters?”
“A think tank called the Monroe Doctrine Foundation,” said my phone. With a name like that they’d have to be strongly Isolationist.
“And who’s behind them?”
“There are several layers of cutouts,” said my phone, “but the next identifiable organization up the chain is something called the James K. Polk Group.”
“Wasn’t Polk the president during the Mexican-American War?”
“Correct. The size of the United States was increased by a third and Mexico was reduced to half its original size.”
“Interesting. That sounds more militant than isolationist.”
“Public documents allowed tracking funding sources up one more level.”
“Shoo… tell me,” I said.
“Eighty-seven percent of the money for the James K. Polk Group comes from the EUA Corporation.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Not at all,” said my phone. “The connection is there.”
The EUA Corporation was a Wall Street darling, a fast-growing but secretive company with a knack for buying firms that couldn’t adapt to GaFTA-driven disruptions. One pundit described them as finding buggy whip manufacturers and re-tooling them to serve the needs of the BDSM crowd. They’d been making waves by purchasing military technology companies and had recently shifted to buying small pharmaceutical and software companies.
“Didn’t EUA just buy… ?”
“VIGorish Labs,” said my phone.
I closed up my laptop, put Cornell’s cell phone back in its stun gun case and drank the last of my Starbuzz. Then I touched my phone to Indiana Jones’ face to leave a generous tip for my waiter and summoned my van to meet me out front. I cleaned up the table, tossed or recycled containers as appropriate and entered a door with Humphrey Bogart’s picture on it to “wash my hands.” Lauren Bacall’s picture was on the adjacent door. My van was there when I stepped outside. I hope I could stay out of the way of rolling boulders.
This afternoon’s meeting with a new prospective client had suddenly gotten much more interesting.
Chapter 16
“Just drive down that road, until you get blown up.” ― General George Patton
VIGorish Labs’ headquarters was in one of the many office complexes near Hartsfield Port south of Atlanta. Despite the growth of Terra’s busiest airport and its expansion into a top ten spaceport there was still plenty of industrial land near the port for offices, warehouses, light manufacturing centers and hangers for both aircraft and spacecraft. Hartsfield Port was a critical engine for Atlanta’s economy. UPPS—United Parcel and Postal Services—had its home office in Atlanta and used Hartsfield as its primary off-planet transshipping hub. Delta American Air-Space, or the D’Am Company as locals referred to it, was a major employer. It controlled half the gates at the airport and more than a third of the pads at the spaceport.
One of the ironies of Earth’s membership in the Galactic Free Trade Association was that access to teleportation technology didn’t kill the airlines. Like plans for the paperless office forty years earlier, teleportation, at least with the precision required to ensure sentient beings remained sentient at the other end, led to more air miles, not fewer. Economics were the main reason. Teleportation was substantially more expensive than air travel, especially after cheap congruent energy eliminated airlines’ dependence on the vicissitudes of the price of oil for their profitability. Airlines were booming as their ticket prices sank to new lows.
Increased business for the airlines also meant increased traffic around Hartsfield Port. That was why I left ninety minutes to travel seventeen miles from Buckhead to the offices of VIGorish Labs. Airport traffic levels were only part of the problem, however. GaFTA membership had not affected Atlanta’s horrendous traffic constrictions and I needed to drive through the worst bottleneck in the metro area, the Downtown Connector, to get to VIGorish Labs.
Atlanta has always been a transportation hub. Originally it had been a railroad town. One of the early names for the city had been Terminus since it was the end—or the beginning—of several lines. As a
fan of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series that had always made me smile since Terminus was also the name of the planet where the super-scientific First Foundation had been established.
The Foundation series was based on psychohistory, the idea that the behavior of people in large numbers could be accurately predicted. There must not have been any psychohistorians on the team designing the Downtown Connector, though. The highway engineers had merged two major north-south interstates, run the combined roadway through Atlanta’s commercial core, built complex intersections with a third key east-west interstate and were surprised when seven lanes in each direction proved inadequate for the volume of vehicles. Alternate routes had been vetoed by powerful political interests and NIMBY neighborhoods so the Downtown Connector remained a sluggish parking lot during not-so-rush hours twice a day. Even at twelve-thirty in the afternoon, leaving ninety minutes to get to the airport area might not be enough. If I was lucky and traffic was light I’d get there early and should have time to scope out the lay of the land around VIGorish Labs before my meeting started.
My van was handling the driving. So far—knock wood—there weren’t any backups. That meant I had time to do a quick review of VIGorish Labs. Last week I’d received a call from the office of Anthony Zwilniki, their founder, requesting a meeting. The staffer contacting me said his CEO wanted to integrate Orishen technology into his company’s next generation of virtual immersive gaming simulators. He said that one of Mr. Zwilniki’s business associates at another firm had said I was a wiz with everything Orishen. I appreciated the secondhand kudos from whoever had recommended me and assured the staffer that I could meet with his boss whenever it was convenient. After some back and forth on scheduling with two layers of Zwilniki’s underlings it was determined that this afternoon was the soonest we could meet face to face. Like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, Anthony Zwilniki—Tony Zed to the media—was a charismatic entrepreneurial genius. It was his idea to make virtual immersive gaming truly immersive by submerging players in wide Plexiglas tubes full of water. Floating in a tube of liquid with neutral buoyancy solved several problems. Players could now move freely in all three dimensions instead of being stuck inside simulator cockpits. The weight of the heavy VR headsets that used to give players neck aches was greatly reduced as well and tactile feedback could be provided by targeted water jets more easily than through bulky tactile feedback suits. Their first game, Atlantis Leviathan, proved immensely popular and the sequel, Space Leviathan, was even more so. Three years ago the company had created a business division that applied their technology for training workers in undersea and orbital habitats. Rumor had it that their latest new market was military training simulations. I’d heard that the impact of jets of water simulating bullets could leave significant bruises.
Xenotech Rising: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 1) Page 15