The Moreau Quartet: Volume One: 1

by S. Andrew Swann

  “Why the right one?”

  Bobby parked himself next to the bell jar, and drew a metal cart from another invisible gap in the shelving. Three different processor boxes rested on the cart. There was an ancient Sony that was held together with duct tape. On top of it was a more compact Tunja 2000. On a shelf, by itself, was a huge homemade box. Frozen rainbows of ribbon-cable snaked from box to box.

  “Can’t get more right than Binder—” Bobby snickered. “Hate Binder. Wish you were investigating his absence from the mortal coil.”

  “Why?” Nohar could understand Bobby’s dislike for Binder. But Nohar had never heard him express a political view on anything before. Legislation had always been irrelevant to Bobby.

  “Need a license to hate a politician? Give you just an example—last session in the House, he led a vote to scuttle NASA’s deep-probe project.”

  Ah, the space program.

  Bobby pulled a small blue device from a shelf. Nohar got up and walked over. The device had AT&T markings on it, a pair of LCD displays, and a standard keypad. It could have been a voice phone, but there was no handset. Instead it had five or six different jacks for optical cable. “Those probes have been sitting on the moon—would you plug this in?”

  Bobby handed him the end of a coil of optical cable and indicated a small plate on the floor. The plate had old East-Ohio Gas company markings. Nohar reached down and lifted it. Under the plate was a ragged hole in the concrete. Half a meter down was a section of PVC pipe running under the concrete floor of the warehouse. A hacksaw had cut a diamond-shaped hole in the pipe, and a female jack had been planted amidst the snaking optical cable. Nohar knelt down and made the connection.

  Something Bobby was working on, probably the blue AT&T box, made a satisfied beep.

  “Thanks, I have trouble getting down there myself. Where was I? Oh, yeah, Binder’s shortsightedness. His group of budget nimrods in the House have been stalling the launch for nine-ten years. Finally decided maintenance was too expensive, so they’re going to dismantle the project. Forget the fact they would have saved money in the long run by launching on schedule, and we would be getting pictures back from Alpha Centauri by now, and the Sirius probe would have started transmitting already—”

  Nohar shrugged. “My concerns lie closer to home.”

  “Yeah. My friend, the pragmatic tiger.” Bobby snapped a few more connections. “Worst bit is, he started as a liberal.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope, kept running for the state legislature as a civil libertarian, government-for-the-people type guy. Lost. Kept losing until he shifted to the far right and got elected. Never looked back. Children—can we say ‘hypocrite’?

  “Enough of that—The Digital Avenger is now online.”

  Bobby flipped a switch and a new rank of monitors came to life with displays of scrolling text. Inside the bell jar, lasers were carving the air into a latticework of green, yellow, and red light. “Now what kind of system do we want to run our sticky little fingers through?”

  First things first. “Any information on MLI you can dig up.”

  “As you wish—” Bobby pulled out a keyboard and rested it across the arms of his wheelchair.

  He paused for a moment. “Another thing about Binder. With just a little tweak of government finances, we might have caught up to the technology that got wasted with the Japs—”

  “I thought you were an anarchist.”

  “Don’t throw my principles at me when I’m drooling over biointerfaces nobody this side of the Pacific knows how to install. Besides, the engineering shortage is degrading the quality of my stock.”

  There was hypnotic movement in the bell jar as the holographic green web distorted and a blue trail started to snake through the mass. Bobby noted his interest. “Like the display? You ever hear a hacker refer to the net? That’s it. My image of it, anyway. The green lines are optical data tracks, the yellow’s a satellite uplink or an RF channel, red’s a proprietary channel—government or commercial—the few white ones are what I and the software can’t figure out—whoops, close there, someone’s watching that one.” The blue line took a right angle away from a sudden pixel glowing red. “Nodes are computers, junction and switch boxes, satellites, office buildings, etcetera. Jackpot!”

  Bobby smiled. “Anyone ever tell you credit records are the easiest things in the world to access?”

  The blue line had stopped at a node, which was now glowing blue and pulsing lightly. Text was scrolling across three screens as Bobby’s smile began leaving his face. “You gave me the right name?”

  “Midwest Lapidary Imports.”

  Bobby sighed. “Never as easy as it looks.” He typed madly for a minute or so, then he typed a command that faded the blue line back to the neutral green. Bobby shook his head. “MLI doesn’t exist.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “No credit records—”

  “Check my credit. Someone is making deposits to my account.”

  More mad typing and colored lights. Bobby ended with a whistle. “You want to loan me some money?”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Just daily cash deposits to your account, untraceable. Thirty kilobucks, plus . . .”

  Nohar was speechless. He hadn’t had the time, lately, to check the balance on his account. After a while, he said, “Check somewhere else.”

  “If you say so. I have an in at the County Auditor’s mainframe.” The blue trail snaked out again, and headed straight for a small nexus of red pixels and lines in a corner of the bell jar. Just before the blue line hit the nexus, it turned red itself. “Isn’t that neat? But I am telling you, you can’t have a company without a credit record. Economically impossible. Even the most phony setup in the world is going to be in debt to someone, you can’t—”

  Bobby paused as the new red line pulsed and text scrolled across one of the screens. “Okay, I’m wrong, you can.”

  “What?”

  “I just downloaded the tax info on MLI.” The scrolling continued. “Shit.”

  Bobby remained silent and the scrolling eventually stopped. The new red line faded. Bobby hit the keyboard again and numbers scrolled across another screen, and stopped. Bobby was looking at the display with his jaw open. Nohar looked at the screen. No more than columns of numbers to him. “What’re you looking at?”

  “The third line. The net assets they reported to the County.”

  “Eighty thousand and change, what’s so great about—”

  “Those figures are in millions.”

  Time for Nohar’s jaw to drop. Eight—no, eighty—billion dollars in assets. Bobby started scrolling through the information. “And forty thousand mega-bucks in sales and revenue— With no credit record? Someone is playing games here.”

  These guys were having billion-dollar turnovers from gemstones? Maybe he was in the wrong line of work. This was one set of rich franks.

  “And Christ is alive and selling swampland in Florida—these guys have never been audited.”

  “So they play by the rules.”

  Bobby shook his head. “You dense furball. That has nothing to do with it. The Fed assigns auditors for anything approaching this size. And those auditors aren’t paid to sit on their hands. They’re paid to dig up dirt—”

  “So why hasn’t MLI been audited?”

  “Beats me.” Bobby studied the screen. “It ain’t normal. For some reason, MLI hasn’t raised a single flag in the IRS computers. They don’t pay too little, or too much—and that is damn hard to do. They even have this little subsidiary, NuFood, to dump money into so they can smooth out their losses. Know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “It’s all a fake and they have a contact in the Fed telling them what their tax returns should look like.”

  Nohar shrugged. “
So what are they spending their money on?”

  “I can give you a list of real estate from the property taxes.” This was accompanied by a few keyboard clicks and scrolling text on one screen. “There’s records of withholding, I can give you a list of employees and approximate salaries.” More clicks, another scrolling list, “That and a few odd bits of equipment they depreciate. Not much else, sorry.”

  Nohar was looking at the names scrolling across one of the screens. He was hoping he might glimpse a name he’d know. No luck on that score.

  “The main thing I want to know is how they were paying Binder—”

  Bobby shrugged. “Public database at the Board of Elections, no sweat. But there’s a solid limit on the amount of individual and corporate contributions, even for a Senate race. I can’t itemize the public record, but all the illegal shit ain’t gonna be there.”

  The blue rail began snaking its way through the net.

  Bobby had just raised another question in Nohar’s mind. The cops had at least one look at the finance records that told them that the three million was in Johnson’s possession. However, Smith said all the money was from MLI—and that wasn’t legal. Nothing in the police report he’d read had mentioned it. From the campaign end of things, the money had to have looked legitimate—to the cops at least.

  More names were scrolling past Nohar on the last screen. Again, Nohar watched it for names he knew—and, suddenly, he got lucky. Nohar stared in widening fascination at the scroll. It was almost too fast to read at all. He was only picking up about every tenth name, but that was enough.

  Except for the label on it, he was looking at a copy of MLI’s employee list.

  Bobby stopped clicking and in the periphery of Nohar’s vision, the blue line faded. The room was silent for a moment. The only noises were the slow creaking of the ceiling fans, the buzz from the holographic bell jar, and the high-frequency wine of the monitors.

  “What do you see?”

  Nohar was smiling. “Can you cross-reference the MLI employee list with the Binder contributors?”

  “Sure thing, compare and hold the intersection.” Tap, tap, tap.

  “Why don’t you have a voice interface on this thing?”

  “Silly waste of memory. My terminal smokes about twenty megahertz faster than anything else because I don’t bother with the voice. Besides, some of the shit I pull with this thing is best conducted in silence— Bingo!”

  A third list was scrolling by on the last monitor. “Hell, I missed that. Good thing you were paying attention. The intersection set is the entire MLI payroll. Every single one of MLI’s employees made a contribution close to the limit . . .”

  Bobby had stopped talking. Nohar was beginning to smell anger off his friend. “What is it?”

  “The contributions from Midwest Lapidary cover sixty-five percent of Binder’s treasury. These guys own Binder. I knew he was corrupt, but this—”

  Now it made sense. Binder’s finance records held the key—but it now made even less sense for MLI to be behind the killing. Their investment in Binder was incredible. MLI was probably going to lose all that hard-bought influence.

  Then, Nohar remembered what Smith had said—MLI’s connection with Binder was to be severed. That was right before the attempt on Stephie. He still didn’t believe in coincidence, and sever was a sinister verb. Nohar wondered if the other people in the Binder campaign were all right.

  “You’ve got a rat’s nest of innuendo here.”

  Nohar looked at the three lists. Only the last portion of each was shown on their screens. On the left was the list from the public contribution records. In the center was the withholding list from the County Auditor. To the right was the list of the names that intersected the two other lists. Something bothered him—

  “How many people are on the withholding list?”

  “Eight thousand, one hundred, and ninety-two.”

  The employee list had finished with an endless list of T’s— Tracy, Trapman, Trevor, Troy, Trumbull, Trust, Tsoravitch . . .

  “This is alphabetical?”

  “Yes, you seeing something?”

  “There’s something about this list of names. It seems unnatural somehow. I can’t put my finger on it.”

  Bobby hit the keys again. “Perhaps if I ran some pattern-analysis software on it—”

  A brief summary replaced the list on the screen. Bobby read a couple of times. “Blow my mind! There are—get this—exactly 512 names for sixteen letters of the alphabet. 512 starting with A, 512 starting with B, same thing for C, D, E, F, but no G’s, 512 H’s, 512 I’s, no J’s or K’s. There’s L, M, N, O, P, no Q’s, R through T, then nothing till the end of the alphabet. Talk about unnatural patterns—”

  “It’s all fake.”

  Chapter 16

  Nohar stayed with Bobby until it was nearly noon. After Bobby had found those unnatural patterns, he had started dumping tax and credit info on individual employees. All the employees they had checked had no credit record and overpaid their taxes. None of them took more than the standard deduction, no investments, no losses, no dependents. The credit record was an anomaly, since the employees they had checked had all been homeowners without a single mortgage among them.

  One of MLI’s employees was named Kathy Tsoravitch. She allegedly lived in Shaker Heights. Her address gave Nohar something to check, to see just how phony the MLI employee list was.

  The Tory was still waiting for him when he left Budget Surplus. The cabby had been leaning back and listening to the news, looked like it was going to be a profitable day for her. Nohar got in the back.

  “ ’Kay, where to now? Back to the ’hio city?”

  “No, Shaker—”

  She shrugged and started off east. She was a talker, and started going off on recent news events. The Ziphead attacks, a bomb on the Shoreway, and so on. Nohar let her, all her passengers probably got the same treatment.

  When they pulled up outside an empty-looking one-family brick house, there was still thirty dollars left on the meter. Nohar added another twenty and told her to wait.

  Nohar got out and quickly walked up the driveway to get away from immediate observation. He wasn’t dressed for the neighborhood. The clothes made him look like a hood.

  The back of the house was as closed up as the front. Shades were pulled at every window. There wasn’t the ubiquitous ozone smell by the empty garage. It hadn’t been used in a while. The backyard had withered in the summer sun. It was too yellow for Shaker Heights.

  Nohar stood in front of the back door of the house. The lock was a clunky one with a non-optical keypad. The door probably led to the kitchen, but he couldn’t tell because a set of venetian blinds blocked his view. He tried the door. It was locked.

  He stepped back and raised his foot to kick it in, and he had an inspiration. He lowered his foot and typed in zeros—five of them, enough to fill the display—and the enter key. The keys were full-traverse and a little reluctant to move, but Nohar managed to force them to register.

  In response to the dipshit combination, the deadbolt chunked home.

  It made a perverse sort of sense that someone on the MLI payroll never bothered to reprogram the deadbolt combination when it came from the factory.

  He opened the door and went inside Kathy Tsoravitch’s house.

  The door did lead to the kitchen—a pretty damn empty kitchen. He let the door close behind him as he surveyed the nearly empty room. No furniture except the counters, no stove, no micro, no fridge, not even light spots on the linoleum tile floor to show where they should be. The only appliance was a dishwasher built into the base cabinets. He turned on the lights and the overhead fluorescent pinged a dozen times before coming on full.

  He walked over to the sink and his left foot slipped. He looked down and saw that one of the linoleum tiles—some faded abstract geometric p
attern on it—had come loose from the floor in a small cloud of dust, the adhesive no more than crumbling yellow powder. He slid it across the floor with his foot and it hit in the corner of the room, shattering into a half-dozen brittle pieces.

  He stopped at the sink. Its stainless steel was covered with a thin layer of dust. He turned on the water. There was a banshee scream from the plumbing, and a hard knocking shook the faucet. It sputtered twice, splattering rust-red water speckled with black muck, and settled into a shuddering stream. Nohar killed it.

  He opened drawers, but there wasn’t much to see. One drawer held a five-centimeter-long mummified body—a mouse or a bat.

  The house was empty. The place had the same smell as the boxes in Manny’s attic—dry and dusty. Any odor with texture to it had faded long ago to a nothing-smell. Even the little mouse corpse smelled only of dust.

  There was a newspaper—a real newspaper, not a fax—lining a drawer. He pulled out the sheet. The date on the paper was January 12th, 2038, fifteen years ago. The headline was ironic, considering Bobby’s view on recent events. According to the paper, NASA had just gotten appropriations to test the nuclear engines for its deep-probe project. The original plan was to have a dozen probes going to all the near star systems. Now, fifteen years later, Congress was going to scuttle the project before the first one was even launched.

  The end of the Pan-Asian war was news, even two years after the fact. The paper had a rundown on the latest Chinese atrocities in occupied Japan. It also contained the latest 2038 reshuffling of the boundaries within a balkanized India. The Saudis had finally killed off their last oil fire, and found their market gone along with the internal-combustion engine. Even the sheikhs were driving electric. Israel hadn’t yet been driven into the sea, but most of the occupied territory was now radioactive. Russia signed peace treaties with Turkmen and Azerbaidzhan—finally. And the INS released new figures on annual morey immigration. In 2037, it topped at one-point-eight million. Putting the new, 2038 moreau population at over ten million. The United States had the largest moreau population in the world—with the possible exception of China from which no figures were available.