by Nyx Smith
"What went wrong?"
Freese coughs, clears his throat. He sounds nervous, saying, "We got sleazed."
"How bad?"
"It was like . . . somebody knew we'd be there. They popped in and blew us away, sucked out all the guano before we got more than a dime."
"How is that possible?"
The silence from the front of the desk gives Gordon warning. He turns in his chair to face Freese and finds the man fidgeting, rubbing at his brow, his nose, his chin. He doesn't seem to have any answers and that's bad because Freese is supposed to have all the answers. In his relatively short tenure with Cyberspace Development Corp, a Fuchi subsidiary, he engineered some major advances for the code in persona chips. He is a brain and now he is Gordon's brain. One of his jobs is to play a little game. He skates into Fuchi financial datastores and moves numbers around. Sometimes he fiddles with interbank accounts. He likes to think of himself as a kind of watchdog. Every time he succeeds in transferring funds from one part of Fuchi, say, the Pan-Europa division, to Gordon's finger accounts, he comes and tells Gordon just how he did it, so that Gordon can order improvements in security.
What Freese is saying now is that someone beat him to it. Gordon doesn't like that. "I asked you a question."
Freese rubs at his jaw. "I never seen anything like it."
"You're the expert. Explain it."
Freese stands almost motionless for going on thirty seconds, staring at the front right corner of Gordon's desk, then rummages through his pockets and pulls out a chip-camera. "I could show you," he says. "I got it all . . ."
Before he can say anything further, Gordon points at the desktop. Freese puts the carrier down. Gordon reaches over and picks it up. A record of the run that went wrong? Evidence that might conceivably be used to crucify the entire Special Administration? Evidence that will shortly be eradicated beyond any chance of recovery. "This is a record of the run?"
"Yeah. Just the main bits."
"You have records stored elsewhere?"
"Uh, no." Freese shakes his head. "I figured I better be careful. Guano like this could cause trouble."
Faintly, Gordon nods. "Good thinking."
Freese smiles nervously.
Gordon taps an optical key in the touch-sensitive top of his desk and an entire workstation console winks on. A display equipped with multiple displays and a full suite of data-ports rises out of the desktop. Gordon taps a few more optical keys and slides the chip from Freese into a port near the display's base. Another tap and the record file from Freese's chip begins executing.
The first scene to appear is direct from the Fuchi private telecommunications grid—the floor of a narrow cavern formed by the cool jet cliffs of a pair of colossal datastores, soaring up infinitely tall into the black electron night. Between the two massive datastores burns the cobalt blue beam of a datastream, looking as hot as the interior of a nuclear furnace.
"ID the stream," Gordon says.
Freese replies, "Funds transactions between Fuchi Union Trust and Fuchi World Bank. An average of ten thousand transactions a second. And they're both on the Fuchi private grid."
Simplifying the task of an intercept.
On Gordon's display, five iconic figures now materialize beside the blazing data stream, Freese and his team of deckers. The sheer volume of the beam make the decker's icons seem puny and frail. Their iconic forms resemble construction workers: hard hats crowned by flashing blue strobes, blue-striped vests. All synchronized to match the blue of the datastream. They set out two lines of glowing blue traffic cones, and, between the two lines of cones, begin construction of a temporary node, a dataline junction that will vanish without a trace once the job is complete.
It's a tactic they've used before. Gordon takes a drag from his Platinum Select and watches the milliseconds tick by on the counter at the top of his display screen. So far nothing unusual.
Just down the datastream hovers a violet globe sizzling with red veins like the markings on a soccer ball. Probably Killer IC of sufficient strength to induce lethal feedback and fry the brain of any decker it attacks. Not a problem for Freese and his team unless they frag their Fuchi access codes or set off a system alert.
Freese and his team open neon blue toolboxes. From the boxes they take jet black panels. They fit the panels together to form a large black box surrounding a section of the datastream. The box has two circular ports, allowing the datastream to pass untouched through the center of the box.
Then they step through the walls of the box.
And into a sculptured node.
Freese and his deckers move into position on the verge of a vast virtual highway a thousand lanes wide and stretching off to infinity in both directions. Iconic sedans fill every lane, streaming along at a speed almost beyond comprehension. As each sedan approaches it flashes its value in nuyen. Freese and his deckers, now resembling police, pick out various sedans with jabbing fingers and wave them down a newly constructed exit ramp.
Briefly, the exit ramp winks, Dataline To Secret Caribbean League Accounts. A counter in the exit ramp's pavement keeps a running tally: ten thousand nuyen, fifty thousand, a hundred and climbing. Freese's team is selective. The sedans they finger never total more than five digits in nuyen, never less than four. Nothing large enough to instigate an immediate alert, and that's all that matters.
Someone somewhere will have to explain what happened to the missing funds, probably within a matter of hours. Not Gordon's problem. His problem is the Special Administration and Fuchi Americas' ruthless competition. If a VP in some banking subsidiary has to be sacrificed to the cause, it's a necessary expense. An investment to secure the future.
"This is where it happened," Freese says.
The greenish haze infiltrates the scene. A whirling five-pointed star like the Matrix icon for the entire Fuchi private grid appears in the electron night just above Freese's iconic head. An oval portal rimmed in sizzling electric green rises out of the pavement of the exit ramp. Iconic sedans sent down the ramp pass through the sizzling oval and vanish into the black interior of the portal.
Before Freese or his team can react, twenty million nuyen are gone.
"What's happening?" Freese shouts.
Three of his deckers continue waving sedans down the ramp. They move like zombies, badly configured semi-autonomous knowbots, stilted, jerky, puppets on strings. Another ten million vanishes into the portal. Then Freese looks up.
"Slag that fragger!" Freese shouts.
One of his deckers draws a shimmering neon sidearm and opens fire on the whirling star above Freese's head. The bullets wink Sparky IC. The star spins into a blur. The bullets abruptly reverse direction and separate into a stream of whirling fragments. The decker screams. As the bullet fragments strike, his iconic body is immersed in a storm of sparking discharges like lightning flashes.
Then he winks out.
"Bucky, he's dead!" another decker shouts. "Jim's dead!"
"This is impossible!" Freese shrieks.
Three of the deckers direct an unbroken stream of sedans down the exit ramp and into the portal. Freese yanks an item from his police-style equipment belt. Trace and Burn! it winks. He fires a liquid stream at the whirling star and then suddenly he's screaming too and it's all going completely to shit.
Freese slams through the walls of his temporary node and then Gordon's display screen goes blank.
Gordon looks across his desk at Freese.
"What the fuck happened?"
Freese's face is gleaming with sweat. He looks considerably worse than a deckhead who's suffering from dump shock. He looks scared. "I'm not sure what happened."
This is not an answer that Gordon likes. If someone offered to fling Freese out the nearest available window, Gordon would feel tempted. But that's purely an emotional response. He lights a fresh Platinum Select. "What's your theory?"
"It's still evolving."
Gordon leans back in his chair. He sips his coffee. "You tried to
trace utility. You got dumped."
Freese nods.
"Your opposition used the Fuchi star for an icon. Internal Security?"
Freese shakes his head. "There's no . . . there's no record of IntSec being involved. I checked."
"Three of your deckers appeared to lose control of their icons."
"We're not clear on exactly what happened with that."
Gordon nods. "I'll tell you what happened. Somebody's got program code and talent as good as our best. What does that suggest?"
Freese spends a while working that over, looking more anxious than before. "I'm not sure," he says finally. "I've been thinking about it. I don't think the hostile used program code that slipped out the back door. Nothing this hot ever slipped out."
"Then what?"
"Something new," Freese says. "The hostile scammed us. My temporary node turned green just before the attack. I think that was a deliberate effect. That's where the attack really started. I think what the hostile did was create a mirage. He superimposed his own code over the temporary node I constructed. A node within a node. Then, when I moved against him, I became in effect a decker intruding on a hostile node. He redirected my trace, and the redirect inserted tapeworm IC into the trace code. And the worm rode my signal right into my workstation CPU. I had to crash my workstation or the worm would've scrambled every pulse of hard memory I had."
"Which tells us what?"
Freese hesitates. "The slag's hot. His code is hot. His system, deck, whatever, is liquid fire. Hoi, I'm not even sure if what I just said is possible."
"Did he come in through the Matrix?"
"I got my team working on that. We're searching the archives for any indications. But if he sleazed the SANs like he scammed us I doubt we'll find anything."
Gordon doubts it, too. Doubts that someone with the talent to breach the Fuchi private telecommunications grid would stumble over the telltales that would record the intrusion. Not if that person had help. Not if, like Freese, that person was up to date on the latest access codes and security protocols. The hostile might have jacked in through the Matrix or even a Fuchi mainframe—no way to know just yet—but it's almost a certainty that whoever scammed Freese had help from the inside. That's how it works.
There's no denying that the walls of the Fuchi grid are tallest where they meet the Matrix, but it's also a fact that Fuchi mainframes maintain defenses in depth. It's just as easy to get burned by Red-12 security somewhere on the inside as at the outer walls. And getting out alive is no less a feat than getting in. The rare few who've managed it, in so far as Gordon is aware, all had help from the inside.
"Who knew you were making the intercept?"
"Just my team."
And maybe a spouse or live-in, or a friend or friends of friends. But never mind that for now. Gordon can see he's got plenty of work ahead without carrying out every calculation to the final decimal point. Obviously, he's going to have to launch a special op merely to find out precisely who had advance knowledge of the intercept and how that knowledge was used. Obviously, whoever sleazed Freese is a threat and that threat must be terminated. Gordon must also decide whether or not to roll up the special operations group under Freese's control before it becomes an embarrassment of cataclysmic proportions.
Deckheads are no less expendable than banking VPs. It's really just a question of whether or not the expenditure is warranted. Fortunately, Freese and his group work off-premises, under the auspices of a Fuchi subsidiary, so Gordon at least has the option of making some plausible denial of responsibility.
"I want you scanning for any indication that the intercept was noticed and traced back to us."
Freese nods. "Okay. Sure."
"Start now."
Freese takes the hint and departs.
12
The building lies on the far side of New York City, beyond the Hudson River, in part of Newark's Sector 6 known as Little Asia. As buildings go it is rather small and unassuming, four stories tall, made of brick, small windows of reinforced transparex, and more than a century old. It is easy to miss, situated between the bright, colorful façades of the Willow Club and the Holy Savior Buddhist Temple, overshadowed by the brilliant neon and sizzling laser displays lighting the rest of the street, turning night into day and directing the eye to the many restaurants and bars and nightclubs and pachinko parlors and small casinos and stores and other businesses pervading the district.
This one small, unassuming brick building might be considered wholly unremarkable, unworthy of notice, except for the transparex panes of the revolving door leading into the ground-floor lobby, each marked with the mon of the Honjowara-gumi.
It has been the traditional headquarters of the Honjowara-gumi for more than four decades, located on Bergen Street.
Machiko arrives at four a.m. when a Hughes Stallion security chopper of the Nagato Security Defense Force alights briefly on the roof. Mere hours have passed since the attacks on the GSG, and Machiko has had no rest. Nagato forces remain on alert. The threat that faces them remains a mystery. New attacks could conceivably arise from any quarter. Despite this, in just a few hours' time, Chairman Honjowara will travel here to the Bergen Street headquarters, to the very heart of the Newark plex, to conduct his monthly "Open House."
The very idea of exposing the Chairman to any unnecessary risks seems like madness, given the situation. Yet Machiko is sworn to obey as well as defend, and the Chairman will not be dissuaded.
"He who enters with a gun in hand reveals his fear," Honjowara-sama told her. "Remember this as you review the security preparations. Remember that our enemies will be watching."
Already, forces are in motion, preparations begun. Machiko finds that Major Hakatoro's number two, Captain Oseki, a very reliable and experienced officer of the Security Defense Force, has activated a command center on the second floor of the headquarters' building. Oseki has ordered barricades into place, blocking all vehicular traffic from the street running past the front of the headquarters and from the alleyway located to the rear. No pedestrians may pass the barricades without first proving their identity and submitting to weapons checks. Technical teams are sweeping the block for anything resembling weapons or explosives. Special observation teams that include GSG snipers are even now taking up positions on selected rooftops along the block. Security choppers patrol the sky, alert for any unusual activity both from air traffic and on the ground.
Machiko puts on a headset tuned to the SDF frequencies and takes a brief tour of the block. She finds it difficult to keep a settled spirit, for everywhere she looks she sees a potential avenue of attack: from the surrounding streets, the alleyways, the rooftops. The presence of an advance squad of GSG, standing watch at the barricades, reassures her only a little. No more than the small teams of SDF performing weapons and security checks. She would like the entire block fortified on a scale equal to that of the Chairman's mansion. But that is not possible. The Chairman forbids it, for it is a matter of image and prestige.
The event of the day soon to dawn will be an event of the Honjowara-gumi. Nagato forces must therefore step aside. The SDF must maintain only the most minimal presence. Even the GSG must take care not to overshadow the clan's own force of irregulars, for it is the clan's own people who must be seen as having the dominant responsibility for security.
A company of hand-picked kobun, all in the signature red and black suit jackets of the clan, suit jackets rather than body armor, all trained in the use of weapons, primarily handguns, line the barricades at both ends of the block. Many are experienced fighters, but they lack the training and discipline of the SDF, and could hardly be considered warriors on the scale of the average member of the Guard.
Still, Machiko takes the time to meet and confer with each of the handful of wakashu, or young headmen, responsible for supervising the kobun. These headmen are important persons within the districts their particular factions control. They must be shown respect and the acting senior of the GSG must be
seen showing them respect.
At four-thirty a.m., a female officer with the rank of deputy chief arrives from Omni Police Services, the corporation currently responsible for law enforcement within the Newark city limits. The deputy chief informs that OPS will be posting additional patrols to the district, and has several emergency teams on standby near the headquarters building. The deputy chief is of course quite content to allow the Honjowara-gumi to run its own show. Relations between Nagato Combine, the Honjowara-gumi in particular, and OPS may be characterized as generally excellent. That is due to the fact that Nagato Corporation owns a significant bloc of ownership shares in Sapporo Corp, which owns OPS. It is also a fact that the chairman of Sapporo is a distant cousin of Chairman Honjowara and their relations are usually cordial.
At four forty-five a.m., a council of district executives arrives, along with their headmen, coming from districts across the entire megaplex. They and the kobun who will soon meet them here on the streets of Little Asia will assist the local headmen in ensuring that peace and order are maintained throughout the entire hood.
Zoge-san, the Chairman's counselor and lifelong friend, is on hand to speak with the district executives and their headmen personally. He reminds them that the day of the Chairman's Open House has become a local festival, the festival of the lotus and reed, symbols of the clan. No unseemly incidents can be permitted. Suspicious persons spotted in the district should be detained for questioning. Rowdies and drunks should be apprehended and handed over to the OPS police. The kobun may utilize any degree of force necessary to see that the rules are obeyed, but always they must be discreet. On this day of all days, even the oldest of grandparents and the youngest of children must be able to walk the streets without fear of incident.
Of course, the kobun should follow all the usual guidelines for patrol of any clan district.
"The majority of our people live within a few blocks of their employment," Zoge-san says in a quiet, clear voice. "They do not drive, they walk. If you see people are having difficulty crossing the street, command traffic to halt. If a man drops litter on the sidewalk, call his attention to what he has done and why it is wrong. In all cases, you will be seen as the personal representative of the Chairman, his strong hand, intervening in the ordinary affairs of ordinary persons, like the father who correctly takes a keen interest in the lives of his children. Thus the people will be assured that their father watches over them and guards them. Thus you will earn the people's respect. And thus you will ensure that our clan continues to enjoy the support of the very people we must serve if we are to survive and prosper."