by Tom Clancy
Mark shouldered the crowbar and grinned at Charlie. "Never mind," he said, "we're in business."
He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.
From some distance away came a tiny sound, like a faraway screech of surprise. "Aha," Mark said, cheerful. "Come on, that's what we're after."
He started to jog to their left, down the wall. Charlie followed him. "Look," he said, "what are our chances of getting caught in here?"
Mark grinned as he trotted along. "No better than one in a hundred at the moment." Charlie instantly broke out in a sweat. He preferred much longer odds. "I mean, think about it, Charlie! Programmers are a spoiled bunch these days. They work what they used to call 'banker's hours.'
Nobody in the coroner's office in some little county building in Maine is going to be hanging over their terminal at eight-thirty in the evening waiting to see if someone breaks in or not! If the system is even housed in the same building, which isn't necessarily the case. And their automatic system security is junk. I know, because I broke through it five minutes ago. I pretended to be its system administrator, and my penetration manager gave it a nice set of circular instructions to play with, based on its own check cycle… so right now it's doing the machine equivalent of staring in the mirror and telling itself that everything is fine. And here we are."
Mark stopped and pointed at a brick high up in the wall. "See that?"
That particular "brick" was glowing red hot. "Kind of hard to miss," Charlie said.
"That's the instruction all these other ones were cloned from. Now then." Mark started to walk up the air as if there were stairs there. With the crowbar he pried out that particular brick and caught it in one hand as it fell.
The wall started to crumble. Charlie jumped back, out of reflex, but as the wall tottered outward toward him, the bricks began to fade: By the time they reached the "floor," they were vanishing like fog in sunlight. A moment later he and Mark were looking out across a vast hall full of thousands of beige filing cabinets.
"Wow, imaginative," Mark said, sounding unusually dry. "Somebody in the data-processing department here really gets off on their work."
He walked down out of the air again, tossing the single glowing red brick in his hand as he did. "We'll hang on to this," Mark said. "We'll want it to put things back the way we found them when we're ready to go." He shoved the brick into the air between them. It vanished.
Charlie started walking among the lines and lines of filing cabinets. "This is the visual paradigm the people who work here have been using?" he said.
"The default, yeah," Mark said. "It may make it easier for you to search. The clerking staff'll probably have left some markers for themselves, to make it easier to find things. But boy, oh, boy," and Mark chuckled, "at times like this, do I ever get seized with the desire to redecorate."
"Please don't," Charlie said, walking among the filing cabinets and looking at the little cards inserted in their drawer-fronts.
"Oh, come on, Charlie. Let me just leave a potted palm in here somewhere. I'll even tie a big red ribbon around it."
"No!" 2004 2005, read one cabinet: 2005–2006… Charlie walked along the line of cabinets, looking for 2024.
"Just kidding," Mark said. Charlie wondered about that. "Aha," he said, and grinned at himself. Mark's turn of phrase was catching. "2020. "
The 2024 cabinet was the fourth one down. Charlie pulled its top drawer open, and suddenly there were five other cabinets standing next to that one. "January through May," he said.
He headed for May, opened that cabinet up, and started riffling through the files there. Delano, he thought. Richard Delano. May third…
The file was there, a plain manila folder. Charlie pulled it out.
Instantly the air around him and Mark was full of windows. One of them showed a file structure "tree," full of files all of whose names began with DELANO. Another few windows showed pictures: crime scene shots, pictures of someone's house, probably Delano' s. Then one more window said STATE PATHOLOGIST'S REPORT.
"Yes, indeed," Charlie said softly. "Mark, can I copy these into your workspace?"
"You can copy them right back to yours, if you like. I've still got a link open."
"Both, then. I want to make sure the data's safe." "Consider it done." A big bright gold hoop appeared in the air and set itself on fire. "Chuck anything you want copied through that: It'll make copies both places and then refile itself."
"Good." Charlie glanced at the ring, amused, then reached out and, with one finger, poked the window with the pathologist's report. It opened out into a series of still more windows, with screenfuls and screenfuls of text, and in one window, images of the body at autopsy. Charlie looked at this somberly, then turned his attention to the text.
"He looked real young," Mark said, from behind him, softly.
"Yeah. This was the sixteen-year-old," Charlie said as he read hurriedly down through the report, skimming it, and finding the words he had suspected he would find: Strangulation. Self-inflicted-
"Right," Charlie said, and folded the window down small, and chucked it through the ring. The ring flared. The window vanished. Charlie gathered all the information together again which had come out of the original file, and threw it, too, through the ring. Then he closed the file drawer.
"That it?" Mark said. "You sure you don't need anything else?"
"Not from here. But we've got five other places to hit, still."
"Gonna be a short, dull night for me at this rate," Mark said, sounding disappointed. "Never mind." They walked away from the filing cabinets again to the point where they had first entered, and Mark plucked that red brick out of its hiding place in the air. "Be fruitful and multiply," he told it, and dropped it on the floor.
A moment later there were two of it, and then four, and eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four… Within about thirty seconds the wall had completely rebuilt itself, even to the sign that read FIREWALL. "Mark-" Charlie said warningly, for the sign was now upside down.
"Oh, come on, Charlie! I was real good. I didn't even leave them a potted palm."
"Mark!"
"Oh, all right. Spoilsport."
The sign righted itself. A moment later they were back in Mark's space, where a stack of what appeared to be manila files was floating in midair, and Mark was referencing the "list" window again. "Next-"
The lines and columns and pillars of light dived and swooped around them again, and Charlie closed his eyes after a few seconds of it, since his stomach really did not like this. "Here we are," Mark said, and they found themselves in another walled area, but this time they were inside the painted concrete walls, not outside them.
"Hmm," Mark said. Charlie gulped, wanting to say a lot more than that, for the walls were moving in on them, like something out of an ancient 2-D horror flick… except that these walls were in 3-D, and, as they watched, were slowly sprouting long, cruel, inward-pointing iron spikes.
"Interesting," Mark said. "Those would pin us here, and ID us to the local system administrator, and lock a trace onto my system and any other one affiliated with this search. If we let them." He snapped his fingers, and the pale tracery of his own Digamma routines became more visible around the two of them inside the rapidly shrinking space.
"And we're not gonna let them do that," Charlie said, sweating harder, "are we…?"
"Not a chance. Hush up now, I have to think."
Charlie started to sweat harder and closed his eyes again as once more the Digamma framework around them did its zoom-and-swoosh roller-coaster number.
"They're a little paranoid here," Mark said matter-of-factly. "I wonder if they've had a break-in recently?"
Charlie opened his eyes again. The disorienting slide and swoop of colors had stopped, and Mark was holding in his arms what appeared to be a wide pipe of pure glowing yellow, as thick as the trunk of a tree. He was wedging one end of it against the inward-pushing wall on the left-hand side, and as Charlie watched Mark picked u
p the other end of the branchless yellow "tree trunk" and began to pull on it. It lengthened as he pulled, until it came right up against the wall on the right-hand side. The walls pushed against it, pushed. The "tree trunk" glowed briefly brighter, bent a little-then braced itself still, bending no more.
"There," Mark said. He watched the walls keep trying to push, but they were making no headway. "Automatic system," Mark said. "No one's watching it-banker's hours, as I said. Or else someone's gone for coffee."
"Any way to tell which?" Charlie said, looking around them for a way out.
"Not without taking a chance that they might notice," said Mark. "Come on, let's find you what you need-" He walked over to the wall, brushed his fingers along it in the same testing sort of gesture he had used with the last one. "Huh," he said. "Thought so. Just Caldera, this time. Here, watch this."
Charlie went over to him, looked over his shoulder. "See this?" Mark said, and pushed his hand right into the "wall." "You can manipulate the programming directly without separate instructions, if you know where to grab each line. And you can exploit the holographic nature of the program-"
Charlie didn't know whether or not he should be relieved that he didn't have the slightest idea what Mark was talking about. A second after Mark thrust his hand into the wall, he pulled it out again, holding a doorknob. "And as I thought," Mark said, "the programmer left herself a nice tidy way back into the main programming space for when she was finished testing this." A door outlined itself in the wall: Mark used the doorknob to open it and stepped through. "Mind your step, here-"
" 'She'?" Charlie asked, stepping through after him. They appeared to be in a dimly lit office that stretched for miles in all directions. "You sure about that?"
"Ninety percent," Mark said, walking through the office and looking around him. "Just something about the feel of it Uh-oh. Somebody's in here. No, don't panic!"
Charlie froze and looked around him. Far off to his right, at what looked like about a mile's distance across this absurdly huge spread of carpeting and desks and office furniture and dividers, he could see a light shining over a desk.
"Just somebody looking at a file, somewhere else in the system," Mark said. "Possibly halfway across the city from where this facility is based. The odds of whoever it is being able to see us, or even being authorized to see us, are minuscule. Don't sweat it, just come on and let's see what the paradigm is-"
It took them only a few minutes to find it. Some of the desks had old-fashioned computer terminals on them, and Mark stopped by one of these and poked at it, a rounded eggy-looking thing done partly in a rather retro turquoise, partly in a translucent white plastic. "Somebody here has a sense of humor," Mark said, "or nice taste in antiques." He bent over to tap at the keyboard. "What's your victim's name in Colorado?"
"Velasquez."
"First initial?"
"J. Jaime."
"Which year?"
"Twenty-three."
"Right-" A moment later a large pile of square virtual datascrips appeared on the desk in front of them, and Mark glanced at them. "Copy again?"
Charlie looked through them. Each scrip, as he picked it up, showed him on its surface what it contained. AUTOPSY SYNOPSIS, Charlie read, RAW DATA, ORGAN ANALYSES, TOXICOLOGY-"Yeah."
Mark tapped at the console again. The datascrips vanished out of Charlie's hands. "Done. Let's beat it and hit the next one-"
They got out of there, Mark carefully removing his "tree trunk" and allowing the squashing walls to start coming together again, while at the same time wiping out any evidence of his and Charlie's intrusion. Then they hit the third facility, the coroner's office in Arlington. It had rather more effective security than the first two, so that Mark had to spend five minutes or so breaking in and making sure they wouldn't leave any trace of their entry behind, but the result was the same as in Bangor and Fort Collins.
The fourth Net-based system, at the coroner's offices in DeKalb County just east of Atlanta, to the astonishment of both of them had no security precautions installed around it whatsoever. Mark was practically dancing with frustration at such carelessness while Charlie raided it for the information he needed, and it was with the greatest of difficulty that Charlie kept Mark from building a security barrier around that system and then locking the DeKalb County staff out of it. Nothing Charlie could do, however, could keep Mark from putting up a big virtual billboard that said KILROY WAS HERE in front of the space.
"Somebody I should know?" Charlie said as he made sure the files were copied back to his space.
"Probably not," Mark said, disgusted, "and probably they won't, either."
"There won't be any trace that it was you doing that, will there?" Charlie said, nervous.
"Are you kidding? Of course not. You think I want my dad to-" Mark gave Charlie a look. "Never mind. Come on. Two more-"
They next hit the data storage system for the coroner's office in Queens. The City of New York system was surrounded with a set of nested security barriers so arcane that they actually kept Mark and Charlie away from the target data for a whole hour. Mark spent the whole time sweating and swearing-first in English, in language that Charlie wouldn't have thought Mark knew, and then in Thai, withgreat vehemence-as he dealt with the barriers, which in this implementation looked like layer after layer of barbed-wire fences, with long stretches of bare ground between them. But finally they fell, and the two of them found themselves making their way into a virtual domain that exactly duplicated the coroner's clerk's offices, right down to the potted plants and the baby pictures. The records Charlie found there were more complete than they had been anywhere else they had raided, and Charlie began thinking that they could have saved time by just raiding this one. But how would we have known? And I need all that other data to make sure the case is watertight…
Charlie was taking a moment to look more closely at one of the files he was carrying while Mark chucked other records one by one through his ring-of-fire "copying" routine. He turned a page, and a great spill of organic-chemistry imaging and visualizations poured out into the air around them, long-chain molecules and imaging of translucent platelets and ribbony blood fractions. "Just look at this toxicology report," Charlie said, overcome with admiration. "Somebody here is a real professional."
"Yeah, well, so are their DP people," Mark said, sounding actively nervous for the first time. "Let's make it quick, huh?"
Charlie started to fold the file up preparatory to tossing it into the ring. This particular file was going to be useful for him. Most of the other coroners' blood and tox results had had rather minimal information about the dead person's blood chemistry. This one listed blood fractions that Charlie had only heard of in his most recent study. Whoever was working tox here was seriously interested in genetic microfractions, as well as-
Charlie stopped and looked curiously at one molecule that was hanging in the air off to one side. It looked familiar. He put the main file aside and went over to it, plucked it out of the air, turned it several different ways, looking at it. "Mark, hang on a minute."
"Okay, but no more than that. Whatcha got?"
"This looks familiar."
"It looks like Tinkertoys," Mark said. "Thought you were a little old for this kind of thing."
Charlie upended the molecule, tried looking at it from another angle. It didn't help. "Squirt, don't push your luck. Home system-"
"Online."
"Let me see this as golf balls."
"Processing."
The construct in his hands changed, got bulkier, and the "sticks" between the colored balls vanished, the chemical bonds now expressing themselves as spots where the balls squashed together. This was the method that his physics teacher had trained him to prefer, almost against Charlie's will, but it did work better than sticks and Ping-Pong balls for him. He turned the molecule over in his hands again, trying to find the best way to hold it. The benzene ring at one end suddenly triggered a memory, and so did the bromate structur
e sticking out of the middle of it.
"Charlie," Mark said, "you should save this for later… we really oughta get out of here."
Mark, getting nervous? It was worth seeing, though Charlie wasn't willing to linger under the circumstances. Nonetheless, he grinned to himself briefly. "Right. But one thing first. Home system-"
"Ready."
"Orthodox name for the compound."
"Scorbutal cohydrobromate."
Charlie's eyes narrowed. Oh, no. Oh, no. "I hate this," he growled.
Mark looked up at him. Charlie refused to repeat himself. "Come on," he said, folding up the file and chucking it through Mark's copying ring. It vanished, and the ring as well. "Let's get the heck out of here."
They hurriedly backtracked the way they had come, through a shortcut Mark had "wire-cut" to the outer security perimeter. He had to stop to reweave the wire, patching his cuts, but it didn't take him too long… which was as well, for far away, inside the "blockhouse" away inside the wire, Charlie thought he could hear sirens wailing. "Company?" he said.
"No kidding. Their security program woke up. Took it long enough-" The implementation was getting louder, as if closing in on them, and Charlie had no desire to see what form it was going to take when it finally appeared in their neighborhood. The last hole chopped into the outermost fence rewove itself. it!" Mark said to his penetration program, and then he and Charlie were once more standing in the darkness of his own workspace, surrounded by the light-forest of the Digamma penetration program.
Mark let out a long breath, and suddenly looked very thirteen. "These guys had it a little more on the ball than the others," he said.
Charlie grinned. "Not necessarily a bad thing. But Mark, you're not afraid of getting caught, are you?"
"Not much. I mean, no, of course not. It's just that, you know…"
"That that one was closer than you like to get." Charlie looked at him. "You want to call it quits?"
"No. Let's finish."
"Good," Charlie said, because they were shy only one set of information now, and it would be a shame to have to stop without it. There would alWays be that nagging doubt that some single important thing had been missed, the one piece of data which would have clinched the case…