Groans and cheers went up. The girls surfaced giggling and spluttering. Furious little knots of partygoers formed, passing money back and forth.
“Jenna next,” someone called.
“And Carrie.”
“Two to one on Carrie.”
“Bollocks, evens.”
“I’ll take that.”
The two new girls began to edge towards each other along the pole.
Ade O’Donal stood on the cracked ochre flagstones at the shallow end of the pool, white chef’s hat drooping miserably, a wooden spatula in his hand. According to Royan’s data squirt he was twenty-four, but his sandy hair was already in retreat, both cheeks were sinking, becoming gaunt, his skin was pasty white, reddening from too much sun. He wore an oversized azure cotton shirt speckled by sooty oil spots from the barbecue, and his loud fruit-pattern Bermuda shorts told Greg who had chosen the house’s furniture.
O’Donal grinned gormlessly round the faces of his friends as the girls poised ready. Then his eyes met Greg’s and froze.
The wooden spatula slashed downwards. “Go,” O’Donal shouted. The girls began pummelling at each other, the blows from their saturated pillows sending out clouds of sparkling droplets. Partygoers began cheering again. The blonde in the lemon swimming suit was walking round the pool filling glasses, a magnum clasped in each hand.
The Indian girl clambered out of the pool, cinnamon skin glistening, and shook her long black dreadlocks. She pressed up against O’Donal, her high conical breasts leaving damp imprints on his shirt as she kissed him. He handed her his glass, which she tossed down in one smooth gulp.
O’Donal pushed her away and walked round the pool towards Greg and Gabriel.
They retreated into the lounge. O’Donal followed.
“Are you with someone?” he asked; his voice was firm, ready to deal sternly with gatecrashers.
“We’re here to see you, Ade,” Greg said.
“This is a private party, pal. Guests only.”
“Private party. Big house. Lots of expensive friends. You’re coming up in the world, Tentimes,” Gabriel said.
O’Donal’s jaw muscles hardened. He slid the patio door shut, muting the music and catcalls. Greg sensed the cold apprehension rising in his mind. O’Donal’s eyes kept straying to the door leading to the hall.
“Sorry, Tentimes,” Greg said. “Your hard case couldn’t make it. It’s just you and us.”
“Will you quit with that handle,” O’Donal hissed edgily. “These people don’t know who I am.”
“What do they think you are?”
“Programmer on a commission to Hansworth Logic.” He brightened. “Hey, I never expected you to show in person, y’know. I mean, I don’t mind you coming, no way. I just didn’t think it was the way you worked. So what is it, you want me to run another burn?”
“You’re sweating, Tentimes,” said Gabriel. “This is all new to you, isn’t it? The high life, money, girls?”
“We’d never have guessed,” Greg said, looking pointedly round the lounge.
“Hey, look, what the fuck is this?” O’Donal demanded. “And what have you done to Brune?”
“Don’t know, didn’t stop to check,” said Greg. “What does it matter? Ace hotrod like you can afford plenty more like him.”
O’Donal’s apprehension now blossomed into outright worry. A little muscle spasm rippled across his bony shoulders.
The pillow fight outside had degenerated into a wrestling match. One girl ripped the bikini top off the other. The spectators whooped approval.
O’Donal licked his lips. “Hey, come on, who are you people?”
“We’re from Event Horizon,” said Greg.
O’Donal’s already pale face blanched still further. “Oh, shit.” He took a half step backwards, ready to turn and bolt, then stopped at the sight of the Walther eightshot in Greg’s hand.
“You’re not used to this, are you, Tentimes?” Gabriel asked with silky insistence. “A solo hotrod, your combat is all mental. Well, this time the feedback is physical. You want my advice? Play ball. Don’t annoy us. There are another seven who took part in the blitz. We’ll just work down the list until we get some co-operation.”
“I didn’t have any choice!”
“Tell us about it,” Greg suggested. “Downstairs.”
“Down? Where?”
“Your terminals,” Gabriel said.
“Shit, how…” O’Donal clamped his mouth shut as Greg flicked the Walther’s nozzle towards the door.
Out in the hall O’Donal stopped and sniffed the air, then his eyes found the smear of viscous liquid on the tiles. A small pulse of anger coloured his thoughts. “Through here,” he said, pointing dully at a recessed door.
“You open it,” Gabriel ordered. “Seeing as how it’s keyed to your palmprint. I’d hate my colleague to receive that thousand-volt charge.”
O’Donal swallowed hard, almost a gulp. As he turned to the door Greg slapped the back of his head, knocking his face against the flaking varnish. The cook’s hat fell off.
“Shit!” There was real fear in O’Donal’s voice and mind. He looked at them to plead, a bead of blood seeping out of his left nostril. “I wasn’t gonna. Honest, shit. I wouldn’t have. Shit, you’ve gotta believe me!”
“Sure,” Gabriel crooned.
Behind the hall door were fifteen steps leading down to another door made of bronze-coloured metal. It slid open at O’Donal’s voice command.
“Impressive,” Gabriel murmured.
The basement had been built as a wine cellar; the stain where the racks had been ripped out were still visible on the rough brick walls. A metal air-conditioning duct which had ensured the bottles were kept at a perfectly maintained temperature ran along the ceiling.
The basement was a hotrod’s crypt, now smelling faintly of acetone. There were five terminals sitting on a long pine table, all different makes, each hardwired with customized augmentation modules. Hundreds of memox crystals were stacked neatly on narrow oak shelving. Four big cubes clung to the wall facing the table, two on either side of a long flatscreen which was lit up like a football stadium Scoreboard, The Gracious Services circuit, detailing burns in progress, hackers on line, requests, available umpires. Greg searched, and sure enough saw Wildace’s name.
“Expensive, too,” Greg said. “According to the circuit you’ve only been solo for six months. Means you’ve been scoring pretty good, Tentimes. How do you do it?
“What…what are you going to do to me?”
Greg shoved the Mulekick against the man-black surface of the Hitachi terminal on the table. There was a flat crack as the power tubes discharged. A zillion precious delicate junctions were smelted into worthless cinders. The smell of scorched plastic filled the air.
O’Donal yelped as though he’d received the jolt. “Oh, shit-fire, do you know how much that cost me?” He stared aghast at the ruined Hitachi.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Greg said indifferently. “Now, where’s the money coming from?”
“They give me targets, pay good.”
“They?”
“They, him, her, shit I don’t know. We’ve never met.”
“Got a name, a handle?”
“Wolf.”
“How does Wolf get in touch, through the circuit?”
O’Donal shook his head, eyes bunking rapidly. “No, that’s the sting, man. Wolf calls over the phone. Direct! God, you’ve no idea how bad that trip was the first time. I mean, that’s the whole point of the circuit, right? It protects us as individuals, no hassle, no danger. You pay your dues, and you’re covered. It’s worked that way for twenty goddamn years. Then Wolf comes along and blows it right out of the water. Why me, I mean what did I do?”
“When did Wolf first contact you?” Greg asked patiently.
“Bout ten months ago.”
“But not through the circuit?”
O’Donal glanced from Greg to Gabriel, face screwing up from anger and,
strangely, outrage. “It was in a pub! I was having a drink with some mates and the fucking phone goes behind the bar, asking for me by name. Wolf knew who I was, where I was, knew about my burns. That is like the most heavy-duty shit a hotrod can get, y’know.”
Greg whistled, intrigued in spite of himself. It’d take good organization to spring a net like that; money and expertise. And for what? A team of tame hotrods. Who would want that? And more to the point, why? “How does Wolf get in touch now?”
“Call box. I have to check in every three days. Dial a number, just like you do for Gracious Services. If there’s a burn in the offing I get run around town for an hour until Wolf’s happy I’m not pulling a backtrack.”
Gabriel was sitting in the black leather high-back chair behind the table, tenting her fingers and staring up at the pewter-coloured duct, lost in thought. “The method of recruiting interests me,” she said. “This Wolf definitely knew you were an active hacker?”
O’Donal nodded sullenly. “The bastard read out a whole list of my burns.”
“How complete a list?”
“Dunno.” He caught the look Greg gave him. “Yeah, all right. I didn’t spot any missing.”
“Going back for how long?” she asked.
“Couple of years, ever since I plugged into the circuit.”
“Have you ever had a criminal record?”
“What? No.”
“Don’t lie,” Greg said. The guilt had glinted in his mind.
“I’m not,” O’Donal insisted hotly. “No record.” He flushed hard, not looking at Gabriel. “Got pulled once, mind. Pigs said she was underage. Shit, I mean no way, not that size, melon city.”
“When was this?” Gabriel asked keenly.
“Six, seven years back.”
“The police, did they search your home?”
“For sure, tore it apart, bastards. They had to drop the charges after that.” He sniggered at the memory. “My mates went and visited her for me. Straightened her out but good. She didn’t want to talk to no one after that, least of all the pigs.”
“Were you into gear then?”
“Yeah, a bit. Nothing serious though, not then.”
“And where were you living?”
“Steve Biko tower.”
Gabriel smiled acute satisfaction. “Your turn,” she said to Greg, as if it was some kind of channel quiz show.
“I’d like a list of all the burns you’ve done for Wolf,” he said.
O’Donal scowled sourly, but began typing on the Mizzi terminal.
“Carefully,” Gabriel warned. “Make sure the code is the right one. We don’t want any mistakes like a call for help, or anything equally tiresome. And believe me, I’ll know if it isn’t the right one.”
The truth finally dawned. “Shit. You two, you’re psychic, right?”
“Got it in one,” Greg said. “How else did you think we found you?”
O’Donal’s subconscious discharged a heavy rancorous stream of revulsion and dread, contaminating his conscious thoughts.
Greg showed his cybofax to the Mizzi, and O’Donal squirted the list of his burns over.
“How much do you get paid for a burn?” Greg asked.
“Depends, normally around five grand.”
“And for the Event Horizon burn?”
“That was a real big deal, I got fifteen for that.”
“No messing. So which half were you in on?”
“I don’t follow you, man. What halves?”
“The attack was twofold, remember? The priority data-squirt blitz against the core, and the shutdown instructions beamed up to the Merlin. Which were you in on?”
“I don’t know nothing about no Merlin shutdown. All Wolf told me to do was hack into the Event Horizon datanet and fire off a squirt at some bioware cruncher core. Man, you’ve never seen anything like that blitz memox, custom job.” He lifted a glittering black sphere the size of a tennis ball from the table, multi-faceted like an insect eye. “The multiplex compression in this lover is absolute genius. Hell, I can’t even retro the bytes. Sure wish I could. I’d love to be able to write my own like this someday.”
“Did this Wolf tell you what the core was?” Greg asked.
“Sure, it’s some kind of fancy Turing personality responses program they’ve whizzed up to manage the company.”
“Have you ever thought of backtracking the money transfers from Wolf? Find out who he is? Hit back, perhaps.”
“Yeah. Big zero.”
“How come?”
“I ain’t up to that, man,” O’Donal muttered quietly.
“Not up to much, are you, Tentimes?” Greg plucked one of the memox crystals from the shelves, reading the handwritten label. “This a core-code melt virus?”
“Yeah.”
“Wolf supplied it, right? How many of them come from Wolf?”
“Some, “bout half. I write my own, too, man!” O’Donal was stuffed with righteous indignation. “I see what you’re getting at, I’m no cyborg, man. I’ve got my own scene outside that arsehole. I’d have made solo without Wolf. I would!”
“Give me your bank account number, the one your Event Horizon burn money was paid into.”
O’Donal clutched at his hair with both hands, pulling hard. “Shit, no way man, I’ve got everything stashed in there. I only burnt your fucking company once.”
Greg jammed the Mulekick down on O’Donal’s Akai terminal. Blue-white static tapeworms writhed across the heat-dump fins, snapping and popping like arid matchwood.
“All right!” O’Donal shouted. “Jesus.” He looked down hopelessly at the tiny wisp of smoke rising from the back of the Akai.
The restraint of fear was wearing thin, anger was predominating again. Greg knew he’d have to do something about that. Soon.
O’Donal’s fingers trembled softly as he squirted the information from the Mizzi to Greg’s cybofax. “Hey, listen, you ain’t going to like do anything to me, are you? I co-operated man, really I did. You know it all now. God’s honest truth, every last byte.”
“That’s right,” Greg said, and straightarmed O’Donal with the Mulekick, punching the electrode deep into his small flaccid beer gut.
O’Donal’s cheeks inflated, eyes bulging. Alcohol-toxic breath rushed out of him, and he curled up, collapsing backwards on to the terminals. Memox crystals went glissading over the cold brick floor.
“Did you enjoy that?” Gabriel asked.
“No. Come on, time for us to make our exit.”
Greg sneaked a peek through the lounge door on the way out. The pool was filling up; people fully clothed, people half-clothed, naked people; empty magnums and sodden burger baps were bobbing about among them. A cloud of thick blue-black smoke was mushrooming up from the barbecue grill, the steaks and sausages were burning fiercely. Led Zep was crashing out ‘Whole Lotta Love’. Hell of a party.
Greg tugged the Duo away from the kerb in a tight U-turn, ignoring the shrill clamour of incensed bicycle bells, and headed back towards Oakham.
Gabriel hunched down in the passenger seat and devoured the information O’Donal had squirted into his cybofax.
“Make any sense to you?” Greg asked.
“Nothing obvious leaps out. The targets are companies and finance houses. Most of the time Wolf wanted logic bombs crashed into their data cores; though there are some data snatches too, mainly high-tech research.”
“Doesn’t tell us much. I’ll squirt it over to Morgan Walshaw, get his economic intelligence team to run an analysis on it, see who benefits most.”
“But you’ve got a pretty good guess. I know you. You’re almost happy about finding this list.”
“Yeah. What odds will you give me that our friend Kendric di Girolamo comes up top of the beneficiaries?”
“You really have got it in for him, haven’t you?”
“Yep, logic and instinct both. All I need is proof, and darling Julia’s avenging angel will take it from there.”
“I
’m not so sure,” Gabriel said. “That entrapment gig this Wolf character snared O’Donal with, it’s very long-term. Find a gear-crazy kid who’s growing up in exactly the right sort of environment that’ll turn him to hotrodding, then tap his phone for seven years just to get the evidence to nail him with. Why? I mean what’s he doing for Wolf that he wouldn’t have done ordinarily on the Gracious Services circuit?”
“Let’s see. How many burns are on that list?”
“Thirty-two, including the one against Event Horizon.”
Greg slowed the Duo and turned on to the B6047 heading for Tilton. It was a terrible road, so overgrown in places that the tarmac had vanished under grass and thistles. He steered into the ruts left by the farm wagons to get some decent traction, hoping nothing was coming the other way.
“Thirty-two is one hell of a lot of burns for a ten-month period,” he said. “And Wolf has a team of at least eight hackers running these burns for him. Gracious Services is normally pretty independent, but even their umpires might begin to wonder what was going down. They’re smart, if there is a pattern to the burns they’d spot it. Wolf isn’t the type to leave his flank exposed like that.”
“Hence the need for privacy. Yes, I can buy that. Well, we’ll just have to see what Walshaw’s people come up with. By the way, what did you want O’Donal’s account number for?”
“Wolf chose O’Donal because he isn’t a true hotrod, not yet. He’s a greenhouse product, force-grown; given viruses on a plate instead of developing his own talent to write them. That way he can’t stray from Wolf’s carefully ordained path. O’Donal doesn’t have the ability to backtrack the credit transfers, but Royan sure as hell does.”
“That still doesn’t explain away the police complicity in O’Donal’s entrapment.”
“Kendric has more than enough money to bribe a squad or two of underpaid bobbies.”
Gabriel groaned in dismay. “Christ, and Eleanor thinks I’m neurotic.”
The Mandel Files Page 25