by Bill DeSmedt
Not for long. On the next “you’ve got mail” announcement, he found himself staring at a system error: MAILBOX IS LOCKED BY ANOTHER POP3 PROCESS.
He tried retrieving the message manually. Now the mailbox was unlocked again. And empty again.
Enemy action! Somebody had installed a daemon in the server, an autonomous process that was intercepting his email. If it was a prank, it was a damned elaborate one. But it was looking more and more like identity theft pure and simple—the misappropriation of Knox’s cyberspace persona for purposes of illicit correspondence.
That correspondence, at least, was easy enough to trace.
“Mack, show me the IPM log for [email protected].”
Archon’s central server came equipped with state-of-the-art Internet Policy Management software. Among other things, the IPM tracked all the emails moving into and out of the organization and could list them on demand. Not the message-bodies themselves, just subject-lines, senders, and addressees.
But that was enough. Considering Knox almost never used this account himself, the log should have come up empty. Instead it held eight or nine entries, the oldest of them—entitled “Long time no see”—dating from this Sunday. That message, and about half the others, had been forwarded through the jknox account to someone called [email protected], and had originated from . . .
Knox frowned as he read the sender’s address: [email protected].
Doe-dot-gov? That was the federal government—the, um, Department of Energy. A quick websearch brought up the DOE home page, but there was no “CROM” listed among its agencies. An undercover op, maybe, and of some hitherto uncatalogued subspecies.
What had he gotten himself into here? Knox had pissed off a lot of people in his time, but that was just una cosa di biznes. And, anyway, he couldn’t recall any feds among them.
Why were the spooks messing with his email?
Damned if he knew, but he did know the quickest way to find out.
“Mack,” Knox addressed his computer again, “link in Weathertop, secure circuit. I need to talk to Mycroft.”
Spooks or no spooks, somebody’s gonads were going to wind up stapled to his office wall tonight!
What was keeping the Compliance guy?
Marianna hung in near-total darkness, trying not to gag on the oily reek filling the elevator shaft. Trying not to think about how long the stickyweb would hold. The adhesive wasn’t designed to support a one-hundred-thirty-two pound load, was it? Not swinging back and forth?
Think about something else. Like what? Like how bad she’d wanted this first field assignment? And how bad she’d gone and screwed it up?
But it was her case, dammit. Her analysis that had tied the last two disappearances back to the shadowy Grishin Enterprises conglomerate, her late nights and weekends that had put CROM out ahead of the curve on this one.
She should have left it at that. She couldn’t. Call it a chance to settle an old score, call it a misplaced search for some sort of redemption, but she’d had to get out from behind her desk and into the field. She’d cashed in favors and half-forgotten promises, lobbied Pete mercilessly, all so she could be in on the bust. And now—
Where in hell was Compliance?
Look on the bright side. At least the email spoof was still running—going on two days now without a hitch. One thing that hadn’t gone wrong yet. And with any luck the mark wouldn’t catch wise till too late. By Thursday night, she should—
Wait one. What was that?
If she strained, she could almost hear—yes, a rumble coming from below, faint at first, but growing with every second.
Oh, shit!
The power must’ve come back on before Compliance could find the cutoff. The penthouse elevator was beginning its ascent, building speed. It would be here in less than half a minute, moving fast as an express train—and she had no way to get out of its path!
2 | Resource Recovery
“COMPLIANCE?”
I Marianna hung in the lightless shaft straining her ears for an answer. None came. The onrushing elevator car was very close now. She could make out the low-watt service lights set into the frame of its roof. Only seconds left.
She couldn’t die like this. Do something!
“Compliance?” What was the guy’s name again? “Whitehead? Talk to me. I—I’ve got a situation here.”
“Keep your pantyhose on, Bonaventure,” a voice crackled over her headset, “Were coming to get you.”
Daring another glance down, Marianna could see the elevator slowing, slowing, easing to a stop inches below her feet. A muffled clang and a hatch opened in its roof.
Light poured up out of the hatch, catching Compliance’s angular features from below and twisting them into something vaguely Mephistophelean. He reached up for her.
“Thought it’d be quicker this way,” he said, helping her down into the car. “No telling how long till the stickyweb broke. Then—splat!”
He wasn’t bothering to hide his smirk. She wouldn’t put it past him to have arranged that business with the elevator just now deliberately. A field agent’s way of showing the desk jockey with the fancy job title her real place in the order of things.
Assistant Director, CROM Reacquisition. What a crock!
She was silent the whole ride down to ground level, afraid that if she spoke her voice might tremble. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the man from Compliance, just kept her eyes straight ahead. From the burnished surfaces of the elevator doors a woman in black body armor peered back at her—tall, slim, dark-haired, young.
Above all, young. Too young, maybe, to hack it, out here in the field.
The doors slid open. She followed Compliance out into a doubleheight lobby newly festooned with Day-Glo Police Line—Do Not Cross tape. They walked through the exit doors and out into the late afternoon heat.
Marianna jerked a thumb back at the growing police presence. “Have you talked to NYPD?”
“We can’t bring the cops in on an extraction. You know that.”
“Dammit, I’m not talking about need-to-know! The cops run a river patrol, don’t they? If not them, the Coast Guard. Somebody’s got to’ve seen which way they went.”
Compliance paused beside the car. “Face it, Bonaventure—that prole is long gone.”
She got in and waited till he’d joined her. “You’re calling it a hand-off, then?”
“Yeah, might as well make it official. But—” His hand hovered over the STU-IV keypad. “You sure we don’t want to get our story straight first?”
She shook her head. “We’ll play spin control some other time. Just log the handoff so I can get started fixing this.” If it was even fixable. If the black hats hadn’t already won, like they had eleven years ago.
With a shrug, Compliance punched in the code and nodded to her to jack in. Handshake tones fluted in Marianna’s headset as the Secure Terminal Unit negotiated a one-time encryption, then: “Critical Resources Oversight Mandate. How may I direct your call?”
“Uh, this is Whitehead, New York Compliance office. I need to make a field deposition.”
A momentary pause, then: “Recording.”
“Right. As of—” He glanced at the dashboard clock. “—5:23 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, July 27th, Compliance Directorate is transferring anti-proliferation action 04-057, Galina Postrel’nikova, to Reacquisition. Hardcopy follows.”
If it hadn’t been her case before, it sure as shit was now.
“Line’s still up,” Compliance was saying. “Want to talk to your boss?”
“In a minute.” Marianna tabbed down the passenger-side window and stuck her head out. Her dark brown eyes made a futile scan of the empty sky.
Where in hell could her prole be going?
Natalya Petrovna Zolotova clutched frantically at the harness straps as the ultralight looped high out over waterfront towers and atriums toward the broad sweep of the river hundreds of meters below. She shrieked as the flimsy craft lurched sic
keningly in the updraft from a rooftop airconditioning unit, stifled another scream when it dipped unexpectedly on entering the regime of cooler air over the water.
The rushing airstream bore her small cries away, rendered her terror inaudible even to herself.
Certainly the pilot gave no sign of having heard her. Natalya risked a glance over to where he hung suspended alongside her, so close she could have reached out and touched him. Not that she would have dared. If possible, she feared this grim-visaged man, this Yuri Vissarionovich Geladze, more than she feared falling into the river below.
And with good reason. He had killed that woman back there on the roof. Shot her as casually as one might shoot a stray dog.
Surely it had been a woman. The visor had concealed her face, but the body, stance, and voice were unmistakably female. The woman’s shouted English had gone by too quickly to register, but her brandished weapon had made the meaning only too clear: Natalya was being arrested. But for what?
All she had done—all!—was to leave Rusalka that morning and, on her way through customs, show the counterfeit passport she had been given. The passport with the photograph of Natalya’s own face above that other woman’s name: Galina something.
Yes, it had been wrong. But it had been her only chance to disembark and explore the great city rising into the sky beyond the 39th Street pier.
And besides, what choice had she had? A lowly clerk-typist dared not disobey the orders of Vadim Vasiliyevich Merkulov, head of security for all of Grishin Enterprises International, and the third most powerful man on Rusalka.
Rusalka. Natalya squinted against the wind and turned her gaze upriver, up to where Rusalka’s shimmering white form towered over the ferries and dayliners, a visiting queen holding court amid the plebian denizens of the waterfront.
Any moment now, the glider would swing north toward the great ocean-going yacht. And once Natalya was back onboard, things would be all right again. It could all be fixed. Forged passports, a broken corpse at the bottom of an elevator shaft—no matter: GEI, the all-powerful Grishin Enterprises International, could fix anything.
Pray God, let it be so! Natalya willed her right hand to release its deathgrip on the strap. Just long enough to make sure that Mama’s locket was still securely nestled beneath her blouse. She clasped it to her heart for a moment, feeling its surprising weight again. Yes, thank God, it was still there—still safe.
A foolish indulgence. The simple silvery locket hanging in the window of the Eighth Avenue pawnshop had been priced at an unthinkable hundred and twenty-five dollars. And, bargain as she might in her halting English, the aged proprietor had refused to part with it for less than ninety.
“Pure silver,” he had claimed. But it didn’t have the feel of the silver tableware aboard Rusalka—too heavy. Could it be silver-plated lead? Fearful of being swindled in this strange city, Natalya had hesitated. But when the locket had opened to reveal, of all things, a little Orthodox cross engraved on the inside of the lid, she knew she was lost.
It would make a perfect gift for Mama—a gift to commemorate her youngest daughter’s day in New York.
A day that was ending. Natalya would be home soon. She braved a look down to see if they’d begun their descent. She saw huge tankers and container vessels plying the river below, each attended by a retinue of tugs. Saw the wakes of small, swift powerboats tracing their obscure calligraphies across the placid surface. Watched the pastel green of the Statue of Liberty, luminous in clear afternoon light, pass below immediately on her right.
Surely that was wrong. They must have missed their northward turn, continued out over the river and angled south. The expensive apartment buildings crowding the far shore, almost directly ahead of them when the flight began, had slid off northwards. In their place, the shoreline ahead now held what seemed to be an old, unreconstructed industrial quarter.
They were already much lower. The little motor was laboring to clear the roofs of the abandoned wharves lining this stretch of river-bank. They could not be going very much farther, but where—?
They spiraled downward into a wasteland of rusted storage tanks, junk-strewn empty lots, the burnt-out hulks of factories and warehouses—a no man’s land transected by truck-filled highways. Here and there, last-gasp urban renewal strove to stem the tide of post-industrial blight, manifesting in compact corridors of incongruously bright and cheery buildings cordoned off from the pervasive decay.
The ultralight was vectoring toward one of those islands of order amid the chaos.
Very close, almost directly below them now, she could see a wide, flat roof with a name painted on it in large white letters. In the Latin alphabet, of course, as everything here was, but Natalya could read it well enough: RESOURCE RECOVERY SYSTEMS, Inc.
And beneath that, somewhat smaller: BAYONNE NJ ENTERPRISE ZONE.
And beneath that? A logo of some sort. She couldn’t make it out from this angle, but its shape and color looked right. Her heart lifted in hope.
The ultralight overshot the roof and looped back toward it, lower and slower now, heading into the wind.
She started at a sudden sound. Her companion—silent ever since they had taken off from the tower—was shouting something at her.
“Lower your legs and push back on the control bar,” he bellowed over the howl of the wind. “No, like me. Watch, do as I do.”
Natalya tried to copy his movements, letting her legs hang down as she straightened her arms against the control bar. The craft’s nose rose into the air. Their airspeed dropped to a stall as they skimmed the rooftop, its tarred blackness very close now, mere centimeters from the soles of their shoes. Closer, closer. Contact!
She nearly stumbled as her feet skidded on the bumpy surface, but the pilot compensated, taking the brunt of the landing with knees flexed and feet spread wide. He stood there a moment, then held the wingframe aloft with one arm as he shrugged out of his harness, motioning her to do the same.
Natalya looked around for the logo she’d glimpsed from the air a moment ago.
The mottled, uneven texture of the tarred roof made for a poor canvas. Even so, the bold, stylized lines were instantly recognizable: the great blue globe crosshatched with white striations of latitude and longitude, the continents of Europe and Africa outlined in a verdant green. And embracing the whole, completely obscuring the equator, an image out of myth—the emerald coils of a world-encircling serpent, its fangs sinking into its own tail. The crimson letters GEI arced over the north pole like an aurora.
At that moment, the corporate icon looked so radiantly beautiful she could have knelt down and kissed it. She slipped a hand beneath her blouse to pat the little locket once more in thanks.
Natalya had made it back safe after all.
“You rang, Jonathan?”
Knox looked over at his display and saw Finley “Mycroft” Laurence peering at him from a conferencing window. Half an hour. Most callers wouldn’t have rated so quick a callback. Wouldn’t have rated realtime at all, just a GIF of an old TV test-pattern and instructions where to send an email. Mycroft didn’t waste bandwidth on nonessentials, a category that, for him, included most social interactions. Knox was one of the few he deigned to favor with his full telepresence.
And what a telepresence! Weathertop’s image enhancer had gone all-out today, painting Mycroft in straw hat, candy-striped jacket, and white ducks, and then bluescreening him into a scene of punting on the Thames.
But the dark, solemn face made an odd contrast with the whimsical Jerome K. Jerome virtuality: in the eighteen months since Knox had last seen him (it doesn’t pay to abuse some privileges), Mycroft had aged. The lines of the lean, regular features seemed incised a little deeper, the grizzled hair peeking out from under the boater had gone grayer, playing catch-up with his scraggly salt-and-pepper beard, and the piercing brown eyes behind the granny glasses were rimmed with circles darker than the mahogany of his cheeks.
They were working him too hard.
Mycroft’s official title—vestige of a time when Richard Moses had foolhardily let his top people make up their own job descriptions—was Senior Vice President for Intractables. Unofficially, he was Archon’s one-man Research Department. Best in the business, if you could get his attention. Knox knew the magic words.
“Hi, Mycroft. I’ve got a puzzle for you.”
Mycroft couldn’t conceal the gleam in his eye, but all he said was “Timeframe?”
“ASAP. Yesterday, if possible.”
“Time travel?” Mycroft shipped his computer-generated oars and cocked an eyebrow, “I believe you want Mr. Wells—Mr. H. G. Wells. Given my current workload, I’m not sure I could help you with future deliverables, much less past ones.”
“This is just a quick hack-and-slash. You’ll be done in less time than it would take you to convince me you haven’t got time to do it.”
Mycroft sighed. “Perhaps a quick look. Search parameters?”
“I haven’t got much, just an email address. But I have faith in you.” Not only was Mycroft a world-class net warrior, he came equipped with an eidetic—what used to be called a photographic—memory to boot. If an elusive factoid couldn’t be found on the web, it was probably catalogued and cross-referenced in the capacious vaults of Mycroft’s cerebral cortex. His quirky brilliance, coupled with his self-imposed exile to a hilltop in rural North Carolina, had earned him his office nickname: the original Mycroft was Sherlock Holmes’s smarter, reclusive brother.
“And the address is?”
“Oh, sorry: [email protected].”
“DOE—as in Department of Energy?”
“The very same,” Knox said. “CROM looks to be one of their subagencies, but there’s no hotlink for them on the DOE homepage, and all my searches come up empty.”