The Scarab

by Rhine, Scott

  I didn’t have the firepower to finish him off, but the Elite did. I initiated spin shutdown to make the cloud last longer, conserve power, and duck any incoming fire. Then I played with the Minos interface till I found the way to broadcast from my external speakers at maximum volume. I reeled off the coordinates of the North Korean’s fuel tanks followed by the phrase “Tail rockets—one-meter spread.”

  After I repeated the coordinates, I had about forty-five seconds left. I pushed the copier over against the overturned table for more shielding, and so I would have something to stand on. I grabbed the nearest stapler and started whacking away at the halon fire-suppressant nozzles on the ceiling. I had no luck by the time I passed the thirty second mark. Then I lost patience and grabbed the fax. In a desperate over-hand smash I took out first one nozzle, then another. After a brief sputter of rust, halon gas came pouring out of the nozzles. I lost my balance trying to get out of the way. Halon sinks to it’s lowest level and blankets the area so that the fire has no oxygen to burn. It does the same thing to human beings if you’re not careful. While a burn-proof gas filled the bowl-shaped depressions above the disk silos and the floor area I had boxed in, I plummeted off the copier. I bounced off the roller chair, and slammed into the trashcan. It took all the time remaining for me to get my wind back. Pain shot through my right arm when I tried to prop myself up on it.

  The timer read two seconds when I rose, clasping my crippled arm against my bruised ribs. I heard a click, but the grenades never erupted. I took advantage of my luck to gather more evidence and look for a way out.

  I pulled the mice and keyboards from all the computers in the room and dumped them into the metal waste basket. I had to do this with my weak hand, but it was worth it if we could find any good fingerprints or DNA. As I passed the game screen, I noticed that the Charon program had activated itself. The North Korean tank had been tagged as dead, and I saw progress reports as the GEVSIM tabulated his score and performed the remaining tests. Meanwhile, the Charon task was downloading files from the deceased and transmitting them to an outside phone number. As the final step, his log was sealed, and an official death certificate was posted. Immediately thereafter, my vehicle began the journey to the other side. Kali wasn’t going to claim my soul, if you’ll pardon the mixed mythos. I ripped out every fragile cable I could find from the spider webs of wire emanating from the backs of the phone cabinets. This probably wrought havoc with every player remaining, but I didn’t care. Nobody scored the Scarab and won!

  I’d find out where all this data was going and stop her. Opening the Charon module in programmer mode, I poked around, hampered by my bad right arm. The first thing I did was slow the default transmission and processing rates down to the lowest speed possible so that I could find the leak before it closed. The code was written in the same language as the game. The style was brilliant and bold but didn’t handle all the details. I’m a details man, and sooner or later, I’d find Kali’s mistakes. At some point during all this, the halon must have shut off, because I don’t remember hearing it over my frenzied key strokes. Eventually, I got stopped at a high-security interface. Somehow, Charon was an integral part of the communication system the hotel had provided for everyone. I was just about to confirm the conditions that allowed the security hole and discover the destination of the information.

  I heard scratching at the hallway door. Someone was unraveling the cable I had looped there.

  “Stay back!” I shouted. “Don’t open the door!”

  I saw the light turn green on the card reader display and dove for the gap between the phone cabinets, dragging the trash can with me. A shredder round blew the lock off the door to the manager’s office. Since this was only an arm’s length above me, I was deafened for the moment. Even so, there was a disturbingly quiet explosion when Federal agents opened both doors and the breeze blew off the halon blanket. The disk silos instantly turned into incandescent piles of slag.

  Fortunately, I only lost some eyebrow and hair on the left side of my head as I tumbled into a room full of guns and flack vests. I managed to put the flames out by rolling. Mare was shouting, “Don’t shoot!”

  Chapter 20 – Back from the Dead

  I answered questions on this fiasco for two and a half hours while a doctor tended to my injuries. The burns were barely noticeable, but the smell of burned hair followed me everywhere. Although I could still move my fingers easily, my right arm hurt to move. Certainly, it looked much worse than it really was. I bruise quite flamboyantly. The doctor worried about bleeding in the elbow joint, so I humored him and wore the sling. It turns out that the Feds were already collecting a hostage response team for Playfair when Mary’s boss called them with another objective. These guys normally don’t work on Saturdays. The Feds were fairly convinced that I was just lucky but incompetent, not a criminal. After repeated grilling on the same questions, they eventually decided to trust me.

  Since they sealed off the hotel as soon as they arrived, Kali still had to be around. She wasn’t the type to give up. If she still had access to the game, she might be greedy enough to try for another score. It was my job to help lure her in. To make sure I didn’t end up with a toe tag, they assigned a shadow to me by the name of Whitaker. He was black with hair so short, it was almost fuzz. Whitaker had the obligatory suit and earphones, but he went beyond professional. He never looked directly at a person; rather, he watched a room like a kid watched an aquarium. It was eerie. He never said a word or blinked.

  On the way down to the first floor, I noticed his college ring and tried to make conversation for the tenth time. For just an instant, his veneer cracked. “Please, sir, do not talk to me while I’m on duty. It distracts me, and you don’t want that. If you must address me, please do so in private. You may address me as Whitaker or Whit if you are in a hurry. In college, I started out wanting to be a jazz musician, but I am not a circular breather. That meant I could never be the best in that field. I was also a wide receiver on the football team, but I never made it past second string. The only thing I’m the best at so far seems to be keeping people alive. I haven’t lost a witness in eight years, but they told me you’d be a challenge, sir. One favor, please avoid further public confrontations where possible.” Then he shut up as suddenly as he had started. Anything I could have said would have been anticlimactic, so I took his advice and went about my business as if this happened every day.

  At around four, I paid a visit to a lounge full of very nervous, very puzzled judges. I heard several quiet accusations from people convinced that I’d caused this game outage as well. “You’re probably wondering why the FBI has gathered you all together here.” Kali also had accomplices we wanted to smoke out. I had been selected to leak certain information to them. I only hoped I was up to it. Mare was the actor, not me.

  “I admit. I triggered the fire alarm, but we were faced with gun play and incendiary grenades in the halls, and I didn’t want any innocent people to get hurt.” I wiggled my right arm in its sling by way of demonstration. I had cleaned off Mark’s makeup job, but my face looked rough enough without it. Mark got credit for rounding up the thug in the stairwell, and they arranged for an outstanding civilian law-enforcement certificate for him to hang on his office wall. “The city Fire Marshall has already cleared me of charges on that account. I also caused the phone line disconnection to Sandia. The Feds have cleared me of that charge and have restored service to the outside world. However, the Sandia network is expected to remain down till tomorrow morning.”

  That kicked the hornet’s nest into full buzz. I just said the words that would cost them millions. “What right do you have to come in here and ruin our event?” shouted the hotel liaison, who I’ll call Holstein to protect the not-yet-convicted.

  He was my primary target.

  “Any one of you worth his or her oath would have done the same thing. Game security had been subverted and proprietary information was being transmitted off-site. It was the only way to stop the
m clean,” I explained. I was using my best, Saturday-in-front-of-the-garage folksy manner to soothe them.

  “Impossible,” said Gertrude. “Sandia security is the best. That’s why we picked this location.”

  Most people didn’t know what that word meant. I wish they’d quit using it. Gertie may have been a great businesswoman, but she hadn’t programmed in about thirty years. I took it easy on her because she’d been easy on me.

  “Normally you’d be right, but they didn’t have to crack security at Sandia; they just had to do it here. They’ve subverted the hotel’s telephone switching system. All calls to the flight recorder system pass through their computers on the seventeenth floor. This data is recorded, and the signal relayed unchanged to the Sandia supercomputer net. I first noticed a delay in the system during the Piccadilly chase. Later I found out all contestants were being monitored. Sometimes fire and turn commands just wouldn’t make it to the phone lines on time. It made eliminating players or fixing the point spread easy.”

  Most of the judges were stunned, one MIT alumnus rushed to his terminal and began countermeasures immediately. Holstein, the hotel liaison, remained unconvinced. “I assure you all that no such Hogan’s Heroes antics are going on here. The man is grasping for an excuse for his own behavior. And any way, what good is the data gained in this fashion? I’m sure whatever wasn’t encrypted was patented.”

  I refused to let him irritate me, and remained diplomatic. “For a legitimate business, I’d be inclined to agree with you. But employees of the hotel who kidnap or kill their guests hardly qualify as ordinary businessmen. The hotel provided most of us with the communications crypto keys we’re using. It would be simplicity itself for these criminals to bribe a judge to get them copies of the keys.” Mr. Holstein was getting mighty defensive, and the guards were looking around the room, trying to decide who they should believe. “Any US firm they sold this data to could crack it within the month, and a foreign government could do it within a day. Patents are useless if you can analyze the hardware, and produce a cheap imitation that does exactly the same thing for half the price. Ask IBM about that one.

  “Besides, the passwords for several accounts were broadcast over the phone lines and captured by the moles. And at least one of them got away.” The MIT guy stopped typing, and picked up his phone.

  “Hello, Myron? Disconnect! Disconnect from the Net. Use an ax if you have to!” Several other judges excused themselves to run to a phone.

  “Why the rush? The game’s shut down, nobody could log in at Sandia now if they wanted to,” said Holstein.

  The MIT grad answered for me. “Who wants to remember another password for just a week? Everybody just uses the same one as they do for all their machines at work. This gives them a key to half the contractors in the country. It’s like discovering that 30 percent of all men pick G-O-L-F for their bank card PIN.”

  Holstein’s eyes got larger for a moment. “Really? But this still in no way implicates the hotel.”

  I had a seat on the table in front of the sole defender of the hotel policies. The other judges were shifting from shock and outrage at the violations to a need to find a scapegoat. “The way I hear it, TSM showed a certain Las-Vegas-based hotel and casino chain how easy a rigged game would be. TSM employees were brought in as security consultants and were the only ones allowed on the seventeenth floor so that the hotel chain could maintain plausible deniability if things went south.” To their credit, the owners of the Windsor never counted on the real agenda of treason.

  “Why would TSM go through all this trouble to lose?” asked Gertrude.

  I liked that lady, sharp as a tack. “I asked the same thing. The specialists are still sifting through the evidence they left behind, which wasn’t much. We suspect the disk drives that have been crashing recently did so to hide TSM’s tracks. I do have a guess, though. In addition to the money they were getting from Las Vegas and the other players for game rigging, the TSM family car division has been siphoning off funds for years with no results. Current estimates show that they’ve also sold at least three times as many stock shares as they have outstanding. They couldn’t delay another year, but they also couldn’t afford to succeed. They needed a failure so big that it would close the division and eliminate all chance of resurrection. TSM needed the books buried, with no questions as to why. There are also allegations of money laundering for organized crime, but I could care less about that. As soon as they killed a government investigator and kidnapped my co-pilot, they stepped over the line.”

  Holstein was sweating. The guards looked nervous, too. One went so far as to remove his cap and badge. “You still have no evidence that there was a murder. The police ruled it a suicide. The rest is supposition without the phone records. For that, you’ll need a warrant.”

  “They got it two hours ago, chum. I’m just here keeping you guys busy while the FBI guys dissect it. They seem to think your friends would try to destroy evidence. Especially the record of a certain tapped long-distance phone call to Washington that got cut off unexpectedly. As for my co-pilot, she’s helping the Feds compile a list of charges, which were made longer by the fact that she’s a Federal police officer. If I were you, I’d make a deal now and sing, because after she gets through, they could bury you in the transcript.”

  “I can show you where we keep the video monitor tapes,” volunteered the still-uniformed guard.

  I had carefully avoided mentioning the fact that they could only steal untraceably from the dead with the Charon function. All that would come out to the appropriate people later. I still had one more piece of information to leak. “By the way, the Feds wanted to know if they can access a log without the player being dead?”

  Gertrude made it plain that nobody could. “Why do you ask?”

  “There’s an error in the score board. The Ghedra pilot could not have died from poison gas. It had no pilot. Since Mary had been kidnapped and I was chasing after her, I had the vehicle in remote control mode. Since the log file never recorded my death certificate, according to the rules, I’m not really dead. The Feds are disappointed, though, because when I used someone else’s terminal I accidentally saved some Swiss Bank Account numbers from the screen. If they can’t get the evidence yet, no big deal. They’ll get it in a few hours any way, win or lose.” I said loudly.

  “If the data structures are as inconsistent as you say, I’m not sure we could justify letting you resume play, Mr. Hayes,” said Gertrude, genuinely sorry.

  “No sweat. Mary Ann already talked with President Sanders about this ruling. Since I was the victim of foul play, I deserved a chance. But he couldn’t afford to bring back every victim of these criminals, or we’d have to do the whole race over again. We’d all like to avoid that much publicity. He said the consortium worked by the will of the members. If half of the ten remaining vehicles voted for my re-entry, I would be reinstated. He said a tribunal could give me any further restrictions by tomorrow morning.”

  She nodded slowly. “I’ll gather an official one, but I defer to Mr. Sanders’ judgment. To be fair to everyone, you’ll need to retrieve your pilot from the last documented manned location before you can score another distance point.”

  My smile dimmed. “That’s clear back at the Liechtenstein checkpoint.”

  “I quote: a player may not cross that day’s finishing line unless it has a registered pilot on board (page three paragraph seven).”

  The smile returned. “Done. I’ll have the signed petition to you by midnight, and you can give me the rest of the rules then.” I was so happy I kissed her on the cheek on my way out.

  God, I was having fun. Now I had to go see a man about returning from the grave.

  Chapter 21 – The Faust Accords

  In the hospitality suite, there was a colossal party going on, with lots of dark beer flowing from a corner keg. Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” album blared over the crowd noise. I told a door keeper dressed like the Grim Reaper my name and that I
was looking for a member of Lamborghini Aerospace.

  “He’s here!” the Reaper shouted to everybody. “Scarab’s here.”

  Along the back wall were a score of cardboard tombstones, mine among them. I had wandered into the equivalent of a wake for today’s dead.

  “How do you like the music?” asked the Reaper. “Somebody said it was your favorite.”

  I vaguely remember using the tune “Wish You Were Here” for a kiss-off message when I killed somebody, and “Welcome to the Machine” when I closed on a victim, but I have about fifty digital songs that I choose from. Already, people were making up intimate details about me. I let it pass and gave him a thumbs up.

  A skinny, pale techie half way across the room raised his arms and rushed to greet me. He had deep black hair streaming from every follicle on his head. He reminded me of Sam’s son, Michael, with an aura of enthusiasm that made him impossible to dislike. “You really know how to die man! Everybody thought you deserved a party for what you did. I was buying a one way ticket to the junkyard when this guys flies out of nowhere. Zoom!” The gentleman had been indulging heavily. Close behind him was a short, energetic girl with flaming-orange hair and a vest edged with Celtic knotwork.

  “And you are?”

  “Antonio. Pleased to meet you, Scarab,” he said pumping my hand and spilling sparkling white wine. I decided we were going to be friends.

  “Call me Ethan.”