Manfred stares at him. "You know I don't have any money."
"Ah," Glashwiecz smiles, "but you must be mistaken. Certainly the judge will agree with me that you must be mistaken – all a lack of paper documentation means is that you've covered your trail. There's the small matter of the several thousand corporations you own, indirectly. Somewhere at the bottom of that pile there has got to be something, hasn't there?"
A hissing, burbling noise like a sackful of large lizards being drowned in mud emanates from the kitchen, suggesting that Annette's percolator is nearly ready. Manfred's left hand twitches, playing chords on an air keyboard. Without being at all obvious, he's releasing a bulletin about his current activities that should soon have an effect on the reputation marketplace. "Your attack was rather elegant," he comments, sitting down on the sofa as Pam disappears into the kitchen.
Glashwiecz nods. "The idea was one of my interns'," he says. "I don't understand this distributed denial of service stuff, but Lisa grew up on it. Something about it being a legal travesty, but workable all the same."
"Uh-huh." Manfred's opinion of the lawyer drops a notch. He notices Pam reappearing from the kitchen, her expression icy. A moment later Annette surfaces carrying a jug and some cups, beaming innocently. Something's going on, but at that moment, one of his agents nudges him urgently in the left ear, his suitcase keens mournfully and beams a sense of utter despair at him, and the doorbell rings again.
"So what's the scam?" Glashwiecz sits down uncomfortably close to Manfred and murmurs out of one side of his mouth. "Where's the money?"
Manfred looks at him irritably. "There is no money," he says. "The idea is to make money obsolete. Hasn't she explained that?" His eyes wander, taking in the lawyer's Patek Philippe watch, his Java-enabled signet ring.
"C'mon. Don't give me that line. Look, all it takes is a couple of million, and you can buy your way free for all I care. All I'm here for is to see that your wife and daughter don't get left penniless and starving. You know and I know that you've got bags of it stuffed away – just look at your reputation! You didn't get that by standing at the roadside with a begging bowl, did you?"
Manfred snorts. "You're talking about an elite IRS auditor here. She isn't penniless; she gets a commission on every poor bastard she takes to the cleaners, and she was born with a trust fund. Me, I —" The stereo bleeps. Manfred pulls his glasses on. Whispering ghosts of dead artists hum through his earlobes, urgently demanding their freedom. Someone knocks at the door again, and he glances around to see Annette walking toward it.
"You're making it hard on yourself," Glashwiecz warns.
"Expecting company?" Pam asks, one brittle eyebrow raised in Manfred's direction.
"Not exactly —"
Annette opens the door and a couple of guards in full SWAT gear march in. They're clutching gadgets that look like crosses between digital sewing machines and grenade launchers, and their helmets are studded with so many sensors that they resemble 1950s space probes. "That's them," Annette says clearly.
"Mais Oui." The door closes itself and the guards stand to either side. Annette stalks toward Pam.
"You think to walk in here, to my pied-à-terre, and take from Manfred?" she sniffs.
"You're making a big mistake, lady," Pam says, her voice steady and cold enough to liquefy helium.
A burst of static from one of the troopers. "No," Annette says distantly. "No mistake."
She points at Glashwiecz. "Are you aware of the takeover?"
"Takeover?" The lawyer looks puzzled, but not alarmed by the presence of the guards.
"As of three hours ago," Manfred says quietly, "I sold a controlling interest in agalmic.holdings.root.1.1.1 to Athene Accelerants BV, a venture capital outfit from Maastricht. One dot one dot one is the root node of the central planning tree. Athene aren't your usual VC, they're accelerants – they take explosive business plans and detonate them." Glashwiecz is looking pale – whether with anger or fear of a lost commission is impossible to tell. "Actually, Athene Accelerants is owned by a shell company owned by the Italian Communist Party's pension trust. The point is, you're in the presence of one dot one dot one's chief operations officer."
Pam looks annoyed. "Puerile attempts to dodge responsibility —"
Annette clears her throat. "Exactly who do you think you are trying to sue?" she asks Glashwiecz sweetly. "Here we have laws about unfair restraint of trade. Also about foreign political interference, specifically in the financial affairs of an Italian party of government."
"You wouldn't —"
"I would." Manfred brushes his hands on his knees and stands up. "Done, yet?" he asks the suitcase.
Muffled beeps, then a gravelly synthesized voice speaks. "Uploads completed."
"Ah, good." He grins at Annette. "Time for our next guests?"
On cue, the doorbell rings again. The guards sidle to either side of the door. Annette snaps her fingers, and it opens to admit a pair of smartly dressed thugs. It's beginning to get crowded in the living room.
"Which one of you is Macx?" snaps the older one of the two thugs, staring at Glashwiecz for no obvious reason. He hefts an aluminum briefcase. "Got a writ to serve."
"You'd be the CCAA?" asks Manfred.
"You bet. If you're Macx, I have a restraining order —"
Manfred raises a hand. "It's not me you want," he says. "It's this lady." He points at Pam, whose mouth opens in silent protest. "Y'see, the intellectual property you're chasing wants to be free. It's so free that it's now administered by a complex set of corporate instruments lodged in the Netherlands, and the prime shareholder as of approximately four minutes ago is my soon-to-be-ex-wife Pamela, here." He winks at Glashwiecz. "Except she doesn't control anything."
"Just what do you think you're playing at, Manfred?" Pamela snarls, unable to contain herself any longer. The guards shuffle: The larger, junior CCAA enforcer tugs at his boss's jacket nervously.
"Well." Manfred picks up his coffee and takes a sip. Grimaces. "Pam wanted a divorce settlement, didn't she? The most valuable assets I own are the rights to a whole bunch of recategorized work-for-hire that slipped through the CCAA's fingers a few years back. Part of the twentieth century's cultural heritage that got locked away by the music industry in the last decade – Janis Joplin, the Doors, that sort of thing. Artists who weren't around to defend themselves anymore. When the music cartels went bust, the rights went for a walk. I took them over originally with the idea of setting the music free. Giving it back to the public domain, as it were."
Annette nods at the guards, one of whom nods back and starts muttering and buzzing into a throat mike. Manfred continues. "I was working on a solution to the central planning paradox – how to interface a centrally planned enclave to a market economy. My good friend Gianni Vittoria suggested that such a shell game could have alternative uses. So I've not freed the music. Instead, I signed the rights over to various actors and threads running inside the agalmic holdings network – currently one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred and seventy-five companies. They swap rights rapidly – the rights to any given song are resident in a given company for, oh, all of fifty milliseconds at a time. Now understand, I don't own these companies. I don't even have a financial interest in them anymore. I've deeded my share of the profits to Pam, here. I'm getting out of the biz, Gianni's suggested something rather more challenging for me to do instead."
He takes another mouthful of coffee. The recording Mafiya goon glares at him. Pam glares at him. Annette stands against one wall, looking amused. "Perhaps you'd like to sort it out between you?" he asks. Aside, to Glashwiecz: "I trust you'll drop your denial of service attack before I set the Italian parliament on you? By the way, you'll find the book value of the intellectual property assets I deeded to Pamela – by the value these gentlemen place on them – is somewhere in excess of a billion dollars. As that's rather more than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of my assets, you'll probably want to look elsewhere for your fees."