Michael pried the lock off the door, and began shoveling files into his voluminous case. The first gunshots began to splinter the windows.
“Get to the fragging back door!” Geraint urged as he let off a flurry of his own shots at the advancing figures just visible outside. The armor won’t last forever.” He scooped up a last handful of files as they blew their way out the back door and found themselves in an alleyway.
“Whoops,” Geraint said as he looked at the cul-de-sac. A platoon of police were running at them from the far end.
“This program cost me half a million nuyen and it had better bloody well work,” Michael muttered grimly as he yanked open the doors of the mechanic’s shop opposite and raced into the gloom. He opened the door of the vehicle and started the ignition. Geraint had already flung himself into the passenger seat and flattened himself as close to the floor as he could. The armored car advanced into the street, performed a tire-screeching ninety-degree turn and raced toward the policemen. It scattered them far and wide, sprays of bullets bouncing off its armor as Michael raced the thing toward the outskirts of town again. Then, extraordinarily, he stopped and opened the driver’s door. A policeman was approaching from the side of the road.
“What the hell-”
“Trojan horse, old man,” Michael said as he handed over his case to the smart frame. “They almost certainly have special locks on data loss, and we may have trouble getting out with the data not ending up degraded. But Simon here won’t have any problems.
“Simon?”
“Give them names, helps me remember what does what. Simple Simon-simple to get data out with.”
“Doesn’t make any sense to me,” said the mystified Geraint.
“Doesn’t have to, it only needs to make sense to me.” Michael pointed out. “Now we have a roadblock to get past and, by the sound of it, half of Renraku’s best are on our tails.” The sirens got louder behind them.
“Now, let’s go knock down that barrier!”
“Well, it wasn’t traceable of course,” Radev said consolingly as he lit another of his endless chain of cigarettes. “But then we wouldn’t expect it to be. If it had been, we’d have been very disappointed. After all, we do pay him to get into other people’s systems without being traced, so at least we know he does what he does for us rather well.”
“Fine,” Kryzinski growled. “And the data?”
“The data in the proximity of the invading personas was transformed by the morphic encrypters at one hundred percent efficiency,” Radev smiled. “He will learn that what we told him was almost correct. If it had matched exactly he’d have been suspicious, of course. Now he’ll think we had a slightly more serious system invasion than we told him we had, and we won’t have to worry about being compromised by our own operative.”
“Good.” Sam sighed happily. “He’s good, we’re good, everything’s just fraggin’ hunky dory. Apart from twenty billion nuyen or you can all expect to wear brown pants for a fortnight.”
“We’ll have to see Sutherland’s initial report,” the Bulgarian replied. “It should conform to the initial assessment we have and then we can proceed from there.”
Kryzinski yawned and looked at the clock. He resented having to work beyond his normal shift to be on hand when Sutherland’s anticipated system intrusion occurred.
“I’m going home to get some sleep,” he sighed. “That’s enough excitement for one day.”
“Our bosses will be pleased,” Radev said consolingly, giving him a nicotine-stained smile.
“They’d fragging better be!” Kryzinski said fervently.
Michael keyed in the final instructions for the frame-analyzers and sat hack triumphantly. Getting out of the system had been easier than he’d expected. The tar pit program that had nearly trapped their car had been the least he’d expected and the attack utilities barking gunfire at the roadblock had been almost disappointingly easy to fend off. Now it was five in the morning and dawn was still an unfulfilled promise. Fresh coffee was just arriving, and gleaming dark bottles of port seemed to be making suggestive invitations to him from the table opposite, but after two days of slotting around with his body clocks, certain minor visual hallucinations were entirely acceptable. Geraint, having already used some minor booster or stabilizer through the cannula implant in his neck, took a shot of something psychoactive to prevent that happening, but Michael preferred a less direct route. Caffeine and alcohol into the gut would do fine, and he lit one of Geraint’s gold-banded cigarettes to add to the cocktail.
“They never saw it. What a bunch of dodos!” he smirked.
“Don’t get arrogant,” Geraint warned. “Wait to see what the discrepancies are. Don’t celebrate the data haul until you’ve seen it.”
“What we came out with was vanilla,” Michael protested. “What the Trojan horse will come out with is-”
Text was already filling the thirty-inch auxiliary screen. It scrolled through the initial sections of the inhouse Renraku evaluations in synchrony with the accelerated lasprint output until Michael keyed the screen to hold. He read fast. The blood drained from his face.
“Holy Mother of God!” he croaked, his hands grasping the edge of the table as if it were the edge of a cliff and he was about to fall off. “Look at this.”
Geraint leant over his shoulder, taking in the formal, emotionless language of the Renraku summarizer.
Total system invasion and collapse has been evaluated from corporate core systems with the following probabilities: Renraku, 100% known and evaluated; Fuchi, 100% with no error; Shiawase, 99% with error estimate +/- 1%; Saeder-Krupp, 99% +/- 1%…
“Total system invasion and collapse?” Michael said disbelievingly, “The whole enchilada? Everything?”
“Look at that,” Geraint said, his finger tracing down the rows on the screen. “They were instantaneous. Right on the stroke of 00:00, Chiba time, and again two hours later. Boy, that takes some doing to go back two hours later when the corps must have had everything cranked way beyond maximum alert. Impressive.”
“Someone invaded and collapsed every single megacorp at the same instant?” Michael cried out, hands falling into his lap as he leaned back in his chair. “No way. Utterly, absolutely no sodding way!”
“It appears to have happened, however,” Geraint pointed out.
Michael was already scrabbling through the printout. “Nothing here on the guy leaving the same icon anywhere else, and nothing on what he wants,” he complained.
“There is for Renraku,” Geraint observed. “He wants twenty billion.”
“Twenty billion?” Michael almost leapt from his chair. Then his voice became slightly manic and humorous. “Well, I mean, why not? Might as well ask for a fur coat for the missus and a bike for the kiddie while you’re at it.”
“If he can crash every Matrix system on the globe at the same instant, twenty billion is probably about the going rate,” Geraint said thoughtfully.
“He? Them must be a whole flock of them!” Michael said. “Working together, one at each system. There’s a whole gang of these people out there.”
“Now that is imposible,” Geraint replied. “Are there eight or so people in the whole world capable of doing this?”
“No,” Michael said, suddenly brought back to earth, “No, there cannot be eight megageniuses sprung from nowhere to conduct such an operation. But how one decker could do it…”
“Look at what you do with frames,” Geraint said.
Michael shook his head. “Couldn’t do this with a frame.”
“Couldn’t do this at all.” Geraint chuckled. “Let’s face it. Whoever did this could construct frames to act synchronously with his own handiwork.”
“How the hell am I ever going to find this guy? I had no idea. This isn’t anyone known in the community,” Michael lamented. “No way I can trace him.”