“Not that I’ve seen. His ex-wife lives in Boston. If he wanted to get her, he missed by three thousand miles. No alimony, no kids, and the new trophy wife is a lot prettier, anyhow. He lost his funding on a research project, but got a higher paying job right after. ”
“Power?”
“Never had an ambition to run things, far as I can tell.”
“Money, then?”
“How does zapping a couple of Chinese villages and then downtown Portland get him rich? Extortion, maybe? But that wouldn’t be too bright, ’cause he’d have to know the authorities would be on his tail forever for multiple murder. He’d never be able to relax, it’s too high-profile. Too late for that now, anyhow, we have the gun. Ammunition is no good without it, and he can’t walk into another of these radio palaces and ask pretty please to use the transmitter, can he?”
No, it didn’t make a lot of sense.
Michaels had a sudden thought. “Suppose you wanted to buy a new computer system, something experimental, way ahead of what everybody else had?”
“Yeah?”
“How would you go about buying it if you weren’t sure what it would do?”
“Sit down and put it through its paces,” Jay said. “Crank it up to high and let it fly, find out what it would do — ah.”
Michaels saw that Jay was going down the same path. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe that’s what Morrison was doing. Maybe he was showing it to a potential customer. How much you figure such a thing might be worth, to the right customer? The power to drive your enemies bonkers?”
“Damn,” Jay said.
“Yeah. I think we just might have found ourselves an even uglier can of worms. As long as it is Morrison, we get him eventually. But what if he passes it along to somebody else? Somebody we can’t get so easily?”
“That could be a problem.”
“It already is a problem. Ours. As of now, this is your reason for living. Hit the net. Get all the help you can get. Find this guy, Jay. And find him fast.”
“Yeah.”
Michaels looked around. “You seen Toni? I kind of lost track of her around lunchtime.”
“Uh, no. I haven’t, uh, seen her.” He looked back at his computer.
Michaels said, “I’m hoping to get her to come back to work. I think she’s considering it seriously.”
“Really. That’s, uh, good, Boss.” Something on Jay’s desk suddenly seemed fascinating to him. And something in his tone of voice didn’t sound quite right.
“What?” Michaels said.
“What, ‘what’?” Jay responded, still not looking up.
Michaels realized he was maybe not the most perceptive man in the world when it came to reading people, but Jay Gridley wasn’t one of the world’s great adepts when it came to hiding his feelings, either.
“You aren’t telling me something I need to hear.”
“Boss, I—”
“I have a lot on my mind right now, Jay. How about you don’t add worrying the unknown to it?”
Jay blew out a sigh. “All right. Last time I was in the feeb mainframe, I left myself a couple of doors, you know, just in case we had problems like when the Russian got into the government systems?”
“Skip the rationalizations, you’re a hacker to the bone. It’s what we pay you for, remember.”
“Yeah, well, I kind of left myself a door in the director’s office subsystem.”
“And you found something I need to know but that you don’t want to tell me. What — am I going to get fired?”
“No, no, nothing like that. It’s just that, well, Toni had a meeting with the director today. At one.”
Michaels’s immediate urge was to cover and say, Oh, sure, I knew about that. But since he hadn’t known, and since there seemed to be more, he didn’t say that. Instead, he said, “And now you can drop the other shoe.”
“You really ought to hear it from her, Boss.”
“Maybe so, but I’m going to hear it from you.”
Jay shook his head. “The director just put in the e-forms for a new staff job in her office. Special assistant. She was offering the job to Toni.”
Michaels blinked. “And she took the job?”
“Not that I can tell.”
Michaels felt an absurd sense of relief. A job offer, fine, that was no big deal. Sure, she should have told him about it, but, hey, things were busy, and maybe she’d planned to brush the director off before she mentioned it. That would be like her. Nothing to worry about.
Yeah? Then why is your stomach suddenly all twisted and cold?
When he used his phone to check his e-mail, Tyrone Howard saw a priority call from Jay Gridley. Huh. What was that about?
It took forever to scroll the message on the tiny screen, but it was pretty straightforward. Jay had put out a call to all his contacts on the web. He was looking for some information, and he was asking for help.
Tyrone stared at the phone. What seemed like a thousand years ago, he had helped Jay chase down a bad guy in VR. He and Jay knew each other from way back, ever since Tyrone’s dad had been at Net Force. Of course, that time he’d helped Jay had been when he was spending six or seven hours a day jacked in to his computer, something he hadn’t done in a while. These days, he was on-line two hours a day, tops, almost nothing, just enough time to read his mail, run through a few VR rooms, and maybe a few minutes of an on-line game. But if Jay was asking, Tyrone bet it had something to do with his dad getting shot, and he was ready to sit down, plug in, and get the data flowin’ fine and fast for that. This was the guy who had pack-pronged Portland, killed people, and ruined the championships, too. A dragfoot juicesucker who needed to be shorted out, no feek. He had his laptop with him, in his pack in his dad’s room. He’d get it and get on-line.
Nadine could help him. She didn’t know a whole lot about computers, but he could take her along and show her as they went. He was not as sharp as he’d been, but he could still lubefoot the net okay. He’d help Jay and they would catch the sucker who had shot his dad.
28
Inside the car, even with the motor running and the air conditioner going on high, it was warm. It was just the two of them, Morrison in the back, Ventura driving. They passed the odd militiaman on the dusty gravel road as they crept along at just over walking speed.
Over the phone, Wu’s voice was silky, relaxed, lulling. He said, “Of course we trust you. It’s just that some of your… ah… associates seem to have a bias against people of our… persuasion. No point in tempting fate, now, is there?”
Morrison nodded at the unseen speaker. Both phones had their picture transmission off, so neither man could view the other. Not that it would have helped Morrison much to see Wu. He wasn’t particularly good at reading expressions on Western faces; as far as he was concerned, the Chinese were inscrutable. Besides, it didn’t matter. Ventura had coached him, and so far, everything the bodyguard had said was right on the button. In theory, their conversation was scrambled, encoded so that it couldn’t be understood even if somebody was able to intercept and record it.
“Perhaps the Chinese embassy might be more to your liking?”
Wu had the grace to laugh. “Well, of course, we could arrange that, but somehow I don’t think Luther would feel very comfortable under such circumstances. In his place, I would not.”
“Let’s cut to the chase,” Morrison said. “I’ll name a place, and we’ll meet there.”
Ventura had told him they wouldn’t like that, getting right to the point. The culture from which Wu came was more patient than America’s, by and large, and the Chinese were willing to engage in as much ceremonial talk as necessary to please all the speakers. They viewed Americans’ lack of formality and impatience as signs of youth and poor breeding.