Leif craned his neck. The glowing letters were backward from his point of view. “Something from Saunders?”
Matt gave another command, and the floating message shifted to a position where they both could read it.
“Another meeting,” Leif said.
“Because the hacking — excuse me, the ‘attempts at unauthorized data extraction’—have continued.” Matt gave his friend a look. “What is it with lawyers that they need five words to do the work of one?”
Leif shrugged. “What is it with your sim partners that one has to keep sticking his nose—”
“Or hers,” Matt pointed out.
“You’re showing a bit of lawyer there yourself,” Leif joked. “That someone has to stick a gender-nonspecific unpleasant word where it has no business being stuck?”
Matt was rereading the virtmail message. “From the looks of the last paragraph, I’d say the mysterious client must be the Callivants.” He pointed. “The Haddings might be able to threaten Ed the Stork with expulsion from the Social Register. But I think it would take Callivant clout to start an audit on the poor guy’s back taxes.”
Leif nodded. “You going to go to this meeting?” he asked.
“Kind of a waste, talking about a sim that’s not going to happen anymore.” He dismissed the message but didn’t erase it. “After this tax thing, I’m sure Saunders won’t want to work with us.”
“Who are you kidding?” Leif said. “You’ve got a whole new mystery now. The Case of the Hidden Hacker.”
Matt hated when people saw through him so easily. “All right, I’ll probably check it out.”
“Just be careful,” Leif advised. “You guys are already being hit with taxes. Can death be far behind?”
I dressed with special care for tonight’s meeting. It reminded me of the grand finales Lucullus Marten sometimes staged for the end of a case. More likely, though, this would turn out to be the sort of loud argument that usually happened when suspects were drawn, one way or another, into the great man’s office.
Too bad Marten wouldn’t have his special heavy-weight chair to sit in.
I chose a bold — and expensive — silk tie that a wealthy lady friend had given me as a gift. It went well with the blue flannel suit I was wearing. While it was the best in my wardrobe, I figured Mick Slimm would probably appear in something more expensive. He was the kind of guy who’d think nothing of spending five hundred simoleons for a tasteful sport coat. Milo Krantz probably spent even more on his shoes. Spike Spanner could just as easily come in a saber-toothed tiger pelt — something to match his caveman personality.
It took two tries to get the knot the way I like it. I turned to the mirror and did the necessary with the military brushes, then slipped into my jacket. Enough with the preliminaries. I was ready for the main bout.
Matt pulled back from the Monty Newman persona, maintaining his appearance as a proxy image. At a silent command Newman’s virtual bedroom vanished, to be replaced with Matt’s floating workspace.
He knew why he’d let himself sink into the virtual character’s confident, slightly smart-aleck style. Matt was nervous. It was ridiculous. He’d done nothing wrong. Why should he worry over what these people — rivals in a mystery sim — might be thinking about him? More than one of them seemed, as Monty Newman might say, “decidedly loony.”
Why else would a hacker keep digging into the Hadding case after the fictional Van Alst murder had come to a crashing halt? It wasn’t just useless, it was obviously painful for the Callivants — and definitely troublesome for Ed Saunders.
Matt allowed himself to arrive a few minutes late for this meeting, to find the other participants, all proxied up as their fictional sleuth counterparts, sitting in a circle around Saunders’s desk.
Surprise, surprise. Lucullus Marten’s mammoth chair had been included. The big man leaned on his cane, trying to get Maura Slimm out of its vastness — while also trying to avoid bursting a blood vessel.
“Young lady—” he began. The tone was unmistakable. It said, “I am no longer amused. In fact, I never was amused with you.”
“Oh, Lukie,” Maura’s chirpy voice replied, “don’t be a spoilsport.”
“Let him have his seat, darling,” Mick Slimm said.
“Yeah, give him a break,” Spike Spanner put in. “Before he starts breakin’ the furniture.”
Marten settled his bulk in the big leather chair. Matt took a much smaller seat beside him.
“Mr. Saunders,” Marten said, grabbing the role of spokesman, “I’m sure all of us here regret your additional troubles.”
“All, apparently, but one,” Milo Krantz interjected, the light from Saunders’s desk lamp glinting off his spectacles. “I confess myself at a loss, however, as to the manner of finding that person.”
“A fine bunch of sleuths we are,” Mick Slimm joked.
“Yeah,” Saunders said. “That’s the problem.” He looked less like a stork today and more like a hunted rabbit. “So here’s what I’m going to do about it. I’m giving you people twenty-four hours. If the hacker hasn’t contacted me by then, and agreed to stop this nonsense, I’m sending a virtmail to the lawyers, explaining that I’ve stopped the sim — and giving them a list of your actual identities.”
“You can’t do that!” A lot of the perkiness had dropped from Maura Slimm’s voice. “Our privacy—”
“Was waived in the sim agreement you all signed,” Saunders grimly replied. “You should have read the small print. It’s just a form that I copied from the programming handbook, but now I’m glad I did. Maybe, if I cooperate with these people, they’ll stop putting the screws to me and go looking where the trouble is really coming from.”
It was almost funny to see this geekoid trying to look defiant.
Funny, Matt thought, except for the trouble it would cause.
“I’m sorry to do it,” Saunders said. “But you leave me no choice.”
5
That does it, Matt thought glumly. What are they going to do now?
The silence of the other make-believe sleuths only seemed to underscore his gloom.
Surprisingly, Lucullus Marten provided an answer. His heavy, square face moved to take in the half-circle of unhappy sim participants. Then he turned to Ed Saunders.
“Would you mind very much giving us a moment or two of privacy?” the big man asked.
Saunders looked just like a startled bird. “Um — no,” he said. “Take as much time as you need.”
An instant later the sim’s creator had vanished from his seat.
Marten leaned back in his big thronelike seat. “My dear colleagues,” he said. “We face a most onerous accusation — but, it seems, an inescapable one. I was hoping that, in the absence of the teacher, as it were, someone might be willing to admit to a little wrongdoing.”
“Just among us?” Maura Slimm said sweetly.
Marten nodded.
But everyone in the room stayed silent.
Marten blew a great, gusty sigh. “I feared it would not be as easy as that,” he admitted.
“Of course not!” Milo Krantz snapped. “The…hacker”—he made a face as the slang term escaped his lips—“this person would have to be witless to make an admission before witnesses. This is not a case of returning the teacher’s apple to the desk, no questions asked. Legal sanctions have been invoked. There may even be criminal penalties.”