Leif looked near-exhaustion, but he smiled. “Congratulations.”
“I don’t think so,” Maj replied. “I think it was a setup. This guy didn’t want to take no for an answer and seemed a little put out when I didn’t want to start talking negotiations immediately.
“Nobody does business like that,” Leif said.
“He says he does.”
“And what do you think?”
“That someone sent him my way as a distraction,” Maj answered honestly.
“Because of Peter Griffen’s disappearance?”
“It’s bigger than that,” Maj said. “And I think it’s more than just the money involved.”
“Maj, when you’re talking about corporations, money’s always the bottom line.”
“Actually, there’s two things,” Maj replied. “You’re used to looking at business somewhat altruistically. Wealth is like politics and is usually about two things.”
“Money”—Leif nodded, understanding—“and power. So if it’s not about the money, where does the power come in?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe you could look into Fortress Games. They’re a major player in the software entertainment business, but maybe they’ve got partners.”
“I’ll take a look,” Leif promised, “and let you know.”
Maj thanked him and broke the connection. Then she placed a call to Mark, catching him on the Net as she’d expected. A vidscreen opened up in her workspace, showing Mark dressed in his crashsuit.
“Andy and I are taking a close look at the Realm of the Bright Waters online gaming package,” Mark said. “Want to come up?”
“Find anything interesting?”
“Maybe,” Mark admitted. “But it’s nothing really glaring. Come take a peek.” He extended a hand through the vidscreen.
Maj took his hand and let him pull her through the Net telecommunications system. The Net blurred around her. In the next instant she stood on a high cliff overlooking a tree-strewn valley. Bright river water reflected the sun as it rushed through the valley’s heart.
“Is there any reason we’re wearing these?” Maj waved at the crashsuit she wore that was similar to Mark’s.
“The game pack has a tendency to want to react with any kind of programming in it,” Andy said. He sat hunkered down at the cliff’s edge, dressed in a crashsuit as well. “Really user-friendly.”
“Is that unusual?” Maj asked.
“Not so much,” Mark admitted. “A lot of game packs tend to be automatically engaging. They present the world and the possibilities, and hope to catch someone’s eye long enough to sign them up for the online services.”
Maj peered into the valley. Brightly colored birds sped through the trees, winged heartbeats of red, orange, emerald green, and shimmering dark blue.
“I wanted us here without triggering all the interactive programming,” Mark said. “When we first got here, we were attacked by a primitive culture.”
“Real Stone Age throwbacks,” Andy agreed, with a grin. “But I had my sword, and Mark had a couple spells tucked away. He set his hair on fire at one point. You should have seen them run.”
“Sounds like fun,” Maj said.
“Like I said,” Mark went on, “the interactive feature is pretty standard. It entices the gamer to want to see the rest of the world. Good stuff. Well designed and well thought out. However—”
“This,” Maj said, “is the part I was waiting for.”
“I checked for the anomaly you and Matt ran into in your veeyar. I ran some diagnostics against what’s being offered in the game pack against what you experienced. The anomaly isn’t here.”
Maj considered that, trying to make it fit with what she was thinking. “It should have been.”
“It’s not. But I checked over the game pack programming and discovered other interesting details. A lot of the normal programming from an online interface is missing.”
“The game pack is defective?” Maj asked.
“No. When a user logs on and downloads the outline programming from the game server, the missing files will automatically be patched in.”
“So why leave them out?”
“I don’t know,” Mark told her.
“The first thought,” Andy put in, “would be to conserve space on the game pack datascript. But that’s not an issue because the files are archived and fit easily in the space that’s provided.”
“And there’s the possibility that Eisenhower shaved production time off the game backs by not including all programming that downloads automatically from the Net.”
“But they could have simply issued a download site on the Net,” Maj said.
“Yeah,” Andy agreed. “But there’s nothing like putting a brightly colored box into a gamer’s hand. That’s total euphoria, and that’s why game companies haven’t gone totally online with releases.”
“Massive downloads can still be a problem online,” Mark said. “A corporation can stumble and fall and fail to provide for all the immediate demand by consumers.”
“All the more reason to produce a complete game pack and keep downloads short,” Maj said. A dragon drifted lazily across the sky above them, but it wasn’t Peter’s dragon. A thought struck her and she looked at Mark. “Did you try adding in the programming that the Net automatically adds?”
Mark nodded. “First thing. But there wasn’t any change in performance. No bleed-over anomaly.”
“Then how did it happen at the convention yesterday?” Maj asked.
Mark shook his head. “The only thing I can think of is that Eisenhower is going to upload some other files beyond the normal Net load.”
“They could blend that programming in with the Net upload, couldn’t they?” Maj asked.
“Sure, but the Net checks for viruses.”
The thought felt right and Maj stayed with it. “I don’t think we’re looking for a virus or a Trojan Horse, or a worm. What if it’s just part of the game programming?”
“Veeyars will accept it and won’t think twice.”
“Yeah,” Andy said, “but if the bleed-over effect can be canceled, why didn’t they?”
“Because maybe it’s not so easily canceled once the whole program runs,” Maj answered. “But I think it’s because Eisenhower and whoever is behind them want the bleed-over in there.”
“Why?” Andy asked.
“That,” Maj replied, “remains the big question.”
A knock at the hotel door woke Maj. Her head felt as if it had been packed with sawdust, and her eyes were too heavy to lift. She stumbled up from bed and pulled a robe on, then looked through the vid security plate. Leif stood out in the hallway. She let him in.
“Catch you sleeping?” he asked in a voice that was simply too cheerful to stand.
“It’s after midnight,” Maj said.
“So?” Leif was dressed in a fresh tux and carefully groomed, but his eyes looked glassy.
“You haven’t been to sleep yet?” Maj asked in disbelief.
“Things to do.” Leif dropped into a chair. “And I thought you’d want to be the first to know.”
“Know what?”
Leif grinned. “Who Eisenhower’s mysterious benefactor is.”
“Tell me.”
“Allow me my moment of drama,” Leif said. “After you gave me Fortress Games, I had my dad’s people start checking on them, find out who’d invested in them. There are generally a few players in any corporation. He turned up a string of shell companies that led back to a source. However, that started me thinking. The way my dad’s guy was able to find out who was behind Fortress Games was through the money manipulations. They crossed a dozen borders, nearly three dozen banks, and sixteen different governments.”
“Sounds complicated,” Maj said.
“Very complicated,” Leif agreed. “My dad hires some very good people, though, and Hendricks is one of the best. Anyway, I asked Hendricks to look back through other funds that had been funneled along the same routes, marking the dates as around the time Eisenhower got their healthy boost of vitamin cash.”