“I don’t want any,” I said brusquely. I was angry, angry that the drug had not been there. That I had wanted it so badly. That I had not been faced, at least, with a choice. I had wanted the drug, I knew that, but now I wouldn’t know whether or not I could also have refused it.
“It’ll warm you up. No? To business, then.” She poured for herself. “I assume you’ve given some thought to how long your clip will have to stand up to scrutiny?”
“A standard thirty-second spot should do it. But most of the money that’s going to be donated will be within the first ten or twelve. I’ve told you about Stella’s friends, the rivalry between them to give as much as they can as fast as they can. Judging by the society and celebrity gossip news, it’s still fashionable to be the first to give to a new charity.”
I remembered Stella at Ratnapida V-handing the screen scanner, laughing at beating out her friends. And the amounts had not been small. “So it all depends on how well the equipment from Hyn and Zimmer will perform-”
“Good for several minutes.”
“-and where and how the money will be moved around.”
That was the sticking point. Now that Ruth would no longer help with false physical ID, the bank accounts would be harder.
But Spanner smiled her narrow-eyed smile. “Since you’ve left I’ve become much more sophisticated. I have this program that will skip credit through the edges of slush funds—the ones no one dares to look at too closely, anyway.”
“Like?”
“Like the accounts the various media use to pay their ‘unofficial sources’ at various levels of government; like the accounts the police use to pay their informants.”
Programs like that were not easy to get. “Where did you get it?”
“A… client. And it’s safe enough.”
If, as I suspected, she had extorted it from a daisy chainer or cajoled it as payment from a sex client, then she was more than likely right. Still… “Have you tested it?”
“Once.”
I could only accept her at her word. “I’ll want my share in debit cards, immediately. The minute we can verify the money in our chosen account.”
“Agreed.”
I decided I wanted some tea, after all. “Hyn and Zimmer still think they can get us the equipment?”
“Any day. They sent me the specs earlier tonight.” She stood, turned on her screen. “Come over here.” I brought my tea. “Take a look. Fabulous stuff. If you could make a clip good enough, I could hold the net for six or seven minutes with these.”
In the glow of the spidery schematics, her face looked softer. I had almost forgotten how appealing she was when she was alight with enthusiasm. I had to fight the urge to touch her cheek. I stepped back a little. “Where are you going to get the money?”
“I’ll get it in time, don’t worry.” She couldn’t take her eyes off the technical specs.
“But I do worry.” She looked so happy, so vulnerable. “Look, Spanner, we could just forget this. I mean, I know I owe you money, but I could pay it gradually. A bit every time I get paid.”
“Are you out of your mind?” The hard lines were back, grooved on each side of her mouth. She stabbed a finger at the screen. “Look at that stuff. It’s hard to get, expensive, and already ordered. We can’t just turn around and say, Oops, sorry boys and girls, we changed our minds! And how much do you earn a month, anyway? Not even enough to pay my expenses for two days! I need money now, not in dribs and drabs over the next few years. No. You heard what Hyn and Zimmer said about these people. There’s no way out now but through.”
I hated her then, for getting herself trapped in such a way that all she could do was dig herself a deeper hole, but then I laughed at myself. Wasn’t that what I was doing? We stared at each other a moment. Whatever she saw seemed to satisfy her.
“Now, we still need information about the net nexuses.”
Spanner might be the soul of impatience when it came to other people, but when she was planning something dangerous and illegal she could wait like a cat by a mousehole. I sighed. “All right. We could both name the locations of half a dozen stations without even thinking hard. And you’re good with locks. So tell me why we can’t just break in and use one of those.”
She almost rubbed her hands. She loved displaying her skills. “Because everyone, no matter how security-conscious—in fact, especially those who are security types—adopts patterns of behavior. The systems that check for intrusion or piggybacking will have initially been generated randomly. But those results are subject to human oversight. And people always form habits. Patterns. If we can find someone to tell us the patterns, we find a hole.”
Chapter 10
Lore is twelve. It is one of those rare days when both Oster and Katerine are busy at the terminals and she is free to do what she wants. It is July, and hotter than usual on Ratnapida; the constant hum of the air-conditioning drives her outside, to the carp pools. Tok is already there, lying on his stomach, dipping a blade of grass in and out of the water. His sketch pad blinks, forgotten, in the grass.
He looks up. “If you do this with the sun facing you, sometimes the fish think it’s an insect or something, and try to grab the grass.” Lore plops down next to him and watches while he dips the grass in and out, in and out.
“I can’t see any fish.”
“They’re there. You probably scared them away.” He throws the grass away. A breeze catches it and drops it in the center of the pool. They watch it turn slowly on the water. “So,” Tok says finally, “Mum and Dad giving you some peace for a change?”
Lore nods. They watch the grass blade some more. It drifts into the tiny eddy near a stone.
“Hang in there,” Tok says softly. “It’ll get better.”
Lore sighs, lies full length on the turf. “How do you cope?”
“It’s not as hard for me. They leave Stel and me alone; maybe they see us as belonging to each other somehow.” He shrugs, then smiles wryly. They both know Stella belongs to no one. No one has seen her for two months; they get occasional net calls from Macau and Aspen, from Jaffna and Rio. “And I’ve got my art. I can say, ‘This is what I want to do with my spare time, until I join the company.’ They tend to leave me alone.”
“I don’t have anything.”
“Find something.”
Lore nods.
“So, what has Dad all hot under the collar?” Tok asks.
“Some emergency about patent law in the Polynesians,” she says. “He thinks the government might disallow our proprietary rights on the Z. mobilis pyruvate decarboxylate gene.”
“Dad’s pet ethanol project.” Lore nods again. She can no longer see the grass blade. It must have sunk. “Oh well, if Dad gets nowhere with the law, Mum’ll send in the dirty-tricks department.”
Lore sits up. “The what?”
Tok grins. “Didn’t think you knew about that. The dirty-tricks department are the ones who do all the dirty jobs. Illegal ones. Off the record.”
“You’re making this up.”
“Nope. Read about it for yourself. It’s in Aunt Nadia’s personal file-”
“How did you get into that!”
“I’ll show you if you like. Anyway-”
“What does it say?”
“I’m getting to that. It talks about a bunch of boring stuff, accounts, company coups, that sort of thing, but it also talks about ‘Jerome’s Boys.’ Remember Jerome Gladby?”
“The old man?” The last time Lore saw her grandmother’s crony, an ex-COO, he was in a wheelchair, his booming voice reduced to a thin creak.
“He wasn’t always old. Years ago he used to run a group of people who did nothing but fix things that couldn’t be fixed by any other means. They carried guns, false ID, everything.”
“You’re kidding!”
“From what Nadia’s journal says it sounds like they did anything necessary: spread disinformation, stole things, sabotaged rivals’ plants. It was just getting interesting when Greta came on the net and kicked me out of the files.”