Deutsch.
Deutsch? What the fuck was Deutsch? The language of Czechia? That didn’t sound right. Whatever Deutsch was, though, Andy needed it translated. He gave the translator a nudge and told it to do Deutsch. Ja-wohl. It did Deutsch for him.
Dirty Deutsch, at that. A spew of filthy words such as startled even Andy went rocketing across the screen. Whoever had written that file was foaming at the mouth at him across the decades, really running berserk, welcoming him to this sealed archive with an unparalleled stream of derisive muck.
Yes. Yes. Yes. This had to be the Borgmann trail, all right!
He went a little deeper, down that tunnel of forking paths.
“And now,” Andy said, talking entirely to himself, because there was no one left in the universe except him, “I should hit the lock that Steve ran into, right—around—here.”
Yes.
It was a real lulu, that lock. On the surface it was very innocent. It looked like a friendly invitation to go forward. Which Andy proceeded to do, knowing full well what would happen, and carefully marking his position before it did. Onward, onward, onward. Then one step too many, and he found himself crashed. There was nothing he could have done to save himself. The trapdoor had opened in a billionth of a nanosecond and that was that, whoosh, gonel Goodbye, chump.
Right. If this lock had defeated a hacker like Steve, again and again over the past five years, it had to be something special. And it was.
Andy got himself back to his marker and started again. Down the tunnel, yes, take this fork, take that one. Yes. There was the lock coming into view a second time, so beguilingly telling him that he was going the right way, urging him to continue moving ahead. Instead of moving ahead, though, Andy simply looked ahead, sending a virtual scout forward and watching through the scout’s eyes until he could see the pincers of the lock coyly waiting for him at the edges of the data trail a short distance onward. He let them grab the scout and backed up once again to his point of entry.
Slowly, slowly. This thing could be beaten.
His many trips through the Entity mainframes in the course of his pardoning work had taught him how to deal with stuff of this kind. You don’t like one route, just carve yourself another.
There’s plenty of megabytage in here to work with. Call in assistance if you need it; link yourself up with other areas of the operation. Tunnel around the block. Borgmann had been one clever cookie, that was clear, but a whole lot of interfacing had gone on since Borgmann’s day, and Andy had the benefit of everything that had been learned about the Entity computers in the past quarter of a century.
He came at the Borgmann data sideways. He routed himself through computers in Istanbul, in Johannesburg, in Jakarta; and also he went through Moscow, through Bombay, through London, simultaneously tiptoeing up on the Czecho data cache from any number of different directions. He built a double trail for himself, a triple trail, letting himself seem to be in all sorts of places at once, so that nobody could possibly could track him to any one point in his journey and come along in back of him and short him out. And finally he shot into the Prague mainframe through the back door and went whizzing toward the Borgmann cache hind-end first.
He could see the lock, shining bright as daylight, up there in the tunnel waiting for new patsies to show up. But he was behind it.
“Hello, there,” he said, as the secret files of Karl-Heinrich Borgmann came swimming up into his grasp like so many friendly little fish asking to be tickled.
It was amazing, even to Andy, how disgusting some of Borgmann’s stuff was.
Layer after layer of porno, stacked a mile high. Videos of naked European-looking women with hairy armpits and spread crotches, staring into the camera lens in sullen resignation as they went through curious and, to Andy, highly non-enthralling movements of a blatantly sexual nature.
Andy didn’t have any particular problem with the sight of naked women. But the sullen looks, the barely concealed anger of these women, the absolutely unavoidable sense that the camera was raping them—all that was very distasteful. Andy could imagine, easily enough, what must have gone on. Borgmann had been the boss puppet-master, hadn’t he, the voice through which the Entities made known their commands to the conquered planet? The Emperor of Earth, pretty much, the highest authority in the world below Entity level. He had been that for a while, anyway, until that woman had walked into his private office—she had been someone he must have trusted, it would seem—and put the knife into his guts. With the powers he held he could have made anybody do anything he wanted, or else they would face the worst of punishments. And what Borgmann had wanted, evidently, was nothing more profound than for women to take off their clothes in front of him and follow his loathsome instructions while he made videos of them and filed them in his permanent archive.
There was other stuff here, too, that indicated that Borgmann had done even creepier things than making unwilling women gyrate on command while he sat there drooling and took movies of them. Borgmann had been a secret voyeur, too, a peeping Tom, spying on the women of Prague from afar.
Moving deeper, Andy found whole cabinets of video documents that could only have been made by snaking spy-eyes into people’s houses. These women were alone, unsuspecting, going about their business, changing their clothes, brushing their teeth, taking baths, sitting on the john. Or making love, even, with boyfriends or husbands. And all the while there was sweet lovely Karl-Heinrich gobbling it all up by remote wire, taping it and stashing it away where it would eventually be found, twenty or thirty years later, by none other than Anson Carmichael ("Andy") Gannett, Senior.
They went on and on and on, these porno films. Borgmann must have had half the city of Prague wired up with his spy-eyes. No doubt he had put the cost of it all into the municipal budget as necessary security monitoring. But the only thing he had monitored, it seemed, was female flesh. You didn’t have to be any kind of puritan to find the Borgmann files repellent. Moving swiftly from cabinet to cabinet, Andy felt his eyes glazing over, his head beginning to throb. How many breasts could you stare at before they came to lose all erotic value? How many crotches? How many waggling fannies?
Sick, he thought. Sick, sick, sick, sick, sick.
But there was no way to get to the Entity material he was looking for, it appeared, except by wading through these mountains of muck. Perhaps Borgmann himself had had an automatic jump-command that took him past them, but Andy didn’t see any quick and convenient way of looking for it and was unwilling to try anything that might deflect him from the main path. So he went on slogging inward the old-fashioned way, file by file by file, through mountains of flesh, tons of tits and ass, hoping that there would indeed be something in this much-sought-after archive of Borgmann’s beside this unthinkable record of the invasion of the privacy of hundreds and hundreds of girls and women of a bygone era.
He got past the porno levels, an endless time later.
He thought for a while that he never would. But then, abruptly, he found himself among files that had an entirely new inventorying system, an archive buried within the archive, and knew, after a few minutes of poking around, that he had hit the jackpot.