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Page 35.

Chapter 20

Next morning, David told Colonel Jankowsky about his meeting with Vern Consiglio. He concluded with “... Obviously I had to tell you, Sir.”

“You did the right thing, David. In the military we have a chain of command. We don’t go working on the outside for civilians, no matter how much we believe in their cause. You proceed as normal. I’ll feed you some more case files, hopefully easier ones than you’ve had so far, and you just do your job. I’ll have to kick your information upstairs, of course.” He paused, apparently noting the worry in David’s mind. He added: “That’s the chance the Vern Consiglios take when they try to outsmart the system and use junior officers. I understand it’s very sensitive information and it will stay in Tony Tomasik’s chain of command.”

David opened a stack of five case files. A mess unit at the Composite required a certification inspection, and he’d have to locate the military health inspector to get him in on it. A senior NCO at a motor pool had phoned in a tip that his company XO and two fellow NCO’s were stealing expensive tools; David kicked that one over to CID. And so it went, until the desk phone rang. It was Tory. “David, can you come over here, like right away? I’m at my old office at Observatory Circle.”

“What is it?” Her hushed, explosive whisper gave him a chill.

“Jet’s found something.”

“I’ll call you from the car.” Leaving word with a secretary, he hurried outside, pulled his car out with screeching tires, and drove toward the Naval Observatory. The sky was a mix of sunshine and gray cotton clouds. He had to turn on the windshield wipers two or three times to clear away accumulating drops from a rain he couldn’t see falling. The tires sang on wet asphalt as he pulled up the observatory drive and parked under a big tree. His feet crunched on the road surface as he walked toward the NSSO building. Tory and Jet hurried to meet him, both wearing raincoats. Tory’s dark hair bunched up in the wind, and Jet’s lank hair flew. Tory said: “We were just checking to see everything got moved to the Atlantic Hotel. Jet was poking around in the net—”

He followed them back into the building, left and right through the short zig zag hallways designed to make life harder for anyone not familiar with the layout, like a spy or an intruder. “In here,” Tory said opening a door, “it’s soundproof. There are cameras in the ceiling, so turn away from them and nobody can read your lips later on film.” She laughed nervously. “Aren’t we getting paranoid?”

They were in the Secure Room. “Ib loved this place,” Jet said.

“Wow,” David said, getting his first close look at the behemoth he’d only glimpsed during his earlier visit. He stared with greedy curiosity at the fifty-ton, burnished-steel egg, with chrome-plated rivets, mounted in a heavy concrete base painted red, that was CloudMaster. No time to ogle now. “Go on,” David encouraged.

Jet handed him goggles like he’d worn the other day. “We’re going to play back Ib's last paths. Ib covered his tracks very well. He could have fooled a lay person or even another head walker, but I know some of his tricks. Here we go, Sir. This is recorded, so don’t try to do anything. No turns, no walking. Just hang on tight.”

David held a sissy bar as they followed Ib’s tracks on the spoor of a European hacker.

“Ib destroyed the paperwork, and he hid the work disk in a common area so it could have been the work of any of us at NSSO. I finally figured out where Ib stashed his records.”

Jet had turned on her seldom-used icon, a slender waif in a dark jump suit, right out of the 25th Century or someplace.

David’s path of vision followed the icon’s appealing figure into a tall wire-frame meant to look like a high-rise.

They descended staircases into the earth, all gray except for the red railing that spelled danger.

They came to a door, and the waif made a waving motion.

The door opened, and they stepped into what looked like a storeroom.

A sign on the wall read: “Ib’s Klub House. Keep Out.”

In a fit of humor, the old Coast Guardsman must have pixeled the drawing that occupied one corner—of an easy chair, a table with a beer and a book, and a raccoon-tail hat on a peg.

A cigarette smoldered in an ashtray.

The waif touched a switch in the wall.

Instantly, Ib’s likeness appeared in the easy chair.

Ib smiled and waved. The big belly, the swollen ankles, the double chin were well rendered.

“He has a good sense of humor,” Jet said. “Here is the trip disk.”

The waif stood prettily on tiptoe before a bookcase. Its finger scanned from left to right, and then pressed a certain book. Instantly the scene changed.

“We’re following Ib’s footsteps now, Sir. Through various net city neighborhoods. That is, data addresses. Archives. The phone company. The power company. Banks. Stores. He was chasing a Dutch hacker named Salty who got into the power company’s files, then a bank’s.”

“That’s what he told me when I first met him.”

“That’s right, Sir. Now we know where he went and what he did. We may be able to dig up that list of names yet.”

“Have you been in there, Jet?”

“Nossir, I’m afraid to get too close. Afraid I might destroy evidence.” She added: “Worse yet, leave a personal trace, and end up with a target on my back.”

David watched the icon of an old sailing ship rotate in the air of a huge bank lobby.

The ship’s cannon boomed.

Jet speeded up the record. “Blink your eyes, Sir. We’ll be there in a second.”

David followed a blinding blur of light and motion. Then they were standing still in what looked like a train station. It was Grand Central under the ground, he thought; only from high windows did harsh sunlight stab inside and lose itself into smoky darkness.

And in the darkness stood huge drums. Kiosks, he thought. “They’re called carousels,” Jet said. “This is the city’s emergency data recovery archive. The carousels are just representations; the real things are huge wafer disks in a cold room. There must have been a brownout the night the Vice President died.”

David was intrigued. “Why do you say that?”

“Watch,” Jet said.

David felt Tory’s fingernails biting into his shoulder as the three of them followed the last steps before Ib’s discovery of the secret that would result in his disappearance.

Inside one of the shadowy carousels, Ib appeared to be browsing around. The insides were covered with thousands of tiny written labels organized into columns, each column further divided into squares. Ib focused on a column labeled Directory Z. “Carousel 49, Directory Z,” Jet said. “Now watch before we go in.” A bunch of information displayed—numbers and text, flashing busily. The waif pointed to a date amid the data. “See this? It’s the night the Vice President died, a half hour before his death.”

“Oh wow,” David said as the proof of Ib’s discovery began to hit home. Tory’s fingers dug into him as she whispered: “David, it’s the most important part! The proof! That address hasn’t been touched since Cardoza’s death. Nobody could fake that.”

“I checked,” Jet said. “There was a browndown minutes before Cardoza was killed. This message was on its way to the VP mansion, there was a browndown, and it got sucked into here instead. Under normal conditions, as soon as the browndown was over, which might be in a few seconds, the messages get barfed back up into the net, and they go to their destinations like nothing happened. Only nobody bothers to erase the emergency archive. So the data stay there, until months or years later, when there’s a future power failure, and it’s this carousel’s turn in the cycle to be overwritten. Ib made sure he merely copied what’s in Directory Z, without a Save that would put a more recent date in the processing registers.”

“If only I’d believed him sooner,” David said. He felt dark piano keys of fear banging in his soul.