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political view on anything before. Legislation had always been irrelevant to Bobby.
'Need a license to hate a politician? Give you just an example—last session in the House, he led a vote to scuttle NASA's deep-probe project.'
Ah, the space program.
Bobby pulled a small blue device from a shelf. No-har got up and walked over. The device had AT&T markings on it, a pair of LCD displays, and a standard keypad. It could have been a voice phone, but there was no handset. Instead it had five or six different jacks for optical cable. 'Those probes have been
sitting on the moon—would you plug this in?'
Bobby handed him the end of a coil of optical cable and indicated a small plate on the floor. The plate had old East-Ohio Gas Company markings. Nohar reached down and lifted it. Under the plate was a ragged hole in the concrete. Half a meter down was a section of PVC pipe running under the concrete floor of the warehouse. A hacksaw had cut a diamond-shaped hole in the pipe, and a female jack had been planted amidst the snaking optical cable. Nohar knelt down and made the connection.
Something Bobby was working on, probably the blue AT&T box, made a satisfied beep.
'Thanks, I have trouble getting down there myself. Where was I? Oh, yeah, Binder's shortsightedness. His group of budget nimrods in the House have been stalling the launch for nine-ten years. Finally decided maintenance was too expensive, so they're going to dismantle the project. Forget the fact they would have saved money in the long run by launching on schedule, and we would be getting pictures back from Alpha Centauri by now, and the Sirius probe would have started transmitting already—'
Nohar shrugged. 'My concerns lie closer to home.' 'Yeah. My friend, the pragmatic tiger.' Bobby snapped home a few more connections. 'Worst bit is, he started as a liberal.'
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'You're kidding.'
'Nope, kept running for the state legislature as a civil libertarian, government-for-the-people type guy. Lost. Kept losing until he shifted to the far right and got elected. Never looked back. Children—can we say 'hypocrite'? 'Enough of that—The Digital Avenger is now online.'
Bobby flipped a switch and a new rank of monitors came to life with displays of scrolling text. Inside the bell jar, lasers were carving the air into a latticework of green, yellow, and red light. 'Now what kind of system do we want to run our sticky little fingers through?'
First things first. 'Any information on MLI you can dig up.'
'As you wish—' Bobby pulled out a keyboard and rested it across the arms of his wheelchair.
He paused for a moment. 'Another thing about Binder. With just a little tweak of government finances, we might have caught up to the technology that got wasted with the Japs—'
'I thought you were an anarchist.'
'Don't throw my principles at me when I'm drooling over bio-interfaces nobody this side of the Pacific knows how to install. Besides, the engineering shortage is degrading the quality of my stock.'
There was hypnotic movement in the bell jar as the holographic green web distorted and a blue trail started to snake through the mass. Bobby noted his interest. 'Like the display? You ever hear a hacker refer to the net? That's it. My image of it, anyway. The green lines are optical data tracks, the yellow's a satellite uplink or an RF channel, red's a proprietary channel—government or commercial—the few white ones are what I and the software can't figure out—whoops, close there, someone's watching that one.' The blue line took a right fci angle away from a sudden pixel glowing red. 'Nodes 770
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are computers, junction and switch boxes, satellites, office buildings, etcetera. Jackpot!'
Bobby smiled. 'Anyone ever tell you credit records are the easiest things in the world to access?'
The blue line had stopped at a node, which was now glowing blue and pulsing lightly. Text was scrolling across three screens as Bobby's smile began leaving his face. 'You gave me the right name?'
'Midwest Lapidary Imports.'
Bobby sighed. 'Never as easy as it looks.' He typed madly for a minute or so, then he typed a command that faded the blue line back to the neutral green. Bobby shook his head. 'MLI doesn't exist.'
'What are you talking about?'
'No credit records—'
'Check my credit. Someone is making deposits to my account.'
More mad typing and colored lights. Bobby ended with a whistle. 'You want to loan me some money?'
'Did you find anything?'
'Just daily cash deposits to your account, untrace-able. Thirty kilobucks, plus . . .'
Nohar was speechless. He hadn't had the time, lately, to check the balance on his account. After a while, he said, 'Check somewhere else,'
'If you say so. I have an in at the County Auditor's mainframe.' The blue trail snaked out again, and headed straight for a small nexus of red pixels and lines in a corner of the bell jar. Just before the blue line hit the nexus, it turned red itself. 'Isn't that neat? But I am telling you, you can't have a company without a credit record. Economically impossible. Even the most phony setup in the world is going to be in debt to someone, you can't —'
Bobby paused as the new red line pulsed and text scrolled across one of the screens. 'Okay, I'm wrong, you can.'
'What?'
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'I just downloaded the tax info on MLI.' The scrolling continued. 'Shit.'
Bobby remained silent and the scrolling eventually stopped. The new red line faded. Bobby hit the keyboard again and numbers scrolled across another screen, and stopped. Bobby was looking at the display with his jaw open. Nohar looked at the screen. No more than columns of numbers to him. 'What're you looking at?'
'The third line. The net assets they reported to the County.'
'Eighty thousand and change, what's so great about—'
'Those figures are in millions.'
Time for Nohar's jaw to drop. Eight—no, eighty— billion dollars in assets. Bobby started scrolling through the information. 'And forty thousand mega-bucks in sales and revenue— With no credit record? Someone is playing games here.'
These guys were having billion-dollar turnovers from gemstones? Maybe he was in the wrong line of work. This was one set of rich franks.
'And Christ is alive and selling swampland in Florida—these guys have never been audited.'
'So they play by the rules.'
Bobby shook his head. 'You dense furball. That has nothing to do with it. The Fed assigns auditors for anything approaching this size. And those auditors aren't paid to sit on their hands. They're paid to dig up dirt —'
'So why hasn't MLI been audited?'
'Beats me.' Bobby studied the screen. 'It ain't normal. For some reason, MLI hasn't raised a single flag in the IRS computers. They don't pay too little, or too much—and that is damn hard to do. They even have this little subsidiary, NuFood, to dump money into so they can smooth out their losses. Know what I think?'
'What?'
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'It's all a fake and they have a contact in the Fed telling them what their tax returns should look like.'
Nohar shrugged. 'So what are they spending their money on?'
'I can give you a list of real estate from the property taxes.' This was accompanied by a few keyboard clicks and scrolling text on one screen.
