explained the system.
“And you’re on-line yourself, of course,” he said, when she had finished.
“Yes.”
He stepped up to her control board, ran a long-fingered hand along the edge of the casing—a netwalker’s hand, Trouble thought, superstitiously, and felt a surge of fear. He nigged the datacord out of its housing, and his attention sharpened abruptly. “You must spend a lot of time on the nets,” he said, and pulled the cord out to its full length, displaying the double head.
Trouble froze again, damning herself for her carelessness. A double jack, highspeed data line and regular dollie-jack combined, was the tool of the serious netwalkers; it was also the only way you could process enough information to satisfy the brainworm. Most users—even most syscops—made do with the ordinary jack, and lived with the time lags. If she had stood up and shouted, the message couldn’t have been plainer. “I do spend a lot of time out there,” she said, deliberately misunderstanding. “Like I said, we do a lot of graphics, both in-house with the fractals and as a time vendor. I spend a lot of time monitoring those jobs, and you have to be able to shut down fast if something goes wrong.”
“Oh?” That was Levy, sounding almost interested.
“Yeah. When you’re running the big color printer and there’s a glitch in the program, well, the faster you can close it off, the less ink and paper you waste. And Seara uses a lot of unconventional materials, all of them expensive.” She gave Starling a guileless glance, and did not think he was impressed.
“You must do test runs to prevent that kind of thing,” Starling said.
“Oh, sure,” Trouble answered, and let a genuine grievance color her voice. “But you don’t know artists. They keep fiddling with a program even after it’s supposed to be set, and when you run what’s supposed to be the final job, you find out they’ve added a line or two of code—” She let her voice go high and thin, imitating Seara. “—just a half-tone difference in one color mask, that’s hardly a change at all—and that will be the thing that screws up the entire run.”
“Uh-huh.” Starling was still looking at the double-headed cord, his eyes moving from its housing to the host machine to the main display. Trouble kept her expression open and innocently helpful, hoping that he believed her—but that was almost too much to expect, with the shadow-walker’s cord staring him in the face.
“When did you send your last report to the sheriff?” Levy asked.
“The beginning of August,” Trouble answered. She could feel the fear swelling in her belly, took a slow, deep breath to keep it down, and tucked her hands into her pockets again.
“So the next one’s due any day now,” Starling said.
Trouble nodded. “I was working on it when you called me.”
Starling looked at Levy. “I think we might as well wait until that one’s in, Ben.”
“Whatever.” Levy looked back at Trouble. “Will you send us a copy as well?” He held out a card, and Trouble took it mechanically.
“Sure. Is there anything I should be looking for?”
Starling shook his head. “Just the usual. You will let us know if you hear anything—anything at all—about Trouble?”
“Absolutely,” Trouble said.
“Or anything else,” Levy said. “Any talk of intrusions, funny accounts, anything at all. Our numbers are on the card.”
Trouble looked at it, the codes barely registering, looked back at Levy. “I’ll let you know,” she said again, and doubted they believed her.
She walked them back upstairs and let them out her front door, watched them walk away across the lawn. They hesitated for a moment at the entrance to the community hall, but then Starling said something, and they turned away, heading toward the compound gate and the carpark beyond. They walked in step as if by habit, and Trouble shivered despite the sunlight. They were bound to be suspicious—they had to be suspicious, after she had been careless enough to leave the double jack out in plain sight. It was just a question now of what she would have to do. She closed the door gently, throwing the locks out of old habit, and started slowly back down the steps to the basement.
She seated herself in front of the keyboard again, but did not reach for the datacord. They would expect her to do that, to go on-line to find out anything she could about them—the netwalkers would know, as they knew all the important enforcement agents; it was just a matter of asking the right people—and if they were any good at all, they would be monitoring her system from their car. If they were as good as she suspected Starling might be, her system would already be crawling with their watchdogs, lurking programs to track her progress across the nets… She shook herself then, clamping down hard on the panic that had seized her. She had checked the system this morning when she went online—though maybe not as well as she should have, after what Butch said—and there had been nothing out of place, nothing she didn’t recognize. She just hadn’t expected Treasury to show up so quickly.
She made a face and reached for the datacord, slipped it into the slot behind her ear. The main thing now was to control the damage, find out what, if anything, they had running in her system; failing that, she would need to find out why they had connected her with the stranger calling itself Trouble. And that would take some fancy shadow-walking. In the old days, it would have been simple to deal with the problem: she would simply have packed up her machines and gone to a new city, found an apartment and started over again. It had always taken months for the law to track her, and the one time she’d been unlucky and they’d found her right off, it had still taken them so long to figure out who had jurisdiction that she had been able to get out of town before the warrants could be issued. But that was a very long time ago, before she’d met van Liesvelt—before you met Cerise, a voice whispered—and things hadn’t been that easy in years. Not since Evans-Tindale—and all of that, she admitted silently, was less the problem than the fact that she herself was out of practice. It had been three years since she’d walked the shadows, at least in any serious way.
She leaned back in her chair, staring at the screen that mirrored the image that hovered in front of her eyes, not really seeing the lines of minuscule type and flickering icons. The first thing she needed to do was find out why Treasury had come here looking for this new cracker. Once she knew that, knew whether she was actively suspected or if she’d just been unlucky, then she would know what more she had to do. She hesitated, wondering if it was worth the risk, then entered the sequence that recalled the brainworm’s control panel. She adjusted virtual levels until she was running at half strength, the setting that would give her the extra control she needed but minimize the inevitable feedback from the brainworm itself.
Chapter Three
