“Find out.”
“The only way I can do that,” Cerise said, “is to wait and see if anything shows up on the market. I’ve already got feelers out, but it’s too soon to tell.”
“I see.” Coigne unplugged the dataline, then lifted the glasses off and slipped them back into their pocket. “I’ve heard a name in all of this.”
“Have you?” Cerise made herself relax against the heavy padding, felt the draft from the comfort systems cool on her legs. The car topped the rise onto the flyway, slipped sideways through a gap in the traffic, and settled into the passing lane. Cars flashed past to her right, overtaken in the slow lane, their shapes blurred by the smoky glass. The regular compound-to-compound commuter shuttle rumbled past, trundling along its track in the center of the flyway. For an instant, the low sun caught and flamed in its mirrored windows, and then it was gone.
“The word is,” Coigne said, “that Trouble’s back on-line.”
Cerise sat very still, knowing better than to speak the lie that had sprung instantly to her tongue. Trouble’s dead—but Trouble wasn’t dead, and it would be too easy to find out that truth, and then it would be too late to convince Coigne that she could still be trusted.
“I don’t suppose you know anything about it,” Coigne said.
Cerise shook her head, managed a faint, one-shouldered shrug. “It would be the first sign I’d seen of Trouble since I came to work for you.” She paused, and tried the lie. “At one point, I heard she was dead.”
Coigne ignored it. “You and Trouble used to work together. I would’ve thought you’d recognize the style.”
“Anyone can copy style,” Cerise said, and laced her tone with faint contempt. “Hell, I see my own programs on the nets, copies of my own work trying to break my IC(E). Style isn’t an ID, Coigne.”
“Not legally, but I would have thought it would be enough for you. Especially since it was enough to set other people talking.” Coigne looked sideways at her, met her eyes for the first time. “I’m sure I can rely on you, Cerise.”
He didn’t need to articulate the rest of the threat: he—Multiplane officially, but mostly, directly, him—knew perfectly well what she had done before he hired her, and had the evidence to boot, evidence that was a guilty verdict suspended for only so long as she worked for him. She lifted an eyebrow at him, achieved a quick smile. “That was a long time ago, Coigne.”
“Three years.”
“On the nets, that’s eternity. Besides, our cracker wasn’t Trouble.”
Coigne looked at her for a moment longer, then turned back to the window. “Don’t fuck this up, Cerise.”
Cerise ignored him, and he seemed content to let it go. She turned her head slightly, looked out the smoky window without really seeing the thickening stream of cars that converged on Multiplane’s central compound. It hadn’t been Trouble yesterday, she was sure of it, just someone who’d learned a lot, stolen a lot, from Trouble. But Trouble had been her partner back in the glory days before Evans-Tindale, and that tainted her judgment, in Coigne’s eyes. He wouldn’t believe her until she found the intruder, this cracker who was using Trouble’s programs, and proved that it was someone else. And God help me if my Trouble’s still on-line somewhere, still in the business; I’ll never convince Coigne it wasn’t her. She rejected that thought even as it formed, her lips curving with the start of a smile. Trouble had walked away from the business three years ago. She wasn’t about to reappear now.
The car slowed and tilted, following the flyway as it curved down in a graceful double-spiral that joined the semicircular road that curved in and out of the central compound. There were other cars ahead of them, more of the heavy-bodied black limos that signified junior executive status and were abandoned for more practical vehicles once the rider made it into the boardroom. Coigne frowned quickly, and glanced at his chrono. A shuttle pulled past them into the main building’s terminal—the elevated tracks ran directly into the fourth-floor lobby—and Cerise found herself wishing she had been on it. She was entitled to a car and driver, but rarely took the privilege; she enjoyed the crowds on the shuttle, and the illusion of anonymity, coupled with the certainty of an audience, let her hone her attitude for each day’s work.
The car slowed still further, braked to a crawl as it took its place in line behind an identical vehicle. Coigne leaned sideways—trying to read the license number, Cerise knew, see who it was ahead of him—then settled back in his place, his mouth twisting in a faint, dissatisfied frown. They slid at last into the docking point, and a security guard, soberly suited, but with the mirrored glasses that hid a heads-up display, and at least one minigun concealed in his perfect tailoring, keyed open the door. Two more guards, so closely matched in age, size, and coloring that they could almost have been siblings, waited in the shadows of the door, ready for trouble. Not that there had been that many invasions of transportation engineering firms; that had been reserved for more controversial businesses, biotech and the direct-on-line computer firms, but Cerise was never entirely sorry for their presence. The first guard nodded a greeting, murmured, “Ms. Cerise,” in a voice so soft and deferential that she could ignore it if she chose, and turned his attention instantly to Coigne.
“Excuse me, Mr. Coigne, but there’s a direct-flash for you.”
“Damn.” Coigne scowled at the guard, whose expression didn’t change.
“I’m sorry, sir, but it’s noted urgent.”
Coigne grimaced. “Put it through to one of the cabinets, will you? Cerise—” He stopped abruptly. “I’ll see you upstairs, then.”
“Of course,” Cerise said, and slung her bag more securely onto her shoulder. One of the other guards held the door open for her, and she went into the building, her heels loud on the polished stone floor. She heard the door of one of the communications cabinets that lined the first lobby close behind her, sealing Coigne into its gleaming interior, but did not look back. She rode the moving stair up to the main lobby, where a quartet of well- dressed secretaries staffed a long counter that was as much barrier as service center. Overhead, another shuttle train hummed almost silently along its guidepath, bright against the brown-toned glass that formed the building’s outer shell, and disappeared through the arch that led to the fourth-floor lobby. The massive pillars that supported the rails cast long shadows across the warm-toned floor. Cerise stepped up to the counter and passed her ID disk through the nearest scanner. One of the secretaries, a dark girl who looked barely old enough to have a network license, looked up as the numbers flashed across her screen.
“Good morning, Ms. Cerise. Your meeting’s in conference dining three.”
“Thanks—” For the life of her, Cerise could not remember the younger woman’s name, and compromised with a smile. “When is it scheduled for?”
“You have fifteen minutes,” the younger woman answered, and her own smile in return was faintly conspiratorial.
Cerise nodded, stepping around the barrier, and made her way into the elevator lobby. There were two banks of elevators, one on each side of the shuttle’s guidepath, polished bronze columns that ran the height of the five-story outer lobby and then continued up the outside of the building itself. The express was running to the executive dining levels at the top of the building, where her meeting would be held, but she ignored it, waiting impatiently for a local car instead. It came at last, and she wedged herself in with a dozen or so others, tucking her carrycase carefully under her arm. With luck, she would be able to check in with her own people without being too late for her meeting.
Network Security took up most of the twenty-first floor, a suite of offices around the perimeter and then a maze of cubicles surrounding the protected core where the mainframes and their backups lived. Cerise stepped out of the car into the tiny metal-walled lobby, and waited while yet another security guard passed her ID through his scanner. Only after the machine had cleared her did he smile and mumble something that might have been a greeting. Cerise nodded—try as she might to accept them as a necessity, the precautions never failed to annoy her—and passed through the heavy door into her domain.
Most of the day staff was already at work, crammed with their machines into their shoebox cubicles. A few were still offline, drinking a last cup of coffee or going over a hard-print report from the previous night, but most of them were already limp in their chairs, cords plugged into dollie-slots, out on the nets. Everything was as it should be, and Cerise made her way around the perimeter of the maze to her own suite of rooms. The outer door was open, and a dark woman looked up from her keyboard in surprise.
“Cerise. I thought you had a meeting.”
“I do.” Cerise came to stand behind her chief assistant, and stared unabashedly over her shoulder at the
