Cerise leaned back in her chair as the waiter appeared with their salads, grateful for the interruption. When the man had left, she went on, “Because none of this is Trouble’s style. Not the cracking—our work was surgical, we did exactly what was needed, nothing more, nothing less—and not the boasting afterward. I hadn’t heard about viruses until I talked to Max—you must be keeping that very much under wraps, Mr. Mabry—but that’s even more not our style, not Trouble’s style. Germ warfare is too double-edged. We never messed with it.”
“What, never?” Mabry murmured, with a lift of his bushy eyebrows. “I thought it was a rite of passage.”
“Don’t play devil’s advocate with me,” Cerise said. “You’re old enough to remember the old days. There were standards, even before the law moved in. Responsible people didn’t do viruses.” She shook her head, the anger cooling rapidly, continued more quietly. “I know, we were breaking the law, offline law, but we did keep to our own rules.”
“I wouldn’t have thought you a romantic,” Mabry said.
“You were there, too,” Cerise answered. “You tell me.”
There was a little silence, and then Mabry looked away. “Yes, I know,” he said, softly. “I get tired of hearing about it sometimes, that’s all.”
He was never one of us, Cerise realized suddenly, had never worked the shadows. She eyed him with new wariness and a new respect, not quite sure which she felt—more like what she would feel for some new and exotic species—and Mabry smiled with what looked like self-mockery.
“Still,” he said. “Cops should stick together—shouldn’t we?”
Cerise smiled, acknowledging the point: whatever he hadn’t been, whatever she had been before, right now they were on the same side.
“Max said this wasn’t like Trouble,” Mabry went on, “or not like the Trouble he knew, and now you’re saying the same thing. I find that very interesting.”
Cerise hesitated, then, deliberately, touched one finger to her dollie-slot. “This new Trouble doesn’t feel the same.”
“A brainworm?” Mabry’s thick eyebrows rose, and then he grinned. “A European job, I presume.”
“Of course,” Cerise said, blandly.
“Yet the Treasury savants make a match of it.”
“Sixty percent accuracy,” Cerise said. “All that means is that they’ve never seen the newbie before, and that it’s using some of Trouble’s old programs—which would make sense, if it’s stealing Trouble’s name. All of which you know.”
Mabry grinned again. “Tell me about Trouble.”
Cerise looked at him in genuine surprise. “What’s Max told you?”
“Very little,” Mabry said, and there was a touch of bitterness in his voice. Cerise lifted an eyebrow, and Mabry took a deep breath. “Max and I have been—together—for about a year now, but we don’t, he doesn’t talk much about his old friends.”
“I didn’t know you were family,” Cerise said.
Mabry touched his own dollie-slot. “Depends on the family,” he said, and this time the bitterness was clear.
Cerise nodded once, careful not to show too much comprehension. Helling was on the wire, of course— they had all been, van Liesvelt, herself and Trouble, Max and his then-partner Jannick Aledort, Carlie Held, Arabesque, Dewildah Mason, and David Terrel. They had lived within a subway ride of each other for three years, and had seen each other off the nets perhaps even more than on—and that was part of what the wire had brought them, the desire to know each other in reality as well. And it would be hard for Mabry, a man who stayed within the law, who adapted to the rules of the net—one of the most ironclad of which was, never try to contact the human being behind the net persona—to know that his lover had not only managed an illegal career with an illegal implant, but had broken that rule as well. “Whatever happened to Aledort?” she asked, with apparent inconsequence, and Mabry grimaced.
“He was shot to death,” he said, after a heartbeat’s pause.
“Two years ago. No one was ever charged, but it was probably Planetaries.”
Cerise nodded, feeling suddenly cold despite the restaurant’s expensive environmental system. That was two down, out of the old gang, Terrel in jail—still—and Aledort dead, and maybe more gone, if she’d been able to keep in touch. It was no surprise that Aledort had gotten himself killed— ecotage was a dangerous profession, and the Planetary League was a particularly bad group to cross; and besides, Aledort had a nasty streak that almost invited murder—but it was still a little unnerving to contemplate.
“And yes,” Mabry went on, with another little smile, “I’m a bad winner.”
So we know where we stand, Cerise thought. She said, “We all thought Max could do better than Aledort.” She carefully did not say that she thought he had done so, and Mabry’s smile broadened for an instant.
“To return to business,” he said. “Tell me about Trouble.”
Cerise paused, took a deep breath, and was pleased that when she spoke, her voice stayed steady, remote. “We lived together, worked together, for just about four years. She’s a brilliant cracker—also on the wire, we all were—with a good sense of place and timing, a nice hand with tools. She used to write most of her own, or modify them. I’m probably a little quicker—she’s bigger than I am, and that shows even on the net—but she’s probably a little more accurate in the long run. She liked to run really clean programs, the architecture mattered to her, she’d polish things just for the satisfaction of it. That’s what’s missing with this newTrouble, that sense of precision. Trouble liked to keep things clean.” Including leaving me—at least it was clean for her. Cerise put the thought aside along with the flash of memory, Trouble’s body pressed against her own, the feel of Trouble’s muscled back beneath her fingers as she pulled the other woman closer into a twining embrace, and said, “What’s Interpol’s interest in all of this?”
There was a little pause, but then Mabry said, “As you know, this new Trouble has been causing a lot of commotion. Treasury is looking for her—or him—here, ECCI and Interpol are mounting their own investigations as well. Since Trouble, either one, has always worked out of the U.S. nets, I’ve been sent over to keep an eye on the Treasury investigation, just in case they turn up something we can use. There have been a series of intrusions, scattershot attacks, into the industrial nets in Europe, but we—Interpol is most worried about the viruses.”
“Reasonable enough,” Cerise said. In spite of herself, she felt another touch of fear worm its way along her spine. You couldn’t steal much in a five-second intrusion, but there was plenty of time to leave an infectious program. In fact, she thought, if I were trying to virus a system, that’s probably how I’d do it. Break in, leave my virus, and then deliberately trigger the alarms in the hope that the syscops would be too busy trying to trace the intruder to spot any stray bits of code. She bit back the desire to call her people immediately with the warning— they had run scans as soon as the intruder had been spotted; she had returned from her futile chase to find the printouts waiting—and said instead, “The same style?”
“All the ones that have been reported,” Mabry said, “follow a similar pattern. A quick intrusion, sometimes a virus inserted, more often not, once a definite theft and subsequent sale, but always boasting afterwards.”
“That sounds like what we had,” Cerise agreed. “I have a transcript of the event with me, if you’d like to take a look at it.”
“I’d like to keep it.” Mabry held out his hand, and Cerise slid the disk across the table.
“Please do,” she said. “We haven’t had any signs of infection, but I’ll double-check when I get back to the office.”
“I can give you a sample of the payload,” Mabry said. “Which hasn’t been particularly destructive. And also what we’ve salvaged of the main code.” He produced another disk from his pocket, and held it out. Cerise took it, nodding her thanks.
“If you find anything,” Mabry went on, “would you save it for us? Most of it’s been set to self-destruct, but still, any fragments are potential evidence.”
“Of course,” Cerise said, and slipped the disk into her carrier.
“There’s one more thing,” Mabry said, “and I’d rather you didn’t answer than lie to me. Do you keep in touch with Trouble?”
It was not the question Cerise had been expecting. She hesitated, choosing her words carefully, thought vaguely that he’d paid her back for asking about Aledort. “No. We didn’t exactly—part friends. Right before Evans- Tindale passed, we had, well, a disagreement about it, about what we should do. Trouble wanted to bail out then
