Virtual Vandals

“My search kicked out all sorts of rumors about people getting their veeyars trashed, and even roughed up. Now, I’ve got a couple of tricks I can pull in virtual — as the lady can tell you.”

“We’ve heard,” the swordsman said coldly. Matt noticed that he didn’t seem to mind that he spoke English with an accent. Unless that accent was some sort of proxy trick…

No, Matt told himself. There’s not the same sort of hang-time on this guy’s lips as on the cowboy.

“So you know my kind of stuff can annoy people, even scare them. But it doesn’t have the same sort of — authority — you can call on.”

Matt spread out his stick-figure hands. “With all the rumors I’d collected, I still wasn’t sure you guys were for real, or some sort of vapor-tale. So I decided to try and find you. I figured you had to be rich — electronic wilding requires resources.” He rubbed his fingers together in the old gesture for money. “I also figured you must live pretty close to where you’ve been playing. That meant getting a line on all the virtual hangouts for rich kids in the D.C. area.”

Matt pinned a smile on his proxy’s sketchy face. “Somehow, I just had a feeling you wouldn’t turn out to be a bunch of forty-nine-year-old computer geeks.”

He shrugged. “And, what do you know, I was right. The first site I tried was Maxim’s. And who do I meet there but the lovely CeeCee, who talked a little, then slugged the real Courtney Vance when she turned up to complain. I heard the punch, I saw Courtney react in pain…and I knew I’d found what I was looking for.”

Matt held up his proxy hand. “I’m not going to tell you how I connected CeeCee with Caitlin Corrigan. Every relationship needs a little mystery. But I do want you to know that I’m way impressed — and I want in.”

“Look here, pilgrim,” the cartoon cowboy said, spouting his silly Wild West jargon again. “I don’t rightly think you realize who holds the whip hand here. You tracked us down, right enough. But one shot from my trusty forty- five, and you’re pushin’ up daisies on Boot Hill. Dead men tell no tales.”

“I’ll say it again,” Matt said, hoping his voice was holding steady. “I don’t want to turn you in, I don’t want to blackmail you. All I want is to join your team — to learn how you do what you do.”

“Then you’d know more than any of us,” the frog muttered.

Matt was confused, but he couldn’t let that show. He had to win this bunch over. But how?

The words burst out almost before he realized he was speaking. “You’re worried about me telling tales? If I ran with you, I’d be in for as much trouble as you catch.”

“Maybe.” Mr. Jewels drawled the word out as if he were tasting it, thinking over Matt’s offer. “I daresay you’ve shown that you know your way around computers, since you got this close to us. But that’s not all you need to prove if you want to run with us.”

“Meaning what?” Matt asked cautiously.

“You have to be able to pull your weight.” The monolithic jewel-monster leaned forward, his words coming faster. “Get us in somewhere we haven’t been able to penetrate.”

A test, Matt thought. That made a certain sort of sense. At least it would let him get out of this empty white room without getting shot.

“I’m willing to try,” Matt promised. “As long as it’s not outright impossible, like the Pentagon or the White House.”

“Oh, it’s more possible than that.” Mr. Jewels gave a grating laugh. “We want to get into the veeyar of Sean McArdle. He’s the son of the Irish ambassador. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you more. You can find out all you want to know with a data search.”

“I’ll start right away.” Matt hesitated before he went on. “You all want to get in there?”

The others laughed. “And walk into a bloody trap? I think not,” Mr. Jewels sneered. “No, all you need to worry about is yourself — and CeeCee here.” He made an ironic bow toward the furious Cat Corrigan.

“Since she’s the only one you know out of our little group, you can contact her when you’ve arranged something.” Mr. Jewels turned his gemstone eyes full on Matt. “If we’ve heard nothing from you in, oh, a week’s time, we’ll simply take it for granted that you’re no longer interested. But if we hear any rumors about our activities — or detect any official interest in Caitlin, then we’ll be forced to interest ourselves in you.”

He loomed over Matt’s insubstantial proxy. “You wouldn’t like that, Yank. No, not at all.”

Matt was glad to let Caitlin take him out of there. But when he came to leave her veeyar, he didn’t go straight home. Instead, he took a complicated, preprogrammed escape route that shunted him with dizzying speed between dozens of different Net sites. He’d done the same thing when he’d bailed out of Lara Fortune’s party, ricocheting back and forth across the Net to baffle any possible tracers that might have been planted on him. He’d even taken the precaution of making this route different from the one he’d taken on Friday night.

His last stop brought him to a huge pyramid ablaze with electrical impulses — the virtual representation of an on-line catalogue operation. The restless glitter represented constant calls for pricing information and orders.

Matt hurtled onward without even slowing, blending into the blaze of electronic activity around the construct. If the virtual vandals had managed to keep track of him up to now, the sheer volume of information glaring would confuse their pursuit.

He was aiming for a tiny dark spot on the side of the pyramid — a few gigabytes of computer memory that Matt had diverted from the catalogue business. Now, the little niche held programs to let Matt run a self-check to insure he’d made a clean getaway.

The tiny dark space suddenly flared into life, blinking brightly as the antitracking programs gave him a green light, then erased themselves. He took one more whirl around the pyramid, routed himself along with some outgoing calls, and veered off homeward.

Matt’s knees felt a little rubbery when he got out of his computer-link chair. Maybe that evasive pattern he’d flown from Vandal Central had a few too many twists and turns. His only regret was that he hadn’t been able to plant a tracing device in the veeyar where Caitlin had taken him.

That problem was, a bug would turn out to be a two-edged sword. It would reveal the node where the virtual vandals had met, but the transmission would let the bad guys pinpoint him. And right now, the only things he had going for him were the Caitlin Corrigan connection and his hidden identity.

Matt walked off his shivers, then headed down the hall to the phone.

Now it’s my turn to try and unmask a few proxies, he thought as he punched in Captain Winters’s office number. Luckily, the captain was in, spending his Saturday clearing away paperwork.

“Captain, it’s Matt Hunter,” Matt said into the handset. “Could I come down there and talk with you? I may have come across a connection to that Camden Yards thing.”

“You don’t want to tell me right now? Or e-mail a report?” the officer asked.

Matt coughed. “I’d rather you hear this in person, sir. When you do, I think you might agree.” No way was he going to talk on an open phone line — or send a message through the virtual vandals’ network playground.

A sigh came over the phone. “I was hoping to leave in a little while — when can you get here?”

“I’m leaving right now,” Matt said.

On the autobus ride to the captain’s office in the Pentagon government office center, Matt tried to organize his experiences of the past week into a coherent report. But even his best effort didn’t sound so coherent when he faced the impatient Captain Winters.

The captain was a lot less impatient and much more worried by the time Matt finished. “You’re suggesting that the daughter of the Honorable Senator from Massachusetts is linked to a group of wealthy virtual thrill-seekers? And several other members of this bunch are foreign — possibly related to the diplomatic community?”

“I think—” Matt began.

But Captain Winters finished his sentence for him. “I think you’d better have some pretty convincing evidence to back up charges like that. We don’t have any official standing in the case — it’s still the Baltimore PD’s baby.” He rolled his eyes. “And they’d just love hearing this theory.”

“I still think the foreign connection is worth looking into,” Matt said quietly.

“As long as you don’t go rocking any boats,” Winters said. He glanced at his watch. “I’ll leave you to it.” Turning to his computer console, he said, “Computer, identify for voice commands.”

“Voice identified as Captain James Winters,” the computer responded.

“Open database search, nonclassified material, Corrigan, Caitlin — known associates, specifically foreign nationals.”