Virtual Vandals

A second later, Matt knew why Caitlin had driven the Copperhead to school. The unmistakable shape of the classic car came whipping around the traffic circle. Caitlin pulled up, Matt jumped aboard, and then they whizzed round the rest of the circle and across the Buffalo Bridge into Georgetown.

The girl was silent as she piloted the car through the local streets and then onto an expressway.

“Well?” Matt said. “I thought you wanted to talk.”

“We — the guys and I — are only supposed to meet through the Net. It’s supposed to be for protection — if nobody sees us together, we can’t be connected.” She glanced at Matt. “But I’m beginning to think it’s more of a control thing.”

“So you wanted to break the rules, and you chose me because I can’t tell on you — I don’t know who to tell.”

Cat’s teeth sank into her lower lip. “I–I wanted to explain some things. Maybe you look at us and think we have it made — the rich kids, living a glamorous life. Let me tell you something. After your tenth diplomatic party, they all start looking alike. You get…I guess the word is bored.”

Her eyes were on the traffic ahead as she went on. “It’s not like we have families. My dad has been running for something as long as I can remember. I barely see him or Mom. Luc — I sometimes think his jokes are a way to get his parents to admit he’s alive. Gerry is over here because he got thrown out of most of the boarding schools in England. And Serge — he hates his father for getting into politics. It made him an ambassador, but it got his mother killed in the last round of troubles in the Balkans.”

“Poor little rich kids, huh?” Matt said.

“Make that dumb little rich kids,” Cat said bitterly. “Bored, angry, and suddenly we have a chance to act out our fantasies, like something in a comic book. Secret identities and everything.”

“Except you weren’t superheroes, but villains.”

“Get over it! We trashed a couple of veeyars. Anybody with a brain has a backup on datascrip. Kids with spray paint did more actual damage than we did.”

“And the people who got hurt?”

She sank a little in her seat. “That’s the dark side of the fantasy.” She glanced again at Matt, pleading with him to understand. “When you’re rich and pretty, lots of people want to do favors for you. I never saw the hook in this — and neither did the others. Serge and the Savage were amazed when they discovered they could deck people in veeyar — frankly, they got carried away.”

“You don’t have to tell me. I saw what Savage did to Sean McArdle.”

“That’s not the real Gerry. He’s lashing out with his fists because that’s all he knows about fighting the trap we’re caught in.”

“Trap?” Matt echoed.

“The person who set up our little game also set us up. We’re being blackmailed, Matt. For every trapdoor we leave behind to go visiting, we set two more that we’re not allowed to use.”

“What do you mean, allowed?”

Caitlin’s voice grew tight. “Ordered would be a better word. I don’t know what those trapdoors are being used for, but Gerry broke a major rule when he took us into Sean McArdle’s veeyar.”

They were coming up on an exit near Matt’s house. Caitlin shifted lanes and pulled onto the exit ramp. She drove a couple of blocks, then stopped the car. “I told you all this because you’re not in too deeply yet. You can still walk away. Just go home and forget we ever existed.”

“Maybe I could help you,” Matt said. “Do you know who’s giving the orders?”

Caitlin pointed to the door. “Just go home, Matt. And be careful.”

Matt was only picking at dinner that evening.

“Isn’t your Net Force Explorers meeting tonight?” his mother asked as they finished.

Matt nodded. The Explorers held a virtual meeting every month, either at regional Net nodes or the much larger chat room in the Net Force Washington computer. Matt really wasn’t in the mood to go. Then he thought about the Genius. If that shadowy figure was checking on him, the last place he wanted to be tracked to was Net Force.

“I don’t think I’ll be going, Mom,” he said.

“Too tired?” his father asked. “Maybe you took on too much, helping your classmate with that project.”

“No, that’s okay,” Matt said, taking the dishes into the kitchen.

The doorbell rang, and a second later, his father appeared, a half smile on his face. “A visitor for you,” he said. “I figured you’d want to get the suds off your hands. It’s a young lady.”

Puzzled, Matt went to the front hall…to find Cat Corrigan chatting with his mother.

“I hope you don’t mind me dropping in like this,” Cat said.

“N-no,” Matt replied. “Want to go for a walk?”

“Fine.”

“Not too late,” Matt’s mother cautioned.

As they walked away from the house, Caitlin’s polite-young-visitor act disintegrated. Her eyes were frantic as they walked down the street. “You said you wanted to help. I don’t know what you can do — what anyone can do.”

“About what?” Matt asked.

“Gerry,” Caitlin answered in a hoarse voice. “He’s dead. Hit and run, about half an hour ago.”

Chapter 14

Matt stared in shock. “Could it have been an accident?”

The moment the words were out of his lips, he knew the answer, and said as much. “No, this was no coincidence.”

“Not unless poor Gerry was the king of bad luck and poor timing,” Caitlin agreed. “And he wasn’t. This had to be some kind of hit.”

“It’s just that I would have expected some kind of virtual revenge,” Matt said. “Running somebody down with a car — that’s pretty cold.” He glanced at Caitlin. “And pretty final.”

“I know.” Caitlin shuddered. “I thought maybe he’d get a warning, or some kind of punishment.”

“I guess this guy never trained dogs,” Matt muttered.

Caitlin turned to him. “What?”

“It’s a line my uncle used to use. If you’re training a puppy and he piddles on the carpet, you don’t shoot him — that just wastes all the training that’s gone before.”

“But there are other puppies,” Caitlin said harshly. “Four of us, including you. Maybe Gerald made himself expendable right when a possible replacement came along. Or,” she choked out, “maybe we’ve all become expendable.”

Matt didn’t like the sound of that. “Whatever’s going on, it’s certainly gotten my attention,” he said. “But I need to know what’s happened before I can start to figure out what’s happening. Who’s pulling the strings on all this?”

Caitlin let out a long sigh. “All right, I’ll tell you. It’s a guy who used to go to school with us. Maybe you remember him — Rob Falk.”

Matt frowned. He had a fuzzy image of a tall, gangly kid, a sort of super-Dexter. High-water pants, shirt pocket bulging with pens, pencils, and computer stylos, wild hair always standing up in a cowlick, always working with the computers. Falk hadn’t been around in a while. Did he drop out or leave? There was something…Matt tried to reach for an elusive memory as Caitlin went on.

“Rob was — well, a nerd. He used to call himself a nerd to the nth power. But he got me through bonehead computing, so he was useful. At the time, I thought he might have had a crush on me.”

Caitlin laughed without any trace of humor. “To make a long story short, he did some work inside my system. What I didn’t know at the time was that he’d left a trapdoor. Then, sometime after he left Bradford, I found some program icons in my veeyar. There were some proxies, and a program that let me into all sorts of places through trapdoors. One day, after I’d scared the fertilizer out of one of my snooty classmates by turning her romance sim