workbench. A very competent hacker might get into the Net Force computers and mess around with the phone logs. Someone even could have gotten hold of James Winters’s fingerprints, lifted them, and put them on the fragments of the practice bomb. Admit the means existed for one bit of black-bag work, and you could allow them all. But if you couldn’t come up with evidence to prove those activities took place, all you had was a theory. Hot air.
A smart lawyer might use that hot air to confuse the issue in court. Matt remembered a pretty infamous Hollywood murder where an old flatfilm star-former athlete had gotten out from under a murder charge that way. But his career — and his life — were ruined ever after.
Matt couldn’t wish that on Captain Winters.
Maybe they should take aim at that so-called practice bomb. Hit anyone who lived near the blast site to find out if they’d heard the explosion and if they remembered anything useful….
Matt scowled. Weeks had gone by. Would people remember the details after that much time? And even if they did, which he doubted, would potential witnesses trust their hazy memories? Or would they simply accept what the media had already told them and repeat it?
Running his fingers through his hair until it stood up like some horrible modern sculpture, Matt continued pacing back and forth. Maybe they should cut right back to the beginning and find someone else with a motive, both for the murder and for the frame-up.
Tori Rush still led the pack for smearing Winters. She wanted a big, fat, juicy scandal. Attacking the honesty and integrity of Net Force would ensure her a lot of attention, maybe even a promotion. But still — to accuse an innocent man of killing someone just to get a network show…Matt had a hard time accepting that as a motive for murder.
Could there be a personal motive in the mix? Someone who hated James Winters for some reason? Hated him enough to kill to frame him? It was possible, of course. Finding out if somebody fit that mold would likely mean getting hold of Net Force records to find out who the captain had put away. Neither Steadman nor Agent Dorpff was likely to share that information.
And, as for hacking it out, well, it was illegal, though he knew some Net Force Explorers with the expertise to do it.
Matt jammed his hands into his pockets. It was way illegal. It would probably get someone caught and sent to jail. He couldn’t be responsible for that.
On the surface of things it seemed as if there was only one person who was angry enough at the captain to try framing him for murder. Unfortunately, Stefano Alcista didn’t seem the kind for subtle vengeance — and he really wasn’t the type to blow himself up.
Unless…maybe the mob boss faked his death! It would give Steve the Bull a chance to retire while sticking it to the man who’d put him in prison. After all, Alcista had been ready to blow Winters up. Why not ruin his life instead of taking it?
He shook his head to clear it of such ridiculous thoughts. That level of brilliant deduction usually turned up at the end of really lame detective shows.
What he needed — what everyone on Winters’s side needed — was some solid proof that Winters was never near Alcista’s car when Steadman and company said he was.
Matt went back over Captain Winters’s story. He’d gotten a call from an old informant, requesting a face-to- face. How to prove that? Tackle the informant? But the call didn’t necessarily have to come from the real informant. It could have been a computer-generated lure, designed to get Winters away from his office for the crucial time period.
In that case, if the files were right, the captain would have been standing on the corner of G Street and Wilson Avenue waiting for his snitch to arrive. Maybe he could find some way to prove that?
For a second. Matt had a disheartening image of himself standing on the corner, showing Winters’s picture to passersby and asking if they remembered seeing him on the corner two weeks ago.
Then inspiration struck. There might actually be a witness with perfect memory — and the ability to prove that the captain was where he said he was. An unshakable witness whose testimony would have true mechanical precision. Wilson and G was a downtown location, and a lot of the buildings around there were protected, at least in part, by security cameras. In the old days of videotape the recording medium might have been changed by now. But digital cameras deposited their images directly into computer memory. Maybe, just maybe, somewhere in a computer downtown, there was an archived image of an annoyed Captain Winters cooling his heels with a nice, convenient time and date stamp on it.
Of course, hacking into those computers would be considered somewhat illegal….
Matt turned to his computer and began snapping orders before he lost his nerve. Somehow, this didn’t seem quite as bad as trying to get into the secure files of Net Force.
11
After an all-nighter on the Net, Matt Hunter sprawled in his computer-link couch, feeling more dead than alive. Carrying bricks on a construction site would probably be more physically demanding. But while his body had lain here, getting the occasional stimulus to twitch a muscle and keep him from turning into a literal couch potato, Matt had been at the nerve-racking occupation of spoofing computer systems into disgorging data.
From the initial contact until he safely got away, he’d had to dodge various security programs and a couple of live systems managers. Matt felt limper than a cheap wash-rag after somebody had wrung it out and hung it up to dry. He literally wondered if he had the strength to get up, go to the bathroom, and throw some cold water on his face.
Worst of all, his whole effort had been for nothing. Matt’s first move had been to consult the city directory, checking off every address which might overlook the corner he wanted. Then he had to search and see if any of those addresses had security cameras. Then came the job of hacking into the appropriate building systems and getting a look at the data for the date in question.
The result? Not one of the cameras actually recorded the corner of G Street and Wilson Avenue. A couple of yards off here, half a block off there. But if there was an angle that might show a waiting James Winters on that corner, he hadn’t found it. Kind of weird, that. He’d have bet that it wasn’t possible to find an unrecorded inch in that neighborhood.
Matt tried to get up and groaned.
School would be coming all too soon. He’d probably walk the halls of Bradford Academy like some sort of zombie, one of the living dead….
Dead…Matt closed his eyes again. It wasn’t worth wasting the time to get up and go to bed. He could just lie here, doze for an hour or so…
At that moment his wallet decided to attack him from his back pocket.
Matt blinked, trying to push his tired mind to make sense of what was going on. Oh — the vibration was his wallet-phone….
He dug the wallet out, switched to the foilpack keypad, and switched it to phone format.
“Hello?” His voice was more like a groan.
“Matt?” Even considering the wallet-phone’s inherent shortcomings, the voice on this connection was incredibly tinny. It took Matt a moment to figure out who was calling.
