Agent Len Dorpff’s.
The tops of Kovacs’s and Steele’s ears were slightly pointed, giving just the hint of elf ears. The skin-covered cartilage, with its bumps, twists, and ridges, even the fleshy earlobe below, looked exactly solid. No trace of ghosting or double image betrayed any differences, standing up even to her most searching gaze.
Megan felt a little weird, peering so intently into somebody’s ear, even if it was a sim. Well, it wasn’t as if the Kovacs-Steele sim was going to turn around and yell “Boo!”
“Amazing,” she finally said, turning to Leif. “They even seem to have the same amount of ear wax.”
More seriously, she went on. “I have no idea what the chances are of identical ears turning up on people. But I suspect it narrows the field a lot more than shoe size or blood type. And you say it’s almost impossible to disguise an ear? Where did you learn that?”
Leif’s smug expression slipped a little. “I think it was an old flatfilm movie — or was it a TV show?”
Megan sighed. “Let’s see if you can back that up with something a little more scientific. Then we’ll take your wax museum to Matt Hunter for a look-see.”
14
Leif looked back and forth between the two friends sitting in his virtual living room.
Megan looked as though she were having second thoughts about discussing the mysterious similarities between Marcus Kovacs and “Iron Mike” Steele.
And Matt Hunter acted more as though Leif were burglarizing the house instead of paying a friendly visit over the Net.
Matt must have caught Leif’s surprised look. “My parents think I’m studying,” he said. “With all the stuff I’ve been doing to help the captain — well, I really got nailed on a couple of tests.”
Leif and Megan nodded somberly. Their grades, too, had suffered as a result of all-nighter Net sessions, long-distance calls, and meetings over how to help Captain Winters.
“I know what you mean,” Megan said. “My folks are just about ready to lower the boom on me, too. Unless something looks as if it’s going to pan out, and really quickly, this will be my last full-scale shot at helping the captain for a while. I’ve got to get my grades up, or I’ll be grounded so long I’ll be collecting retirement before I can venture out again.”
Matt nodded unhappily. “Me, too. So, you two, what have you got?”
“Tell him, Leif,” Megan said.
Leif glanced at her. Yes, she was definitely getting cold feet. He’d only half-convinced her last night, and now her confidence was leaking like a soda bottle hit with a load of buckshot. Even though he’d shown her the passage in the FBI manual about ear shape being a prime identifier, and admissible in court. The usefulness of ear shape in identifying a disguised suspect was why people in mug shots and on wanted posters had their hair pulled back in the profile shot. The authorities wanted that information on record. Meg had heard, she had read, but she was obviously having a hard time believing.
Calling up his lists of similarities, Leif began his dog-and-pony show.
Megan was also right. Matt was even harder to convince than she was.
“Do I get what you’re trying to say here?” Matt said in disbelief. “You want me to believe that these two people are the same guy? Or, rather, that Marcus Kovacs is ‘Iron Mike’ Steele?”
“Let me just point out a couple of things,” Leif replied to his skeptical friend. “According to his paper trail, Marcus Kovacs is supposed to be a financial guy — what my father calls a bean-counter. Yet he’s going great guns as the head of a detective agency. That would sound like more of a job for Mike Steele, late of Net Force, trained in the special facilities at the FBI’s Quantico Academy.”
“‘Late’ is right,” Matt shot back. “Mike Steele is dead, remember? He had a Viking funeral.”
“Correction. Mike Steele was declared dead on an island down in the Caribbean, because people saw his boat burn up and sink. Nobody actually saw
“And what about Marcus Kovacs? You gonna tell me that his whole life is made up, a paper trail? He’s got a valid birth certificate. Didn’t anybody see him get born?”
“You’d have a hard time finding witnesses,” Leif said. “The village where Kovacs was supposedly born got smeared by both sides during the Sava River campaign. There’s no town hall left — it was flattened; no church…no records at all, really. Paper hardcopies of whatever documents the refugees had were submitted to the central government, when a new database was set up. The authorities had to take a lot of things on trust.”
“So Kovacs is a figment of a computer’s imagination?”
Leif shook his head. “He could have been a real person, born in that ghost town and getting a university degree. He’d have been just the right age to fight in the war that created the Free State. But a lot of people died in that war in thousands of little guerrilla actions — and, again, neither side has great records.”
He looked at Matt. “The fact is, neither side keeps such great records even now. The Carpathian Alliance is under serious trade embargo, so they can’t get decent computers. And the Free State is too poor to afford the newest machines — or the security software to protect them.”
Leif pounced on Matt’s expression of surprise. “Given a reasonable knowledge of the language, a good hacker could easily penetrate government computers over there and insert a whole life story. Or rather, a life story in fragments, just like almost everyone else’s.”
Matt still wasn’t coming over. Leif could see it in his face.
“Remember,” Leif said, “Steele got the nickname ‘Iron Mike’ because people kidded that he was part computer. He was a specialist agent whose job was to penetrate systems and uncover information for the good guys. It would be easy for him to plant whatever he needed in the old crap they’re using in the Balkans.”
He stabbed a finger at his friend. “And it would explain how this bean counter became so good at computer investigation. More important, what caused Mike Steele’s downfall in Net Force?”
“Falsifying evidence,” Matt admitted.
“And what is I-on Investigations making its big profits on?”
“Fake evidence,” Megan said.
“I’ll give you something else. Marcus Kovacs is known as Marc to his friends and associates.”
“So?” Matt said.
“Marc…Mike. They sound awfully alike, don’t they? It makes life easier for someone who adopts an alias. That’s why the majority of Witness Protection program people pick sound-alike names or use the same initials.”
“Your analogy breaks down, then,” Matt said. “Mike Steele — Marc Kovacs? What sort of connection is that?”
Leif shrugged. “Not much of one in English. But Kovacs is a Hungarian name. In that language it means ‘smith.’”
“Oh, great,” Megan said. “America’s most popular alias on motel records.”
“You still don’t get it,” Leif said. “Smith — as in ‘blacksmith’—somebody who works on iron…and steel.”
His friends stared at him for a long moment, until Matt finally broke the silence. “Pretty clever, Leif. But you’re hanging a lot of
“The basis for that leap is in the FBI manual,” Leif began wearily. “And I’m just raising some possibilities. The world is full of professional investigators — some of whom may even be honest. It will be up to them to prove or disprove what I’m suggesting.”
“Up to them?” Megan repeated.
“We’re not the Junior Net Force, you know,” Leif pointed out. “We don’t have police powers. We just poke around and ask questions. And something tells me that it would be smarter — and maybe healthier — to let the
