Leif chuckled. “Spike Spanner might get away with a crack like that, too.” He paused. “How did you wind up choosing a rough diamond like the Spikester, Father Flannery?”
“I discovered the Spikester, as you call him, in an old flatfilm television series in the last century.” The priest shrugged. “I became a fan. Over the years I tracked down all the episodes and the various films and books.”
“Wasn’t there also a Spike Spanner holo series a little while back?” Matt asked.
Father Flannery made a disgusted noise. “It had a former male model prancing around in it, trying to convince people that he was tough. The old versions were much better.” Then he shrugged and grinned. “Still, I decided that if a silly male model could do it, why couldn’t I?”
Leif chuckled. “Spanner isn’t exactly a ‘turn the other cheek’ kind of guy.”
“More like a ‘kick rump before somebody tries to kick thine,’” the priest said with a laugh. “Playing the character helped me vent off some of the frustration of my job, I admit. Some of my friends from the seminary play sports to do the same thing.”
“So your superiors would have no problem with what you were doing?” Leif pressed.
“About what I do for entertainment, no,” Father Flannery’s face darkened. “About being accused of illegally hacking into secure government databases to win a sim mystery — now that would bring up lots of problems.”
Matt pointed to the printout still in Flannery’s hand. “Will I see you — or rather, Spike — at seven o’clock?”
Father Flannery nodded unhappily. “I’m curious enough, or desperate enough, to go. Although I’d prefer to know who my host was.”
“If I were you, I’d like to know who the whole cast of characters was, while I was at it.” Leif’s eyes got a faraway look. “Maybe I’ll take a whack at that myself.”
For someone actually traveling its electronic pathways, the Net could be a neon kaleidoscope, an ever- shifting cityscape whose vibrant colors glared against a blacker-than-black backdrop.
Leif had decided to take a crack at the offer he’d made while Matt was visiting. He waited until Matt left, shortly after Father Flannery had cut his Net connection. Matt was a little annoyed, since Leif wouldn’t discuss how he intended to expose the identities of the mystery role-players. But Leif figured some things were easier if you didn’t know all the details. That was especially true of Mr. Straight-Arrow Matt Hunter, who’d told Martin Gray and his father about the anonymous message before heading over to tell Leif. Not that the cops were likely to tell Matt what — if anything — they planned to do with the information. Or whether they’d in fact decide to take action. Matt said that Mr. Gray hadn’t been too interested — it seemed that the police were leaning very strongly toward accidental death rather than homicide in the case of Ed Saunders. No, Leif figured, if he and Matt wanted a real answer to the mystery, they’d have to find it themselves.
As soon as Matt was out the door, Leif warmed up his computer. The person he wanted to contact was not at the last address Leif had for him, so he had a little searching to do.
Finally Leif got what he wanted, sat in his computer-link couch, closed his eyes, and gave the order. After a moment of nasty mental static, he was flying through the Day-Glo buildings of the Net. His hurtling course took him to a relatively quiet section of the garish metropolis, far from the fanciful sites of the big corporate players. His destination was in one of the much simpler, almost boxlike virtual constructions that offered a Net presence for smaller businesses.
A glance at the target building’s directory showed an importer of skimpy Brazilian beachwear (complete with picture), a genealogist, and a craftsman devoted to repairing mechanical wristwatches.
Some of the listings gave only a vague company title or someone’s name. The suite Leif was headed for— 1019—had only a blank space showing.
Leif hurtled up to the tenth level and went down an anonymous hallway past door after identical glowing door. The entrance to suite 1019 was unlocked. No security worries here. Uninvited intruders would just have to suffer the consequences to their computer files, their systems, and — knowing the guy behind this front — maybe to their health.
Taking a deep virtual breath, Leif moved in. The place was Spartan — an empty space that would have echoed in real life. Walls, ceiling, and floor were bare. Leif saw a single desk, equipped with what looked like a turn-of-the-century computer system. A flatscreen monitor glowed over the box of the central processing unit. In front lay an old-fashioned keyboard.
As Leif came closer, the screen suddenly lit up.
Letters appeared on the glowing display.
“Do I have to type in a reply?” Leif asked the empty air.
Leif shook his head. This particular hacker was never easy to get a hold of. He changed his virtual address often. In fact, he moved so often that Leif wondered if he really paid for his office space. And he (at least, Leif thought it was a he) never dealt face-to-face with his clients. Communication was always arranged though some sort of weird cutout. Once, Leif had entered a door like the one he’d just gone through and found a perfect replica of a starship bridge from an old sci-fi show. A silvery female voice had answered him then.
“I have a friend who’s going to be meeting some people tonight,” Leif said. “He doesn’t know them, and they’ll be all proxied up. What he needs is a tracer to find out who they really are.”
“I’ll freight it — within limits,” Leif hastily added. “Is it a technical problem, or just a question of speed?”
After prompting Leif for the time and location of this meeting — and getting his answer — the computer screen was blank for a while.
The next few exchanges broke down to the sort of haggling done eight thousand years before computers existed. After taking a bigger hit in his credit account than he liked — but contingent on timely delivery — Leif got ready to leave.
But the computer wasn’t done with him.
Leif began to grin. “As a matter of fact, I can suggest one,” he said.
As Matt came to his destination, the Net’s usual brilliant colors faded to the dimmest of outlines. Not surprising. Out here in the middle of virtual nowhere, there was no need for advertising, no need to catch the eye. Not enough eyes came through here to be caught. Below him, a faint white glow delineated a vista of featureless black boxes. They stretched, row after row, to the virtual horizon, like chips on a monstrous circuit board — or more poetically, like mausoleums in a cemetery.
This is where information went to die. Officially it was known as long-term filing, but most people called it dead storage.
Matt had suspected this was where he’d be heading, even before he and Leif had decoded the address on the virtmail invitation. Each of these mammoth boxes represented an archive of government or corporate records, stuff that wasn’t needed except maybe once in a blue moon. The data was supposed to lie here, safe and quiet, in the unlikely eventuality that someone would want to look at it again.
However, hackers sometimes worked their way into these boxes, deleting the data and using the space for programs of their own, virtual meeting rooms, sometimes even illegal sims.
He throttled back the spurt of anger he always felt when people fracked around where they shouldn’t have. In a bizarre way, this obviously clandestine meeting place was reassuring. Since the message arrived, he’d had the
