“He waits without, sir. He also is most anxious to see you.”
“Sounds like a real emergency. Well, okay. But that stewardess out there is going to be mighty confused when I don’t come out of here. She’ll think I pulled a D. W. Cooper.”
The page gave him a puzzled look. “Your pardon, sir. I do not quite take your meaning.”
“Forget it.” Gene made a motion to step over the toilet seat, which hadn’t disappeared. But he halted. “Wait a minute. My father is supposed to meet me when I land.”
“I believe, sir, that a temporal adjustment will be made for you when your business is concluded.”
“Time travel again, huh? Last time we tried that little trick it took four hours of mumbo jumbo. Oh, well, when duty calls …”
He straddled the commode and stepped into the room. The servant did not move closer.
Gene said, “Clever, that bit about making me think I was going to wet my pants. Was that Osmirik, or did Sheila come up with it? Sounds like her style.”
“All will be explained shortly, sir.”
Gene looked around. The only door to the place was in the far wall. He heard a pop, and turned in the direction he had come from. The aperture had disappeared, and with it the privy of the L-1011. He was now inside Castle Perilous. Or so he thought.
He turned to the servant and motioned toward the door. “Through there?”
The page gave no answer as he took two steps backward, his expression one of guarded expectation.
“What’s the problem?” Gene wanted to know. He started forward.
A rumbling sound issued from above. Gene looked up to see a wall sliding down from a slot that ran the width of the ceiling.
“Damn!” Gene dashed forward but didn’t make it. The wall slammed down and cut him off, stranding him in darkness and echoing silence.
Two
Queens
Through the open window, Jeremy Hochstader heard the telltale sound of a police radio and knew he was about to get busted.
It wasn’t much of a sound, just the momentary blurt, the pop, of a transmitter being keyed, the kind of static that might come from, say, a CB radio. But it had come from directly below the window, in the narrow alley to the side of the apartment building where a vehicle could not squeeze. Therefore, the noise had probably come from a walkie-talkie; which meant, probably, plainclothes cops; which meant one was waiting at the bottom of the fire escape, blocking off Jeremy’s only avenue of retreat. Which meant that in a few short moments, there would come the pounding of heavy fists again his apartment door.
He was not normally paranoid. The sight of a squad car in front of the building would ordinarily be of no concern. But Jeremy knew that Mark DiFilippo had been arrested. DiFilippo was Jeremy’s drug connection, among other things. The charge had been simple possession, but Jeremy had heard that the arrest had been carried out by Federal agents, and he was suspicious. Obviously they had DiFilippo on bigger stuff. Obviously what had happened was this: DiFilippo had plea-bargained his way out of the drug-dealing counts and had been arraigned on charges of computer crime: illegal use of interstate telephone lines, diversion of monies from various bank accounts, illegal use of credit card numbers, and other state-of-the-art, high-tech offenses, all perpetrated on the clutter of computers and peripheral equipment that lay about Jeremy’s fourth-floor walkup apartment. They were willing to go relatively easy on DiFilippo to get the hacker. Him, Jeremy.
The evidence was everywhere. Floppy disks made precarious piles on desks, shelves, floors, even on the refrigerator. Recorded on the disks was program after illegal program, some of which Jeremy had written, some of which he had “downloaded” — stolen — and some of which he had copied with blithe disregard for U.S. copyright law. But copyright infringement — even “willful infringement,” which technically was a felony — was the least of his problems.
DiFilippo must have talked.
In fact, the pizza-faced little wop must have sung like Caruso. Told them everything. Handed over all the account numbers, spilled everything about all the scams, the Trojan horse programs, the money-market accounts — everything, all the dope.
Dope!
All this took a second to race through Jeremy’s mind when he heard the squawk from the plainclothesman’s walkie-talkie. Leaping out of the chair, he rummaged through the debris on the coffee table and came up with a small plastic bag half filled with white powder. He dashed to the bathroom, emptied the bag’s contents into the bowl, flushed the commode. Then he rinsed out the bag and threw it out the window.
At least there wouldn’t be any drug charges to load on top of the hacking rap….
Except for the marijuana. Which was …
Heart pounding, Jeremy rifled through the place but came up empty. It didn’t matter much; there was no end of contraband strewn all over the joint, pills hiding in the mildewed depths of the sofa, uppers on display in jars in the kitchen cabinets, downers clutched in the paws of dust bunnies under the bed. Anything they would find would go straight to the lab and come back inevitably tagged:
He did not pause to marvel at how he had arrived at the certain knowledge that cops would soon be beating down his door. He had no need to look out the window and see the cop covering the fire escape. Jeremy knew the cop was there.
A few floors below, heavy feet thumped up the stairs. There came the sound of gruff voices, and again the fartlike sputter of walkie-talkies.
So it all comes down to this, he thought. No matter how bright he was — and he was very, very bright, always had been — it’s come down to a major felony rap, probably a conviction … and jail.
Jeremy did not want to go to jail. That fate he feared more than any other. He was young — only twenty- three — slight of build, and possessed not one ounce of physical courage. In jail he would be dead meat. They’d use him and abuse him and throw him away like a candy wrapper. At the very least he’d get AIDS.
Jeremy didn’t think much of himself, for all that he knew he was one of the best hackers in the city. He had been on the verge of becoming a successful freelance microcomputer systems consultant. He had already done a few jobs for some small brokerage houses on Wall Street, mainly on the recommendation of his uncle George, an independent stock analyst. But his age was a handicap, and so were his looks. Jeremy looked about fifteen. He couldn’t go to work for a company. No sheepskin. He’d flunked out of Columbia two years ago.
So when money got tight — and when Jeremy was into heavy speedballing, money got
“It’s gonna stop snowin’, Jeremy. Christmas ain’t gonna come this year. Unnerstand? Come on, tell Santa where you’re getting the cash to pay for this stuff.”
Jeremy had told him, and DiFilippo wanted in. The rest was history.
I’m just another goddamn drug-abuse statistic, Jeremy thought ruefully. Just like in the TV public-service spots. How dumb. How unoriginal.
I did drugs, and I lost my job, my wife, my kids….
Jeremy liked coke. The subject here is not soda pop. He had a pronounced affinity for the crystalline alkaloid commonly processed from the dried leaves of the coca plant: cocaine. Coke, snow, nose candy … (plug in the current sobriquet). He’d started out packing his beak with the stuff, snorting it, then had graduated to freebasing and shooting the gunk into his veins along with some heroin to lubricate the pipes. Speedballing made you feel loose and smooth and good — damn good. Speedballing was fun, as long as you took it easy, watched your chemistry,