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.
Talk about your obsolete technologies, Leif thought. What’s next? A blacksmith in the basement?
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. Long time no see.
“Do I have to type in a reply?” Leif asked the empty air.
We hear all, even if we don’t necessarily know all, the screen flashed back.
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.
So what’s the problem at hand? the unknown hacker asked. I already said we don’t know all.
“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 hope your “friend” has a fat credit line, the hacker’s response blinked onto the screen.
“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. Six hours from now — not optimal. But it may be possible to adapt an already existing product.
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. The existing program requires contact with the virtual form of the people to be traced. The monitor blinked at him. Any suggestions as to a delivery vector?
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.
I suppose that’s okay if they’re eliminating what people owe in library fines from 2013, Matt thought. But what if somebody has to prove military service from twenty years ago, or that they filed the correct forms on a claim way back when?
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 niggling fear that this was actually a setup by the Callivant lawyers. But this felt like a hacker’s work — an amateur hacker pushed to the limit.
Matt finally arrived at a big, dim box, apparently no different from the ones on either side of it. But this was the address on the virtmail invitation. Let’s hope whoever sent it doesn’t suffer from typos, Matt told himself as he went inside.
This was the place. The interior had been programmed into a shadowy warehouse. Which, Matt suddenly thought, is really what these places are. But it was also just the sort of meeting place a fan of 1930s mysteries would create. The echoing space was almost pitch-black, with a few pools of light from single bulbs in tin shades like flattened cones.
You could hide an army out in the darkness, but Matt figured there were only five other people out there. He could even hear them breathing. Problem was, nobody wanted to announce him- or herself, because the others would then think that person had called the meeting. And then that person would be accused as the hacker who’d gotten the names for this meeting — and probably gotten everyone into trouble in the first place.