The Callivant patriarch rolled his automated wheelchair nearer. “Do you realize what you’re doing, Nicola? You’re a Callivant. That means you have certain — family responsibilities. Your grandfather is inside, waiting to see the coverage of his announcement that he’s seeking the nomination.”
He rounded on Matt. “And you bring this — what? This would-be muckraker—blackmailer into our house? Do you want to destroy your grandfather’s chances of getting back into the Senate?
Anger overcame Matt’s sense of intimidation, and he finally found his voice. “Oh, sure,” he said. “What are the lives of a few peons versus the chance of having a Callivant back where he belongs?”
“Shut your mouth, you miserable thief!” the Senator thundered nearly as well as Lucullus Marten. “I know your type only too well — and I’ve dealt with them over the years. You’re like the rats in the wall, emerging to nibble, nibble, nibble away at your betters, coming out to spread lies like some loathsome disease. You’re a ghoul, digging up the dead past to feed on it!”
It was quite a speech, even if the Senator wound up mixing his metaphors a bit. “So tell me, Senator. Did you send Clyde Finch out for a bit of pest control?”
“You don’t seem to realize your position, boy.” The Senator’s face became downright sinister as he ran his wheelchair almost onto Matt’s feet. “You’re an intruder in my home.”
“There are people who know where I am,” Matt replied as steadily as he could. “Lots of them. And I have friends who know exactly what you’ve been doing. If anything happens to me, Net Force will be asking questions.”
“I’ve deposed directors of the FBI,” the elder Callivant sneered. “Do you think you can scare me with some low-level agent in a wash-and-wear suit?”
“I think that I’m here as an invited guest. And if you try anything stupid, you’ll discover you’re not above the law.”
“I think you’re the stupid one. I’ve been arranging the laws as it seems fit to me since before your parents were born. You’ve got a nerve to lecture me. Not to mention a foolish streak. The truth is what we Callivants say it is. If we say you’re an intruder—”
“I invited him,” Nikki ground out from between her clenched teeth.
“You are being just as foolish as he is, dear.” The Senator aimed a cold look at her. “You’re not thinking clearly. Sadly, it’s a trait that runs in our female line.”
“Don’t think you can do to me what you did to Aunt Rosaline,” Nikki flared. “With that convenient ‘nervous breakdown.’”
Walter Callivant’s cold eyes looked at his great-granddaughter as if she were some sort of lab specimen. “Yes,” he said, “you’re very like Rosaline. But once she’d been committed and started on medication, she became much less of a problem.”
A new voice came from the doorway. “That’s enough, Father.”
Matt remembered Megan’s description of the pleasant Walter G. Callivant she’d met at that formal hoedown. But the gray-haired man who faced them now looked more like the harassed junior senator the comedians all made fun of. It was the hunted look in his eyes. “What’s this all about, Nikki?” Walter G. asked.
“It’s about Priscilla Hadding.”
Nikki’s grandfather flinched, but he didn’t retreat. “It was an accident,” he said softly. “But I’ve never been able to forget it. All these years, it’s stuck with me. We — I was just about your age. We’d gone to a party — a pretty rowdy affair. Silly and I — that’s what we called her, you know.”
He took a deep breath. “Silly and I were out in the Corvette, arguing as usual. Then she was cursing at me, going to leave. I gunned the engine to drown out what she was saying. That Corvette — that was more car than I could handle. Somehow, it got into gear—”
Walter G. Callivant’s face was no longer bumbling or vague as he looked back on that memory. “It almost flew down the road. By the time I got it stopped — Silly’s foot — it had been caught in the door—”
His eyes squeezed shut, and he brought up his hands to cover his face. “But it was an accident,” his muffled voice came from between his fingers.
“A bad-looking accident — especially for a Callivant,” Walter Senior suddenly spoke. “He was my son. It would have reflected badly—”
“On you,” Nikki said angrily. “So you covered it up. Clyde Finch saw his chance. He got hold of a similar car and switched the license plates. It got him a new job, and, thanks to his daughter, he got into the family — sort of.”
“At least Marcia knows how to keep her mouth shut!” Walter Callivant, Sr., didn’t look so senatorial all of a sudden.
But Nikki was far from shutting up. “You let Mrs. Hadding dangle all those years to protect your lie. How—”
“Angela Hadding is a typical example of what happens if you let a woman speak her mind,” Walter Senior cut in.
I bet that attitude must have gone over well with the women voters, Matt noted silently. Then he spoke. “But freezing out a childless widow wasn’t enough. You had to keep people away from those old court records. So you overreacted when your security system sent off hacker alarms. Clyde Finch managed to trace the hacker to the D.C. area. He must have spread his search pretty wide to come up with Ed Saunders’s mystery sim.”
“I thought he was stretching things, too, when he came up with that scenario,” the senator said. “But after our legal people sent the usual letters, we suffered a major hacker attack.” He turned to Nikki. “The hacker erased our family history site, filling it with nasty questions about Priscilla Hadding. And he wanted to blackmail us.”
Matt stared at him. “And that was enough to justify killing Ed Saunders and Oswald Derbent as well as the hacker?”
The eyes of the man in the wheelchair blazed with fury. Apparently it was the first time in decades that someone had questioned Walter Callivant’s decisions. “We didn’t know who the hacker was — we only suspected it was somebody in that sim. Saunders’s death was an accident,” Callivant snapped. “Finch had arranged for him to be mugged. We wanted to get the list of sim participants from him. We figured we could step up the pressure on all of you and find the hacker.”
“It certainly stepped up the pressure on Ed,” Matt agreed ironically. “It killed him.” He shook his head. “And it was totally unnecessary. The poor guy had already sent your lawyers the letter naming the participants.”
“How were we to know?” Callivant Senior demanded. “The fool tried to run and slipped on the ice.”
Matt nodded in understanding. “Of course — it’s much more sensible to stand around and get beaten up.”
Callivant was so angry, he wasn’t censoring himself at all. “I said it was an accident. What about you? What about the threats you sent us after Saunders died? You claimed you had enough already to destroy my son’s candidacy.”
“Not me,” Matt told him. “The hacker, we suspect, was Harry Knox. You must have thought so, too, once your lawyers got Saunders’s list. If you checked people’s backgrounds, you’d have come upon the juvenile charges against Knox for hacking.” He leaned forward. “Was the failure of his truck’s brakes supposed to be another warning?”
“We were dealing with a criminal,” Callivant said stiffly. “My grandson Daniel devised a response and saw the job through.”
“Just like a spy novel,” Matt continued to needle information out of the old man. “Did Daniel get his hands dirty monkeying with the brakes, or was it a high-tech job, like what happened to the autobus? Did he use an EMP to send the truck’s circuits haywire?
“It’s a secret technology.” A little belatedly Callivant Senior clamped his lips shut.