“Hold on, son. What are you here for?”
You swallow. “I’m a contractor, working for Dietrich-Brunner Associates, who I’m supposed to be meeting here”—you check your glasses—“ten minutes ago.” Damn.
Mr. Moustache pulls out an ancient smartphone that bristles with keyboardy goodness. “Just a mo. Can I see your ID card?”
You resist the urge to get shirty and open your wallet. “Yup.”
“Okay.” He checks his phone. “In you go, Mr. Reed.”
“Thanks—” You pause, suddenly realizing something. “Who are you?”
“The tooth fairy, son.” His cheek twitches, then he reaches into his suit pocket and produces a warrant card. “In you go.”
“You can never be too sure,” you say, risking it, and scurry inside before the mummy lobe can scream and faint at your scandalous temerity in questioning his authority.
The bored temp on the reception desk stares at you like you’re something she trod in by accident: “You’re late,” she says. “Second level, room 110.” She points at the lift opposite, then hands you a badge. You get the message, and head straight for room six (having figured out—unlike the temp—that of course the lunatics at Hayek Associates number everything in binary).
Room six turns out to be a boardroom. The door’s open, and as you slide through it crabwise in an unconscious attempt to render yourself invisible you find Elaine, half the gang from last night, and a bunch of strangers, some of whom have that geek vibe to them. Chris, Elaine’s boss, is speaking. You sneak in and stand at the back like a naughty schoolboy while Chris rolls on in an imperious tone of voice, telling the bunch of strangers that he’s got the legal equivalent of a carrier strike group zeroed in on them, and they’d better give him access all areas, or else. Which goes down about as well as you’d expect.
“What you’re asking for is impossible,” snaps the leader of the enemy faction, a big silverback marketroid with all the charm of a Gitmo interrogator. “The audit can be arranged, if you’re willing to pay for it and contract with a mutually acceptable third party who will be bound by our standard NDAs, but the rest is right out. You’re asking for a complete copy of our database and transaction log, plus core mission-critical systems so you can perform a hostile audit while we’re trying to keep our business running in the face of an external hack attack: That’s just not practical, unless you’ve got a few hundred petabytes of storage kicking around and a data centre to run the sandbox in.”
The vaguely rat-faced guy from last night—Brendan—raises a document wallet. “This says you’re going to give us access. Why not just get it over with?”
“Give me that,” the silverback says contemptuously. He sniffs a couple of times as he reads it. Meanwhile, you fidget with your specs. There’s a new layer on the room, and a whole bunch of documents. It’s lawsuit-space: Cool! You glance at the auths and see that you’re on the Dietrich-Brunner case folder—they’ve listed you as staff, so you can edit their files. “Chris, I’d appreciate a word with you and your counsel in private with me and Phil.” He glances at a cynical thirty-something who is doodling notes with a pen on a yellow legal pad. “Just to clear the air.”
Chris turns round. “You heard him, everybody take ten.” He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. Thinking you might as well beat the rush, you slide out the door about five seconds ahead of Elaine.
“What’s going on?” you ask.
“Chris and Hackman are trying to outasshole each other.” Her lips underscore the dry disapproval of her tone. “When they finish posturing, the lawyers will broker a deal, and the winner gets to dry-hump the loser’s leg.”
You roll your eyes. It’s not exactly a novelty, but…“Why is it that the further up the greasy pole you look, the more childish the games get?”
She examines you with clinical interest, as if looking for signs of life on Mars. “Let’s go find the coffee station. I think they’ll be at it for at least half an hour. Got to make it look hard-fought.”
As it happens, Elaine is out by less than four minutes. You’re just finishing a polystyrene cup of mechaccino from the robot caffeine dispenser in the Mess Hall (that’s what it still says on the door) and you’ve just about gotten round to thinking why me? for the third time this morning when Cynical Phil sticks his head round the door. “It’s safe to come back, the shooting’s over,” he mutters, then withdraws in a hurry. Everyone puts their coffee down and troops obediently back to the boardroom, where the Chris-and-Hackman show has dropped the final curtain.
“You’ve got a week,” says Hackman. He looks like he wants to bite someone’s throat out: No wonder his lawyer didn’t want to hang around. “Your tech heads can poke around as much as they need to, and Rebecca and Mike will give them what they need.” A subtle emphasis on the last word there. “Wayne will act as gatekeeper. You want something, you ask Wayne, he’s got the authority to say yes or no. Your accounts team can dupe our personnel files and accounts and look at them off-line, subject to nondisclosure arrangements. But I don’t want you underfoot. Two bodies, one week, that’s all you get to plant down here.”
One week? Chris smiles lopsidedly and nods at Elaine. “That should be sufficient,” he says confidently. “I’ve got every faith in you, Elaine.” And that’s you, and your eight grand a day, right there.
Midafternoon finds you attending a business meeting in a dungeon under Vhrana, with a gorgon called Stheno and a dark elf archer called Venkmann. Venkmann is one of the house avatars, currently being driven by Mike Russell. He has black-enamelled armour, an elaborately engraved skull-faced helmet, a twenty-centimetre-long Fu Manchu moustache, and an evil laugh—and that’s just the visible assets. “Where do you want to start?” he asks.
“The Orcs.” You ground your blunderbuss on the uneven, rubble-strewn floor of the cave and lean on it. “They were bearers, right?”
“Pretty much.” Venkmann raises one bony finger. Its tip glows green as he commences writing notes that hover in the air behind him. “Encumbrance, one hundred and ten pounds each before they hit a movement penalty.”
“Did you go hunting their registered owners?”
“Yup.” Venkmann scrawls another check mark in mid-air. “All forty were signed up via a botnet in Malaysia, using stolen credit cards. The cost of a tag in Avalon Four is low enough that their banks just authorized the transactions without doing a fraud check.”
The gorgon is looking a little bit lost. Periodically, she shrugs or twitches, stereotyped body language untouched by mortal puppeteer. “Where did the card numbers come from?” she finally asks.
“Who knows?” Venkmann shrugs. “It’s petty crime at this level—fifteen euros here and there. We told the cops, who made a note of it, but—”
“No, I mean, did all the numbers come from the same source?” she asks. “If some web storefront got themselves hacked, that might tell us something. Work it from the other end, find the hacker, find who they sold the numbers to.”
Venkmann looks perplexed. “Is that possible?” he asks.
You shift your weight between feet and rumble bearishly. “Of course it’s possible,” you point out. “There’s a real world out there, Mike. Maybe we ought to ask the cops if they’ve covered that angle yet.”
“The cops will take the details and give you a pat on the head, then they’ll ignore you,” predicts Stheno. “It’s a volume crime, they don’t investigate small frauds individually, it’s not cost-effective.” A small buzzing insect, no doubt attracted by the smell of blood, flies too close to her, and one of her asps snaps at it. The snake-lock misses, but the fly drops to the floor and shatters like glass. “If you expect them to share intelligence, you’re mistaken. The rule is, information flows into an investigation, never out of it. Break the rule, and you risk tipping off the target.”