“Right.”
Scull sighed. “I gotta admit, Petey, that right there confuses me.”
“Same here,” Nimec said. “And the sooner you can find information that’ll unconfuse us, the better.”
The phone became quiet again.
“Still with me, Vince?”
“Yeah, I had some private business that needed doing, want a graphic description?”
“No, thanks.”
“Then why don’t you hang up and let me roust my top-notch staff from under their quilts,” Scull said.
“Think we can keep this in-house?”
“Don’t see why not. Cal Bowman, you know him?”
“The name rings a bell.”
“He’s got a good bunch under him who specialize in what we call maritime works issues. They do reports on coastal processes, traffic forecasts—”
“Great, Vince.”
“I’m guessing you’re on a ’crypted freq?”
“Yeah. My satphone.”
“Keep it handy,” Scull said. “I’ll call back in a few hours with whatever we can pull together.”
Nimec considered that and had to smile.
“Those birds chirping in SanJo yet?”
“Not anywhere near my block, how come?”
“Thought you’d feel it was a little early to be waking people up.”
Scull produced an ogreish chortle.
“I give what I get when it comes to distributing the misery,” Scull said. “Fuck ’em all, big and small.”
“That a Vince Scull original?”
“A collaboration between me, Robin Hood, and Karl Marx,” Scull said. “Like it?”
Nimec shrugged. “Sends a clear message.”
“On behalf of the three of us, I’m glad you got it loud and clear,” Scull said.
And on that delightful note he signed off.
Henri Beauchart had been at the surveillance station well before Eckers arrived at nine A.M., accompanied by three of his adjuncts from Team Graywolf.
It only fed Beauchart’s existing unhappiness. He and his own staff had already completed their electronic probe. A simple effort, yes, but hastily called for. And here Eckers would come walking in the door to take control of an operation that was itself something Beauchart detested at his core. Still, what was to be gained from dwelling on his resentments? That would only make him miserable. The time for second thoughts or complaints was long past. His position at Los Rayos had been one thing before Jean Luc Morpaign returned from Paris to handle his deceased father’s business affairs, and another thing afterward. The brutal truth was he’d allowed himself to be purchased, gone from preventing and solving crimes to committing them. And he should be accustomed to Tolland Eckers stepping on him these days.
Eckers was Jean Luc’s man. Indeed, his spiritual familiar.
Now he approached the U-shaped terminal where Beauchart sat beside a young, dark-haired woman wearing a conservative blouse and skirt, a red bindi dot of Hindu tradition in the center of her forehead.
“Henri,” he said. “You have what I wanted?”
Beauchart looked back over his shoulder at the American. His companions had remained a few paces behind him.
“It is all done,” he said with a nod toward the woman at his console. “Chandra is one of my best intranet monitoring operators. I’ve had her bring up this graphic so you can see for yourself how the information was obtained.”
Eckers waited.
“The summary log reports and strip charts have been hard-copied, but I’ll venture a guess you won’t care to review them,” Beauchart said, pointing to the screen in front of him. “What you see here will be good enough.”
Eckers leaned forward and scanned the screen. Its galaxy view of the resort’s network architecture showed a large circle representing the primary host surrounded by smaller circles that depicted its various nodes, with connecting lines to display the inbound and outbound communications routed between their portals. On the perimeters of the orbiting circles were hundreds of tiny colored points, each of which stood for an individual computer in the system.
“My first step was a global query, entering the names of Mr. Nimec and his wife,” Chandra explained. “This sought them out of the resort’s computer databases and those of any licensed and rented alliance businesses they might have visited on the island.” She paused. “Shops, nightclubs and restaurants, tour organizers… we require they use certain collaborative software applications to give us different sorts of information. Most of it’s statistical. They rarely raise complaints, since the stated reason for this is our desire to learn which attractions and hospitality providers are popular with our guests, and how to improve and better target services for them.”
“Tracking their activities being a fringe benefit,” Eckers said.
The woman nodded.
“Our partners understandably do object to having some of their programs, or specific program files, interface with our central database… There are degrees of overlap in the merchandise and services they provide, and that creates occasional competition between them,” she said. “An example of what they like to keep private might be their accounting and inventory figures. Scheduling information is another very pertinent example, as I’m about to show you. The business owners are often insistent about maintaining the confidentiality of this data, which is why we slip trojans into their computers over the intranet. They’re self-updating and undetectable to any firewall or spyware-detection program compatible with our system infrastructure. And we have built-in alarms should they try to install any other such programs.” Chandra placed a hand over her computer mouse. “To get back to my global search, it gave us several immediate hits. But the tracking data we needed would usually take from several hours to a day before being transferred between their computer subsets and our host by the trojans.”
“Why’s that?” Eckers asked.
“Too routine to red flag other than for a special action,” she said. “Then it suddenly becomes important. But an unregulated flow of traffic would overtax the system’s capacity, so we use automatically staggered cycles.”
“Like timed stoplights on a busy intersection.”
“Yes… unless circumstances dictate that we go into the computers, override the predetermined cycle, and extract the information packets as I did from here,” Chandra said, and then moved and clicked the mouse.
Eckers watched closely as she highlighted one of the orbital subnet circles on the galaxy view and then zoomed in on a specific point along its circumference. It grew large on the screen, a numerical internet protocol address appearing above it.
Beauchart saw the American’s eyes narrow with curiosity. Again, he had to stamp down on his distaste.
“The computer we’ve identified belongs to one of the resort’s licensed agents… a water sports shop that also schedules a range of excursions,” he said. “The Nimecs are booked for an outing this afternoon. One that I believe will present the singular opportunity you desire.”
Eckers caught his quick, meaningful glance.
“The shop’s name?” he said.
Chandra clicked her mouse and it appeared over the IP address.
Eckers read it off the screen, grunted as his interest was further stirred.
“Okay,” he said. “Give me a look at the details of what they’ve got scheduled.”
Chandra gave them to him.
They were, as Beauchart had predicted, good enough.
Jean Luc winced when his blackline cell phone rang on its docking station first thing in the morning — the caller ID display told him it might only complicate what was set to be a busy day. At the top of his schedule was a ten o’clock meeting in Port of Spain to settle down the apprehensive gentlemen at the Ministry of Energy and Energy Industries. Then it would be across Independence Square to the Finance Building, where he’d no doubt have to apply more verbal palliatives. And then an international call to Reed Baxter, during which he’d be obliged to pass on a filtered and edited version of the gaining worries in the Capitol and tolerate Reed’s whining on about his own. So much nervous energy generated on both sides, and he the transoceanic conductor that made it flow smoothly back and forth rather than build to some dysfunctional system overload. Jean Luc hated to think what might happen if he decided to let it go. The whole shebang, everything. And sometimes he felt he could, even would, inherited alliances and duties aside. He had an ample bequest and many interests. He could travel the globe for the rest of his life and never grow tired of its sights and cultures. The past bore on him only to the degree that he allowed it, and by no means would Jean Luc continue shouldering its burdens if he grew convinced they’d add up to his personal ruin.