1
. . . Ross Bohlen is another problem. It’s high time something was done about this individual. I was in fact considering dismissal following the Lower East Side incident, but decided this would be a harsh step to take while the man was hospitalized. I am well aware of Bohlen’s record of success, but we have to ask ourselves if such a man is properly representative of the Agency. We’ve discussed this in the past, and I believe the phrase used was “natural-born killer.” As the Agency enters its third phase, the sophistication of personnel will become a crucial factor. In lieu of the fact . . .
The subject of the memo crumpled it and tossed it into the corner. Going to the window, he gazed out at a typical Washington February, forty degrees and not a patch of snow in sight. Bohlen was from the north woods and thought he knew what winters were like. This wasn’t a winter.
From the window he could see the Capitol dome, the Washington Monument, and the very tip of the Reagan Memorial. The sidewalks below were packed, most of the men wearing the fur hats in style this year, big Mongolian things that made them look like detachments of the Golden Horde come to slaughter the bureaucrats. Bohlen smiled. He knew where they could start.
The memo had been marked restricted to staff, with the copies numbered. He’d fished it out of the secure files after his request for field duty had come back. Denied, like the previous three, with no explanation this time, not even the excuse that he was recuperating. Just a scrawled no followed by a pair of initials: HC.
The same letters ended the memo. HC. Harland Cummins, former head of the University of Arkansas compsci department, former assistant director of COSSF, appointed the director of same after Marcus Amory’s death, and undoing the old man’s work ever since.
Bohlen snorted. Born killer—Cummins had some nerve taking that line after what happened at Key West.
The printer hummed behind him. He went over and tore off the sheet. Another memo, another HC. Bohlen flicked it away. Jesus, Cummins wasn’t even in town and he was sending memos. Out in Hawaii, giving some kind of speech to a Pacific Alliance meeting.
Kicking the chair back, Bohlen sat down. He supposed he ought to do some work, earn his keep until Cummins ordered his butt dragged out onto the pavement. He stared at the screen with loathing. Records—good place for a psychopath.
He’d been sitting here processing old data since he came in off sick leave a month ago. Requisitions, time sheets, expense forms—the most worthless files you ever saw. Good to have you back, Ross. You look great. Straighten out those old W-2s, why don’t you?
And that was it. Not word one about what had happened up in NYC. No debriefing, no interview, no investigation either. They didn’t know who the shooter had been, but he wasn’t a chiphead, and that was all that . . .
“Ross?” Lu called out. He looked up. The building was an old Maxim’s hotel commandeered during the war, and this office was two singles with a door between them. “Yeah?”
“Awful quiet in there.”
“You woke me up.”
“Uh-huh. Well, I’ve got something for you.”
Bohlen snarled silently. More goddamn records. “What?”
There was a tap of heels, and Lu appeared in the doorway. She was dressed like a French schoolgirl gone bad—a black dress that could have been looser than it was, white tights, and clunky strap shoes, the Marianne Look or some damn thing. It rather suited her, although Lu resembled a Midwestern college student more than anything else, a sorority type who played a lot of volleyball.
“It’s an anomaly,” she said. “Out west someplace. Maria sent it up from Analysis. Thought you’d be interested.”
Bohlen frowned. Maria was one he’d miss when he was shipped off to the pound: Amory had snatched her from Naval Intelligence at the beginning, and Ross had been her favorite bad boy ever since. She was no idiot, which was more than could be said for the rest of the analytical section. “What’s so special about this one?”
Lu bit her lip. “There’s a murder. Really nasty.”
“Yeah? Put it onscreen, will you?”
As she vanished from the doorway, he called out, “Where’s it from, anyway?”
“Montana. Irontown, or something.”
The monitor beeped. Lines of print appeared: dates, locations, time of day, type of intrusion, and the programs used. Seeing the dates, he wondered if Maria had lost it: stale data, two-three years old, all from California. “Lu,” he hollered, “what’s this West Coast crap? I thought you said . . .”
“Scroll, Ross,” she called back.
He went to the last entry. Ironwood, Montana. Never heard of it. Someone had needed mad money; the intruder had tapped a bank, the Ironwood First State, probably a farmer’s outfit with no modern countermeasures. The time code told him that whoever it was had been in the system for nearly thirty seconds, plenty of time for mischief. Sloppy, though, as if he hadn’t cared whether he was detected or not.
The programs involved were listed in the upper right corner. Birdman, Dog Story, Caligula, all standard intrusion software, all evolutionary and able to adapt to countermeasures, all illegal as hell. He scrolled back through the California entries, San Mateo, Marin, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and saw that they were duplicated on each. Oh, a couple of others here and there, but imps usually loaded half a dozen or more, and this had to be a chiphead spike or Maria wouldn’t have sent it to him.
He switched to the murder report. The Crimewatch logo came up, along with a warning that BurCyb would get you if you were accessing illegally. He turned away, tapping the desktop, a staccato rhythm with three fingers. The screen lit up. He looked back and winced in spite of himself.
It was a photo of the crime scene: a nightmare image, all blood and bone, far beyond brutality, nearly an abstraction illustrating the worst that the world could hold. It took him several seconds to realize that the victim was female. He frowned. Someone had not liked this woman, or perhaps any woman.
He punched for ID and another picture came up, from a driver’s license issued in California. It was impossible to reconcile with the one he’d just seen: a pretty face, cheekbones a bit too prominent and the lips a little thin, but some people would have said she was a beauty. There was a hint of Eastern ancestry around the eyes and in the clearness of the skin. The hair was black, worn in the old New England style popular a couple years ago, parted in the middle with rolls on either side of the head.
Sandra Nagawa-Butler, Oakland, California. Turned twenty-one last December. Height 5’8”, weight 110, eyes brown. No record apart from a few speeding tickets. Blood sample from a donor drive showed no trace of illegal substance or STD. Life history, according to the bureaucracy: local schools, two years at UC, Santa Cruz, associate degree in fine arts. Enrolled currently at an art institute in San Francisco, studying modern dance. No record of displaced person status, which fit. Not many had fled the Bay Area; the Medranistas had gotten no farther north than Tehachapi.
So what the hell had she been doing in Montana? He ran a search for relatives, a boyfriend, maybe a tour by a dance group—did they do that? He came up with nothing, which was no surprise. Identification had been made only this morning, from DNA records, and what Crimewatch had so far was minimal.
He went back to the pathologist’s data accompanying the photos. No exact time of death, just an estimate based on body temperature. Switching to the intrusion entry, he checked the time. It was right in the range. Somebody had killed that girl and then made an after-hours withdrawal. Or vice versa. Or simultaneously.
Bohlen didn’t like that. Chipheads weren’t stupid; crazy they might be, but stupid, never.
Granted that it was a chiphead at all. There were still such things as casual murders, even in this enlightened age of vigilance committees, retroactive warrants, and national security police. But a murder coincident in area and time with a nonhacker cybernetic intrusion was a bad sign. Particularly a murder like this one.
“Lu,” he called out. “What’s Analysis doing with this?”
“Nothing. The California sequence was downgraded to inactive last year, so—”
“Who ordered that?” Bohlen said, knowing the answer.
“The director.”
“HC,” he muttered as he bent over the keyboard. “HC, HC . . .”
“What?”
“Nothing.” He read the California entries. Eight murders, beginning right after the war and ending last year. The victims were of both sexes, all ages, races, economic strata. The youngest was a San Jose girl of twelve, the oldest a businessman of sixty-one found on a highway north of Sacramento. The only connection was MO: they’d all been beaten to an unimaginable degree, just like the dancer. The sequence had been flagged due to an unexplained series of anomalies in the same area. He split the screen so that both lists appeared. Only one real match, in Palo Alto: the murder had occurred a day after an intrusion. Not much, but Amory might have sent a team out on it.
The list seemed familiar. It took a moment for him to realize why: this was the sequence Frank Ricelli had been investigating when he was killed. Run down by a car outside Frisco . . .
Bohlen leaned back, about to ask Lu why the Hillbilly had deflagged the file, but then thought better of it. She wouldn’t know; Cummins never indulged in explanations. That was beneath him.
Instead he tried to get hold of Maria, diddling the call so it wouldn’t be recorded. He wasn’t supposed to contact Analysis over an open line. In fact, he wasn’t supposed to call them at all—COSSF’s flow chart contained nothing called Records.
But it turned out she wasn’t around. The guy who answered—Bohlen didn’t know his name, though he knew who Bohlen was—told him that one of her kids had gotten sick at school and she’d left for the day. As he cut off, Lu appeared. She backed against the doorway, eyes lowered. “You’re, going to be mad,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows.
“That Montana thing,” she went one. “I was checking to see if anything new came in, and . . . well, they arrested somebody.”
She bit her lip as he stared at her, and he forced himself to relax. Am I getting that bad, he thought. Lu was one person he didn’t want to rage on; she was in the same position he was. Cummins detested her too, for some unfathomable reason, and had dumped her here as the last step before kicking her out into the street. She didn’t talk about it, but he knew it depressed her.
He gave her a smile. “It’s okay.”
“Sorry, Ross.”
As she turned away, he called to her. “Throw me the report just for the fun of it, huh?”
The monitor beeped and went through the logo-and-warning cycle again. He leaned closer when the report came up. The entry had been made that morning. It would have been nice if it had been cleared before he’d gotten into an uproar, but Crimewatch took most of the day to process incoming data for softbombs, viruses, and other surprises.
The report was in copese, a dialect that Bohlen rather enjoyed, more to listen to than anything else, though reading it also had its pleasures. He would have expected something coming out of Montana to be a bit more laconic, along the lines of “I done seen him and I catched him,” but he knew that was asking too much.
. . . several reports received of an inebriated white male perpetrating a disturbance . . . (A drunk raising hell, in other words.) . . . Deputy Frostmoon took the call and upon arrival at the scene observed suspect inflicting grievous harm on a canine belonging to . . . (Kicking a dog. How awful. And what kind of name was Frostmoon, anyway?) . . . Frostmoon endeavored to put suspect into custody, who resisted . . . (Bohlen smiled. Done catched him.) . . . in the ensuing altercation, Frostmoon was forced precipitously to the pavement . . . (Ralph got knocked on his ass.) . . . Deputy Nast appeared on the scene and moved to assist Frostmoon in subduing suspect . . . (Nast . . . he was the one investigating the murder. Okay.) . . . suspect attempted to abscond, with Deputies Frostmoon and Nast in a close pursuit. Suspect evaded several initiatives to seize him during the chase but was finally apprehended and put under restraint . . . (They beat the living hell out of him.) . . . while Frostmoon escorted suspect to the patrol vehicle, Nast collected several articles shed by suspect. At this point in time several members of the Polk County 501 appeared at the scene . . . (501? What the hell was that? A vigilante outfit?) . . . demanded suspect be placed in their custody due to a report that he had destroyed and/or damaged solar collector at the domicile of one member present, also occasioning some alarm in the member’s household. A disagreement transpired . . . (Right; a bunch of vigs trying to horn in on a legit arrest. Must happen every other day out there.) . . . Deputy Nast calmed the situation, enforcing an understanding upon the 501 contingent that the Polk County Sheriff’s Department possessed overriding jurisdiction . . .
Eloquent stuff; modern-day poetry. He couldn’t see why somebody hadn’t written a blank-verse epic in cop talk. But how did it tie in with the murder? Wait, here it was:
. . . suspect’s possessions included, among other items, a bayonet and an electromagnetic sap . . .
A slapper. He thought of what had been left of the woman’s face. A slapper would have done the job: a foot of steel spring snapped out by superconducting coils at two hundred feet per second. But there had to be more to it than that.
The perp had been carrying a ratty piece of military ID: dexter, james—private first class. Bohlen went through his record, a whole string of PI and D&D busts going back to just after the war, with a couple of visits to dry-out clinics that obviously hadn’t taken. Nothing more violent than a few brawls, but . . . He read the last entry and smiled. Two months ago he’d had one too many in Stockton.
That was it. Dexter roars into town, terrorizes the neighborhood, is caught with a nasty piece of hardware, and was in Northern California a while back. So he killed the girl. Q.E.D.
And that was exactly what Nast’s report said: . . . illegal weapon . . . Northern California vicinity . . . uncontrolled violent behavior . . .
Done seen him, done catched him.
He switched over to comm mode and called Montana. Only one number; must be a small department. The screen put up a clearing signal, so he overrode. Against regs, but everybody did it. If you waited to be cleared for an outside line, you’d never get anything done.
A woman answered, moon-faced, her hair in a braid wrapped around her head. “Polk County . . .” she began brightly. Bohlen cut her off. “Patrolman Nast, please.”
“That’s Deputy Nast,” the woman said.
“Right. Thanks.”
She smiled solicitously. “Now, who’s calling?”
“Ma’am, do you see that symbol on the bottom of your screen?” She nodded amiably. “That means federal security. Now, is he around?”
The woman’s eyes widened. “From Washington?”
“That’s right, Washington.”
“Oh . . . I’ll get him.”
The screen displayed a picture of the departmental shield. A lot of mountains, sun bursting through clouds, in the foreground a guy on a horse. The horse looked like the smart one.
There was a flicker, and he found himself contemplating a blank wall. A shadow moved across it, and he heard a high-pitched voice winding up his introduction: “. . . from Washington.” Then Nast appeared.
Bohlen didn’t know what he’d been expecting; whiskers, big hat, a wad of chaw in one cheek. Nast fit another mold: brown uniform shirt, strap of a Sam Browne across one shoulder, sandy hair cut to within an inch of his skull, skin wrinkled in harsh folds around the eyes. The epitome of the smalltown cop. The only thing that marred the image was a bandage above his right eyebrow.
Nast gazed into the screen, not at Bohlen but through him. The thousand-yard stare, they called it.
Bohlen felt his hackles rise. He’d come across the type before; the army was full of them. A lifer—seen it all and liked none of it. He hadn’t been able to stand them then, and nothing had changed since.
“Nast,” the cop said quietly.
Bohlen leaned forward. Stay calm. Remember, you’re asking for cooperation. Keep things light and easy. He pointed at the bandage. “Looks like you had a rough one. That wouldn’t have been Dexter, would it?”
“Who are you?” Not even a smile.
“Name’s Bohlen. I understand you’re holding this Dexter for the, uh . . . Butler murder. That’s the name, right?”
The cop said nothing. Okay, Bohlen thought, you want to play hardass, we’ll play. “I’m interested in your train of thought there.”
Nast’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You read the report?”
Bohlen nodded.
“That’s it.”
Still nodding, Bohlen picked up a sheet. It was another memo, but Nast didn’t have to know that. “Okay. So Dexter comes around, goes on a spree, teases Fido the Pup, and runs you and your pal Frostmoon a race across the prairie. All this a day after he mauls a woman so bad, it took a DNA tag to identify her.”
“Looks that way.”
“Yeah,” Bohlen said loudly. “And it looks like he planted the Manhattan bomb and was a go-between for Medrano and Castro, too. What are you trying to sell me?”
Nast’s face reddened. “What’s your problem, mister?”
“I’ve got a few. Bloodstains. That was a pretty soggy job. Any on Dexter? The slapper? And opportunity. How’d he run into her? In California? Carried her over his shoulder since December, I suppose. I was in Frisco last summer. Why don’t you book me?” Crumpling the memo, he shook it at the screen. “You think you got a case?” He flicked it over the monitor. “There’s your case. Now you got something you want to tell me about this?”
Nast moved his head. No more than an inch, but it was as if he’d almost lurched through the screen. “What the hell do you mean?”
“Long time between homicides out there, huh? You wouldn’t be keeping the caseload clean? Pinning it on the first schmuck to come along? Who gives a shit about Dexter? Piece of trash thrown up by the war. That how you do things in Ironburg?”
Bohlen paused.
Eyes wide, Nast was leaning forward. “If you were standing before me,” he said, his voice almost inaudible, “I would put your ass on deck.”
Bohlen was opening his mouth to reply when the screen went dark. He raised his hands as if to drag Nast out of the monitor bodily, then dropped them.
He’d handled that just fine; one of his better moments at external liaison. He cast an eye at the door. No wonder Lu was so spooked. Things were starting to get to him: the shooting, all that time in the hospital, three months of deskwork, and on top of it all, HC.
He went to the window. Five blocks south was DuPont Circle, where the bomb had been planted. In a van parked by a bookstore, sitting there for two days while the town quaked in hysterics waiting for Medrano’s next move after his attempt to pancake Manhattan. When it was towed, the crew at the impound lot hadn’t known what to make of it. The Navy bomb team had, though. “About thirty kilotons,” the chief said after they cut through the roof. “Never could have gone off. Lousy design.”
If it had, the edge of the fireball would have been right about where Bohlen was standing, give or take a yard.
His breath fogged the glass. He drew a target, then wiped it clear with his sleeve. What to do about Ironville? That cop’s story was a crock. His burnout could have killed the girl, unlikely as it might seem, but burnouts didn’t leave implant spikes behind. Only chipheads did that, and if it was a chiphead, then this was COSSF business.
That’s what the Computer Subversion Strike Force was for, whatever Cummins was saying these days. Set up in the second year of the war to take on a problem that BurCyb and the FBI Computer Crime Unit had never encountered and didn’t know how to handle: the Cybernetically Enhanced Individuals. The chipheads, the imps—a self-styled elite who had taken the next step in cybernetic evolution, and come to the conclusion that this made them superhuman, and eligible to grasp the reins of destiny. And that the worst days of a war to the knife between their country and a Latin megalomaniac was the time to do it.
There had been no more than a handful of them—estimates ranged from 180 to 300—but they’d managed to turn the country inside out all the same. Placed in positions close to the comps that ran things, in Defense, the CIA, Human Services, Treasury, the FBI, they used the trapdoors they had smuggled through data encryption to delete a byte here, diddle a program there, all according to orders given by people who knew nothing of the world outside a university campus. Information was power, and whoever controlled information controlled everything—and everything was what the imps had been shooting for.
COSSF was a dedicated agency, its only mission to track down CEIs and apprehend them. In practice, apprehension meant killing. Apprehension was where Bohlen came in. That was his job, and he was very good at it.
Once Marcus Amory got mad at him for some forgotten reason—antagonizing outside law, maybe. “You’re a knucklehead, Ross,” he’d said. “But you have one thing going for you: situational awareness. Fancy word for intuition. The old fighter jocks had it. Total gut grasp of what’s happening at any given moment: they always knew when there was an enemy plane nearby. With you it’s intellectual. You know when something is off, when a piece just doesn’t fit. And that is why we put up with your antics. But,” he went on, just as Bohlen was beginning to feel cocky. “It’s a good thing you have it, because without it you’d have the mentality of a stone.”
He felt it now. Right behind him: some mad, twisted remnant of the great cybernetic crusade that had pushed the interface a little too far, tapped one time too many, and then bang, over the border into blood country. If the old man was still around, Bohlen would be flying west right now. But not under the Cummins regime. Since the Hillbilly had taken over—and Bohlen longed to know how he’d pulled that trick!—it was third phase this, reification that, heuristic management the other, anything but what the COSSF had been created to do. Mushmouth had even gone in front of Congress last fall to say that the chiphead problem was essentially solved.
Bohlen knew better.
But he needed more data. Glancing at the clock, he went back to the desk. Nearly one o’clock out on the Coast; he might catch Floyd before he went clomping out to lunch . . .
The comp buzzed as he touched the keyboard. He stared at the monitor, afraid that his call had let something into the system, but that wasn’t it. He felt his face grow hot as the words came up:
DAILY WORK QUOTA FOR RECORDS COMPILATION IS FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY (520) ENTRIES. YOU HAVE AT THIS TIME COMPLETED ONLY ONE-FIFTH (1/5TH) OF THAT TOTAL. UNTIL QUOTA IS FILLED THIS STATION WILL DISREGARD ALL ATTEMPTS AT USE OTHER THAN . . .
He clenched a fist and lifted it to the screen. So there was a quota now, was there? He’d give ’em quotas. He leaned toward the monitor, which was now explaining that a report was being placed in his file. “Off,” he said softly. The screen went dark.
He stood clutching the edge of the desk. “Shit,” he muttered. There was a sound from the other room: Lu, probably wondering what was going on. He paced a couple of minutes to cool himself down, then went to the door. “Let’s knock off and go out for a drink.”
Lu squinted back at him. “What about Madeline?”
“I’ll call her too.”
She smiled. “You do that first.”
“Okay,” he said, turning back to the room. The crumpled memo still lay in the corner. He gave it a kick as he went past.