Cyberbooks (19 page)

TWENTY-ONE

It was not easy being the son of Pandro T. Bunker. Junior sat in the last row of the half-empty courtroom, listening with only half his attention to the testimony being given up on the witness stand. No one sat near him; he had the entire pew of seats to himself. None of the sales people in the audience wanted to be seen sitting near the son of the publisher. And all of his dad's people, including his mom, were up in the front.

But Junior smiled to himself. They all think I'm just the owner's son, he told himself. They all think I'm a spoiled brat who doesn't know nothing and gets everything handed to him on a silver tray. I'll show them. I'll show them all. Even Mom and Dad.

Junior's work in the office, as a special assistant to the publisher, had not been terribly successful. Most of the editors either distrusted him as a snoop for his parents or belittled his intelligence. After weeks of being alternately ignored and avoided, he transferred to the sales department just in time for Woody's lawsuit to explode in everybody's face. Naturally, the sales people regarded him as a pariah.

But Junior leaned back on the hard wooden bench of the courtroom and grinned openly. I'm smarter than they think. I'm smarter than any of them.

Up on the witness stand, Woody Baloney was being questioned by the cowboy lawyer the sales department had brought in from Colorado.

"And what, in your professional estimation, will be the result of the Cyberbooks program?" asked the cowboy, his weathered, crinkle-eyed face looking serious and concerned.

"The result?" Woody said, glancing at the judge. "We'll all be tossed out on our butts, that's what the result will be!"

"Objection!" shouted three of the five defense clones in unison.

"Overruled," snapped the judge. "The witness will continue."

The lawyer prompted, "So this electronic book gadget, this
. . . thing
they call Cyberbooks, will result in the whole sales force being laid off?"

"That's right," said Woody.

"In your professional opinion," the lawyer amended.

"Uh-huh."

Junior slouched farther on the hard wooden pew. Mom and Dad have pinned everything they've got on this Cyberbooks idea, and the sales force is going to stop it cold. Then what happens? They can't fire Woody or anybody else; they'll be back in court before you could say "prejudice." They won't be able to work with Woody or the rest of the sales force; too much hard feeling.

No, Junior concluded, the company's doomed. Finished. Mom and Dad are going down the tubes.

Which only made him smile more. Because I've been smart enough to take the money I have and invest it wisely. In one of the biggest multinational, diversified corporations in the world.
My
fortune isn't going to depend on some crazy invention, or on a lawsuit by my own employees.

Two days earlier, P. T. Bunker, Jr., had taken every penny in his trust fund and sunk it into Tarantula Enterprises (Ltd.). He had not merely acted on his own, nor did he trust a stockbroker with his money. Junior had first bought the latest computer investment program, and used his own office machine to examine all the various possibilities of the stock market.

Tarantula Enterprises was a great investment, the computer had told him. In order to fight off an unfriendly takeover bid, Tarantula was buying its own stock back at inflated prices. Although this had removed most of the stock from the open market and made the price for Tarantula shares artificially high, the computer program predicted that the price would go even higher as the takeover battle escalated. So Junior instructed his computer to automatically buy whatever Tarantula stock was available, and to keep on buying it until he told it to stop.

Glowing with self-satisfied pride, he told himself that he could even retire right now and just live on the dividends.

*

Lt. Moriarty, meanwhile, was causing no end of anguish among the staff tending the intensive care unit at St. Vincent's Hospital.

The usual routine was to keep ICU patients calm and quiet, sedated if necessary. Usually such patients were so sick or incapacitated by trauma that there was little trouble with them. Generally the intensive care ward looked somewhat like a morgue, except for the constant beepings and hums of monitoring equipment. Except when there was an emergency, and then a team of frantic doctors and nurses shouted and yelled at one another, dragged in all sorts of heavy equipment, and even pounded on the poor patient as if beating the wretch would force him or her to get better.

No one knew how many times a screaming emergency at bed A had resulted in heart failure at bed B. No one dared even to think about it.

Moriarty was different, though. All the monitors showed that he was in fine fettle, and since he had been in the hospital less than twenty-four hours, the nurses could not even claim that he was too weak to be allowed to get out of bed. But the hospital rules were ironclad: no one got out of the intensive care ward until their physician had okayed a transfer or release—and his insurance company had initiated payment for the bill.

Moriarty insisted that he was detoxed and feeling fine. They had removed the IV from his arm; the only wires connected to him were sensor probes pasted to various portions of his epidermis. He wanted
out.
But Dr. Kildaire was out for the day; he would not return until the midnight shift started. And the accounting department, its computer merrily tabulating hourly charges, absolutely refused to discharge a patient whose insurance was provided by the city.

Threatening bodily harm and a police investigation produced only partial results. The head ICU nurse, a slim Argentinean with a will of tempered steel, at last agreed to allow Moriarty to sit up and use a laptop computer.

"If you stay quiet and do not disturb the other patients," she added as her final part of the bargain.

Moriarty reluctantly agreed. He had to check out a thousand ideas that were buzzing through his head, and he needed access to the NYPD computer files to do it. The laptop was not as good as his own trusty office machine, but it was better than nothing.

For hours he tapped at its almost silent keys and examined the data flowing across the eerily blood-red plasma discharge screen. Yes, all of the victims had indeed been Tarantula stock owners; most of them had owned shares for years, decades. But he himself had only recently purchased a few shares. So new owners were just as vulnerable to the Retiree Murderer as old ones. The murders had nothing to do with being retired, the victims were owners of Tarantula stock who lived in New York.

Which meant that the murderer was connected in some way to Tarantula. And lived in New York. Or close enough to commute into town to commit the murders.

Pecking away at the keyboard, Moriarty used special police codes to gain access to the New York Stock Exchange files. What happened to the stock of the murder victims? Who was buying the shares?

It was impossible to trace the shares one for one, but there
was
a buyer for the shares of the murder victims. Within weeks after each murder, the victim's shares were sold—and bought immediately. But by whom? Tarantula shares were traded by the thousands every day of the week. Who was buying the shares of the murder victims?

For hours that question stumped Moriarty. Then he got an inspiration. He asked the NYSE computer if any one particular individual person was acquiring shares of Tarantula on a regular basis.

The stock exchange computer regarded corporations as individual persons, and gave Moriarty a long list of buyers that included corporations headquartered in New York, Tokyo, Messina, and elsewhere. It was almost entirely corporations, rather than human beings, who were regularly buying Tarantula stock.

Again Moriarty stared at a blank wall. But slowly it dawned on him that Tarantula Enterprises (Ltd.) was itself one of the largest regular buyers of its own stock. The corporation was buying back its stock wherever and whenever it could. Not an uncommon tactic when a company was trying to fend off an unfriendly takeover, and if Moriarty read the data correctly, Tarantula was lighting savagely to beat off a takeover attempt by a Sicilian outfit.

The Mob? Moriarty asked himself. Could be.

Then could it be the Mob that is knocking off these little stockholders and buying their shares?

Not likely, he concluded. The Mafia-owned corporations were buying Tarantula stock in big lots, tens of thousands of shares. Not the onesey-twoseys that the Retiree Murder victims had owned. Moreover, there hadn't been much selling to the Mobsters over the past several months. Tarantula was buying back its own stock pretty successfully and preventing the Mafia from gaining a controlling interest.

So who's buying the murder victims' stock? Moriarty asked himself for the hundredth time that afternoon. The computer could not tell him.

It takes two talents to be a good detective: the ability to glean information where others see nothing, and the ability to piece together bits of information in ways that no one else would think of. Perspiration and inspiration, Moriarty called the two.

He had sweated over the computer for practically the entire day. It had told him everything he asked of it; a most cooperative witness. But it had not been enough. Now he had an inspiration.

While the nurses were making their rounds, replacing the IV bottles that fed the comatose patients in the intensive care ward, Moriarty asked the computer for photographs of the members of Tarantula's board of directors. Maybe. Just maybe.

The pictures were slow in coming. The simple laptop computer, with its limited capability, built up each photo a line at a time, rastering back and forth across the screen like the pictures sent by an interplanetary probe from deep space.

The chief nurse herself brought Moriarty a skimpy dinner tray and laid it on the swinging table beside his bed with an expression on her face that said, "Eat everything or we'll stick it into you through an IV tube. Or worse."

Moriarty actually felt hungry enough to reach for the tray and munch on the bland hospital food while the computer screen slowly, slowly painted pictures of Tarantula's board members, one by one, for him to examine.

It wasn't until the very last picture that his blood pressure bounced sky high and his heart rate went into overdrive.

"It's him!" Moriarty shouted. "I'd recognize those eyes anywhere!"

He flung back the bedsheet and started to get to his feet, only to be surrounded instantaneously by a team of nurses and orderlies that included two hefty ex-football players. Despite Moriarty's struggles and protests, they pushed him back in the bed The chief nurse herself stuck an imperial-sized hypodermic syringe into Moriarty's bare backside and squirted enough tranquilizer into him to calm the entire stock exchange.

"You don't unnerstand," Moriarty mumbled at the faces hovering over his suddenly gummy eyes. "There's a life at stake. Whoever bought Tarantula stock . . . his life's in danger. . . ."

Then he fell fast asleep and the team of nurses and orderlies left, with satisfied smiles on their faces.

*

Weldon W. Weldon was forced to call a recess to the board of directors meeting after the orderlies had finally cornered the all-singing, all-dancing Gunther Axhelm and carted him away. The conference table was a scuffed-up mess, and several of the older directors needed first aid.

He sat in his powered chair, Angora blanket across his lap, and watched the maintenance robots polish the table and rearrange everyone's papers neatly. The conference room's only door swung open, and a malevolently smiling P. Curtis Hawks stepped in. His red toupee was slightly askew, but Weldon said nothing about it.

"You wanted to see me?" Hawks snapped. He self-consciously planted his fists on his hips, just above the pearl handles of imitation Patton pistols.

"Yes I did," Weldon replied, adding silently, You stupid two-faced idiotic clown.

"Well?"

"Close the door and come down here," said Weldon. "What I have to tell you shouldn't be shouted across the room."

Hawks pushed the leather-padded door shut and slowly walked down the length of the long conference table, avoiding the robots that were industriously polishing its surface back to a mirror-quality sheen.

Pulling up a heavy chair and sitting directly in front of the Old Man, Hawks slowly took the pacifier from his mouth and said, "You forced me to do this."

"Did I?"

"Yes you did," the younger man said, his voice trembling just a little. Like a little boy, Weldon thought. A little boy who's mad at his daddy but knows in his heart that he's being naughty.

Weldon said carefully, "You thought that I sent Axhelm into your operation to destroy you."

"Didn't you?"

"No. I sent him to Webb Press because the operation had to be cleaned out before we could transfer to electronic publishing. And you wouldn't have the kind of cold-blooded ruthlessness it took to clean house."

"Clean house? He's driven us out of business!"

"Not quite," said Weldon. Then he added with a smirk, "Your losses are going to save Tarantula a walloping tax bite next fiscal year."

"Webb Press shouldn't be run as a tax loss. . . ."

"And it won't be," said Weldon softly, soothingly, "once you've converted to electronic publishing."

"You mean you . . ."

"Haven't you been paying attention to the industry news?" The old man was suddenly impatient. "Haven't you seen what's happening at Bunker Books? Their own sales force is suing Bunker over Cyberbooks."

Hawks gaped at him, uncomprehending.

"I had to clean out Webb Press," Weldon explained, "before you could even hope to start with electronic publishing. One thing I've learned over the years, never expect a staff to change the way it does business. If you're going to go into a new venture, get a new staff. That's an ironclad rule."

"So you were going to get rid of me, too," said Hawks grimly.

Weldon felt exasperation rising inside him like boiling water. "Dammit, Curtis, you can be absolutely obtuse! I
told
you your job was safe! I
told
you I wanted Webb to lead the world into electronic book publishing. What do I have to do, adopt you as my son and heir?"