Shadowfires (48 page)

 

Having run only a few hundred yards, Rachael was already gasping for breath. Her legs felt leaden.

She was not out of shape; it was just that the desert heat was so fierce it virtually had substance, and running through it seemed almost as bad as trying to run through water. For the most part, the heat did not come down from above, because all but a sliver or two of sky was clouded over. Instead, the heat came
up
, rising from the scorching sand that had been baking in the now-hidden sun, storing that terrific heat since dawn, until the clouds had arrived within the last hour or so. The day was still warm, ninety degrees, but the air rising off the sand must have been well over a hundred. She felt as if she were running across a furnace grate.

She glanced back.

Eric was about twenty yards behind her.

She looked straight ahead and pushed harder, really pumping her legs, putting everything she had into it, crashing through that wall of heat, only to find endless other walls beyond it, sucking in hot air until her mouth went dry and her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth and her throat began to crack and her lungs began to burn. A natural hedge line of stunted mesquite lay ahead, extending twenty or thirty yards to the left, an equal distance to the right. She didn’t want to detour around it, because she was afraid she’d lose ground to Eric. The mesquite was only knee high, and as far as she could see it was neither too solid nor too deep, so she plunged through the hedge, whereupon it proved to be deeper than it looked, fifteen or twenty feet across, and also somewhat more tightly grown than it appeared. The spiky, oily plant poked at her legs and snagged her jeans and delayed her with such tenacity that it seemed to be sentient and in league with Eric. Her racing heart began to pound harder, too hard, slamming against her breastbone. Then she was through the hedge, with hundreds of bits of mesquite bark and leaves stuck on her jeans and socks. She increased her pace again, gushing sweat, blinking salty streams of the same effluvient from her eyes before it could blur her vision too much, tasting it at the corners of her mouth. If she kept pouring at this rate, she’d dehydrate dangerously. Already she saw whirls of color at the periphery of her vision, felt a flutter of nausea in her stomach, and sensed incipient dizziness that might abruptly overwhelm her. But she kept pumping her legs, streaking across the barren land, because there was absolutely nothing else she could do.

She glanced back again.

Eric was closer. Only fifteen yards now.

At great cost, Rachael reached into herself and found a little more strength, a little more energy, an additional measure of stamina.

The ground, no longer treacherously soft, hardened into a wide flat sheet of exposed rock. The rock had been abraded by centuries of blowing sand that had carved hundreds of fine, elaborate whorls in its surface—the fingerprints of the wind. It provided good traction, and she picked up speed again. Soon, however, her reserves would be used up, and dehydration would set in—though she dared not think about that. Positive thinking was the key, so she thought positively for fifty more strides, confident of widening the gap between them.

The third time she glanced back, she loosed an involuntary cry of despair.

Eric was closer. Ten yards.

That was when she tripped and fell.

The rock ended, and sand replaced it. Because she had not been looking down and had not seen that the ground was going to change, she twisted her left ankle. She tried to stay up, tried to keep going, but the twist had destroyed her rhythm. The same ankle twisted again the very next time she put that foot down. She shouted—“No!”—and pitched to the left, rolled across a few weeds, stones, and clumps of crisp bunchgrass.

She wound up at the brink of a big arroyo—a naturally carved water channel through the desert, which was a roaring river during a flash flood but dry most of the time, dry now—about fifty feet across, thirty deep, with walls that sloped but only slightly. Even as she stopped rolling at the arroyo, she took in the situation, saw what she must do, did it: She threw herself over the brink, rolling again, down the steep wall this time, desperately hoping to avoid sharp rocks and rattlesnakes.

It was a bruising descent, and she hit bottom with enough force to knock half the wind out of her. Nevertheless, she scrambled to her feet, looked up, and saw Eric—or the thing that Eric had become—staring down at her from the top of the arroyo wall. He was just thirty or thirty-five feet above her, but thirty vertical feet seemed like more distance than thirty horizontally measured feet; it was as if she were standing in a city street, with him peering down from the roof of a three-story building. Her boldness and his hesitation had gained her some time. If he had rolled down right behind her, he very likely would have caught her by now.

She had won a brief reprieve, and she had to make the best of it. Turning right, she ran along the flat bed of the arroyo, favoring her twisted ankle. She did not know where the arroyo would lead her. But she stayed on the move and kept her eyes open for something that she could easily turn to her advantage, something that would save her, something . . .

Something.

Anything.

What she needed was a miracle.

She expected Eric to plunge down the wall of the gulch when she began to run, but he did not. Instead, he stayed up there at the edge of the channel, running alongside the brink, looking down at her, matching her progress step for step.

She supposed he was looking for an advantage of his own.

With the help of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, which provided a patrol car and a deputy to drive it, Sharp and Peake were back in Palm Springs by four-thirty Tuesday afternoon. They took two rooms in a motel along Palm Canyon Drive.

Sharp called Nelson Gosser, the agent who had been left on duty at Eric Leben’s Palm Springs house. Gosser bought bathrobes for Peake and Sharp, took their clothes to a one-hour laundry and dry cleaner, and brought them two buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken with coleslaw, fries, and biscuits.

While Sharp and Peake had been at Lake Arrowhead, Rachael Leben’s red Mercedes 560 SL had been found, with one flat tire, behind an empty house a few blocks west of Palm Canyon Drive. Also, the blue Ford that Shadway had been driving in Arrowhead was traced to an airport rental agency. Of course, neither car offered any hope of a lead.

Sharp called the airport and spoke with the pilot of the Bell JetRanger. Repairs on the chopper were nearly completed. It would be fully fueled and at the deputy director’s disposal within an hour.

Avoiding the french fries because he believed that eating them was begging for heart disease, ignoring the coleslaw because it had turned sour last April, he peeled the crisp and greasy breading off the fried chicken and ate just the meat, no fatty skin, while he made a number of other calls to subordinates at the Geneplan labs in Riverside and at several places in Orange County. More than sixty agents were on the case. He could not speak to all of them, but by contacting six, he got a detailed picture of where the various aspects of the investigation were going.

Where they were going was nowhere.

Lots of questions, no answers. Where was Eric Leben? Where was Ben Shadway? Why hadn’t Rachael Leben been with Shadway at the cabin above Lake Arrowhead? Where had she gone? Where was she now? Was there any danger of Shadway and Mrs. Leben putting their hands on the kind of proof that could blow Wildcard wide open?

Considering all of those urgent unanswered questions and the humiliating failure of the expedition to Arrowhead, most other men would have had little appetite, but with gusto Anson Sharp worked through the last of the chicken and biscuits. And considering that he had put his entire future at risk by virtually subordinating the agency’s goals in this case to his own personal vendetta against Ben Shadway, it seemed unlikely that he would be able to lie down and enjoy the deep and untroubled sleep of an innocent child. But as he turned back the covers on the queen-sized motel bed, he had no fear of insomnia. He was always able to sleep the moment he rested his head on the pillow, regardless of the circumstances.

He was, after all, a man whose only passion was himself, whose only commitment was to himself, whose only interests lay in those things which impinged directly upon him. Therefore, taking care of himself—eating well, sleeping, staying fit, and maintaining a good appearance—was of paramount importance. Besides, truly believing himself to be superior to other men and favored by fate, he could not be devastated by any setback, for he was certain that bad luck and disappointment were transitory conditions, insignificant anomalies in his otherwise smooth and ever-ascending path to greatness and acclaim.

Before slipping into bed, Sharp sent Nelson Gosser to deliver some instructions to Peake. Then he directed the motel switchboard to hold all calls, pulled the drapes shut, took off his robe, fluffed his pillow, and stretched out on the mattress.

Staring at the dark ceiling, he thought of Shadway and laughed.

Poor Shadway must be wondering how in the hell a man could be court-martialed and dismissed from the Marine Corps with a dishonorable discharge and still become a DSA agent. That was the primary problem with good old pure-hearted Ben: He labored under the misconception that some behavior was moral and some immoral, that good deeds were rewarded and that, ultimately at least, bad deeds brought misery down upon the heads of those committing them.

But Anson Sharp knew there was no justice in the abstract, that you had to fear retribution from others only if you
allowed
them to retaliate, and that altruism and fair play were not automatically rewarded. He knew that morality and immorality were meaningless concepts; your choices in life were not between good and evil but between those things that would benefit you and those things that would not. And only a fool would do anything that did not benefit him or that benefited someone else more than it did him. Looking out for number one was all that counted, and any decision or action that benefited number one was good, regardless of its effect on others.

With his actions limited only by that extremely accommodating philosophy, he’d found it relatively easy to erase the dishonorable discharge from his record. His respect for computers and knowledge of their capabilities were also invaluable.

In Vietnam, Sharp had been able to steal large quantities of PX and USO-canteen supplies with astonishing success because one of his coconspirators—Corporal Eugene Dalmet—was a computer operator in the division quartermaster’s office. With the computer, he and Gene Dalmet were able to accurately track all supplies within the system and choose the perfect place and time at which to intercept them. Later, Dalmet often managed to erase all record of a stolen shipment from the computer; then, through computer-generated orders, he was able to direct unwitting supply clerks to destroy the paper files relating to that shipment—so no one could prove the theft had ever occurred because no one could prove there had been anything to steal in the first place. In this brave new world of bureaucrats and high technology, it seemed that nothing was actually real unless there were paperwork and extensive computer data to support its existence. The scheme worked wonderfully until Ben Shadway started nosing around.

Shipped back to the States in disgrace, Sharp was not despairing because he took with him the uplifting knowledge of the computer’s wondrous talent for remaking records and rewriting history. He was sure he could use it to remake his reputation as well.

For six months he took courses in computer programming, worked at it day and night, to the exclusion of all else, until he was not only a first-rate operator-programmer but a hacker of singular skill and cleverness. And those were the days when the word
hacker
had not yet been invented.

He landed a job with Oxelbine Placement, an executive-employment agency large enough to require a computer programmer but small and low-profile enough to be unconcerned about the damage to its image that might result from hiring a man with a dishonorable discharge. All Oxelbine cared about was that he had no civilian criminal record and was highly qualified for his work in a day when the computer craze had not yet hit the public, leaving businesses hungry for people with advanced data-processing skills.

Oxelbine had a direct link with the main computer at TRW, the largest credit-investigating firm. The TRW files were the primary source for local and national credit-rating agencies. Oxelbine paid TRW for information about executives who applied to it for placement and, whenever possible, reduced costs by selling to TRW information that TRW did not process. In addition to his work for Oxelbine, Sharp secretly probed at TRW’s computer, seeking the scheme of its data-encoding system. He used a tedious trial-and-error approach that would be familiar to any hacker a decade later, though in those days the process was slower because the computers were slower. In time, however, he learned how to access any credit files at TRW and, more important, discovered how to add and delete data. The process was easier then than it would be later because, in those days, the need for computer security had not yet been widely recognized. Accessing his own dossier, he changed his Marine discharge from dishonorable to honorable, even gave himself a few service commendations, promoted himself from sergeant to lieutenant, and cleaned up a number of less important negatives on his credit record. Then he instructed TRW’s computer to order a destruction of the company’s existing hard-copy file on him and to replace it with a file based on the new computer record.

No longer stigmatized by the dishonorable-discharge notation on his credit record, he was able to obtain a new job with a major defense contractor, General Dynamics. The position was clerical and did not require security clearance, so he avoided coming under the scrutiny of the FBI and the GAO, both of which had linkages with an array of Defense Department computers that would have turned up his true military history. Using the Hughes computer’s links with those same Defense Department systems, Sharp was eventually able to access his service records at the Marine Corps Office of Personnel (MCOP) and change them as he had changed his file at TRW. Thereafter, it was a simple matter to have the MCOP computer issue an order for the destruction of the hard copy of Sharp’s Marine records and replacement with the “updated, corrected, and amended” file.