Splicer (2 page)

The programmer watched Dante unfold his wings and dive. In an instant he was out of sight, gone from the screen. But Grieves could still hear him - could still imagine the sound his wings might make if they were actually beating their way down a corridor that was a fiber-optic cable. He pictured him swooping down through a junction, racing at nearly the speed of light across the American landscape, the hiss of the ether roaring in his ears. But this wasn't actually happening of course - because Dante was just a computer program.

And the little bat was just a clever piece of animation Grieves created for his own amusement.

In the time it took Grieves to blink, Dante had arrived at the East Coast. He pulled in his imaginary wings and touched down. He stared up at a familiar doorway – a locked entrance known as a
firewall
- a security device designed to keep hackers like Grieves out of private computer systems. Or if not out, track and destroy the intrusive program once it was inside. And find out where it came from.

But Dante was built smart. It sniffed trouble. It raised its virtual head and a faint siren alerted Grieves at his laptop, which smiled now, sensing that all the long work was finally paying off. This particular firewall wasn't there yesterday. But Grieves expected as much. Someone had spent tens of thousands, possibly hundreds, just to keep nasty little programs like Dante, and clever programmers like Grieves, from having their way with corporate secrets. Or more importantly, dirty little personal secrets hidden somewhere in a morass of files and computerized ledgers, never expected to see the light of day again. But now Dante sits and waits, at the side of the road, watching the electronic traffic stream by, infinitely patient.

Within minutes, a visitor shows up. A packet of data - sent by some other computer system - screeches to a halt at the threshold of the fire door. It issues a password correctly, then streams through. Grieves shakes his head because he knows that Dante has been listening. That's its job. But how could the firewall know that? The simple act of parking an infonaut like Dante, a bundle of software instructions, really nothing more than a program that can move around like a guided missile through the Internet or sit beside a known firewall like some hitch hiker, would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Hell, it's unthinkable even today, thought Grieves. But someone has to dream these things up. They don't invent themselves. At least not yet.

And just like that, Dante's in. And once inside, he'll start his search through a myriad of files like a tireless bloodhound on the scent. And then once he has what Grieves is looking for, he'll flash back across the continent and roost back in his home base computer and no one will ever be the wiser.

That's not to say that Dante never leaves a trail. Sometimes that adds spice to the game. Creates fear too, in the right people. And that's why; in this case, it's clearly part of the plan.

The coroner lifted a flap of grayish skin with her gloved finger.

"See here?" She pointed, looking bored. "See the multiple lacerations?" The older cop bent over, grunted, wondering how many times he'd stood here in one of these rooms over a corpse. His partner nodded, the ceiling lights glowing off the shiny dome of his head.

The coroner ran her finger across the ragged line on the neck of the deceased. "Sorry to keep the two of you awake, but that's why I think your murderer is an amateur," she added.

"You'll testify to that?" yawned the older cop.

She straightened, peeled off her latex gloves and shook her head. "You got somebody in mind already?" Neither cop answered. "I've seen more talkative corpses than you guys have been today." She turned away. "Fine. A pro could make it
look
like this kind of a hatchet job." She shrugged. "If they had enough time. And that was what they wanted."

They absorbed that. "Do you know who this is?" one cop asked.

She looked down. "Does it matter? Toe tag says
Ludd, W. Jeffrey
. Politico?"

"You never heard of Jeff Ludd?
GeneFab
?"

She whistled softly. "The billionaire who buys his clothes at thrift shops?"

"Bought," corrected the younger cop. She looked at him with only slightly less malice in her smile.

"This is some going-away present they gave you, Kozak." She meant the older cop, the thin one with the mousy grey hair. She bent close again to the body, squinted at the knuckle-white separation of the skin. "This someone's idea of giving you enough rope to hang yourself?" She beamed at him, lips so red they seemed wine-stained. "Just a thought. Sorry to bring it up. You know . . . the carnage of your career."

"Thanks for your help, Simmons," droned Kozak, darkly sarcastic.

Out in the hall a few minutes later, he lit a cigarette and tried to blow the smell of disinfectant out of his lungs. The younger cop, his partner, leaned against the opposite wall.

"Did you get what you need? Besides the abuse, I mean." No answer. "What'd you do to her? Kick her cat once?"

His senior partner snorted. A short economical laugh - like he didn’t have enough air to get it right.

Three years ago Kozak had been involved in the highly publicized arrest of a prominent lawyer who routinely defended battered women. Which led to an initial conviction for sexual harassment. Some women never forgave him for that. Then the case blew up in his face when it was discovered there was tampered evidence. It was a long messy story and he didn't want to get into it right now. It created a lot of enemies on the force.

"I forgot to get her a birthday card one year. For some reason coroners are sensitive about that shit," said Kozak.

The other cop sighed. "She'll be a big help."

Kozak was writing something in his notebook. "She's pissed. But she's too dumb to lie. The fact that Ludd was hacked at by some amateur helps us anyway."

"Unless she goes up on the stand and makes a big case for some hit man trying to make it look like a bungled job."

Kozak looked up. "Since when did juries start gettin' an imagination?"

His partner closed his eyes. "This case is giving me everything. The heebies.
And
the jeebies."

His partner said nothing, no sign of anything coming from the other side of the hall. Like one of those statues in the park "You think they gave us this assignment as a career boost? This is like a fuckin' Kamikaze mission."

The other cop juggled a bit of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. "I've had worse."

The younger cop, Otter, smirked, shaking his big head. "In your nightmares." He shivered. "And of course everyone, including CNN, is breathing down our necks on this one. Those hyenas smell action. Personally I feel like I've got it unzipped, it’s overtime, and I'm standing out on center ice."

They looked at each other for a few brief seconds across the dull green light of the hallway. They both sensed something cruel and unusual in the cluttered shape of their last few days together - a week that was only going to get meaner and stranger.

The older cop looked for an ashtray, then tossed the butt on the yellowed linoleum and crushed it under foot. The coroner was right; this might be his last case.

"Somebody up there likes us, I guess. So zip up, partner," he said. "It's show time."

Everything came apart the way a fat June bug dissolves on your windshield at eighty miles an hour. Instantly, and with a mess to clean up.

But Rusty wasn’t surprised. Maybe it was because he just wanted this sale so damn bad that just thinking about it gave him a tension headache. Maybe
that
was why the deal evaporated right before his eyes. And his life and his marriage too, approximately in that order. He was trying too hard again.

His biggest customer just cancelled a huge sale. It was the deal he was depending on to make the rent check - actually the last three rent checks. Their excuse for not buying? A crummy quarter. Well, Rusty Redfield was having his own crummy quarter.

At eleven AM he'd picked up the call about the cancellation. At eleven-fifteen, his boss asked to meet with him after lunch, likely to discuss why he thought she should be carrying a thirty-six year old salesperson who just fumbled the biggest prospective client in the company’s history.

Then at ten to twelve, two plain-clothes cops walked in off the street and arrested him in front of everybody in the office, a small spectacle of crime enforcement playing out in the foyer, while they waited for an elevator crammed with employees headed out for lunch. And Rusty was wearing cuffs. They hadn't cuffed him the last time. But they told him that this time they had to. It was the rule with homicide suspects.

He was soon hunched over a wooden chair in a small room no bigger than the bedrooms they build in those narrow plan starter homes. A single gray door, no windows. Sounds were coming through the roof vent from the floor above, women screaming obscenities. It was like sitting through one of those off-off-Broadway art plays - one seat, no waiting.

He got his one phone call, which he declined to take back at Great Barrier. That was an easy decision. No one had offices anymore, only cubicle space.
Virtual offices
is what they called them in
Wired
magazine. He wasn't going to spill his guts to a lawyer while dozens sat by listening through the non-existent walls of his virtual office. So they passed a sweaty black phone to him through the door of the lock-up and he called Jayne.

Jayne McEwan, a criminal lawyer and partner in the small downtown firm, McEwan & Osgood, was not in. She was in court, where she made a good living, though not as much as she might if she wasn't so attracted to those pro bono cases that put her in the media spotlight.

Rusty left a message with her assistant. She was calm and professional. She didn't even flinch when Rusty said
murder
. Rusty hated her for that.

He hung up then and waited. He had a sense that there would be a lot of waiting ahead.

Aaron Grey felt worn out, his pale green eyes faded and unfocused like a 50's surveillance photograph.

He set his phone down and studied his hands; boney fingers that had held babies, caused women to cry out in pleasure, and crushed the life out of a dozen men. He stared at them with dull fascination. They were the same hands of his youth. They had looked like the hands of an old man even then. But they didn't have this history written over them - this tale of woe tattooed across his knuckles like barbed wire scars.

Aaron was the last of a generation at the CIA, a ghost in the machine. Long past retirement age with nowhere else to go, he was famous for being the oldest spook in the shop - yet he still ran one of the most powerful divisions in intelligence - the Property Operations Group (POG). So he could never be ignored. Ever.

POG bought companies for the CIA; businesses that owned technology they needed, banks on the verge of closure they could leverage, foreign run companies operating in the U.S. that worried somebody in power. They operated over twenty domestic and foreign lending institutions and managed trillions of dollars of untraceable cash.

When the Carter administration drastically reduced the CIA’s official operating budget in the eighties, the agency took matters into its own hands. Within a decade they had built a national network of covert businesses and tripled their operating budget. And virtually eliminated political over-sight in the process.

Aaron had just finished talking to one of his agents who had finalized a business deal with a company called
XTech
. XTech was one of several companies they owned with a mandate to develop genetic opportunities before the other guy did. Genetic as in biological weapons.

Grey's connection in Toronto wasn't part of
the shop
. He was hired only because he understood gene research and DNA re-structuring.

XTech had just made a very cagey investment in
GeneFab
, a company that had revolutionized the biotech industry and made its founders near billionaires in the process. But now that GeneFab's President was dead, the future value of the stock had plummeted and their newest discovery known as
The Splicer,
was being put on hold. This was getting them international attention. Nervous attention.

The Splicer, it turns out, could be more dangerous than a neutron bomb and a lot cheaper. Grey, through his holding company, had managed to pick up more than half the privately-held shares of the only company that knew how to build one. Yet.

Word had reached the intelligence community a year before that GeneFab had stumbled onto a technology that would allow complete
desktop gene manipulation
. Now a user, even an amateur, could cobble up a new gene the same way you whipped up a newsletter or sampled a rock and roll drum track. A gene that could destroy your immune system, turn your internal organs to mush, or give someone the equivalent of Alzheimer's in a matter of hours.

When Grey first approached
GeneFab, he was told to take a hike. Jeff Ludd, the company's President, was an idealist and at least a billionaire on paper. A very dangerous man.

Now Ludd was out of the way completely. He may never have understood what he was really playing with. He had forgotten that this game was about more than just share prices. Which was unfortunate because Ludd was the genius who had taken an idea called
GeneFab
and had given it flesh and bone. Now
his
flesh and bone was lying lifeless on a stainless steel autopsy table.

Aaron looked down at the printout he held in his gnarled fingers. For all intents and purposes, he now owned
GeneFab
lock, stock, and bank account. And that meant he finally had
The Splicer.
A technology that would give them
all
the willies - the Russians, the Chinese, Pakistan, Hezbollah - and yes, even the Democrats.