Coming up the front steps of the library.

5.

Mulwray and Christian got out of the elevator on the fiftyfirst floor, leaving Stephanie alone with the little boy Patrick, and the lingering smell of Mulwray's perfumed hair gel.

It wasn't an unpleasant smell. It reminded Stephanie of lavender and something else, something herbal. In any case, Stephanie imagined she was going to have to get used to it. From Monday she and Mulwray would be working together in the Social Acquisition department.

Stephanie held the little boy's hand a little tighter as they stepped out on to the roof of the King Building. The high city wind swept grit off the surface and lashed them with it. Stephanie squeezed her eyes shut and kept them shut until they were on the sheltered side of the helicopter shack. She didn't like to think about what kind of crud would be settling out of the sky on top of a building in New York these days. Get a speck of industrial waste lodged on your cornea, let it melt in your tears and you'd wake up with a poached egg rolling around in a dead socket in your head. Then wait eighteen weeks for a transplant, even on the company's priority health scheme. Considering her job, it would be easy to get an early operation and select some good stock, healthy and attractive. But a new eye would most likely be brown. Even if it was blue it could never exactly match the colour of the one she already had.

Stephanie didn't worry about the kid's eyes. He was wearing a fullhead city mask. He loved it. Couldn't get into it quickly enough. It gave him a killer robot aspect, making his head bugeyed and big on his tiny body. The mask went well with the gory, textured Jack Blood teeshirt. The expensive Korean hardware in the mask was filtering the air so it didn't scorch his little pink lungs. The child was called Patrick and Stephanie had spent the day on what was basically a PR exercise, showing the kid around the Butler Inst.i.tute office complex, a big bright smile on her face and lots of maternal gush. She made sure that Mr O'Hara, Patrick's father, was in sight when she had given the little kid a carefully timed impulsive kiss on the cheek. Set that image in the father's mind. His child and another woman. An attractive young woman, let's be frank about it.

Stephanie was in good shape and she knew it. Still in good shape despite nearly eighteen months in New York. She'd needed minor surgery only on a couple of occasions. Once for a cyst in her breast and once for lung cancer. The new lungs in Stephanie's chest had come from a young Peruvian woman who had come north. She'd intended to make a new and better life in the USA and had ended up living on one of the innercity housing projects. When Stephanie had found her she'd been there only three weeks, so her lungs were still viable.

They'd picked up the Peruvian woman on a routine sweep of the city database. She'd been arrested for attempted murder, which under the current legislation merely meant that she'd been operating as a prost.i.tute in an area with a high incidence of HIV7. Miraculously enough, she'd actually been clean and it was the report on her blood that had attracted the Butler Inst.i.tute computers. They'd picked the Peruvian woman up within an hour of arrest and retested her. She was still clean after an hour in the cells. Another miracle. The Butler Inst.i.tute made the clinical sacrifice and removed her lungs the same day and within fortyeight hours Stephanie had undergone her operation, a gift from the company.

They'd made her forfeit her Christmas bonus, though.

She could hear the helicopter now, invisible behind the solid grey overcast. A stormfront of industrial precipitate moving down from upstate. From Buffalo, blowing in off the Great Lakes. Stephanie hoped the b.a.s.t.a.r.d would get the helicopter down in time. She didn't want to be on the roof when those beefy clouds pa.s.sed over. Patrick shifted impatiently at her side. The child's hand was lost in her grip, tiny fingers like frog bones squeezed in her strong hand.

The helicopter had broken through the haze now and they were caught in the approaching engine noise hammering off the reflective concrete underfoot. The huge weight of black machinery was settling down delicately at the centre of a painted circle. The sky above was factory sludge, dark now with approaching night as well as the storm. Stephanie sighed aloud. With the sound of the helicopter and the mask on Patrick O'Hara couldn't hear her. The day spent with the little boy had been a PR exercise all right. PR for her. But it had meant a day away from her screen and a day's work she was going to have to do this evening. The pilot popped his door open and waved from behind the plastic c.o.c.kpit. Stephanie waved back as she walked towards the landing pad, ducking low under the slowing sweep of the rotor blades, forcing a smile.

Stephanie's offices were on the fiftysecond floor of the King Building, one up from Biostock Acquisitions. The place was quiet now. O'Hara, the boss, had drunk his traditional democratic Friday drink with the staff then caught his own helicopter out to Albany. After he left the staff had begun to drift away to begin their own weekends. Stephanie waited around, wearing her streetcoat, joking about waiting for her date and maybe being stood up. When the last of the staff had gone she sat back down at her Apollo work station, switched it back on and booted it up again.

The company logo appeared before anything else. Not the words 'Butler Inst.i.tute', but just a bold image consisting of a fat friendly cartoon b.u.mble bee and, beside it, a human eye.

It always looked to Stephanie as if that bee was flying directly towards the eye, ready to sting and blind.

As the operating system woke up on the Apollo the company logo faded and a customized screen greeting flashed up for her. Then the computer presented Stephanie with a desktop featuring all her current paperwork. For ten minutes Stephanie did legitimate work. If anybody looked in on her she would just be working late. But n.o.body looked in.

After ten minutes she saved the doc.u.ment she was working on, a routine report on stock problems. Then she went into her applications folder and triggered an icon labelled 'BGSW'.

Stephanie watched it flash as the process awakened and shot away into the background of her screen.

She went back to working on another report, concentrating on the phrasing, losing herself in it so she didn't notice the pa.s.sage of time. She was doing only basic word processing but her machine had slowed down appreciably since she'd started the new process. 'BGSW' stood for 'bug sweep'. Stephanie had sent Bugsweep scurrying around the network to make sure no one was watching what she did on her computer. She worked on the report for another twenty minutes while the process waited and monitored activity. Just after midnight a small cheery icon popped up on her screen. A smiling pink cartoon elephant with a knot tied on his trunk. The cartoon elephant's tail twitched and a little word balloon appeared reading 'Don't forget Mom's birthday! Oct 27th!' The image had been pirated from a genuine piece of commercial software, a kitsch memopad utility she'd bought in a Mexican souvenir shop. But now it was being used as a coded message by Bugsweep to tell her that the system was clear. Stephanie saved the doc.u.ments she was working on, then dumped the word processor. Only now did she begin her real work.

Bugsweep had finished and the system had snapped back to its normal response time. But not for long. Stephanie was about to unleash the Ferret.

Bugsweep was one of the goodies Stephanie had brought with her when she'd left her job at Texas Instruments. The Ferret was another. They were both software packages which had been developed for defence. Both were outgrowths of AI research artificial intelligence and used particular AI techniques. But the Ferret was considerably more complex than Bugsweep.

Stephanie moved her cursor to an icon showing a dripping dayglo green syringe and doubleclicked on it. It was the trademark of a popular piece of virusbusting software. The syringe turned a bright red. Rather a tasteless choice, thought Stephanie. Activity on the screen was slowing down and now it seemed to freeze completely. Even the system clock came to a standstill, locking at 03:32. Stephanie hadn't noticed the pa.s.sage of time. She'd missed supper and her stomach was rumbling. She'd have to eat something soon.

The small cartoon syringe flickered red and steady on the screen. If someone had looked over Stephanie's shoulder they would have seen what was apparently a virus protection package searching her hard disk.

What was really happening was the unleashing of the Ferret. The Ferret wasn't created by the AI research team at Texas Instruments. It had been bought on the grey market from the Pacific Basin, so they could take it apart and study the methods used in its searching technique. Now the screen flashed and the syringe was replaced by the Ferret front end. Originally the package had come with a terribly boring military ID screen, just some serial numbers and a diagnostic menu. The boys at Texas Instruments had replaced that with the graphics that now flashed in front of Stephanie, washing her face with coloured screenlight in the dark office.

The Ferret looked like a genuine ferret, a weaselthin carnivore snaking around and twisting its neck, happy to be unleashed from whatever software hibernation limbo held it between excursions. Bright eyes and yellow teeth. It moved as if it was ready for the hunt, the screen animation hardly blurring. At the top left of the screen a network status panel appeared, showing the codenames of the hard disks for every terminal in the Butler Inst.i.tute. The hard disks appeared as solid black rectangles, showing that they were locked and secure. n.o.body could get into them through the network. Two fat boxes appeared next. These were the gateways into the Butler Inst.i.tute mainframes. They were also black. Locked solid.

The Ferret thrashed on the screen.

There was a popping sound like someone opening a sixpack of softdrink cans all at once, close to your face. Stephanie flinched. She kept the sound on her machine turned off in normal use, but Ferret could override any system defaults.

With the volley of popping noises the rectangles symbolizing the hard disks all snapped from black to white. The mainframe boxes took a moment longer. Then both unlocked with the sound of champagne bottles opening.

The whole system was wide open.

Ferret moved as if it had caught the scent of blood, tail whipping. It turned and looked at her and winked then lunged towards the top left corner of the screen. En route it split into a dozen tiny dashing cartoon ferrets. Each one darted into a box representing a hard disk or a mainframe, disappearing into it as if vanishing down a rabbit hole.

The Ferret was penetration and search software. You told it what you wanted to look for and unleashed it on a network. That's where it was now, a sly predatorprocess sniffing at every node in the Butler Inst.i.tute, cracking open every file on every disk and nosing through it. Anything of interest that it found it would copy. It was a smart program and had a knack for choosing only the relevant material. The criteria it used were sophisticated and remarkably astute. That was where the artificial intelligence came in. The Ferret had been written using some very sophisticated techniques. The boys in her old research lab had still been scratching their heads over it when she left, a highly illegal copy of the Ferret in her briefcase. Once she knew she'd be working at the Butler Inst.i.tute she'd suspected it might come in useful.

In an alcove beside the washrooms there was a small refrigerator, its top covered with dirty coffee cups, a microwave and coffee machine. Stephanie took a break from her screen and ducked in there for some coffee. It took her five minutes expertly to fix herself a cappuccino, even grating some chocolate from a bar in the refrigerator, sifting it on to the stiff white foam.

When she sat back down at her workstation there was a folder containing seven doc.u.ments on the screen, with a note indicating that more were on the way. The Ferret had been busy. Stephanie cracked open the first doc.u.ment, unlocking its encryption using the Ferret's menu of code busters. After thirty seconds she was able to read what turned out to be a numbingly boring corporate memo. The second and third folders were stock market forecasts which she could have found in the New York Times New York Times. The fourth and fifth were reports about new environmental problems. Reluctantly, Stephanie binned them. She'd never find the time to fit in more reading. The sixth file was an odd piece of paperwork concerning a New York cop called McIlveen. A personnel file copied from the police database. Stephanie scanned through it quickly, chewing at a thumbnail. She set it aside to return to later.

When she opened the seventh file retrieved by the Ferret she struck gold.

It was a letter describing how the Butler Inst.i.tute was in the process of buying some communications and research facilities in the Midwest. It sounded like a fairly impressive piece of corporate acquisition until you checked up on the Midwest stock and discovered it wasn't exactly a business at all. It was more like the United States Air Force. Stephanie read the doc.u.ment twice, heart pounding a little as the caffeine entered her bloodstream.

She slipped a floppy disk into her computer and was making a copy of the letter when all h.e.l.l broke loose.

The doc.u.ment seemed to be taking rather a long time to copy but that didn't worry Stephanie at first. It meant only that somewhere in the network the Ferret had hit a rich seam of information and was in the process of dragging the goodies back to her. But then her screen locked completely.

For a full minute nothing happened. Now it wasn't the coffee that was pushing up Stephanie's heartbeat. She began to accept that her machine had crashed. Nothing was moving anywhere on the screen. This could be a major disaster. She could reset and reboot easily enough, but she didn't know what side effects might be involved. In normal use the Ferret would come scampering back at the end of its hunt, licking its paws, closing every file behind it, relocking the disks and restoring the mainframes to exactly their original state so there'd be no traces of the nocturnal hunt. But what would happen if Stephanie rebooted now? Would people come in on Monday morning and find muddy ferret tracks all over their files? She bit her lip and hesitated. The only sound in the office was the whirring of the air conditioning and the hum of the fan which cooled her hard disk. Then she leaned forward and pressed the startup switch.

Nothing happened.

Stephanie hit it again. Still nothing.

It was bad enough if she couldn't cover the Ferret's tracks. But what would happen if she couldn't even switch her machine off? It would be glowing like a beacon when everyone filed back in on Monday. Might as well just hang a sign around her neck saying, 'I'm the one who did it.'

Stephanie thought about her blonde hair swinging and the twenty years it had taken to grow it. She thought about the small fingers of the boss's child in her hand, and candysick breath, and about how long it had taken her to pay for just the jacket of the Otomo suit.

Then she thought about what the Butler Inst.i.tute might do to her if they found her probing their secrets.

Stephanie came to a decision. Boot up and take her chances. If the Ferret was gone from the network she'd quit for the evening. Take what she had and call it a day. She'd become greedy and it was a mistake. Sweat had burst under her arms, soaking the Hamnet silk. The coffee heaved uneasily in her stomach. Stephanie found herself making bargains with a G.o.d she hadn't believed in since childhood.

Let the network be clean and I won't push my luck again. I swear. Even let the Ferret be wiped out, corrupted during the crash so I can never use it again. Just let me get out without any traces this time.

Never again.

Just let me get out.

I swear.

She was reaching to pull the power plug when the screen came back to life.

The system clock came alive again and spun through a highspeed blur of digits, recapping the time since the Apollo had gone down. The rectangles of the hard disks and the boxes of the mainframes reappeared in the top left of the screen, still coloured white, still wide open. Her active folders popped back up, one by one, reopening for her at the exact line in the exact page where she'd been reading when the system went down.

Stephanie stared and then moved the cursor on the screen.

It jerked around crazily but that was because her hand was trembling so badly. She clicked utilities on and off, ran a quick systems status check, examined the network.

There was no sign that she'd rung any bells. The system security was asleep. No one else was logged on. The network was quiet.

The Ferret's status screen had come up.

Systems failure it said. it said.

Nine doc.u.ments left to import.

Continue Or Quit?

Stephanie hesitated for a tenth of a second.

She moved the mouse and clicked on Continue Continue.

New folders began to pop up on her screen as the Ferret dragged them back across the network. Stephanie thought about saving each one to floppy and then getting the h.e.l.l out of the office. She thought about her promises to G.o.d.

But that wasn't the way to succeed in this life. If you didn't take the chances you didn't get the rewards. She'd stay and read each doc.u.ment as the Ferret decrypted them, exactly as she intended. It didn't do to let yourself get spooked. That wasn't the way to end up on the board of the Butler Inst.i.tute. Maybe she should even send the Ferret out again, after she'd done a little reading, with a new set of specifications.

The miniature cartoon ferrets were coming back, scurrying out of the hard disk and mainframe icons. They grew as they ran, and merged together. Halfway in the journey back across the screen they'd coalesced into the original single big Ferret. He stopped and winked a cartoon wink at Stephanie, preening his whiskers.

He was still preening them when the green thing hit him.

It came out of the network through the hard disk icons, following the Ferret's route. It lashed down across the screen in a hot green slash of pixels, shedding a radiant series of afterimages behind it like glowing empty skins. The Ferret was just beginning to react to its presence. The Ferret sensed the arrival of security software and tried to hide. Its whiskers twitched as it began to respond. The menus and software badge vanished. The Ferret faded into a ghost image and the disguise of the syringeshaped trademark began to appear in its place. But the green thing came crashing down on to the vanishing Ferret's shoulders and locked on with a grip of death. The syringe popped out of sight and the Ferret's colours came up bright and clear again. It tried to strike back but the green thing was sprouting long claws now.

It lunged and slashed and the Ferret went down.

'Good, isn't he?' said a voice.

Stephanie had once given herself a week of whiplash pain in her Honda by hitting the brakes when she'd had the headrest removed. It was nothing compared to what she did to her neck now, snapping her head backwards to try to look over the back of her chair. But before her eyes registered anything she'd already caught the smell.

A smell like lavender.

Lavender and something else, a scent of herbs.

Mulwray nodded towards the screen where the green scaly thing was tearing into the Ferret, lacerating it with red streaked claws. 'That's the Ferret Killer.'

Mulwray leaned forward from where he was standing behind her chair. Stephanie had to twist away so that his arm didn't touch her face. The smell of him was very strong, very close. He touched the soundlevel controls on her computer. The death squeals of the Ferret rang through the office as the green thing disembowelled it. Brilliant pixel viscera sprayed across the screen, the torn body of the Ferret beginning to lose smoothness and decompose into an angular outline as its graphics controls went.

'Ever looked at this before?' Mulwray was standing hunched over the coffee maker in the kitchen alcove. 'Looked at it properly, I mean.' Now Mulwray turned towards her, carrying a cup. He gave it to Stephanie. His gun, a small automatic, a standard Biostock sidearm, remained in his other hand as he picked up his own cup and sat down beside the Krupps coffee machine. It was an antique that someone had brought from a defunct graphics art firm in Chicago.

'What about it?' said Stephanie.

'We own Krupps.'

She said nothing.

'You must know that, right? That's what you were doing on the computer.'

'I was working late.'

'What you were doing was cracking confidential files. You were reading about the corporate structure of the Butler Inst.i.tute.'

'I was '

'You were looking at things you weren't supposed to look at. You were taking information that didn't belong to you. You took it out of our computers and put it into your mind. That's the equivalent of taking money out of somebody else's bank account and putting it into yours. It's theft. And who are you stealing from? Just the company that pays for you. Feeds you. Clothes you. Heals you when you're sick.'

'This is just a misunderstanding.'

'Sure. Now tell me what you found out when you broke into the boss's computer.'

'I'm not saying anything.'

'Well, then, I'll tell you.' Mulwray smiled. He blew on his coffee to cool it. 'I'll tell you what I found out back in April.' He set his gun down now and his smile got even wider. 'Because that's when I broke into the boss's computer.' He sipped his coffee, grinning at Stephanie, and Stephanie began to feel like she could breathe again, began to feel her heartbeat slow. Lines crinkled around Mulwray's eyes when he smiled. They detracted from the perfection of his Eurasian beauty but Stephanie liked those lines. 'I found out that a big j.a.panese company owns the Butler Inst.i.tute,' said Mulwray.

'Hoshino,' said Stephanie.

'Right. But the Butler Inst.i.tute owns everything else.'

'That's not true.'

'Okay. I'm exaggerating a little. But we own every other company in this building. Every single one of them is a subsidiary, mostly acquired over the last decade. How do I know this?'

'The office rental records.'

'Right. It's a secret that BI is so big. But it makes accounting sense for them to pay all the ground rents in one lump sum from one account. They get a deal from the landlords or something.'

'And anybody who can read a tax audit can work it out. Like you did,' said Stephanie.

'Like we both did,' said Mulwray.

'It's so big it's scary.'

'Not as scary as breaking into files in the middle of the night then having somebody come up behind your chair.'

'You b.a.s.t.a.r.d. I never even heard you.'

'Good aren't I?' said Mulwray, amus.e.m.e.nt gleaming in his eyes.