"Let's get the frag out of here," he said. "And bring your toy along."

15.

0531 hours, November 14, 2053 "Who the h.e.l.l were they?" Sly said.

They were driving along in another car, one stolen from the Sheraton's underground parking lot. They'd sprinted down the fire stairs from the twelfth floor before the hotel's security response-probably ma.s.sive, considering the mayhem that had broken loose-could arrive on the scene. Modal wanted to grab the same car they'd had earlier (his Ingram and the AK-97 were still in the trunk) but Sly convinced him that risking the security in the Washington Athletic Club garage was too much of a gamble. Besides, the Sheraton lot was such easy pickings that it took him only a minute to bust into and hot-wire the ignition of a sleek Saab Dynamit. Now they were cruising south on I-5, out of the downtown core.

"Who?" Sly asked again.

Modal pulled something out of his pocket, tossed it into her lap. "Here," he said, "the previous owner doesn't need it anymore."

Sly flipped on the map light, examined the item. It was a synthleather wallet that was once light tan but now was stained dark with its owner's blood. She flipped it open, glanced through the contents. Laminated hard-copy printouts of the personal drek found on anybody's credstick-driver's license, DocWagon contract, gun license, etcetera drek etcetera-all in the name of Lisa Steinbergen. Probably an alias, Sly thought.

But then she found something that changed her mind. A corporate ID card, with a small holo showing a pet.i.te redhead about Sly's own age. (She remembered spotting the small woman, seeing her go down as one of Modal's shots punched through her throat.) If the name on that card was not an alias, what did that mean?

She put that thought aside for later consideration. In the upper-left corner of the card was a full-color holo of a corporate logo-a stylized Y.

"Yamatetsu," she said flatly.

"I knew they were corp," Modal remarked. "I guess they expected to take us without any problem."

Sly nodded. Why else carry your ID to a job?

Unless it was some kind of trick to make them think it was Yamatetsu, when it was actually someone else. . . .

But that didn't hold together. For the theory to make sense, the bosses who'd sent the team would have expected Sly and her chummers to dice up the hitters. By all rights, she. Modal, and the Amerindian kid should be either dead or captured. The corp team had come in smart. Sure, they'd made one big mistake-they didn't know that Sly and crew had two rooms-but even so, it had been a close call. If not for the kid . . .

She glanced back over her shoulder. Falcon was sitting in the back seat of the Dynamit. Lost in his thoughts, he hadn't said a word since they left the Sheraton.

It surprised her to see him toying idly with the machine pistol he'd taken from one of the dead hit men. She didn't know why Modal had let the Amerindian keep the weapon. Then again, there was some kind of weird dynamic going on between the elf and the kid, something she didn't understand.

"How did you know?" she asked.

Falcon looked up, startled. "Huh?"

"How did you know?" Sly repeated. "We'd have opened the door. We'd have got ourselves scragged but good. You knew it was a setup. How?"

The ganger didn't answer right away. Sly saw his eyes go blank as he retreated back into memory. "I don't know," he said at last.

"You heard something?" she pressed. "Saw something?"

He started to shake his head, then hesitated.

"You heard something?" she repeated.

"I heard ..." His voice trailed off.

"You heard what?"

"Nothing." Those sharp black eyes were seeing something, something that confused him or scared him. But she knew right then that he wasn't going to talk to her about it. Not now, maybe not ever.

She shrugged. "You saved our lives," she said. "You've got our thanks for that." She let him sink back into his silent study, turned to face the front again. There was little traffic on I-5. That would change in the next half-hour, but for the moment the roads were as clear as they ever got.

But to take advantage of clear roads, she thought, you've got to know where you're going.

As if overhearing her thoughts, Modal spoke up. "So, what now?"

"I don't know," she confessed. "I've got to do something."

"Why not do what I suggested?" the elf said. "Drop out of sight. Slip the border, and just keep your head down till the drek stops flying."

It was an attractive idea, but . . . She shook her head."I can't."

"Why the frag not?" he demanded. "Because of the b.l.o.o.d.y corp war?" He snorted. "Who named you as responsible for the whole b.l.o.o.d.y world? And anyway, what good can you do if you get the chop?"

She sighed. "That's part of it," she admitted, "but just a small part. You say I should take my retirement in installments, right? Well, what kind of retirement is running for my life? Knowing that every fragging megacorp in Seattle-and the rest of the world as well-wants to wring my brain out? No matter how low a profile I keep, no matter how good my security, how soon before somebody scores? What are the odds I'll last a month? Two months? A year? Sooner or later my luck will just run out." She shook her head. "I couldn't handle just waiting for it. Could you?"

Sly could see Modal still wanted to argue, but he didn't have a logical comeback. He drove in silence for a few minutes. Then, "So what did the toff have to say?" he asked. "Argybargy, or whoever?"

"Agarwal."

"Whoever."

"He said I've got two choices," Sly explained. "One is to destroy the file-"

"Sounds good to me," Modal cut in.

"-and prove to everyone that I destroyed it," she finished. "Doesn't sound so good anymore, does it?"

"Not b.l.o.o.d.y likely," the elf conceded. "How do you prove something like that? What's the second choice?"

"Disseminate it, make sure everyone gets the information. That way n.o.body gets an advantage. There's nothing to go to war about and no percentage in scragging us."

Modal nodded slowly as he thought it over. "I like that one better," he mused. "Did he say how?"

She shook her head. "Any ideas?" she asked him with a wry smile.

"Hmmm." Again Modal was silent for a time. "You've got to make sure everyone gets the data at the same time," he said finally, thinking out loud. "If you tell corp A before you tell corp B, it's a b.l.o.o.d.y certainty corp A will try to geek you before you can tell anybody else.

"And there's something else," he added pensively. "It's like destroying the file: you have to make sure everyone knows what you've done. Every corp has to know that all the rest got the same paydata, right? That's the only way to persuade them there's no margin in coming after you."

"You're saying I can't do it privately," Sly pointed out. "My only choice is to do it openly, publicly."

"I guess that's what I'm saying." Modal paused. "So that answers your question, doesn't it? You've got to post the data. Post it publicly, on some kind of electronic bulletin board system. A BBS."

A BBS. Yes, that was logical. "But which BBS?" she asked. "All the big ones are owned, directly or indirectly, by some megacorp. As soon as I post something like this-a.s.suming I can even log on-the system operator's going to s.n.a.t.c.h the data and erase my posting. It'll be like giving the data directly to one corporation, the one that owns the BBS."

"What about Shadowland?" Modal asked. Shadowland. That was the name of the most famous clearinghouse for "black" or "shadow" information in North America. Its services included bulletin boards that contained the most astounding variety of dirt on governments, corps, and individuals (some of it even true); online, real-time "conferences" where deckers and others argued over just about anything; "virtual" meeting places where deckers could conduct business safely; and much more. The governments of North America- particularly the more secretive ones like the Pueblo Corporate Council and Tir Taimgire-hated Shadowland with a pa.s.sion, as did the megacorps. The shadows were full of rumors concerning attempts to compromise or crash the system. According to conventional wisdom, the only reason that Shadowland still existed was that its central data core-its hub, known as the Denver Data Haven-was located somewhere in the contested territory of Denver. So edgy were all the governments that had divided up the city under the Treaty of Denver that none could organize a campaign to ferret out and eliminate the Shadowland service. From that standpoint, Modal's suggestion made a lot of sense. But . . .

"But what corp runs Shadowland?" she asked.

"Huh?" Modal grunted in shock. "Shadowland's independent, everyone knows that."

"Sometimes I get suspicious about things that 'everyone knows,'" Sly said quietly. "What is Shadowland? It covers the continent, right? Headquarters in the Denver Data Haven-wherever the frag that is-but it's got local 'floating' servers in every major city in North America. Right?" Modal nodded, troubled. "And all those servers connect back to the Denver hub, right?"

"What are you getting at?" Despite his emotion-deadening drugs, Modal sounded surly, as though Sly's questions were starting to undermine some cherished belief. And maybe that's just what I'm doing, Sly realized.

"n.o.body's ever compromised those data channels. Isn't that what everybody says? n.o.body's ever found the links between the floating servers and the hub; n.o.body's ever broken them. No government, no corp." She could hear the intensity in her own voice, recognized that the ideas she was pursuing disturbed her as much as they did Modal. "Secure channels-that many of them, and that secure . . . Doesn't that require one frag of a lot of resources for a scroffy bunch of shadowrunners?"

Modal didn't answer at once. But when he did, his voice was totally under control, its usual emotionless self. "So what are you saying?" he asked.

"I'm asking, who runs Shadowland? Wouldn't controlling it secretly be a real coup for some megacorp? Total control over one of the biggest communication resources for the shadow community in North America. And, who knows, maybe even the rest of the world. The corp can monitor everything that's going on out of the light. It can spread whatever information-or disinformation-it wants. It can eliminate speculations that harm its interests. It can manipulate every fragging shadowrunner who depends on Shadowland for anything." Modal whistled tunelessly. "That is one twisted b.l.o.o.d.y concept, mate," he said at last. "Do you really believe it?"

She shrugged. "I don't know," she admitted. "But it makes sense, doesn't it?"

"Too much b.l.o.o.d.y sense," Modal agreed.

"And even if I'm wrong," Sly went on, pursuing the logic to its conclusion, "I still don't think I can trust the data to Shadowland. So far, n.o.body's crashed the Shadowland hub, mainly because it hasn't been worth the cost to do it. But now ... Do you see what I'm getting at?"

Grudgingly, Modal nodded. "Now that we're looking at a corp war, all bets are off."

"Let's say Mitsuhama's the first corp to spot the posting on Shadowland," Sly said. "They download the data . . . and suddenly it's in their best interest to make sure n.o.body else gets it-no matter what the cost. They've got to take down Shadowland. So what if they have to use up ninety percent of their private army and blow up half of Denver to do it. If it guarantees they're the only ones with the lost tech, it's all worthwhile, isn't it?"

"It wouldn't be that easy ..."

"Wouldn't it?" Sly demanded. "Shadowland has serious resources, but compared to the entire, worldwide resources of Mitsuhama Computer Technologies? And its subsidiaries? And whatever other companies it's got its hooks into? Come on."

"All right," the elf conceded after a few more klicks had hummed under the Dynamit's wheels. "Shadowland's out. So what else? I still think the BBS is the only way to go. So pick a private BBS with the clout to fight off a major megacorp."

"Yeah, right," Sly snorted.

"I don't know," Modal mused. "What about a government system? Mitsuhama's tough, but I'd like to see them try to sc.r.a.p it out with the UCAS government."

"The governments want the lost tech, too."

"Huh?" That shocked Modal, she could see.

"Why not?" She repeated what Agarwal had told her about the federal teams operating in the sprawl.

When she was finished, he sighed. "Every time we turn around, the b.l.o.o.d.y box is smaller. So the governments are out. What about systems that the megacorps wouldn't want to crash, for their own reasons?"

"What reasons?" Sly demanded. "Name one."

"The Zurich-Orbital Gemeinschaft Bank." The voice came from the back seat.

Sly turned, stared at the kid who called himself Falcon. No longer lost in his own thoughts, apparently he'd been listening and coming up with his own conclusions. "What about the bank?" she asked.

"It's where the corps keep their money, right?" the ganger said. "What corp's going to blow up its own bankroll?"

Sly was silent for a few moments. The kid probably thinks the Z-O Gemeinschaft's just one big vault full of gold, she thought, but it doesn't work that way. High-level banking's not about money as such, or gold. It's about information. Agarwal had taken pains to explain this basic truth to her. The Z-O Gemeinschaft was just a bunch of big computers, a ma.s.sive exchange for financial information.

But the kid's idea still makes sense, doesn't it? she thought. Any financial transaction is just an exchange of data. But you've got to have a safe channel to exchange that data. That's why the Gemeinschaft's important. Falcon was right. The Gemeinschaft was much too important for any corp to trash it, or even threaten it. All she had to do was get the data from the encrypted file into the Gemeinschaft's information system.

All. All? The Gemeinschaft was a bank. And not just any bank, it was the megacorps' bank. What kind of security would it have on its datafiles, on its communication channels, on every node in the system? Black ice all the way, no doubt about it. Killer black ice-the best that almost unimaginable sums of money could buy.

"You okay, Sharon Louise?" Modal had slowed the car, was watching her with some semblance of concern.

She was shivering, her hands were shaking, and her skin felt cold.

"Are you okay?" the elf asked again.

"I'm all right," she said, trying to keep her voice calm and controlled. Trying to force the fears to the back of her mind. "I'm just thinking, that's all." She took a slow, deep breath, let it out quietly, imagining the tension leaving her body with the air. Better.

"The Gemeinschaft's a no-go," she p.r.o.nounced firmly. "Too much security. No decker would ever be able to penetrate it." She saw Falcon slump with disappointment. "Good idea, though."

Then another thought struck her. "Not the bank," she mused, "but what about something a.s.sociated with it? What about something else that's in Zurich-Orbital?"

"You're not talking about the Corporate Court. . . ."

She patted Modal on the shoulder. "But think about it," she said, enthusiasm growing. "For one thing, what corp is actually going to make a move against the Corporate Court?"

"They're already ignoring the Court," the elf pointed out.

"Ignoring it and acting directly against it are two different things," Sly reminded him. "And it's in the same orbital habitat as the Gemeinschaft Bank. Who knows, maybe they even share computer resources. n.o.body would dare slot with the Court, because they might crash the bank."

"And there won't be as much security, maybe," Falcon added from the back seat.

"That might be the way to go," Sly concluded. The kid was right. Unless the Court was totally paranoid-possible, but not certain-a decker would have a better chance of penetrating that system than the bank. . . . And living to talk about it afterward.

Modal looked sour. "You're a.s.suming the Court has some kind of BBS," he reminded her.

"It makes sense that they would," she said.

"You've got to make sure."

Sly nodded, then gave it some thought for a few minutes.

"Head for Puyallup," she told Modal.

Theresa Smeland's apartment was only a few blocks from The Armadillo, on 123rd Street East, half a block off Intercity 161. Sly had never been there before, but she knew that Smeland owned the entire upper floor of the small building, while the ground level was occupied by an electronics supply shop.