Private Lives

11

After an all-nighter on the Net, Matt Hunter sprawled in his computer-link couch, feeling more dead than alive. Carrying bricks on a construction site would probably be more physically demanding. But while his body had lain here, getting the occasional stimulus to twitch a muscle and keep him from turning into a literal couch potato, Matt had been at the nerve-racking occupation of spoofing computer systems into disgorging data.

From the initial contact until he safely got away, he’d had to dodge various security programs and a couple of live systems managers. Matt felt limper than a cheap wash-rag after somebody had wrung it out and hung it up to dry. He literally wondered if he had the strength to get up, go to the bathroom, and throw some cold water on his face.

Worst of all, his whole effort had been for nothing. Matt’s first move had been to consult the city directory, checking off every address which might overlook the corner he wanted. Then he had to search and see if any of those addresses had security cameras. Then came the job of hacking into the appropriate building systems and getting a look at the data for the date in question.

The result? Not one of the cameras actually recorded the corner of G Street and Wilson Avenue. A couple of yards off here, half a block off there. But if there was an angle that might show a waiting James Winters on that corner, he hadn’t found it. Kind of weird, that. He’d have bet that it wasn’t possible to find an unrecorded inch in that neighborhood.

Matt tried to get up and groaned.

This is what I get for breaking the law, he thought.

School would be coming all too soon. He’d probably walk the halls of Bradford Academy like some sort of zombie, one of the living dead….

Dead…Matt closed his eyes again. It wasn’t worth wasting the time to get up and go to bed. He could just lie here, doze for an hour or so…

At that moment his wallet decided to attack him from his back pocket.

Matt blinked, trying to push his tired mind to make sense of what was going on. Oh — the vibration was his wallet-phone….

He dug the wallet out, switched to the foilpack keypad, and switched it to phone format.

“Hello?” His voice was more like a groan.

“Matt?” Even considering the wallet-phone’s inherent shortcomings, the voice on this connection was incredibly tinny. It took Matt a moment to figure out who was calling.

Finally, “Squirt?” Matt squinted over for a look at his clock and flinched in horror. “Do you know what time it is? What are you doing up?”

“I — um — I was hacking,” Mark Gridley confessed.

Well, I know how that feels, Matt thought.

Mark rushed on. “Sorry. I know this must sound kind of scraggy. I’m still on the Net. Figured this would be quieter than disconnecting and calling from a phone.”

Matt could understand that. The vidphones didn’t exactly ring selectively. And a parent awakened before daybreak was not a happy parent. His own folks wouldn’t be pleased to discover that he’d spent the entire night out on the Net. The Squirt would probably get it worse than Matt would. He was four years younger…and his father was the head of Net Force.

Mark was still babbling. “I knew that calling your house would probably wake everybody up. So I tried your wallet-phone, one of those hope-and-a-prayer things. I’m kind of surprised I got you.”

In a reasonable universe I’d have been asleep in my pajamas, and the phone would have been gently vibrating on the top of my dresser, Matt thought.

Aloud, he said, “But you did get me. What was so important that you’d take a shot at waking me up before sunrise?”

“I couldn’t copy the files I hacked into, and I want to share this while the memory is still fresh. It’s about Captain Winters. I got the feeling that the I.A. report was holding stuff back. So I used some of Dad’s codes and went into the Net Force computers…hello?”

Matt finally remembered to breathe out all the air he’d just sucked in. “You did what?” he asked in a strangled voice. And here I was sweating over a bit of stupid, low-level hacking, he thought.

“The stuff I got — it’s not the I.A. report, but records from before — the time of the first bombing.” Mark sucked in a breath of his own. “The time when the captain’s wife was killed.”

The more Mark talked, the wider Matt’s eyes became. He stirred himself around, cued up his own computer, and began recording the story the Squirt was telling. He had a lot to learn from the kid….

Megan was frankly annoyed to be attending another meeting of the D.C. crew. Not only was she wasting time watching everybody discuss what they should do, but they were wasting time she could have spent sharing information with Leif Anderson. They’d sealed their alliance last night by agreeing to a Net date this evening to go over all the information they’d dug up.

“I’m sorry to drag everybody in again,” Matt greeted them.

“You sound like Agent Dork,” Megan grumbled.

“The Sq — that is, Mark — came up with something last night,” Matt went on. “I’ll turn the floor over to him.”

“If we had a floor,” Andy Moore joked from where he floated in the void.

Mark Gridley was usually talkative, even cocky. But this evening he was strangely subdued. “I thought there were pieces of the Internal Affairs report that we weren’t seeing, so I went in—”

“Where?” David asked.

“Where do you think?” Megan shot back.

David shut up, but there was a worried look on his face.

“There was nothing useful in the report, but there were other records that they were using to collate their findings with — stuff dating back to when Mrs. Winters was killed in the bomb blast.” Mark took a deep breath. “Sealed court transcripts, internal memos, and the results of a Net Force disciplinary hearing.”

“Who got disciplined?” Megan asked. She felt a sudden chill. “The captain didn’t do something crazy back then, did he?”

“Captain Winters and his partner, ‘Iron’ Mike Steele, were investigating a mob-owned company that supposedly offered computer assistance to small businesses. What it actually did was drain them dry. If the owners realized this and tried to break the contract…well, this was Alcista’s baby. They wound up with broken legs. Or worse.” Mark looked sick. “It seems Alcista liked to get out in the field and show his leg-breakers how it was done. Winters and Steele were gathering evidence to show that besides running a criminal organization, Alcista had personally put several victims in the hospital.

“Somehow, Alcista found out and decided to stop the investigation by taking out both Net Force operatives. Bombs were placed in both Winters’s and Steele’s cars.”

He shook his head. “Apparently, Mrs. Winters had an early doctor’s appointment, and her car wouldn’t start. She got behind the wheel of the captain’s car, and…we know what happened then. There was time to warn Steele, so he never got in his car that day. Lucky thing, considering the bomb Net Force found. The problem was, no matter how hard they pressed, Net Force couldn’t manage to link the bombing plot to Stefano Alcista.”

“We know all that,” Megan said impatiently. “That’s why Alcista only took the rap for fraud and extortion.”

But Mark was shaking his head. “That wasn’t the story the court papers showed. Alcista was going to be arraigned on murder charges.”

“How?” P. J. Farris demanded.

“When Net Force couldn’t pin the bombings on Alcista, Iron Mike came up with evidence that showed certain records had been deleted from Alcista’s computer, but not completely destroyed. When Net Force techs brought them back, they definitely incriminated Alcista.”

Megan frowned. “Then how—”

“It wasn’t real,” Mark Gridley said. “Steele got the nickname ‘Iron Mike’ not because he was so strong, but because people joked he was part machine. He was a specialist agent who could just about make computers sit up and bark on command.”

He shook his head. “I was impressed at how he managed to plant the evidence. A seemingly innocent phone call inserted a very nasty program that called several incriminating numbers, then erased the records. Get it?”

Megan nodded. “But the traces would be left if anybody looked for them. And it would seem as if Alcista had tried to erase the evidence that would prove him guilty.”

“Federal prosecutors were getting ready to try and put Alcista away for life….” Mark hesitated. “Until Captain Winters found out that the evidence was false. He took the story straight to my father.”

The nightscape they were floating in was quiet as the Net Force Explorers took that in.

“But — but—” Daniel Sanchez was so upset, his protest came out as a sputter. “Alcista was guilty. By blowing the whistle on the falsified evidence. Winters was letting his wife’s killer walk.”

Mark nodded. “That’s exactly what happened. Not only did the murder case crash and burn, it gave Alcista’s lawyers the leverage to set up a pretty lenient deal for the charges that could stick.”

“Which explains the closed court records,” Leif said quietly. “No one would want the reason for the change in sentencing getting into the public record.”

“So, instead of life, a killer gets a couple of years in a country-club prison,” Megan said bitterly. “Talk about a slap on the wrist—”

“What happened to Steele?” Andy wanted to know.

“That was the disciplinary hearing,” Mark said. “Pretty open-and-shut. Steele twisted the prime purpose of his job — the very reason Net Force was created. He was cashiered but disappeared before charges could be brought against him. Apparently, he was a boat nut. He took his cabin cruiser and headed south.”

The Squirt shrugged. “About a month later the boat blew up in the Caribbean, with Steele aboard. There were some internal Net Force memos about whether it was accidental or deliberate.” He shook his head. “Apparently, he’d told a lot of people that he preferred a Viking funeral, sailing into the sunset aboard a burning boat.”

“Sounds like he got his wish,” Andy said. “Even if he had to arrange it himself.”

“Forget about all that stuff,” Matt said excitedly. “Don’t you see? This whole earlier episode proves that Captain Winters is innocent! He had a chance to screw over Alcista and not even get his hands dirty. Why would he plant a bomb after the guy got out of jail?”

“Take it from Steadman’s point of view,” Leif said harshly. “Winters does this tremendously noble thing, and his worst enemy gets sentenced as if he’d spat in the street instead of killing somebody. A couple of years go by, with Winters stewing over the unfairness of it all. Then Alcista gets out — and Winters sets out to get justice, no matter how belatedly.”

Megan fought a chill as she stared at her supposed ally.

Leif shrugged. “Twist hard enough, and you can make any set of facts fit the pattern you’ve already decided on. We see the captain’s actions as proving his innocence. Steadman saw it as showing his guilt.”

“Won’t a jury get to decide all that?” Matt insisted. “The stuff Mark found shows Winters in an entirely different light from the picture the media is pounding into everyone’s heads.”

“Do you honestly want things to go that far? I don’t. So what do you want to do with what we know?” Leif snapped. “Spread it around to every competitor HoloNews has? It would just be dismissed as wild rumor. We don’t have any documentation we can show anybody.”

Miserably Mark nodded. “I wasn’t able to download anything without setting off alarms from here to Canada. Just getting in was hard enough.”

Leif went on a little more quietly. “Besides, this isn’t news to the one person who really counts. Captain Winters lived through it all. His lawyer could subpoena all the records Mark found, and maybe even petition the court to unseal the records on Alcista’s sentencing deal.”

He hesitated for a second. “If he wanted to.”

“If?” Megan echoed. “IF? Don’t you mean when? What are you talking about, Anderson? This is the captain’s ‘get out of jail free’ ticket.”

She stared uncomprehending at Matt’s suddenly stricken expression. Out of all the kids in the room, Matt was probably the most like James Winters. So why wasn’t he happy? What was wrong with this information that would exonerate the captain?

“If he uses it,” Matt said in a hollow voice. “Here’s a guy who basically let his wife’s killer go rather than ruin Net Force’s reputation for integrity. Do you think he’s going to smear the agency now just to get himself off the hook?”