The Cold Cash War

6

Mausier paused to wipe the beads of sweat from his forehead, then bent to his task once more. Adjusting the high intensity lamp to a different angle, he picked up the watchmaker's tool and made a minute change in setting in the field terminal in front of him.

Without removing his eyepiece, he set aside the tool, reached over to the keyboard at the end of his workbench and input the data. Finally he leaned back and heaved a sigh. Done. He flexed his hands to restore circulation as he surveyed his handiwork.

The field terminal was a work of art. It could easily pass for a cigarette case, as it was supposed to. But if you pressed in three corners simultaneously, the inner metal lining folded out to reveal its interior workings, stark but functional. Two wires on mini-retracting reels were concealed in the hinge and could be pulled out to connect the unit to any phone. On the side of the lid was a tiny viewscreen. On the other side of the unit was a small keyboard containing both numbers and letters for data input. There was also the thumblock. Once the connection was made, the agent pressed his left thumb onto the metal square which would scan his print for comparison to the one on record in the master file. It would also check his body temperature to see if he was alive and his pulse to see if he was in an agitated state. If any of the three checks didn't match, the unit would self-destruct. Nothing as spectacular as an explosion-merely a small thermal unit to fuse the circuitry.

The Japanese had outdone themselves in producing these units for him. All he had to do was to make final adjustments for the individual's code number before it was issued. This allowed private communication with the individual client in addition to the general announcement postings.

Mausier smiled proudly at the unit. He had come a long way from his coincidental beginning in the business. At a cocktail party, one of his acquaintances had almost jokingly offered to pay him for details on a new machine modification Tom's company was working on. Tom had just as jokingly declined, but expressed an interest in the sincerity of the offer. The result had been an evening-long conversation in which his friend enlightened him as to the intricacies of corporate espionage and the high prices demanded and received due to the risks involved.

A short time after-within the week in fact-another friend of Tom's, this one within his own company, had admitted to him over coffee the dire financial straits he was in and how he was ready to take any reasonable risk to raise more money fast. Tom repeated his other friend's offer and volunteered to serve as a go-between.

In the years to follow, he served in a similar capacity for many similar transactions. Some of the people he dealt with were caught and dismissed for their activities, but he always escaped the repercussions due to the indirect nature of his involvement. Eventually, his clientele grew to the point to where he could quietly resign from the corporate world entirely and concentrate his efforts in this highly profitable venture.

Like most people who went into small businesses, the demands he made on himself were far in excess of any the corporation had ever made, yet he labored willingly and happily, realizing he was working because he wanted to and not because he had to. He was his own man, not the corporation's.

Mausier set aside the field terminal and stretched, rolling his shoulders slightly to ease the cramps from the prolonged tension of his work. It was late and he should go to bed. His wife was waiting patiently, probably reading. If he didn't go up soon, there would be hell to pay. As it was, she had already commented tersely several times in the last week about his lengthening his already long hours.

Finally he made up his mind. To hell with it! A few more minutes couldn't hurt. Having made his decision, he settled in at his desk and turned on his doodlescreen. It never crossed his mind that his wife might grow impatient enough to enter his office and interrupt his work. She might nag or scold or sulk once he entered the house, but she knew better than to interrupt him when he was working.

The workspace he keyed for was by now hauntingly familiar. The Brazil workspace. He still thought of it as that even though by now it had spread to cover other areas. He should call it the Brazil-Iceland-Africa-Great Plains workspace, but the two items from Brazil had gotten him started, and it stayed in his mind as the Brazil workspace.

He concentrated on the screen. From the original two items, it had grown until the items listed covered over half the screen. Still, there were several things about the way the problem was progressing which perplexed him. A pattern was forming, but it wasn't making any sense.

He adjusted the controls on the screen and all the items blinked out except the names of the eight corporations. He leaned back and studied them. It was an unusual assortment of business concerns. There were four oil companies, a fishing concern, two mining corporations, and a communications conglomerate listed. What did they have in common? Some were international while some were local. Some were American in origin while some were based overseas. What was it they had in common?

Mausier frowned and played with the controls again. The eight names sorted themselves into pairs and moved apart, two to each corner of the screen. Now he had the two mining concerns (Africa), two of the oil corporations (the Great Plains), an oil corporation and the fishing concern (Iceland), and an oil corporation and the communications conglomerate (Brazil) grouped together. It still didn't make sense. It couldn't be mergers. The interests of the Iceland pair and the Brazil pair were too dissimilar. What's more, if the articles in the business journals were to be believed, the mining interests in Africa and the two oil concerns in the Great Plains were bitter rivals. It couldn't be mergers. What was the common factor of all eight corporations?

Almost unconsciously his hands twitched across the controls and the notation "C-Block" appeared in the center of the screen and blinked like a nagging headache. Another pass over the controls and solid lines appeared, linking each of the eight corporate names with the C-Block notation.

The C-Block had identical standing offers in for the same information on each of the eight corporations: Any information on new hires and/or terminations at location. Mausier's hands moved and new lines grew like a spider web. One of the mining concerns had identical standing orders in for the six corporations at the other three locations, as did the communications conglomerate. Both the oil concern and the fishing interest had identical requests in for the pairs on the Great Plains and in Africa.

Mausier should have been very happy. With duplicate requests for the same information, he could either collect his broker's percent for a double sale or see his fee skyrocketed by a bidding war. He should have been happy, but he wasn't. Whether or not the corporations knew the C-Block was watching them, they knew about each other and were watching each other.

Watching each other for what? What was so vital about the personnel at these locations? It was as if there was a pool of specialized workers that the corporations were passing back and forth, but what could it be? Engineers? They had new engineers beating down their doors with resumes. They could pick and choose at leisure. What was so special about the people at these locations? The geography and climate varied dramatically from location to location, so it wasn't a matter of acquiring a work force accustomed to working under a given set of conditions.

He suddenly realized he was working from negatives. Arriving at a solution by process of elimination was always tedious and often impossible due to the vast number of possibilities. It was always better to work with the facts at hand.

He cleared the screen and keyed for the other information requests coming from the eight corporations in question. He scanned them slowly and was again disappointed. Nothing out of the ordinary here, just the usual interoffice political bickerings and ladder-climbing. How is a specific executive spending his time away from the office? Does anyone have any inside information on a rival's presentation plans? Any information on plans to shift a meeting site to another hotel? If interoffice communications ever improved, Mausier would lose a sizeable portion of his clientele. Still, there was nothing to add to his speculations.

He cleared the board again, this time using the display of a newspaper article. This was one of the few hard fact items in this file. He leaned forward to study it for the twentieth time.

His agent had not been lax or killed when he missed the rendezvous. He had been involved in a traffic accident and was still in the hospital. This article from a Brazilian newspaper gave the details of the incident. It all seemed very aboveboard. His agent had been stopped at a red light when another car hit him from behind, pushing him out into several lanes of busy cross-traffic. Nothing suspicious, except...except the driver of the car that hit him from behind was an employee of one of the corporations everyone was watching.

Mausier studied the article again, then shook his head. It had to be coincidence. He remembered what the rendezvous had been about, the sale of plans for some piece of electronics gear being used by the communications conglomerate. The driver, a Michael Clancy, was an employee of the Oil Combine. If he had been aware of the transaction, he would have either allowed it to happen or made some attempt to steal the information himself, which he hadn't done. It must be just what the article said it was an accident while the employee was out joy riding with some waitress he had picked up in a bar.

Mausier suddenly realized he had been at the doodle-screen for nearly two hours. There would be hell to pay when he went home. Still, there was one more thing he wanted to check.

He cleared the article and keyed for one more item-today's entry to the file. There had been a new request on the board today from the C-Block, another request for personnel new hires and terminations. The group under study was a group of Japanese business concerns.

Mausier scowled at the request. It bothered him on several levels. First, it was a new factor in his already complicated puzzle, a new front, a new location. But there was something else that concerned him. One of the Japanese businesses listed was the company that manufactured his field terminals. For the first time, Mausier began to feel deep concern for the security of his scramblers.