city blues 01 - dome city blues Read Online Free PDF Page B

computer-skullduggery had overreached Maggie’s talents.
    Zeus’s real name was Orville Beckley, a fact that he went to great lengths to conceal.  I’d found that out as a result of a bet that Orville had made (and ultimately lost) with Maggie.  He’d boasted of having erased every trace of his real name from the net.  True to his prediction, Maggie hadn’t been able to catch even a sniff of his birth records in the net.  But he hadn’t reckoned with Maggie’s tenacity.  She’d gone on to teach him three simple facts:
    #1 Hospitals are bureaucracies.
    #2 Bureaucracies are paranoid.
    #3 Paranoid bureaucrats keep duplicate records of everything ... in hardcopy... in file cabinets.
    I could still remember the look of stunned disbelief on Zeus’s face when Maggie had whispered the Orville word in his ear, the certain knowledge that his secret was not dead after all.  The memory brought me a smile.
    I looked around again.  As far as I could tell, Zeus wasn’t in the bar, but I did catch sight of a face I recognized.  I threaded my way through the crowd until I came to her table.  Her handle was Jackal; I didn’t know her real name.
    She wore a baggy maroon jumpsuit with a couple of hundred pins and badges stuck to it.  I remembered her as thin.  Now she looked anorexic.
    Her hair was a thick black mop that ended suddenly just above the tops of her ears.  It looked as though someone had dropped a bowl on her head and shaved off everything that stuck out.  Her eyebrows were shaven as well.  As she craned her neck, I saw two, no, three gold alloy data jacks set flush into the back of her head.  One jack held a program chip.  A thin fiber-optic cable ran from the second jack to a box clipped to her belt.  The box was about two-thirds the size of a pack of cigarettes, molded from charcoal gray plastic, covered with flickering LEDs.  The third jack was empty.
    She looked up at me, a bare glimmer of recognition in her eyes.  She knew she had seen me before; she just couldn’t remember where.  She reached into the right breast pocket of her jumpsuit and pulled out a small handful of data chips.  She selected one and plugged it into the empty jack.
    Her eyes closed for a second.  When they opened, her expression was totally changed.  She gestured toward a stool.  “Stalin, right?  Long time.”
    I took the offered seat and faked a sip of the almost-beer.  “Yeah, it has been a while.  You still calling yourself Jackal?”
    “ THE one, THE only,” she said.
    She took a swallow from her tall green drink.  “Are you looking for Zeus?”
    “Yeah,” I said.  “Have you seen him?”
    Jackal shook her head.  “Not in a couple of months.  The last I heard, he snooped Ishikawa Audio for some pretty fancy technical specs.  If he fenced them through the Cayman Islands, like he usually does, he’s probably off spending his bankroll in the skin-bars in Bangkok.  We probably won’t see him for at least another six or eight weeks.”
    I nodded, and studied Jackal’s face.  As near as I could figure, she must have been about twenty-eight.  She looked forty.
    Jackal returned my stare.  “Are you looking for Zeus for social purposes, or are you here on business?”
    We had to lean close to hear each other over the crowd and the music.
    “Business, actually,” I half-shouted.
    “What have you got?  Maybe I can hook you up.”
    I thought about it for a second.  I didn’t really know her.  I’d seen her hanging around with Zeus from time to time, but I had no idea whether or not she was any good.
    She obviously had the skull modifications, and she knew how to talk-the-talk.  But, when it came time to ride the data grid through somebody else’s security software, could she slip in and out without a trace?  Or would she leave a trail of bread crumbs through the net that some AI could follow?  Or, worse yet, tangle with a neuro-guard subroutine that would reach through the interface and fry