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The corporate jet field is saturated, competition is getting worse, and we have nowhere else to go. There are eight thousand people, more or less, who could lose their jobs because of a rotten little thief. I’m not going to stand for it. Not if I can do anything about it.”
    “Do you know who the thief is?”
    He glanced at Dillon. Dillon stared back impassively, and when Anshiser turned to me again, I got the feeling he was about to tell a lie. “No. We have some ideas. But right now, we don’t know.”
    “Okay. So where do I come in? What do you want me to do?”
    “A couple of things. Everything we do, from design to production to cost estimating, we do on computers. It’s all so complicated, there is no other way. If somebody smart got into our computer system, I don’t know how, but did it, he could hurt us. Badly.”
    “And you think it’s the same with Whitemark.”
    “I know it is. There simply isn’t any other way to do the work. Whitemark has about three months to integrate the String system with their Hellwolf avionics. Then they have to demonstrate to the Navy and Air Force that it will work. As it is, they might not make the deadline. They’ve got a crash program going, but they started late. I want you to slow them down. I want you to get into their computer system and screw it up. Be subtle, be obvious, I don’t care. But I want you to push them to the wall—I want you to jam them up so they can’t move. If they can’t demonstrate their system in three months, and we can, we’re back in the ball game.”
    “What’s the other thing you want?” I asked.
    “Revenge,” he said, his killer’s eyes glittering in the dying light. “I want revenge on the bastards who stole my baby.”

Chapter 4
    I SPENT THE night in a Chicago hotel, watching a bad movie about teenagers and thinking over the job proposition. Anshiser was a maniac, of course. He knew what he was doing, but he was clinging to a thin edge of control, like a grunt with battle fatigue. Would a crisis crack the control, or harden it? It could go either way. Maggie was something else. She was precise, measured, cool. She knew what she was doing, and she was nowhere near the edge. She apparently agreed with Anshiser. Dillon was a cipher.
    Their proposition was not entirely novel. There have been several hushed-up incidents in which businesses were damaged by computer attacks. Most of the time, the object of the attack was theft or embezzlement, and the damage was an unintentional byproduct.
    A major railroad was burned when a group of techno-thieves, as they were called in the FBI report, began shuffling and relabeling boxcars. The intent was to send certain cars, loaded with high-value consumer items like televisions and stereos, to remote sidings, where the gang would crack the cars, load the loot onto trucks, and haul it away. The most serious damage came when they tried to cover their tracks. Three thousand boxcars were mislabeled and sent to the wrong destinations. The result was chaos. Perishable products rotted, time-critical shipments were late. It cost the railroad millions to straighten out.
    In a few of the known raids, the damage was intentional. In every case, though, the attacks were from the inside—guerrilla hits by employees against their own company. Anshiser’s proposition was altogether different. He was proposing a war, an act of naked aggression, an attack to the death by one corporation on another. As far as I knew, there had never been anything like it. A war that was business by other means, to paraphrase a famous Prussian.
     
    MAGGIE CALLED AT eight o’clock.
    “Jesus,” I said with a yawn. “When you said morning, I thought you meant like eleven. Where are you?”
    “Downstairs,” she said briskly. “I have three warm bagels, a small cup of cream cheese, a plastic knife, two Styrofoam cups of coffee, and your room number. What do you think?”
    She looked like she’d been up for hours. She came