I heard a tentative “Did you do something I should report to the boss?” from Mr. O’Donnel.

I looked at him for a moment. “Probably. At least he should know that Vasilienkov knows about his CRS. Not that he is a particularly strong threat anymore, but your boss should ask a few hard questions there.”

He smiled a bit. “Sure, that was the plan anyway. But what I meant was what you did.”

“And what did I do?”

He smiled a bit. “That is what I want to get out. What problems will what you did cause? And of course, I want to find out what exactly you did.”

I smiled back. “Do you really want to know? At this time you can honestly claim that you know nothing.”

He looked at me thoughtfully, before he answered.

“I am not sure I want to know, but I am pretty sure I need to.“

“As you wish. Vasilienkov was apparently of the opinion that I am helpless and too rich, and he could steal from me without consequences.

He was wrong.

As I have told your boss, I am welcome in the Abyss. What that means is that I am a pretty accomplished hacker.

I made a combat dive into Vasilienkov’s computer system, copied any data he had before deleting it, appropriated his liquid reserves, and initiated a system alert before leaving. The call was the culmination of that effort.”

He scratched his chin a bit.

“That sounds dangerous. Are you sure you are no danger to the boss?”

I had to snort with that.

“Ok, first, if I knowingly posed a danger to your boss, do you seriously think I would tell you that? You have to take my answer with a bit of faith.

To answer your question though, no, I’m not a danger to your boss or your organization as far as I know.

For once, why should I?

Our relationship is pretty cordial and advantageous for both your boss and me. I have no reason to risk that, especially as any betrayal on my part would sour any future relationship with anyone else.

Another factor is that your organization is virtually immune to such attacks.

Vasilienkov is… was a fixer.

His strength was his cache of information and his contacts.

Unless such a person has extensive offline storage, and surprisingly few of them do, their Achilles heel is their database.

Sure, he most likely has backups on crystal, but there are ways around that.

Your organization on the other hand is less about information and more about manpower and possession. Try as I might, it would be impossible for me, or any other hacker, to threaten that.

Sure, I could do some damage, but that would be mostly superficial.

You don’t have any secrets that could threaten your group, any money you lost would be replaced rather fast and the people are immune from the matrix.

But before you talk to Mr. Walker you should wait a bit.

I started an avenue of investigation yesterday evening and I should have some preliminary results in a few minutes. I am sure he wants to know them.”

He nodded at that and leaned back. I on the other hand renewed my connection and dived back into the matrix. I couldn’t help myself and played a bit. I managed to keep it under an hour though.

With a pang of regret, I forced myself to attend to the results the cluster had ready for me. Immediately I was glad to have access to the cluster and having used it to make a deep comparison.

The first and even the second layer were exquisitely faked.

Anybody without a rather sizeable server would have been incapable of proving it false.

At least in a single lifetime, and the normal server would chew several years on it.

The cluster though was a supercomputer.

It was probably not in the top 20 in the world, but still extremely powerful.

To make it short, it was able to isolate the inconsistencies in the voiceprints.

I had the proof that somebody played a seriously messed up game and used considerable resources to make it look as if the Berardino family tried to kill Mr. Walker and who knows how many others.

Sadly there was no trace of who did it, which in itself was pointing to a rather select group of people. Access to something like the cluster was a necessity, the needed skills were few and far in between.

All in all, it was either a super-national corporation, one of the top 30 from the Abyss, or something similar.

There was a – very – remote chance that it was a spy organization of one of the bigger nations, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

As I had kept the compression relatively benign at 30:1 it took me only a few seconds to surface.

When I arrived back in reality O’Donnel was still looking at me instead of reading. When he realized I was aware he questioningly raised one eyebrow.

“I was right. What information I got is something that should interest Mr. Walker tremendously.”

He nodded and activated his phone.

“O’Donnel here. Kitten says she has some information the boss needs. Yes, I will wait.”

I winched when he mentioned the nickname. It seemed that I was stuck with it.

“Ok, I will bring her. Till later.” Then he faced me again. “The boss wants to meet you. I will drive you there.”

“No!”

He looked baffled. “What do mean with no?”

“I mean that I will not leave this building for the time being. Whoever is behind this already has locked on to me. They have your base of operations infiltrated as the event with Oleg demonstrated.”

“And you are sure that this building is secure? With all the workers installing who knows what?”

Carp, I never thought about that. Of course, our security was compromised. Naturally, that did not mean I would go out.

“It is safer than anything else. I have the security system and security bots. There are weapons mounted everywhere. And thanks to your reminder I will up the thread level.”

“That of course works when somebody shuts down your reactors.”

“They have an emergency power supply, and the bots are independent for several hours.” Did he not understand that I seriously did not want to leave? Dang was he persistent.

“You know that the boss is aware that our organization was compromised, right? He has trustworthy people working security. What do you have here? Do you even know the others? I mean really know them? From what you said you met them a week ago? I’ve known the majority of our people for years. You on the other hand had two of your people try to stage an uprising just today.

If they had been smart they would have kept a low profile and sabotaged you in secret.

It would have been easy for them to take a gun and accidentally kill you. Or poison your food. Or let somebody into the house.”

Honestly, that shocked me.

I had completely missed the fact that I couldn’t really trust any of the others yet. It would have been no problem if the situation hadn’t developed so rapidly into high pressure.

With more time, as I planned initially, and without the unknown enemy we would have had time to develop a better relationship, but now O’Donnel was right.

I was not much more secure here than I was in Walker's headquarters.

I reacted as the mature, intelligent person that I was and cursed up a storm.

After my outburst of expletives slowed down to a standstill I began to think again.

“All right then. If either Darren and/or Kate come with us we can do it at your HQ.

I need to refill Precious’s fuel cells.

And I have to extrude another outfit. At best we can move out in 30 minutes.”

He nodded. “Ok, I can understand the Mute, but why Darren?”

“First, don’t call her a Mute. That is the same as when somebody would call you a Mongrel and she has not earned that level of contempt. And I want Darren because he is a Psionic. I don’t think that regardless of who our enemies are, they can defeat a telepath. Otherwise, the whole scheme would make even less sense as it does.”

Preparing Precious for transport was quickly accomplished.

During that time I had ordered the fabber to fabricate new outfits for Kate and me.

After I was done with that I queried the security system about the location of Darren and Kate. They were both in the Gym, apparently tidying it up, so I wheeled there. Convincing them to accompany us to Mr. Walker took some talking, but in the end, both agreed to come, so Darren got a new outfit too.

After consulting my diagnostics I decided to take the wheelchair with me. I could have walked, but the pain would have been at least distracting, if not crippling. And with the only available pain remedy having the side effect of zombifying me I chose not to torture myself.

When we reached Mr. Walker's headquarters we were subjected to a cursory inspection and then let through.

I still decided to offer them my gun, and the guards seemed to appreciate the gesture. Then Patrick guided us to a somewhat bigger room, where Mr. Walker with three other men awaited us.

Two of the new men were middle-aged, while the third was maybe a couple of years older than me.

Mr. Walker gave a slight wave and gestured to a place on the table.

“Ah, welcome Kitten. You came just in time. We are discussing how to react to this attack.

But first, this are Dylan Cox, my second in command” he was gesturing to the man on his right in a smart business suit,

“Leon Reid, my computer associate,” the other older male, this time much more casually dressed, “and his son Hunter, who assists him.” The younger guy, in jeans and an originally dark or black but very washed out t-shirt.

Then he pointed at me.

“This is Kitten. She is the computer specialist and cyber surgeon who discovered the plot.”

Dylan bowed his head, Leon seemed less than enthused and Hunter gave me a small salute.

“You told Justin that you have information that I need? To make it quick, we already followed up on the database hack. Leon said it was only a matter of hours to find where it originated. So what more do you have?”

I relaxed a bit.

“Whew, I am in time then. Please let me explain the full situation before you come to a conclusion. First, the trail will lead you to the Berardino compound.

There you will find files containing conversations between Giorgio Berardino and a hacker named Enigma but written in leet.

You will find that Giorgio has ordered the hacking of the database, and that of more than half the crime bosses in New York.

Furthermore, you will audio logs and planning documents where Giorgio lays out his plan to sweep aside most of the competition.”

Dylan was the first to react.

“Damn, we have to prepare the men. We can’t let that asshole walk over us.”

I lifted my hand.

“Wait, please. We are extremely lucky that I was there and investigated, or a gang war would be unavoidable.

First, to make the alterations to the database without having the regular inspections scream about them it takes either an exceptionally talented Queen or a halfway experienced Jack.

Or in other words, somebody who was good enough to leave not enough evidence behind to trigger the security.

People like that have the knowledge and experience to use basic stealth approaches like IP jamming or at least spoofing.

To make it clear, it should be impossible to find an IP trace of somebody proficient enough to make the alterations or if, and that is a very big if, the person messed up and there is a trace it should lead to an unrelated computer.

Even then if everything fails, and we have encountered a complete and utter idiot savant that made a trail back, it would lead to the hacker, not the employer.

Honestly, I can’t think of any real situation where the trace should exist and lead back to Berardino.

Second, the ‘Berardino compound’ the trace leads to looks nice and professional until you actually look deeper.

The security is only for show, to make it look like any hacker you employed was good enough to break through and luckily get the data.

The payload is pseudo encrypted.

It looks like a strong encryption but any tablet you have would be able to break the encryption in a couple of hours.

The rest of the ‘data’ is pure and utter nonsense. Random generated junk, while the computer activity follows a relatively complicated but automated algorithm, meaning it is simulated.

All in all, if you look deeper, with enough computing power, the whole thing is nothing more than a mockup of a computer network.

Third, when you look at the Berardino compound from the matrix without following the trace you will find a network that, at first glance, looks pretty similar, but in reality, is completely different.

The security is real, and by the way leagues above what you have here, the activity is realistic and finally, the data you get is encrypted in a schema that takes an average server a few weeks to break.

The difference is in one word startling. In my opinion, there is no way that the two compounds were set up and used by the same people.

And finally, I took some of Giorgio Berardino’s correspondence, and some of his audio logs and had them compared to the data I found at the end of the trace.

It took some work but in the end, my comparison found that we have an extremely good forgery. And with extremely good I mean so good that, if my estimation of your computer resources is not off by an order of magnitude or more, it would have taken you years to find the artifacts and got proof that it is false.

If I had no access to Spectre’s systems I would not have been able to get it, but luckily for us, I can use the supercomputer for such things.”

Mr. Walker made a pyramid with his fingers.

“So if I understand you right, the whole thing is a frame-up. Somebody wants to incite a gang war. Honestly, that sounds pretty farfetched to me.”

I nodded.

“Of course it does.

The whole thing makes absolutely no sense.

The costs have had to be exorbitant.

The alterations to your database will have cost a couple of million bucks. Not cheap but relatively affordable. But if the fake data is right, the same alterations were made to more than 30 crime families. We are talking about around 70 million dollars. Only the alterations.

I have no idea how much it did cost to subvert several cyber surgeons, but I would be surprised if it was much cheaper.

The construction of the fake compound would be almost negligible, a few hundred thousand.

The fake e-mails are also not that expensive, ten million or so.

But the faked audio logs? That was not simply a professional but somebody who used a supercomputer or a decade of work.

You can’t get that type of work for below 2 or 3 hundred million.

So all in all my estimate is that this whole scheme cost something around 350 to 450 million dollars. For that amount of money, you can hire a whole horde of assassins and have the bosses and their lieutenants murdered and come still out ahead.

So yes, I agree with you, it is pretty idiotic. My guess is that somebody with way too much money and way too much time on his or her hands fell in love with his or her cleverness and wanted to play evil genius.”

I leaned back in my wheelchair and looked at the men.

Dylan was the first to respond.

“That is complete bullshit. Nobody would try such a convoluted mess. So are you working for them? Is that it?” He propped himself up on the table. “You want to kill us all? Or milk us of money?”

Mr. Walker put a hand on his shoulder and dragged him back into his seat.

“That would make even less sense.

If she had not intervened we would still not know about it. In one or two weeks I would be dead and about a third of our guys would be slowly dying from CRS.

So if anything she hindered this plot.

And as of now, she has not asked for any money.

On the contrary, she pays us.

She gave Richard a nano fab. I concede it is an older one, but these things are still worth several million dollars.

Even if her cure for CRS does not work, then we still got out ahead.

We know that the nano-therapy works.

Better for me with the more modern nanobots she provided than for you or the rest, but even with the older nanos that Richard uses for you it increases your life expectancy to decades instead of months.”

Dylan was not completely satisfied.

“And if the nanobots used for you are so much better then why don’t we use them for all of us?”

This I could answer.

“Because making nanobots by the liter takes time.

And my nano fab is used otherwise.

The best that Doc Schaeffer can do is apparently what he is doing, considering that his nano fab is five generations behind mine.”

“So why don’t we then just take yours?”

“You can if you want to ensure that your boss doesn’t see next spring. Even with the nano-therapy, I would be surprised if he would survive two months.”

“So if we take your toys you won’t help our boss, is that what you’re saying?”

I had to sigh and shake my head.

“No, what I am saying is that my nano fab is busy converting the new cyber heart for your boss.

If you take it, I can’t use it to adapt the tech, in which case I can’t save him, so he will die.

Simple as that.

If there is an urgent case among you I can make the nanobots for his therapy between using it for the adaption, but it only has the capacity for four, maybe five patients.

Honestly, if you are not in the fourth stage of CRS then the third-gen nanos that Dr. Schaeffer can make in his nano fab reduce your life expectancy at best marginally, and when I have my operation up and running, in three to six months the whole point is moot anyway.”

That deflated him. Somewhat.

“Ok, so we can’t use your nano fab for us, I understand. But that still does not change the fact that this so-called frame job of yours is in any way realistic.”

I massaged my temple for a bit.

“Again, I agree with you to the fullest.

This frame job can be only described as madness. But as one of the early fictional detectives said if you eliminate the impossible, then what remains has to be true, regardless of how unrealistic. And I think it is impossible that Berardino was the culprit.”

“And of course, you have evidence for that, right?”

Now he sounded nearly insulting.

“Yes, I have evidence for that.

To recapitulate first is simple logic.

Anybody who has the capabilities to modify your database in the way it has been modified has to have the capabilities to remain undetected. And even if not the trace would lead to the hacker, not Berardino. Unless Berardino has an experienced hacker working out of his compound it can’t be true.

The second and third are easy to prove if you hire another hacker, a Jack or a Queen instead of a King like Mr. Reid, to compare the compound the trace leads to with the compound the Berardinos actually use.

The fourth is a bit iffy.

Here you have to trust me to provide true evidence.

Otherwise, you would have to hire a hacker, and here you would need somebody who walks the Abyss, to hack Berardino’s files and run an in-depth analysis to compare it with the easy-to-obtain files ordering this murder plot.

While it may be if not easy, then at least possible for an exceptionally good Queen or an average Jack to get Berardino’s files, the comparison needs a supercomputer if you want the results this decade.

So unless you are prepared to pay 10 to 15 million dollars for that you either trust me or not. Verifying is not possible.”

Walker leaned forward.

“Ok, the first point I have to agree. It is possible that Giorgio obtained a talented hacker, but unlikely. And you are right, somebody talented enough to do this damage is talented enough to not leave tracks.

Second and third, why can’t we use Leon for that?”

“Because if my examination of your computer systems is right, Mr. Reid does not believe in the mindscape…”

“Too true, that stuff is pure hogwash.”

“As I said, he does not believe in the mindscape.

While that is his privilege, it limits him massively in what he can do concerning cyber combat.

There is a reason why not one of the top 100 hackers in the world is a King or a Queen.

The coupling of a human mind with the cold computer creates something bigger than the sum of its parts.

Your computer security is alarmingly inadequate for that very reason. A Jack or a Queen will be able to actually see the reaction of the security systems in real-time, instead of getting a sterile line of message that the computer was pinged.

The Jack will also get the message of the ping, but unlike the King, he will see that the security gives no reaction to an echo.

That is exactly what I did. I had one of my bots, disguised as a spam bot generate said echo, without result.

The software interface of a King simply can’t convey that.

It only shows that it was pinged.

So a Jack or Queen will need a couple of minutes in the fake network and a couple of seconds in the real one to realize that there is no way in hell that these belong to the same people.”

Walker nodded. “Ok, that makes sense. And for the fourth, I assume you have evidence for that?”

“Yes, I do.” I lifted Precious up on the table and removed the case. “I have it here on my board.”

At the sight of Precious Reid Jr. let out a whistle. “Wow, is that a Seraphim Mk. IV?”

I was, in all honesty, surprised that anybody recognized her, well at least to the extent that Jr. did.

“Uh… no, she is an Mk III.”

“Hu, I never knew that there existed an Mk III. Cool. But I would rather have an Mk IV.”

“Not surprising considering that there are only two Mk III in existence.

And the Mk IV is the downgraded commercial version of the Mk III.”

He was visually surprised, while I booted Precious up and activated the holo emitter.

“What do you mean downgraded. The Seraphim Mk IV is one of the best cyber boards one can buy.”

“And you can’t buy the Mk III. But this is a discussion better suited for another time.”