Free Steel Rain by Nyx Smith Page B

problem."
    Chrome Horse is a special op against Xiao. A fact-finding op. It pays to keep informed.
    Donelson goes out. The chief tech with the security detail steps up. He shows his open palm. Lying on his palm is something about the size of a fleck of dandruff.
    "Looks like another IntSec model, sir. They seeded the carpet. We'll be clean in a few moments."
    Fuchi Internal Security. They never quit. Gordon's got the tech to neutralize the really sophisticated techniques applied against his office suite, so IntSec keeps trying this primitive shit. Seeding his carpet. They managed to get a bug into his exec sec's clothes a few weeks ago. Gordon's got an op running in response to that, too. Payback is a bloody slitch and he'll see that they pay in quad. IntSec's problem is that they're jealous of his budget, his overt budget, those portions they've managed to find out about. What worries him now is the budget that no one knows about, the shadow budget, for the ops that no one approves, because, regardless of how things go, no one really wants to know.
    He takes a drag on his Platinum Select and starts snapping his fingers. The techs rush it. The senior tech sweeps Bucky Freese and Gordon as well, and says, "All clear, sir."
    "No calls."
    "Understood, sir," replied his senior exec sec.
    Another sec has a cup of his brand of Brazilian coffee steaming inside his private office. He motions the sec and the techs and bodyguards out, then motions Bucky Freese inside.
    Behind his gleaming onyx desk, the doors sealed, security tech on, Gordon turns in his high-backed synthleather chair to face the broad unpaned window overlooking the Hudson. He sips his coffee and draws on his cigarette. He considers Freese, shifting nervously in front of the desk, never really at ease without a datajack in his head. The key to the man is tech. Computer tech. Hardware or soft, it's all one big toy. The more powerful the toy, the greater his interest. Give him a specialist group with access to some of the most powerful toys in existence and he'll only want more of the same. Give him the freedom to play with his toys and he'll swear his undying loyalty.
    "What went wrong?"
    Freese coughs, clears his throat. He sounds nervous, saying, "We got sleazed."
    "How bad?"
    "It was like . . . somebody knew we'd be there. They popped in and blew us away, sucked out all the guano before we got more than a dime."
    "How is that possible?"
    The silence from the front of the desk gives Gordon warning. He turns in his chair to face Freese and finds the man fidgeting, rubbing at his brow, his nose, his chin. He doesn't seem to have any answers and that's bad because Freese is supposed to have all the answers. In his relatively short tenure with Cyberspace Development Corp, a Fuchi subsidiary, he engineered some major advances for the code in persona chips. He is a brain and now he is Gordon's brain. One of his jobs is to play a little game. He skates into Fuchi financial datastores and moves numbers around. Sometimes he fiddles with interbank accounts. He likes to think of himself as a kind of watchdog. Every time he succeeds in transferring funds from one part of Fuchi, say, the Pan-Europa division, to Gordon's finger accounts, he comes and tells Gordon just how he did it, so that Gordon can order improvements in security.
    What Freese is saying now is that someone beat him to it. Gordon doesn't like that. "I asked you a question."
    Freese rubs at his jaw. "I never seen anything like it."
    "You're the expert. Explain it."
    Freese stands almost motionless for going on thirty seconds, staring at the front right corner of Gordon's desk, then rummages through his pockets and pulls out a chip-camera. "I could show you," he says. "I got it all . . ."
    Before he can say anything further, Gordon points at the desktop. Freese puts the carrier down. Gordon reaches over and picks it up. A record of the run that went wrong? Evidence that might conceivably be used to crucify the entire