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  “If they deserve it, they should pay,” David said.

  “I don’t deny that,” Leif slowly agreed. “But a lot of innocent people are going to be hurt, too. The damage this will do to business is the kind of economic warfare that guys like Cetnik dreamed of.”

  “It’s going to cost,” Winters admitted. “Technology sometimes gets its pound of flesh.”

  “Yeah.” David laughed. “It’s kind of ironic. We’ll probably have a bunch of former business leaders joining the Manual Minority.”

  His laugh died, replaced by a thoughtful look.

  “We were especially interested in this case involving the Forward Group,” Leif said.

  “Not surprisingly.” Winters nodded. “I’ve been paying extra attention to that bit of business myself.” He shrugged. “According to the leak, it only involves middle-level executives. There’s no chance of getting to the sharks in chief.”

  “When we heard about it—well, our opinions were divided,” Leif said. “It could be a genuine leak, aimed at hurting a major corporate predator. Or it could be a blind, with Forward sacrificing a few executives to hide the fact that the company is causing—or at least using —the very leaks that are supposedly hurting it.”

  “Possible,” the captain admitted. “This perjury deal, it’s not fatal for Forward—unless we get these guys to turn.” He looked dubious about the chances of that happening anytime soon. “Of course, they’re getting legal representation up the wazoo. But they’d be better off coming over to us for witness protection.”

  His face lost all expression. “I expect a heavy accident rate I among those executives. It will be spread out over time, but j things will happen. Car crashes. Electrical malfunctions. Heart attacks. Maybe even a suicide.”

  “Sort of makes you wonder why anybody would take a job | working for a company with such a drastic way of retiring executives,” David said.

  “Oh, the junior sharks never think it’s going to happen to j them,” Leif said.

  Winters gave him a look. “Something tells me you know that mind-set a little too well for my peace of mind.”

  Leif made a “what can I say?” gesture. “Too much experience with the type. Although my dad doesn’t hire sharks— just people who could go that way.”

  “So we still don’t have a line on the leaker,” Winters said. “And we have a new billion-dollar question. Why this flood | of secret information? Why now?”

  “From the timing, we’d have to say that Luddie wasn’t the J info-thief,” David said.

  “Unless it’s a posthumous revenge,” Leif suggested. “Usually, that sort of thing happens only in opera or the Bible— you know, larger-than-life gestures by larger-than-life people. Gotterdammerung. Samson pulling down the pillars of the J! temple. Luddie MacPherson’s computer program reaching out from the grave to get vengeance on his enemies.”

  “Or …” David said slowly, “… Luddie’s sister trying to punish the world.”

  Both Leif and Winters stared at David as he went on. “Leif and I were both too annoyed over being tossed aside to see how she was acting when she dismissed us.”

  “In a word, she was weird,” Leif admitted.

  “We’ve both said it before. Luddie had no reason to wreck his own company by playing with computer leaks. Even though the leaks were clearly coming from within Hardweare, they weren’t doing Luddie’s company any good—financially or in any other way. But despite the harm the leaks caused him, Luddie’s actions with respect to them were those of a man determined to block any kind of law enforcement—he hunkered down behind a legal stone wall when the investigation got serious.” David looked at Leif. “He even started that scorched-earth rant. You wondered what he thought he was doing. Maybe that was the wrong question. Try ‘Who was he trying to protect?’ If Sabotine has been the source of the leaks all along, everything Luddie did makes perfect sense.”

  “That’s as interesting as your theory about the Forward Group.” Winters’s voice was like a splash of cold water. “Although it’s even more off the wall.”

  “Is it?” David asked. “Name one other person who’s intimately connected with Hardweare—and still alive.”

  Leif glanced over at the captain’s hologram setup. “Considering the Forward Group’s tendency to be a bit—abrupt— with problems, maybe we should get in touch ta make sure Sabotine is still alive.”

  Almost unwillingly, Winters went to his system and made the call. He frowned as the display flickered, but nobody picked up.

  “No answer,” he grunted. He kicked in the computer and issued a couple of complicated orders. When he saw the results, he started heading from the office. “No connection. But the rest of the local phone system is fine. I’m getting a team and heading out there.”

  He hesitated, looking at the boys. “Maybe you’d better come, too. Whatever’s going on out there, it might be better if she has somebody she knows to talk to.”

  mike. “I may be Net Force these days, but I came out of the Marines—we may need the assets, and we’d better have them in place when we arrive.”

  The rest of the trip passed in a blur, jockeying past cars that pulled aside for the sirens, challenging those drivers who didn’t.

  Then they were off the parkway, careening along winding country roads. Long before the stone walls surrounding the MacPherson mansion came into view, they encountered a roadblock. A pair of local police cars were drawn up to redirect traffic. The local cops stood around looking nervous, their hands on the butts of their pistols.

  Captain Winters pulled up and was out of the car, his card case open to show his Net Force credentials. “Anybody know what’s going on up there?” he asked.

  The sergeant in charge, a big, good-looking guy with a uniform tailored to show off an impressive physique, simply shrugged. “From what we heard, it sounded like a small war—definitely more than we could handle. So we got this glorified traffic detail while waiting for the staties to show.”

  “I guess you would know.” Winters tapped the row of ribbons the sergeant wore over his badge. Leif realized that some of them were military decorations.

  “You get these during that last dustup in the Balkans?” the captain asked.

  The sergeant thawed a little, nodding. “Sava River campaign.”

  “I was with I-Corps, holding Corsokak.”

  The shared battle experience made the police officer more talkative. “We were supposed to hold position here and keep any passersby out of the war zone,” he said. “But I went up a little closer—attempted reconnaissance.”

  He shook his head. “They got pretty incontinent ordnance up there, sir. Something got loose. Either it hopped the wall or flew over and, well, Mr. Wheeler’s gonna be pretty upset about what happened to his horse herd.”

  “Heard and noted, Sergeant,” Winters said. “And you won’t have to wait for the state police. We’ll be going in after the lead choppers size up the situation.”

  The police officer looked dubious. “You’re going to send choppers down into whatever is going on in there?”

  “Gunships,” Winters corrected. “Marine Super Cobras. They’re going to stop whatever’s going on in there. That’s why we’ll be able to go in.”

  As if they’d heard their cue, the long, snakelike silhouettes of the AH1-W gunships appeared in the sky. Winters excused himself and got on the car’s radio set to coordinate with the choppers.

  As the helicopters advanced, something painfully bright | against the darkening sky came whizzing up from the ground. With a deep-throated boom, a blossom of fire erupted beneath the lead gunship, which shuddered in midair, changed angle, and fired a missile in reply.

  The explosion on the ground was much louder. It led to a sudden rattle of small-arms fire directed at the gunships. They answered ruthlessly. Winters kept on the horn with the choppers while also talking with the police sergeant, who was on his own radio.

  By the time several truckloads of Marines arrived, the
y had * been joined by state troopers and more police.

  “Looks like we’re ready to go in,” the captain said.

  The Marines went first, guided by the police sergeant who’d been running the roadblock. Then came the cops and state police, followed by the car full of Net Force agents, and then Captain Winters and the boys.

  A thick pall of smoke shrouded the stone walls of the MacPherson estate. It was thrown up by a smoldering grass fire in the pasturelands across the road. The breeze quickened, blowing the smoke away. Leif abruptly turned his head. Clearly an errant shell, missile, whatever, had landed in the middle of the horse herd. Leif was glad the windows were closed and that the wind, judging by the rising cloud of black smoke, was blowing away from them. He wasn’t sure he’d want to smell the result.

  Winters turned in at the entrance—or rather, where the gate had been. The reinforced steel structure now lay torn, twisted, and partly chewed up, on the ground about ten feet from where it had once stood.

  “What did these guys use to get in here?” David asked. “A tank?”

  The former gatehouse was just a mass of masonry rubble.

  Several Marines and police officers were trying to clear the collapsed wreckage away. One officer knelt down on the side of the road, rolling out long, black, plastic sacks—body bags.

  They continued up the drive to the house. The lawns, which Leif remembered as carefully tended stretches of green, now looked like a battlefield, scorched and scarred with shell holes.

  In the distance a tracked vehicle lay on its side, spewing smoke.

  “Can you believe it? They did have a tank!” David burst out.

  Captain Winters squinted in that direction. “More like an armored personnel carrier,” he said. “I can’t tell much from this angle—or from what’s left. It could be an old Bradley fighting vehicle, or a British Warrior-class APC. One thing we can be sure of, these bozos were playing for keeps.”

  He nodded toward an area of raw earth where Marines were carefully probing the ground. “On both sides. Looks like some of the intruders were caught in a minefield.”

  “Great,” Leif muttered. “Remind me not to go for any long strolls around the grounds.”

  The house itself had stood up to the attack pretty well, except for some shattered windows. Sections of the walls bore scorch marks. “Looks like things got pretty hot around here,” the military man said.

  “I’d say it’s still pretty hot.” Leif pointed to some of the holes where windows had stood. They still spewed smoke as the furnishings inside blazed away.

  “Here comes the answer to that.” Captain Winter pulled the car aside, letting a fire engine pass.

  In the distance, by the far wall of the estate, rifle fire sounded again—a brief firefight. Then a report came in over the car radio.

  “The intruders were having a rough go of it even before our choppers turned up,” Winters said. “When their tank went up, they tried to boogie out of Dodge. But it was too late.”

  His face was grim. “That bang-bang you heard was the last

  batch of them. They chose to shoot it out rather than surrender. That’s all of them. The site is under control.”

  “No prisoners?” David asked in disbelief.

  “Apparently, they got one wounded guy. He got his skull creased with a bullet, and he’s been out cold. They’re bringing him here.”

  He pulled the car up in front of the house. Leif noticed that the fancy automatic doors were blown in. Firefighters were moving among Sabotine MacPherson’s art collection, trying to save what they could from crackling flames.

  Winters got out of the car as a squad of Marines arrived, guarding a pair of stretcher-bearers. The police sergeant who had gone in with the Marines came along, too.

  “Has he come around?” Winters asked.

  “Just moaning,” one of the medical corpsmen replied. “He should start taking an interest in things just about now.”

  The police sergeant leaned over the occupant of the stretcher—a hard-looking young man with buzz-cut blond hair. “He’s in deep kimchi, but we especially want to find out who sent him,” the cop said. “They’re gonna be responsible for a lot—”

  Moaning, the young man on the stretcher opened his eyes. He froze, taking in the strange faces around him.

  “Take it easy, son,” Winters said in a surprisingly gentle voice. “You got clipped, but there’s no serious damage—”

  The young prisoner clamped his mouth shut, apparently grinding his teeth together. Then he grimaced, swallowed, and suddenly began a wild struggle against the bindings holding him to the stretcher.

  “Kid, you can’t get loose,” the cop said.

  “He’s not trying to get loose!” Winters grabbed the corps-man. “He’s gone into convulsions!”

  The medical man leaped to his patient, but there was nothing he could do. In seconds the captive—young, strong, barely hurt—lay dead. His eyes were glazed; his face and lips had a faint blue tinge.

  Winters came forward and carefully sniffed at the dead j man’s mouth. “Open it,” he told the corpsman. They angled the head toward the glare of the fire engine’s headlights.

  ‘There’s a broken tooth, or one missing,” the corpsman reported.

  “The old cyanide pellet in the hollow tooth,” Winters said in disgust. “I take it no one searched him all that carefully?”

  Although the captain’s tone was mild, Leif could predict an unpleasant future for the squad commander who’d missed the poison pill. Leif stared down at the body. This guy wasn’t that much older than he was—or David.

  The police sergeant shook his head. “That’s the sort of fanatic nonsense we ran into fighting those C.A. crazies during my time in the Balkans,” he said.

  Winters simply looked disgusted. ‘ ‘Or the reaction of a mercenary who’s more scared of his employers than of the federal government.”

  He made a dismissive gesture to the stretcher-bearers. “Take him away. There’s nothing we can do to help him— and he’s certainly made sure he’ll be no help to us.”

  They spent almost another hour outside the house while firefighters put out the interior blazes.

  Had Sabotine survived? David wondered. Some body bags came out—the remains of the hit squad, he was told. Then Winters received a report of more bodies found in the basement—around the sort of steel door usually found in bank vaults. Judging by appearances, the fallen men were a mix of guards and invaders.

  “It’s either an escape tunnel or a final redoubt,” he said. “And I wouldn’t expect to find that kind of door on a tunnel.”

  The door area was pretty chewed up from small-arms and what looked like antitank fire. At last, however, communications were established with the people inside.

  There were only a few survivors—Sabotine and her female bodyguard among them. The security woman was pale-faced. A sloppily applied pressure bandage on her arm showed where she’d taken a bullet getting Sabotine into the hidey-hole.

  Sabotine MacPherson seemed sunk within herself, almost catatonic.

  Winters had David and Leif help her shuffle out. She flinched when she saw bloodstains on the floor. “Dead,” she muttered. “More dead. All because of me.”

  They went upstairs. Sabotine’s once-elegant parlor still reeked of smoke. Luddie’s wonder-couch was a charred wreck. So was the thronelike chair Sabotine had sat in when she’d dismissed David and Leif.

  But the little stool somehow survived. Sabotine huddled on the carved wood seat, as if there was some special comfort to be gained from it.

  Captain Winters introduced himself. “Can you tell us what happened?”

  Sabotine looked up. “I tried to hurt whoever I thought might have killed Luddie,” she said calmly enough. “And they tried to kill me. We heard the explosions at the gate. Our Net connection was cut. Then they were coming through the front door. The security people did their best to slow them down. Matilda and a couple of the guards got me down to the
bunker.”

  The girl drew in a ragged breath. “Matilda got shot. I wanted to leave the door open longer, to let the others get in. But she—she closed it after that.” Her eyes lost focus, seeming to stare through the floor. “We saw through the pickups until they were blown out. People dying—so many people dying, all dying because of me.”

  She flopped to the floor, making a retching sound, but nothing came up.

  David knelt beside her, helping her up. “Their job was to protect you,” he said. “And that’s what they did.”

  Sabotine glared at him in sudden anger. “I don’t mean the guards,” she said in that same tone she’d used to dismiss him a few days earlier. Tears filled her eyes. They trickled down her cheeks as she squeezed the lids shut. “I mean Nicky. And Luddie. And who knows how many others—all because I could read people’s thoughts.”

  people. Especially computers. And I—I believed him. I believed in what my father was trying to do.”

  Her face tightened with remembered pain. “But Luddie always fought with Daddy. There were a lot of arguments. Luddie’s mom had left Daddy, and so did mine. Then Luddie left us. But Daddy and I had each other. He was so proud of the j way I learned art and design—working with my hands, not, with computers.”

  Sabotine shrugged. “Luddie was out there in the world somewhere, making money. Then he came back—and he sued to take me away from Daddy.”

  She sank her face into her hands, as if she were hiding. “Daddy got me to a safe house, to keep me away from Luddie. But my brother had people find me, and I came to live withj him.”

  Sabotine peeked from behind her fingers, a look of wonder 1 on her face. “I thought I should hate Luddie. But then even* I could see he was doing something new and wonderful withi Hardweare.”

  “You thought your father was right, and you thought your brother was right,” Leif said.

  She glanced back over her shoulder at him. “That’s it!” she said eagerly. Then the spark of animation faded. “But theyf couldn’t both be right.”