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“What did you do?” David asked gently.

  “I saw how one could help the other,” Sabotine replied., “When Luddie put me in charge of the vests, I added a circuit’ of my own—I don’t suppose he even suspected that I knew how to. It was hard, figuring it out, but in the end it worked.”

  “A trapdoor?” Captain Winters asked in disbelief. “You just tacked it on to your brother’s design?”

  “There was nobody to see,” the girl explained. “The robot factories put it in every vest. And, as I learned more about computers, I was able to tap in on the processors of Hardweare i vests whenever the users connected with the Net.”

  “Memos, spreadsheets, dictation notes,” Winters said “You just reached out, and all that information fell into youi lap.”

  “But it was more than that, wasn’t it, Sabotine?” David began to see where the girl was going.

  She nodded, almost eagerly. “I thought I could just eavesdrop on all those executives. But when I began downloading, I got much more. I could catch the thoughts and emotions behind the things they were doing.”

  Yeah, David thought, just like I caught the emotions — the terror that ran through Nick D’Aliso’s mind as he was running. He glanced over at Captain Winters, who sat in silence, appalled at this ultimate violation of privacy.

  Sabotine shuddered. “Some of those people were bad— very bad. But it’s like I got hooked. I’d tap in on someone, and if I found out something they wanted to keep secret, I’d put it on the Net.”

  Winters finally got his voice back. “So where did D’Aliso come into this?”

  “Nicky came to work for Hardweare, and he found out what I was doing.” Tears filled Sabotine’s eyes again. “He liked me—he tried to help me, but I—I couldn’t stop.”

  She glanced at David. “When you took the job, he warned me not to talk with you—you’d get me in trouble.”

  Her hands clenched. “But it was Nicky who got in trouble.”

  Hunched over, she went on. “We knew some big corporation was sniffing around, trying to find out how the information was coming out—and how to get control of the leaks. Nicky found out who it was. He was approached by the Forward Group. When he couldn’t stop them, he tried to play for time.” She sighed. “He got them furious by going to them personally.”

  A wan smile at the memory curved her lips. “About the only thing he didn’t do was hire a brass band to go in with him. Nicky was sure he’d be seen and connected with Forward—and they’d have to back off.”

  Her face went desolate. “B-but it didn’t save him—they killed him—just like they killed Luddie.”

  “Why did you let all the secrets out when Luddie died?” Leif asked. “Was it revenge?”

  “I wanted to hurt them all—all the soulless monsters who used machines.” For a moment Sabotine fell back into her father’s rhetoric.

  In fact, David realized with a chill, she even sounded like Battlin’ Bob.

  “I spent hours on the Net, nonstop, tapping in and blowing out every dirty little secret I heard. But I was really looking for something to hurt the Forward Group. It looked impossible, but then I hooked into this lawyer dictating notes from a client’s meeting. They called it shading testimony, but it came down to lying. I put it out, and then those guys came to kill me. They’d gotten everybody else, and they thought with me gone, they could grab up the company.”

  She looked up defiantly. “Well, it won’t get them anything. Hardweare is gone. I’ve wiped out all the designs and blown the automated factories.”

  Her voice had shifted again. It was like hearing a female echo to Luddie’s rant about leaving nothing behind.

  “Luddie always told me there were parts of the design he kept only between his ears,” Sabotine finished. “With him gone, no one will ever know how the vests were made. And I’ve taken care of all the rest.”

  Captain Winters turned way, feverishly digging out his wallet-phone. He punched in the code for his office and began to make frantic inquiries. “No, I’m not kidding. I want each of those locations checked out. Immediately, if not sooner.”

  Leif made his way to the room’s computer console. He worked for a few moments, then looked back. “I can’t tell if it’s the fire or what she said. But there seems to be nothing on this system.”

  Sabotine nodded placidly.

  David looked at the girl, beautiful, bright, and obviously, quite hopelessly, insane. Corporate greed had killed her boyfriend the hacker and her brother the genius.

  But, David had to admit, Sabotine had shown a certain mad genius as well, keeping her brother’s brilliant work out of his killers’ bloodstained hands.

  Too bad, he thought. Too bad protecting Luddie’s incredible j accomplishments meant completely erasing all of them.

  S itting in his virtual office, Leif closed out the file marked “Hardweare.”

  Even in her breakdown, Sabotine had been as good as her word. Hardweare’s robot factories were rubble, their computerized records nonexistent. The memory files hadn’t merely erased themselves; in some cases, the very media they’d been recorded on had been dissolved. Leif suspected this case would be discussed in business schools for years to come— the most successful large-business lobotomy in history. All that was left were the patent applications. But everybody knew Luddie hadn’t put everything he discovered in them.

  So, to that extent, Sabotine had been successful. But she hadn’t managed to pin the blame for Luddie’s murder on the Forward Group. The men who’d attacked the MacPherson mansion were apparently all foreign nationals with no American criminal records—and no fingerprints. They hadn’t carried a scrap of identification. Even the manufacturer’s labels had been cut from their clothing—which seemed to be foreign and mass-produced.

  As weeks had passed, Net Force had managed to get some of these characters identified through Interpol. They all seemed to be mercenaries, people who fought for whoever met their price.

  The armored personnel carrier turned out to be equally elusive. It had disappeared from British service during the last round of fighting in the Balkans. Tracking it beyond that point led into a maze of small companies owned by larger companies, which in turn were held by companies that no longer existed—or corporations which apparently had never existed.

  As for attempts to reverse-engineer any of the remaining Hardweare vests, the only public results so far had been several hundred of the systems being fried by the antitampering circuit.

  Someday, perhaps, someone might be able to insinuate control through the vests’ built-in trapdoor and circumvent Luddie MacPherson’s tireless defender.

  Maybe when Mark Gridley gets a bit older, Leif thought with a grin. But who, if anyone, could ever be able to duplicate the work of that irreplaceable brain?

  If the Forward Group killed Luddie—and Leif saw no proof to the contrary—they had probably made a sound strategic move. Left free to pursue his own maverick style of genius, who knows what else he might have come up with?

  Luddie might have reinvented the computer—and shaken j players like the Forward group right out of the game.

  That was what depressed David, Leif knew.

  For his own part, Leif was enough of his father’s son to i regret the missed business opportunities caused by the downfall of Hardweare. The international business scene was before coming more and more hostile to lone geniuses like Luddie MacPherson shaking things up. Entrepreneurial spirit was all I right in fast food, or flower delivery … or, just barely, in the investment field. But from aerospace to food production, the i large and monolithic corporation was becoming the world model. Large, established giants, often with government subsidies …

  It would be a much grayer world without people like Luddie i MacPherson.

  Unwilling to contemplate such an unpleasant future, Leif : was about to break his Net connection when a complicated I series of chimes began. He found the sound less distressing than the sirens or bleeps some people used to catch their inte
rest for incoming data.

  Querying his system, he identified the download as a news- i feed of low priority, part of an automated clipping system he maintained on various subjects.

  When he asked which file it was headed for, his interest < i quickened when the answer came back. “Hardweare.”

  Leif ordered the download formatted for instant viewing. It j turned out to be a real-time HoloNews story one of Leif s crawlers had detected on the Net.

  It would have been just as easy to break the connection and j i watch it in the flesh. But since he was here …

  David answered the incoming message chime on the hallway i system of his family’s apartment.

  A white-faced Leif Anderson looked out from the display. “Have you seen the news?”

  “About what?” David asked.

  “I guess that gives me the answer,” Leif said. “It happened in New York, but this is sure to make the national news. There’s been a bomb blast in a downtown office tower.” He paused for a second. “It’s the building where the Forward Group’s offices were located.”

  “Were?” David echoed. “As in past tense?”

  “The report I heard said that the blast ripped through all three floors.”

  “Sounds like your Mr. Symonds wasn’t up to his job,” David said. “Or maybe he was so busy keeping an eye on the competition, he didn’t bother to protect his own roost.” He looked at Leif’s image carefully. “There’s something you aren’t telling me.”

  “Two things,” Leif said. “Then you’ll see why I’m not laughing. First, the explosion happened in the middle of a meeting of the Forward Group’s management board. The sharks-in-chief may have beaten the rap on Luddie’s murder and that perjury case, but this bomb may have wiped them all out. It was set right inside the conference room door.”

  “I’m sorry. But if you’re expecting me to burst into hysterical tears—” David began.

  “Nah. I couldn’t care less about that,” Leif said. “It’s the identity of the bomber. Security cameras apparently got images of a guy in a maintenance uniform who wasn’t supposed to be there.”

  He looked straight out of the display. “It was Battlin’ Bob MacPherson.”

  David stared. “You’re kidding.”

  Leif shook his head. “Not about this. Battlin’ Bob was shown wheeling a dolly with what looked like a replacement bottle of springwater. Apparently, he wheeled it past the conference room—and his whole shebang went up.”

  “And him with it?” David demanded. “He was a human bomb?”

  “The Japanese had a word for it— kamikaze.” Leif managed a cynical smile. “As soon as the news came out, there was an immediate response from the Manual Minority. They circulated a signed statement from MacPherson, resigning as

  president of the organization—specifying ‘family problems/ M

  The boys stood silent for a moment, Leif s image facing David.

  “This one was a mess,” David finally said.

  “With a big butcher’s bill,” Leif agreed.

  ’ ‘An entire family, either dead or institutionalized. A practical genius, on the order of Edison, lost forever.” David’s voice grew angry. ‘ ‘Can you balance that against taking out a room full of corporate predators with a bomb?”

  “Bob MacPherson seemed to think so,” Leif said quietly. “For me … I don’t know. I guess only the future can tell.”

  “Yeah,” David said sadly. “Only the future can tell.”

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