Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

He returned to the main menu and asked for item C. BULLETIN BOARD. That proved to be a collection of messages that Watkins and his officers had left for one another regarding matters that seemed sometimes related to police work and sometimes private. Most were in such cryptic shorthand that Sam didn’t feel he could puzzle them out or that they would be worth the effort to decipher.

He tried item D on the main menu, OUTSYSTEM MODEM, and was shown a list of computers nationwide with which he could link through the telephone modem in the nearby municipal building. The department’s possible connections were astonishing LOS ANGELES PD (for police department), SAN FRANCISCO PD, SAN DIEGO PD, DENVER PD, HOUSTON PD, DALLAS PD, PHOENIX PD, CHICAGO PD, MIAMI PD, NEW YORK CITY PD, and a score of other major cities; CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF MOTOR VEHICLES, DEPARTMENT OF PRISONS, HIGHWAY PATROL, and many other state agencies with less obvious connections to police work; U.S. ARMY PERSONNEL FILES, NAVY PERSONNEL FILES, AIR FORCE; FBI CRIMINAL RECORDS, FBI FILES (Local Law-Enforcement Assistance System, a relatively new Bureau program); even INTERPOL’s New York office, through which the international organization could access its central files in Europe.

What in the hell would a small police force in rural California need with all those sources of information?

And there was more data to which even fully computerized police agencies in cities like Los Angeles would not have easy access. By law, some of it was stuff that police could not obtain without a court order, such as the files at TRW, the nation’s premier credit-reporting firm. The Moonlight Cove Police department’s ability to access TRW’s data base at will had to be a secret kept from TRW itself, for the company would not have cooperated in a wholesale disgorgement of its files without a subpoena. The system also offered entrance to CIA data bases in Virginia, which were supposedly secured against access from any computer beyond the Agency’s walls, and to certain FBI files which were likewise believed to be inviolate.

Shaken, Sam retreated from the OUTSYSTEM MODEM options and returned to the main menu.

He stared out at the parking lot, thinking.

When briefing Sam a few days ago, Morrie Stein had suggested that Moonlight Cove’s police might somehow be trafficking in drugs, and that New Wave’s generosity with computer systems might indicate complicity on the part of certain unidentified officers of that firm. But the Bureau was also interested in the possibility that New Wave was illegally selling sensitive high technology to the Soviets and that it had bought the Moonlight Cove police because, through these law-enforcement contacts, the company would be alerted at the earliest possible moment to a nascent federal probe into its activities. They had no explanation of how either of those crimes accounted for all the recent deaths, but they had to start with some theory.

Now Sam was ready to discount both the idea that New Wave was selling to the Soviets and that some executives of the firm were in the drug trade. The far-reaching web of data bases that the police had made available to themselves through their modem—one hundred and twelve were listed on that menu!—was greatly in excess of anything they would require for either drug trafficking or sniffing out federal suspicions of possible Soviet connections at New Wave.

They had created an informational network more suitable to the operational necessities of an entire state government—or, even more accurately, a small nation. A small, hostile nation. This data web was designed to provide its owner with enormous power. It was as if this picturesque little town suffered under the governing hand of a megalomaniac whose central delusion was that he could create a tiny kingdom from which he would eventually conquer vast territory.

Today, Moonlight Cove; tomorrow, the word.

“What the fuck are they doing?” Sam wondered aloud.

29

Safely locked in her room at Cove Lodge—dressed for bed in pale yellow panties and a white T-shirt emblazoned with Kermit the Frog’s smiling face—Tessa drank Diet Coke and tried to watch a repeat of the Tonight show, but she couldn’t get interested in the conversations that Johnny Carson conducted with a witless actress, a witless singer, and a witless comedian. Diet thought to accompany Diet Coke.