“What’re your orders, anyway?” he asked his driver’s back.
“Just to remain at your disposal, sir. This was a first-priority call.”
“Bleeding right it is,” Lacey said. He tried to blank the rage from his voice before he added, “Look, find an empty pad somewhere—an office building too run down to get air traffic, something like that. Set down there and let me think.”
As the car rose smoothly, Lacey said to his implant, “Run me life stats on Lyall Mitchelsen, Richmond Subregion.”
There was a pause, followed by a crunch of static and a metallic voice stating, “The information you have requested is under Security block. Please punch your access code.”
“Cancel,” Lacey said so sharply that the syllables clicked. He paused a moment, then said, “Technical request.”
“Ready,” replied the implant.
“I ran a code board on my hand scanner two minutes ago. Retrieve that and analyze the buttons for wear patterns by group.” Using the alphabet rather than Arabic numerals gave more than 2 x 1011 possibilities in an 8-digit figure, hopelessly beyond the realm of chance discovery; however, the buttons would wear with use. If the board was used only by one man, that left 64 combinations to eliminate. Assuming, of course, that the Technical Section had not been programmed to alert Security when a request like Lacey’s was received. It was the first time Lacey had tried to break a Security code, but he had gotten where he was by his total unwillingness to stop when he had started something. He wasn’t going to back off now.
“Degree of wear is as follows. First group, S. Second group, A-E-G-H-I-N. Third group, remaining buttons, with no significant wear.”
“Now—” Lacey began. He planned to set up a dummy query through the CS net to insulate his identity from Security when he began running his potentially 63 incorrect access codes. The pattern of the seven letters—S doubled—struck him suddenly. Barking a laugh of vicious triumph, he keyed his implant and repeated, “Run me life stats on Lyall Mitchelsen, Richmond Subregion.”
Crunch. “The information you have requested is under Security block. Please punch your access code.”
Lacey’s index finger picked out S-I-G-H-A-N-S-E. It would not have been ease of recall that possessed the Sepo to pick that code—no one with trouble remembering eight letters would have risen to Hanse’s level. But it could well have been the silent joke of arrogance between Hanse and the computer; proving that he, alone among the .8 billion people of Southern Region, the State-ruling Sun Belt, had not lost his identity.
“Lyall Mitchelsen, 56, industrialist, murdered 4-28-02 in Greater—”
Yesterday. “Method of murder?”
“Air car crash. Controls locked at 500 meters when a rogue circuit was triggered by a tight-beam radio signal.”
“Bleeding martyrs! How did a circuit like that get into Mitchelsen’s car?”
“The circuit was designed into all 01 and 02 Phaeton Specials. Investigation has as yet failed to identify the member of the design team actually responsible. There is an increasing possibility that it was somehow imported from beyond the team.”
The computer had halted, but it added as a seeming afterthought, “The murder technique was discovered through analysis of seven identical accidents yesterday within a 21-minute period. The other victims were . . .”
With the scanner helmet down, using it and his implant simultaneously, Lacey continued to run his data oblivious to his external surroundings. The Security computer had already linked eighteen assassinations in the Southern Region during the past day and a half, Follard’s being the most recent of them. Aside from their style of death, the only known factor unifying all eighteen was their enormous private power. None had been in government directly—bureaucrats and elected officials both could be scanned at public booths by any citizen at any time—but the wealth of these men and women had given them influence beyond that of all but a handful of those in open authority. Their lives were open to licensed reporters, but reporters—or their superiors—were amenable to pressure unless an incident was too striking to ignore.
And of course, even the most powerful of men could be scanned from all angles by investigators like Lacey, except when a camera went out.