Spin State - Chris Moriarty [47]
But that was why Nguyen had sent her, of course. Nguyen knew her. She’d told Li her career was riding on this mission and then she’d turned her loose, knowing she’d get the job done, knowing she was willing to risk everything on every throw, every time.
Five minutes later an obscure CanCorp research assistant sent a message to the network administrator. Six minutes later, Li opened a blind window on the administrator’s account and started surfing the internal mail archives of CanCorp’s entire R&D division.
CanCorp security had been thorough, Li noted with a professional’s appreciation. They had good eSec protocols and they hadn’t been shy about slapping the wrists of employees who violated them. But researchers never took security seriously, and CanCorp’s researchers were no exception.
Three of the facility’s designers still had archived mail talking about a prototype device similar to Sharifi’s wire. The project had been terminated twenty-eight months ago. The one prototype of the interface had been sent to an off-site storage room from which, according to later inventories, it had simply . . . vanished.
Li cursed in frustration, surfaced briefly to a disorienting image of her quarters on-station, then plunged back in.
Let’s go at this from another angle, she told herself. Look for the organic component.
She accessed Sharifi’s medical records again and put together an itinerary for her last few months Ring-side. Then she cross-checked Sharifi’s whereabouts against all the clinics licensed to install the kind of specialized internal wetware Sharifi needed. Match: one discreet, expensive private clinic in the Zona Camilia.
The operation had been paid for from an unnumbered Freetown account. And twenty hours before Sharifi checked in, the clinic received a bonded and insured shipment of medical supplies from one Carpe Diem, an obscure colonial net-access provider that had never logged a single shipment to the Zona Camilia clinic before or after.
Carpe Diem turned out to be a bona fide though not particularly profitable operating company that held down a solid chunk of the civilian streamspace access market in the Lalande 21185 metaorbitals. Li quickly pierced its security perimeter and slipped into the internal operations database. She found exactly what should have been there: payroll, billing records, internal corporate documents, and a reasonably active unofficial e-mail dialogue to substantiate the actual existence of Carpe Diem’s alleged 479 on- and off-site employees.
But when she hacked the accounting department, she got a different story. Enough money was flowing through Carpe Diem to fund a small but technologically sophisticated war. Payments, large and numerous, some of them to the same players involved in installing Sharifi’s tech. And for every transfer out, the files showed a corresponding transfer in.
Whoever made the transfers had cared enough to cover their tracks. The incoming transfers were never exactly equal to the outgoing ones, and they showed up on the Carpe Diem accounts with lead times varying from two days to two months before the equivalent outbound transfers. It would have been extremely hard to prove a connection.
But Li didn’t need proof; she just needed a track to put her nose to.
She traced the money through two bankruptcies, five anonymous holding companies, and a string of numbered bank accounts scattered across eight star systems.
At one point she felt a presence, as if a great bird hung above her, rising on a strong head wind, the currents of cyberspace breaking across its pinioned wings. Something brushed along the edge of her mind. A blue-bright eternity of open spaces flashed before her eyes and was gone before she could even be sure she’d seen it.