The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [17]
Mike was still waiting for a comment.
“If their target really was the cities, and they’re doing it to make a point,” Lisa said hesitantly, “they’ll have to ram the point home somehow. Maybe Kenna was wrong about the ransom demand—maybe we’ll get one as soon as the TV news people wake up.”
Mike immediately picked up the thread of the argument. “We have to be looking at some kind of organization with an inside connection,” he said. “They had a smartcard pass and the combinations of all the doors they needed to get through. In a way, than the weirdest thing about the whole operation. They got through your door, and Miller’s, just as easily. They also switched off the power to a substantial slice of the city, and they knew my mobile-phone number. That’s a lot of inside information, Lis—and it’s from at least three different insides, unless…”
“Unless it’s our inside information,” Lisa finished for him. “They’re trying to set me up with this Traitor’ crap, aren’t they? Why would they do that, if not to distract attention from someone else?”
“You don’t suppose it could be Ms. Kenna, do you?” He wasn’t serious. He had seen Lisa’s mood darken again, and he was trying to compensate.
“No,” she said, for form’s sake. “Not her—but not Morgan, either. Not me and not you and not Ed Burdillon. But it has to be someone who knows more than he or she should about at least three of those five and the places where we live and work. If it’s not someone close to us, it must be one hell of a hacker. The Gaean Libs are rumored to have high-powered hackers in the ranks, but all the best poachers turn gamekeeper as soon as they can. If we’ve been hacked to that extent, it’s far more likely to be someone working for one of the megacorps. But what would convince a megacorps that a quiet backwater like the fourth campus of a provincial university has any secrets worth stealing? That would be one hell of a mistake—if it is a mistake.”
“If it is a megacorp op,” Mike observed glumly, “the MOD won’t get to the bottom of it. Not that they’d tell us if they did. Can’t be, though. Mayhem and kidnapping isn’t the megacorp way. They already own the whole fucking world, thanks to the big smash-and-grab raid that fucked up the Eubank, the Fed, and everybody’s pension funds. Their carpetbaggers can buy anyone they want for next to nothing, even out of a university. Especially out of a university. Where else can you and I go—if Kenna manages to ease us out—but straight into the pocket of the Cabal?”
It was all true, Lisa conceded. Ever since the great stock-market bouleversement of ’25, a handful of megacorporations had gradually taken effective control of the world. The power of national governments had been on the wane for a century, but the engineered crisis had administered the coup de grâce. The “gray power” everyone talked about was just ballot-box power; no matter how it contrived to expand the legally sanctioned work opportunities of the over-fifties, it couldn’t conjure up any new employers. If you wanted to work, you had to take your begging bowl to the megacorps, and if you had a valuable secret of any kind, you had to sell it to the megacorps. It was no good trying to play one corp off against another, because they all worked as a team. The broadsheets called them “the Ultimate Cartel,” but that was just politeness; the tabloids were right to prefer “the Cabal.” Megacorp publicity claimed that the substitute term had arisen because tabloid editors were as illiterate as their readers, not because anyone had knowledge of an actual secret conspiracy, but everyone with half a brain took that as one more sign of their undoubted guilt.
Mike Grundy’s gaze had wandered. Lisa followed it, tracking across