Stephen Cannell - Runaway Heart

"I can hardly wait for that one, Herm," she said with a wink, then left.

There could definitely be something going on here, Herman thought as he watched her go.

Susan gathered up her laptop and printer and started packing her stuff away. "Dad, what are you going to do about getting another client?" she asked. "You said, don't worry about it, but I can't help but worry. Judge King is going to demand we represent someone. In order to get a jury trial we had to add a suit for damages to the injunctive relief. We need a plaintiff who's been damaged."

"We're in luck. We've just been hired by the Danaus Plexippus Foundation," he said.

"And what on earth is the Danaus Plexippus Foundation?" She was smiling at him now. That was just like him to have something up his sleeve.

"It happens to be Latin for 'butterfly.' It's a DBA operating in Michigan, and they've gone all over the country spending money on saving the monarch. I had it on standby, just in case. By the way, you're the secretary-treasurer, and you are looking at the president and founding partner."

"A sham foundation?" she said, arching her brow at him.

"Honey, it's the best we've got. It's going to pass muster. We'll just amend the plaintiff list with this motion before court tomorrow." He ripped a page from his yellow pad and handed it to her. She scanned it. It was in his curlycue, hard-to-decipher script. Only Susan and Leona Mae Johnson, his secretary back in D.C., had ever successfully translated an entire page. She folded it and put it into her purse.

"Dad, if Judge King finds out…"

"How is Judge King gonna find out? Three people know about it. You, me, and Leona Mae, and unless you guys blow me in, we're cool."

She nodded, then turned off his bed lamp. "I love you, Daddy."

"I love you, too, sweetheart. I count on you more than you know."

Then she leaned down and kissed him, holding her father close to her, almost afraid to let go. His heart was beating with hers as she pressed against his chest, strangely in rhythm, his was electronically beeping from the bedside monitor while hers was frightened about the future.

She closed her eyes as she hugged him.

Beep… beep… beep. Thump… thump… thump.

His was the heart of a lion.

The phone rang, pulling Roland up with a start.

Where was he? His one-bedroom apartment in D.C.? His cot at the Institute for Planetary Justice? Then he landed back in time and place. He was in San Fran, asleep in the rectal monstrosity. It was the middle of the night and he was ready to do battle with the Gen-A-Tec cyber-shit who kavorked him that afternoon. He fumbled the phone off the hook. "Your wakeup call," the operator said.

"Bitchin'." Roland hung up, got out of bed, and went into the bathroom where he splashed cold water on his face, then returned to his computer and turned it on. He looked down at his weapon of choice while it booted up. With this little twenty-four-ounce spaceship he could fly anywhere in the

universe, visit secure sites, soar above it all a bird of prey searching for rabbits in the system.

Once his laptop was up he grabbed a Coke out of the minibar and went to work. He logged into the Gen-A-Tec mainframe using the stolen security codes that his line-sniffer had lifted from Jack Sasson's log-on. In seconds he was accepted and welcomed into the real Gen-A-Tec computer system.

"Eat my shorts," Roland said to his screen as he got in.

The rest was cake.

He found the real RESHCORN file and downloaded it, scanning as it copied to the zip disk. Everything Herman wanted was in there: the almost total lack of testing Gen-A-Tec had done; the callous disregard for collateral damage that the genetically enhanced corn might wreak with its self-generated pesticides. He pulled up the EPA and FDA reports. Those agencies had really done a piss-poor job of vetting this Frankenfood. The whole program had been fast-tracked by the Department of Agriculture, probably because of Gen-A-Tec's strong-arm lobbying tactics.

Roland downloaded the file on human testing, which consisted of not one single test, but just a bunch of scientific opinion. Then he went on a search to find out what the fuck DARPA had to do with this private-sector lab. He started back in e-mail and screened the executive boxes. Several e-mails cropped up with DARPA in them. He read them all and finally saw the same fragment of the message he had seen in the shadow system:

We should put in a request for additional funding before darpa closes its budget in the fall.

Below the message were listed the Gen-A-Tec projects that DARPA was interested in. There were two.

One was [DNA ENHANCED GENE SPLICING]. That could include the Frankenfood, Roland thought, the corn, soybeans, all the other stuff. The second program was something called [THE TEN-EYCK CHIMERA PROJECT].

This was the first mention of the Ten-Eyck Chimera Project he had seen in all of the browsing he had done in the Gen-A-Tec system, so he went all the way to the root directory and gerped for the text string on TEN-EYCK CHIMERA. This took him a while, but the search came back:

The only mention was in the e-mails he already had. He looked for the table of file systems and found it. There were two related files:

/dev/hda8/chimera /dev/hda9/chimera

So there was a Chimera file. He had no idea what the hell it was, but Roland was getting jazzed. He was on the case. He issued a mount-a-command to load up every related file in the system. Then he asked for a complete list of file directories. What he got back looked like gibberish. "What the fuck is this?" he wondered aloud.

Inside the Gen-A-Tec building an alarm went off and Lincoln Fellows walked over to his computer and saw that a window had popped up, warning:

Line was about to allow it when he decided, just to be safe, to check the sign-in logbook. It was after 2 A.M. and, although some Gen-A-Tec employees worked screwy hours, this seemed worth investigating. The Chimera file was restricted to A-list in-building use. For Sasson to legally access the file he would have to be in his office down the hall, and it was a little strange for the CFO to be working here at this hour.

Line checked the logbook. Dr. Sasson had gone home at five and had not signed back into the building. Link resented it when corporate cheese thought they could just walk in at strange hours and ignore his security system. He was the one who would get reamed if there was a breach. So Lincoln Fellows left the control room and walked down the hall to the corporate offices on Mahogany Row.

Sasson's office was empty and dark.

The guy was downloading secure files from his home computer… a complete breach of security!

Link stormed back to his control room and snatched up the phone.

While Lincoln was waking up Jack Sasson, Roland was downloading the corn file. He went back to the systems directory to prowl around, and found another strange encryption:›@nA*p amp;AE01. This one was shorter, so Roland thought he could break it with the encryption programs in his toolkit. He downloaded it for later.

Then, as the RESHCORN files completed downloading, Roland went back to the problem of penetrating the Ten-Eyck Chimera file.

"Yes?" Jack Sasson's voice was thick with sleep.

"Dr. Sasson," Lincoln said, trying to keep the anger out of his voice.

"Who is this? It's two in the goddamn morning."

"This is Lincoln Fellows, the night systems administrator at Gen-A-Tec. I need to advise you, Doctor, that you are in violation of our security mandates right now."

"What the fuck are you talking about?" More awake now, and really pissed.