Mark Tiedemann - Chimera

"I don't know who 'they' are. And if I'm one of them, why would I have to ask 'them'? You're not making sense."

Jeta glanced from Ariel to Wenithal, then back to Coren. "I didn't tell anybody."

"Then you were traced. "

She scowled. "I'm better than that, there's no way-"

"My system was compromised, and I can afford a hell of a lot better protection than you can."

Jeta shook her head. "Don't brag on it, gato-that's how I found you. "

It took Coren several moments to understand her meaning. "You broke into my system?"

She nodded. "It was hard, you've got a good one, but…"

Coren looked at Ariel. "But-"

"Someone piggybacked in with you," Ariel said. "Your system's still compromised."

"Who are they, Jeta?" Coren asked. "Who's trying to kill you?"

"Ask them, gato, I got my own problems!"

"I'd love to, but it could be fatal. Who are they?"

Jeta swallowed loudly. "All I know is, I handed over the data to you and went back to my hole! Two of 'em were waiting for me before I got there!" She looked at him narrowly. "I thought you'd had them standing by for after you got what you wanted."

Coren shook his head. "Then why follow me? If I set you up, this is the surest way to get yourself killed."

"I said that's what I thought. I thought it then, not now."

"What changed your mind?"

"I checked you out. It's not too often you find an honest cop."

"Then-"

"Good cops go bad."

"That still doesn't explain why you're here." He looked at Wenithal, who seemed to be pointedly ignoring them, drinking his coffee. "If I went bad-"

"I didn't know where else to go! All right? I don't trust any of my usual contacts! I thought I could make an arrangement with you. "

"If I were still a good cop, I'd help you. If I were bad, we could do business."

"Something like that."

"I've been trying to find you for over three days."

"I know. Why?"

"I thought you'd double-marketed the data."

Jeta's face hardened. "I don't do that."

"Then how did they know about the baley shipment?"

Jeta let out her breath slowly. "I'm a good troll, Mr. Lanra, very good, but I'm not the only one. If I could find out, so could a dozen others, easy. If I was you, though, I'd ask the people running the baleys to begin with. If anyone'd know…"

"I thought about that. I've been trying to find them. "

"No luck?" A mocking smile tugged at her thin lips, even though her eyes still showed fear. "Maybe you need to hire a professional. "

"Fine, then," Coren said tersely. "You're hired."

"My fee's doubled," Jeta said.

"I don't mind, I have an expense account."

"I have expenses, we're even. What you want to know first?"

"First? What are you doing here?"

"Following you."

"So you say. You want to tell me why? The truth this time."

Jeta looked around. "Do you mind if I put my stash down? Thanks." She set her pack on the end of the table by the sofa, then dropped into the cushions with a loud, relieved exhalation. "You botched my ride, gato. Then you almost got me killed. I thought that, anyway. I figured if anyone could solve my problems, it'd be the gato who caused them all to begin with."

"What do you mean, I botched your ride?" She gave him a guilty look. "Confession time: I found that data for you as fast as I did 'cause I already had it. I was slated to go on that shipment. I had a berth with them. " "I've been trolling for almost sixteen years," Jeta explained. "It's not a bad life if you don't mind the occasional hassle from police-public and private-and planning for the very long term. Some of us get good enough that we get hired as staff somewhere, go completely legitimate. Finding lost data is a full-time industry in some quarters. Can I have something to drink?"

Ariel went into the kitchen again and returned with a glass of water. Jeta sniffed at it, frowned, then shrugged and drank.

"Anyway, you have to understand how much data there is on this planet. I'm talking centuries of accrual. It never entirely disappears. Overwritten, archaic storage media, just plain misplaced, misfiled, or misremembered. It sits in layers, piling up, lumping together. Whole AI systems are devoted to sifting through it all, but it occasionally takes a deft hand, intuition, a lucky guess-human qualities you just don't find in a machine. There are specialists who do it, going through stuff that's really old. Some of them start out legit and move into freelance, but for most of us it's the other way around. There's a hardcore bunch that never go legit.

"Mostly though, it's not much more dangerous usually than any other job. It's been understood for a long time that the troll isn't a target; you don't damn well shoot the messenger. Killing us hurts everyone. And then there are the clearing houses that offer protection and anonymity, and some corporations keep their best trolls on retainer and offer defence. Worrying about sanitizers is just not a big issue. I've been beaten up a couple of times, but no one has ever-ever-threatened my life.

"Till now. About three months ago I was retained to find some old minutes from a board of directors that no longer exists. This kind of thing isn't my most common job, but I've done a few. It's surprising how careless some corporations are with old data like this. I think it's just arrogance-that was the old board, they didn't do anything right, why bother keeping the minutes around, and if there's no legal reason to do so, they just shove them somewhere. A new board is like a new government and anything that happened before them is by definition full of error. Nothing unusual, standard fee, I got a few leads where to start, and I went trolling. Turned about to be a real challenge. I could find traces of it, but it was obvious someone had gone to some trouble to hide it. Took me nearly a month to recover enough of it to make any kind of sense. I found it hiding in stockholder reports, maintenance logs, spread out through portfolio surveys, resumes, spread sheets. Bits of it even turned up in vacation itineraries. The program that hid it was sophisticated enough to actually reconstruct it all with the right command sequence, so it was obvious someone wanted to be able to recover it, otherwise a lot of it would have been corrupted beyond recognition."

Jeta grinned proudly. "But I did it. I found it all and reassembled it and put it into a package for the client. I was finishing it all up when I got a message on my comm that said, 'If you deliver what you have, we will kill you.' Very simple, very direct. Somehow, I didn't think it was crank. We don't get them often, but we do get threats, and there are procedures for dealing with them. I turned it over to my controller at the clearing house and delivered my package per our contract. When I got back to my hole I found a new message: 'You were given fair warning.' That's all it said. "

"No signature?" Ariel asked. "No source?"

"That's all it had to say, 'cause it wasn't the words that scared me, but the timing. I knew then I was being monitored-closely-and that my own system had been hacked."

"Did you try to trace it?" Coren asked.

Jeta scowled. "Of course I did! It ate at me. I've been scared before, especially back when I started out, but this was different-this had an edge to it. After a couple of days and I was still scared, I started making plans to disappear. I did my accounts, added things up, and it looked like I could make it work. I reconfigured my system three times to purge the intruders, then made inquiries to emigrate. I always wanted to, anyway-it was one of my two or three top retirement options. This decided the issue for me.

"No way I'd get my assets through ITE. I'd have to go baley and smuggle what I could. Meantime, I just kept on as always, living my life, doing business like I always had, making no moves I'd never made before. No flags, no warnings, nothing to tell anyone that anything had changed. The final vetting came through Baltimor for the Petrabor Egress-that's what they called it-and I started arranging everything to be ready to transfer at a heartbeat.