Nightside City

Not only that, the program disappeared on my end, as well; it just folded up and died, dropped out of the system as if it had never been there. I couldn't check for tampering, or whether anyone had seen it coming; it was just gone, and I didn't know who knew what.

I didn't like that at all. Whatever Orchid was up to, he didn't want anybody asking questions. I was pretty sure, from what I'd read and what I'd remembered, that he wasn't bright enough to have programmed that himself, so I figured he must have bought some serious security somewhere.

That brought some questions to mind. For example, where'd he get the juice? Orchid had always been smalltime.

And what was he doing that needed that sort of security?

What was I getting into?

Whatever it was, I was in, now. If someone had invited me back out again, I'd have given it serious thought- whichever way it went, bribes or threats, I'd have had an excuse to drop the whole case, and a bribe might have helped the credit balance. Even if I had decided to stick, at least I'd have had a chance at picking up a little more information from whatever approach was made.

I waited at the screen for a few minutes, but nothing came in. It occurred to me, waiting there, that I hadn't eaten lately, that my stomach was uncomfortably empty and it was a reasonable time for di

Going after Paulie Orchid didn't look like the fastest approach after all, and the way that searcher had vanished had me a bit edgy about it anyway, so I took another angle entirely, something I probably should have tried right off. I went after the money.

There's a nice thing about money-it leaves a trail. Always. Sometimes the trail's hidden pretty deep, but it's never gone completely. If you dug deep enough, you could probably trace every damn credit on Epimetheus back to old Earth, right back to the twenty-second, maybe the twenty-first century.

Before that there's too much data loss, and some people still used primitive money-nonelectronic, I mean-but who cares? I didn't need to go back two or three hundred years. I needed to go back six weeks.

It was simple enough. Those six corporations had all been keeping their business secret. Their nominal officers were almost all software, written for the purpose and with no history to trace; that was standard for dummy corporations, had been for centuries. They had no business addresses available; that wasn't unusual, either, for outfits that had no regular business. The names of their stockholders were not available to the public-again, no surprise. I couldn't get at them through people or places, unless I went after Paulie Orchid.

But they had paid out money for property. That meant that money had come in from somewhere. If I traced the money back, I might learn something.

So I touched keys and plugged in to keep a closer-than-screen watch on developments, but I didn't ride wire. I kept my eyes open and functioning, just taking the data as data.

I picked a transaction at random, Nightside Estates buying a foreclosure from First Bank of Eta Cassiopeia, and went after it.

I opened an account at First Cass, bought a share of their stock, and then applied for an audit of operations for a "random" date as a check to protect my investment. I had a file that did this stuff automatically and gave all the right answers to the queries, and meanwhile I did a little illegal maneuvering to intercept queries going elsewhere and feed back the right answers to those. In about twenty minutes I had an account number for Nightside Estates at Epimethean Commerce.

That was interesting, since I knew that ECB hadn't handled their sale as an in-house funds transfer. That meant the accounts for the dummy corporations were scattered.

Once you've got an account number these things are easier; it took only ten minutes to break into the account records at ECB. Of course, it was completely illegal, where my maneuver at First Cass had only been a matter of expediting a process.

Most bank data security is pitiful; they do so damn many out-of-house transactions that there are always a dozen routes in.

Besides, there are a dozen different legitimate reasons to get at information-bankruptcy proceedings, lawsuits, whatever-so they don't bother with high security.

Of course, that's only true for information; try and touch any of that money without human authorization, and they'll get tough.

I got the account records, though. Nightside Estates had an inactive account-net balance of zero. The account had existed for thirty-two days; there had been three deposits and three withdrawals, in matching amounts. In short, somebody had put money in the account a couple of hours before begi

The question was, Where had the deposits come from?

This was getting trickier; I thought I sensed some of the bank software watching me, and the security stuff I had evaded wouldn't play dumb forever, but I kept digging.

The third deposit had come from Paulie Orchid's personal account at First Cass; that was interesting, but not very helpful unless I went after him, after all. I noted his account number into my own com, then went on.

The other two deposits came from a number-only account at Nightside Bank and Trust.

I noted that, too, then pulled out quick.

I waited a minute for the system to clear itself and any pursuit to have its chance, and then went in, on wire this time-number-only accounts are usually a high-security item.

I knew I couldn't get a name; that would be in files too secret and too well-guarded for me to crack without a lot of work and risk. It's also what most people would go after, so the security programs watch for it. I was subtler than that-nothing too tricky, but a little less obvious. I went through the records of statements transmitted, trying to find an address that had accepted a statement from the account I was after.

I found one, too-a com address, not a street. I unplugged, fed that com address back into the system for a little research, and was able to give it a street address.

At that point I figured I might need to go out and do a little fieldwork, because usually, from what I had, you can't get an exact room or apartment without getting into the building, but I was wrong. The street address was a house-a single-family dwelling in the East End.

I couldn't put a name to it from any directory-full privacy on everything. Whoever this was, he or she wasn't making it easy. I ran it through the tax records office, though, and finally got a name.

The name was Sayuri Nakada.

I looked at that for a long, long moment, acutely aware of the spy-eye hanging around outside; I hoped nobody had a new way of cracking a window shield that I hadn't heard about yet. If I was going to be dealing with Sayuri Nakada, I didn't want it on public access.

I mentioned Nakada earlier when I was talking about the New York, of course, but I hadn't really expected the trail to lead right to her. Even if you'd never heard of the New York, the name Nakada ought to get a beep out of the system, and Sayuri was the only Nakada in the city. She was the family's representative on Epimetheus, overseeing everything they did on the planet. She hadn't been around all that long, but she was definitely an established part of Nightside City's elite.