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Back The Empress File
Chapters (20)
  1. Prologue
  2. CHAPTER 1
  3. CHAPTER 2
  4. CHAPTER 3
  5. CHAPTER 4
  6. CHAPTER 5
  7. CHAPTER 6
  8. CHAPTER 7
  9. CHAPTER 8
  10. CHAPTER 9
  11. CHAPTER 10
  12. CHAPTER 11
  13. CHAPTER 12
  14. CHAPTER 13
  15. CHAPTER 14
  16. CHAPTER 15
  17. CHAPTER 16
  18. CHAPTER 17
  19. CHAPTER 18
  20. CHAPTER 19

I yawned, sat down naked at the machine, tapped a key to kill the alarm, switched the modem to send and punched in a number for East St. Louis. The number rang eight times, and I pressed the “a” key. It rang twice more and was answered with a twenty-four-hundred-baud carrier tone. A few seconds later a “?” flashed on the upper left corner of my screen. I typed Hivaoa, my code name on Bobby’s system. It’s taken from Gauguin’s 1902 painting The Magician of Hivaoa, which hangs in the Musž d’Art Moderne in Ličge. As a password Hivaoa may seem pretentious, but it fills the two main requirements of any computer code word: It’s easy to remember, and you don’t have to worry that somebody will stumble on it by accident. Bobby came back instantly:

Friend bad-needs face-to-face ASAP.

When/Where?

Today/Memphis.

Short notice.

Asking favor.

I’ll check airlines.

Already booked 4:47 Northwest Airlines Minn-St. Paul-Memphis arrive 7:20.

Booking the plane was presumptuous, but Bobby’s a computer freak. Computer freaks are like that. Besides, he was virtually a full-time resident of the Northwest reservation system, so it probably didn’t cost him anything.

Bobby and I had met inside a GM design computer back in the old days and had enlarged our friendship on the early pirate boards, the good ones that the teenyboppers never saw. Over the years we’d dealt a lot of data and code to each other. I’d never met him face-to-face, but I’d talked to him on voice lines. A black kid, I thought, still young, early to mid-twenties. A southerner. He had a hint of a speech impediment, and something he said suggested a physical problem. Cerebral palsy, like that. A while back he helped me out of a jam involving the mob, several murders, and a computer attack that wrecked a defense contractor. I still flash on it from time to time, like visitations from an old acid trip. In return for his help, I sent a bundle of cash Bobby’s way. So we were friends, but only on the wires. I went back to him:

Where go Memphis?

He meets plane.

OK.

After Bobby signed off, I went back to the bedroom, reset the alarm for eleven o’clock, and crawled into bed. Chaminade smelled of red wine and garlic sauce, a little sweat and a tingle of French scent. She’s a large woman, with jet black hair and eyes that are almost powder blue; both her genes and her temper are black Irish. She does electronic engineering, specializing in miniaturization. She was one of the first to crack the new satellite-TV scrambling system and makes a tidy income on pirate receivers.

She was lying on her side, facing away from me. I put my back against hers; the cat turned a couple of circles at my feet. Chaminade said, “Wha?” one time before we all went back to sleep.