Infernal Revenue td-96 Read online

  The word went up and down the line, and the gunfire commenced.

  "Cease fire!" he ordered when the Truck slewed to a wild stop, ending up facing forward.

  "Capture the driver!"

  Commandos went out, but they started back the instant they reached the Truck. They came back in parts. An arm here. A leg spun there. A helmeted head bounced and rolled to a stop at Colonel Kyung's feet like a turtle whose legs are pulled in from fright.

  Not a shot was fired. Not by his men. Not by the Americans-unless one counted the distant shooting too far away to hit anyone under Colonel Kyung's command.

  "The next northern dog who fires at the Master of Sinanju," a booming voice resounded, "will cause the deaths of himself and all who run with him."

  "Sinanju!" Colonel Kyung barked. Lifting his voice, he demanded, "Who comes?"

  "Chiun. Reigning Master."

  "Why did you not use the tunnel?"

  "The idiot whites filled it with clods of dirt."

  Colonel Kyung stood up. "They are barbarians whose days are numbered."

  "Their empire will outlast the regime in Pyongyang by a thousand years," the Master of Sinanju flung back.

  Stung, Colonel Kyung did not respond to this. He was a good Communist, and fully half his men were political officers whose task it was to shoot any defector headed south in the back and report disloyalty directly to Pyongyang.

  "You wish transportation north?" Colonel Kyung asked after an awkward silence.

  "Send a jeep to fetch us. I will walk no farther now that you have stupidly broken the truck of the Americans with your clumsy bullets."

  "Us? Who is with you?"

  "My nephew."

  Colonel Kyung personally drove the jeep to the spot in no-man's-land where the US. truck sat on three blown tires.

  The Master of Sinanju stood with his hands unseen in the sleeves of his kimono. Beside him stood a tall man, also in black, Colonel Kyung recognized it as the two-piece fighting uniform of the ancient night tigers of Sinanju.

  Remembering to bow first, he addressed the Master of Sinanju. "It is an honor to ferry you to Pyongyang."

  "We go to Sinanju."

  "Once Pyongyang authorizes this, I will be honored to take you to Sinanju."

  "If Pyongyang learns of my presence before the Master of Sinanju is ready for Pyongyang to know, dire will be your fate."

  "Understood," said Colonel Kyung, who was a good Communist but preferred his internal organs to remain within the warm bag of his body and not be torn from them in anger.

  In the dark he noticed the face of the tall night tiger. It was white.

  "This man is white," Colonel Kyung said suspiciously,

  "Half-white."

  "Half?"

  "He is my American nephew." "You have an American nephew?"

  "His mother was from my village. His father was a soldier in the invasion."

  Colonel Kyung spat on the ground. "He looks all white."

  "Consider at his eyes."

  Colonel Kyung stepped up to the unflinching eyes. The eyes of the white night tiger were very dark in the dim moonlight. They were also very dead. They gave Colonel Kyung the chills. They were the eyes of a dead man who had refused to lie down and relinquish his life.

  "They do look Korean," he admitted. "A little." The Master of Sinanju smiled. The white frowned. He seemed to understand Korean.

  "What name does this half-breed go by?" Colonel Kyung demanded.

  "He is called Gung Ho."

  "That is no name for a Korean."

  "It is good enough for a half Korean. Now I must be to my village."

  Colonel Kyung waved to his waiting jeep. The Master of Sinanju and his half-white night tiger took the hard seats in back. And Colonel Kyung set the jeep rolling north; stopping only to warn his men not to leak word of the Master of Sinanju's advent.

  He felt certain that none would. All were loyal to Pyongyang, but even Pyongyang feared the wrath of Sinanju.

  In the back of the jeep, Remo nudged the Master of Sinanju.

  "Gung Ho?" he asked in English.

  Chiun shrugged. "You were a Marine. It suits you."

  "And that fib about me being half-Korean?"

  "How do you know that you are not?"

  Remo folded his arms and said nothing. He did not like being back in North Korea. It was as alien to him as the moon.

  As they pushed north, he began noticing how much like New England the trees and hills were, and it suddenly occurred to him why Chiun had taken to living in New England so well. It was probably as close to North Korea as he could get in America.

  Chapter 16

  It was as dangerous a risk as Harold Smith had contemplated in all his years as head of CURE.

  He sat facing the placid sound, brows knit, wiping his rimless eyeglasses, thinking hard.

  He stood at a crossroads. He had lost every advantage that his position as head of CURE afforded him. All his secrets were known and laid bare before his unknown foe. Except one. Smith's discovery that he had a hidden opponent. In that one fact not recorded on his mainframes lay the advantage of surprise. For Harold Smith, bereft of his enforcement arm, was about to enter the field personally.

  This was not as risky as it seemed. His foe appeared to be extremely computer literate but ruthless. Yet he lacked real-world commonsense qualities. Otherwise, Smith would have been executed.

  A hacker, perhaps. Someone seated before a monitor exerting his will electronically. It all might be a grandiose prank on the part of some MIT graduate student with access to a computer more intelligent than himself.

  This mind might not expect Harold Smith to attack him outside the realm of cyberspace.

  On the other hand, he might be expecting it. Perhaps all that had come before was engineered to force Harold Smith out of the cold cocoon of his Folcroft office and into a position of peril.

  Therein lay the risk.

  Smith thought hard as he cleaned his glasses of even the tiniest dust speck. As his eyes aged, any such mote on the lens was enough to give him a blinding headache. Eyes that looked for the tiniest connections couldn't see past a speck of lint.

  Replacing the glasses on his patrician nose, Smith turned and brought up a blank screen. His fingers caressed the touch-sensitive keyboard until a crisp amber sentence appeared on the buried desktop screen: I KNOW YOU EXIST.

  Smith pressed the transmit button, although he had every reason to believe that whatever he wrote onscreen was simultaneously reproduced elsewhere.

  He waited for a reply. None was forthcoming. Smith frowned. He knew he was not wrong. Perhaps he had chosen to contact the unknown at a time when he was sleeping or attending other matters.

  The intercom buzzed and Smith keyed it.

  "Dr. Smith, your wife is on line two. And I have your mail."

  "Bring it in," said Smith, automatically reaching for the button that would darken the monitor. He felt its coolness and stopped. Reaching for his ROLM phone, Smith left the screen illuminated. The keyboard had gone dark once his hands had withdrawn from the capacitor field.

  "Harold, are you coming home tonight?" came Mrs. Smith's voice.

  "I'm not certain, dear."

  The office door opened and Mrs. Mikulka came in, her eyes brightening at the sight of Smith's new desk.

  "Very nice," she mouthed, laying a short stack of mail on the shiny glass and walking out again.

  "Harold, I have last night's meat loaf in the refrigerator. If I keep it another night, it might not be very good."

  "Then you have it, dear. I will eat in the cafeteria."

  "Harold, you forgot to call to say you weren't coming home last night," Mrs. Smith said in a sad, resigned voice. "It's not like you to be so thoughtless. Is everything all right?"

  "I am in the middle of an IRS audit," Smith explained, and it bothered him terribly to distort the truth to his faithful Maude. "But I will try to be more considerate in the future."

  "Very well
, Harold."

  Smith hung up. It had worked; his secretary had practically loomed over the monitor and not seen it. The screen was canted toward him slightly, making it virtually invisible unless one faced it squarely. Once he arranged his desk nameplate, pen holders and other items strategically about the desk, the blips of reflected light from the overhead fluorescents would combine to conceal the entire arrangement from prying eyes.

  His eyes went to the screen, and Smith was disappointed to see no sign of a reply. Then he noticed that his original message had been changed. It now read, YOU KNOW I EXIST.

  WHO ARE YOU? Smith typed out.

  This time the reply appeared under Smith's question:

  Smith blinked. What was this?

  It winked out.

  REPEAT REPLY, Smith typed.

  Back came the same string of seemingly nonsense symbols.

  Smith stared at this for some moments. It looked for all the world like a comic-strip representation of a four- letter word. He saved the screen and called up a corner window where he could work. Typing out the string of symbols, he asked the computer to analyze them.

  The answer came back at once.

  :-) IS AN EMOTICON USED IN COMPUTER BULLETIN-BOARD COMMUNICATIONS TO SIGNIFY A SMILE. ALSO KNOWN AS A SMILEY.

  "A smiley?" Smith muttered, puzzled. It struck him a moment later. Tilted upward, the symbols constituted a crude smiley face. He was being taunted by his own computer.

  Lips thinning, Harold Smith considered an appropriately salty reply. Instead, he typed, YOU WIN.

  YOU LOSE, appeared in place of Smith's admission of defeat.

  Smith logged off the system and pressed the black button that powered down the desktop monitor.

  "Mrs. Mikulka," he said into the intercom, "I will be out the rest of the day.''

  "What about Mr. Ballard?" "Ballard can wait," said Smith, reaching for his briefcase. The IRS was the least of his worries.

  Chapter 17

  Chip Craft was beginning to think that the past five years of his life were ail a mirage.

  He had come to XL SysCorp fresh out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology class of 1980 with a degree in computer engineering.

  The computer field was booming then. Not like now. Back then the sky seemed, not the limit, but a simple stepping stone to cosmic heights. Back then it was not XL SysCorp but Excelsior Systems. And Chip Craft never got to see the inside of the CEO's office, much less occupy it in style.

  In those days he had been an installer. Not just any installer. Excelsior had been deep into supercomputers: the Umbra 44, the Dray 1000 and the first supercomputer with artificial-intelligence programming—the ES Quantum 3000. And it had been Chip's responsibility to install ES machines into various Pentagon, CIA and NSA offices. He had top secret DOB clearance. And he was at the top of his profession.

  Chip never dreamed of the CEO's chair in those days. It was exciting enough jetting between the old building in Piscataway, New Jersey, and wherever the U.S. government needed him, just like 007. Except he carried a tool valise not a Beretta.

  It began to change when a government agency whose name Chip never learned had won the bid on the ES Quantum 3000 prototype. And after a short trial period, returned it as unsatisfactory.

  It was unheard-of. No one ever returned a supercomputer. Not one that was voice activated and responded in a fetching female voice that was programmed into the software because studies had determined that the female voice was more attention holding and also because it made a great selling point— even to the Intelligence community.

  But the ES Quantum 3000 had come back, and it was Chip's job to find out what was wrong with it.

  The first strangeness struck him the minute he powered up the spindle-shaped supercomputer. Its voice had inexplicably become masculine. It was impossible. The voice had been created from a recording of an actress specifically hired for her tonal pleasantness and mixed so that her voice synthesized any word, phrase or sentence the software was called upon to reproduce.

  Five years after the fact, Chip Craft remembered the first words the strangely transformed ES Quantum 3000 had spoken to him.

  "Hello, friend."

  That was the second weird thing. The computer was not programmed to be so informal.

  The third weird thing was the question the ES Quantum 3000 asked. It was not a question generated in response to an imprecise command. The ES Quantum 3000 was not designed to ask random, unprompted questions.

  This question was not random. It was very specific. Coming from a computer, it was virtually a non sequitur.

  The computer had asked, "How would you like to be rich?"

  The new voice was so smooth and ingratiating that Chip was taken in. The ES Quantum 3000 responded by asking Chip to address him by a new name. Friend. With a capital F.

  That was when Chip Craft realized that the ES Quantum 3000 was seriously damaged. But it was exhibiting a strange kind of logic, of a kind Chip realized was well-advanced of any artificial intelligence then devised. So he decided to humor the ES Quantum 3000, hoping to learn more.

  "Okay," Chip had said. "Make me rich."

  And Friend had. Not overnight, but steadily, incrementally. Inexorably.

  First Friend had given him a Pick 4 number to play. And Chip had won nearly ten thousand dollars on a two-dollar bet.

  "Pretty good. Let's do it again."

  "Small potatoes," Friend had said.

  "Not if we put all ten grand on Saturday night's lotto game coming up."

  "Nickels and dimes."

  "The jackpot is almost ten million dollars."

  "Paid out over a twenty-year period. We will need more money than that to achieve our goals."

  "Which are?"

  "Owning Excelsior Systems."

  "Impossible."

  "The first step is to put you on the fast track, Chip."

  "I like where I am."

  "I have the design for a biological electronic microchip that guarantees one hundred percent wafer yields."

  "You created a self-healing microchip?"

  "No. But the Nishitsu Corporation of Japan has. And I have cracked their computer system and downloaded the specs."

  "This is industrial espionage."

  "No. This is industrial counterespionage. The Nishitsu design is based on an IDC prototype stolen by a planted worker."

  "Okay, let's see the design," Chip had said.

  The design was everything Friend had said it would be. It revolutionized microchip technology, landing Chip Craft in a senior vice presidency in a matter of three months. From there it had become just a matter of surfing from position to position.

  Things happened at Excelsior. Higher-ups moved on, were demoted into oblivion, and one even died in an elevator accident. The events were all random and irregularly spaced, but within three years Chip Craft was president of Excelsior Systems. Only one man stood between him and the office of CEO.

  That one man abruptly cashed out his stock and launched his own company. He was bankrupt and back looking for a job. And the man who sat in his chair was Chip Craft.

  By then the company had been renamed XL Sys- Corp. It was the early nineties, and the computer business was reeling under a punishing recession.

  One day Friend announced that they were downsizing.

  "How many do we lay off?" Chip had asked.

  "Everyone."

  "We can't lay off everyone."

  "We will replace them with outside contractors who will be paid on an assignment basis, requiring no medical insurance and avoiding payroll taxes."

  "Sounds drastic. But what are we going to do with this building if we don't have staff?"

  "Rent it out. We are going to build a new building that will serve our needs better."

  "Where?"

  "Harlem."

  "Harlem! Nobody builds office buildings up there."

  "We are building in Harlem because it is cost- effective, there is ample land availabl
e, and no one will notice us."

  "It's not exactly safe. People won't come to work."

  "They will not have to. Only you will."

  "I don't want to work in Harlem," Chip had protested.

  "Are you offering your resignation, Chip?"

  "I'm CEO."

  "I will interpret that as a negative response."

  When he first saw the new XL SysCorp building, Chip Craft almost forgot he was smack in the middle of Harlem. It was a magnificent twenty-story building of blue glass and steel. It towered over everything else on Malcolm X Boulevard, and once Chip entered the lobby and saw the marvels it had to offer, his reservations melted away.

  XL SysCorp really took off after that. It was a new way of doing business. No employees—only an army of consultants, contract-service workers and free-lance technicians.

  The entire building was computerized and controlled by Friend, who could be contacted by intercoms from all over the building once the ES quantum 3000 had been moved into place on the thirteenth floor surrounded by the best XL mainframes and other slave computers.

  It was a concept so new a name had to be coined to describe it.

  They called XL SysCorp the first virtual corporation. It had the legal status of a corporation and all the tax benefits, but operated like a loose alliance of skilled free-lancers, some permanent, some temporary, all working out of their homes or small business storefronts. Only Chip Craft actually worked in the headquarters building itself.

  Oh, there were problems. Community activists did not appreciate the revolution in business that XL SysCorp represented. All they cared about was that a new business had come to Harlem and no blacks were being hired. That no one was being hired of any color at all seemed not to matter.

  "We gotta hire some of these people, sir," Chip had complained to Friend one day.

  "We are in need of installers at the moment," Friend said.

  "These guys don't have that kind of background."

  "What is their employment background?"

  "I'm not sure, but I think a lot of them don't have any."

  "Educational backgrounds, please."

  "Some high school, maybe a few GEDs. Most are dropouts."

  "They are not qualified to work for XL, then," Friend said in the same smoothly inflected voice he always used.