The office of Harold W. Smith was a Spartan cube that looked as if it had been furnished in 1963 from a municipal auction of sixty-year-old surplus school equipment.
The desk was a scarred slab of oak; the leather executive chair in which Smith sat was cracked with age and the corrosive action of human perspiration. Smith had sweated out countless crises in the chair.
There was a faded green divan that might once have sat outside a school principal's office for discipline-problem students. The file cabinets were a mixture of dark green metal and oak. Intelligence analysts could have pored over the contents of those cabinets for a hundred years and would have been forced to conclude that Folcroft was no more than a stodgy private hospital.
Behind him, Long Island Sound was a crinkling expanse of moonlit India ink visible through a picture window of one-way glass so prying eyes could not read Harold Smith's lips or peer over his shoulder at the computer terminal that occupied one corner of Smith's pathologically neat desk.
The illumination was fluorescent-as an aid to Smith's nagging eyestrain. One filament shook nervously. When the day came that it finally burnt out, Smith would replace it, not before.
As he worked the keyboard, Harold Smith was not even aware of the annoying problem.
From this terminal, Smith could reach out with invisible fingers and touch virtually every computer net accessible by phone line. Right now, he was monitoring the internal computer systems of the three major networks and Vox TV.
On his screen appeared, in rotation, news stories being written in distant terminals by network newswriters, internal office memos, and electronic mail.
All four networks were busy. According to their computer activities, there was a great deal of gossip and speculation going on, but no hard facts. Doggedly Smith logged off one network and switched to another. It sometimes seemed to him that it had been easier in the early days of CURE, before computers revolutionized American business. In fact, it had been more difficult. It was just that the proliferation of computers meant that much more raw data was accessible to Smith-and hiring a staff to keep track of it all was out of the question.
As Smith secretly prowled the Multinational Broadcast Corporation database, unknown fingers were typing a fragment of electronic mail.
"This weird fax just came in," the fingers wrote. "And the brass all went into a huddle."
Smith dropped out of the MBC net and accessed the AT that processed telephone calls. He brought up the MBC headquarters active billing file and backtracked the most recent incoming calls. There was no way to differentiate between voice and fax transmission calls, except that the latter were usually brief. In the last five minutes, Smith found, MBC had received six incoming calls. Only one was long-distance. It was from Atlanta, Georgia.
Smith dropped out of the file and brought up the American Networking Conglomerate billing file. ANC, too, had received a long-distance call from Atlanta. The number was the same. Ferociously, Smith accessed the BCN file.
There had been no call from Atlanta. Then, as Smith watched, one appeared.
Like a demented concert pianist, Harold Smith dropped out of AT ed up the BCN database. Most faxphones, he knew, were tied into computer software so that on-screen text could be faxed by the simple press of a hot key, without bothering to generate a hard copy. Smith raced from screen to screen, breathing like a jogger in motion, looking to see if an incoming fax was appearing anywhere in the system.
Then he found it. Line by line, it began manifesting itself on his own terminal.
"My God," he croaked. "It is worse that I imagined."
Without taking his eyes off the screen, Smith reached for one of the many telephones on his desk. From memory, he called the Atlanta number that was the source of the fax. The other telephone rang six times. Then there was the click of a backup line cutting in, followed by more ringing.
As the fax completed itself in ghostly green letters, a telephone voice was speaking in Harold Smith's ear.
Smith groaned, a low inarticulate sound. The voice had told him exactly where the fax had originated.
If it meant what he thought, a new and terrifying kind of conflict was about to be played out. And the battlefield would be an electronic one.
Chapter 6
Cheeta Ching was afraid to leave her office.
Normally, Cheeta Ching wasn't afraid of man, beast, or machine. Behind her back, she was known as the Korean Shark. Even her coworkers feared her. But if there was one colleague even she feared, it was senior BCN anchor Don Cooder.
Theirs had been a long-running feud, dating back to the days before she had jumped rival MBC for BCN. Cheeta had never wanted to leave MBC. Certainly not for a lateral slide from MBC weekend anchor to BCN weekend anchor. She would never have done it. Never in a million years. Except for Don Cooder.
With Cooder in the Chair, BCN was dead last in the ratings, heading for the ratings cellar with a millstone around its corporate neck. Nobody expected him to last. And as the pressure had mounted, the hothead from Texas had become increasingly unstable.
There was the famous seven-minute walk-off. The shouting matches with presidential candidates. Being kidnapped by irate taxi drivers. It was only a matter of time, the industry knew, before Don Cooder cracked like an overboiled egg.
Cheeta Ching knew that she was making a potentially disastrous career move. She also understood that if Cooder went off the deep end, whoever was his heir-apparent was certain to land her lucky ass in the Chair. And Cheeta Ching wanted to be the proud owner of that lucky ass.
Industry critics all but wrote her professional obituary when she accepted the BCN weekend anchor slot. In interviews, she shrugged off all predictions of doom. After all, she was Cheeta Ching. The Cheeta Ching. The only female Korean anchor on earth. Or at least outside Korea. Nothing had ever stood in her way.
Except, she had discovered to her everlasting chagrin, Don Cooder.
The man was like a starfish attached to an oyster with that damned Chair. He couldn't he pried up, knocked off, or smashed loose.
Not that Cheeta Ching hadn't tried. During one of their smoldering feuds, she had hired a group of thugs to jump him outside his Manhattan apartment crying, "What's the frequency, Kenneth?"
It should have sent him over the edge. It didn't. The man was a barnacle, inert and immovable.
After that, Cheeta shifted tactics, announcing the start of her heroic struggle to become pregnant. As Cheeta saw it, the publicity value would be incalculable. She was over forty, female, and a symbol to career-minded women across the nation. To have a child would have made her the ultimate emblem of having it all. And why not? It had worked for Candice Bergen.
Except that Cheeta Ching couldn't conceive to save her life.
It was embarrassing. Entertainment Weekly called her the "Little Anchor Who Couldn't." Don Cooder had ramrodded onto the air a special report, "Why Superwoman Can't Ovulate."
It was especially embarrassing because her husband was a gynecologist-turned-talk-show-host. They did it in every position except free-fall-but only because Rory's fingers couldn't be pried loose from the open aircraft door. He was petrified of heights.
Next, they resorted to every fertility drug known to man. Her biological clock ticking, every tabloid holding her up to ridicule, Cheeta Ching grew desperate as a starved barracuda.
Then, like a miracle, a man had appeared in her life. A Korean. Of course. Only a fellow Korean, a member of the most perfect race ever to grace a sorry world, could have helped barren Cheeta Ching to total, womanly fulfillment.
His name had been Chiun, but out of respect for his years, Cheeta always called him "Grandfather." She had never spoken of him to her husband. There was no need to crush his spirit. Rory had been certain that the oysters and Spanish fly omelette breakfasts he had endured for more than two years had done it.
For nine months now, Cheeta Ching had basked in the glow of positive press. BCN Weekend Report ratings were soaring, even as Cooder's were sinking. She had been cover-featured by People three times-once each trimester. Vanity Fair had a standing cover-shoot offer, preferably showing mother and child nude. Breast-feeding. In the rarified world of the celebrity anchor, Cheeta Ching was Queen of the Mountain-and determined to grind her stiletto heels into the eyes of the competition. It was only a whisper in the halls, but already they were talking about making a major change when Cooder's contract came up for renewal.
The Chair was as good as Cheeta Ching's.
All she had to do was live long enough to plant her lucky behind in it.
It was almost eleven o'clock now. Cheeta had been locked in her office since she had signed off the 6:30 feed and rushed from the newsroom.
"It's for your own good," said the producer, as he escorted her to her office. Security guards ringed her with drawn guns. Down the corridor, Don Cooder was incoherent with rage, screaming, and frothing at the mouth.
The remaining security force was sitting on him.
"I'm admiral now, right?" Cheeta had asked breathlessly.
"We'll talk about it later. Okay?" the producer returned.
"What about the seven o'clock feed?"