Mind Prey

receptionist as he went by; she smiled and waved and kept talking on her phone. Barry Hunt was in his office with one of the techies, poring over a printout. When Lucas knocked, he gave a friendly, “Hey, come on in,” while his face struggled to find an appropriate expression.
    Hunt had been finishing his MBA at St. Thomas when Lucas started looking for somebody to take over the company. For ten years, Lucas had run it out of his study, writing war and role-playing games, selling the games to three different companies. Almost against his will, he got involved in the shift to computer gaming. At the same time, he’d been forced out of the department; he wound up working full-time, writing emergency scenarios for what became a line of police-training software. The software sold, and everything began to move too quickly: he didn’t know about payroll, taxes, social security, royalties, worker’s comp, operator training.
    Elle had met Hunt in one of her psych classes and recommended him. Hunt took over the company operations and had done well, for both of them. But Hunt and Lucas were not especially compatible, and Lucas was no longer certain that Hunt was happy to see him drop by.
    “Barry, I need to talk to the software guys for a minute,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a problem. It’s this Manette thing.”
    Hunt shrugged. “Sure. Go ahead. I think everybody’s here.”
    “I swear, just a minute.”
    “Great…”
    The back two-thirds of the office suite was a single bay, cut up into small cubicles by shoulder-high dividers, exactly the kind used in the Homicide office. Seven men and two women, all young, were at work: six at individual monitors, three clustered around a large screen, running a search-trainer simulation. Another man and a heavy-set young woman, both with Coke-bottle glasses, were drinking coffee by a window. When Lucas walked in with Hunt, the room went quiet.
    “Hey, everybody,” Lucas said.
    “Lucas,” somebody said. Faces turned toward him.
    “You’ve all probably heard about the Manette kidnapping case. The guy who took her is a gamer. I’ve got a composite sketch, and I’d like you all to look at it, see if you recognize him. And I’d appreciate it if you’d fax it or ship it to everybody you can think of, here in the Cities. We really need the help.”
    He passed out copies of the composite: nobody knew the face.
    “He’s a big guy?” asked one of the programmers, a woman named Ice.
    “Yeah. Tall, muscular, thin,” Lucas said. “Crazy, apparently. Maybe medically crazy.”
    “Sounds like my last date,” Ice said.
    “Will you put it on the ’Net?” Lucas asked.
    “No problem,” Ice said. She was a throwback to the days of punk, with short-cropped hair, bright red lipstick that somewhat flowed out of the lines of her lips, and nose rings. Hunt said she wrote more code than anyone in the place. An idea began to tickle the back of Lucas’s head, but he pushed it away for the moment.
    “Good,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
    On the way out, Hunt said, “Lucas, we need to get together.”
    “Trouble?” Lucas feared the day that the IRS would knock on the door and ask for his records. Records? We don’t got no steenking records.
    “We need a loan,” Hunt said. “I’ve talked to Norwest, and there won’t be any problem getting it. You’d have to approve.”
    “A loan? I thought we were…”
    “We need to buy Probleco,” Hunt said. “They’ve got a half-dozen hardware products that would fit with ours like the last pieces in a puzzle. And they’re for sale. Jim Duncan wants to go back to engineering.”
    “How much do you want to borrow? Maybe I could…”
    “Eight mil,” Hunt said.
    Lucas was startled. “Jesus, Barry, eight million dollars?”
    “Eight million would buy us dominance in the field, Lucas. Nobody else would be close. Nobody else could get close.”
    “But, my God, that’s a lot of money,” Lucas said, flustered. “What if we fall on our butts?”
    “You hired me to keep us off our butts, and we are,” Hunt said. “We’ll stay that way. But that’s why we’ve got to meet, so I can explain it all.”
    “All right; but we’ll have to wait until after this Manette thing. And I’d like you maybe to come up with a couple of other options.”
    “I can think of one big one, right off the top of my head.”
    “What?”
    “Take the company public. It’s a little early for that, but if you wanted out, well…we could take the