The Fool's Run

system in three months, and we can, we’re back in the ball game.”
    “What’s the other thing you want?” I asked.
    “Revenge,” he said, his killer’s eyes glittering in the dying light. “I want revenge on the bastards who stole my baby.”

Chapter 4
    I SPENT THE night in a Chicago hotel, watching a bad movie about teenagers and thinking over the job proposition. Anshiser was a maniac, of course. He knew what he was doing, but he was clinging to a thin edge of control, like a grunt with battle fatigue. Would a crisis crack the control, or harden it? It could go either way. Maggie was something else. She was precise, measured, cool. She knew what she was doing, and she was nowhere near the edge. She apparently agreed with Anshiser. Dillon was a cipher.
    Their proposition was not entirely novel. There have been several hushed-up incidents in which businesses were damaged by computer attacks. Most of the time, the object of the attack was theft or embezzlement, and the damage was an unintentional byproduct.
    A major railroad was burned when a group of techno-thieves, as they were called in the FBI report, began shuffling and relabeling boxcars. The intent was to send certain cars, loaded with high-value consumer items like televisions and stereos, to remote sidings, where the gang would crack the cars, load the loot onto trucks, and haul it away. The most serious damage came when they tried to cover their tracks. Three thousand boxcars were mislabeled and sent to the wrong destinations. The result was chaos. Perishable products rotted, time-critical shipments were late. It cost the railroad millions to straighten out.
    In a few of the known raids, the damage was intentional. In every case, though, the attacks were from the inside—guerrilla hits by employees against their own company. Anshiser’s proposition was altogether different. He was proposing a war, an act of naked aggression, an attack to the death by one corporation on another. As far as I knew, there had never been anything like it. A war that was business by other means, to paraphrase a famous Prussian.
     
    MAGGIE CALLED AT eight o’clock.
    “Jesus,” I said with a yawn. “When you said morning, I thought you meant like eleven. Where are you?”
    “Downstairs,” she said briskly. “I have three warm bagels, a small cup of cream cheese, a plastic knife, two Styrofoam cups of coffee, and your room number. What do you think?”
    She looked like she’d been up for hours. She came in, sat in one of the chairs, and ate one of the bagels while she watched me finish the other two.
    “You look like you’ve been dragged through hell by the ankles,” she said. “Any thoughts yet?”
    “It will take a while,” I said, scratching my day-old beard. “I wonder about Anshiser.”
    “If he’s crazy?”
    “I might have picked a different word.”
    “But that’s what you want to know,” she said. “The answer is, no, he is not crazy. He is extremely anxious. This might be our last card. If we’re going to play it, we have to do it soon. In six weeks, or two months, it will be too late.”
    “Hmph.” I drank the last of my coffee. “Let me shave and take a shower, and we can get out of here.”
    She came and leaned on the bathroom door-jamb while I shaved, still nibbling on her first bagel. “I used to watch my father shave when I was a little girl,” she said as I wiped the last of the shaving cream off my face.
    “You watch your father take a shower, too?” I asked.
    “Of course not.” A tiny frown.
    “Well, if you’ll move your elbow, I’ll shut the door and spare you the experience,” I said, and she grinned and moved off across the room.

    THE ANSHISER RESEARCH plant was somewhere out by O’Hare, a nondescript, modernoid building. It looked, as somebody clever once said, like the box the building should have come in. The director didn’t quite slaver over Maggie’s hand, but he personally took us down to the laboratory level, where a String package was being assembled.
    The lab looked like the world’s cleanest machine shop, with concrete floors and a lot of noise. The String package was in a back room. Entry was through three sets of glass doors, and for the last two the director needed different-colored key cards.
    String was the size of a console television. It was mounted on a testing gyro that allowed it to swivel freely. There was nothing tidy about it. Wires and electronics boards stuck out at all angles. There