The Empress File

his front lawn, watching them. They found the boy in the cinders and sandbabies next to the tracks, facedown. One bullet punched through his neck; a second took him in the spine between his shoulder blades; a third caught him a little lower and to the left, maybe nicking a lung. Good shooting. The boy must have lived for just a second after hewent down, Tud thought, because his mouth was full of dirt and cinders, as if he’d bitten into the earth as he died.
    The two officers looked down at him for a minute, and then Tud squatted and dumped the bag the kid had been carrying. Out fell a two-quart carton of chocolate rocky road, steaming in the muggy night air. They both looked at it for a long beat. Then Tud turned his sad hound dog eyes up to his partner.
    “Goddamn it, Billy Lee,” he said, shaking his head. “You went and shot yourself the wrong nigger.”

T HE COMPUTER ALARM went off at four in the morning. When it started buzzing, I’d been asleep for half an hour. The alarm sounds like an off-the-hook telephone, and it took a minute to penetrate.
    “Jap phone?” Chaminade Loan made a bump under the sheet across the bed. Her voice grated like old rust.
    “Zwat?”
    “Jap phone?”
    “Yeah.” The cat was curled at the foot of the bed and looked up as I rolled out and padded down the hall toward the front room. When I passed the study door, a message was running down the blue screen of the Amiga 3000, and I realized I was hearing the computer alarm, not the phone. A dozen small computers and dumb terminals are scattered around the study, three or four of them plugged in at any one time. Several people knew how to call and dump data to theAmiga’s memory. Only one knew how to tap the alarm.
    Bobby Duchamps.
    Bobby wouldn’t be calling to chat. The alarm sounded as soon as the data came in and repeated one minute out of every five until I turned it off. The message on the screen was straightforward. After the sign-on stuff, it said:
    Call Now.
    When Bobby said now, he meant
now
. As far as I know, he sits in front of a computer around the clock; Bobby doesn’t have a workday and always answered personally when I called his private board.
    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 Musée d’Art Moderne in Liège. 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 physicalproblem. 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