Cyberbooks Read online

  While the bailiff read the title of the case and the charges, Carl studied the judge sitting up there above them all. His utterly bald head looked like a death's skull glaring down at them. Carl felt his easy confidence in the unassailable righteousness of the Cyberbooks project begin to melt away under the baleful glower of the judge's implacable eyes.

  "Motions?" asked the judge.

  One of the defense attorneys popped to his feet. They all looked so much alike that Carl thought they might be clones.

  "Move to dismiss," said the attorney in a clear, crisp voice. "This suit is without grounds and totally irrelevant. . . ."

  "Motion denied," snapped Justice Fish.

  The young lawyer looked surprised. He sat down.

  "Opening statements," the judge said. "Plaintiff?"

  The westerner gangled to his feet. He was tall and lean as a fencepost.

  "What we've got here," he drawled, "is a clear case of a deliberate, intentional—I might even say evil and pernicious—attempt to eliminate the jobs of a whole flock of hardworking, loyal, and faithful employees, and to substitute in their place a heartless, soulless, newfangled machine whose only purpose is to make money for the greedy employers of these poor and long-suffering working men and women."

  The lawyer's words shocked Carl. How could he describe Cyberbooks that way? It wasn't true. None of what he was saying was true.

  But then he saw the expression on the judge's face. A benign smile, such as saint might bestow on a nativity scene.

  We're in deep trouble, Carl belatedly realized.

  *

  Detective Lieutenant Jack Moriarty opened his eyes and saw a smooth, featureless expanse of pastel blue. I must have made it to heaven, he said to himself.

  Then he heard a faint humming sound, and a rhythmic beeping. He tried to turn his head and found that there was no difficulty with it. It's not heaven, he realized as he focused on a bank of electronic monitoring instruments, their screens showing a steady heartbeat and breathing rate. He felt slightly disappointed, immensely relieved. I'm in an intensive care ward. His detective's brain concluded it was St. Vincent's Hospital, in the heart of Greenwich Village.

  For an immeasurable length of time he lay in the bed unmoving, reliving in his mind those last few minutes in front of the liquor store. Whoever had attacked him, it was no random act of violence. The perpetrator knew who he was, and had followed him to the liquor store. Of that Moriarty was certain. It was the Retiree Murderer; the method of operation fit, and so did the fact that the victim—himself—owned a few shares of Tarantula Enterprises, Ltd.

  "Welcome back to the living!"

  Moriarty turned his head toward the heartily cheerful voice and saw a grossly overweight black man in a white doctor's smock with a day's stubble on his fleshy, wattled face. He's got more chins than the Chinatown phone directory, Moriarty said to himself.

  "I am Dr. Kildaire," said the medic in a lilting Jamaican accent. "And no jokes, if you please."

  For all his unlikely appearance, Kildaire was a first-rate physician. Moriarty learned that he had been clinically dead when the ambulance had brought him in.

  "A very rare poison, the kind you only see in the tropics. Distilled from the sap of a jungle flower known in Brazil as the Rita Hayworth orchid, for some obscure reason. Lucky for you I spent my military service in Central America; I bet I'm the only M.D. this side of the Panama Canal who'd recognize the symptoms of Rita Hayworth poisoning."

  They had restarted Moriarty's heart and detoxed his bloodstream. Brought him back to life, quite literally. Moriarty mumbled his embarrassed thanks, then asked how the poison was administered.

  "The murderer jabbed you with a sharp instrument, right between your shoulder blades. Might have been a needle coated with the toxin. Might even have been a thorn from the plant itself. Did you get a look at him?"

  Moriarty closed his eyes briefly and relived the scene. Yes, the sharp pain in his back. He was falling to the sidewalk—no, the entryway of the liquor store. It was all going black. But he had turned his head to glance over his shoulder and he saw a man in a blue trenchcoat, shapeless brimmed hat pulled down low, umbrella in one hand. For the barest instant he had looked into the eyes of his murderer.

  "I saw him," Moriarty said. "I'd know him if I see him again. I'd know those eyes of his anywhere."

  *

  In all honesty, Weldon W. Weldon had not expected to be stabbed in the back. He sat in his powered wheelchair at the head of the long gleaming conference table and listened with growing incredulity to Curtis Hawks's tirade.

  ". . . and with all due respect," Hawks was telling the board of directors, the blistering acid of scalding irony dripping from his words, "in this time of crisis we need a CEO who is physically and mentally sharp enough to repel the pirates who are trying to take over this corporation."

  Hawks was pacing up and down the length of the long polished table, forcing the directors who sat on that side of it to turn in their chairs to follow him. The head of Webb Press was wearing a military-style suit vaguely reminiscent of a World War II general named Patton. Even down to his glossy calf-length cavalry boots and the fake ivory-handled revolvers buckled to his waddling hips.

  "Snotty ungrateful sonofabitch," Weldon muttered to himself. I streamline his operation for him, get Webb Press ready to shift over to electronic publishing, and he rewards me with this stab in the back.

  ". . . and to show you just what kind of senility we're dealing with here"—Hawks had raised his voice to a near shout—"let me introduce you to the vaunted efficiency expert that was foisted on me, the superbrain who was given carte blanche by our beloved CEO to wipe out most of Webb Press's staff and move our base of operations out of Manhattan altogether!"

  He snapped his fingers, and the flunky sitting next to the conference room's only entrance jumped to his feet and opened the leather-padded door. There was a slight commotion in the outer room, and then two burly men in white uniforms led in Gunther Axhelm, who was securely wrapped in a straitjacket.

  Gasps went around the long conference table. Cigars fell out of hanging mouths. Pouchy eyes widened. They all knew Axhelm, by reputation if nothing else. They knew of his Prussian precision and the ruthless thoroughness of this operations. What they now saw was a wild man, red-rimmed eyes and drooling maniacal grin, straitjacket stained with spittle, baggy gray hospital drawers and bare feet. Even his crew-cut blond hair seemed askew.

  "This is the result of breathing too much of the glue that he himself demanded we use in binding our books, instead of the glue we normally used. It has cost Webb Press roughly a hundred million dollars; it's cost Gunther Axhelm his sanity."

  Of course, Hawks had made certain that Axhelm had all the glue he wanted to sniff in the private hospital where he had stashed the loopy Axe. That, and a steady diet of Gene Kelly videos.

  Axhelm suddenly shouldered free of his two handlers and, with a deranged shriek, ran to the conference table and jumped atop it. Two directors tumbled backwards in their chairs and fell gracelessly to the floor. The others backed away in sudden fright.

  But Gunther Axhelm meant them no harm. In his bare feet he capered along the table in a mad parody of tap dancing, the strap ends of his straitjacket flapping away, singing at the top of his lungs in a decidedly Teutonic accent, "Be a clown, be a clown, all the world loves a clown. . . ."

  THE WRITER

  In his miserable roach-infested room in the welfare hotel, the Writer pored over the current issue of Publishers Weekly that he had stolen from the local branch of the public library.

  The State had stepped in and taken charge of his life. When the drugged-out staff of the warehouse had tried to burn the building down (with materials and helpful instructions from the management, incidentally), the apparatus of the State wheeled itself up in the form of (in order of appearance) Fire Department, Police Department, Bureau of Drug Enforcement, the Public Defender's Office, Department of Rehabilitation, Bureau of Une
mployment, and the welfare offices of the state of New Jersey and the city of New York, borough of Queens.

  Now he lived in a crumbling welfare hotel in Queens, detoxified, unemployed, and seething with an anger that seemed to grow hotter and deeper with every passing useless day.

  But now it all focused down to a single point in space and time. For in his trembling hands he saw how and why it would all come together.

  BUNKER SALES FORCE SUIT

  OPENS IN FEDERAL COURT

  The headline in Publishers Weekly caught his eye. Bunker Books. They were in a courtroom. All of them. The publisher, the editors. Out there in a public courtroom, where any member of the public could come in and see them, face to face.

  With an immense effort of will, the Writer forced his hands to stop trembling so he could read the entire article and learn exactly where they would be and when.

  As he finished reading, he looked up and saw a single ray of light shining through the filth that covered the room's only window. The shaft was blood red. Sunset.

  The Writer smiled. Where can I get a gun? he asked himself.

  TWENTY-ONE

  It was not easy being the son of Pandro T. Bunker. Junior sat in the last row of the half-empty courtroom, listening with only half his attention to the testimony being given up on the witness stand. No one sat near him; he had the entire pew of seats to himself. None of the sales people in the audience wanted to be seen sitting near the son of the publisher. And all of his dad's people, including his mom, were up in the front.

  But Junior smiled to himself. They all think I'm just the owner's son, he told himself. They all think I'm a spoiled brat who doesn't know nothing and gets everything handed to him on a silver tray. I'll show them. I'll show them all. Even Mom and Dad.

  Junior's work in the office, as a special assistant to the publisher, had not been terribly successful. Most of the editors either distrusted him as a snoop for his parents or belittled his intelligence. After weeks of being alternately ignored and avoided, he transferred to the sales department just in time for Woody's lawsuit to explode in everybody's face. Naturally, the sales people regarded him as a pariah.

  But Junior leaned back on the hard wooden bench of the courtroom and grinned openly. I'm smarter than they think. I'm smarter than any of them.

  Up on the witness stand, Woody Baloney was being questioned by the cowboy lawyer the sales department had brought in from Colorado.

  "And what, in your professional estimation, will be the result of the Cyberbooks program?" asked the cowboy, his weathered, crinkle-eyed face looking serious and concerned.

  "The result?" Woody said, glancing at the judge. "We'll all be tossed out on our butts, that's what the result will be!"

  "Objection!" shouted three of the five defense clones in unison.

  "Overruled," snapped the judge. "The witness will continue."

  The lawyer prompted, "So this electronic book gadget, this . . . thing they call Cyberbooks, will result in the whole sales force being laid off?"

  "That's right," said Woody.

  "In your professional opinion," the lawyer amended.

  "Uh-huh."

  Junior slouched farther on the hard wooden pew. Mom and Dad have pinned everything they've got on this Cyberbooks idea, and the sales force is going to stop it cold. Then what happens? They can't fire Woody or anybody else; they'll be back in court before you could say "prejudice." They won't be able to work with Woody or the rest of the sales force; too much hard feeling.

  No, Junior concluded, the company's doomed. Finished. Mom and Dad are going down the tubes.

  Which only made him smile more. Because I've been smart enough to take the money I have and invest it wisely. In one of the biggest multinational, diversified corporations in the world. My fortune isn't going to depend on some crazy invention, or on a lawsuit by my own employees.

  Two days earlier, P. T. Bunker, Jr., had taken every penny in his trust fund and sunk it into Tarantula Enterprises (Ltd.). He had not merely acted on his own, nor did he trust a stockbroker with his money. Junior had first bought the latest computer investment program, and used his own office machine to examine all the various possibilities of the stock market.

  Tarantula Enterprises was a great investment, the computer had told him. In order to fight off an unfriendly takeover bid, Tarantula was buying its own stock back at inflated prices. Although this had removed most of the stock from the open market and made the price for Tarantula shares artificially high, the computer program predicted that the price would go even higher as the takeover battle escalated. So Junior instructed his computer to automatically buy whatever Tarantula stock was available, and to keep on buying it until he told it to stop.

  Glowing with self-satisfied pride, he told himself that he could even retire right now and just live on the dividends.

  *

  Lt. Moriarty, meanwhile, was causing no end of anguish among the staff tending the intensive care unit at St. Vincent's Hospital.

  The usual routine was to keep ICU patients calm and quiet, sedated if necessary. Usually such patients were so sick or incapacitated by trauma that there was little trouble with them. Generally the intensive care ward looked somewhat like a morgue, except for the constant beepings and hums of monitoring equipment. Except when there was an emergency, and then a team of frantic doctors and nurses shouted and yelled at one another, dragged in all sorts of heavy equipment, and even pounded on the poor patient as if beating the wretch would force him or her to get better.

  No one knew how many times a screaming emergency at bed A had resulted in heart failure at bed B. No one dared even to think about it.

  Moriarty was different, though. All the monitors showed that he was in fine fettle, and since he had been in the hospital less than twenty-four hours, the nurses could not even claim that he was too weak to be allowed to get out of bed. But the hospital rules were ironclad: no one got out of the intensive care ward until their physician had okayed a transfer or release—and his insurance company had initiated payment for the bill.

  Moriarty insisted that he was detoxed and feeling fine. They had removed the IV from his arm; the only wires connected to him were sensor probes pasted to various portions of his epidermis. He wanted out. But Dr. Kildaire was out for the day; he would not return until the midnight shift started. And the accounting department, its computer merrily tabulating hourly charges, absolutely refused to discharge a patient whose insurance was provided by the city.

  Threatening bodily harm and a police investigation produced only partial results. The head ICU nurse, a slim Argentinean with a will of tempered steel, at last agreed to allow Moriarty to sit up and use a laptop computer.

  "If you stay quiet and do not disturb the other patients," she added as her final part of the bargain.

  Moriarty reluctantly agreed. He had to check out a thousand ideas that were buzzing through his head, and he needed access to the NYPD computer files to do it. The laptop was not as good as his own trusty office machine, but it was better than nothing.

  For hours he tapped at its almost silent keys and examined the data flowing across the eerily blood-red plasma discharge screen. Yes, all of the victims had indeed been Tarantula stock owners; most of them had owned shares for years, decades. But he himself had only recently purchased a few shares. So new owners were just as vulnerable to the Retiree Murderer as old ones. The murders had nothing to do with being retired, the victims were owners of Tarantula stock who lived in New York.

  Which meant that the murderer was connected in some way to Tarantula. And lived in New York. Or close enough to commute into town to commit the murders.

  Pecking away at the keyboard, Moriarty used special police codes to gain access to the New York Stock Exchange files. What happened to the stock of the murder victims? Who was buying the shares?

  It was impossible to trace the shares one for one, but there was a buyer for the shares of the murder victims. Within weeks after each murder, the
victim's shares were sold—and bought immediately. But by whom? Tarantula shares were traded by the thousands every day of the week. Who was buying the shares of the murder victims?

  For hours that question stumped Moriarty. Then he got an inspiration. He asked the NYSE computer if any one particular individual person was acquiring shares of Tarantula on a regular basis.

  The stock exchange computer regarded corporations as individual persons, and gave Moriarty a long list of buyers that included corporations headquartered in New York, Tokyo, Messina, and elsewhere. It was almost entirely corporations, rather than human beings, who were regularly buying Tarantula stock.

  Again Moriarty stared at a blank wall. But slowly it dawned on him that Tarantula Enterprises (Ltd.) was itself one of the largest regular buyers of its own stock. The corporation was buying back its stock wherever and whenever it could. Not an uncommon tactic when a company was trying to fend off an unfriendly takeover, and if Moriarty read the data correctly, Tarantula was lighting savagely to beat off a takeover attempt by a Sicilian outfit.

  The Mob? Moriarty asked himself. Could be.

  Then could it be the Mob that is knocking off these little stockholders and buying their shares?

  Not likely, he concluded. The Mafia-owned corporations were buying Tarantula stock in big lots, tens of thousands of shares. Not the onesey-twoseys that the Retiree Murder victims had owned. Moreover, there hadn't been much selling to the Mobsters over the past several months. Tarantula was buying back its own stock pretty successfully and preventing the Mafia from gaining a controlling interest.

  So who's buying the murder victims' stock? Moriarty asked himself for the hundredth time that afternoon. The computer could not tell him.

  It takes two talents to be a good detective: the ability to glean information where others see nothing, and the ability to piece together bits of information in ways that no one else would think of. Perspiration and inspiration, Moriarty called the two.