an ex-COO, he was in a wheelchair, his booming voice reduced to a thin creak.
“He wasn’t always old. Years ago he used to run a group of people who did nothing but fix things that couldn’t be fixed by any other means. They carried guns, false ID, everything.”
“You’re kidding!”
“From what Nadia’s journal says it sounds like they did anything necessary: spread disinformation, stole things, sabotaged rivals’ plants. It was just getting interesting when Greta came on the net and kicked me out of the files.”
“Greta?” Lore is astounded. “I thought she was in Hangzhou or somewhere.”
“Zhejiang. She was just on the net, I guess. Anyway, she cut me out of those files clean as a whistle. Said little brothers who meddled in people’s private business came to regret it. Then she was gone. And when I tried to get back in, the files were deleted. Or she’d hidden them somewhere.”
Lore shakes her head. There is no point trying to figure out Greta’s motives; she has always been unfathomable. Instead, Lore tries to imagine what it would be like to have Jerome Gladby’s clandestine power. “Do you think that old man used to run around like a commando, pockets stuffed with knives and earwigging bugs?”
They laugh. “I bet all he did was sit in a secret room somewhere and issue coded orders over the net.”
“Hey, maybe they took pictures of rival CEOs beating their dogs and blackmailed them?”
“Or planted government information in their bags and had them arrested by the police. . .”
“Or faked up footage of them doing things with children. . .”
They amuse themselves for nearly an hour with imaginary exploits that grow more outrageous. They laugh until Lore’s stomach hurts.
She is still grinning when Oster finally emerges from his net conference and they go for a walk together along the beach. He rubs his eyes every now and again, and sighs.
“Everything go all right?”
“Mostly. But they’ve got some new hard-line government in power who want to throw away all international protocol and claim all foreign assets as their own, especially intellectual property.”
“But you fixed it?”
“I think so. We’ve formed a loose coalition with other corporations—especially publishers and the entertainment business, who get all their money from —and we hope that the threat of massive sanctions will cool the new government’s ardor.”
The sun is almost setting. Lore picks up a piece of driftwood and throws it as far into the reddening sea as she can. “But if that doesn’t work you could always send in a couple of assassins, right?” she asks as they resume walking.
“Now there’s a nice thought. It would solve a lot of problems.”
Lore wipes sandy hands down her shorts. “Then why don’t you? I don’t mean actually kill people, but, you know, make sure that things don’t go quite right with, oh, I don’t know, the national power system or something.”
Oster laughs as they walk, and Lore laughs along with him at first, but then she gets more serious.
“Is it true? I mean, could you do that if you wanted?”
He stops, looks at her closely. “Where on earth did you get that idea?”
“Tok was telling me about Jerome’s old group.”
Oster looks nonplussed. “But that group was shut down years ago, in my mother’s day.”
“So it did exist?”
“Yes. But it doesn’t anymore, at least not in that form, anyhow. Now it’s a legitimate troubleshooting team.”
They walk on some more. A cormorant dives into a wave. “So why was it shut down in the first place?”
“It got out of hand.”
Lore, imagination running riot, pictures grim men and women with drawn guns. “I don’t suppose they liked that. Did they shoot anyone?”
Oster bursts out laughing. “Sometimes I forget you’re only twelve.” He ruffles her hair. She smoothes it back patiently. “Look, let’s sit down a minute.” They find an old, half-buried log and sit facing the sea. “The lubricant behind all corporate machinery is money. My mother didn’t have to use threats. She didn’t have to fire anyone. All she did was reduce the funding for the group and tighten their accounting methods. Illegal operations are very expensive: matériel is purchased on the black market, bribes have to be made in the right places, cleanup operations are time-consuming and delicate. They simply can’t work without lots of liquid cash. No funds, no operation. So those who missed the glamour days went away and found some other kind of work, and those who are left have the souls of accountants. All that double-dealing stuff is history.”