Montezuma Strip by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online

immediately, resorting to furious threats
     when Cardenas refused. Gradually they gave up and left him alone again. They’d get their hands on Noschek’s last innovation
     soon enough.
    If it was Vladimir Noschek’s last innovation, Cardenas thought.
    There was also the possibility that the dual tactical-numb screen wasn’t the work of Noschek at all, that it had been set
     up by whoever had vacuumed him. The psychomorph could have been inserted specifically to deal with trackers like Angel Cardenas.
     Or it could be a false lead spectacular enough to divert any probers from the real answers.
    Answers hell. He wasn’t sure he knew the right questions yet.
    They’d find them.
    First he needed to know how a max psychomorph had been inserted into a conventional industrial box. Hypatia confirmed his
     suspicions about the requisite parameters.
    “If you saw what you say you saw, then Noschek or whoeverbuilt the insert needed a lot more crunch than Parabas employs here in Agua Pri.”
    “How do you know how much crunch Parabas has here?”
    “It gets around. No reason to keep it a deep dark secret.”
    “Assuming for the sake of discussion that it’s Noschek’s toy we’re dealing with, could he have drawn on crunch from the home
     office?”
    “Possible, but considering the distance it would’ve been mighty risky. Would make more sense to borrow locally.”
    “How much would he have had to steal?”
    “Based on what you describe I’d say he would’ve needed access to at least one Cray-IBM.”
    “GenDyne?”
    She laughed. “That’s more crunch than our whole installation would use in a year. No way. Though I’d love to have the chance
     to play with one.”
    “So who on the Strip uses a Cribm?”
    “Beats hell out of me, Angel. You’re the cop. You find out.”
    He did. Fast, using Parabas’s circuits to access the major utility files for the whole Southwest Region in Elpaso Juarez.
     His opto police security clearance let him cut through normal layers of bureaucratic infrastructure like a scalpel through
     collagen.
    “Sony-Digital,” he finally told her as the records flashed on screen. The wall’s audio checked his pronunciation. “Telefunken.
     Fordmatsu. That’s everybody.”
    She stared at the holoed info. “What now?”
    “We find out who’s been losing crunch—if we can.”
    They could. Word of what had happened at GenDyne and Parabas had made the corporate rounds. As soon as Cardenas identified
     himself and the case he was working on they had plenty of cooperation.
    It was Fordmatsu. Their own Security was unaware of the theft, much less its extent, so cleverly had it been carried out.
     Cardenas sourced it, though. He didn’t bother to inform them.He was no accountant and he didn’t want anybody sponging around until he’d finished what he’d come to Agua Pri for. Though
     no expert, he knew enough to admire the skill that had been at work in Fordmatsu’s box. Everything had been done during off
     hours and painstakingly compensated for throughout the crunchlines. Neat.
    “How much?” Hypatia asked him.
    “Can’t tell for sure. Hard to total, the way it’s tucked in here and there. Weeks worth. Maybe months.”
    She stared at him. “A Cribm can crunch trillions of bytes a second. I can’t think of a problem it couldn’t solve inside an
     hour. There isn’t anything that needs days of that kind of crunch, let alone months.”
    “Somebody needed it.” He rose from behind the desk. “Come on.”
    “Where are we going?”
    “Back to GenDyne. There are some sequences I ran here I want to rerun on Crescent’s wall.”
    “What about the psychomorph?”
    He put an arm around her shoulders. She didn’t shrug it off. “I’m going to endrun that sucker so slick it won’t have time
     to squeal.”
    It was all there in Crescent’s Mermaid. If he hadn’t tripped the psychomorph in Noschek’s storage, they never would have found
     it. He leaned back in the dead man’s