All the facts fit-or I could make them fit-but I had to admit it was all circumstantial evidence at best. Frag it, like I do all too often, I was getting my exercise by jumping to conclusions. The "corp coup" theory answered some questions, but it left a couple of puzzling queries unanswered. Those queries continued to nag at me as the rusty bedsprings creaked under my back. Specifically, I couldn't stop thinking about the wide discrepancy between how Te Purewa had described his friend's political outlook and the way Scott had presented himself to me. When we'd seen the protesters outside Government House, he'd expressed no sympathy, no solidarity with them. Why, when according to Te Purewa he was a staunch Na Kama'aina/ALOHA supporter?

Could Barnard and Yamatetsu be in bed with ALOHA in some way?

I rolled over on the bed, and something prodded me in the hip. Not another bedspring, something else…

And with a bellow of "You're a fragging idiot!" I jolted bolt upright in bed and dug in my pocket. There it was, where I'd stuffed it unconsciously when the first Room-sweeper shot had pummeled my ear.

The message chip that Barnard had given me to pass to Tokudaiji.

My fingers were trembling slightly as I slipped the optical chip into the reader slot of the doss's ancient telecom. Trying not to let myself hope too hard, I ran a directory of the chip's contents. A single file-BARNARD.TXT. Pretty fragging self-descriptive, neh? I rattled in the command to copy the file under another name-in case there was some kind of protective virus that would delete the original if someone jacked with it-then tried to open the copy, not the original.

The screen filled with a flurry of graphical symbols- happy-faces, Greek characters, and such drek-and the speaker fired off a fusillade of beeps. Well, that wasn't so hard to predict, was it? The file was encrypted, encoded so a curious third party-like me-couldn't read it.

Okay. Now the question was, how "robust" was the encryption? There are thousands of ways of encrypting a file; maybe a dozen are in widespread use. Of this dozen, they range from theoretically unbreakable (practically speaking, there's no such thing as totally unbreakable encryption) all the way down to as insecure as a safe door sealed with nothing but masking tape. My next step would depend entirely on the kind of encryption Barnard had selected for his message.

(Now hold the phone a tick. Didn't the fact that there was a message at all tell me something? If the whole "message delivery" scam was just camouflage, why bother… But no, that didn't hang together. Barnard had no guarantee that I wouldn't scan the chip before delivering it. There had to be something there to set the mind of the Trojan horse at ease.)

I scrolled back up to the beginning of the encrypted file and examined the header-that string of bytes that basically tells decryption/display software, 'This is a message encrypted so, and here's where it begins," I connected my personal 'puter to the telecom's dataport, and let another one of Quincy's busy-beaver programs loose on the header.

The results showed up on the portable 'puter's small screen, and I cursed. Public-key encryption, with a 70-bit key code. It could have been worse… but not much.

I don't know how much you savvy public-key encryption, but it's a slick little system that's been around for nigh on eighty years now. Everyone who uses the system has two key codes (both 70 bits long, in this implementation, equivalent to a 22-digit number): a private key that he tells no one and a public key that he can tell all and sundry, or even publicize. The way the system is most commonly used today in 2056, if Adolf wants to send a secret message to Barney, Adolf encrypts the message using two keys: his own private key and Barney's public key. To decrypt the message, Barney uses two keys: his private key and Adolf's public key. Theoretically, only Barney can read the message, since only Barney knows his private key. (Well, duh.) As an added bonus, he knows it had to come from Adolf-or, at least, that it had to have been encrypted using Adolf's private key- otherwise it wouldn't have decrypted properly. Clear as mud? Good, then we'll continue.

The point is that, according to the cryptographic theories in fashion when the public-key system was developed and for thirty-odd years thereafter, it was theoretically impossible to crack a public-key system within the projected life span of the universe. Theories have changed, though-they tend to do that. Today, some bright sparks claim that using Eiji recursion and other bits of black art, it's possible to crack a 70-bit code in a couple of days of churning on a fast enough computer. Which is why few people bother with anything less than an 85-bit code as of 2056. (Should the fact that Barnard plumped for a less secure system tell me something? Or was I still reaching…?)

The upshot? It should be possible for a nova-hot cryptographer to bash through Barnard's security in somewhere between twenty-four and seventy-two hours. The problem?

I was fresh out of nova-hot cryptographers at the moment. With a sigh, I remembered some of the resources I had access to back in Seattle. Rosebud the dwarf, a quasi-legal technomancer with computing power equivalent to a MultiVAX installed right in her braincase. And, for bigger challenges, the ex-decker called Agarwal… no, he was dead now, wasn't he? Deeper sigh.

Here, out in the middle of the fragging Pacific? Nobody, chummer. Still deeper sigh. (Okay, okay, don't say it, I know: I could do it all virtually, spew it all through the matrix to whatever decrypt artist struck my fancy, all without leaving my doss, yattata yattata yattata. In principle, true. But when your life's on the line, chummer, sometimes you really want the hands-on control that only a face-to-face can give you. You scan? So get off my back.)

Moral of the story? I had to find the nova-hot cryptographer I needed, using the limited resources I had. Which meant, sad to say, Te Purewa, and that was about it. Deepest sigh.

The pseudo-Maori was better than nothing, but he definitely wasn't the drek-hot resource I'd hoped for. From the way Scott had introduced him, I'd figured him for a part-time fixer. What did they call them around here?-kalepa, that was it-with a stable of contacts. No banana on that one, chummerino. He was SINless, true, surviving by doing odd jobs and getting paid under the table… so by some people's measure, that made him a shadowrunner. He did know a few fixers, but only socially-or so I gathered. Translation? He was in the shadows, but not of them, if you see the distinction. He might have met some people with the skill-sets I was looking for, but he might not have known it.

Still, he was the only entree into the Honolulu shadow community I had at the moment. If I could figure a way of getting him to put the word out-while keeping it from the various and assorted hard-men who wanted to see me dead-I'd have to do so. That was going to take some thought… which, in turn, was going to require some sleep. My brain was soya-paste. I reached out to power down the telecom…

Then stopped. What the hell, I might as well check my blind maildrop while I was at the keyboard. It didn't seem particularly likely that Argent or Sharon Young had gotten back to me already, but it was worth a look. Using the nicely hidden back door that Quincy's gofer had installed in HTC's system, I accessed my datamail box and requested a directory listing.

Wonder of wonders, there was a message there: voice, not just text. No name-predictably, and the originator address was one of the many anonymous remailer services that thrive in the Carib League. Curious, I keyed playback.

"Mr. Montgomery, we need to talk."