Vertical Run by Joseph Garber Page A

sprawled across an entire floor, a quarter of which was given over to the sort of ponderousmainframes that most executives, Dave among them, thought of as dinosaurs.
    He was happy to see them now, though. The nicest thing about the monsters, he thought, was their finicky complexity The pampered giants demanded endless care and feeding. Legions of high paid technicians to coddle them. Custom power systems. Heavy-duty air conditioning. Endless rows of peripherals. Special monitoring and control equipment.
    And wire.
    Lots of wire. More wire than you can imagine. Large mainframe installations consume oodles of cabling. And you don’t simply hook these suckers up once and then forget about them. No way. You always have to fiddle with the cabling, reconnecting ports, plugs, and interfaces. Oh, the DASD’s connected to the mainframe, and the mainframes connected to the frontend, and the frontend’s connected to the multiplexer, now hear de word of de lawd!
    Which meant raised flooring. American Interdyne’s computer room, like that of every other big mainframe user, was built on a raised floor. The wires and the cables snaked beneath. The floor was paneled so that, as was required every so often, the computer staff could open it up and reconfigure the wiring.
    Dark, warm, and cozy. It really was quite peaceful under the floor.
    Dave needed the peace. Twice after leaving the Prime Minister’s Club he had almost bumped into members of the NYPD Bomb Squad. If they had seen him … tattered, filthy, stinking of vomit, his arms full of stolen food and supplies, and with a brace of exceptionally illicit pistols stuck in his belt …
    Would’ve had a little trouble talking your way out of that one, pal. Especially explaining the shootin’ irons
.
    The pistols were automatics. One belonged to Carlucci, and one to Ransome’s backup man. They were the same make and model, although what that make and model was, Dave could not say. Neither bore a manufacturer’s stamp nor a serial number. Both had lightweightpolymer fiber frames, factory silencers, laser sights, and staggered clips holding twenty-one rounds of ammunition.
    Those rounds were cause for reflection—TUGs, they were called, short for
Torpedo Universal Geschoss
. Dave had never known that pistol versions were manufactured. The bullets were hunting ammo, designed to penetrate deep, mushroom inside the body, rip a target’s heart out. A man hit in the torso with one of those rounds would die where he stood; even a grazing wound would render him immobile.
    Just above their safety levers, the pistols had slightly recessed slide bars. Dave guessed that pushing these slides forward converted the pistols to fully automatic operation, turning the pistols into handheld machine guns.
    Room brooms. Not quite your old Ingram MAC with the WerBell Sionics suppressor, but wicked enough. Thirty-eight auto, 130 grains for a muzzle velocity just a skosh below the sound barrier. Optimal silencing that way. Punches your target up with a bit more than three-hundred foot pounds of energy. Ouch
.
    Also ouch if the authorities ever caught a civilian carrying one. Dave suspected that even
thinking
about such a gun was a violation of the Sullivan Law.
    Which raises a few questions about where they come from—and the people who carry them
.
    Safe beneath the floor, his head pillowed on a nest of comfortable, rubber-clad 22 AWG wire, Dave tried to doze. His argumentative guardian angel wouldn’t let him. The issue was Helen, of course. Why had she materialized at the side of Ransome’s men? How had they persuaded her to turn on her own husband?
    Dave doubted that she’d betrayed him intentionally. Ransome’s people probably had told her some godawful lie
(or worse
, cautioned his inner voice,
some godawful truth)
to trick her into identifying him.
    What lie? he asked himself.
What truth?
the angel countered.
    He could find answers to neither question. Nor could he—not quite yet—allow