Chapter 6

The two wounded invaders were taken to the hospital, and the others were taken to the morgue. A police sergeant went with me to see why our guards had not reacted to the invasion. The answer was obvious when we got there—every one of the guards was dead. They had all been killed with knives while they slept.

Shit, it looks like we can do a better job of taking care of ourselves than can a bunch of professional guards. When the stores open, I'm going to beef up our intruder detection system and stop depending on outsiders for our protection. It reminds me of the old saying, "If you want something done right, do it yourself!"

I was sure with the right detection system and matching software, we could be as safe as it was possible to get in this crazy new world. Anyway, that was the route I was going to follow from now on.

I was wide awake, now, so I thought that I would see what could be done with that name Sun Li got from the wounded attacker. We only had a last name, Argentine, but it was rare enough that I figured that I could get something useful from a computer search. I got three hits, locally, though there were several more in other cities. Two hits were female and one was male, about what you would expect from the current preponderance of women in the population.

Maybe it was chauvinistic, but I assumed that the man was the more likely troublemaker. Oh, man, was I in for a shock. The man was a preacher in his 80s, so I set him aside and looked at the two women. Both women were listed as being business leaders and had no obvious connection with organized crime, so I was going to have to work a bit harder to pick one out.

Both women were in their 50s, so they fit into the age range I pictured for a crime lord. One woman had children, two boys, and one didn't, though neither was married. Neither of the children were living in this area, so I was not sure how to handle that. I admit to leaning toward the woman without children, though I can imagine the one with kids being able to run a criminal organization if she was strong enough.

It looked like I was going to have to sic my computer programs on them to see what I could come up with. Hell, I might as well do the preacher, too, since the normal lifespan nowadays was around 115, he could be considered young enough to be a crime lord, too. Dammit, it looked like all of my preconceived notions were going to get a shaking up.

Hey, here was something I had missed before, possibly because I had gone through the reports too hurriedly, the two women were sisters, and the preacher was their father. Now, things look a bit more likely. The preacher could be using his church as a cover, and the two women could be acting as his lieutenants. That would have given the one woman time to raise her kids.

When I search their computers, I'll keep the possibility of that relationship in mind. Oh ho, the preacher's church is one of our software customers, and all of the family's computers are protected by that one copy of the software. Do I detect a little software piracy going on here? The church bought a license for five linked computers, but I count at least 13 using that one piece of software. Well, it looks like we'll have to make a slight change in the software to make that sort of thing impossible. Oh, well, live and learn. It looks like I just paid for my search already, even if I have to look elsewhere for tonight's culprits.

All of our programs have a back door known only to me, so I was able to bypass the security protection of Keep Out and avoid Booby Trap. I dug into the preacher's computer all the way to the extreme of his most deeply buried files. At first, I didn't find anything. However, it dawned on me to look at some of his sermons with some really weird titles, like "September Morn," and found a list of brothels with their daily take. Another sermon, "Feed Thy Neighbor," covered his loan sharking operation, and so it went. He had the full gamut of illegal operations from alcohol to whoring. Actually, in this day and age, prostitution was not illegal, but failing to pay taxes on the income was about as illegal as anything could get. I knew about this, because I found the file containing his tax records; it was listed under "Render Unto Caesar."

OK, so now I had the head man's story, what about the daughters? I pick mommy first, for no particular reason, but her computer was a big problem. The reason was that she had everything poked in there helter-skelter. I couldn't believe that she was that disorganized, so she must have a hidden key to keep everything straight. Then I found it—every file name beginning with "c" was related to crime in some way. Most of her files had two word names, and the first letter of the second word was the pointer to the file's contents. For example, the file on gambling was labeled "cold grits," and the one for brothels was "cuddly bears." The scheme would work fine as long as there was no conflict in naming an operation, but that was her problem, not mine. Sorting the file names alphabetically made it easy to find the files I was looking for.

The second woman was a lot more systematic about the way she filed things. Her criminal activities were filed under the heading of "Hell." That one threw me for a moment until I realized that "Hell" equals "underworld." She was not so coy in her file names—I'm sure dad would have given her a bit of his version of hell if he had seen that she was blatant about her file names. "Alcohol, gambling, prostitution," and the one that interested me the most right now: "enforcement."

Under "enforcement," I found a series of files with names that I was sure were a person's initials. I looked at the file named "wa," and found several items which looked like dates. The last entry was for today's date. Under that listing were six names. I would have to check the cops' computer to see if those were the six hoods that attacked us tonight. If they were, I had all of the proof that I needed. I had no intention of waiting on the long and tedious arm of the law to deal with these people, I planned to deal with them myself. Now that I knew who they were, their days were numbered!

Before I shut the computer down, I fired off a memo to my office ordering a fix to all of our software which would eliminate the possibility of somebody using a program on more computers than they had paid for. I saw it as a trivial fix and outlined the changes I figured were needed. So much for that, now I could concentrate on my enemies in the mob.

I had talked to all of my wives immediately after the cops had left, but I went back to them now to fill them in on what I had learned and what I had planned for increased security for our home. They and the two boys were all in our big bed in the master bedroom. Nobody was asleep, including the boys, but they were lying quietly as if they had been waiting on me.

There were hugs and kisses all around, then I explained what I had in mind for our new security setup. I wanted to put in a 12-foot fence with motion detectors and infra-red sensors with overlapping fields of view. I planned to set them so that anything larger than a pigeon or squirrel would set off an alarm. The only way in through the fence would be a human gate activated by a palm print and a facial scan, both would be required, or a vehicle gate which required a specific coded radio signal to open the gate.

The code would be generated by a computer program which I would write that would be changed every time a car went out the gate. Of course, both gates could be opened by someone inside the house at the request of the person at the gate. Security cameras would be active on the gates at all times so that a person inside the house could see as well as talk to the person wanting entry. Probably, it would be necessary to hire someone to man the security system, but, at the moment, I was thinking of having that done simultaneously by someone in the house and someone at a remote location, and they both had to agree before the gate could be opened to admit a stranger.

I told them that I realized that this would be a pain in the ass to live with, but it was better than being attacked the way we were tonight. Everybody agreed to that, so that was settled.