Runaway Heart by Stephen J. Cannell Page A

'butterfly.' It's a DBA operating in
Michigan, and they've gone all over the country spending money on saving the
monarch. I had it on standby, just in case. By the way, you're the
secretary-treasurer, and you are looking at the president and founding
partner."
          "A sham foundation?" she said, arching her brow at him.
          "Honey, it's the best we've got. It's going to pass muster. We'll
just amend the plaintiff list with this motion before court tomorrow." He
ripped a page from his yellow pad and handed it to her. She scanned it. It was
in his curlycue,
hard-to-decipher script. Only Susan and Leona Mae Johnson, his secretary back
in D.C., had ever successfully translated an entire page. She folded it and put
it into her purse.
          "Dad, if Judge King finds out. . ."
          "How is Judge King gonna find out? Three people know about it. You,
me, and Leona Mae, and unless you guys blow me in, we're cool."
          She nodded, then turned off his bed lamp. "I love you, Daddy."
          "I love you, too, sweetheart. I count on you more than you
know."
          Then she leaned down and kissed him, holding her father close to her,
almost afraid to let go. His heart was beating with hers as she pressed against
his chest, strangely in rhythm, his electronically beeping from the bedside
monitor while hers was frightened about the future.
          She closed her eyes as she hugged him.
          Beep. . . beep. . . beep. Thump. . . thump. . . thump.
          His was the heart of a lion.
     
     
     
     
     
SEVEN
     
    T he phone rang, pulling Roland up with a
start. Where was he? His one-bedroom apartment in D.C. ? His cot at the
Institute for Planetary Justice? Then he landed back in time and place. He
was in San Fran, asleep in the rectal monstrosity. It was the middle of the
night and he was ready to do battle with the Gen-A-Tec cyber-shit who kavorked
him that afternoon. He fumbled the phone off the hook. "Your wakeup
call," the operator said.
          "Bitchin'." Roland hung up, got out of bed, and went into the
bathroom where he splashed cold water on his face, then returned to his
computer and turned it on. He looked down at his weapon of choice while it
booted up. With this little twenty-four-ounce spaceship he could fly anywhere
in the universe, visit secure sites, soar above it all—a bird of prey searching
for rabbits in the system.
          Once his laptop was up he grabbed a Coke out of the minibar and went to
work. He logged into the Gen-A-Tec mainframe using the stolen security codes
that his line-sniffer had lifted from Jack Sasson's log-on. In seconds he was
accepted and welcomed into the real Gen-A-Tec computer system.
          "Eat my shorts," Roland said to his screen as he got in.
          The rest was cake.
          He found the real reshcorn file
and downloaded it, scanning as it copied to the zip disk. Everything Herman
wanted was in there: the almost total lack of testing Gen-A-Tec had done; the
callous disregard for collateral damage that the genetically enhanced corn
might wreak with its
    self-generated pesticides. He pulled up
the EPA and FDA reports. Those agencies had really done a piss-poor job of
vetting this Frankenfood. The whole program had been fast-tracked by the
Department of Agriculture, probably because of Gen-A-Tec's strong-arm lobbying
tactics.
          Roland downloaded the file on human testing, which consisted of not one
single test, but just a bunch of scientific opinion. Then he went on a search
to find out what the fuck DARPA had to do with this private-sector lab. He
started back in e-mail and screened the executive boxes. Several e-mails
cropped up with DARPA in them. He read them all and finally saw the same
fragment of the message he had seen in the shadow system:
     
    We should put in
a request for additional funding before darpa closes its budget in the fall.
     
          Below the message were listed the Gen-A-Tec