I looked up to find Ray sulking. “What?”
“Can we stop it with the names?” he demanded.
“I didn’t call you any names.”
“What about ‘weasel’? That supposed to be complimentary?”
“It was more of an expression.”
“And ‘butthead’?”
“That was you. You called yourself—” I shut my eyes. “Never mind. Just tell me what happened.”
“What you think happened?” he asked grumpily. “I kept cutting portals and making deals with the people I found on the other end.”
“And nobody ever noticed anything? None of those other smugglers ever saw a bunch of people lugging out truckloads full of suspicious-looking merchandise right across the street from them?”
“Well, sure, they might have. If we’d been dumb enough to be across the street.”
“But you just said—”
“I said I had to be near their portal to hack into it. I didn’t say I had to stay there.”
“Then how did you—” I stopped. Because a horrible suspicion had just formed. A really, really horrible suspicion. But I had to be wrong. I had to be. Because not even Ray would have.…Would he?
“Ray,” I said carefully. “How did you get the stuff out?”
He looked up from contemplating his navel or whatever he’d been doing, and blinked at me. “Same way I got it in. Some masters have more guys, you know? So they can patrol more. I couldn’t be seen moving a lot of stuff right by where they had a portal. These guys aren’t too bright, most of ’em anyway, but they are paranoid. If they caught me with a bunch of stuff near their gate, they might have gotten suspicious.”
“So…”
“So sometimes I had to link another portal to the first one,” he said, oh so reasonably. “So I could cut into another line and divert the stuff away from the area.”
“You cut a hack, from the hack you’d just made, into another portal?” I asked, sure I’d gotten it wrong.
“Yeah,” he said brightly. “Or sometimes two, because it’s like the subway, every train isn’t going where you need. But link enough of ’em, and sooner or later—”
“Link enough of them? How many of the portals in Manhattan have you drawn into this bastardized system of yours?”
“I don’t know. Maybe half?”
“Half?” I stared at him in disbelief.
“Well, it’s not like I used all of ’em, but like I said, it wasn’t always possible to know where a portal was going when I hacked into it. There was a certain amount of trial and error in—”
“Does the Senate know?” I interrupted.
“Of course they do. I mean, I had to tell ’em, right? They were planning to blow up the illegal portals, but some of them were linked to legal ones through some of my hacks, and that could have caused…oh, a lot of problems. I mean, can you see their faces if they’d blown up one of theirs?”
I didn’t even react to that. I wasn’t even surprised anymore. Maybe I was going numb.
I drained the rest of my beer.
“You hacked into the Senate’s portals,” I said flatly.
“Well, it wasn’t like I was using their gateways, was it?” he said, frowning. Like he’d expected to be patted on the back for his ingenuity, and all he was getting was dull-eyed horror. “They got so many protections on those things, a guy’d have to be crazy to try to break in. And even say you did, whaddya got? A bunch of pissed-off masters who’ll end you before you can blink. And I didn’t need their gateways anyway, just some of the space in between. You know, to bridge the gap between some of my other lines.”
I just stared at him for a moment, actually speechless. “Why are you still alive?” I finally demanded.