Virtual Vandals nfe-1

by Tom Clancy

  Matt realized his course was taking him to a modest-looking structure with a porch and pillars. It looked strangely familiar. Then Matt recognized it. He was flying toward a simplified version of Mount Vernon, George Washington’s eighteenth-century plantation house.

  But he wasn’t headed for a door or window. Matt was flying toward a blank wall.

  A little late, he found himself remembering that Cat’s gang could use virtual technology to hurt people.

  Nice going, Matt thought. They could crash me out right in front of Caitlin’s house. After the stunts I pulled last night, who’s going to believe me when I try to explain.

  At the last moment, Matt jerked to a stop so sudden, it would have flung his stomach up to his throat in real life. As it was, he found himself staring at a neon-white wall.

  Okay, Matt thought. Obviously I’m supposed to do something. But what?

  Cat hadn’t given him a password. Unless…

  He extended the virtual hand that held Cat’s earring/doohickey. The fist sank into the wall — and so did Matt.

  A moment later, he found himself in a veeyar — a perfectly flat landscape patterned like a checkerboard, vanishing off into the distance. Fluffy clouds passed overhead, and in between, weird twisted constructs floated in midair.

  Interesting, Matt thought, looking around. Lots of money went into this. He recognized one of the flying constructs as a compressed version of a very expensive virtual game. But the veeyar didn’t show much in the way of programming genius. Matt’s own veeyar had more personally coded touches. Most important, there was one serious lack. Caitlin Corrigan was nowhere to be seen.

  Matt was just about to pull out when the girl suddenly appeared. This was a Caitlin he’d never seen before. She wore shorts and a T-shirt. Her blond hair was disheveled, held back by a terry-cloth band, and her face was sweaty.

  “I was in the gym when the beeper went off,” Caitlin began. Then she halted as she took in Matt’s proxy figure. “Well,” she said. “You’re seeing me at my worst. The least you could do is drop that stupid proxy and let me know who you are.”

  “I’m touched that you didn’t proxy up when you knew I was here,” Matt replied. “But I had to work to track you down, and it’s only fair that you work a little to find me.”

  “Who are you?” Cat burst out. “Why are you popping up around me?”

  “I’m interested in you…and your friends…and what the four of you did in Camden Yards.”

  Caitlin’s face went white. “I–I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she stammered.

  “Caitlin, Caitlin, you might like to proxy up as actresses, but you’re no actress yourself. Your face just gave you away.”

  Caitlin bit her lip, and Matt went on. “Hey, I’m not here to arrest you. I’m a kid, not a cop. You saw what I could do at Lara’s party. But what you guys can do — I’m way impressed. I’d like to meet the masters, that’s all.”

  Cat Corrigan looked at him in silence for a long moment. Then she gave a jerky nod. “All right. I’ll see what I can do. Hang here. I’ve got to talk to the others first.”

  She vanished, leaving Matt alone in her big rich kid’s playground. He walked around, playing tourist, checking out the floating constructs. They were all various expensive programs, big programs, cleverly compressed for instant use.

  Biggest bunch of icons I ever saw, Matt thought, a little disappointed. The whole veeyar was just a standard setup, pricey, but lacking any sense of personal involvement. Cat hadn’t tried to customize it to her own personality at all.

  She must be almost computer-illiterate, Matt thought. How did she get involved with the virtual vandals at all?

  He became sharply aware that time was passing. What was Caitlin doing? Had she decided to freshen up before contacting her friends? Or maybe she’d bailed out to warn them, and they were trying to decide what to do with him. Could they be trying to trace his path back through the Net? Maybe they were working to trap him in here!

  Matt was on the verge of breaking contact when Caitlin returned to the veeyar. She was trying to clamp a blank expression on her face, but Matt could tell she was unhappy.

  “They’ll talk to you, but not here.” Cat held out an icon in her hand — a little black skull.

  Great, Matt thought. But he’d come too far to be scared off now. Silently, he reached out to take Caitlin’s hand.

  It was a short hop through the Net, quick and confusing. That was probably done on purpose, Matt figured, to make it harder for me to track them down.

  They lurched wildly through several Net sites, then came to rest in an empty virtual room. The walls were so white, they almost hurt Matt’s eyes.

  But he wasn’t paying any attention to the walls.

  He was busy checking out the three proxies who stood waiting for them. They were a weird collection. The hulking, gleaming Mr. Jewels was there. So was the six-foot frog. They were accompanied by a figure that looked like an animated drawing of a cowboy.

  “Mr. Dillinger, Mr. Beatty, and Dr. Crippen, I presume,” Matt said, determined not to show any fear.

  “Yuh know, podnuh, you been stickin’ your nose in places you really shouldn’t have ought,” the cowboy said in the thickest Wild West accent Matt had ever heard. “Somebody ought have learned you that’s dangerous.”

  Right then, Matt noticed that there was the barest hesitation between the cowboy’s words and the movements of his lips.

  But there was no slowness at all as the cowboy whipped out his cartoon pistol and pointed it at Matt’s head.

  “I aim to give you a good lesson,” the cowboy said.

  Chapter 6

  Matt had seen manholes that were smaller than the muzzle of the cartoon pistol in front of his face.

  “Okay, Tex, you’ve got my attention,” he said, still determined not to give in to the fear spurting along his nerves.

  These people know how to hand out pain in virtual situations, a terrified little voice chattered in the back of his head. What would it feel like to get hit by a bullet from that hand-cannon?

  The giant frog suddenly changed shape, too, transforming into a rakish-looking young nobleman from hundreds of years ago. Long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and skintight pale-leather trousers covered his legs. He wore a ruffled silk shirt — and the smile on his handsome features was as razor-sharp as the yard-long sword he aimed at Matt’s throat.

  And, of course, Mr. Jewels didn’t need a weapon. He just loomed behind the other two, clenching gleaming fists, each as large as Matt’s head.

  “I really have to hand it to you guys,” Matt told the threatening threesome — and the worried-looking girl. “You’re good…really good. At first, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing when I heard the reports about what happened in Baltimore. Then I checked out every frame of holo-imagery shot at the game, and ran a Net search to see if anything else like this had ever happened in the Washington area.”

  “So how did that lead you to her — and us?” Mr. Jewels wanted to know. His gemlike eyes held an ugly glitter as he looked over at Caitlin.

  “You guys can still hide behind your masks,” Caitlin’s voice was bitter as she turned to her fellow vandals. “And we can be just as sure that he couldn’t track me through the Net. He’s got to be somebody from my school who caught on to me in the real world. So you don’t have to worry,” she sneered. “We haven’t met out in the flesh since we began this stuff!”

  Mr. Jewels looked ready to slug the girl, and Matt tensed his muscles, ready for a hopeless defense. But the cartoon cowboy gestured the gleaming titan back with his oversized six-gun. “Hold on there, ya big galoot. We’re workin’ from the other end of the rope right now.”

  Once again, Matt noticed the fractional hesitation between moving lips and Western-holo speech. If that’s the Idiom Savant program, it’s working even slower than David said it would, Matt thought. Unless…it’s not just changing English into that silly lingo, but a complet
ely different language!

  But there wasn’t time to get into that right now. He had to convince this bunch of spoiled rich kids that he could be useful — and amusing.

  “My search kicked out all sorts of rumors about people getting their veeyars trashed, and even roughed up. Now, I’ve got a couple of tricks I can pull in virtual — as the lady can tell you.”

  “We’ve heard,” the swordsman said coldly. Matt noticed that he didn’t seem to mind that he spoke English with an accent. Unless that accent was some sort of proxy trick…

  No, Matt told himself. There’s not the same sort of hang-time on this guy’s lips as on the cowboy.

  “So you know my kind of stuff can annoy people, even scare them. But it doesn’t have the same sort of — authority — you can call on.”

  Matt spread out his stick-figure hands. “With all the rumors I’d collected, I still wasn’t sure you guys were for real, or some sort of vapor-tale. So I decided to try and find you. I figured you had to be rich — electronic wilding requires resources.” He rubbed his fingers together in the old gesture for money. “I also figured you must live pretty close to where you’ve been playing. That meant getting a line on all the virtual hangouts for rich kids in the D.C. area.”

  Matt pinned a smile on his proxy’s sketchy face. “Somehow, I just had a feeling you wouldn’t turn out to be a bunch of forty-nine-year-old computer geeks.”

  He shrugged. “And, what do you know, I was right. The first site I tried was Maxim’s. And who do I meet there but the lovely CeeCee, who talked a little, then slugged the real Courtney Vance when she turned up to complain. I heard the punch, I saw Courtney react in pain…and I knew I’d found what I was looking for.”

  Matt held up his proxy hand. “I’m not going to tell you how I connected CeeCee with Caitlin Corrigan. Every relationship needs a little mystery. But I do want you to know that I’m way impressed — and I want in.”

  “Look here, pilgrim,” the cartoon cowboy said, spouting his silly Wild West jargon again. “I don’t rightly think you realize who holds the whip hand here. You tracked us down, right enough. But one shot from my trusty forty-five, and you’re pushin’ up daisies on Boot Hill. Dead men tell no tales.”

  “I’ll say it again,” Matt said, hoping his voice was holding steady. “I don’t want to turn you in, I don’t want to blackmail you. All I want is to join your team — to learn how you do what you do.”

  “Then you’d know more than any of us,” the frog muttered.

  Matt was confused, but he couldn’t let that show. He had to win this bunch over. But how?

  The words burst out almost before he realized he was speaking. “You’re worried about me telling tales? If I ran with you, I’d be in for as much trouble as you catch.”

  “Maybe.” Mr. Jewels drawled the word out as if he were tasting it, thinking over Matt’s offer. “I daresay you’ve shown that you know your way around computers, since you got this close to us. But that’s not all you need to prove if you want to run with us.”

  “Meaning what?” Matt asked cautiously.

  “You have to be able to pull your weight.” The monolithic jewel-monster leaned forward, his words coming faster. “Get us in somewhere we haven’t been able to penetrate.”

  A test, Matt thought. That made a certain sort of sense. At least it would let him get out of this empty white room without getting shot.

  “I’m willing to try,” Matt promised. “As long as it’s not outright impossible, like the Pentagon or the White House.”

  “Oh, it’s more possible than that.” Mr. Jewels gave a grating laugh. “We want to get into the veeyar of Sean McArdle. He’s the son of the Irish ambassador. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you more. You can find out all you want to know with a data search.”

  “I’ll start right away.” Matt hesitated before he went on. “You all want to get in there?”

  The others laughed. “And walk into a bloody trap? I think not,” Mr. Jewels sneered. “No, all you need to worry about is yourself — and CeeCee here.” He made an ironic bow toward the furious Cat Corrigan.

  “Since she’s the only one you know out of our little group, you can contact her when you’ve arranged something.” Mr. Jewels turned his gemstone eyes full on Matt. “If we’ve heard nothing from you in, oh, a week’s time, we’ll simply take it for granted that you’re no longer interested. But if we hear any rumors about our activities — or detect any official interest in Caitlin, then we’ll be forced to interest ourselves in you.”

  He loomed over Matt’s insubstantial proxy. “You wouldn’t like that, Yank. No, not at all.”

  Matt was glad to let Caitlin take him out of there. But when he came to leave her veeyar, he didn’t go straight home. Instead, he took a complicated, preprogrammed escape route that shunted him with dizzying speed between dozens of different Net sites. He’d done the same thing when he’d bailed out of Lara Fortune’s party, ricocheting back and forth across the Net to baffle any possible tracers that might have been planted on him. He’d even taken the precaution of making this route different from the one he’d taken on Friday night.

  His last stop brought him to a huge pyramid ablaze with electrical impulses — the virtual representation of an on-line catalogue operation. The restless glitter represented constant calls for pricing information and orders.

  Matt hurtled onward without even slowing, blending into the blaze of electronic activity around the construct. If the virtual vandals had managed to keep track of him up to now, the sheer volume of information glaring would confuse their pursuit.

  He was aiming for a tiny dark spot on the side of the pyramid — a few gigabytes of computer memory that Matt had diverted from the catalogue business. Now, the little niche held programs to let Matt run a self-check to insure he’d made a clean getaway.

  The tiny dark space suddenly flared into life, blinking brightly as the antitracking programs gave him a green light, then erased themselves. He took one more whirl around the pyramid, routed himself along with some outgoing calls, and veered off homeward.

  Matt’s knees felt a little rubbery when he got out of his computer-link chair. Maybe that evasive pattern he’d flown from Vandal Central had a few too many twists and turns. His only regret was that he hadn’t been able to plant a tracing device in the veeyar where Caitlin had taken him.

  That problem was, a bug would turn out to be a two-edged sword. It would reveal the node where the virtual vandals had met, but the transmission would let the bad guys pinpoint him. And right now, the only things he had going for him were the Caitlin Corrigan connection and his hidden identity.

  Matt walked off his shivers, then headed down the hall to the phone.

  Now it’s my turn to try and unmask a few proxies, he thought as he punched in Captain Winters’s office number. Luckily, the captain was in, spending his Saturday clearing away paperwork.

  “Captain, it’s Matt Hunter,” Matt said into the handset. “Could I come down there and talk with you? I may have come across a connection to that Camden Yards thing.”

  “You don’t want to tell me right now? Or e-mail a report?” the officer asked.

  Matt coughed. “I’d rather you hear this in person, sir. When you do, I think you might agree.” No way was he going to talk on an open phone line — or send a message through the virtual vandals’ network playground.

  A sigh came over the phone. “I was hoping to leave in a little while — when can you get here?”

  “I’m leaving right now,” Matt said.

  On the autobus ride to the captain’s office in the Pentagon government office center, Matt tried to organize his experiences of the past week into a coherent report. But even his best effort didn’t sound so coherent when he faced the impatient Captain Winters.

  The captain was a lot less impatient and much more worried by the time Matt finished. “You’re suggesting that the daughter of the Honorable Senator from Massachusetts is linked to a group of wealthy v
irtual thrill-seekers? And several other members of this bunch are foreign — possibly related to the diplomatic community?”

  “I think—” Matt began.

  But Captain Winters finished his sentence for him. “I think you’d better have some pretty convincing evidence to back up charges like that. We don’t have any official standing in the case — it’s still the Baltimore PD’s baby.” He rolled his eyes. “And they’d just love hearing this theory.”

  “I still think the foreign connection is worth looking into,” Matt said quietly.

  “As long as you don’t go rocking any boats,” Winters said. He glanced at his watch. “I’ll leave you to it.” Turning to his computer console, he said, “Computer, identify for voice commands.”

  “Voice identified as Captain James Winters,” the computer responded.

  “Open database search, nonclassified material, Corrigan, Caitlin — known associates, specifically foreign nationals.”

  “Going back to six months ago,” Matt suggested. “I don’t think they’ve been meeting recently.”

  The captain nodded. “Time variable extending to six months before present date. Datascrip copy to be presented to Matthew Hunter, identified now.”

  “Matthew Hunter,” Matt said.

  “Execute,” Captain Winters ordered. He glanced at Matt. “I’m sure you’ll have a bit of a wait. Even for our computer system, this will be a long search.” He went to the door. “I’ll leave this locked. Just close it on the way out. And tell me if anything interesting kicks out.”

  Matt didn’t know whether to be flattered by the captain’s trust or annoyed by his obvious belief that nothing interesting would emerge. Standing alone in the office, he waited impatiently as the Net Force search engines ground through all the public information sites — print news, electronic info, HoloNet, and government public affairs — for any connections between Caitlin and Washington’s large foreign community.