by Tom Clancy
The air shimmered, and his reality faded in and out.
He kept going.
Born here doing this. Will live here forever doing this…
The scene faded. Everything was dark now, he couldn’t see a thing. But he could hear—
A faint sound, brilliantly crisp and electronic. The click of heels on a floor, the smell of… antiseptic?
He tried to speak, tried to turn his body, but succeeded only in a quiet moan.
“Jay?!”
Saji!
University Park, Maryland
There were times when Thorn did general practice — basic forms with all three weapons: foil, épée, and saber — and other times when he just concentrated on his footwork or blade work alone, repeating a series of lunges or parry-and-riposte drills. Now and then, he would concentrate on one blade, such as he was doing today with the épée, and one particular exercise that he felt was a weakness. Playing to your strength was more fun, of course, it gave the old ego a big boost when you could execute a fancy series and know that nine of ten people you faced would have trouble handling it. But you lost matches on your weaknesses, and eliminating those made you a better swordsman — even if your competitive days were long past.
This morning, he felt ready to deal with one particular chink in his armor, and decided that he was going to concentrate on his infighting.
Infighting was more of a foil style than something you saw much of in either épée or saber, which was exactly why he wanted to work on it. One of the big advantages in cross-training — and this was especially true when it came to cross-training with eastern weapons and styles as well as western fencing technique — was that it opened your mind to seeing each weapon in a new light. The fact that it sometimes gave you new moves, new styles, and new advantages didn’t hurt either.
Infighting was exactly that: close-in fighting, often standing side-by-side with your opponent, your fighting arm twisted behind your own back, your point probing, your parries forgotten. It was something you did, not something you planned, and the whole concept was contrary to Thorn’s own natural style.
He preferred distance. He had a long reach and a great sense of timing, and so he liked to stay outside of his opponent’s reach whenever possible, drawing him out, creating openings that he could attack into. When he closed, it was to take advantage of something, and almost always resulted in a quick hit. He’d never been comfortable going toe to toe.
It was time to change that.
He was working at home today, in a little room he’d left clear of furniture. It didn’t have the right flooring, or the racks of weapons, or the wall full of mirrors that he planned to install in Net Force’s gym, but that was all right. He wasn’t planning a full-scale bout with any of Jay’s VR opponents.
He’d hung a number of golf balls on long strings from the high, vaulted ceiling. Each golf ball was a target. His normal work-out routine started with him addressing a single golf ball, coming to guard before it and simply thrusting at it, over and over, until he hit it fifty times in a row. It got significantly harder after the first hit, since the ball would be moving, swinging back and forth like a pendulum, after each successful strike.
After fifty consecutive hits, he would move back far enough to add a lunge to his strike. Twenty consecutive hits later he would move back still farther, adding a quick step and turning his lunge into a ballestra.
That was his normal routine, and he did it with either foil or épée, depending on which weapon he was concentrating on at the time. It was good for practicing aim, for developing speed, and for working on timing. Some days it was simply warm-up for other drills. Other days that was all he did. Today he wanted something more.
He raised the first golf ball, shortening its string so it hung at about shoulder height. Another golf ball hung a couple of feet behind the first one. He lowered this so that it hung near his hip. Then he stepped back and dropped into guard position.
Go!
He lunged, striking at the first golf ball, simulating an attack upon an imaginary opponent. As the tip of his épée struck home, he turned the move into a prise de fer, keeping his point low and sweeping his guard through a hook and lift, visualizing his opponent’s blade being lifted and carried above his left shoulder. His guard held near his left ear, pinning his imaginary attacker’s blade away from his body; he brought his point on line and stepped forward with his right foot, driving his tip into the second golf ball.
He smiled at the thunk of the tip. Not bad, but that was the easy one.
Stepping back, he waited for the golf balls to stop swinging and then did it again. And again.
When he felt he had the rhythm down, he rehung both golf balls, adjusting their strings so they were both chest high.
Now for the hard one.
He came to guard closer to the first ball. In this drill, the first ball would be his opponent’s blade, the second ball would be his target.
Go!
He beat, once, fast and hard, knocking the first golf ball to the left with the side of his blade. In the same motion, he stepped forward with his left foot and brought his blade around the back of his head, whipping his point at the second ball.
He missed. Badly.
He stood there a moment longer, feeling the strain in his right shoulder, until the first ball, swinging on its string, hit him in the back.
Nice one, Thorn, he thought.
Grinning, he shook his head and set up once again.
Twenty minutes later, having hit the ball only three times, he sighed and took off his mask. He was still a long ways from where he wanted to be, but at least he’d made a start.
Feeling as if he had addressed the problem, if not completely solved it, Thorn went to take a shower.
19
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Thorn wasn’t doing anything illegal, but he still felt a little guilty as he ran the computer check on Marissa. He wasn’t using his status with Net Force to gain access to any classified or secret information — he would never do that; the material he found on the web was public information, available to anybody who bothered to look. That was legal. But still…
Some of it he already knew, but he was definitely intrigued by her, and curious about the rest.
In her academic records, he came across a set of scores on assorted exams, for college, government service, and the like, and one of them was a standardized IQ test. Thorn had always done well on those himself, since his IQ edged into what was considered genius range on such scales.
He blinked at Marissa’s number:
Five points higher than his.
She was smarter than he was!
He shook his head. He hadn’t even considered that before. He had assumed that she was a feeler, not a thinker.
That she was brighter or quicker didn’t threaten him — he liked smart women, he liked to be challenged — but that he hadn’t seen it did bother him. Slipped right past him, that did.
This was an old lesson, one he should have gotten by now: What you see isn’t always what you get.
What else was he missing because he accepted it at face value?
New York City
It was early, the domestic market hadn’t opened yet, and Cox was attending to business that had piled up during the night. Business never slept when you dealt with people around the globe.
The scrambled phone rang. He knew who it was; there was only one caller who used this line.
He pushed a blue button on the unit, picked up the receiver, and leaned back in his custom-built Aeron form-chair, the specialized pellicle flex-plastic shifting under his weight. Most people wouldn’t think of paying several hundred dollars for a chair, much less the several thousand this one had cost him.
Most people were shortsighted.
“Cox.”
“Good day, Comrade.”
Of course, it was the Russian, making his tired little joke again.
Cox’
s tone needed to be consistent, otherwise the Russian would start to wonder. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?” He kept his voice dry.
Cox knew the intricate chain of events he’d set off by pushing the blue button. The good Doctor had been most cautious — understandably so — when he’d awakened his sleeper, preferring to contact him by phone and infrequently. He’d been smart enough to realize that if Cox figured out where he was, that might not be a good thing for him. But if being rich had taught Cox anything, it was a special kind of patience, the ability to see beyond the present.
Patience, along with money, could buy all manner of things. The chair upon which he sat, for instance, was more than just a comfortable seat. The quality of it, the fine materials and the beauty of its design — all added to the pleasure of using it. The areté of such a fine mechanism improved his life.
It was a matter of value. His time was priceless, as it was the only thing he could not buy — although he had some tame scientists working on antiaging drugs which might pan out. The chair increased his pleasure by being well-constructed, beautiful, and functional, all at once. It gave him satisfaction. The expense was nothing. He would have bought it even if he couldn’t afford it, and figured out a way to pay for it later.
So, too, had he invested quite a bit in the Doctor. He had decided that he would need to speak to the man on his terms someday, and had started tracing his controller’s phone calls as a matter of course almost as soon as they had begun.
The demise of the Soviet Union had not, unfortunately, dulled its agents’ paranoia. Even low-tech tradecraft and off-the-shelf technology could foil most people trying to trace them electronically.
Vrach — Cox didn’t know his real name — had not called him directly, at least not since Cox had begun trying to find him. Instead he’d phoned through a network-access setup, encrypting his voice into an Internet datastream which could be bounced all over the world. The data would leave the network at an exit point, and be turned into a phone call.
Cox looked at an LCD inset in the desk and noted that the exit point chosen this time was Brazil.
Should the Internet data be traced to the point where it entered the network, a tracker would discover that the Russian had used a cell phone, making a trace more difficult still. And Vrach called on disposable cell phones, never using the same one twice. Backwalking and finding him, using electronic tracking alone, was nearly impossible.
There were, however, other ways. It had taken a team of Cox’s agents quite a while to get as far back along the trail as they were now; these men were always on call, waiting to move at any time.
Vrach had been tricky, routing his communications from access points all over the world. The man could be thousands of miles away — or right next door.
So Cox’s hackers had designed and distributed a computer virus specifically designed for the hardware that tracked incoming and outgoing calls on Internet-phone connections. This had allowed Cox’s hounds instant access to the network where the call originated. Once they were inside the firewall, they could trace the call over the Internet back to the true origin.
“I have good news.”
The only good news the Doctor could have worth being happy about would be that every record of him as a Soviet agent had been destroyed. Since that wasn’t likely, Cox wasn’t too excited.
“Really?”
The final, and largest problem in finding the Doctor was that his cell phone calls not only originated from different cities, but from moving locations: buses, trains, subways, and once even a ferry.
He could almost hear the Doctor grin into the mouthpiece.
Go ahead and grin; my turn is coming.
“The Net Force agent assigned to decode the captured file has been severely injured, in what the authorities have been led to believe was an incident of road rage. He had decoded but a small portion of the information, and you were not on it.”
Cox did not feel relief, he felt irritated. That the Russian’s not-so-subtle hint suggested the incident had been the Russian’s doing. Cox knew better.
Pathetic.
Sooner or later, he would find the man. Cox had spread men across the eastern seaboard and the Midwest, at each place where the Doctor had originated a cell call. Helicopters waited in every city, and with the press of the blue button on this phone, were launched moments after a call came in, cellular-direction finders in each one.
Aloft, these copters would triangulate the calls as soon as the hackers provided the relevant information. It took time to get close, however, and even if the helicopters had found which boat, train, or bus the doctor was on, it wouldn’t show them who was behind the phone, or where he lived.
Which was why an army of detectives constantly rode buses, trains, and ferries in several metropolitan areas. Those alone cost him nearly a million dollars a month.
Cox tried to imagine how it would be to have such a job, waiting all the time, on a train where he might have to track someone identified as a target.
It would be mostly boring, he decided, but that didn’t matter. They were well-paid for their time. They could read, or listen to music, or whatever, he didn’t care, as long as they were there when he needed them.
A text screen lit up on the dedicated computer attached to the phone. Amber letters scrolled across it:
Connecticut. Train to New York.
Fantastic. They hadn’t had a hit this good so quickly before.
“This does not seem to help me much,” Cox said. It wouldn’t do to cut the call short.
“But it does — and it shows that we are still looking out for you, da?”
Cox shook his head in disgust. Vrach was trying to assume credit for Natadze’s action. It obviously never even occurred to him that Cox would have taken matters into his own hands. The man was not nearly as clever as he thought he was. Few men were.
“I see.”
Agent in place at next stop, read the text.
Excellent! thought Cox. Even with the call terminated, they would be able to find the phone — Cox didn’t know how, but his technicians had told him they could, as long as it was still powered.
“I should think that this would convince you to keep helping us. There is a Senator we would like to know more about.”
He could hear a rustling as the Russian talked. It sounded as if the man was moving around.
Train stopping, said the text onscreen.
Cox sighed, making it sound as if he were exasperated. “All right. Tell me his name.”
The Doctor did so.
“You will do what you can?”
A green LED lit up on his caller ID box, and the display now read, “Subject Identified,” as the instant message screen popped up a confirmation.
Yes! They had him!
Subject has left the train. We are tracking.
“But of course,” said Cox. “Don’t I always?”
“You see? I knew my call would cheer you.”
Cox smiled. “You have no idea how much better I feel now, Doctor.”
“We will speak later.”
After the disconnect, Cox didn’t even put the receiver down before he called Eduard. Yes, by God, things were finally beginning to look up. They had the Russian. And after Eduard got to him, they would have everything he knew about Cox’s situation.
This was how empires were built: one brick at a time.
20
Midnight, Full Moon
The Hills of West Virginia
Thorn had a great-uncle who had been born in West Virginia, and the man, ancient when Thorn had met him, had told some wonderful stories of his boyhood. Hillbillies and moonshine stills, the incredible landscape with its hardwood and pine forests, and the days he’d gone spotlight hunting with his bluetick and red-and-tan hounds in the dark. At some point, Thorn had decided that he would go there, but he had never managed it in the Real World — though he had eventually built himself a scenario.
So it was that h
e now tramped through the warm summer night following a pack of baying coon hounds, in pursuit of whatever it had been that caused Jay Gridley to be shot.
He had managed to open nearly all of Gridley’s files, and the one that held the most promise was the one from the Turkish Ambassador. As had many of the countries in the Middle East, the Turks had been on-again, off-again friends. Currently they were on-again, and Net Force’s decision to help them had not been strictly altruistic, since uncovering Russian moles still in place was in the best interests of the United States, even though the Russians were no longer the evil empire they had once been.
Ahead, the hounds called, their deep barrooos! resonant under the light of the full moon. Bright enough to read by out here, bright enough to see the sparkles in the opal ring Thorn wore, the ring that had belonged to his grandfather. Thorn wore it in VR a lot, though not so much in RW — there it was only for special occasions. His grandfather had had small hands, and it just fit on Thorn’s little finger.
The old man had believed opals were potent stones, full of magic. He had gone to Australia once, bought a small but gorgeous black boulder opal from the Cody Brothers, well-known for their outstanding stock, and had it set into a custom gold ring made by Rick Martin Snow Owl, a beautiful setting that protected the opal. It had been one of his grandfather’s criteria for a good stone — if it shines brightly under moonlight, it’s a good one.
Thorn had inherited the ring. It was an irregular-shaped red-multicolor flashfire, had blues, greens, oranges, even yellows in it, and on a sunny day, you could see the fire shining from across the street.
Not so bright in moonlight, if you wanted to keep your scenario TTL — true-to-life — but still a comforting glow. The colors reminded him of looking at a neighborhood strip mall full of neon signs at night from five hundred yards away; brilliant, electric, magic.
