by Tom Clancy
There were only four places, according to the Russian, where the intelligence regarding Samuel Walker Cox still existed: First was the old Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie — the GRU — and that piece was at the former HQ building at the Khodinka Airfield, near Moscow. They still called it “The Aquarium,” and Natadze knew it well enough. You could take the purple metro line to Polezhaevskaya Station, big as you please, and stroll a short ways to the place. Getting into such a building even now would be difficult, but that wasn’t necessary. They were all still broke in Moscow, despite the newest reforms, and if you had enough money, you could buy just about anything you wished.
Natadze knew hungry people in the GRU who would be more than happy to do him a favor for a suitcase full of rubles, much less American dollars. A computer crash, a small fire, and those files would be gone. And his contacts knew that to try and hold out on him for blackmail later would be a bad idea.
The second place was with the Turks, who certainly had kept a copy of the encrypted material that had begun this whole affair. There were poor file clerks in Turkey as well, and Natadze knew somebody who knew somebody who could pave a road to a clerk’s door with enough money to buy those files.
The third had been the Russian himself, and he wasn’t going to be telling anybody anything unless he believed in an afterlife, and that would be the Devil who processed him into Hell. Should be there by now. If such a place existed, no doubt the doctor would wish to discuss it with Natadze when he eventually arrived there.
He smiled. He did not believe in Hell, nor in Heaven. God, if He existed, should be too busy to concern Himself with what people did on this one little mudball of a planet.
The fourth, and most problematic, was the file at Net Force HQ in Quantico. Americans could be bribed, of course, but not all of them were corrupt — and if you chose the wrong one to try, the whistle would be blown, fast and loud. An organization such as Net Force would be full of patriots, and men who valued their country more than they did personal fortunes were very dangerous. As far as he knew, Net Force still did not understand the significance of the Turkish files, and Natadze did not wish to alert them to this.
So that would be the biggest challenge. He would have to figure out a way to get to the files and destroy them. Fortunately, the man he had put into the hospital was in no position to work on them, at least for a while. He could start the ball rolling on the GRU and Turks with a couple of calls. Money was no object to Mr. Cox — an amount that would make a man rich in Moscow or Ankara was pocket change to a man worth billions.
Natadze felt good about things, better than he had since the snafu with Gridley. He was on top of the situation, he had been very careful with the Russian, the death would look like an accident, and in any event, he’d left nothing behind to follow him. Mr. Cox would be pleased with him. Thinking of which, he picked up the throw-away cell phone and pressed in Cox’s number.
“You have good news?”
“Yes. It is done,” he said. “No problems.”
“Excellent. I’ll see you soon.”
“Yes.”
Natadze discommed. He would destroy the phone at the first stop for petrol, and would scatter the pieces into several garbage cans at different locations. No more mistakes.
Washington, D.C.
Jay asked the doctor point-blank: “If you were me, would you stay here?”
Dr. Grayson smiled. “If I were you, I’d probably be in a circus sideshow, me being a woman and all.”
“Funny,” he said, not answering her smile. “And not a bad sidestep of the question, either.”
She sighed. “You were in a deep coma, Mr. Gridley,” she said. “After having a bullet thwack you in the head. Another day or two in the hospital is a smart idea in the long run.”
“In the long run, Doc, we’re all dead. And you’re still dancing.”
She shook her head. “If I were you and I knew what I knew, I’d stay here for another day. People are both very tough and very fragile, and we don’t begin to know all there is to know about this kind of injury.”
“But I’m not in a coma now, my head wound is not serious, I’ve got a bandage on it and all, and I can lie around in my own bed a lot cheaper than I can this one.”
“Why don’t we wait for your wife to come back from lunch and discuss it?”
“Oh, no, then it would be two against one. I want to go home.”
“What’s so important there it can’t wait?”
“The guy who put me here is still out there. I can help track him down. Wouldn’t you be perturbed if somebody had shot you?”
“If I agreed to let you go home and you had a relapse, my malpractice insurance company would never forgive me.”
“I won’t sue you.”
“That’s what they all say.”
“Come on, Doctor. I need to be out of here.”
She nodded. “It’s not a prison, Mr. Gridley. You can check out AMA if you wish.”
“AMA?”
“Against Medical Advice. You sign a waiver, then if you drop dead on the way home, you can’t blame us — though the families usually do anyway.”
“Where do I sign?”
She smiled again, and shook her head. “That’s what your wife said you would say.”
“Saji talked to you?”
“On the way to lunch. She said you would tell me you were checking out of the hospital, and no matter what I said, you wouldn’t be swayed. She said she would keep a careful eye on you.”
Jay frowned. “How could she know this? I didn’t discuss this with her.”
“Apparently she knows you better than you think.”
He sighed. Yeah. Apparently so.
But that didn’t matter. He was going home.
25
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Even though he knew it was theoretically possible, Thorn hadn’t really believed he’d be that lucky. Now and again, it happened, just often enough to keep him from discounting it.
The Super-Cray had come up with a match on Jay’s shooter and whoever killed the dead Russian.
Alone in his office, Thorn had his holoproj float the two images side-by-side. The picture on the left was from a bank ATM cam near the spy goods store — the man hadn’t been using the machine, but had been walking past it in the background, behind a woman withdrawing money from her account. Forty dollars, according to the ATM’s records. It was not the sharpest picture in the world, and only caught him from about the knees up, but it showed a dark-haired man of perhaps thirty-five glancing in the camera’s direction. A scale running down the size of the image showed his height in centimeters, based on the known height of a NO PARKING sign on a post behind him. He was about six feet tall.
The woman, a young and attractive brunette who was visible only from the chest up and blocking most of the frame, wore a skimpy red halter top that had trouble keeping her rather voluptuous breasts in check, and if the rear view was as interesting as the front one, Thorn guessed that this was the reason the passing man was looking over his right shoulder her way. He was checking her out.
That would mean he was heterosexual.
Or maybe he was gay, she had on designer pants, and he was admiring those.
Or maybe she had a puppy standing next to her and he was a dog breeder…?
Leave that for now.
The second image was taken by a traffic cam covering an intersection in southern Connecticut, the town of Bridgeport, four miles away from where the Russian spy’s body had been found. A car was halfway through the intersection, making a clear right-hand turn on a red light, right next to a NO TURN ON RED sign. The traffic cam had snapped an image, showing the driver and the front of the car with its license plate, all neat for the local authorities to run the plate and mail the driver a ticket. The picture was date and time stamped.
The driver was an elderly woman, white-haired, and barely able to see over the top of the full-sized Cadilla
c’s steering wheel.
But: Behind that car, stopped behind the crosswalk, was a new Dodge, and seated at the wheel of that car was a dark-haired man whose head was surrounded by a pulsing red circle.
“Enlarge two hundred percent. Unsharp mask, selected field, on image two,” Thorn said. “Apply reasonable extrapolation generator.”
The computer obeyed, doubling the size of the image inside the circle, sharpening it, and augmenting the colors and shapes rendered based on a specialized enhancement program, the REG.
It looked like the same man to Thorn, but the big thing was that the Cray thought so, too. It had a much higher accuracy rating than Thorn’s eyes.
“List facial feature matches, normal tolerances.”
A pair of grids showing sizes blossomed, one under each image. The computer brought the two grids together into one image in the middle. All the features that were plus or minus a millimeter lit in flashing red for a beat, then locked. There were twelve matches of the eighteen factors scanned.
Same size nose, same size right ear, same distance between pupils, same ratio of forehead to ear height to chin angle…
Thorn didn’t need to go any further. Once you hit five major facial points, it was either the same guy or his twin brother, and Thorn didn’t think that was likely.
This was the guy who had bugged Jay’s car, shot him, and who had killed the Russian spy. Thorn was sure of it.
“Ha!” he said. “You are mine, pal!”
Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be that easy. He searched the rest of the file, but there was no obvious way to identify the man — at least none that the Super-Cray had been able to come up with. The Cadillac in the foreground blocked the bottom of the car the shooter had been in, so there was no license plate visible. No other images of that car were in the traffic cam, and if the Cray hadn’t seen him elsewhere in its strain, then it wasn’t like a set of human eyes would do any better.
“Print images,” he said.
Thorn passed out hard copies of the holographs to General Howard, Colonel Kent, and Lieutenant Fernandez.
“This is the guy?” Howard said.
Thorn nodded. “I believe so, yes. What’s the word on Jay?”
Fernandez said, “He’s checked himself out of the hospital and gone home. We have guards watching the house. Saji says he’s planning to head back into VR and start looking.”
Thorn frowned. “VR? I would think the doctors would want him to stay out of that for a while.”
Howard nodded. “They do, but Jay’s more stubborn than they are.”
Thorn said, “I’ll call him and pass this along when we’re done. “I’ve run the driver’s license databases from all fifty states through the mainframe. The Super-Cray is checking all military photo records, current passports, and federally incarcerated prisoners — nothing yet. NCIC and CopRec databases are matching the image through local and state jail and prison systems, and that will take a while even with big crunchers. If he’s in the system, we’ll find him. Eventually.”
“You want us to go out on the streets looking?” Fernandez asked.
Thorn smiled. “The regular FBI is doing that already. They’ve got agents flashing these pictures in the vicinity of the spy store, the area where Jay was shot, and in the dead Russian’s neighborhood.”
“Good. At least that’ll give them something to do,” Fernandez said. “What’s this on his fingernails?”
Thorn frowned. “What?”
Fernandez pointed at the picture. “Looks like he is wearing nail polish on his right hand, see?”
The picture was too small to see more than a little gleam.
Thorn tapped the computer console on the conference table, called up the ATM image, and had it focus on the right hand — the left was behind him and out of sight. The computer enlarged and enhanced the hand.
A little fuzzy, but sure enough, it looked like the guy had fairly long fingernails, neatly manicured, and they did seem awfully shiny. Kind of an odd, slanted shape, angled to one side. That didn’t mean anything to Thorn, though.
“What’s the other hand look like?” Kent said.
“Can’t see it,” Howard said. “Miz Halter Top there is blocking it.”
Thorn called up the other picture, in the car. The man’s left hand was on the car’s steering wheel, at about ten o’clock. He had the computer magnify and enhance the image. It was grainy, not as sharp as the ATM image of the right hand, but it appeared as if the nails on that hand were much shorter and duller. Odd…
“He’s a guitarist,” Kent said.
“What?” Thorn said.
“I have a nephew, in Tucson, Arizona, my sister’s oldest son, who teaches music at the local U. He plays classical guitar, and that’s what his hands look like. Nails on his right hand are long, polished, and angled, and the ones on his left are clipped short — it’s how you play the instrument.”
The others looked at him.
“You pluck the strings with your nails, but if you have long nails on the other hand, the strings buzz when you fret them — at least that’s what my nephew told me.”
“So maybe he’s a country-western guy, or bluegrass or folk music player,” Fernandez said. “Even a rock star.”
Kent said, “Could be, but rock stars mostly flat-pick, and acoustic guitars have steel strings. Fingernails simply don’t hold up against those, so those guys wear curved finger-picks or have fake nails. Classical guitars have nylon strings.”
“How do you know all this?” Thorn asked.
“When I was stationed outside Atlanta, one of my sergeants was a serious blues guitarist. I used to go and listen to him play at local clubs, and I picked up a few things here and there.”
“And you remembered it?” Julio asked.
Kent looked at him. “Not everybody older than you is automatically senile, Lieutenant.”
“No, sir,” Fernandez said. “Point demonstrated and taken.”
General Howard grinned.
“Does this help us?” Kent asked.
Thorn nodded. “Absolutely. If nothing else, it’s another place to look. And something tells me there are not a lot of classical guitarist hit men around.”
Washington, D.C.
Jay sat in the command chair of the Deep Flight V, and stared out at the inky black water over two miles below the surface of the ocean.
He tapped instructions on the keyboard and the deep-sea submersible tilted to the right — starboard — and headed toward an odd-looking pile of silt. At this depth there wasn’t much moving except him. Vaguely nautical-sounding music played out over the stereo, and there were odd creaks and groans from the structure around him caused by intense pressure from the ocean.
Except that he just didn’t feel it. He wasn’t there. It wasn’t real.
He frowned and shook his head. I was sure this would work.
Even as he thought it, he knew that it wasn’t true. He’d wanted it to work, but he hadn’t really believed it would.
He sat in the media room of the apartment he and Saji lived in, the 270-degree panorama projection screens at one end of the room lit up with images from his VR simulation. He was looking for a Spanish treasure fleet lost in the late 1500s. But when he leaned back, he could feel the upholstery of the chair, and hear the purr of the ventilation system. He even thought he could hear Saji rattling around in the kitchen, though that could be his imagination.
He frowned again.
You’re going to have to do it, Gridley.
After spending subjective months inside his head, in a world similar to VR but not as controlled, he found that he was loathe to leave reality. No, more than that. He was afraid—if only a little bit — to leave reality. He knew you couldn’t get trapped in VR. It just wasn’t possible. But then he’d always believed that you couldn’t get trapped inside your own head, either.
He’d devised a non-VR metaphor to break the code that had put him in the hospital. He’d built a simulation he could run
from a flatscreen, a remotely operated vehicle sim that searched the ocean floor while he sat in his desk. He’d been hopeful that it might work, that it would let him wait a while before going back into artificial reality.
But it just didn’t do the job. Not even close.
So he’d taken the next step, programmed the media room for near-full VR immersion, and created a sim that put him inside a submarine. That worked better. He was more engaged. But it still was not enough.
No, not nearly enough.
Jay’s edge, his best trick, was using all of his senses in VR. Limiting himself to vision only, or even audio and visual, was like cutting off his arms or legs. It felt wrong.
He took a deep breath and saved his location before killing the sim. He stared at the VR gear hanging on the rack, feeling a slight chill.
Can’t be a VR jock unless you do VR, Jay, said a voice in his head. Was he ready to give it all up? Not go back because he was afraid?
No.
Besides, he had to find the guy who had done this to him. Before he came back and found a way to put Jay back inside his own head permanently.
He called up several research databases and began to construct what he needed. He took his time, writing code segments that added to the reality of the VR, making it more detailed than necessary. One of the things he’d realized from his experience was that most VR wasn’t as good as his unconscious — even his.
But after a while he realized he was just stalling.
“Saji,” he called out. “I’m going in.”
“I know.” Her voice was faint from the kitchen, but he smiled at the sound. She knew. She always knew. And she’d be there to help him if somehow, someway he got into trouble. Not that he would, but…
He closed the file window and pulled his stims off the rack. The movement was familiar and practiced, and within seconds he was ready to jack in. He reached inside his desk drawer and got a large binder clip. He pried it open and clamped it on the loose flesh behind and above his left elbow.
