by Tom Clancy
"That's cute," Toni said, meaning the music. She waved her finger as if directing an orchestra.
"Jay must have sneaked into my office and reprogrammed the ringer again. Better than last time, when it was George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone."
"Ta dah dah dah dah dump!" Toni sang.
"Everybody I work with has a warped sense of humor," he said. "This is Alex Michaels."
"Please hold for the director," a secretary said.
Toni looked at him, and he held his hand over the virgil's microphone. "Boss."
"I sure wish Walt Carver hadn't had that heart attack," Toni said.
"I think he's glad he did. It gave him an excuse to retire and go fishing. It's only been a month; we should give her a chance—"
"Commander, this is Melissa Allison. I'm sorry to interrupt your vacation, but we have a situation of which you need to be aware."
Her face appeared on the virgil's liquid crystal display screen, so he tapped his send-visual mode and held the unit so he could see the virgil's cam thumbnail of his own face in the screen's corner.
Allison, forty-six, was a thin redhead with a cool-bordering-on-cold voice and demeanor. She was a political appointee, a lawyer with no experience in the field but an encyclopedic knowledge of where dozens of political bodies were buried. The rumor was that certain high-ranking members of congress had prevailed on the President to offer her the FBI directorship vacated by Walt Carver's mild cardiac event so she'd keep quiet about things better left that way. Outside of a couple of meetings and a few memos, Michaels hadn't had to deal with her yet.
"Go ahead."
"Some hours ago, an unidentified military force attacked a Pakistani train near the Indian border, killed a dozen guards, and then blew the train to pieces. The cargo was a top-secret shipment of electronic components on their way to be used in the Pakistani nuclear bomb program."
"I thought there was a nonproliferation treaty between Pakistan and India."
"There is, but neither country pays any attention to it. The government of Pakistan is convinced the attacking terrorist force was a special unit of the Indian Army."
"Do they have proof of this?"
"Not enough to start a war. Not yet — but they are looking hard."
Michaels looked at the tiny image of the director's face. "With all due respect, ma'am, what's this got to do with us? Shouldn't the spooks be on the hot seat?"
"They are, but if they and the Pakistanis can be believed, there was no way anyone could know about the train and what it carried. The terrorists had plenty of time to get into position for the ambush, and the Pakistanis say this wasn't possible."
"Obviously it was," Michaels said.
"The liaison with the CIA tells him there were only four people who knew about the shipment and the route. The crates were unmarked, and the workmen and train personnel who loaded and were delivering the materials didn't know what they were carrying."
"Coincidence, maybe? They attacked a train at random?"
"Nineteen trains passed that point in the twenty-four hours prior to the one that was destroyed. Only one carried anything of strategic importance."
"Then somebody told."
"The Pakistanis say not. Nobody had a chance to tell. Once the operation began, three of the four who knew were together, and the other one — who happens to be the head of their secret police — didn't get around to decoding the computer message telling him about the shipment until an hour before the attack. Some kind of computer failure on his end had his system down. Even if he had wanted to tell, there wasn't enough time."
"Somebody intercepted the message and broke the code, then," Michaels said.
"Which is why it concerns us," she said. "The problem there is, the security encryption was supposedly bulletproof, a factored number hundreds of digits long. According to the CIA, it would take a SuperCray running full time, day and night, about a million years to break the code."
Great, Michaels thought. He said, "I'll have my people look into it."
"Good. Keep me informed."
Her picture disappeared as she broke the connection.
Toni, who had been listening, shook her head. "Not possible," she said.
"Right. The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer. Come on, let's go see the maze."
"You going to call Jay?"
"It can wait a few more minutes."
Chapter 2
Friday, April 1st
London, England
The waiter arrived with a Bombay gin and tonic and set it on the table next to the overstuffed leather chair where Lord Geoffrey Goswell sat reading the Times. The Japanese markets were going to hell in a handbasket, the American stock market was holding steady, and gold futures were up.
The weather forecast for London called for rain on the morrow.
Nothing about which to be concerned.
Goswell glanced up. He watched the servant bide a moment to see if there was anything else required, and gave the waiter a military nod. "Thank you, Paddington."
"Milord."
The waiter glided noiselessly away. Here was a good man, old Paddington. He'd had been delivering the paper and drinks here at the club for what? Thirty, thirty-five years? He was polite, efficient, knew his place, and never intruded. Would that all servants were half as well-mannered. A man to be remembered with a nice tip at Christmas, was Paddington.
Across the short stretch of dark and worn oval Oriental rug, reading a trash paper like the Sun or the New York Times or some such, Sir Harold Bellworth harrumphed and blew out a fragrant cloud of Cuban cigar smoke. He lowered his paper a bit and looked at Goswell. "Can't believe what the American President said today. I don't understand why they put up with that kind of bloody nonsense over there. If the PM did that, he would be tossed out on his ear, and rightly so."
Bellworth, eighty-two, was class of '47, thus eight years older than Goswell.
Goswell smiled politely at the older man. "Well, they're Americans now, aren't they?"
"Mmm, yes, of course." Here was a standard reply that answered neatly so many questions. There was the British way, and then there were all the… other ways. Well, they are Americans, aren't they? Or French, or German, or for God's sake, Spanish. What else could one expect from foreigners, save the wrong way of doing things?
"Mmph." Harry lifted the paper and went back to his reading.
Goswell glanced at the big, round clock over the bookcase. Half-past five already. He should have Paddington call Stephens, he supposed. It would be a slow drive to The Yews, especially on a Friday evening, with all the rabble streaming out of the city for their weekly two-day holiday, but there was no help for it. Normally, he would just stay at Portman House in the city until Saturday, then enjoy the leisurely drive to his estate in Sussex, but that scientist fellow of his, Peter Bascomb-Coombs, was arriving for dinner at half-nine, so there was no help for it. Given the traffic, Goswell would be lucky to make it in time as it was. He folded the financial section and put it next to his gin and tonic, picked up the drink, and took a large sip. Ah. He put the glass down.
A moment later, unbidden, Paddington appeared. "Milord?"
"Yes, have Stephens bring the car round, will you?"
"Of course, milord. Some tea and sandwiches for the trip?"
"No, I have a dinner when we get to the country." He waved one hand in airy dismissal.
Paddington left to find the chauffeur. Goswell stood, pulled his watch from his vest pocket, and checked its time against the club's clock.
Harry looked up from his paper again. "Off, are we?"
"Yes, a meeting with my scientist at the country house."
"Scientists." Harry delivered the word in the same way he would have said "thieves" or "whores." He shook his head. "Well. Cheerio, then. By the way, have you cut down that bloody yew behind the greenhouse yet?"
"Certainly not. I expect to nourish its roots with you any time now."
Harry gave a wheezy smoker's laugh. "I'll dance on your grave, you young upstart. And warm my hands from that bloody yew as it burns merrily in my fireplace, too."
The two men smiled. It was an old joke. Yews were often planted in graveyards and, because they seemed to always grow largest in such locations, it was thought that the minerals from the decomposing bodies were good for the plants' roots. The big yew behind the greenhouse on Goswell's estate was eighty-five feet tall, if it was an inch, and probably four hundred years old. He had been threatening to feed Harry to it for years.
He glanced at his watch. A minute or so fast, but close enough. The watch was a gold Waltham, of no great value, but it had belonged to his Uncle Patrick, who had died during the Blitz, and it had come to him as a lad. He had better timepieces that ran dead-on, Rolexes and Cartiers and a couple of the handmade Swiss things that cost as much as a new car. The Waltham was a simple machine. It did not offer the date nor the market news nor could it be held to one's ear and used as a telephone. It was no more than a watch, and he rather liked that.
He slipped the Waltham back into his vest pocket and started for the exit. By the time he reached the street, Stephens would have the '54 Bentley waiting. He preferred the Bentley to the Rolls, as well. It was basically the same automobile, without that ostentatious grill, and being ostentatious was not something a gentleman did, now was it?
He would listen to the BBC news on the way out of the city. See if the wogs in India and Pakistan had started shooting at each other over that little… entertainment he had arranged. That would be lovely, if they would just bomb each other back to the time of the Raj, and the Empire had to come back and bring them along to civilization again.
There would be justice, wouldn't it?
Friday, April 1st
Somewhere in the British Raj, India
Jay Gridley rode the net, master of all he surveyed.
Right at the moment, he was in a VR — virtual reality — scenario he had designed especially for this new assignment Alex Michaels had called him about. In RW — the real world — he sat at his computer console inside Net Force HQ in Quantico, Virginia, his eyes and ears covered with input sensors, his hands and chest wired so that his smallest movements could be turned into control pulses. But in VR, Jay wore a pith helmet, khaki shorts, and a starched khaki shirt, along with knee-socks, stout walking shoes, and a Webley Mark III.38 revolver strapped around his waist. He sat upon the back of an Indian elephant, inside a howdah, next to the local rajah. Overhead, the afternoon sun broiled everything it saw, smiting men and beasts and vegetation alike with withering heat. Ahead of them, brown-skinned natives in loincloths beat upon metal plates with sticks, rattled rocks inside cans, and chanted loudly to spook and drive from the chest-high grasses the tiger who might be hidden therein.
Jay smiled at the image, knowing it was not politically correct, but he wasn't worried. He wasn't likely to run into anybody he knew while playing this scenario, and besides, he was half Thai, wasn't he? Once upon a time, one of his great-great-grandfathers or uncles would probably have been barefoot down there in the grass, in what had been Siam, making noise, praying to assorted gods that the tiger would go the other way. All things considered, it was better to be in the shaded little hut up on the back of a ten-foot-tall elephant, with a Nitro Express double rifle racked right next to you, than it was to be on the ground beating a plate with a stick. And there was that extra, a small boy perched on the elephant's rump waving a fan on the end of a big pole to provide a warm but welcome breeze for him and the rajah.
First class all the way. The only way to travel.
What Jay was actually hunting was information, but keyboarding or voxaxing queries for coded binary hex packets wasn't nearly as much fun as stalking a man-eating Bengal tiger.
Of course, they hadn't seen the big tiger yet, and the beaters had been thumping and rattling for a long time, relativistically speaking. The rajah was apologetic. "So sorry, sahib," he alliterated, but it wasn't his fault. You couldn't flush it out if it wasn't there.
Oh, yeah, there were lesser beasts running from the hunters. Jay had seen deer, pigs, all manner of slithering snakes, including a couple of eight-foot cobras, and even a young tiger, but not the big cat he'd hoped to find. The tiger had come and gone — maybe burning bright, but certainly leaving no easy trail — had gutted its prey and disappeared. The VR prey in this case was a goat inside a stainless steel and titanium cage with bars as big as a bodybuilder's legs. A tyrannosaur couldn't chop through those barriers, even if his big ole teeth were made from diamonds, no way, no how. The goat — actually an encrypted file giving the time, location, and other particulars of a train shipment in Pakistan early today — should have been monster-proof. But something had ripped the bars open as if they were overcooked noodles, gotten inside, and Mr. Goat was history.
Jay hadn't believed it at first. He thought surely somebody had managed to get a copy of the one-time key, which was how these encryptions worked, but after he'd gotten a look at the cage — the mathematical encryption — he could see it had been brute-forced open, no key involved. This was not some kid's DES, used to hide a porno file from his parents, but a decent military-grade encryption, and while not unbreakable in the long run, whoever had cracked it had done so in less than a day.
And that, of course, was just not possible. No computer on earth could do that. A dozen SuperCrays working in parallel might manage it in, oh, say, ten thousand years, but in the few hours since the message was sent and it was broken, it couldn't be done. Period. End of story. Here, let me tell you another one…
Jay took off his pith helmet and wiped the sweat off his forehead with one arm. Hot out here in the Punjab and, shade notwithstanding, the little elephant house didn't have AC. He could have designed that in, of course, but what was the point? Anybody could cobble together a bastard scenario full of anachronisms; artists had to maintain a certain kind of purity. Well, at least every now and then they did, just to show they still could.
How could this break-in have been done? It couldn't — at least not using any physics he knew.
It reminded him of the old story during the early days of aeronautics. Some engineers had done studies on bumblebees. Based on the surface area of the bee's wings, the weight and shape of the insect, and the amount of muscle and force it had available, they had determined, after much slide rule and pencil-on-paper activity, that it was flatly impossible for such a creature to fly.
Bzzzzt! Oops, there went another one.
It must have been terribly frustrating to look at a paper filled with precise mathematical calculations about flow and lift and drag, to know that bees couldn't fly, and then have to watch them flitting from flower to flower, oblivious to man's certainty that they simply couldn't do that.
The obvious deduction was that the researchers had missed something. They went back to their bamboo slide rules and pencil stubs, did more observations, filled dozens of legal pads, and eventually they figured out how the synergism of bee flight worked.
If you already have the answer, you damn sure ought to be able to at least figure out the question. Bees had been flying about their business for millions of years, despite what anybody thought otherwise, and that had to be factored in.
So here was a file that couldn't be brute-forced, and it had been broken open like an eggshell in the hands of a giant. What was it Sherlock Holmes had said? "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
This break-in couldn't be done by any method Jay Gridley knew about and, modesty aside, he was as good as anybody when it came to computer rascalry. But since it had been done, then there must be a new tiger out there in the tall grass. All he had to do was figure out what it looked like, find it, and capture it. Without getting eaten.
He grinned again. That brought up another bit of hunting wisdom. The recipe for rabbit stew?
First, you catch a rabbit.
Friday, Apr
il 1st
Stonewall Flat, Nevada
Mikhayl Ruzhyo squinted into the desert sun. Although he was relatively fair-skinned, he had tanned since he'd moved here, and now he was the color of good holster leather, lines etched into his face, veins prominent on his bare arms. The days were not as hot here in Nevada as they would be in a couple of months, and the nights were still chilly, but it was warm enough out. He stood in front of the small Airstream trailer he had purchased and towed to the five-acre plot of sand and scrub weed he had also bought, feeling the hot wind play over him. He was more or less alone. Only one of the other five-acre "estates" within a mile had a structure on it, and that was a green plastic dome lined with what appeared to be aluminum foil, full of packets of freeze-dried food, like campers and hikers used. Ruzhyo had picked the simple padlock keeping the place shut and checked it out within a few hours of locating this property. Every couple of months, an old man who drove a large GMC pickup truck would arrive at the dome, unload more of the freeze-dried packets from the vehicle and store them in the building, then lock up and drive away. Ruzhyo wondered why the old man brought the stuff out. Was he storing it against some future catastrophe? Worried about a war? Or plague? Or was it part of some commercial venture?
It was hard to determine the motivations of Americans at times. Back home in Chetsnya, even in Russia, he had never seen old men hoarding this kind of food. Of course, maybe that was because nobody thought such things were worth hoarding. Or they couldn't get it if they did think that.
Ruzhyo shrugged mentally. No matter. The dome was the only building close, and the next structure past that was a cabin near the small river that was a dry bed most of the year, almost three miles away. The cabin belonged to a Methodist church, and it had been used by hardy campers but three times since Ruzhyo had lived here, never for more than two nights at a time. None of the campers had hiked close enough to speak to him.
He was grateful for the solitude. Since retiring from wetwork, he'd had few occasions to even talk to people, much less have to kill them. He had money banked he could retrieve as needed, using a computer card. Once a week or so, he drove almost two hours into town and bought his supplies in one of several large supermarkets where he was totally anonymous; he did not chat with the clerks when he checked out. He would fill the car's tank with gasoline and drive home. He would pass Death Valley on the west, and turn off the highway onto a dirt road that led to his trailer. The nearest town — if it could be called such — was Scotty's Junction. A military gunnery range dominated the land to the east.
