by Tom Clancy
He stood near the middle of the field, testing the wind with a wet fingertip. There was a pretty good breeze coming in from the north, and he decided to tape a couple of pennies to his MTA boomerang to keep it from getting wind-whipped. That took only a minute, then he was ready.
He angled himself against the wind, took a couple of deep breaths, and shook out his shoulder to loosen the muscle. He'd been considering lifting weights. The top throwers were all in good shape, and he could use a little more power in his arms. The balance was tricky. If you threw too soft, you didn't get any time aloft, and if you threw too hard, you could get a fast nosedive. But there were times when you needed a little more strength, like now, when the wind was gusting, and at his size, Tyrone didn't have any extra muscle. He didn't need to be Hercules or anything, but a little more mass wouldn't hurt.
He made his first throw, to check the angle of the blades and see how the taped coins balanced. The Indian Ocean glowed in a red blur as it spun but wobbled off-center and augured in too fast. He retrieved the 'rang and adjusted the angle on the blades by carefully bending them up. He moved the coin on the long arm in toward the angle a few millimeters, retaped it, then tried another throw.
Better, but still off a hair. Well, he could spend all day adjusting the thing, especially in gusty conditions, and it was close enough for practice.
He was on his seventh toss, having finally gotten above a minute for flights, which was about as good as he expected in the wind, when he heard Nadine yell at him.
"Yo, Ty!"
She came across the field, shrugged out of her backpack, and removed from it her own MTA, a long, L-shaped blue and white striped model. It was a Quark Synlin. He'd never seen one up close, but he'd seen holos, and he saw a couple at the tourney, from a distance, so he recognized it right off.
"Man, how'd you come by that? I thought Quark quit the business."
"He did, but there are a few still for sale. My mother told me if I could show her I could handle the top-of-the-line 'rang, she'd loan me the money for it. When I won the contest, she figured I was ready. It came air express this morning." She held it out. Tyrone took it from her as if it was a live baby, holding it carefully.
"How does it throw?"
"Dunno, I haven't had a chance yet. Why don't you give it a try?"
He blinked at her. "You need to be first, it's yours."
"No, go ahead. You're already warmed up."
"Yeah?"
"Sure."
He wet his finger, checked the wind.
She said, "Medium-hard, angle up fifty, don't lay over. Better to over-vertical. Five to ten into the wind."
He nodded. Set his stance. Took a good breath, reared back, and made the toss.
The big Quark zipped out about fifty meters before it started to make its turn, gained height — a lot of height, thirty, thirty-five meters — then started to shift from perp to flat. It bounced a couple of times on an updraft.
"Man, look at that!"
It was a beautiful flight, wind and all. It just seemed to hang there forever, and it finally came down within twenty meters of where he'd made the throw, slightly down field. He did an easy slap catch.
Tyrone didn't have his stopwatch, but Nadine had hers. "Two minutes fifty-one," she said. "Not bad."
"Yeah not bad! That beats my PR!" With that time, he would have beaten her at the tourney, too. Damn!
He looked at the boomerang, then smiled at Nadine. "Thanks." He handed it back to her. "Your turn. We've got like twenty minutes before the soccer geeks run us off."
"Time enough for two throws, you think?"
"You wish. " They both laughed.
Nadine was all right. Especially for a girl.
Chapter 15
Wednesday, April 6th
Alamo Hueco Mountains, New Mexico
Jay Gridley stood on a patch of high desert listening to the silence among the rocks and scrub growth. The sun was a blinding mallet, hammering everything beneath it into the dead ground. It looked like the middle of nowhere, and if you headed directly east, west, or south, you'd leave the U.S. and hit Mexico; from here, the nearest border was only a mile or three away.
Next to him, Saji stood, looking much more like a Native American than a Tibetan. He wore faded blue jeans, cowboy boots, a long-sleeved work shirt, and a white ten-gallon hat with a rattlesnake skin band around it.
"Smell the water?" Saji said.
Jay, dressed much like Saji, but with a shadier, wide-brimmed Mexican sombrero, shook his head. "All I smell is desert. Dust, sand, and baked rocks, that's it."
Indeed, every step they took kicked up more reddish brown dust, fine as talcum powder. It coated his boots and clothes, stung his eyes and nose, and made breathing hard. There was no wind, so at least the dust settled quickly. A very realistic scenario, and it was Saji's. Something like this was still beyond Jay's capabilities.
"Okay, let's see if we can cut some sign."
Jay shook his head. "How did you learn all this tracking stuff?"
Saji smiled his idiot's grin. "Jerry Pierce, a Navajo buddy of mine, is a Son of the Shadow Wolves. Tracker for the Border Patrol. He taught me about this, I taught him about the Middle Way."
"A Navajo Buddhist?"
"Why not? Buddhism doesn't get in the way of most other religious beliefs, at least not the ones that aren't militantly monotheistic. Come on."
The two of them walked carefully over the sandy ground. After a few yards, Saji said, "Stop. You see it?"
They were maybe ten feet from the edge of a steep drop-off, a cliff that went down sixty, seventy feet. "See what? The end of the world?"
"Nothing quite so dramatic. Right there in front of you."
Jay strained his eyes, staring at the ground. Here were three things: hardpan dirt, a single broken blade of pale green grass, and a weathered, dusty, reddish rock. The ground here wouldn't hold a track. "I don't see anything."
"Not anything?"
"Okay, fine, I see something. There's a patch of hard dirt, a rock, a piece of dead grass. That's it."
"Look around. Any other vegetation?"
Jay raised from his crouch, glanced at the area around him. "There's something looks like a creosote bush about ten yards that way." He moved toward the cliff edge, peered over it. Nothing growing down that way. "Nothing close. There's a big cactus way the hell over there. It's desolation row here."
"Okay, think about that for a minute."
"No offense, Saji, but if I could think for more than thirty seconds without going blank-stupid, I wouldn't need you!"
"Close your eyes, count your breath."
Jay sighed. He did as he was told. One… two… three… what… did… I… see…?
He opened his eyes. "The grass."
Saji nodded. "What about it?"
"It doesn't belong here. How did it get here? There's nothing else around like it."
"Good. Could it have blown here?"
Jay shook his head. "No wind. And if it had been here very long, it would have been dry as a bleached bone, but it's still green."
"Which means?"
"Something put it there. Maybe it fell out of a shoe or was stuck to somebody's pants leg."
"Very good. Now what?"
Jay considered it. Saji had told him, but he couldn't remember it. Okay, think logically, Jay. It was hard, but it wasn't like he had to do any major programming, just take the next small step. Which would be…?
"Spiral out, look for tracks in any dirt that will take them?"
"Good. Let's see it. Careful — you don't want to obliterate any sign."
Jay spiraled out from the grass, moving slowly, looking for tracks. He couldn't spot any for fifty feet in a circle around it. He shook his head. "No tracks."
"You sure?"
"Hell, yes, I'm sure!"
Saji waited for a few seconds.
"Sorry. I'm on edge."
"No problem. Look over here." Saji led Jay to a patch of dust, point
ed at it. "There."
"Come on. That dirt is perfectly smooth, not a mark on it, you can't tell me you see a track there!"
"Carpet People," Saji said.
"Come again?"
"They wear pieces of cut carpet on their feet, booties over their shoes, that don't leave tracks. You see a perfectly smooth spot in the desert, it's wrong. Look there, next to it. See the wind riffles? The rain pocks? The way the dust is uneven, here and here? Now look back at that spot, there."
Jay looked. Yes. The dust was perfectly smooth.
"Get down to ground level, get the sun to the side."
Jay did. Yes, he could see a slight edge around the smooth spot, a rough oval shape. "I see it!"
"Sometimes, what you have to look for is the absence of something that should be there. Sometimes it will be very subtle, like this no-print footprint. Our quarry passed this way, heading north, staying close to the cliff edge. A man tracking him on horseback wouldn't get too close to the drop-off, even if the horse would let him. That big cactus you mentioned, way the hell over there?"
"Yeah."
"I bet he stopped there to rest in the shade."
"How could you possibly know that?"
"It's to the north. There's no shade behind us for miles. After walking out here in the hot sun for a couple of hours, your half-cooked feet wrapped in carpet booties over shoes, moving slow so as not to disturb the dust, wouldn't you stop in the shade to take a drink?"
Saji started walking briskly toward the barrel cactus.
"Uh, Saji? Don't we need to be careful of stepping on sign?"
"Nope. If he went to the cactus, we don't need to know how he got there. He didn't go over the edge, or we'd see the buzzards circling his body. He didn't come back our way. He went to the cactus. We'll pick up his trail there."
"Right," Jay said. "You're the boss."
"No, Jay, you are the boss. I'm just a guide."
He moved off. Jay followed him.
Wednesday, April 6th
Jackson, Mississippi
John Howard stood staring in the Holiday Inn room where Mikhayl Ruzhyo had spent the night before. The maid hadn't cleaned the room yet; Ruzhyo had paid for two nights and put a Do Not Disturb sign on the door before he left. Even so, the room hardly seemed to have been occupied. The bed was made, the single used towel had been refolded and put on top of the unused ones. A paper-wrapped glass in the bathroom had been rinsed clean, dried, and put back where it came from. And if he had used the crapper, the man had even folded a new point on the remainder of the toilet paper roll when he was done.
"No-impact camper," Fernandez said. "Wish my bride was so tidy."
Howard chewed at his lip. "I suppose it was too much to hope he'd leave a map with a destination circled, along with his airline reservation number and flight times."
"We'll get him, Colonel. We traced him this far, we'll pick up his trail from here, too. Looks as if he is heading east."
"Maybe."
"Maybe he is heading east, or maybe we'll get him?"
"Both."
Wednesday, April 6th
The Yews, Sussex, England
Peel stood outside the old church that was now his office, staring at Lord Goswell, who was still traipsing around carrying that ancient shotgun, trying to find one of the rabbits that had been raiding his garden.
The old boy considered himself quite the hunter. Peel had heard his old hunting stories a dozen times. Back in the early sixties, when such things were still routinely done, Goswell had gone on safari to Africa. There, he had taken an elephant, a lion, and a leopard, along with assorted wildebeests and springbok and other smaller game animals. Of course, his lordship's eyes and ears had been a lot sharper and younger fifty years ago, and he'd had an army of bearers to carry his gear, not to mention a local white hunter to find his targets. With that kind of stalk, one just showed up and pulled the trigger when told, and if one missed the shot, the white hunter would save one's arse. Hardly the same as tracking a wounded cape buffalo into a bamboo thicket alone, was it?
Just at the moment, the old boy, who was half deaf and blind, was probably as much threat to his own feet as he was to any lurking rabbits. He had been hunting bunnies on and off for months, and while he had fouled the air numerous times with that black-powder cannon of his, he had yet to hit anything other than the ground — or once, the side of the tool shed.
Goswell wasn't an awful man, merely a prime example of his class. Born rich, educated at the best schools, with all the right connections, the man had never had to want for anything. He'd married well, had the usual half-witted, inbred children, who'd also married well. One or the other of them would come to call now and then, more often since their mother had died a few years back. Even a couple of the grandchildren came round to see the old boy, and he doted on them, of course. It was true what they said; the rich were different, especially the old-money rich. They expected certain things as their due, never considered otherwise.
The old man whipped the shotgun up, aimed — but held his fire. Lowered the weapon and muttered to himself.
Peel grinned. Well, he could find out how it felt to be rich. He had a million in the bank. He could quit right now, invest the money conservatively, and live very comfortably off the interest for the rest of his life without ever touching the principal. There was security, especially for a man who had always expected to die with his boots on. But he could do even better by simply continuing on, working for Goswell. Everything the same, except that his reports about Bascomb-Coombs would change somewhat. His men would continue to follow the computer expert, save at certain specified times. One watcher would be taken off, thinking another would replace him, only that wouldn't happen. There would be a gap, as long as Bascomb-Coombs needed, and Peel would fill it in when he wrote up the reports. Not bad work for a million, altering a few schedules.
The old man wandered around the corner out of sight and, as he did, Peel reflected that the big sound-suppressor headphones made Goswell look rather like some kind of geriatric alien.
Peel glanced at his watch. About time for his men to check in.
Of course, the deal with the Jew scientist would eventually involve more than just keeping his lordship in the dark; he knew that. The other shoe would drop, and it would certainly involve work somewhat more strenuous than altering a computer log. And while Bascomb-Coombs seemed convinced of his invincibility when it came to his Qubits and all this quantum nonsense, if somebody kicked in the door and started shooting, it would take a man who knew how to shoot back to save his brilliant arse.
Well, Peel had done that for a long time, first for the queen, then her duffer son the king, and for a lot less money than he was getting now—
A bomb went off. Half a second later, another blast followed.
Peel dropped into a gunfighter's crouch, looking for danger, his hand automatically darting to his pistol. He relaxed when he saw the greasy white cloud of smoke swirl past, and heard the old man cursing. "Bastard! You filthy, thieving bastard!"
Peel grinned. Missed another one. He straightened, shot his cuffs, and went to make sure the old man was all right. Just because he was betraying Goswell's trust didn't mean he shouldn't be civilized.
Chapter 16
Thursday, April 7th
London, England
Michaels decided to accept Toni's invitation and go along to the silat class. He ought to work out, he'd been neglecting his practice the last few days, and God only knew when they'd get home and back into a normal routine. So far, they had zip on this new threat. He'd probably feel a lot better if he exercised, developed a good sweat.
"You've got the long stare," Toni said.
She sat in the seat across from him in the cab, and he smiled reflexively at her. "Sorry. I spent most of the afternoon counting figurative paper clips. I'm not any closer to this guy than I was before. I feel stupid."
"Why do you feel as if you personally are responsible for catching the mad
hacker? Dozens of governmental agencies around the world are chasing him, and none of them are any further along than we are."
"Yeah, but I sit at the top of the pyramid in the can-do U.S. of A. Nobody is eyeballing the Portuguese or the Tasmanians and expecting them to track this guy down. We're the only superpower left."
"Hi ho, Silver!"
He blinked at her. "Huh?"
"How the Lone Ranger got his name. Tonto nursed him back to health after the Butch Cavendish gang am-bushed the ranger troop. He came to, asked about the others. Tonto said, 'Him dead, all dead. You… only ranger left. You… lone ranger.' "
"Really?"
"Truth. You know what it says on the barrel of the Cisco Kid's gun?"
He blinked at her. "What?"
" 'Don't make me hurt you.' "
He smiled at her. "How do you know stuff like that?"
"A misspent youth. Older brothers who collected everything from cars to old 78 rpm vinyl records. I can tell you about Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, and Gene Autrey, if you want. Want to know about Red Ryder's sidekick?"
"Maybe not," he said.
"You don't want to hear about Li'l Beaver?" She batted her eyes at him and smiled.
"Well… yeah. But… not in front of the cabbie."
They both laughed.
The silat school was a dump, in a ratty neighborhood that made Michaels wish he had brought his taser. It was clean enough inside, though, and the students were polite when Toni introduced him.
The instructor, Carl Stewart, arrived, and Michaels met him, too. Seemed like a nice guy, a few years older than Michaels, in pretty good shape. A little taller, a little grayer, a little wider across the shoulders and thicker through the arms. He wore bifocal aviator glasses, and Michaels wondered why he wasn't wearing contacts or droptacs instead.
"Toni tells me you've begun studying silat, " Stewart said. "Are you going to join the class this evening?"
"If that would be all right, yes."
"Certainly." He smiled at Toni, she smiled right back, and Michaels felt a little pang of… something.
