Cybernation (2001)

by Clancy, Tom - Net Force 06

  A man had to do what he had to do, but, he had to admit, some jobs were more fun than others . . .

  Zehlendorf Forest Berlin, Germany Summer 1959

  Jay was in tracking mode, a skill Saji had taught him when he’d been recovering from his stroke. He walked carefully along the dirt road, cutting sign, looking for the smallest indication that his quarry had come this way.

  The road was easy. It was dusty, and upon it, the passages of somebody in a vehicle or on foot were simple to spot, no problem. Somebody looking to hide his trail could brush the tracks away with little effort, but because the dust was so fine, it showed every tiny detail, and erasing something itself left a sign that was more interesting than the tracks. A man trying to avoid pursuit could change his mode of transportation, from a car to a bike to a pogo stick; he could change his shoes, and with a little bit of misdirection, lose a pursuer who was following combat boots when they turned into running shoes. But wiping away all tracks? That might seem smart on first thought, but really wasn’t if you knew anything about how to follow a trail.

  Sometimes, as Sherlock Holmes was wont to say, it was the absence of the dog barking in the night that was important.

  The lack of impressions on a dirt road were more telling than any bootprint.

  Carpet-walkers would sometimes glue carpet to the bottoms of their shoes, so as not to leave impressions, but that worked on sand or rocky soil, not on a red-dirt road with baby-powder-fine dust; instead, it would leave distinct patches of relatively smooth tracks. And somebody dragging a branch or burlap sack behind them would likewise wipe out the tracks, but leave drag lines that would last through a dry and moderately windy day, even though rain would eventually patter them down.

  No, a smart runner would get off the road entirely, head for the rocks or streams where any tracks either wouldn’t show, or would be swirled away in a few minutes or even seconds. And he would double-back, angle off in false starts, and head in the wrong direction long enough to gull a so-so tracker before he circled around for his true destination.

  But if somebody was taking only the barest precautions, and they didn’t really think they were going to be noticed or tailed, they weren’t likely to be as cautious. You didn’t go into full alert and stealth mode every time you went out to collect the mail from your box, or the paper from your front lawn—what was the point?

  Keller wore carpet shoes, and for most people, most of the time, his basic moves would have done the job. Nobody driving along the road would notice any tracks. Anybody walking but not looking wouldn’t notice the smooth patches. Even somebody looking for tracks of a particular kind of shoe would probably miss ’em. But Smokin’ Jay Gridley wasn’t just anybody, was he?

  It was a nice day for a walk. Greenery everywhere, flowers in bloom, the smell of pollen and dust in the summery, early evening air . . .

  Ahead, on the right, was a weathered wooden building. It had a caduceus painted on the side, the winged staff with two snakes twined around it, indicating a doctor’s office, the paint weather-worn and faded from black to a light gray. Yes, this must be the place.

  Jay walked to the front door. The office was closed for the day, and the door was locked, but the latch was an old-style spring lock, and it took all of ten seconds for Jay to open it with a skeleton key he pulled from his pocket.

  It was dark and quiet inside. Jay looked around, didn’t see any alarms. He flipped a light switch up. There was a four-drawer steel file cabinet full of patient files next to a big wooden desk. The drawers were locked, but he opened them with a couple of bent paper clips. So easy when you knew how.

  He found the file quickly enough, too. Keller hadn’t even bothered to use a phony name, and had paid for the office visit and medication with his corporate credit card—which is how Jay had tracked him here so quickly.

  He read the report. “Fell down stairs” was what had been written on the new patient form. The physical examination showed multiple contusions and abrasions, no broken bones or torn ligaments. In one corner, in tiny, neat lettering was a note: “Altercation c jealous boyfriend over woman,” it said. The letter “c” had a line over it, and the words were underlined twice. Apparently the good doctor, one Willem Konig, M.D., had gotten a different cause for the injuries than had his receptionist.

  So. Whaddya know. Keller had gotten his butt kicked for fooling around with somebody else’s girlfriend. That was interesting. Keller had never been a ladies’ man in school, but you never could tell. Jay himself hadn’t been that much of a lover back then, either. Things changed.

  He put the report back into the drawer, closed and re-locked it, looked out the window to make sure nobody was around, then exited the building, locking it behind him. Technically, he was bending the law here. While he had a legal warrant to do an electronic search, that permission only extended to the U.S. borders. While Net Force did have reciprocity agreements with dozens of countries, including Germany, and the U.S. federal warrant would eventually have gotten a counterpart here, he didn’t have time to wait. He wasn’t planning to use this information in court, so it didn’t have to have all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed, as long as it helped him find his quarry.

  Outside, behind the doctor’s office, was a small hill. Jay climbed to the top and looked around. Krumme Lake was to the west, a short distance away, on the edge of the Berlin Forest. The Grunewald area was right over there. There were roads, a train track, and what was still West Berlin, deep in the eastern heart of a divided Germany, that wouldn’t be reunited for decades. The Cold War was still cranking up in this era.

  So, Keller was in Germany, or at least he had been yesterday, and a routine request from State to the German government for any use of Keller’s U.S. passport had come back negative, so if he was gone, he must have done it illegally. Given his current status, Jay couldn’t say Keller wouldn’t do that, but since he didn’t know anybody was looking for him, there wouldn’t be any compelling reason for him to sneak out of the country.

  Why Germany? Who was the jealous boyfriend who must live here who clobbered Keller? Where had he gone?

  That was the problem with searching for information. Sometimes you came up with more questions than answers . . .

  “Hold on a second,” Jay said aloud. Wasn’t there something else about Germany he had come across recently? Something about a barge . . . ? No, that was Japan. It was a train. CyberNation ran a tourist train or somesuch here. And there were the iron horse’s tracks, right there. Maybe it was a sign.

  And maybe not. But it gave him something he could check. Train schedules were public information. Find all those that had passed on this track down there for the last couple of days, run them down, find out where they went. Find out if the one owned by CyberNation was around. If it was, that would certainly be a big coincidence, wouldn’t it? And a great place to go and look . . .

  31

  On the Bon Chance

  Toni played the tourist, mindful of what she had come to the ship to do. She carried a cheap electronic camera, and she took pictures of her room, the exterior decks, the swimming pool, and the helicopter barge. She bought a gambling credit card for two hundred dollars and played the slot machines. She lost eighty dollars over a period of four hours, then hit a three-cherry payout for a hundred dollars. She had lunch in one of the cafeterias, a club sandwich and iced tea, with a slice of very good banana cream pie for dessert, and that cost her half what it would in most D.C. restaurants.

  In the early afternoon, she slathered herself with coconut-scented sunblock and lay in one of the deck chairs near the swimming pool. It was hot, but a nice breeze off the water kept things bearable.

  A steward came by and asked her if she wanted a drink. She ordered a margarita, and when it came, it looked like a big green snow cone.

  She went to her cabin, showered, put on shorts and a T-shirt, then took her camera to the ship’s stern, where passengers tossed bits of food to a flock of hovering sea-gulls. She took
pictures of the birds, and more views of the ship from that angle.

  The periodic drone of passenger helicopters landing and taking off from the barge was noticeable, but not overly loud.

  She could get used to this. Too bad Alex wasn’t here to enjoy it with her.

  Late in the afternoon, she went back to her cabin and changed into workout clothes, bike shorts and a halter-top, running shoes, white cotton socks. She didn’t want to practice silat while she was here, even in her room, but she could at least ride the stationary bike and maybe do a few sets on the weight machines. She draped a towel around her shoulders, tucked her room keycard into her left sock top, and headed for the gym.

  There were a dozen people in the gym, which was down a level from her cabin. The place had eight or ten weight station machines, pneumatic rather than stacks of iron, six bikes, three stairclimbers, two treadmills, and in one corner, a heavy punching bag hung on a thick nylon strap, the bag itself center-wrapped with layers of duct tape. Toni wished she could work the bag, but she didn’t want to draw any attention to herself. Even in this day and age, a little woman beating the stuffing out of a punching bag drew raised eyebrows and male interest. Men who might not ever speak to you while you were on a bike or stairclimber would feel the need to say something if you were kicking a heavy bag. It was somehow a challenge to their masculinity.

  Toni got a free bottle of spring water from a dispenser, found an empty spot in front of the mirrors, did a little stretching and a few warm-ups, then moved to one of the cardiobikes. The one she picked had one of those fan blade front wheels, so the harder you pedaled, the more air you had to move. This was good, because it helped keep you cooler. The electronics allowed a choice of difficulty. She started off slow, and built up resistance after a few minutes.

  She was halfway through what she figured would be a forty-minute ride when the black man she’d seen on the copter ride came in. He wore an old pair of baggy shorts, no shirt, rubber sandals, a white cotton headband, and had a towel around his neck.

  The shorts had the Bon Chance logo on them. He must work here, she realized. If he was a tourist, the shorts would be new, not old and worn as they were, right?

  Toni sipped at her water. The man was well-built, all muscle, no fat on him. Not like a power lifter, but more like a boxer a few days from a championship match.

  He moved to the hanging bag, kicked off his sandals, tossed the towel next to them, and went through a series of stretches.

  He was very limber for somebody with that much muscle, she noticed. She was curious to see if he was going to work the bag, or that was just a place where he loosened up.

  It didn’t take long to satisfy her wonder.

  The man stood in front of the bag, and started slapping it. Open-handed, first with the palms, then with the backs of his hands, he developed a rhythm—palm right, backhand right, palm left, backhand left, over and over, until the sound of the strikes sounded like somebody working a speed bag, wapata, wapata, wapata, wapata.

  After a couple of minutes, with a sheen of sweat beaded on his head and body, he switched to elbows, and the rhythm was slower, but similar. Right horizontal elbow inward, then back, followed by the left, bap-bap!

  Toni kept pumping, watching the man in the mirrors rather than looking right at him.

  He switched from elbows to punches, using hammer fists in the same pattern. Then he went to his knees, and then to a series of instep-then-heel kicks. Right, left, right, left.

  He was working really hard. Most people didn’t realize how difficult it was to strike a heavy bag like that—it took a lot more energy than riding a bike or walking on a treadmill, a lot more. And not wearing bag gloves was hard on the hands, too.

  The timer on Toni’s bike cheeped. She looked down at it. The black man had been working the bag for twenty minutes, and while he was sweating profusely, he didn’t look particularly tired.

  The guy was in incredible shape. And though she couldn’t tell from the strikes what his art was, he was obviously deep into some fighting discipline. He moved in balance the whole time, and his hits, while fast, were also powerful. Interesting.

  She warmed down on the bike for another minute, gradually slowing her pedaling. She stepped off the bike, wiped her face with the towel, finished off her water, then started for the exit.

  The black man stepped back, threw a hard sidekick at the bag, and lifted it a foot into the air, to drop back on its nylon strap hard enough to shake the mirrors. He reached for his towel, wiped his face and head, slipped his feet into his sandals, and walked away.

  He was a few feet behind Toni when she stepped into the hall.

  “You a dancer?” he said. He had an accent, sounded like Spanish or Portuguese, maybe.

  Toni looked at the man. Was he hitting on her? In her guise of divorced secretary, she would probably be receptive to such things. He was a strong, good-looking man. Then again, she was supposedly from the South and might have a racial prejudice, so perhaps she ought to seem a little timid. If he worked here, maybe she could find out some things from him.

  “No,” she said. “Not really.”

  “You have the legs,” he said. He nodded at her.

  Toni gave him what she thought would pass for an embarrassed smile. “Well, I try to keep in shape. Are you a boxer?”

  He shrugged. “Kind of.”

  He moved up next to her as they walked. “Your first visit to the ship?”

  “Yes. You’ve been here before?”

  “Oh, yeah. I work here.”

  “Really? What do you do?”

  “I’m with Security,” he said.

  No surprise, but Toni raised her eyebrows. “How exciting.”

  He shrugged again. “Pretty dull, mostly. You maybe want to get a drink later?”

  Toni pretended to be more nervous than she felt. “Uh, well, maybe.”

  He grinned, showing perfect white teeth. “I don’t bite, Missy. My name is Roberto Santos.” He put out his hand.

  “I’m Mary Johnson.” She took his hand. It was damp, but warm, and she could feel the power in his grip, even though he throttled it way back. “From Falls Church, Virginia.”

  “It is my pleasure to meet you,” he said. He released her hand. “That drink?”

  “Oh. Okay. I want to shower and change. Can I meet you somewhere?”

  He smiled again. “How about the Lady Luck, that’s the little bar next to the dining room outside the main casino. In an hour?”

  “That would be fine,” she said.

  After he had gone on his way, Toni felt her heartbeat start to slow. It had been a long time since she had been in the field working a contact. That he was such a primal, physical man added something to her nervousness. This man was dangerous. No question of that.

  On the CyberNation Train Near Halbertstadt, Germany

  When Jay sneaked onto the train, he kept it simple. This close to Keller, he wanted to be sure he wasn’t distracted by historical details or esoteric odors in a complex scenario—Keller was, he had shown, too good to shrug off. So the train was just a train, the era was the present and real-time, and Jay’s plan was to get in and out without raising a ruckus. He hadn’t come to slap Keller’s face with a glove and challenge him to a duel, only to find out whether he was here or not.

  The duel would come later. On Jay’s terms.

  Not that even this much was easy. He made his way through the baggage car with his utmost stealth, stopping frequently to look and to listen. Cracking any of CyberNation’s secure services would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. These were people who prided themselves on their ability to program and weave, and any chinks in their armor would be microscopically small. But the train ran on public tracks, and it had a connection to the railway system’s computers, which were a lot easier to rascal. Jay wasn’t hurting anything, he wasn’t going to even peek at the rail system’s files, he was just riding their coded sig into the CyberNation train. They had to allow it acc
ess, and while it wouldn’t get him past their foot-thick firewalls, the information he wanted wasn’t behind them anyhow.

  Jay got through the baggage car. Just ahead was the conductor’s office. Jay knocked, and when nobody answered he slipped the lock with a credit card and stepped inside. If the conductor had been in his office, Jay would have offered some excuse, gone away, and created a diversion that would have drawn the man out.

  A file cabinet stood near the conductor’s desk, but it was partially open, not even locked. Jeez, Louise! Not that the lock would have stopped him, but still, they didn’t have to make it so easy. It was amazing to him how often people who should know better left their doors unlocked.

  A few minutes shuffling through papers came up with what he wanted: a passenger list. He looked at several other manifests, on the off-chance somebody might someday notice he had poked around in here. No point in being obvious about what he was looking for.

  Jay recognized several of the names on the passenger list from his own list of high-end computer program grads. And there, plain as day, was the name he had come to find.

  Jackson Keller.

  So, this was where he was, and this was where his primary team was, too.

  Jay put the list back into the drawer, went to the door, peeked out. Nobody around.

  He hurried back toward the baggage car. He had what he wanted. Time to leave.

  “We’ve got a hacker incursion,” Taggart said.

  Keller stared at her. “Incursion? Not a failed attempt? Impossible!”

  “Not in our systems. In the train’s op comp. We got a bounce-back from Deutsche Bahn Access, said he wasn’t who he said he was. I checked it: The hit came in off the sat pipeline from EuroAlliance One, not from any registered Deutsche Bahn connections.”