by Tom Clancy
“So, what have you come up with?” he asked.
She took a drag from her cigarette and blew the smoke into the air. “I think I’ve got a line on the backbone server he hacked into for distribution.”
“Really? How did you manage that? I couldn’t get a fix on it.”
The singer finished her song. The audience applauded, the sound of that coming in a rhythmic wave that swelled, then receded. The lights came up—still not bright, but brighter—and the band segued into Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.”
A woman laughed behind Jay, a deep and almost sexual sound.
Most of crowd got up and headed for the dance floor. The walla of their voices was happy, excited, full of fun. That kind of music.
Rachel stood and held out her hand. “Come on, Jay, let’s cut a rug.”
He shook his head. “I’m not a dancer.”
“You are in my scenario. Just let yourself go, I guarantee you’ll be king of the jitterbug.”
“Rachel . . .”
“Up, Jay. It don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing.”
Reluctantly, Jay got to his feet. Rachel grabbed his hand.
On the polished wood floor, Jay found that if he relaxed, he had the moves Rachel had promised—the steps, twirls, even grabbing her and shooting her between his legs, then up into the air. Her skirt flared, revealing silk stockings held up by a black garter belt.
She definitely had an eye for the little details.
A very athletic dance, this.
The tune wound up to its frenetic crescendo, then ended.
Jay smiled at Rachel, who smiled back.
The band started to play again, this time a slow one—“Stormy Weather.”
Rachel smiled and raised an eyebrow at him. “One more?”
Jay shrugged. He caught her right hand in his left, and put his right hand in the small of her back, leaving about three inches of space between them.
She pressed herself against him, chest and hips, and put her head on his shoulder.
They swayed to the music.
Very nice was his first thought.
Bad idea quickly followed.
“Rachel,” he began.
“Let’s finish the dance, Jay, then we can get back to business.”
“Okay.” It was just VR, after all, right?
But it didn’t feel okay. Or rather, it felt a lot more okay than it should. As he danced, he tried to think about Saji and his little boy, but that was hard, and Lewis wasn’t making it any easier.
He thought about disabling the feedback again, to keep his VR body from mirroring his RW reaction, but his arms were around her, and he couldn’t lift his hand just yet without breaking character.
She knew that, of course, which was undoubtedly why she had brought him out onto this dance floor.
What was she up to?
He gritted his teeth and tried to conjure up images of Saji and their son.
As they danced, Lewis allowed herself to feel Jay’s body against hers. Yes, it was an illusion, courtesy of top-grade electronics and biofeedback gear; still, it was easy enough to suspend your disbelief. They could be in a nightclub in Chicago during the war years, moving now to the music made famous by Billie Holliday, who had died long before Rachel had been born. Jay here wasn’t a bad-looking guy, and he was smart and as sharp as a box of fresh sewing needles. She’d always been a sucker for a bright man. Of course, she had to keep him off balance because he was dangerous to her. But it didn’t have to be an unpleasant chore. What could be done in VR could eventually be done in the real world, too. . . .
She wasn’t exactly dull herself. She had filled her scenario with priming elements—little devices designed to evoke a subconscious response in anybody who played it. It was an old psychological trick—give somebody a word test, making short sentences out of a jumble of five or six words, and put a theme into it by carefully choosing words in each sentence to point in a particular direction. The unconscious brain’s autopilot, used to making snap choices, would fasten upon those words: bury terms like “confident,” “reliant,” “smart,” “clever,” “capable” in a session, then send the person to take a short exam? He would do better than normal.
Put the terms “dull,” “stupid,” “inept,” “confused,” and “slow” in that same kind of little quiz and send him to the test, he would do worse than normal.
Attitude, it turned out, was more important than most people knew. Affecting that attitude via the subconscious was much easier to manipulate than most people would believe. The autopilot took certain things for granted; it tended to mirror societal beliefs. Tall, good-looking, smiling people were generally viewed as more intelligent, somehow superior. Short, ugly, frowning people came across as inferior—at least subconsciously, regardless of whether people would ever admit to it if asked. Way more company CEOs were tall than short. That said a lot.
Rachel’s scenario practically reeked with hints for Jay Gridley to let himself go and indulge in sensual pleasure, with Rachel as the prime focus of that pleasure. The songs being played by the band would invoke sympathy for the women singers—“Mean to Me” and “Stormy Weather.” The instrumental “In the Mood”? That one was pretty obvious. The cigarette girl’s hooters and offer, the package of cigarettes on the table, the overt control of the jitterbug, wherein Jay moved her as he wished, the close contact of the slow number, even the horn player moving his mute in and out of the trumpet, those were all aimed at pointing Jay down the garden path—to her bedroom door.
She smiled into his shoulder at the thought. VR sex wasn’t illegal, nor grounds for divorce, unless unfaithfulness in your mind counted, and it didn’t. Not legally, anyway. Of course, her intent was to befuddle Jay, and when it came down to the real world—which it would, eventually—certainly his sense of guilt would help. Happily married man with a child suddenly finds himself in an affair with a colleague? That would give him plenty more to think about so he wouldn’t have a clue that Captain Rachel Lewis was the bad guy he was chasing. . . .
Jay was good at what he did, but so was she. And a man facing a bright and not-unattractive woman who was intent on having him? He was at a definite disadvantage. . . .
The music ended, and the dance stopped. She saw that her plan was working, to judge from the uncomfortable expression on Jay’s face. She smiled. “Well, that was nice. So, let’s get back to work, shall we?”
As they headed for their table, the swing band began playing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”
Indeed, it did.
Pinehurst, Georgia
Amos Jefferson Lowe invited Thorn to take a walk so the dog could stretch a little. Thorn agreed.
Amos was a big man, half a head taller and probably thirty pounds heavier than Thorn, and while there was white in his closely cropped hair, he moved like a man much younger than one in his late seventies or early eighties, which he had to be. He wore a work shirt and overalls over lace-up work boots, and there was no fat on him Thorn could see.
They started up the graveled driveway. The nearest house was probably a quarter of a mile away. The wind was cold and blowing pretty good, and Thorn felt it even through his jacket. If the cold bothered the other man, there was no sign of it.
The dog ranged back and forth, snuffling the ground, as if tracking some critter, limping a bit, but not looking unhappy about it.
Neither man said anything for a few moments. Thorn remembered walks like this with his grandfather when he’d been a boy. Sometimes they’d walk for an hour without saying anything; then the old man would stop and point at some sign on the ground: “See that? Deer tracks—doe and a fawn, see the little prints, here and there?”
The old man could spot things invisible to Thorn’s eyes—and, he suspected, to most anybody else’s eyes. He was tuned to the earth in ways most people never were.
Thorn smiled at the memory.
Amos raised an eyebrow.
“Just remembering my grandfather,” T
horn said. “We used to do a lot of walking when I was a boy.”
“He passed?”
“Yes, sir, some time back.”
“You miss him.”
“I do.”
The older man nodded. He bent, picked up a stick. “Sheila!”
The dog turned, saw the stick. Amos tossed it—not very far—and the dog gimped off to fetch it. The old man smiled.
“So, is this my premarriage interview?”
Amos chuckled. “Marissa made her choice, and you’re it. If she doesn’t have enough on the ball to get something this important right by now, nothing we can say now’s gonna make much difference.”
Thorn nodded. “But . . . ?”
“Nope, no ‘buts.’ Grandma and I, we want to be able to see in you what Marissa sees. Ruth liked you the minute you stepped into the house. She feels things quickly; me, I’m a little slower—I usually have to think on it some.”
The dog brought the stick back and dropped it in front of Thorn. He bent and picked it up, threw it a few feet. Sheila trotted off to fetch it again.
“Ruth’s always been a quick and accurate judge of character. If she’d thought you were a threat to our little granddaughter, she’d have put poison in your biscuits.”
Thorn blinked. It took a second for him to realize the old man was pulling his leg. At least he hoped that’s what Amos’s grin meant.
“Let me ask you something. You date many women of color?”
“No, sir.”
The dog returned. Dropped the stick. Thorn picked it up and tossed it again.
“Why start now?”
Thorn felt the urge to shrug, but stifled it. It didn’t seem appropriate somehow. “Usually, I found myself attracted to tall and brainy Nordic women. College professors, programmers, a doctor, once. Marissa doesn’t flaunt her intelligence—but she’s smarter than I am. And she’s funny, and she’s . . . wise, in a way I’m not. And she’s gorgeous. I wouldn’t much care if she were green or blue. I’m not sure what she sees in me.”
The dog returned again, but she was panting as she dropped the stick at Thorn’s feet. “That’s enough, Sheila,” Amos said. “I don’t want you so tired I have to carry you up the stairs when we get home.”
Thorn would have sworn the dog nodded and smiled. She left the stick, turned around, and wandered off the graveled driveway, sniffing the ground again.
“Gonna rain this afternoon,” Amos observed. “Couple degrees colder, it’d be snow, but we don’t get much of that down here.”
Thorn nodded.
“You have a pretty good job with the government,” Amos said.
“Yes, sir.”
“You like it okay?”
“Most of the time. There are days when I feel like walking away.”
“Every job is like that. So you can take care of our granddaughter if she decides to quit and stay home? Maybe have a baby?”
Thorn grinned.
“Am I missing something funny?”
“Marissa didn’t mention that I had my own business before I went to work for Net Force?”
“I don’t recall that it came up.”
Thorn chuckled. “I was lucky enough to have developed some software that was popular. Sold out at the right time. If the government fires me, we, uh, won’t miss any meals.”
The older man nodded. “Good enough. Marissa tells us you are a fencer?”
“I train on my own, but my best moves were twenty years ago.”
“Foil, épée, or saber?”
Thorn blinked again, surprised. “Mostly épée.”
Amos answered Thorn’s unasked question. “I expect she also told you I’m a big Shakespeare fan. Some of the roles require a little stage swordplay. I learned a bit of that over the years.”
“Ah.”>
“Well, I don’t want to overtire my old dog here, so maybe we should just head on back. Ruth’ll be fixin’ lunch pretty soon, and I want to tell her to make sure not to put any poison in yours.”
He extended his hand. Thorn took it. Amos had a firm grip. “Welcome to the family.”
“Just like that?”
“Marissa picked you, Ruth likes you.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, no problem there—I knew you were okay when my dog brought you the stick. She’s a better judge of character than either Ruth or I am.”
15
Eastern Seaboard Airlines Flight 1012
In the Air Somewhere over Tennessee
Carruth leaned back in the first-class jet seat and sipped at his drink, ice with one of those little bottles of bourbon. He smiled. It had been a banner week for him, at least when it came to capping people. First, the two Metro cops, then those two terrorist wannabes in New Orleans. It was good to know that, when push came to shove, he still had the moves. Yeah, training on the range was all well and good, and VR was getting more and more realistic, but there was nothing quite like the real thing: There was the sudden rush of adrenaline, the pucker-factor going from zero to full. The recoil of a rifle butt against your shoulder, the smell of gunpowder, the sharp crack! as the bullet zipped from the barrel and broke the sound barrier, loud even past the earplugs he wore . . .
Squeeze the trigger, work the bolt, squeeze again, and the bad guys went poof!
He knew Lewis wouldn’t count those three down on the Mississippi as a great victory—except that she had walked away alive and they hadn’t—but that’s why he’d been there as backup, and he’d done his job. She put two into the buyer—bam-bam! quick as you please—and he already had the scope dot lined up on the one who thought he was hiding a few meters away. Carruth cooked the sucker before he got his pistol into gear.
The second guy Carruth hadn’t seen until he started moving, but he had a good idea of where the guy should be, if he was there, and sure enough, he was almost spot on when the guy stepped into view.
Two shots, two up, two down—couldn’t do much better than that.
Three dead men on the ground and it was time to leave!
Lewis headed for the boat she’d set up. Either she’d make it or she wouldn’t, that was her concern. He cranked the van’s motor and took off.
He had three routes worked out, but the first one had been all he’d needed. It was as if God smiled upon him—the lights all turned green, there weren’t any traffic accidents, nobody working on the roads, it couldn’t have been any smoother. Some days, you got the bear, and he was happy this was one of them.
He crossed the Mississippi on the Highway 90 bridge, into Gretna, drove west, and took a dirt road to the south. He stopped at a big sludge pond near the railroad tracks—they had plenty of water down here—ponds, bayous, canals, lakes, and more.
He made sure nobody was watching him before he got the rifle out of the van.
He wasn’t attached to the deer rifle. He slung the .30-06 into the pond. He got back in the van and continued west, past the St. Charles Parish Hospital, veered to the north and east on I-310 to the Airline Highway, and then back to the airport. If anybody ever found the weapon, which was unlikely, it was clean, no prints, and there was no way to trace it to him—it had been bought by one of his men at a gun show in Orange County, California, from somebody who didn’t have a table but was walking around with a “for sale” sign stuck in the barrel. A cash transaction—Carruth’s man didn’t give a name, nor did he know the name of the man who had sold it to him. Perfect.
He’d turned the van back in, sans the magnetic sign, buried his gloves in a garbage bin, and gone to catch his flight, with two hours to spare. Slick as a spray of Break Free on a glass tabletop.
With the Winchester at the bottom of the pond, Carruth was more or less unarmed. He hadn’t wanted to risk shipping his BMF revolver anywhere, so it was locked in his gun safe at his house.
He sipped the liquor. Well, he wasn’t totally unarmed. He had a briefcase—one of those big, heavy, aluminum jobs, and it held two hardback books so thick he could barely close the ca
se. He was fairly sure that the case and books would be enough to stop or at least slow down a common pistol round, enough so it wouldn’t kill him if it did get through. So if some would-be hijacker tried to take over the plane, that would give him some protection when he rushed the guy. If all the guy had was a knife? Then that wasn’t gonna be enough against a trained Navy SEAL swinging five kilos of metal briefcase. Carruth would pound that fool like a man driving railroad spikes.
There hadn’t been a successful hijacking of a U.S. commercial jet in a while—those maniacs who’d attacked the Towers had made hijacking a dangerous business. Before, people would sit still and wait for the authorities to deal with it; now, somebody stood up and announced that he was taking over the plane? Everybody and his old granny would jump the guy—he’d be hit with everything that wasn’t nailed down. If you figured you were going to get plowed into a building, then a guy with a box cutter didn’t seem so scary. People survived being stabbed all the time—hitting a skyscraper at a couple hundred miles an hour and being turned into a jet-fuel fireball didn’t leave any survivors.
Carruth finished his drink. He thought about getting a second one, and decided against it. He needed to stay sober, just in case. Terrible, that you had to worry about such things in the United States of America.
Well, Carruth was prepared. Nobody was taking this jet anywhere it wasn’t supposed to go, not on his watch.
FBI/Net Force/Marine Corps Obstacle Course
Quantico, Virginia
There were days when Abe Kent felt like he had at nineteen. He’d get out of bed rested, no aches and pains anywhere, and if it weren’t for the bathroom mirror, he could almost forget for a minute that nineteen was more than forty years behind him.
This wasn’t one of those days. Normally, as part of his warm-up before he ran the obstacle course, he’d do ten or twelve chins, fifty push-ups, some crunches and stretches, to get the blood flowing and his joints limber. But a front was moving in, there was a cold and nasty drizzle falling, a little snow and a few ice pellets in the mix, and after eight chins, he knew he wasn’t going to get another rep without pulling something.
