by Tom Clancy
The first shot shattered the window, and it and the other two were damned loud in the car, but there was no help for that.
The Hummer’s driver hit his brakes. Too much to hope for that he’d hit the guy, but at least he’d slowed him down—
He saw sparks from the road in front of him. They were trying for his tires. He wouldn’t make much speed running on the rims.
He swerved the car again, slewing back and forth.
The gate was ahead, and a counterweighted pole was the only thing blocking the exit, though the guy in the kiosk had triggered the rolling gate and it began to close—
The pedal was floored, he wasn’t going to make the car go any faster, but it looked as if he might make it—
The guy in the kiosk ducked as Carruth pointed the SIG and let one go in his direction—
Why weren’t they closing on him? It was like they were hanging back on purpose—
The car threaded the gap, though the gate scraped the back passenger panel with a steel-fingernail-on-a-chalkboard noise. He had to be doing fifty, and in a few seconds, that went up to seventy.
Off the base!
Nobody was out here waiting for him—why the hell not?
Carruth uttered a steady stream of curses as he drove, watching the rearview mirror for pursuit. Another half a block into the base, he’d have never gotten out, even if he’d turned around and tried. His instinct had saved his ass—at least temporarily.
But—what the hell had happened? How had they gotten on to him?
Worry about that later, too. Right now, he had to drive like his life depended on it. Because it sure as shit did.
32
Net Force Gym
Quantico, Virginia
Thorn stepped out of the shower in the Net Force gym he had pretty much turned into his private practice salle, dried himself, and began to re-dress. Other people still came by to work out, but almost never when he was here.
He didn’t expect he would be working out here that much longer. As his grandfather used to say, you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The zephyrs of change were about to start roaring through Net Force like a small hurricane. What had started out as a civilian-run group under the aegis of the FBI had been co-opted by the DoD into another arm of the military, and its mission had radically changed. A tank just didn’t run the same way a Corvette did.
So far, the military had left most things as they were, but eventually they would alter things. It was in their nature. Like a corporate raider forcing a company merger, the powers-that-be were going to look around and notice there was a lot of duplication of effort—and it would be cheaper, simpler, and smarter to eliminate that duplication—why have four when two were plenty?
Why have two when one could do the job?
Thorn finished dressing. He checked himself in the mirror, ran a comb through his hair. He had come out of private industry, he had been involved in his share of buyouts and takeovers, and he knew how things worked. Things changed, and for all kinds of reasons: Buggy whips weren’t made anymore because there were no buggies. There came a time when the old gray mare was put out to pasture because she couldn’t keep up. That was how it had always been, and Thorn didn’t see that stopping anytime soon.
When the DoD took over Net Force, the agency’s days were numbered, and, as he looked at it, that number wasn’t very large. Six months, a year, maybe longer, but his guess was sooner rather than later. It didn’t make any sense otherwise. Net Force would be broken into components and the chunks sold or traded or given away, and in the end, nothing would be left. The name might stick around for a time, but the heart and soul would be gone. It wasn’t about the hardware, but about the people, and if they left, the party was over.
Thorn had an older cousin who had been a paper company manager twenty-five years or so past. The company, thinking ahead, always replanted the trees it harvested, put three in the ground for every one they chopped down. They were cutting third-growth, fourth-growth wood now. And they were adding new kinds of trees that grew faster and made better pulp, but now and again they would screw up the timing. A region would start to be harvested and trees replanted as they went, but they would cut down all the viable timber before the new plantings matured. There would be a five-year, sometimes a ten-year gap. When that happened, all the local loggers and support people were laid off. Thorn’s cousin had been the manager of one such area, up in Alaska. He’d had to shut the operation down to a few caretakers; a couple hundred workers, most of whom had been working the woods all their lives, thirty, forty years some of them, were let go. The little mill town had no other industry, and property values went into the toilet. Those people who couldn’t make it farming or fishing or hunting had to leave and find work elsewhere. The town effectively died.
Thorn’s cousin would tell the story at family gatherings, how the heart went out of the people who worked for him. How there had been suicides, divorces, vandalism against the company. It was a terrible experience, his cousin would say, taking another drink from his beer. Awful to be part of, depressing to watch. A way of life being lost. Much like what had happened to the Indians.
The listeners in the room would mutter and nod, and take sips of their beers. Yah, but who could have sympathy for the white men who went through it? Their own fault. Not like being herded onto a reservation and kept there by force.
Even though it was nearly as dramatic in this situation, Thorn wasn’t going to do that with Net Force. He had no intention of leading a funeral march. The party was winding down. It was time to think about getting his coat and taking his leave.
Pentagon Annex
Lewis called Jay, using the private number to his virgil this time. She was past trying to rattle Jay’s wife. It was time to get down to serious business.
“Rachel?”
“I need to see you,” she said. “I’ve got a break in the hunt.”
“Now?”
“As soon as you can. I figured out who designed the game. But I can’t ship you the file.”
“I’m on my way. It’ll take me an hour or so.”
“I’ll be here.”
She leaned back in her form-chair and smiled. She had a another red herring for him. Roy “Max” Waite, a fellow student who had graduated the same year she had. He’d gone into design for one of the big entertainment companies, built a couple of movie-tie-in games, had several other good game credits. In one of those lovely bits of good luck that sometimes happened at just the right time, Max Waite had been killed in an auto accident recently—only a few weeks ago. She had come across this just yesterday; somebody sent her an e-mail of a posting on an alumni website, lamenting the man’s early departure from life.
Big, fat, ole Max was dead. What a shame.
She’d seen immediately that she could use this. She’d gone through the system files, through her backdoor into the original game, and found what would look like a clue pointing to the dear departed Max, whom she remembered as a very stout man who’d spent most of his time in the computer labs perched precariously on a sturdy, but complaining, chair. It wasn’t real, the clue, but Jay wouldn’t know that, and he’d have no reason not to believe her. And even better, it would be almost impossible for him to check it further. Perfect.
Earlier, it could have been another wild hair for Jay to hunt down and tug at, but that wasn’t the reason she wanted him to come and see her. Once she got him behind the locked door of her office today, she was going to go for something much more primal. And she was sure he would be up for it.
Jay’s escort tapped on Lewis’s door. “Come on in.”
Jay did, and the sergeant ambled away. He shut the door behind him. “Gear up,” she said. “I’ll show you what I’ve got.” All crisp business, which was good.
He went to the guest chair and started slipping into sensors. He was already wearing his mesh under his clothes. He had taken the time to put it on so he wouldn’t have to do that here.
He jacked in, and the scenario blossomed. This time, it was a 1950s version of a big-city newspaper’s newsroom—copy boys bustled back and forth carrying typed sheets of papers; reporters, mostly men, smoked cigarettes or cigars at their desks and pounded away on old manual typewriters. The place even smelled like pulp paper and ink and cigar smoke. Nice.
Rachel said, “This way.”
Jay followed her down the hall to a door with a brass plate on it bearing the word MORGUE.
They went inside. An elderly woman in a gray wool suit and sensible shoes behind a scarred wooden counter smiled and handed Rachel a manila file folder. Rachel led Jay to a nearby table, and sat in an armless wooden chair, then patted the seat of the one next to that. He sat.
She spread the file out on the table in front of them. It was full of newspaper clippings in black and white.
She tapped one of the clippings with a fingernail. “Here.”
Jay read it. It was dated about three weeks ago:NOTED GAME DESIGNER DIES IN AUTO ACCIDENT
Jobsville, CA—Roy B. “Max” Waite, 31, died in a two-vehicle traffic accident at the corner of Her-man Avenue and Ishmael Road in Jobsville early this morning. Witnesses say that Waite’s car, a Volkswagen Beetle, was struck when a tractor-trailer driven by Al Huxley, 43, ran a stop sign and hit the VW broadside. Police say alcohol was not a factor, but that Huxley’s truck was traveling at an estimated 40 mph when it crashed into Waite’s car.
“I spilled my coffee on my lap and I was trying to blot it up—I didn’t see the sign until too late,” a tearful Huxley said, according to witnesses at the scene. Police are investigating the incident. No arrests have been made.
Waite, unmarried, worked for ICG Corporation, headquartered in Lucasville, and was the creator of several popular and best-selling computer games, including “Tentacles” and “Lords of the Galaxy.”
This is the third traffic fatality in Jobsville thus far this year, the second at this location. Local authorities are considering the installation of a traffic signal at the intersection.
If the trucker hadn’t stopped at the stop sign, would a red light have made any difference?
Jay looked at Rachel, whose leg was, he noticed, now pressed warmly against the side of his own leg.
“Graduated MIT/CIT same year I did,” she said. “And look at this.”
She slipped a flat color photograph out of her purse, and slid it over to where Jay could see it. It was a video still lifted from the bug game. There was an alien standing by some kind of machinery, a vehicle, parked on a raised platform. The bug was looking at a readout of orange, alien hieroglyphs on the edge of the platform.
“What am I seeing?”
“That’s a scale. The bug is weighing the car. See what it says on the read?”
Jay frowned at her. “It’s in what I assume is bug,” he said. “Not a language I know.”
“It translates to a number—thirty thousand. And the last part says, ‘Maximum Weight.’ ”
“Ahh.” Jay got it immediately. The dead programmer’s nickname—“Max Waite.” Of course. Every programmer signed his or her work. But if you didn’t know who had built it, it was often hard to find, much less decipher, the in-joke.
Even taken as a whole, this wasn’t anything you could take into a court of law and prove, but it all fell together: Game designer who built space games, his nickname hidden in a glyph? This was the guy. He would have had the chops. Shoot, Jay even remembered Tentacles. It had been all the rage when it first came out.
Of course, Waite being dead wasn’t going to help them a whole lot. He wouldn’t be telling them anything unless Jay could find a spiritual medium who could reach beyond the grave. . . .
Crap.
It was good work, though. He told her so.
“Thank you, Jay. That’s something, coming from you.”
At which point she slid her hand up his leg to his crotch.
Startled, Jay bailed from the scenario.
But that wasn’t much help. Rachel squatted next to his chair in her office, and her real hand was on his real lap.
“Rachel! What are you doing?!”
“Clever man like you can’t figure that out?” She smiled. Rubbed a little.
Jay shook his head. “Not a good idea,” he said. He tried to back his chair away, but the wheels seemed stuck.
“Oh, it’s a great idea. The door is locked. Nobody will interrupt us.”
“I’m married!”
“Good for you. This won’t hurt your wife, Jay. Nobody but us ever has to know. I won’t tell.” She squeezed him again. “You want it.”
She was right—he did want it—and that fact was more than a little obvious to her, given where her hand was. And nobody would know. . . .
For a few heartbeats, Jay sat balanced on the razor edge of choice. She reached for his zipper, smiling. . . .
He caught her hand. “No. I can’t.”
“It’s already evident that you can, Jay. And that you definitely want to.” She leaned in, to kiss him. . . .
He got the wheels working on the chair, and it rolled back suddenly, leaving her a couple feet away as he slammed into the wall, hard.
He leaped to his feet. “I’m sorry, Rachel. I just can’t do this!”
He practically ran for the door.
And part of him kept saying, “Idiot! Go back! She wants you! And you damn sure want her!”
Yeah, and that was the problem!
33
The Bizarre Bazaar
Jay had bagged the sci-fi convention scenario to try something different. He was still rattled by his visit with Rachel, really rattled. He felt as if he had developed a sudden case of some tropical fever; he was alternately hot and cold and on the edge of throwing up. He didn’t want to think about it, and work was the best way to avoid that, but even so, it kept coming up in his thoughts.
How close it had been. Way too close. He was ashamed of himself for letting it get that far. For even considering it.
So here he was, in fantasy Arabia, looking at a hookah when the alarms went off. The hookah was big, maybe three feet tall, and VR text hanging in the air in front of it advertised it as suitable for flavored tobacco or “other substances.” The hose of the hookah had been customized to look like snakeskin, and the mouthpiece had been molded appropriately to match.
“Other substances.” Yeah, right.
The alarms sounded like air-raid sirens. All around him vendors grabbed their cash boxes and headed for the exits. The VR commerce center had been modeled like a cross between something from the Arabian Nights and a 1940s Hollywood movie about Damascus in Glorious Living Technicolor—baskets, tables covered with colorful cloth, and brightly decorated awnings inside a huge, cavernous, walled marketplace. A bizarre bazaar, indeed . . .
It was mostly a gray market—products which were illegal in some countries, but not here, as well as questionable transfers of supposedly legal items.
Like, say, firearms.
If he could figure out for sure who bought the BMF, they’d be one step closer to nailing the terrorists attacking the bases.
Unfortunately, while the information was here, the site containing the information was international—which meant he had no jurisdiction to demand anything. How what he wanted had come to be here, Jay didn’t know, but he was sure that it was.
The problem was the way the records were kept. There were hundreds of vendors, each of whom had their own unique files. And most of those were only internal—to follow the money outside the market, their transactions had to be cross-checked with the site’s commerce engine. He could easily hack the individual sellers, but getting to the money transfers was somewhat more difficult. The guy who had bought the gun had used a swiped ID, but he had come, for some odd reason, through here to do it. Jay was betting his real name was here somewhere.
The data he wanted was kept behind a major firewall—one designed to Net Force specifications. Which meant that even being Jay Gr
idley wasn’t enough to get into it.
If only I could get the good guys to protect their stuff like that.
So he had followed what one of his professors had called the “Prophet Tactic”—if you couldn’t go to the mountain, maybe you could get the mountain to come to you. . . .
He’d run two quick tests, triggering the site’s security. During each test he’d seen the site’s crisis measures in action.
Rather than wiping every dangerous piece of data, the site database was split and fired off into different directions. After a set time the pieces would be reassembled and business would begin as usual at YAVA—Yet Another VR Address.
Jay had twice watched the burnoose-wearing VR metaphor for the cash records haul ass down a dark alley toward the back of the market and out through an arched doorway.
So all he had to do was trigger the alarms again, grab the records from the avatar—who looked like a middle-aged accountant in faux-Arabic robes—and he’d be in good shape.
There he goes. . . .
Exactly as predicted, the cash records guy hustled out the firewall entrance—which looked like a concrete bunker pasted with advertisements in Farsi or something—and toward the rear of the marketplace.
And here I go. . . .
This was where it could get iffy. Up until now, he’d been a bystander, no one who would catch the attention of site security.
If site security ID’d him quickly enough, they could start unraveling his net disguise and track him back to U.S. law enforcement.
Which would be embarrassing.
Not that the United States wasn’t used to being embarrassed—but Net Force’s top VR jock certainly wasn’t.
And I don’t want to start now.
Jay ran past the hookah vendor’s long table toward an intersection the records carrier would cross before turning into the alley. By not following the carrier directly, he hoped he was less likely to catch unwanted attention.
