Changing of the Guard nf-8 Page 10

  He would cautiously and carefully drop these blocks into the East River later, where they would spend however many thousands of years it took before they rusted away. Even if they were found, nobody would ever be able to connect them to a weapon used to shoot a federal agent. Just more junk at the bottom of the river, good for nothing, of no concern to anyone.

  What an awful shame it was to do such a thing to a weapon like the Korth.

  On the Beach Primeval

  Jay stood in the sand, watching the surf come in. Everything was gorgeous: The waves lapping at the shoreline were a deep blue, the sun overhead gave the sand a glow that made it seem pure gold, and a gentle breeze caressed his skin.

  After a few moments, he realized he must be in VR.

  This is too good — it’s got no teeth.

  The phrase had originated with his instructor in VR 101, an undergrad course that had been new when he’d been in college. The old man had always said it: “Reality bites. Nothing is perfect. Remember that.”

  Even the most beautiful beaches had sand mites, stinking seaweed, or rotting fish that marred their perfection. A good VR programmer would include details like this, little teeth, to at least nibble a bit at a VR viewer and thus make it seem more real. Well, except for fantasy VR guys — in those, reality wasn’t supposed to bite.

  Had he accidentally jacked into someone else’s datastream? Grabbed an old datafile he’d used for research by mistake?

  He reached out with his mind, flicking the off switch which would take him out of the scenario.

  Nothing happened.

  He frowned. What was going on?

  Had his hardware glitched? Maybe an interface problem? The neural stimulators were so good these days it was possible to forget you had a body. One of the new guys he’d hired over the summer had gotten stuck one day when he’d removed the safety and alarm on his stims. That was strictly forbidden, and hard to do without some skill. The poor kid might have stayed there all day if he hadn’t had a dentist appointment and they’d called looking for him. Jay had done a hardware shutdown to pull him out of the figure eight. A bit of bad programming that could have been serious, and a lesson learned: Don’t shut off the safeties.

  While Jay didn’t run his stims that high, he did get focused so intently that the effect was sometimes the same.

  Well. No matter, he’d break it off now.

  He focused on becoming aware of his body; he reached out to feel his index finger, crooking it slightly toward the cutout sensor he knew was there.

  Got it…

  But once again, nothing happened. The scene stayed on, the waves lapped inward, and a few seagulls, their feathers pearly white, flew by overhead.

  Well.

  Whatever was happening definitely had his attention now. He’d been feeling a little funny, kind of unfocused when the scenario started, but that was fading fast. His mind searched through alternative fixes for the problem.

  Time to try software.

  He’d route to an outside link, contact someone to go check on him in the lab. If someone had been messing around with cheap software in his VR rig, they were going to be sorry they had ever been born.

  He couldn’t find the link. A moment of panic enveloped him.

  Wait a second, hold on. Maybe he wasn’t in VR?

  Could he be dreaming?

  It was an occupational hazard that VR programmers often developed extremely realistic dreams. All the time that they spent coding sensations into a scenario wore a groove in their own heads. He looked at the perfect sunset and frowned. He’d like to think he’d dream something better than this.

  There was an easy way to find out. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet.

  Which is there because I programmed it? Or dreamed it?

  He’d taken the idea from an old book about lucid dreaming. Lucid dreamers were people who were aware that they were dreaming. Once this synaptic jump was made, they could control their dreams, a very attractive proposal prior to VR. The dreamer would carry a card around in his wallet that said, “If you can read this, you’re not dreaming.”

  The wallet trick worked because, in a dream state, your brain had a hard time keeping text together. Lucid-dreamer wannabes would pull the card out in their dreams and read it. When the text didn’t work — usually it slid around the page, or faded out — they’d know they were dreaming.

  Jay had used the technique to separate himself from his dreams several times and had offered it to other VR jocks he knew. He’d done it often enough that he’d actually managed to have a few lucid dreams as well. VR without the hardware.

  He looked at the card.

  If you can read this, you’re not dreaming.

  Well, that answered that.

  He glanced away from the card and then looked back to be sure.

  If you can read this, you’re not in VR, either.

  A chill frosted his shoulders.

  Uh oh. What was going on here?

  He tried to remember his day… It had been calm — he was going to see Saji, and then—

  As if the thought had conjured her, he suddenly saw his wife across the beach, almost at the opposite end.

  Saji! He felt a sense of relief. Saji would know what was going on. He’d talk to her, see what kind of VR he was stuck in.

  As he drew closer to her, he could see that she held something. A little white bundle.

  The wind on the shore suddenly carried to him a thin cry over the crash of the surf.

  The baby!

  What was going on? She’d just been diagnosed — well that wasn’t the right word, she’d… found out she was pregnant, just a few days before.

  Something was wrong. He looked over toward Saji, and noticed that even though he hadn’t been moving slowly, she seemed to be farther away than before.

  And in the same glance, he noticed that the water had pulled back from the sand — way back. Fish were flopping in the suddenly empty bay, seaweed and kelp beds were exposed, out past the coral reef.

  He looked far out to sea and it was as if his vision had suddenly turned telescopic.

  A huge swell moved toward the shore.

  Tsunami!

  Jay had gone on a holiday a few years back and had seen a sign on the shoreline: TIDAL WAVE ESCAPE ROUTE. The words had cast a shadow over his short foray on the beach — that and the fact that an old man had looked at his pale skin and asked, “Where you from, boy, Alaska?”

  When he returned to the hotel, he hit the net and did a little studying on tsunamis. Shortly after that he moved to a hotel farther inland. The power of the water in a tidal wave could wipe out entire villages in seconds, and you never knew when one was just going to show up and swamp everything before the warning could do you any good.

  And there was Saji and his baby right in front of one.

  No way. VR or dream, or whatever. He was Jay Gridley, he was not going to let this happen!

  Jay ran, using every trick he could think of to alter the scene: imagery, focus points, meditation, and VR conjurations.

  Nothing worked. The wave kept coming.

  He ran faster, figuring that at least his body — or what passed for it, wherever he was — was operating with a set of consistent physics.

  But he wasn’t going to make it. He got closer, though, close enough to see little fingers grasping his wife’s shoulder as she started to breast-feed.

  She doesn’t see the danger.

  The sound of the water coming had grown, and there was a feel of imminent threat, death coming, everybody out!

  “Saji!” he yelled, as loud as he could, “Get out of here! Run!”

  He kept yelling as he ran, getting closer and closer. He thought about what he would do if and when he reached her. Run with her toward high ground, or at least try to find some kind of shelter—

  He glanced to his left and saw it. The swell had jumped up in size, the seabed forcing higher as it approached. He had seen some surfers once on
TV, riding on sixty-foot waves, monsters that dwarfed them, making them look like toys.

  This wave was bigger.

  A lot bigger.

  He screamed Saji’s name again, and this time she heard him. She looked over, her eyes widening in surprise, and a smile beamed across her face.

  No, no! Run! Run!

  He gestured frantically toward the sea, and finally, chillingly, she looked.

  Her face went pale, her eyes wide, and her mouth opened to scream. She turned away from the oncoming wave, tried to shelter the baby, but it was useless—

  They were swept away—

  Jay braced himself as best he could as the wave hit. He expected to be crushed, but some freak variation of the shoreline must have saved him: The water thundered down, tossed him into the air, then carried him away, but somehow, he came to the surface, alive, uninjured.

  Except for the emotional horror of it all. His wife and new baby hit by a wall of water! And him unable to do a thing about it!

  It wasn’t real. He clung to that small solace. It couldn’t be real — but… what was it? It certainly wasn’t VR as he knew it.

  His face felt as if it had been set in stone. This was not good. He was supposed to be in control.

  He floated in the water, the taste of salt harsh in his mouth.

  What was happening?

  11

  University Park, Maryland

  Thorn didn’t want to go home. The doctors at the hospital where Jay Gridley was lying in a coma had told him there wasn’t much point in hanging around. Gridley was in no danger of dying — at least they didn’t think so — and if he awoke, they would call.

  Jay was alive, but the doctors didn’t know when — or if — he would come back. The man who had shot him was still at large. Witnesses had described the man and his car, but the police had not found him.

  By the time he left it was already past two A.M., and there didn’t seem to be much point in going home. He would barely have time to get to sleep before he’d have to get up and head back to Net Force HQ. Besides, he was too wired to sleep.

  Hospitals did that to him, ever since his grandfather had passed away. At the end, the old man had checked himself out of the hospital and gone home to die in his own bed surrounded by his family, but he had spent a week full of tubes and needles before he’d had enough, and Thorn had spent much of that week there with him. The smells, the look, they came back every time he had to go to one of those places.

  Halls of the dead and dying, his grandfather had called hospitals, and if he was going to die anyway, what point was there in spending large amounts of somebody’s money to do it?

  No, Thorn didn’t want to go home to an empty house, but, outside of his Net Force office, he didn’t really have anywhere else to go. Heading to his house, he opened a beer and went on-line, hoping for a distraction.

  He found one.

  His mailbox was stuffed with more than three hundred e-mails.

  He opened the first one. It, and most of the others, were from his troll.

  Wonderful.

  Rapier, the troll who haunted him, had apparently generated a repeating message that was, if unchecked, eventually going to fill Thorn’s hard drive with his drivel:

  “Hahahhaa, Thorn! Touché!”

  That was all it said, repeated fifty times per message, and continuing to come in one e-mail at a time every few minutes. If Rapier had tried to dump more than two megabytes at once, Thorn’s filters would have stopped it, but dribbling in as short e-mail with different return addresses — all false ones, Thorn was sure — the spam- and size-filters let them pass.

  Thorn took a sip of his beer and glared at the screen. Given how the rest of his day had been, he did not need this.

  He deleted the e-mails, reset his filters to stop anything from the e-mail server Rapier was using, and decided that maybe hunting this guy down and getting him tossed off his server was the least he could do.

  The basic process was fairly simple to start. First, you did the obvious check — the sender’s e-mail return address. Thorn had noted several of the ones Rapier had used, all from the same IP.

  Thorn blipped a quick message cc: ed to the addresses he’d noted. After a few seconds he got a bounce from the server, in this case, boohoo.com, that his messages were undeliverable.

  Big surprise there.

  He pulled up the troll’s most recent posting to the newsgroup and checked the header, next to the HELO sig. There was a ten-digit number, broken by dots, that identified the sending machine. Of course, that couldn’t be relied upon, since there were ways it could also be faked, but it was a place to start. Next to that was the receipt date that the ID’d server showed, followed by the routing info as the posting was shuttled into UseNet.

  Thorn logged into the Internet registries, starting with the American Registry — ARIN. From his language and spelling, Thorn figured that Rapier was an American.

  Once on the ARIN site, he ran a WHOIS search on the IP address and sure enough, the address was in the ARIN database.

  The WHOIS came up, and at least it was a legitimate addy — the inetnum, netnam, and description showed it to be a small server located outside of Chicago, BearBull.com. What he was looking for were the contacts for the IP, and there they were, two of them.

  Using his official Net Force address, Thorn fired off an e-mail to both:

  Dear Sirs, I am seeking your assistance in locating a client of yours who has apparently violated federal law regarding use of the Internet. I would appreciate any assistance you might render in this matter.

  He listed the particulars of the e-mail, and then he signed it, “Thomas Thorn, Commander, Net Force.”

  This was a big hammer to use. Yes, technically the troll was breaking the law — stuffing a mailbox was illegal, under the denial-of-service statutes, though hardly something Net Force was going to go after, and if the IP didn’t want to provide the information, Thorn wasn’t going to run to Legal and get a warrant. Then again, he’d probably get a reply in a day or so, and maybe—

  His e-mail program chinged! and an incoming message header appeared: From BearBull.com.

  Look at that — must be an automatic response—

  Nope, apparently the BearBull Webmaster was a night owl:

  Commander Thorn— Sir, our records indicate that the machine you asked about belongs to Access & Eats, a cybercafe located west of Chicago in the Oak Brook Mall, in the city of Oak Brook. The owner’s name is Dennis James McManus…

  There was a phone number, e-mail address, and a webpage listed under the name, along with an offer to do anything to help Net Force that they could.

  Thorn shook his head and smiled. Well, so much for tracking down his troll. The guy was clever enough to use a public computer, and that made it a lot harder to finger him. Of course, had he been a real terrorist, Thorn could have called upon the FBI to trot field agents out to the mall to find the guy, but for a troll? No way. Not a good idea to start one’s tenure as head of a law enforcement agency by indulging in a personal vendetta…

  Then again, there was nothing wrong with asking questions as a private citizen. He could drop Mr. McManus an e-mail, ask him if he had a regular customer who maybe talked about fencing. Certainly Rapier spent a lot of time on-line, he must be in and out of the cybercafe often enough so maybe somebody would have noticed him?

  As Thorn recalled, the University of Chicago had a pretty good fencing team, at least it had been back when Thorn had been competing in college. He’d gone to a tournament there once, got to the semifinals in épée before he lost to Parker King, which had been no shame, since King had gone on to win the NCAA finals and, eventually, a Bronze in the Olympics.

  Maybe somebody there knew Rapier?

  He shook his head. Say, do you know a troll who bugs people on UseNet, calls himself “Rapier?”

  For all he knew, anybody he asked could be the guy, and wouldn’t that be an unpleasant experience? Having Rapier field his
call and know he had gotten to him?

  Of course, it might scare him off, getting a call from Thorn, but then again, maybe not, and he didn’t want to give the troll the satisfaction of knowing he had rattled Thorn’s cage.

  Time to give it up, Tom. You have other things to occupy your time. It’s just a troll, a pathetic man with no life. Let him stew in his own juices.

  Before he shut down, he tapped in the URL for the cybercafe’s webpage.

  The splash page came up, with a directory, and Thorn clicked on the biography for the cafe’s operator.

  Dennis James McManus was a slight, fair-skinned red-head, balding, about Thorn’s age, a serious, almost scowling expression on his face. He leaned against a dark wall, arms crossed, practically glaring at the camera.

  An unhappy man, Thorn reflected. Looked familiar, somehow, though Thorn couldn’t place him. Oh, well.

  He was about to log off, had, in fact, hit the quit button on his browser, when he noticed a word in the bio, just a quick flash as the page blinked off:

  Epée.

  Hello?

  Thorn quickly logged back on and read the bio.

  Apparently, Mr. McManus had been a collegiate fencing champion in Ohio.

  Well, well, well. How about that…?

  Gotcha!

  Walter Reed Army Medical Center Washington, D.C.

  John Howard was talking to Julio when he looked up and saw Alex and Toni Michaels heading toward them.

  “Alex, Toni. I thought you were in Colorado.”

  “We almost were,” Michaels said. “We caught a flight back as soon as we heard. How is he?”

  “Julio talked to Saji a few minutes ago — she’s in the ICU with him.”

  Fernandez nodded. “No change. He’s unconscious. The bullet apparently broke apart when it hit the windshield, and about a third of it glanced off his forehead, just above the right eye, dug a bloody groove, but did not penetrate the skull. It hit him hard enough to rattle his brain, and he is in shock. Everything else seems to be working okay, but he hasn’t come around and nobody is quite sure why.”