Changing of the Guard Read online

  Tiger!

  It was the tiger that had gotten him before, the one he’d seen in the VR scenario during his involvement with the quantum computer.

  Jay turned and ran, screaming, and while the pain in his head pounded with each step, that didn’t matter. He had to get away.

  He climbed a tree that seemed to stretch as he climbed, bark chipping under his fingernails, his fear driving him. It was as though he were climbing a conveyor belt in the wrong direction, carried down as he tried to climb up. Eventually, through a sheer burst of terror, he made it onto a large branch.

  The tiger, the tiger!

  Jay stared down at the jungle floor, but the creature had vanished as silently as it had come.

  That’s the tiger that got me before!

  The last time it had left him near death in a coma.

  Coma . . .

  The word resonated in his head like the sound of a giant gong, and the headache pain he’d felt all morning intensified.

  Suddenly, Jay was terrified.

  What if I’m still in that coma? All the other stuff—Saji, the baby, Alex and Toni retiring—what if none of that ever happened? What if I’m still lying in a bed, dreaming?

  The thought was scarier than anything he’d contemplated yet.

  The silent jungle seemed to close in on him, and Jay clung to the tree as his ancient ancestors might have, hoping against hope that he was wrong—

  And wondering how to figure it out.

  New York City

  Cox was on a roll. The calls, the e-mails, the faxes, those never stopped, and whatever else was going on, there was business to conduct, business at which he was expert and experienced. You didn’t get to sit around and wring your hands in his world when problems arose, no matter what they were.

  You kept moving or the jackals would pull you down.

  Jennie, his secretary, spoke over the intercom. “President Mnumba on line five.”

  Cox touched a button. The man’s image appeared on his computer screen, just as his own visage would on Mnumba’s monitor thousands of miles and halfway around the globe from here.

  “John Simon, how are you? Good. Family okay? Good. Listen, reason I called, it’s about those leases. Yes, yes, I know, but listen, John Simon, that’s how it has to be. If I don’t get those, I can’t go forward, simple as that. Yes, I understand. I appreciate your position, and naturally, I wouldn’t want you to do anything that makes you uncomfortable. Yes. Great to hear that, Mr. President. Have your man call mine when they are ready. You take care.”

  Cox smiled at the image of the African on his screen as it faded.

  “Bertrand on four.”

  Cox touched the control again. No image this time, Bertrand was on a vox-only phone.

  “Sir. We have . . . collected the material we wanted.”

  “Excellent. No problems?”

  “An omelet’s worth, nothing major.”

  Bertrand was in the Baltics, doing some industrial espionage. Odd as it seemed, the Croats or the Serbs or somebody there had come up with a new petroleum flow process that was more efficient than the industry standard. Cox had to have that. An omelet meant there were a few broken eggs—or broken heads. All the same to Cox.

  “Good. I look forward to seeing the new material.” He broke the connection.

  The incoming e-mail alert pinged, and it only did that when there was something of import from somebody who had the private address.

  “Jennie, I’m on-line!” he yelled.

  “Sir.” She would start cycling and rerouting phone calls until he was done.

  He logged onto his mail server. There was a single message, sent from a public machine, no signature.

  “Cleaned up,” it said. “Moving forward.”

  Eduard. Good. Cox nodded to himself.

  “Off-line!”

  “Ambassador Foley on three.”

  “Jim, how are you? Your daughter have that baby yet?”

  This was what Cox lived for. The game, the hunt, the wheeling and dealing that kept the engines rumbling, moving forward. Sometimes he had to take a detour, now and then, even stop occasionally, but mostly it was onward, ever onward. He’d never get to the destination, he knew that, the road never ended, it would circle back on itself, like an equator, but that didn’t matter. As long as he was in control, driving it all, that was the thing. That was the important thing.

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  Thorn pushed back from his desk and stood. One of the crew had just called from the hospital—no change in Gridley’s condition.

  He shook his head. Terrible thing, a man being shot like that.

  So far, the state police hadn’t come up with the man who had done it, and apparently the witnesses weren’t much help. The shooter might never be found. Meanwhile, Net Force’s best computer jock was in a coma, and nobody knew when—or even if—he was coming out of it. Lord.

  Other than that, things were pretty quiet.

  Thorn decided to take a walk around the building. He still wasn’t quite used to this all being his domain.

  He wandered down the hall, nodding at passersby.

  After a while, he found himself outside Colonel Kent’s office. He stepped inside, nodded at the receptionist, and through the open door saw that the colonel was hanging a katana on the wall behind his desk. At least that was what it looked like to Thorn—he was no expert when it came to the Japanese samurai blades, but it seemed to be the right shape and length. Might be a daito, which was a little longer, but it was one or the other.

  The blade was mounted in a plain wooden sheath, painted in black lacquer. Kent set the curved sword edge-up onto the two hooks he had affixed to the wall behind his desk, then stepped back to look at it.

  “Interesting,” Thorn said. “You study the sword, Colonel?”

  Kent turned. “Commander. Not really. My grandfather was a Marine. He brought it back from the campaign against the Japanese in the Pacific. Took it from the dead hand of an officer who held out alone against the American forces for twelve days on one of those nasty tropical islands. The soldier kept moving from cave to cave, hiding in the trees. When he ran out of ammunition for his sidearm at the end, he made a final charge against two squads with nothing left but this sword. Straight into a wall of rifle and submachine-gun fire, and he kept going after he should have been knocked down. My grandfather had no love for the Japanese—his brother went down on a ship sunk at Pearl Harbor—but he respected bravery in an enemy.”

  Thorn nodded.

  “When he was getting on in years, my grandfather—his name was Jonathan—took it upon himself to do a little research on the sword. The Japanese had buyers traveling around the U.S., going to gun shows, putting ads in magazines and whatnot, trying to buy back a lot of the things G.I.s had brought home from the war, so he figured he might have something valuable.”

  Kent reached up and retrieved the sword, then tendered it to Thorn.

  “Take a look.”

  There was an etiquette for this, the proper way to accept and remove a Japanese sword for viewing, but Thorn had only the vaguest notion of how it worked. He gave the colonel a short, military nod, took the weapon, and slid the blade a few inches from the sheath.

  The steel gleamed like a mirror, and there was a faint but distinct swirly temper line along the edge. Thorn knew that the smith put clay along the edge during the tempering process so that it would be harder than the body of the blade, which needed to be more flexible. When the blade was polished, the harder portion became whiter than the rest of the metal, which was usually folded and hammered flat many times, making a high quality, fine-grained “watered” or Damascus steel. The Turks had a similar process for swords, as had the Spanish, and even the Norse.

  Kent said, “The furniture—the handle, guard, spacers, and such—are World War Two issue. The blade is a family heirloom, dressed down so the officer—a lieutenant, my grandfather said—could carry it into battle. The blade itself is
more than four hundred years old. Probably worth twenty, thirty thousand dollars. Under the handle, chiseled into the steel, it tells the name of the smith who made it, when, where, and for whom it was made, the temple where it was dedicated, and the result of the cutting test. You know about the test?”

  Thorn shook his head.

  “After a blade was finished, and the furniture put on, it was used on condemned criminals to check for sharpness and durability. Sometimes they were already dead, sometimes not. They were piled on top of each other, and a man with strong arms took a whack at the pile. The measure was how many bodies the blade could cut through before it stopped. A one-body sword was not much, a two-body sword okay, and a three-body sword excellent. This is a four-body sword, according to the inscription.”

  “Man,” Thorn said.

  “Maybe they were all skinny. It doesn’t say. Apparently, condemned criminals who had a nasty streak would sometimes start swallowing stones a day or two before their scheduled execution. They’d fill their belly with rocks so that when the executioner came to try his blade he had a good chance of breaking it when he cut through them.”

  “Lord.”

  “Yep. A different culture over there. Makes you wonder what would have happened if they’d won the war.”

  Thorn stared at the mirrorlike steel.

  “My grandfather found all this so fascinating that at the age of sixty-four he took up the study of the thing from a Japanese expert in San Francisco. There are two main arts—kendo, with the bamboo and armor and all, and iaido, practiced with the live blade.”

  Thorn nodded again. Yes, he knew that much.

  “When I was a boy, my grandfather showed me some of the basic iaido stuff. The old boy used to practice this for an hour or so every day, rain or shine, cold, heat, whatever. It seemed to steady him, somehow, made him calmer. He was pushing ninety when he passed away. He did his sword work that morning, went in and took a nap, and died in his sleep.”

  Thorn slid the blade back into the scabbard and offered it to Kent, who took it. “You still practice, Colonel?”

  The man shrugged. “Now and then. My grandfather taught me a couple of forms.”

  Thorn said, “I do a little fencing. Western-style, foil, épée, saber, like that. Maybe you could show me some of the iai stuff sometime.”

  Kent regarded him, as if suddenly seeing him for the first time since he’d come into the office. “Yes, I could do that. Meanwhile, what else can I do for you, sir?”

  “Well, to start, drop the ‘sir,’ business, Colonel. I’ll answer to ‘Thorn,’ or ‘Tom,’ or ‘Hey, you!’ but I was appointed to this job, not elected.”

  Kent almost grinned. “All right. I can manage that. Any word on Gridley?”

  “Still in a coma.”

  “Terrible thing,” Kent said.

  “Yes.”

  13

  In his office again, Thorn considered the matter of Jay Gridley. There were technicians going over the man’s work, but some of it was inaccessible to them. Gridley, like most computer whizzes, had encrypted passwords and retinal blocks on some of his files—even though that was against Net Force policies precisely for the situation that now existed: What if something happened to an operative and nobody could get at what he’d been doing?

  Gridley was good, very good, but Thorn was better. Besides, he had a big advantage—there was an override, a back door built into Net Force mainframe software that would allow the Commander to get past most of the wards. Thorn could call virtuals of any of his operatives’ retinal scans; he had the encryption codes for Net Force’s main locks, and he could probably figure out Gridley’s private codes using the Super-Cray’s breakers. Having access to that was a computer nerd’s delight—more powerful than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. . . .

  At the very least, even though it was probably not connected, he could take a look at what the man had been working on.

  “No time like the present,” he said to himself.

  His office wasn’t rigged for full-VR. Gridley’s was. He’d go there. Besides, there might be something in the office that would help. You never knew but that Gridley might have his codes written down on the inside of a desk drawer.

  He smiled. Top programmers didn’t do anything that stupid, though he had once known one who had used his own birthday as a password. Guy had said that nobody would be so stupid as to expect that. He’d been wrong—there were plenty of stupid people in the world, for whom subtlety was not possible. It was almost always a mistake to make that kind of assumption.

  New York City

  As he was tightening the G, twisting the tuning machine to raise the pitch, the string broke. The nylon went bing! as it snapped, right at the tie block, which was where they usually let go. The thing was, Natadze hadn’t broken a string on his instrument in years—he changed them regularly and never let them get so old and worn that it was apt to be a problem. These were only a couple of weeks old. It must have been defective.

  He quickly grabbed the loose nylon to make sure the broken end didn’t accidentally scratch the French polish finish. The French polish was better than other finishes for tone, but it was not the most durable. A lot of luthiers had started limiting it to the front of their instruments, while using lacquers of various types on the sides and backs. The sound was much the same, but the lacquers wore much better.

  Practice would be delayed. He had to change out the remaining five—replacing one at a time was, for him, something better left only for emergencies. The other strings should be good for another month before they started to sound dead, but he was a believer in the idea that birds of a feather sang better together.

  It was well known that wooden instruments, at least the good ones, got better with age. A guitar’s tone, like a violin or cello, would improve with playing. Cedar tops did it faster, spruce took longer but grew in volume as well as tone; everybody knew that.

  While there was no proof that strings needed to be the same age to vibrate well together, Natadze believed that this was the case. Change one, change all was his philosophy.

  He fetched his winder, slipped it over the low E tuning peg, and began slackening the string. He had tried different tuners on his instruments, and he preferred those made by the late Irving Sloane. Rodgers’s and Fustero’s were prettier and much more costly, though on an instrument as expensive as this a few hundred dollars for gearheads was nothing. But the Sloanes seemed smoother, they gave an absolute lock, and they lasted forever. He had gone to them on all his guitars, save for the collectible ones that shouldn’t be altered.

  Likewise with strings, he had tried all the major brands, mixing and matching the wound basses with the trebles, and eventually came to realize that D’Addario’s Pro-Arte Hard Tensions gave him the best sound on this instrument, even though the medium tensions he normally used were a bit easier on the fingers. Interesting, because they were far from the most expensive ones.

  Once he had removed all the strings, he wiped the fretboard with cleaner and then lemon oil, wiped it dry again, put a piece of cardboard below the bridge to protect the finish, and began to re-string the guitar. He used a variation of John Gilbert’s method, melting a tiny ball on the ends of the nylon trebles before running them through the tie-board and looping them, starting with the high E and the other nylons, then jumped to the low E and other two basses. In theory, this gave the trebles time to adjust as you strung the wound strings, but in practice, all the strings went flat quickly for a few days until they had time to properly stretch out.

  The process took half an hour. He clipped the long ends, using a small pair of blunt wire cutters, retuned all the strings, and ran a few scales. New strings, while not staying on key for long, did sound great, the sound cleaner and much more alive. Once the sweat from your fingers began to work, the strings had a limited life. You could take them off and soak them in cleaning solution, or even boil them to remove the grime, but that was troublesome,
and it was much easier just to install new ones. If you had a guitar that cost as much as a new car, stinting on fifteen-dollar strings seemed fairly foolish.

  Finally, after retuning for the fourth time, he was ready to play. He’d have to retune every few minutes, but that was unavoidable.

  He might have screwed up his work a few times of late, but there was no reason why he couldn’t at least practice playing well. With the would-be kidnap victim in a coma in the hospital—he had checked that out personally—he wasn’t going to be causing any problems for a while. And the road rager who had shot him? Gone and no way to track him.

  As he began to run his scales, a sudden unexpected thought burst into his brain, a nasty and unwelcome visitor, and one that stunned him with the force of its arrival.

  Oh, no! How could he have been so stupid?!

  Walter Reed Army Medical Center Washington, D.C.

  In the small waiting room on the eighth floor, John Howard sipped at a really bad cup of machine coffee and shook his head. Julio Fernandez also nursed a paper cup of the vile brew, but seemed less bothered by the taste.

  “I’m going to check with the doctors once more. If there’s no change, I’m heading out,” Howard said.

  Fernandez said, “I can stick around for a while. Joanna and the boy are still at her friend’s in New York, no reason to go home except to sleep, and I can do that here.”

  Howard laughed. “You can do that anywhere. I believe I once saw you fall asleep eating a bowl of hot soup.”

  “Did I finish it?”

  They sipped coffee.

  Fernandez said, “So, tell me about Colonel Jarhead. Why’d you put him up for the new honcho?”

  “Ah. Back when I was still a light colonel and in the RA, and you were probably being busted back to corporal the second or third time, you might recall that I did a rotation teaching ROTC at a U down in Georgia.”

  “Yes, sir, I recall that. Goofing off at the student union, eyeballing the coeds, and grading papers. Hard work.”