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  That cane was at home. The one she inspected at the moment, the Instructor's model, was almost identical to the Combat style, same length and diameter, but the crook was a hair wider and the horn was rounded instead of beaked. It looked a lot more like the cane an old lady should be using to hobble about with. It wouldn't do for some eagle-eyed cop to see that pointed horn and think: Why, Granny, what a sharp stick you have…

  The weapon looked okay, so the Selkie left the kitchen and padded naked into the living room of her rental condo where she had set up her practice target. This was a section of an inch-and-a-half-diameter aluminum rod with a ringbolt on one end. The rod was wrapped in a pad of biogel, the same stuff they used to soften racing bike seats and the insteps of running shoes; the gel was then covered with a stretched sheet of chamois leather and held tightly in place with duct tape. It wasn't exactly the same as flesh over bone, but it was close enough for her purposes. At home, she had a wing chun training dummy set up with similar wrapping, so she could work the full range of angles, with weapons or feet and hands, but on the road, one had to make do.

  She got a sudden mental image of herself trying to check a wing chun dummy in at an airport with her luggage, with the reaction that would bring, and grinned.

  A thin nylon rope ran from the target's eyebolt through a second eye hook she'd screwed into a ceiling rafter; the other end of the line was tied to a doorknob. This way, she could adjust the target's height. Right now, it was at knee level. Knees were great targets for a stick — a broken knee put a big crimp in anybody's fighting style.

  She moved within range of the target, took a couple of cleansing breaths and assumed her basic stance, cane in front of her, tip on the ground, both hands on the crook. She was aware she would look very interesting to a watcher were not all the curtains pulled closed: a naked woman standing with a cane in front of her crotch in the middle of a room empty except for something weird hanging from the ceiling. She grinned. She'd always liked working out nude, there was something so primal about it.

  She cleared her mind. Wait. Wait…

  She whipped the cane up from the floor in a short arc from her right, slid her right hand to mid-shaft to guide the strike, her left hand to the carved grip to power it.

  The solid thunk of the wood into the padded bar felt very satisfying. A good hit.

  She spun the cane, caught the target in the crook, pulled it toward herself, then pivoted the stick and hit the padding from the opposite side.

  One more solid hit and the target stopped cold, no swing.

  Yes!

  She pulled the cane back, held it like a pool cue and thrust the tip forward. Hit the target high, knocked it back.

  Yes.

  It was just practice, but even so, the Selkie was in the zone — she was in the killing zone. And there was no place more exciting.

  17

  Monday, September 27th, 3 p.m. Maintenon, France

  Plekhanov sat in an old stone bell tower, a long-barreled Mauser Gewehr Model 1898 rifle balanced across his knees. The piece weighed about four and half kilos, was intrinsically accurate, fired the 7.92mm cartridge at high velocity, and had an appropriate-period M73B1 telescopic sight mounted upon it. Even though the scope was American-made, used primarily on the Springfield 1903, some of the optics had found their way into Germany. This was somewhat ironic, given the uses to which they had been put. The long bolt made the rifle's action slow to operate, and it held only five rounds in the box magazine, but the range would be enough to allow plenty of time to escape despite the sluggish operational speed.

  The church steeple was the tallest point in the picturesque and nameless little village southwest of Maintenon, and offered a good view of the approaching armies. The AEF — American Expeditionary Force — had come late to the Great War, but they were here now, and would help turn the tide. Recent storms in the region had been torrential, and it was one of their brigades now slogging its way across the muddy fields even as Plekhanov watched.

  Along with the Americans was a polyglot combined-unit comprised of Russian, Serbian, Chechen, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Chinese and Indian soldiers.

  Plekhanov removed the clunky helmet he wore and ran one hand through his sweat-damp hair. He grinned. Historical accuracy fell down a bit in this scenario, since no Oriental countries had fielded soldiers in this area during World War I, even though Japan and China had been considered allies of the western Europeans battling Germany. Certainly there had been no Koreans or Thais — still called Siamese back then — nor Indians, unless perhaps the Brits had sprinkled a few Gurkhas or Bengal Lancers in among their troops. The British were odd ducks, so he supposed that might well have been possible. Plekhanov's research was not as thorough as it might have been, since it wasn't really necessary. While writing the software, he did recall reading a piece about how outraged the Brits had been when the nabob of Bengal, one Suraj-ud-Dowlah, sacked Calcutta in 1757. After the battle, the nabob had stuffed 146 captured Brits into a small and very hot room at Fort William. When they were released the next day, only twenty-three of them were still alive; the rest had died, most of them from heat stroke. Thus was born the infamous "Black Hole of Calcutta."

  Careful there, old man, you are drifting. Best you get back to the business at hand.

  Plekhanov put his helmet back on, shifted his position from where he sat upon the empty wine cask and propped the rifle onto the ledge under the tower's opening. He could have used the hiking scenario, but since he was taking direct action himself — there was nobody he could trust to do this particular job — he thought a more active imagery was appropriate. A German sniper picking off enemy troops at long range seemed eminently suitable. Poetic, even.

  He chambered a round, and lined the scope up on a rather fat American officer who looked like a caricature of a Wall Street stockbroker, despite the military uniform. Even with the optics, the target was still somewhat small at the distance — nearly two hundred meters, he judged. The scope was zeroed in at one hundred meters, so he aimed a bit high, for the head, to allow for a little extra drop. He took a deep breath, held it, squeezed the trigger…

  In New York City, a currency tasking computer subcontracted to the Federal Reserve sent copies of all user ID codes admitted to every connected terminal—

  Even as the fat American collapsed with a bullet buried in his chest, Plekhanov worked the bolt and shifted his aim. Ah. There was the White Russian, saber in hand, leading his men. Plekhanov put the crosshairs on the man's throat, held his breath again, fired—

  In Moscow, the computer interlink responsible for balance-of-trade statistics with the European Commonwealth scrambled and went down—

  There was the Korean officer, trying to get his troops to duck and cover. Plekhanov worked the rifle's bolt, ejected another spent shell and chambered a fresh round. Goodbye, Mr. Kim—

  A small setting inside the fabber making the new PowerExtreme mainframe computer chips at the Kim Electronics plant in Seoul altered, not enough to be noticed by the operators, but enough to change certain pathways in the chips' silicon circuitry. The virus had a time limit, so the settings would revert, but a thousand chips would be affected before that happened, turning the high-end systems they would eventually control into electronic time bombs waiting to go off—

  And here on the muddy French field was an Indian looking for a place to hide. Sorry, Punjab, old Wog, there's no cover there—

  The newly installed computer traffic system in Bombay blew its triple-redundancy circuits. All two hundred main traffic signals under its direct control turned green. All passenger-and freight-train track signals turned green. So did all light-rail crossing signals—

  One unfired bullet remained. He had to use it before they got too close. He already knew his target. Plekhanov swung the rifle's barrel to the right. The Siamese commander held a pistol; he fired it wildly. He would not be able to hit Plekhanov at this distance, save by accident, even if he could see him, which he could not. S
till, it paid to be cautious. Plekhanov recalled the last words of the American General John Sedgwick, speaking of the Confederate sharpshooters during the Civil War Battle of Spotsylvania: "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance—"

  Plekhanov grinned.

  Aim. Squeeze—

  The Thai Prime Minister's collection of personal pornography, most of which showed recognizable images of him in sexual congress with women not his wife — and some of which showed him in such congress with her, too — somehow uploaded itself from his home computer and into the mainframe of the Southeast Asian News Service. Then, two of these pictures went into the hourly edition of SEANS NetNews in place of scheduled images.

  Plekhanov raised his face from the Mauser. An oily wisp of smoke drifted from the muzzle, the smell of burned powder entwined with it. Below and still a hundred meters distant, the enemy soldiers milled around in panic, then dropped prone, looking for targets. Some of them returned fire, but none of the bullets came close to where he was.

  Enough damage for one day. He shouldered the rifle by its sling and headed for the tower's steps.

  Monday, September 27th, 8:11 cum. Quantico

  Everywhere Jay Gridley drove on the net, sirens screamed. The virtual highways were full of fire engines, ambulances, police cruisers, a whole shitload of activity as people went to repair the damage and to haul away metaphorical bodies. Within a few minutes, there had been major wrecks in at least three or four supposedly secure systems internationally, maybe more.

  Jay drove the Viper at speed and got to the spots as best he could, legally when they allowed it, illegally when they didn't; what he saw was not good. It was the same guy dropping sharp spikes on the roads. The pattern was there, the same blurred and unidentifiable footprints as before, leading away and quickly dead-ending. Maybe the local operators couldn't see it, but Jay was sure of it. He couldn't ID the terrorist, but he knew it was one guy.

  He pulled the Viper to a halt on a long and relatively straight stretch of the new Thailand-Burma Highway. A reporter stood next to a smoldering limo with a bunch of cops, making notes on a little flatscreen. Jay knew the guy slightly; he was a distant cousin a couple of times removed.

  "Hey, Chuan, how's it goin'?"

  "Jay? What are you doing here? Something I ought to know about?"

  "Nah, just cruising."

  The other man looked around, seeming to shift his gaze as he blinked. "Ah, your highway metaplay. I see you're still driving that bomb on wheels. I disremember what it's called, some kind of lizard or snake?"

  "Viper. It gets me there." He looked at the limo. "So who's the cookie in the shake-and-bake portable oven there?"

  "A mess, isn't it? Behold, our beloved Prime Minister Sukho. This is what's left of his career, anyhow. Somebody got past the OS security wards on his personal system, and then became very clever with the nasty pictures hidden therein. Gave them to my bosses. My service somehow managed to accidentally send a pair of them out with the feed — or so the editors say. I know a few would have happily done it on purpose.

  "So, on the sports screen, instead of the photo of the Indonesian football team winning the World Soccer Cup in Brazil, we got our beloved Prime Minister being attended to by an enthusiastic professional girl well known in Bangkok as Neena the Cleaner. And two jumps later, on the international screen, instead of Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamad doing a nice ribbon-cutting with a bunch of dignitaries for a new rec facility at Cyberjaya, we gave our viewers Sukho on a big round bed with two other very naked Bangkok working girls seeing what will go where. Bet those pix raised an eyebrow or two at the old water cooler during break." He smiled. "Hey, you ever been to Cyberjaya? In RW, I mean?"

  His cousin was talking about a nine-mile-by-thirty-mile zone in Malaysia called the Multimedia Super Corridor. Begun in ‘97, the MSC stretched south from Kuala Lumpur, and included at the south end a new international airport and a new federal capital, Putrajaya. "Once," Jay said. "I spent a few days there a year or so back, a real-time seminar on the new graphic platform. Unbelievable place."

  "They say that's where CyberNation's programmers came from."

  "Yeah? I hadn't heard that. I heard nobody knew where they came from."

  "Rumors." He shrugged. "So much for the sordid tale of a political career gone south. I gotta get back and file my story."

  "Not a lucky man, your Prime Minister."

  "Oh, he's real lucky — thing is, it's all bad. This ain't America where the politicians can get away with such things, you know. It don't play with the family vote over here. Plus it is well known that Sukho's wife's brother was one of the Secret Bandit Warlords before he died. Word is, the wife's still got a couple SBW nephews out in the jungle who would just as soon cut you in half as look at you. The Prime Minister's wife is in big shame over this. Some pictures were of her, taken from a hidden camera, and I bet she didn't know about ‘em." He waved at the burned-out limo. "I was Sukho, I'd tap my Swiss accounts and retire someplace in a galaxy far, far away. And I'd do it under another name, and with fifty grand's worth of false teeth, hair dye, and plastic surgery, while I was at it."

  "I'd have thought his computer security would have been better than normal, given what he had to hide and him being a PM and all."

  "Yeah, you'da thought so. My guess is, next guy selling a pick-proof OS around here is gonna make a fortune."

  "Here and everywhere else."

  "I scan that. See you, Jay."

  "Later, Chuanny."

  After his cousin was gone, Jay considered the situation. So Thailand was going to get a new Prime Minister. That might or might not have much effect on the world, but he had to figure that whoever was doing this rascal had picked his targets carefully. To what end, Jay didn't know, but his gut feeling was that it was a real bad end.

  He better get back himself. The boss would want to know about the newest developments.

  On the way, however, something else caught his attention.

  Holy shit!"

  * * *

  "Alex? I think you better see this."

  Michaels looked up and saw Toni in his doorway.

  "In the conference room," she added.

  He followed her. The big-screen viewer was on, CNN.

  A newscaster was doing a voice-over as images flashed across the large screen.

  "Bombay, India — known by the locals as Mumbai — is the capital of Maharashtra and the major economic power of western India. Located on the shore of the Arabian Sea, it is a city steeped in culture. From the Victorian façades of the British Raj, to the tourist ghetto of Colaba, to the pulse-of-the-city Fort, eighteen million people call Mumbai home. Most of them are dirt-poor."

  There was an aerial shot of the city. Stock footage.

  Michaels glanced at Toni and raised an eyebrow. Why did she want him to see a documentary on India?

  "This is the sidebar," she said. "Wait a second and they'll get back to the main story." She sounded grim.

  "Modernization has brought at least some of Bombay into the twenty-first century," the newscast continued. "And modernization has reared its ugly head here today."

  The image shifted. Two buses had crashed together in an intersection. One of the red double-deckers lay on its side; the other was tilted, resting against the back of a fruit truck. Some kind of yellow-orange melons were scattered and shattered all over the street. Bodies were laid out along the narrow street's narrower sidewalks. Rescuers ran to the buses, pulling more dead or injured from the wrecks. A man covered with blood wandered in front of the camera, yelling something over and over. A small boy sat on the curb, staring at a woman lying next to him who was obviously dead.

  "All over the city, computer-controlled traffic signals apparently turned green at the same instant."

  Another image. A major intersection with at least a dozen cars melded together by impacts. The cars were on fire, and an explosion rocked the scene, knocking the cameraman down. Somebody cursed in English: "Shit, shit, sh
it!"

  Here was a high-angle helicopter shot — scores of cars, trucks, motor scooters and bicycles compacted into jagged masses. The voice describing the event was excited, but not overly so: "There are at least fifty known dead in a massive traffic pile-up on Marine Drive, with hundreds more injured, and estimates of other traffic fatalities in the city go as high as six hundred—"

  Again the image shifted, showing a train station. A passenger train lay crumpled like a child's toy next to a stretch of track. Freight cars were scattered among the coaches, some of them turned onto their sides.

  "At Churchgate Railway station, malfunctioning train signals apparently caused the collision of a Central Railways passenger train northbound from Goa, with a freight train heading south. At least sixty are known dead at this point, with more than three hundred injuries. We have unconfirmed reports of electric commuter trains colliding in suburban areas with fatalities, but travel in the city is impossible and we are unable to get to those locations except by air."

  Another scene shift. A twin-engine airplane, engulfed in flames. Bodies — and parts of bodies lay scattered around it like broken dolls.

  "Air traffic control malfunctions have reportedly caused at least four plane crashes. This one, a sightseeing flight filled with Japanese tourists, crashed into the yellow basalt monument known as the Gateway to India at the northeastern end of the Colaba tourist district, killing all twenty-four on the aircraft and at least fifteen on the ground, with dozens more injured. We have unconfirmed reports that an Air India jet with two hundred and sixty-eight passengers on board has crashed into Back Bay just south of Beach."