Virtual Vandals nfe-1 Read online

  Blackbeard went to the right while the Kid moved left, forcing Matt to divide his attention between them. He began backing up again, trying to keep some distance between them. “Computer! Pause!” he yelled.

  But the action kept unrolling around him. Whatever Rob Falk had done, he’d taken control of the simulation right out of Matt’s hands.

  The black-bearded soldier began a series of short jabs. Matt blocked them, then spun back and to his right, foiling an attempt by the other guy to get around behind him.

  Matt brought up his rifle as if he were going to fire, sending both attackers scrambling back away from him. But as he tried to engage the weapon, the hammer fell with a dry click. Either the gun had already been fired, or it needed something that Matt didn’t know about.

  Blackbeard suddenly broke into a run, swinging his rifle in a wide, looping movement to slash with his bayonet. Matt braced himself to receive the attack. But suddenly, the black-bearded man was falling!

  The look on his attacker’s face would have been comical in any other situation. A brilliant red stain appeared on his gray uniform jacket, and down he went.

  Matt couldn’t help glancing at the Union battle line, where jets of flame lanced from the muzzles of massed rifles. Did they have to worry about stray bullets on the battlefield?

  No, that was impossible. This was a reenactment, not the actual battle. They couldn’t have been using live ammunition.

  Then Matt realized. When Rob had sent his pals into the sim, he’d simply picked the three closest soldiers to Sandy and Matt. Now it turned out that one of those soldiers had been slated to become a casualty. His number had come up, and down he’d gone!

  That meant Matt had only a lone opponent to face — for the moment. The youthful face opposite him looked a little worried as the Kid feinted and jabbed with his weapon.

  Matt parried almost mechanically, his mind busy on something else. The “death” of Blackbeard meant that Falk didn’t have complete control over the simulation. The computer was still doing what it was programmed to do.

  The Kid glanced over Matt’s shoulder. That was the only warning Matt received. He thumped his opponent in the chest, knocking him back, and spun round as a Confederate officer lashed out with his sword. The blade made a chilling noise, worse than fingernails on a blackboard, as it scraped along Matt’s rifle barrel. If he’d been a little slower, people would have had to call him Lefty!

  Even if Falk didn’t absolutely control the computer, he could keep sending his people back into the simulation. Just two of them now, it seemed — maybe Matt had managed to hurt the third.

  That didn’t matter. Sooner or later, one of these clowns would score with a lucky shot.

  And then Matt would suffer the fate of Gerald Savage.

  Unless….

  Matt retreated again as his attackers came in from opposite sides.

  What was the first command Sandy had given the computer? The one that had set up this particular run of the simulation?

  Hoping he’d gotten the numbers right, Matt shouted, “Computer, reload Gettysburg simulation, cue two-two-seven!”

  It was like time travel. Matt and Sandy were between the two battle lines. Nothing was moving — and that included Sandy. He lay on the weirdly stiff grass.

  But Matt couldn’t worry about that right now. His end run had succeeded! He’d managed to yank control of the computer back from Rob Falk!

  “Computer!” he shouted quickly. “Cancel. And exit!”

  The slopes of Cemetery Hill winked out, and Matt was back in Veeyar Lab Six. He leapt from his computer-link chair. Sandy Braxton lolled in his seat, unconscious.

  “Mr. Braxton?” A voice suddenly filled the room. Matt recognized it as Mr. Petracca, the school librarian. “What’s going on in there? My monitors are giving some very odd readings for that simulation you’re running.”

  “Something’s gone wrong,” Matt called. “Sandy Braxton is unconscious. I think the sim has been tampered with. Get the school doctor!”

  He made sure Sandy was okay, then pulled out his wallet. After this attack, all bets were off. He was calling Captain Winters.

  Even as he hit the option for phone configuration, sparks flew out from under the foilpack keypad. Matt dropped the wallet to the floor as the polymer smoldered. Coughing from the acrid smoke, Matt stamped on the wallet. It didn’t burst into flames, but it was obvious the circuitry was a complete loss. So much for phoning.

  Mr. Petracca, the doctor, and a nurse had come bursting into Veeyar Lab Six. “The boy is in shock,” the medical man said after a quick examination.

  “I’ve already called for an Emergency Services ambulance — and the police,” Mr. Petracca said.

  Fine, Matt thought. I can report all this to them — in person.

  A few minutes later, Matt sat in the school office, waiting for the cops to arrive. If only this hadn’t happened! He didn’t like blowing the lid off Rob Falk and the virtual vandals before he spoke to Cat Corrigan.

  At that moment, Caitlin walked into the office.

  The two of them stared at one another. Then, at almost the same time, they both asked, “What are you doing here?”

  Cat responded first. “I was pulled out of class. There was a message from my father’s office. He’s sick — he collapsed. I’m just checking in before I go home.”

  She looked at him, expecting his answer.

  “Finish what you’ve got to do first,” Matt muttered.

  Caitlin got a pass from the office staff, and Matt walked her to the door. “Sandy Braxton picked up a sim for the research project we’re working on,” Matt said quietly when they were in the hall. “We were in the veeyar lab when things began to go very, very wrong.”

  She stared at him. “How wrong?”

  “It was the re-creation of a famous battle. But some of the soldiers departed from their programming and began attacking us.”

  Cat’s eyes went wide. “Oh, no!” She turned back to the office. “Where’s Sandy?”

  “He’s going to the hospital. As far as I can tell, he’s no worse off than the people who got shot at Camden Yards.” Matt’s voice was grim. “I don’t know how I’d have ended up, though, with three guys with bayonets coming after me.”

  Whatever color was left in Caitlin’s face just drained away. “Rob!” she whispered fiercely. “It has to be Rob!” She looked sick. “One of the first places we stuck trapdoors was in the school’s veeyar system. I never thought—”

  “Neither did I,” Matt admitted. “I should have been more careful, especially since we passed through one of the veeyar system sites on our way to see Sean McArdle.”

  Still, Caitlin looked as if she blamed herself for the ordeal Sandy and Matt had gone through.

  Matt took her arm. “Where’s your car?”

  “In the lot out back,” Caitlin said. “I was kinda late getting in today.”

  “I’ll walk you out.” Matt’s brain was going into overdrive. The cops would be arriving any minute. It was now or never to convince Cat to cooperate with the police and Net Force.

  “This has gotten way out of control,” he told Caitlin as they stepped out of the rear exit of the school. “You know already that you can’t control Rob Falk. Isn’t it time to admit you can’t keep protecting him, either?”

  “It’s not like I have a choice!” Cat cried. “Rob is—”

  “Rob’ll be mad at you, if you keep flappin’ your mouth about him,” a voice interrupted.

  Matt turned from Caitlin in complete shock. He hadn’t expected to find anyone in the school parking lot during classes.

  Instead, there were three kids surrounding the doorway. And no way were they Bradford students. They wore ripped jeans and armless shirts over T-shirts, bandannas, and gold jewelry. The one who’d spoken was a big, husky kid with dirty-blond hair — the accent of the mountains was still thick in his voice. To his right was a wiry Asian youth, while the boy on the left seemed to mix several natio
nalities and races.

  Though these street kids all looked wildly different, Matt noticed that each of them was wearing some combination of green and black.

  Gang members.

  Matt couldn’t believe that they were being confronted by gangbangers at the doors of Bradford Academy. But there was no arguing with the evidence of his own eyes.

  And there was no arguing with the gun the blond kid suddenly whipped from behind his baggy shirt. “Let’s have the car keys, honey.”

  They were marched across the pavement to Caitlin’s car. It was lucky she hadn’t taken the Copperhead this day. Even so, it was a tight squeeze for the five of them. The blond boy sat in front behind the steering wheel with Cat beside him. Matt was in the backseat, wedged between the other two.

  “Tuck your hands under your butt,” the blond boy had ordered as Matt sat down. “I don’t want to see you moving a muscle. ’Cause if you do, Ng here will have to use this.” He handed the pistol to the Asian boy. “And what he’ll do is blow a big ol’ hole through the front seat and right into this pretty li’l girl here.”

  The big guy nodded at Caitlin, who sat frozen in the passenger’s seat.

  “Wh-where are you taking us?” she asked in a strangled voice.

  “Why, we’re takin’ you to see Rob Falk,” the big blond boy said as he twisted the key in the ignition and started the engine. “Seems only fair, with you takin’ such an interest in him an’ all.”

  Chapter 16

  Sitting on his hands in the backseat of Caitlin’s car, Matt could only watch helplessly as the blond boy pulled out of the Bradford Academy parking lot.

  If I were alone, I might just make a try for old Ng over there, Matt thought, looking at the wiry Asian boy with the pistol. Net Force instructors were Marine-trained, and expected everyone connected with the agency — even the young Explorers — to have some self-defense ability. Matt had done fairly well in his unarmed-combat courses. If he only had himself to worry about, he might have been able to get the gun from Ng’s hand.

  But he couldn’t be sure of getting the gun before one shot went off. And the way things were set up, that shot would go into Cat Corrigan’s back.

  So Matt sat where he was, grimly trying to memorize the route they were taking.

  They quietly wove their way through local streets until they reached the Rock Creek Parkway. The blond boy pulled onto a northbound entrance ramp.

  Sure, Matt thought. The Beltway.

  Many years before, city planners had completely ringed the District of Columbia with highways, so that drivers could avoid the traffic of the city’s center. Improved transportation had also started a boom in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. Housing developments were laid out, malls, office complexes — by the 1980s, sharp Washington business and government types were known as “Beltway Bandits.”

  But even by the turn of the century, things were changing. As improvements were made in the city, problems emerged in the inner suburbs — those inside the ring of roads. Ironically, they were the sort of “city problems” that people had moved to suburbia to ignore. Immigrants. Poverty. Drugs. Gangs.

  Cities, in spite of their problems, have business districts and lots of people to act as a tax base. The suburban towns found their police and social services overwhelmed.

  Wherever they were going, Matt was sure it would be somewhere inside the Beltway.

  The boy behind the wheel upped the speed, moving along with the flow of highway traffic.

  “Nice,” said the boy at Matt’s left. “Is a nice car, Willy, no?”

  “Nice car, yes,” Willy, the blond boy, said from behind the wheel. “Light-years past my daddy’s pickup. Too bad we have to dump it.”

  On Matt’s right, Ng jumped in surprise. “We don’t keep?”

  Willy jerked his head at Caitlin. “This little girl is a Senator’s daughter. Word gets out she’s been snatched, we’re gonna have the FBI and all the rest of the alphabet after us. Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, who knows what-all?”

  The other boy made a disappointed sound.

  “No way, Mustafa. We don’t want to be anywhere near this car when the gov-boys find it. So we leave it where other folks will find it first. Leave them to get the blame.”

  Willy exited the Beltway and drove along an access road to a seedy-looking mall. The place had probably been built before the turn of the century, and whatever shine the buildings might have had once was long gone. Half the storefronts were empty, and some of those had holes in the windows. The other places were what Matt’s father would call “junk stores,” full of cheap, shoddy merchandise with big signs about bargains in the windows.

  Matt noticed a phony-looking electronics store with a banner screaming about the tremendous buys inside. The glaring colors had faded in the sunshine, and there were tears in the plastic.

  This is exactly the kind of place where you could buy a cheap antique of a computer, he suddenly thought. Except they’d probably try to hold you up for too high a price.

  They thudded their way across the cracked concrete parking lot until Willy brought them to a halt next to a beat-up sedan.

  It was hard to tell what color the car had been originally. One door was bluish-gray, and a fender was green. The rest seemed to be beige, except for the leprous gray spots of body putty.

  “Everybody out,” Willy ordered.

  Willy hopped from behind the wheel and got a firm hold on Caitlin’s arm. In his other hand he had a Bowie knife, which he quickly showed to Matt, then lowered the weapon to the side of his leg where it wasn’t so obvious to the people passing by on the street. “Just so you don’t try anything stupid-like,” the boy said in his back-country drawl.

  Ng held his gun down against his leg, but Matt knew he could have it up and shooting in a moment. Part of him was amazed that these guys were so cool about showing weapons so openly. But then again, they weren’t doing anything to catch anyone’s attention. They were just transferring themselves from a late-model car to a beat-up old rattletrap.

  The seating arrangements were just the same. Matt was in the back, sandwiched between Ng and Mustafa, sitting on his hands. He wondered if they were going to fall asleep there under his butt.

  Willy sat behind the wheel, his knife having disappeared as miraculously as it had leapt into his hand. Caitlin had the passenger’s seat, right in front of Ng’s gun.

  People still called that the death seat, Matt suddenly remembered. He tried to push the thought out of his head.

  Willy started the engine, and the clunker lurched forward ahead of a cloud of bluish smoke. “You be careful with that gun, you hear?” he ordered Ng. “I don’t want you makin’ no useless holes in this here seat. When we finish, this car’s gonna be mine.”

  Matt twisted to look out the filthy rear windshield at Cat’s sports car. It looked as out of place as a butterfly in an ant farm.

  “Left the keys on the front seat,” Willy said. “Somebody’ll be moving it along any minute now.”

  They headed back to the Beltway and began retracing their path — probably to throw off anyone who might have been tracing Caitlin’s car, Matt realized.

  Their counterclockwise journey took them across the Potomac River above the Northwest section of D.C., halfway around the city, then across the much wider expanse of the river south of the city on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge.

  They left the Beltway on the first exit past the bridge, entering Southwest Washington. This was still a decayed neighborhood. Willy pulled into a no-name gas station and drove right into the mechanic’s bay. A man was running a rag over a delivery van. When he saw the newcomers, he just walked away.

  “Change your partners, once again,” Willy said. “You’ll get to sit in the back with your pal,” he told Caitlin. “And with my pals, too,” he added.

  The back of the van was a little roomier, Matt had to admit. He and Caitlin sat side by side. Ng and Mustafa sat across from them. The Asian boy still covered them with
Willy’s pistol.

  Matt’s main complaint was that he couldn’t see where they were going. The rear of the van was completely enclosed. They were in a dark box, heading who knew where. Judging by the speed they were traveling, Matt figured that Willy was back on a parkway.

  But then they got off, went through several turns, and came to a stop. Willy opened the rear door. Matt noticed he had his knife in his hand again. “We’re here,” the blond boy announced. “Shake a leg, you two.”

  Willy pulled Caitlin out, keeping his grip on her wrist. Then it was Matt’s turn. He was very conscious of Ng with the gun behind him. Matt tried to take in his surroundings, but all he got was a quick glimpse of red brick before Willy gave him a not-too-gentle smack in the head with the hilt of his knife.

  “You ain’t here to play tourist. Just watch where you’re walkin’. Let’s go.”

  They were hustled to a scarred wooden door, which swung open just as they reached it. Inside was a reception committee — another trio of tough-looking street kids, each carrying a military rifle.

  Matt paused in the doorway, his nose wrinkling at the mixed smells of sweat, beer, mildew, and rotting wood. Mustafa shoved him through.

  “Went like a piece of cake,” Willy said. “We picked her up with no problem, and this one was with her.” He nodded at Matt. “Lucky thing Rob showed us pictures of all the suckers.”

  He made his knife disappear, but kept his grip on Caitlin’s arm. “Come on along,” Willy said. “We got some people want to see you.”

  The prisoners were marched into what had probably been a cozy parlor about 120 years ago. Now it was just a ruin. A few strips of wallpaper still dangled on the walls, but they were mainly defaced plaster. A couple of big pieces of furniture that no one had bothered to take with them sat rotting against the walls. They’d been moved to clear a space in the middle of the room, where a pair of tables held maps, papers, and a collection of mis-mated, old-fashioned computers.