Springboard Read online

  “Thursday’s bowling league night,” he said.

  “Uh-huh. I can’t even imagine you in a pair of bowling shoes.”

  “I was the lowest scorer in my junior high class,” he said. “A solid ninety-six average. Shall I pick you up?”

  “Nah. If I’m back, I’ll meet you there. Eight o’clock?”

  “Assuming I can get reservations.”

  “Big-time bureau commander and rich man like yourself? No problem. Eight o’clock.”

  She discommed, and Thorn grinned to himself again. He did like smart, funny, beautiful women. What was not to like?

  Paris, France

  Unlike some of his colleagues, Seurat didn’t mind going into the city when he had a good reason. He left his car at home and took the Metro—nothing of worth in the city was more than five hundred yards from a Metro station, so the saying went, and parking in the city, like a pay telephone, was impossible to find. Nobody with a brain drove into Paris, and since the advent of mobile phones, the government assumed everybody would have one, so why have the clutter of phone kiosks everywhere?

  Today was a meeting with a potential new client—a Saudi prince and businessman who was looking to start a new server in that country, and who wanted a link with CyberNation. Being a prince was not as impressive coming from that country as it was, say, from England. There were scores, hundreds, maybe thousands of them down in the desert atop the oil pools, the result of royal families in which the men could have as many wives as they could afford. An oil sheik could afford a considerable harem.

  The Saudis were not as pure as they liked to pretend; much of that Muslim strait-lacing offered publicly disappeared in private. Yes, they were currently French allies, of a sort, and there was a quid pro quo, but some of the hardest drinkers, biggest womanizers, and consumers of pornography Seurat had ever met had been Saudis. If you had enough money, there was usually a way to get what you wanted, if you wanted it enough, and to make sure that people looked the other way while you enjoyed it.

  And in VR, it didn’t count—since you weren’t actually drinking or screwing around. . . .

  He glanced at his watch. Running a little later today than he wished. No time to stop at a museum or gallery. Seurat liked to drop round the Musée d’Orsay every so often and see Le Cirque. Georges Seurat had done many drawings, but only a few major paintings, and they were all over the world. Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, his most famous, and the inspiration for a musical play, Sunday Afternoon in the Park with George, was at the Art Institute in Chicago. Others were in London, New York, San Francisco. Too few of them were in Paris. A shame, that, but buyers with enough money to afford such things lived where they lived.

  His connection to his famous relative was known and accepted by some, if the legitimacy was sometimes argued by others. Though Georges had died a young man, only thirty-one, of meningitis or diptheria, depending on whom you believed, he had two hidden families. Most knew about Madeline Knobloch, of course, but few knew of his other mistress, from whom the director of CyberNation was himself descended. . . .

  The day was warm and sunny, and Seurat enjoyed the bustle and sounds of the city as he walked along the Rue Vernet, toward the Elysees Star Hotel. There was a woman he had met there once, a Spanish countess, ah . . .

  He saw the Saudi prince lounging in a cast-iron chair at the outdoor cafe down from the hotel, a cup of tea or coffee on the small table before him. Such cafes were traditional in Paris, of course, though Seurat himself thought that drinking coffee and having croissants with a steady stream of noisy automobiles passing by was hardly relaxing. There were cafes on some of the pedestrian malls, streets that had been closed to vehicular traffic but not those on foot, that he found much more appealing. It was hard to appreciate the swaying walk of a beautiful woman in high heels when a moving van with a loud muffler crept past and belched smelly exhaust at you.

  The prince was in a business suit that had probably cost more than the price of the average car. The prince, who liked to downplay that and be called Said, saw Seurat strolling in his direction. He raised his cup in salute.

  Seurat smiled and nodded.

  A sudden darkness rolled over the street. Seurat frowned and looked up, to see a rain cloud blotting the sun. That had come up fast—

  A lightning bolt lanced down from the cloud, struck a group of walkers waiting to cross at an intersection, and scattered them as if a bomb had gone off in their midst.

  A demonic voice began to laugh loudly as more lightning played over the street. Hail started to fall, clumps as big as golf balls, smashing down; hurricane winds blew, and people on the street screamed and ran for cover—

  Merde! The bastard whoreson hacker was at it again—!

  Rue de Soie

  Marne-la-Vallée France

  Seurat stripped the sensory gear off, still enraged. Losing a potential client was bad, but not major. That the hacker was still able to attack CyberNation seemingly at will was major. He had already called his technical people and they were on the hunt, but he did not hold out much hope for a quick taking of prey.

  This had to stop. And when the man responsible was caught, Seurat wanted to see him put into a hole so far down that the light of day would never touch him again.

  Merde!

  17

  Quantico, Virginia

  Getting rid of a body was not nearly as worrisome as all the forensic television shows and movies made it out to be. The main trick was to make sure the corpse wasn’t discovered before you were far enough away that the authorities couldn’t possibly link it to you. And not to leave anything really obvious around that pointed in your direction—DNA, fingerprints, or your business card. . . .

  All that stuff where they took a hair and put it into some medical machine that whirred and fifteen seconds later spit out a picture of the killer? Total fabrication.

  Locke had wrapped the blackmailer up in the bed’s top sheet, waited until dark, and taken the corpse to his rental car, where he put it into the trunk. He’d located the motel’s cleaning woman, waited until she had gone into an empty room to clean it, and taken a clean sheet from the stack on the cart to replace the missing one.

  The next morning—one did not want to skulk around late at night with a body in one’s car trunk and risk being pulled over by a bored policeman—Locke drove to a nearby industrial district and scouted it. It took but half an hour for him to find what he was looking for. He found the number of a real estate agent on the sign in front of the building, made a call from a pay telephone, and determined the information he needed. Luck ran his way—the place was perfect.

  From there, he drove to a local mall and bought supplies. From a hardware store, he purchased a hand-truck dolly, a battery-powered Skil Saw, a tree saw, and a hammer, along with a small machete, a painter’s drop cloth, and a box of green plastic leaf bags. He also picked up a set of painter’s coveralls, shoe covers, and rubber gloves, and several bottles of spray cleaner and paint thinner.

  At an art supply store, he bought a large roll of plastic wrap and another of white butcher’s paper, along with a black marking crayon.

  He found a cyber cafe, bought an hour on a computer, and logged on to the Internet. There, he found an appliance store, and using a PayPal account into which he had deposited several thousand dollars under a phony name months before, bought a chest freezer and arranged to have it delivered immediately to the address he had found in the industrial district.

  At a long-term parking lot near a new commuter airport, he stole a minivan, swapping the license plates on it with the car parked next to it. He wore a basic disguise when he did this—a hat, a pair of sunglasses, and a fake moustache—and paid the lot fee on the stolen car at an automated exit teller. He drove back to his rental car, parked in a lot next to a cinema complex, and transferred the body and supplies to the new vehicle.

  He drove out into the Virginia countryside, found what looked like an old and mostly unuse
d logging road in a pine forest, and drove until he was several miles away from the main road.

  He got out, dressed in the coveralls and shoe covers, and put the gloves on.

  He carried the rest of his supplies and the body into the woods. He laid out the drop cloth and unwrapped the body onto it. He removed the clothes and put them into a trash bag.

  It took a couple of hours to get the body reduced to packages of five pounds or less, fifteen minutes alone to saw the head into small bits and knock all the teeth out. Each part was wrapped in plastic, then in butcher’s paper and marked with a crayon: steaks, roasts, ribs, chops.

  When he was done, he rolled the bloody drop cloth up and put it into a plastic bag, cleaned the saws and machete carefully, then loaded these into three different plastic bags. He removed the coveralls, gloves, and shoe protectors, and put them into another bag.

  He packed up and left.

  Back at the industrial site, which was a recently emptied building, he parked in the back where he’d had the freezer delivered. He picked the lock on the door, and used the hand truck to move the small freezer into the building. He removed the freezer from its corrugated cardboard box, and took the styrofoam packaging out. As the real estate agent had told him, the electricity was still on, and was supposed to stay on for at least a month, because there was a new tenant due to move into the building then. He found an outlet and plugged in the freezer.

  He transferred the packages from the van and put them into the freezer, all except the bits of head and fingers, closed the freezer, relocked the door, and drove away. It wasn’t recommended, to load a freezer that way before it got cold, but if the meat was burned a little, that didn’t really matter. Eventually it would go solid.

  At a Dumpster behind a butcher shop, he put the leaf bag with the drop cloth in it.

  At an apartment complex eight miles away, he got rid of the bag with the dead man’s clothes. He kept the wallet, watch, and keys, along with a ring.

  The freezer’s packaging went into a different trash bin.

  The wallet, empty, and the watch, ring, keys, and saws went into a lake in a park, heaved far enough from shore that nobody was apt to step on them if they went wading, which they probably wouldn’t, since there was a sign that forbade swimming. He tossed the teeth into the water, too. Even if somebody found any of them with the fillings, there was no way to put them into context to match a dental chart.

  The rest of the supplies went into trash bins or Dumpsters in four different locations. The last bags, containing his coveralls and gloves and the contents of the dead man’s wallet, he set afire in an old oil drum behind a junk yard, using the paint thinner to get them flaming good. He made sure the gloves burned—no fingerprints left there.

  He drove to a cemetery and found an open grave awaiting a new tenant. He remembered the old joke about grave-yards: Why were there fences around them? Because people were dying to get in. He put the bag with the chopped-up head and fingers into the empty grave, covering it with enough dirt so that it wasn’t visible. He very nearly was discovered at this by somebody visiting nearby, but managed to finish his chore before they got close enough to see him. He had considered finding a dog kennel or going to an animal shelter and feeding the bits to the dogs, but he remembered the old urban legend about the choking Doberman, and while the brains and skull bits wouldn’t give anything away, a finger would, since government security guards had their prints on file.

  He returned to the airport lot, put the minivan back in the same slot it had occupied before, switched the license plates to their original vehicles, and left.

  As he drove toward a different motel, he considered what he had done. Yes, it had been a lot of work—he could just as easily have buried the headless/fingerless body in the woods, It might not have lain there undisturbed forever, but it probably wouldn’t have been discovered for weeks or months, if not years. And once it was found, the authorities probably wouldn’t have been able to ID the corpse—most people did not have DNA records on file.

  But when the new tenants of the industrial space opened the freezer, they would either toss the packages of meat, or somebody would take one home for supper. If that happened, unless that diner happened to be a cannibal, there would be an immediate uproar. Such a heinous crime could only be the work of some twisted sociopathic psychotic, a real loon, and the FBI profilers would have themselves a fine time.

  And what they would come up with wouldn’t bear any resemblance to Jack Locke. . . .

  He smiled. He had given them a show, and they would buy it, because they wanted to buy it. Locke was, he felt, an artist, and this kind of thing was part of his art and craft. The last person they’d be looking for would be a Hong Kong businessman.

  A simple sleight of hand. And clever, too, if he did say so himself.

  Meanwhile, he still had to deal with the issue at hand, Net Force and CyberNation, and while that shouldn’t take any violence, it was always an option. . . .

  18

  Space, the Starship Enterprise

  Jay was studying the holographic projection on the bridge of the Enterprise with Bretton when the alert light and Klaxon began flashing and blaring.

  “All hands, Red Alert!” came a stentorian voice.

  Jay nodded at his VR companion.

  “I’d better take this.”

  George just nodded, and Jay stepped back into an alcove to take the call, muting the scene with a privacy screen. He could see out, but Bretton couldn’t see in. Only Saji and Thorn could intrude on one of his scenarios with this level of urgency, so he knew it had to be important.

  “Jay?”

  It was Saji. She sounded worried. All of his calm curiosity disappeared when he heard the tone in her voice.

  “Yeah, babe?”

  “It’s Mark.”

  A bolt of fear stabbed through the VR jock as the words registered.

  Mark.

  Was he dead? Had someone kidnapped him? Jay had thought his imagination fairly good, but parenthood thus far had shown him that he had entirely new realms of worry to discover.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know!” Her voice rose on the last word.

  He was unnerved. In all the time he’d been with her, Saji had never sounded like this. She maintained her calm, had held her center under the most severe stress. She hadn’t even sounded this bad when he came out of the coma.

  “We were playing in the living room, and suddenly he started coughing and acting funny. I got worried and called the on-duty nurse, and she said we ought to bring him in.”

  She paused.

  “And then he seemed fine, but he started jerking around like he was having a seizure, and we’re stuck in traffic, and he’s not getting better!”

  Oh, God!

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m on—on Sherman, heading towards the Children’s Hospital. Traffic is jammed!”

  Jay stared through the privacy screen at the quiet bridge of the Enterprise, stars flickering on the main viewscreen, the hologram of the Dyson sphere floating in the center of the space. His emotional distance couldn’t be farther from the calm scene—it seemed like hours had passed since he’d taken the call. He looked over at the chronometer readout and noticed it had only been a minute. Less.

  For a moment he just sat there. Saji’s terror and his concern for his son froze him. But only for a moment. He hadn’t gotten where he was without being able to work under pressure.

  Come on, Gridley, let’s get something rolling here!

  First Saji: “It’ll be okay, babe,” he said, not having any clue that it would be. But he had to say something. She had to keep it together, and it was the best he could do.

  “I’ll fix the traffic—and I’ll meet you at the hospital as soon as I can. Hold on, babe. How’s he doing now?”

  Calm, Gridley, radiate calm.

  “He seems a little better.” She paused. “I love you, Jay.”

  “I lov
e you, too. Drive. It’ll be okay.”

  He disconnected and broke the privacy screen.

  Bretton looked up. “Something wrong?”

  “Family emergency. Gotta go—I’ll check back with you when I can.”

  Bretton nodded. “Good luck.”

  Quantico, Virginia

  Jay killed the VR he’d been using to link with Bretton, and shifted his work space from the military network he’d been on to regular VR. Even though they had secure filters all over his link, and the transfer packets were all a different protocol than his regular VR, he was still very careful not to mix his VR access.

  And with what he was going to do, he certainly didn’t want the military to be able to access him now. Or anybody else.

  He tabbed to a different scenario—he was in a large office with filing cabinets all around. He ran to a large green one and jerked open the top drawer. The drawer squeaked as it had since he programmed it years ago as an exercise in office interface, the VR equivalent of an old-school desktop.

  From a hanging file folder labeled Recent he pulled a thin red folder, opened it, and hurriedly leafed through the pages inside.

  He tapped a sequence on the floor with his foot, and a voice-input box appeared by his head.

  “Find Saji,” he said.

  “Acknowledged.”

  The program he’d called was a subset of a larger FBI project that had been scrapped several years before. Officially, at least. Through a combination of GPS satellite and ground-based radio repeater triangulation, the software could identify the location of a particular cellular telecom signal, if it was on file.

  Ostensibly, the project had been killed due to a lack of interest, but the real reason had been to avoid big-brother backlash—a concern that, unfortunately, was not completely unwarranted. Jay had used the program a few times for Net Force operations, and once, when checking the satellite logs, he’d seen that several other agencies within the alphabet soup of Washington’s security apparatus had Lazarused the software more than a few times.