Changing of the Guard nf-8 Read online

  “You surely rated bodyguards?”

  “Yes. Had some, for a time.”

  There was another pause. Thorn waited, not speaking.

  “You aren’t married, are you? No children?”

  “No,” Thorn said. “But I understand your point.”

  “With all due respect, Commander, no, you don’t. Having your two-year-old need an armed guard to go to the park? No job is worth that if you have a choice. I was a target just by being the man in charge, and that put my family at risk. Life is too short.”

  Thorn nodded.

  “I can’t speak for General Howard,” Alex went on, “but he also has a wife and son he wants to see grow up, and he’s been into the field enough times to prove to himself and anybody else that he’s a brave man. Not to mention he can get twice the money he makes now as a consultant in private industry. So can I, for that matter.”

  Thorn smiled again. Was that a dig? Was he saying that it was easy for Thorn to take this job because he was already a wealthy man?

  Michaels said, “We did our job, did a little good now and then, and now it’s our time to move on. Nothing sinister — although the politics of the job are a bitch. Some of the hearings up on the Hill you’ll have to attend, you’ll need an iron bladder.”

  Thorn chuckled politely.

  “My advice is for you to do what you do best and leave the heavy lifting in the field to the regular feebs or the military arm. Stay in front of the computer, work Congress to keep the wheels oiled, and you’ll do fine.”

  Thorn nodded. “Thank you, Alex. I appreciate the advice.” Not that he needed it. He had his fencing, but you didn’t get to carry an épée or saber around in polite society these days, and facing off with thugs was not his forte. His mind was his most valuable tool, not his fists. Muscle was easy to hire.

  “Well, I’m about ready,” Alex said. “You’ll want your own people, of course, but you have a pretty good team here already. I would stay and help you in the transition, but I have only a couple of weeks before I have to be at my new job, and we need to get moved and settled. Jay Gridley can answer any questions you might have.”

  “I know Gridley’s work,” he said. “Thank you, Alex.”

  “You’re welcome. I hope the job is what you want, Commander.”

  Me, too, Thorn thought.

  Jay Gridley sat in his office and stared at the zip disk. Another day, another top-secret code to unravel. Ho, hum.

  Change was in the air: Alex and Toni were leaving; John Howard, too, and new faces were coming in. Soon just about the only familiar face around here would be Jay’s own. Which was odd — he had never thought of himself as the survivor type.

  He supposed he could be worried about that. New bosses sometimes cleaned out the cupboards when they came on board, re-shuffling the deck and dealing in their people. But Jay wasn’t too concerned about that. He was Jay Gridley after all — there weren’t any people who could replace him — well, at least not on this side of the law. Besides, if he had to, he could always do what Alex and Colonel Howard were doing: get another job somewhere else. He could find another one, and for a lot more money, at the drop of a hat. It would be their loss…

  Either way, though, he was going to miss the old crew. They were his friends. Oh, they’d probably stay in contact, but it wouldn’t be the same. It might be better. It might be worse. But it was for sure that it wouldn’t be the same.

  He glanced at the zip disk. It wasn’t often he got to play with old-style media these days, what with flash memory and cardware being so cheap, and data disks so wonderfully dense.

  Shoot, the thing held less than a half gig. Hardly worth going into VR for. It would barely touch his desktop’s CPU for sifting, much less require the mainframe.

  But that was the way it was in third-world countries — most of the toys they got to play with were outdated cast-offs. Which did make his job easier when he was trying to pry information from its hiding place.

  A cheap, rough-looking, dot-matrix-printed label covered the hard plastic protecting the disk. It was really ugly, too — blocky black-and-white dots portrayed a cartoonlike lion’s head, with an even uglier-looking border surrounding it. Arabic numerals and script proclaimed “Mosque-by-the-sea Tourist Photos disk 11.” At least that was what the neat hand-written print in English underneath the script said.

  A Turkish spy in Iran had died just after delivering the disk. Jay didn’t think that the Turkish ambassador himself would be asking Net Force to dig around in it if all it held was tourist photos.

  Jay slid the disk into the drive he had dug up from a storage closet and jacked into VR…

  He stood next to a cold and muddy stream, dressed in period Levi’s, the pants held up by suspenders over a faded red-flannel shirt, a battered leather cap jammed tight onto his head. Next to him was a gold sluice, water tricking over its riffled surface. Behind this was a large pile of ore.

  Of course that wasn’t what it really was — but visual metaphors took on some serious substance in VR.

  In this case, the data on the disk was the ore, and the sluice was a complicated search engine he’d put together with code lifted from the NSA, with some of his own special touches. Running the ore through the sluice would wash away the dirt, uncovering objects on the disk. Regular files would show up as rocks, and encoded ones — the kind he wanted to find — would appear to be gold nuggets.

  Far more fun than a command-line process.

  He smiled — a gap-toothed smile in this VR scenario, unkempt whiskers brushing his lips. Kids these days thought a command-line was some kind of military authority.

  He shoveled ore sand into the sluice, enjoying the sensation. The new stim units he’d put in would actually stress his muscles in RW as he worked in VR. If he worked out here, he’d get the benefit there. He hummed the tune for “My Darling Clementine.”

  The sun shone brightly in the pre-pollution California of the 1850s, birds tweeted, and the creek burbled. He let himself flow into the “is” state he and Saji had been practicing, allowing himself a brief stab of pride at the craftsmanship of his scenario. Not everyone would bother with such touches.

  In very little time he’d sluiced all the ore. He dropped the shovel he’d been using, enjoying the thunk it made in the damp sand of the riverbed, and went to see what he’d found, walking alongside the sluice.

  Rocks… more rocks… yet more rocks…

  Huh.

  Which shouldn’t be. The disk had been recovered from a dead man, just seconds before a couple of his killers had died trying to collect it. If it was worth that many people dying for, it must have something on it…

  Jay snapped his fingers and was suddenly in a brightly lit kitchen, wearing a huge chef’s hat and the associated double-breasted white top.

  A bag of flour sat on the countertop. Next to it was a bowl and a sifter.

  Carefully he scooped flour from the bag and dumped it into the sifter. A crank turned a wire whisk in the device, brushing only the tiniest particles through a wire mesh set in the bottom and into the bowl, keeping anything else.

  The dry, yeasty smell of flour filled the air as he worked.

  Nice touch, he thought. I’d forgotten that one.

  Straining the stuff through the sifter would give him the closest inspection possible of the data on the disk. This program, unlike the prospector, used more CPU power, tapping into the mainframe and taking up a large portion of Net Force’s available processing power. Word processors on Net Force’s network wouldn’t feel it, but anyone doing anything complicated right now would probably be cursing him.

  Sorry, guys.

  He paid close attention, inspecting everything that stuck to the bottom of the mesh.

  Which was nothing: If it was hiding here, it was microscopic.

  Damn! Apparently the third world was stumping him. Had they given him something he couldn’t crack?

  Not bloody likely.

  He remembered a line he�
��d read in a newspaper article once, a quote from Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine. “You can only fail if you give up too soon.”

  He killed the chef scenario.

  Back in his office, Jay blinked. What was he missing here? Could there be something hidden within the pictures on the disk?

  He jacked back into VR…

  Jay slipped into a viewer program modeled after a movie theater he’d liked as a kid. His shoes stuck and released as he walked on the gummy concrete floor. When he sat, he felt the rough fabric of the old cloth seat against his back.

  The disk was full of pictures exactly as advertised — a beautiful old mosque near the sea. A few video clips showed worshippers bowing toward Mecca, kneeling and bowing on beautifully woven prayer rugs, and others showed old-style stitched-photo VR views of various points around the temple.

  The program he’d used would have detected any hidden steg-artifacts in the compressed images, and he didn’t see any obvious here-it-is! clues. All of the images had been shot within a single day — a filter he ran on the backgrounds checked visual cues, sun angle, clouds, repeated tourists and the like, so no new images were hidden with the rest that might be worthy of further study.

  Double damn.

  Hmm. Maybe that was it. Could there be a slim data-fiche built into the surface of the disk?

  Jay killed the scenario—

  Back in RW, Jay ejected the disk. He scrutinized the surface, looking for any pits or depressions that could be a disguised interface for a film of nanotransistor RAM. Maybe he’d underestimated the resources of the third world.

  It looked as smooth as the proverbial baby’s butt. Not a dimple, a scratch, nothing.

  He scanned the disk for the third time. Come on, Gridley, think outside the box!

  And finally, it came to him. So simple. So… obvious.

  No way!

  He pulled his hi-res cam from its holster on the side of his ancient flat panel and captured a scan of the ugly dot-matrix label.

  He yanked his VR goggles down—

  Jay strode into his electronics-lab scenario. Once there, he tapped a console, and the scan of the label appeared as a holoproj in midair.

  Look at that. Two-dimensional code. Son of a bitch!

  It was like Poe’s purloined letter, right there in plain sight. The dots making up the border and the lion made an ugly picture, but they served a hidden purpose as well — they filled a two-dimensional data matrix with information.

  He smiled, feeling a thrill of pleasure, admiring whoever had come up with the code scheme. Gotcha, sucker!

  In the late eighties and nineties, programmers had devised ways of storing data by printing it. Primitive UPC barcodes evolved into data structures that were read up-and-down as well as left-and-right. The result was that several pages of data could be stored in a tiny space, looking like nothing so much as a series of dots.

  The technology had advanced as printer technology and CCDs had gotten more powerful, and had included basic error corrections that allowed part of the matrix to be lost without loss of information.

  As a boy, Jay had had a battered and much-loved Nintendo Gameboy that had featured a card reader. Games were “printed” on the back of the card in 2-D formats and “read” by the handheld. Run the card through the reader, and pow! — you got game.

  Of course no one did that anymore, it was more trouble than it was worth given flashmem and cardware.

  Well. Almost no one did it, apparently. So old and hoary, it was like shaving the head of a slave and tattooing a message there, waiting for the hair to grow back, then sending him on his way.

  He zoomed the scan and took a closer look. A lot of 2-D codes had been developed, each with different characteristics and different baseline reference points — bullseyes or L-shaped lines used to orient the camera reader. The programmer of this one had been smart. There were no reference points at all. Which made things more difficult — unless he read the code from the exact direction it had been intended to be read from, he’d get nothing.

  And that was before any decoding of whatever he found.

  Well, well. It looked like this was going to be more interesting than he’d figured. He might even have to think about it.

  He laughed aloud at that. It was so much more fun if you had to stretch a little now and then.

  2

  Trans-Planet Chemical HQ

  Manhattan, New York

  Samuel Walker Cox spared a glance at the timer on the stair-stepper, even though he was sure he had four minutes and a few seconds left before he was done.

  The timer, flashing down from twenty-six minutes to zero, read 04:06.

  He smiled. The internal clock he carried was still working pretty well for a man in his mid-sixties. Well, all right, to be technically accurate, sixty-six. Even better.

  The stair-stepper, which was the top-of-the-line DAL Industries model, was a marvel of hydraulic and electrical engineering. It was essentially a set of endless risers, and worked like a treadmill: You climbed stairs, but you never went anywhere.

  He had no idea what it cost — probably a couple of thousand dollars. His assistant had bought it and had it installed in his office on the fortieth floor of the TPC building. Every workday, for twenty-six minutes, he used the device. Coupled with a quick shower and fresh clothes, it worked out to thirty-five minutes exactly that he spent on his conditioning, which was sufficient. He was not a threat to any Olympic athlete, but neither was he going to run out of steam if he needed to take the stairs to the lobby in the event of a fire or terrorist attack on his building. He had talked to personal trainers and sports doctors and determined that twenty-six minutes was the amount of time he needed to maintain optimum health at his age, and that was what he gave it, no more, no less.

  During his workout, no phones rang, no computer voices announced incoming mail, and nobody came through the Chinese carved-cherry double doors into his office. He did go so far as to opaque the de-stressed triple-layered Lexan windows, which formed an L-shaped floor-to-ceiling panorama looking out over Manhattan. The windows were three inches thick and bulletproof, and would stop anything short of an armor-piercing rocket. A special service came and cleaned the windows’ exterior once a week, and once every three months they polished the surfaces to remove any scratches from dust or nearsighted birds.

  Cox didn’t know how much that cost, either, nor did he care. When your worth was measured in the billions, you didn’t worry about the small stuff.

  Two minutes remaining. He kept his pace even. There were all kinds of monitors he could have hooked to himself — pulse rate, blood pressure, temperature, and the like — but he didn’t bother. He was sweating, his muscles were working hard and he knew it, and he wasn’t going to cheat himself out of a full effort. A man who wasn’t disciplined enough to exercise without somebody standing over him counting cadence didn’t have any fire in his belly.

  Usually, he managed to avoid going off on mental voyages while he trod upon the never-ending stairway — concentration was supposed to help the body benefit fully — but now and then, something would be pressing enough so that he could not help but think about it.

  Now was one of those times. He had gotten a coded message from Vrach—“the Doctor”—and as usual, the Russian wanted something from him: a small matter of some pressure against a reluctant oil executive in one of the Middle Eastern countries. It was nothing Cox couldn’t do with a come-hither of one finger and a few words in the right ear. Still, it was annoying, even after all these years. Especially after all these years.

  He shook his head. Of all his regrets, this one was the biggie. While still in college, he had made the dumbest mistake of his life. He had been young, idealistic — another word for stupid — and full of himself. He had drifted into a crowd of socialistic types, and the next thing he knew, he was a spy. For the Soviets.

  It was the sixties, times were turbulent, nobody trusted the government, and maybe he could be excus
ed. At least he hadn’t been out in some hippie commune smoking dope and talking to the trees. He had, however briefly, believed that what he was doing might be part of the solution instead of the problem. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the idea of a nuclear war felt way too real, and the U.S. was way too aggressive. Or so he had believed at the time.

  Young, ignorant, and stupid — that had been him.

  Of course, he had never really done much spying. His control had explained he would be more useful as a mole, and they would wait to activate him. They gave him a little money. It had seemed like a fortune at the time. Now, if that much fell out of his pocket, it wouldn’t be worth the time and energy to stoop and pick it up. But still, he had been on the payroll.

  As the years passed, the Soviet Union eventually went belly-up, as did his idealistic and foolish notions, and eventually he found himself running a major corporation and richer than a small country. Unfortunately, he didn’t get lost in the shuffle when the Soviet Union fell apart. The Russians had long memories, and one day, after he hadn’t thought about them in a decade, they gave him a little heads-up: Ho, Comrade! How are you? Ready to serve the cause?

  At first, Cox had been amused. Cause? What cause? Communism is dead, pal. The war is over. You lost. Get over it.

  Perhaps that is so. We have moved on. But we have new objectives.

  I’m happy for you, he had said. Go away.

  But of course, they had not. They were capitalists now, and they laid it out flat and straight: Help us — or we’ll tell everybody how you betrayed your country…

  Blackmail! Son of a bitch, he couldn’t believe it—!

  The timer chimed, interrupting his bad memory. He stopped climbing the stairs, grabbed a towel, and headed for the shower. The phones would start ringing again in nine minutes, and he needed to clean up and put on fresh clothes.

  Done was done. Maybe someday he could figure out a way to get clear of them. Isolate the few who knew about him, have Eduard pay them a visit and shut down their memories, permanently.