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  Howard was a good man, and a good general. Thorn had been sorry to see him leave.

  “General. How are you?”

  “Fine, sir.”

  “Still enjoying consulting?”

  “Yes, sir. Or at least I was.”

  “Sounds like one shoe dropping, John,” Thorn said with a small smile. “Want to let the other one go?”

  Howard’s image nodded. “Commander, I understand Net Force recently received a request by the Army for help regarding an unexpected problem with the military’s VR exercises.”

  “That’s correct, General,” Thorn said. “We were up to our ears in work—somebody in the Internet Fraud Complaint Center and the National White Collar Crime Center dropped a ball and asked us to take up the slack.”

  “Yes, sir. Well, the problem has gotten worse, and the Army’s experts haven’t been able to pin it down.”

  “I’ve heard that, too,” Thorn said, frowning. After a moment he added, “So why are you calling about this, John?”

  Howard hesitated, then said, “An old friend in the Pentagon thought I might be able to help.”

  “Is lobbying part of your consulting now?”

  Howard smiled. “Personal touch never hurts.”

  Thorn smiled, too. “True,” he said. “I’ll see if I can shake some help loose to take a look at the military’s problem. I can’t promise anything—seems as if we are being nibbled to death by little fishes here lately.”

  Howard didn’t reply, but he didn’t move to break the connection, either.

  “Something more, John?” Thorn asked.

  Howard nodded, all trace of humor gone from his face. “Sir, the powers that be at the DoD were concerned that Net Force might not consider this a priority item.”

  Thorn sighed. “What can I say? You worked here, you know how it goes. Running errands for the DoD is not in our mission statement. We’re a civilian organization under the direction of the FBI, with a little National Guard in the mix.”

  “Yes, sir, but the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is involved with this. The man is used to getting his way.”

  It wasn’t the most subtle threat Thorn had ever heard. He felt an immediate, almost reflexive, pulse of anger.

  “Well, I appreciate the heads-up, and General Hadden certainly has the clout to make us dance. It wouldn’t be a good idea for him to thump us too hard with it, though. Unhappy workers don’t always do the best job.”

  “No, sir.” Howard paused again, but not quite as long this time. “Commander,” he said, “I think it would be a good idea if we met. There are some things I know that you need to know—material I would rather talk about face-to-face.”

  Thorn felt a sudden chill. That didn’t sound good.

  “Okay. What’s good for you?”

  “I can be there in an hour.”

  “That fast?”

  “Yes, sir. Some grains, the military grinds slow and fine. Some, they chop quick and coarse. Bread is about to be baked, and in your oven.”

  “Come on in, General. And, John?”

  “Commander?”

  “Thanks again. I appreciate it.”

  Howard discommed and Thorn sat back in his chair, staring at the blank screen. He didn’t like the sound of this at all. Maybe he had time to step down the hall to the gym and do a little épée work before the general arrived. Never hurt to be relaxed when problems arrived, and he had a feeling one was about to do just that. . . .

  People’s Army Base HQ Annex

  Macao, China

  Comrade General Wu stood in his office, staring out the window. From here you could see the lights of the casinos. Tonight’s rain turned them into blurry, distant smears of neon and glare.

  A pretty sight, but Wu hated them.

  Billions of dollars ran through those buildings each year. Like it or not, capitalism was here to stay. Even many of the hard-liners had agreed when the concept of property rights had been put into the Chinese constitution a decade ago. Wu shook his head. Only a fool could still pretend that Communism was going to win out in the end, and whatever else Comrade General Wu might be, he was not a fool.

  His secretary buzzed him on the intercom.

  “Comrade General, Comrade Shing is here.”

  “Send him in.”

  Wu went back to his chair and sat, keeping his back straight, his posture that of a soldier. Shing was a civilian, and while he was Wu’s man for a number of reasons, not the least of which was money, civilians were unpredictable. Wu needed him, no question, but he didn’t have to like the man. Shing represented much that Wu detested.

  Not that Wu would ever let even a hint of his feeling about this shine through.

  “Comrade General,” Shing said, offering a cursory military bow.

  “Comrade Shing,” Wu said, staying in his seat and returning the nod with just a hair less angle. “Please, have a seat.”

  Shing sat. The chair facing the desk was comfortable, excessively so. Wu knew men of the old school who thought a hard wooden chair or even a backless bench was better for visitors, to keep them on edge, but Wu was not of that mind. A man who was comfortable and relaxed was more apt to reveal his true nature.

  One did not have real power without access to truth.

  Shing was a computer expert, in his twenties, educated at MIT in the United States, and as sharp as a master butcher’s favorite boning knife. Shing had gone to America young, learned the language, the culture, and, more importantly, as much about the computer business as anybody. Wu did not trust him as far as he could spit against a cyclone, but he needed good tools, and Shing at least was Chinese, of a good family, and somewhat loyal to the homeland. He was also a genius in the ways of modern electronica, and that was a prime consideration.

  Wu hated computers and the cultures that had spawned them. The West was corrupt in so many ways a man could spend half his life just listing them aloud. They had no tradition, no honor, no chi, nothing that set a truly civilized society apart from the barbarians. Yes, yes, Communism was a bankrupt philosophy, Wu knew that, but the vestiges of it continued in China, and if you wanted to be a force, you had to deal in it and with it. It would not always be so. Fifty, a hundred, two hundred years? Mere heartbeats in the dragon’s breast. China herself abided, she absorbed all, in time.

  Wu intended to help China recover her glory and status. She was well on the way, but he would provide a small boost.

  History was full of men who, when they acted at the proper moment with the proper motion, had swung the course of events in new directions. Wu would be one of those men. He had spent half his life gathering the proper tools, and if he had to use one such as Shing, so be it. There were times when you fought fire with water, and times when you did it with fire. However distasteful Shing’s manner and mores, he was what Wu needed to go up against the Americans.

  One did not need to love the arrow one shot into the enemy’s heart. . . .

  Wu initiated a few minutes of polite civility, Shing responded appropriately, and eventually they came around to the reason the younger man was here.

  “Things are progressing well?” Wu asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Shing said. “The U.S. Army hacks don’t know what happened. Can’t find how I got in, haven’t a clue how to keep me out or undo what I’ve started.”

  Wu kept his polite smile fixed firmly in place. “There will be no problems with keeping to the schedule, then?”

  “None I can see.”

  “And the . . . other thing?”

  Shing raised his eyebrows. He gave away entirely too much on his face—more of the legacy of all those years in America. “Well, that will be trickier—CyberNation’s security ops are the best. Our attacks there must be flawless. Still, I can do it. And set them against each other.”

  “Good. Well, then, I will let you be about your business.”

  Shing nodded. “Thank you, Comrade General.” He paused. “Do you suppose I might have another . . . small advance on my .
. . stipend? There is, ah, a young woman I have met I wish to take to the casinos.” He smiled.

  Wu’s answering smile was genuine this time. “Of course. Youth should not be wasted entirely in rooms full of computers.” He opened his desk drawer and removed from under a file folder a plain manila envelope containing a thick stack of Japanese yen. He handed it to Shing, who probably thought that the comrade general’s smile was there for reasons other than it really was.

  Shing did not know that the young woman he had recently met was one of Wu’s agents. The woman, named Mayli, was beautiful, accomplished in many things—not the least of which were the erotic arts—and she had been instructed to do whatever was necessary to keep Shing happy. If that included marrying him and bearing his children, so be it. Wu already knew all about Shing’s favorite foods, the football team he rooted for, and his rather pedestrian sexual preferences. A handwritten report from Mayli detailing those—and much more—was in his desk drawer. He’d just moved it to retrieve the envelope of money he’d given to Shing.

  The report was the reason for the smile.

  Shing thought Wu a fossil, old, out of touch with modernity, and as a result, weak. Wu knew this because Shing was vain, egotistical, and prone to pillow talk, and Mayli’s memory was excellent. There was an old proverb Wu recalled, from his visits to the Middle East. It was Persian. One of the fighting instructors he had sometimes worked with there, Mushtaq Ali, a graybeard Sufi, had passed it along one day over thick, black, bitter coffee in some Turkish-style restaurant: “The young mouse thinks he can bite the lion’s tail because the lion is old.”

  Wu’s grin was one of knowledge.

  Mayli seemed to be doing her job properly. She had a watcher about whom she did not know, of course. Mayli’s watcher would eventually have one of his own, too.

  Wu was not a man to trust anyone blindly.

  Once Shing was gone, Wu walked back to the window again, to stare through the rain at the neon lights in the distance. Great plans took time, but this one was nearer the end than the beginning. Destiny was not that far in the distance.

  Wu smiled.

  He returned to his desk, and touched the intercom button.

  “Locke?”

  “Here.”

  “Join me.”

  “What did you think?” Wu asked. He now spoke in Yao, with bits of Sho thrown in, dialects Jack Locke had learned in Hong Kong while running with the street gangs. There were a lot of southern boys in the gangs, and Yao was a favorite dialect. Locke was also fluent in Cantonese, Putonghua, Guoyu, English, and a little Spanish. He was working on German.

  Locke, sitting in that same chair in front of Wu’s desk, shook his head. “The boy is an idiot savant. He has the touch with computers and can make them sing and dance, but outside that . . .” He shrugged.

  General Wu nodded. He leaned back in his chair, and steepled his fingers. “And our plans?”

  “On target. If Shing does half what he claims he can do.”

  “You foresee no problems.”

  Locke laughed. “Oh, I foresee problems. Scores, hundreds, thousands of problems, crouched and hidden like hungry tigers, waiting for us to stumble. A misstep, and we’ll be eaten, our gnawed bones left to bleach in the sun. But I’ll deal with those.” He paused. The general was a fan of Sun Tzu and of the Japanese swordsman, Musashi, and Locke had made it his business to learn their work. He said, “What is it Musashi says? When faced with the ten thousand . . . ?”

  “Fight them the same way as one,” Wu finished. He smiled slightly. “I am trusting you with a great deal,” he said.

  “Comrade General, you don’t trust me any farther than you can see me,” Locke said. “Instead, you recognize that our interests lie on the same path, and you trust me to travel that way until we achieve our common goal.”

  Wu smiled again, but did not speak.

  It was a slight risk, tweaking the general’s nose this way, but Locke also knew that the man respected ability, and Locke would not be sitting here if Wu didn’t believe he had the skill and talent to do what the general wanted. Plus, toadies were easy to come by—to impress a general, you needed to show some starch.

  Jack Locke was aware of the file on Shing in Wu’s desk. And he was certain there was a file on him somewhere—Wu never chose to be sightless when there was any way he could see.

  Locke also had a pretty good idea what was in Wu’s secret file on him, and what was not. He knew he was not a particularly impressive or handsome man, at least not as he understood the words. Too many angles and planes in his face, nose a little too long, lips too thin, and almost-black eyes that, to him, seemed a bit bug-eyed from within deep sockets. His hair was black, with a sharp widow’s peak, and while he was in excellent shape from swimming and lifting weights, he was only average height, and not so muscular or broad in the shoulders as to draw attention. Most men looking at a crowd would pass over Locke without a second glance, just another Eurasian face, nothing to mark him out of the ordinary.

  Most women, however, saw something there. He had tried to get them to explain it to him, but no two answers were ever quite the same, and there was a vagueness about them when pressed. The most consistent comment women offered was that he looked “interesting.” And that part of that look included a hint of cruelty.

  Women were ever attracted to bad boys.

  Wu would know all this, and more.

  Born in Hong Kong, Locke was a mongrel foundling who had been dropped off at a British orphanage forty years ago. He had some Chinese in him, some European—probably English, given where he turned up. He had run away from there at sixteen, and they hadn’t made any great effort to find him and drag him back.

  He spent some time learning how to live in the mean, crowded streets of Hong Kong, learned how to fight with a knife and his hands while in the gangs, and was certainly on the short road to jail or an early grave when he had been found by a high-born English woman, Lady Patricia Knowles. Patricia—one never called her “Pat,” even in bed—had thought him a diamond in the rough. She was richer than the Queen, thirty-six years old, and married to a dotty English lord who was pushing seventy-five and beyond Viagra’s help.

  She cleaned Locke up, gave him his new name, installed him in an apartment in a good neighborhood, and taught him all manner of things, ranging from how to dress, eat, and behave in polite society to most of the positions found in the Kama Sutra. Patricia had been that classic storybook woman—a proper English lady at a formal dinner—and a shameless whore in bed. He could barely keep up with her, even though he was half her age.

  After five years, she and her husband had returned to England, but by then Locke was more than a little adept at pleasing a woman, and polished enough to pass for a gentleman. Patricia had directed him to one of her friends, Martha, and he hadn’t even had to change apartments.

  After Martha, there had been other women eager enough to pay for his company. Sometimes he was merely arm-candy, most times he earned his way in private, but there was always another woman waiting. He had learned his lessons well, and he knew that his appeal, whatever it was, was something upon which he could depend.

  He supposed he could have lived that life for a long time. But one can only lie in so many beds, drink so much expensive champagne, attend so many tuxedoed parties before those things begin to pall.

  So Locke had turned to crime.

  Not because he needed the money—his benefactors had been generous enough over the years, and he was well enough off that he could live on his investments. No, it was the challenge, the spike of adrenaline that let you know you were alive—but that death was coming up just behind you.

  Locke’s talent here had not been in strong-arm robberies, but in setting up heists worth small fortunes. He traveled in circles wherein there were rich people with cash, jewelry, and art in their homes. That was the beginning. From there, Locke had gone on to bigger things: galleries, jewelry merchants, museums. He had scores all over the Orient,
and even into Europe.

  If one moves in certain circles, and becomes expert in them, word gets around. Even though Locke hadn’t been looking for a job, Wu had found him. Wu had a proposition. When he had put it to him, Locke had been surprised, but intrigued. What Wu could bring to the table made the venture not quite as impossible as it seemed on the face of it.

  Locke had said he would consider it. He spent a week mulling it over, then went back to Wu. He was in.

  And Wu had known that, too.

  “What next?” Wu asked.

  “France, then America,” Locke said. “Shing’s mastery of the virtual does not extend to the real world. There are things that must be seen in person to be known.”

  Wu nodded. “Yes.”

  “I will keep you apprised.”

  Locke stood. The two men gave each other military bows. Locke made sure his gesture was deeper than Wu’s. The general would notice. Locke considered himself an equal in this project, not an employee, but it never hurt to be well mannered. Patricia had taught him that. Bless her, wherever she might be.

  Route du Parc

  Near Nice, France

  Charles Seurat exited the A-8 toward Sophia Antipolis, accelerating into a tight, controlled turn in the little Peugeot he’d rented at the airport in Nice. The car was a natural-gas /electric hybrid and had surprising power.

  Not too bad.

  Still, he missed the larger engines and power afforded by essence—gasoline.

  C’est la vie.

  It would have been gauche to drive anything else to this particular meeting, however. It certainly wouldn’t do to drive up in one of his restored Porsches—particularly not when the meeting was in the very PC, cutting-edge environment of Sophia Antipolis.

  The small town had started off as little more than a research park in the 1970s, and by the turn of the century had grown to be one of the largest tech centers in western Europe. With streets named after famous scientists and artists: Rue Albert Einstein, Rue Dostoievski, Rue Ludvig Von Beethoven, and the like, it was the place to do business, particularly if you were CyberNation.