Net Force nf-1 Read online

  Gridley walked to the car, the two teenagers behind him. He had a sudden thought. "Better get in the back," he said, "I've got stuff piled up all over the front passenger seat."

  That wasn't strictly true, but it would be by the time they got to the car. He could do that from here easily enough.

  What the hell. He'd been that young once. Seemed like a long time ago as he looked at Tyrone and his friend Belladonna, but unless his memory had blown a fuse, getting to sit next to a beautiful girl in the backseat of a small car was still a pretty big thrill at that age.

  Shoot, when you got right down to it, it was still a thrill at his age.

  They had just entered the car when Tyrone said, "There he is!"

  Gridley looked. Sure enough, a man was exiting the restaurant. He headed for the Vette. Jay got a good look, then grinned. Yes! It was the same persona he'd seen in New Orleans! The guy was sure cocky, to keep using it. Stupid to keep using it, too. Here at last was the break they needed.

  "Way to go, Ty-rone! I owe you one."

  "It's him?" Bella said.

  "Oh, yeah."

  "Exemplary, Ty!"

  It sounded as if somebody's stock had just gone up in the backseat. " ‘I have you now,' " Gridley said in his best Darth Vader imitation. He reached under the Neon's dashboard and came out with a com mike. He keyed the mike. "This is Jay Gridley, Net Force operative, ID number JG-six-five-eight-nine-nine, authorization Zeta one-one. I have a Priority Five at these coordinates, that's a Priority Five. Stand by for particulars." Gridley put out the code, the fake tags on the Vette, and a description of the vehicle and persona.

  In the back, Tyrone quietly told the girl, "He's alerting law enforcement agencies. Any cop on the net who sees the Corvette will log in a time and location. We might be able to get a location pattern after we lose him."

  She said, "After we lose him? You don't think we can keep up with him?"

  "Not if the guy is a lubefoot running guilty. He'll be checking. He'll spot a tail sooner or later. If he just cycles and bails, that leaves his lines open and a trail that we can follow. So when he spots us, he has to outrun us, or lose us some other way."

  "Not with these tires," Gridley said. "They're puncture-sealers."

  "Huh?"

  "Never mind."

  Tyrone said, "If slip comes to slide, the guy can bail out of VR with a gear peel or a power cut. Probably crash his system and damage his VR program if he does it on the fly, but if he does, he's gone."

  "Would he do that?"

  "I would," Gridley said. "First rule of computers is to back everything up. Might take him a little while to reinstall his software and sharpen things back to where they were, but that sure beats having Net Force kick in your RW door to arrest you."

  "Whoa," she said.

  Gridley cranked the Neon's engine. "Yeah, well, that's later." He looked at the Vette as it pulled out of the lot and onto the highway. "Until then, he's not gone until he's gone. Buckle up."

  Sunday, October 3rd, 3:00 p.m. Albany, New York

  As a matter of course, Sullivan paid for the lost dog. She did it the long way. The company that dropped the envelope full of used hundreds at the kennel was the third in the chain; it got the envelope delivered to it by a second company. The second company had it brought to them by a first. The first picked it up from the lobby of a hotel where it had been left by an underage kid who Sullivan had bought a six-pack of beer for, and she had done that transaction in disguise. It was unlikely anybody would trace any of this, even if they were looking, and it dead-ended with the boy, who would remember little more than a forty-year-old woman with a warty mole on her chin.

  So now she was in Albany, and now she had made her decision. She was a young woman. She might have another sixty or eighty years, given the state of medicine, maybe more. Yes, it was true, she was at her peak — mentally, physically, her skills as good as they were likely to get. After all the years of dancing on the edge, she had developed a feeling about things, almost an instinct. She had learned to trust those feelings. Right now, on some level, she knew: It was time to leave the party. Hanging around like an over-the-hill boxer to get decked by some big kid with an iron jaw was not a good idea. So. As soon as the missed target was deleted, the Selkie was going into early retirement. She would shut down all the Selkie's lines. If wasn't as if she was poor. She had eight million dollars tucked away. With careful investments, the money would generate all the income she'd ever need. Ten million had been a goal, but never more than a hypothetical number. And there were a couple of high-risk, but very-high-return, ventures she could invest in that were likely to pay off. She wouldn't starve.

  But the one big dangling problem was Genaloni.

  Probably her employer would wind up like most of the wise guys, dead or in stir. But "probably" wasn't good enough to risk sixty or eighty years on. She did not want to be spending any big part of those years sneaking looks over her shoulder, worrying that Genaloni might lurk behind her in the shadows.

  No, Genaloni had to become part of her past. Her dead past.

  It wouldn't even be that hard. The criminal types surrounded themselves with muscle and guns to protect themselves from each other. They had lawyers to take of the cops, and they figured they were immune from anybody else. Genaloni was maybe the brightest of the bunch, but he had weaknesses. The Selkie made it her business to know all about her clients before she ever took a job from them. Genaloni had a small army of thugs and lawyers, but he also had a mistress. Her name was Brigette, and while she was well off from Genaloni's care, she had neither lawyers nor bodyguards between her and the world.

  So. First Genaloni, then the bureaucrat in Washington. Then off for a month in beautiful Hawaii, maybe. Or perhaps Tahiti. Someplace warm and sunny and without clocks or work to order her day.

  The Selkie smiled. It was good to have a new goal.

  29

  Sunday, October 3rd, 11:05 p.m. The North Euro Asian Highway

  He had, Plekhanov realized, a tail.

  He cursed briefly in Russian, vented his anger, then put it away. Done was done, the past but prologue. He had to make adjustments.

  The car shadowing him was one of those ubiquitous little sedan things, like millions of others on the net and in the Real World, and he wouldn't have noticed it, save that he was doing a standard side-road loop-the-loop to check for just such problems. This was the third of his evasive maneuvers, and while he had not spotted the tail before, he had to assume it had been with him for some time. How long had he been under surveillance? That was merely the first of several questions, wasn't it? Who was it? How had they found him? What was the best way to rid himself of them?

  He swung the Corvette back onto the main road. Best to pretend he did not see them. Better the devil one knew than the devil one did not.

  The gray car followed, maintaining a fairly long distance, but assuring him he was right. They would be gathering information generated from his vehicle — vectors, construction, code modules, all things that, in the hands of an expert, could eventually point to him. VR was a metaphorical place, but the images had real underpinnings. They could be recorded and perhaps traced — especially since if it was Net Force, they had enough computer power to brute-force their way through programmer profiles. The longer they stayed with him, the fewer possibilities they would have to sift. Before, he could have been one of tens or hundreds of thousands; now, every minute they stayed with him, that number fell. Every programmer had a style — and the best of them had styles that were as nearly as individual as fingerprints or DNA profiles. If they stayed with him long enough, they would suck his true identity out — or get so close they'd find him on a first or second pass through their strainers. It was a matter of knowing what to look for, of which questions to ask the search system.

  Damn!

  He was on the North EuroAsian Highway now, already through the Baltics and almost home. He couldn't go there, of course, but a sudden course change would
engender suspicion in his pursuers. Too, he had to assume they weren't alone. There could be cars rolling ahead of him, others waiting at intersections for him to pass. If the little gray car was that of a Net Force or affiliated agent, then there almost certainly would be others around.

  All right. He could turn off on the India Highway a hundred kilometers ahead, lead them south and away from home. He could park the car, go into a restaurant, bail from the scenario—

  No, what was he thinking? That kind of panicky reflex would leave them the car and a possible way to trace it.

  Something else…

  It had worked once. Maybe it would work again. Maybe he could lose the chase car, take a side road, maybe duck other pursuit. Get away from this scenario and dump it.

  Certainly worth a try.

  He slowed, allowed the following car to draw a bit nearer. When he was ready, he drew the spikes from the pouch he carried, and with a quick and practiced hand, scattered them across all four lanes behind him, a sharp-pointed shower—

  The pursuer swerved, missed most of the caltrops, but still ran over a few.

  Aha!

  His bright flare of triumph went dark quickly. The gray car's tires did not deflate, nor did it slow. If anything, it speeded up.

  Damn, damn! They must suspect who he was, at least in this persona and vehicle. They knew what to expect, had hardened their program against his defense. Unfortunately, he didn't have much else in the way of armament — at least nothing that would stop people as good as these had to be. He had plenty of smoke-and-mirror programs, but they wouldn't do the trick here.

  If he couldn't shake them, he couldn't lead them very far, either. They already knew too much. He could not take the risk they'd pull enough more information by osmosis to further narrow down their search. He wouldn't be able to make the India Road.

  He had to get out of VR now!

  The damage-to-system warning light flashed on his computer, along with the vox: "Warning! System Failure! Warning! System Failure!"

  Plekhanov degeared and slapped at the power switch, killed the juice to his computer, not bothering with the emergency shut-down procedures. Data would be corrupted, the OS would be mangled and the VR was probably a total loss. None of that mattered when seconds counted for escape or capture.

  Damn, damn, damn! How had they found him?

  How much did they know?

  Sunday, October 3rd, 3:10 p.m. Quantico

  Ahead of them, the Corvette exploded into a bright flash of light, then vanished.

  "Shit!" Jay said.

  "There he goes," Tyrone said to Bella. "He spotted us and crashed out." To Jay, he said, "You get anything useful?"

  "Yeah, yeah, I think so. He was on the road to Central Asia — Russia, one of the CIS, maybe. He might have turned off at the India Road up ahead, or been going on through to the Orient, but if he was planning to head south, he should have cut that way a hundred klicks back. Besides, he doesn't drive like any Japanese or Korean I've ever seen. I think he was going home, and I think he drives like a Russian."

  "What is he talking about?" Bella said.

  Tyrone explained it to her, about programmers' styles.

  "We're gonna have to take what we've got home and study it," Jay said. "Maybe we got enough to nail this sucker."

  Sunday, October 3rd, 3:23 p.m. Quantico

  Michaels waved his phone circuit to life. "Yes?"

  "Boss, Jay Gridley. We got something on the guy who has been giving us fits in Europe and Asia."

  Michaels felt a quick stab of disappointment. Steve Day was higher up on his personal priority list right at the moment; still, the other business was more important for Net Force, even if his career did go down in flames. "That's great, Jay."

  "I'll be in there as soon as I've tied up the loose ends," Jay added.

  As soon as Michaels discommed, the phone cheeped again.

  "Hello?"

  "Hey, Dadster!"

  "Hey, Kidster."

  "You sleeping late?"

  Three-thirty in the afternoon and she wanted to know if he was still in bed. He smiled. "Nope, I'm at work."

  As a matter of course, Net Force had an agent keeping an eye on Susie, plus the local cops had been alerted, but there hadn't been any signs of trouble so far.

  "Mom got the visual fixed. Scope it out."

  The image of his daughter blinked onto his computer screen. She wore blue coveralls and a red T-shirt. Her hair was shorter than he remembered; she must have gotten it cut. What a beautiful child she was, a younger image of her mother. That was a totally objective thought, of course, her being beautiful. He grinned, tapping the camera control to send his visual to her.

  "Whoa, Dadster, you look like Drac's old granny."

  "Who is Drac's granny?"

  "Come on, you don't watch Drac's Pack! It's only the number-one entcom anywhere, Dad! Vince O'Connell is Drac, Stella Howard is his wife, Brad Thomas Jones is the son? The old granny is the mom from Chunk Monks'? Are you living on the moon?"

  He grinned again. "I haven't had much chance to watch the entcom casts lately."

  "It's a great show, you should watch it. Anyway, you look awful. You're not sick, are you?"

  "Nope. Just tired. Working too hard, not getting enough rest. But I got a dog, though."

  "A dog! An RW dog, not a sim?"

  "Yep."

  "What kind? When did you get it? Will you bring it with you when you come for my play? How big is it? What's its name? What color is it? Is it smart?"

  He laughed. "It's a toy poodle, his name is Scout and he's about as big as a medium-sized cat. He's pretty smart. I think he'll like you."

  "Too shiny!" She glanced off camera, then yelled: "Mom! Dad got a dog! He's going to bring it when he comes to visit!"

  He heard his ex-wife mutter something in the background.

  "You think he'll like me?"

  "I'm sure he will, sweetie."

  Watching her, the thought about leaving Washington and moving out West came up again. It sounded better all the time. Of course, he would rather go out with his banner held high, not dragging in the dust. But still…

  Well. The clock was running. He needed to finish this, whatever else he did. Steve Day wasn't going to be forgotten. No way.

  Sunday, October 3rd, 4:00 p.m. Long Island, New York

  Ray Genaloni glanced at his watch. Traffic, even this far out on Long Island on a damned Sunday, was terrible. Of course, he was in the back of a limo with his driver having to deal with it, but even so, it pissed him off. Every minute he spent stuck in a crawl of cars and trucks was one more he wouldn't get to spend with Brigette.

  It wasn't as though he didn't get out here once or twice a week. And it wasn't as if Brigette was the best thing ever to pull off her skirt. He'd had better, a couple of times, actually. On the other hand, she was drop-dead gorgeous, ten years younger than he was, and willing to do anything he asked — stuff he would never think about mentioning to his wife, much less trying to do.

  When he got to Brigette's place — a little house he'd bought for her on a cul-de-sac in a quiet neighborhood among far bigger and more expensive houses — Genaloni sat in his car until his guards in the car in front of his got out and did a quick check of the area. When he came out here, he always had two or three guys in a car in front of the limo, and a couple more in a car behind it. They stayed outside until he was done, even though nobody had ever tried to follow him out here as far as he could tell.

  He rang the bell, and his mistress opened the door, dressed in a transparent black silky thing that went from her neck to the floor but hid absolutely nothing. Her grandparents had come from Sweden or Denmark or somewhere like that, and she was big, busty, and fit. You could also see she was a natural blonde. She had two glasses of champagne in her hands, the glasses still frosted from the freezer.

  "Hi, handsome. My husband is out. Want to come in and have a drink?"

  He smiled. Sometimes they played games. He
took a glass of champagne and stepped in past her. He knew she was giving his bodyguards a show, and he liked that. Suffer, boys, he thought.

  As soon as she closed the door, he slid one hand underneath the silk thing and cupped one of her breasts. No silicone here, just smooth, warm boob.

  "Well. If that's what you want, we'd better hurry before my husband gets home."

  "He can wait his turn," Genaloni said.

  Sunday, October 3rd, 2:01 p.m. Las Vegas

  Even in the airport, there were machines: slot machines, poker machines, keno machines, electronic beggars lined up to take your money as you walked to your flight. The walls were plastered with giant viewscreens showing dazzling stage magicians, wild-animal acts, and showgirls clothed only in glitter.

  Ruzhyo watched as the Snake stopped and fed a dollar bill into one of the slot machines, then cranked the big handle and waited expectantly. The machine whirled its bright colors, then clicked to a stop. Grigory the Snake shook his head, grinned, shrugged. He was not a winner.

  "Don't know when to quit, does he?" Winters said.

  Ruzhyo did not speak to that, though it was certainly true. In three days here, Grigory had lost at least five thousand dollars gambling. His one small winning streak at the blackjack tables had ended quickly. In addition to his losses, he had probably spent another two thousand dollars on whores. Of course, it was his money, and he was well paid by Plekhanov; still, seven thousand dollars would provide food and shelter for an average family back home for, what? Nearly two years? Grigory was a fool, a waste of oxygen.

  "I have a call to make," Ruzhyo said. "Let him spend whatever he wants until the plane leaves. We have more than an hour."

  "I'm gonna mosey on over to that gift shop, pick up a magazine."

  Ruzhyo nodded. He moved to a bank of public telephones, clamped a one-time scrambler over the mouthpiece and dialed the emergency number. The call took a few seconds, since it was being rerouted five or six times around the world on its way. He was not worried, at least not much, but Plekhanov had missed the last two scheduled calls, on Friday and Saturday, and this was the procedure in such a case.