Springboard nf-9 Read online

  She nodded. “Interesting,” she said. “But you said there were two differences. Target area is one. What’s the other?”

  He grinned. “Rules,” he said. “Specifically, something called right-of-way. In épée, whoever hits first wins the touch — and bouts used to be to one touch only, just like real duels. In foil, if your opponent has right-of-way, defined as his elbow straight or in the process of coming straight, and his point on line with your target or in the process of coming on line, then you have to respond to his attack before you can claim right-of-way and make an attack of your own. You can parry it, or evade it, or retreat out of distance, or do something to make him break the definition of right-of-way — pumping his arm, for example, so his elbow is no longer straight or coming straight. If you do that, you can counterattack and, if you both hit each other, you win the point. If you don’t deal with his attack first, however, and simply counter into it, you would lose the touch if you both hit.”

  “And épée?”

  He replaced the foil and brought out an épée. “This is the closest to a ‘real’ weapon in Western fencing. Note how much heavier the blade is than the foil. That’s to make it more like the rapier, which it’s modeled on. A larger bell guard protects the hand and wrist because, unlike foil, those are valid touches. Also, it takes a heavier touch to score — seven hundred fifty grams instead of five hundred to depress the point. No rules. Whoever touches his opponent first wins the point. If you both hit within a twentieth of a second, you both lose a touch. Used to be, back when a bout only had one touch, you could both lose the bout on a double touch.”

  He paused. “The épée is my weapon of choice, by the way.”

  “Mine’s a handgun,” she said with a smile, “but to each his own, I guess.”

  He grinned. “The last weapon is the saber, and it’s not much like the other two. Patterned after the cavalry saber, it’s an edge weapon. You can use the point, and do, sometimes, in a bout, but mostly for a change of pace or a surprise move. Historically, the valid parts of the blade were the entire front edge and the top third of the back edge. The flat of the blade was not legal, and hitting your opponent with that did not score a touch. That changed a couple of decades ago when they electrified the saber, and now the entire blade is valid. Personally, I prefer the old way.”

  He pulled a saber out and made a couple of quick cuts with it, whipping the air. “It has essentially the same right-of-way rules as foil but, since it’s designed to replicate a cavalry weapon, and assumes that the combatants are on horseback, the target area is everything from the waist up.”

  “Wouldn’t do much good to hit your opponent in the thigh if he’s riding a horse.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “He might die later, of infection, but that wouldn’t stop him from taking your head off with his counterattack.”

  She touched his saber, then looked over at the foil and épée he’d pulled out. “So,” she said, “feel like giving a girl some lessons?”

  He smiled. “Absolutely.”

  Washington, D.C.

  There was nothing he had to do at the office he couldn’t do from his home system, and Jay was rattled enough by his meeting with Kent that he wanted to go home. More than that, he needed to go home.

  When he got there Saji was sitting seiza on the floor, just finishing her meditation. She looked up at him and smiled.

  “How’s the boy?” Jay asked. He was still shaken, both from being spotted when he had been sure he’d been invisible, and from the idea of being “disappeared.” That somebody could do that. That they would.

  “Fine,” Saji said. “Been alert, smiling, perky all day. No fever, ate like a pig. Sleeping like a rock at the moment.”

  That was what he wanted to hear, of course, but the serpent was in the garden, and things were never going to be the same. Before, he had known it intellectually, but now, he knew it in his soul: His son would always be at risk. Worse, past a certain point of prevention and basic first aid, there was nothing Jay could do about that. It was an awful feeling.

  The baby monitor on the coffee table was quiet, the viewscreen showing Mark asleep in his crib, so everything was all right, but…

  Jay smiled. “I’m going to go check on him.”

  He walked down the hall and crept into Mark’s room. There he was, an angel, out like a light. Jay leaned down and made sure he was breathing. The boy had that healthy, clean-baby smell. Later, when they went to bed, Mark would sleep with them. If he woke up in the middle of the night, they’d both be with him. They had been doing that since he’d been born.

  The thought of something happening to his son, or that he wouldn’t be here to see him grow up? Bad juju.

  Jay moved quietly out of the room and back to where Saji now sat on the couch. He sat next to her.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  She smiled. “I’m fine. It was unexpected, all that happened, but it brought home what I already believed.”

  “Which is?”

  “The Four Noble Truths,” she said.

  Jay shook his head. He knew what those were, at least: There is suffering in the world. The cause of that suffering is attachment to things that will all ultimately pass. There is a way to stop this suffering. The way to that attainment lies in the Eightfold Path. Simple. Not easy, but simple.

  Part of what had drawn him to Saji in the first place was her Buddhist philosophy. It wasn’t really a religion, in that the existence of a God wasn’t necessary to the precepts. You could believe in a deity or not, but Buddhism was about morality and ethics in the here and now, not whatever afterlife there might be. But this was their son!

  “Saji—”

  She cut him off, gently. “I know what you’re going to say. This is Mark, our baby, our child. How can we not be attached to him?”

  “Took the words right out of my mouth.”

  “Nonattachment does not mean that we don’t love and cherish Mark as much as humanly possible. I would step in front of a bus to save him, and I know you would, too. But unless we can let go of that craving, that clinging, we’ll always be in fear for our son. All things must pass.”

  Jay shook his head again. “With any luck, we’ll pass before he does. That’s how it is supposed to work.”

  She reached out and took his hand. “But sometimes it doesn’t work that way. What if Mark had died?”

  “I don’t want to go there.” That thought on top of the rest of his day made him feel ill.

  “Nor do I,” she said. “I was never so terrified in my life as when I saw our baby convulsing and I thought he might leave. And he didn’t go. But it is possible. And if that moment had come — if it comes within our lifetimes…”

  “No,” Jay said. “I couldn’t deal with it.”

  “You could. You would have to. You wouldn’t be the first parent who had to deal with it.”

  “And you believe the Eightfold Path will provide the tools.”

  “Yes.”

  Jay stared into space. He had learned those ideas from her, too. They weren’t complicated — the parade of rights, he thought of them: right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, concentration. They were supposed to help you develop in turn a blend of wisdom, conduct, and spiritual development. Not as simple as “Just do it” in application, of course. There were all kinds of exercises — meditation, not harming people or animals, not drinking or screwing around, and dozens of others. Over time, you would develop a strength that would shield you from desire and attachment, and thus free you from suffering. The idea was that you hurt because you don’t get what you want. If you don’t want anything that bad, it doesn’t hurt if you don’t get it.

  That was the theory as Jay understood it. But he couldn’t see it applying to his son. If Saji could, she was far and away superior to him along the path to serenity.

  Of course, he already knew that. Even as upset as she had been before, she had recovered faster, and done better about i
t than he had. Still, it was a big leap. He didn’t see how he could ever manage it. He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to manage it. If your son dies, how could you just… shrug it off? You ought to feel grief, pain, suffering…

  “Let it sit,” she said. “You can come back to it later.”

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  “So, how was your day?”

  He smiled. To jump from dealing with the possible loss of your child to how-was-your-day? Funny.

  He decided that the meeting with Kent didn’t need to be mentioned. He could talk about other stuff. No point in worrying her — it was history.

  “Terrible,” he said. “The Chinese hacker is a ghost. No tracks, no shadows, nothing. We haven’t been able to figure out how he’s doing it, much less who he is.”

  “You will. I have faith in you.”

  He laughed. “I want this guy, bad. Which, I know, is a not-good desire and all, but I am definitely attached to getting him.”

  She laughed. “You don’t say.”

  “Bretton and I have come at this from every which way we can think of, and still zip.”

  “Not really. You know he is Chinese.”

  “I believe that. I don’t have any proof. My latest foray into CyberNation confirms it, in a bass-ackward way — something I didn’t see as much as something I saw — but it doesn’t seem to have helped overall. I don’t know what to do from here.”

  “Just keep on truckin’,” she said.

  He smiled again. He was a fan of the great underground cartoonist R. Crumb, and he had managed to buy a vintage poster with that funny walk by the man. He also had a small statue of Crumb’s Catholic School Girl, which had set him back a week’s pay ten years ago. She was right. Sometimes that’s what you had to do — just keep on truckin’…

  Only, from now on, he would do it more carefully. He wanted his son to have a father when he grew up.

  In that moment, Jay remembered that he had an appointment with Chang at Net Force HQ that afternoon.

  He pulled his virgil from his belt. He had Chang’s number; he probably wouldn’t have left for the meeting yet. He could call and cancel it. No, wait, Chang was in the District — why not meet him somewhere? Or even have him come here?

  “Babe? I was supposed to meet the Chinese guy at the office this afternoon, and I forgot. Would it be okay if he came by here? We could stay in my office and do some VR there.”

  “The place is pretty messy,” she said.

  Jay looked around. “Looks fine to me.”

  She laughed. “You wouldn’t notice a dust bunny until it was big enough to trip over. But, okay, bring him by. I’ll run the vacuum cleaner.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “You must have never been a housekeeper in any past incarnation,” she said. “Of course I have to do that.”

  Jay shook his head. “Call Chang,” he told the virgil.

  28

  Palace of Prosperity

  Macao, China

  Jack Locke walked out of the casino, slightly lighter in the wallet than when he had arrived two hours earlier. He had played blackjack, small bets, winning for a time, then losing. It didn’t matter. Gambling was not the point, familiarizing himself with the place was. Knowing where things were, how many steps it took from the front doors to the men’s toilets, where the gift shop was, the number of stools at the bar, all these were minor details.

  Locke had been around long enough to know it was in the minor details where the devil lived, and if you didn’t pay him proper attention, he would mess up your plans. Today, it was the Palace of Prosperity; tomorrow, he might stop by the Golden Wheel, or the Diamond, or the Sands, the Kam Pek, the Lisboa. He could lose at baccarat or boule or fan-tan, or play the slots. And if he dropped a few thousand MOP or HKD? Nothing.

  Locke’s cell phone rang. Although they weren’t supposed to, some of the casinos, and that included the Palace of Prosperity, used phone jammers. Nothing like a big base station that would be easy to spot, but guys walking around with tiny ones disguised as pagers or pens or calculators that would kill digital phone signals coming or going within twenty or thirty meters.

  There were a couple of reasons the casinos did this. First, they didn’t want customers thinking about the outside world as long as they still had money to lose. That was why there were no clocks in casinos. If a man on a losing streak gets a call from his wife, he might decide to cut his losses and go home if she got demanding enough. But if his phone didn’t ring, that possibility wasn’t there.

  Second, there were players who would use every angle they could to beat the house. Card-counting, for instance, wasn’t illegal, but it was prohibited by all casinos, and if you got caught doing it — and winning — you’d be banned from play. The house always won in the end, but it hated to lose anything anytime.

  Counters sometimes worked in teams, talking via tiny wireless phones with earplugs so small nobody knew they were there. Jamming those signals made it harder for teams to communicate. Some of the blackjack counters were pretty good. There had been a group from some American school a few years back — MIT? — that had hit Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and even a few European casinos, for millions before a security man finally figured it all out.

  The casinos were smart enough not to kill all phone calls. If you were in the lobby or waiting for a table at one of the restaurants, your phone might work just fine. There were dead zones all over, and if there were a few more than usual in a casino, at the tables? Who could prove anything?

  “Locke,” he said into his phone.

  “You have a problem,” said the voice. No names, but Locke knew who it was. Leigh.

  “Do tell.”

  “Not on a phone.”

  “Our conversation is protected.”

  Leigh laughed. “Right. And I’m the King of England. I can probably decrypt your phone program, and I’m not particularly good at it. Come to my place.”

  Leigh disconnected.

  Locke snapped his phone shut and tapped it against his chin. Leigh wouldn’t have called if the problem was something piddly. He could still walk away from everything if an unsolvable problem cropped up. The plan had not progressed to the point where he was committed, where retreat was not an option. So, they would reach that point, and pass it, but not yet.

  Best to find out what Leigh had come across before they reached the point of no return.

  Locke waved at a taxi. He wasn’t worried about being followed, but he would change cabs at least once. No sense in taking foolish risks.

  The cabbie pulled over, and Locke entered the vehicle.

  Washington, D.C.

  Chang arrived at Jay Gridley’s condo, feeling most pleased with himself. He had something to bring to the table. No way was he Gridley’s equal, but at least he came with information that he felt the Net Force operative did not have.

  Of course, Gridley had not told him the particulars of his business to the point were it would be considered a breach of security; still, Chang had not just fallen off the rice cart. Gridley had dropped enough hints for him to be pretty certain he was chasing a Chinese player of more than passing cleverness and skill, for some reason of major importance. And Chang had an idea as to why.

  Perhaps the tidbit he had would be but a small morsel against the sumptuous feast at Gridley’s table. Maybe it was no more than a little seasoning. Still, it was better than coming up empty-handed.

  A beautiful woman answered the door. “Mr. Chang?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am Saji — Jay’s wife. Won’t you come in?”

  He inclined his head in a slow bow. “My honor to meet you,” he said.

  She led him past a sleeping baby to a room where Jay Gridley was powering up a VR system. “Hey, Chang. Come on in. I have something to show you.”

  “And I, you,” Chang said. He smiled.

  Hanging Garden Apartments

  Macao, China

  After meeting with Leigh, Loc
ke went directly to another meeting with Wu. Locked had called this meeting, on his cell in the cab from Leigh’s place.

  He hadn’t even bothered changing cabs. This was important, and there was little time for games.

  Wu, in his uniform, answered the door. Locke nodded and followed Wu into the kitchen.

  “Nice place,” Locke said.

  “Which we both know you have seen before,” Wu said. “Along with the occupant.”

  Locke smiled, one man of the world to another, and didn’t bother to try and deny it. “Is that a problem?”

  “No,” Wu said. “It doesn’t affect our business. What she does on her own time does not matter to me.” This was not strictly true, but better Locke should think so. One did not show the chinks in one’s armor to an armed man, even if he was an ally.

  Alliances changed.

  Locke bowed his head.

  Wu gestured at one of the two chairs next to the small table. There were two glasses set upon the table, along with a bottle of very good Australian red wine. Locke sat, picked up the bottle, read the label, then poured, filling Wu’s glass first before his own.

  After they had both sipped at the wine, exchanged a few meaningless pleasantries, and remarked upon the hot and wet weather, Wu leaned back in his chair.

  “We have a situation,” Locke said.

  “Which is…?”

  “Shing.”

  Wu raised one eyebrow. “Shing?”

  “He’s a gambler.”

  “This I already know. I have been supplying him with money.”

  “Not enough money, apparently. He has… incurred debts.”

  Wu frowned. “How much? And to whom?”

  “About forty-five thousand British pounds, to Water Room; another twenty thousand to Flexible Bamboo.”

  “To triads? He owes this much money to criminals?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I have dealings with another computer expert. He has access to Li Ho Fok’s accounts, as well as those of the loan shark Firecracker Jiang. These accounts are private and there would be no reason to show Shing in them if he did not owe this money.”