The Archimedes Effect Read online

  Marissa laughed. “Jamal, I’m old enough to be your mother!”

  “No, ma’am, I can’t see that at all. You twenty-five? Twenty-six maybe? My sister. Stepsister.”

  She laughed again. “Twenty-five? Not for a long, long time. You don’t have much trouble with women, do you?”

  “No, ma’am, I haven’t so far.” He flashed a bright smile at her.

  “When you get through making moves on my girl, I’ll buy you a soda,” Thorn said.

  “Yes, sir, I could use one. Hard work, waving that sword around. Maybe I could show Ms. Lowe how, if she’s interested?”

  “Down, Jamal. I’m way ahead of you.”

  They all chuckled.

  Gibson’s Sporting Club

  Quantico, Virginia

  “Jesus H. Christ! What are you shooting over there, Carruth? It sounded like a damned bomb going off!”

  Carruth smiled. “What’s the matter, Milo, a little noise bother you?”

  “When it about blows my damned ears out through my headphones, hell, yeah, it bothers me!”

  Milo, a short fireplug of a man, ambled down the firing line. It was just the two of them at the range on this rainy Saturday morning. Milo was ex-Army, a green hat who’d done his time before, during, and just after the second Gulf War, and so Carruth had respect for him, even if he was Army and not Navy. The man had been shot at, he had shot back, and that was worth something in Carruth’s world. They bumped into each other at the range now and then, but they weren’t drinking buddies or anything, though they could slap coins at one another.

  Carruth held up the new handgun. “This here is your basic 500 Maximum, aka the BMF. Custom-made by Gary Reeder, down in Arizona.”

  “I heard of him. BMF? I bet I know what that stands for.”

  “Best-made firearm,” Carruth said, his face serious. Then he grinned.

  “Looks like a Ruger Bisley,” Milo said. “Stainless steel?”

  “Yep, about a five-inch barrel, but the frame is heavier, and stretched a little, on account of the round being a tad on the large side.” He tabled the revolver and picked up a round of the ammo. “Fifty-caliber. This particular specimen is a 435-grain LBT-hard-cast gas-checked bullet made by Cast Performance—developed by John Linebaugh—for the elephant herds in Wyoming.”

  “Ain’t no elephant herds in Wyoming,” Milo said.

  “Exactly.”

  Milo shook his head. “I stepped right into that one.”

  Carruth grinned again. “Forty-eight grains of powder for a muzzle velocity around sixteen hundred feet per second.”

  “Christ.”

  He handed the round to Milo.

  “Lord, it makes a .45 auto round look like a runt. Bigger around and twice as tall. You expecting to run into a rampaging water buffalo out on the Mall?”

  “I wouldn’t use one of those if I did.” He nodded at the cartridge Milo examined. “That sucker will punch right through a water buffalo from beak to bunghole and knock down a lion standing behind him. It’s a bit stout for everyday use. Here.”

  He picked another round up from the bench and handed it to Milo. It was a little shorter. “This is the carry load. The 510-GNR, an itty-bitty 350-grain LBT bullet, a mere thirty-three grains of powder pushing only thirteen hundred and fifty feet per second. That’s Reeder’s proprietary load. The big one is the elephant-stopper. There’s a medium version, halfway between, pretty good for brown bear. The littlest one? That’s the sissy load—for people only.”

  Carruth picked up the revolver and offered that to Milo.

  Milo said, “You ever tap anybody with it?”

  “So far, no.”

  “Not all that heavy,” the ex-Green Beret said. “What’s it weigh?”

  “Right at three pounds empty. Got five ports milled into the barrel to help with the recoil, though they kinda make it look like a dragon sneezing flame. Piece costs a couple house payments in a good neighborhood. Want to cook off a few?”

  Milo hefted the piece. “A 435-grain bullet with forty-eight grains of powder? You got a crowbar to pry it out when it recoils and buries the front sight in my forehead?”

  Carruth laughed. “Yeah, it’s a wrist-breaker, all right. Your basic .357 Magnum? Six foot/pounds of recoil, with a 125-grain round. Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry .44 Magnum? Fourteen foot/pounds. Casull’s .454? Thirty-one foot/pounds. This honker? Talking about . . . seventy-two foot /pounds.”

  “Damn,” Milo said. He handed the revolver back to Carruth.

  Carruth laughed again.

  Milo shook his head. “What’s the point, man? I mean, it’s way too much gun for anything around here—hell, on the whole continent, the one below us, and those across the nearest two ponds.”

  “Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it,” Carruth said.

  “Yeah, uh huh, right.” He gave the taller man a look.

  “Okay. I’m six-two, two-thirty-five, and I can bench-press four hundred pounds. Fifty-caliber is the biggest round allowed by law for a handgun. It’s a man’s piece and I can handle it. No matter what’s coming down the alley in my direction? I can stop it. Lion busts out of the zoo, I can drop it faster than you can blink. Guy in body armor wants to play? I can knock him down and break something even if it doesn’t penetrate the weave—it’d be like getting hit with a sledgehammer. If I need to shoot somebody, he will stay shot. I like that.”

  Milo shoot his head again. “You fuckin’ SEALs, you’re all fuckin’ crazy, you know that?”

  Carruth nodded. “Oh, yeah. Big-time.” What he didn’t tell Milo was that he had a custom-made horsehide holster and belt made by Kramer Leather for the BMF, and that it was, in fact, his carry gun. Of course, in D.C., any gun was too much—they frowned on concealed carry, or even owning the suckers unless you were in the employ of the local police or some federal law enforcement agency, or were willing to fill out a shitload of paper, get printed, and wait a year for the FBI check to come back. . . . Well, fuck ’em. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

  Yeah, the piece was a bit heavy on his right hip, but he was big enough to hide it under a jacket or windbreaker. Milo was right, it was too much gun for anything he was going to run into, but he carried it, and the real reason?

  Because he could. And someday, he expected he would get a chance to cook with it when it counted.

  He expected that would be pretty soon, too.

  4

  Washington, D.C.

  Abe Kent sat in his new apartment in the city and stared at the guitar in the chair. He had taken it out of its case and set it there and, no doubt about it, it was beautiful. He had done enough research when he’d been chasing the Georgian, Natadze, so that he knew what a good guitar looked like, and he liked listening to people who were adept with them, but he had no musical talent himself.

  And yet here he was, with a ten-thousand-dollar guitar.

  He sighed. He had taken the instrument out and looked at it a dozen times since he’d gotten it. He didn’t know why, but he felt as if he somehow owed it to the man he’d killed to . . . make use of the thing. He could sell it, or give it to charity, but neither of those felt right. And if he was going to keep an instrument worth that much? It ought not to be sitting in the corner in its case gathering dust.

  He sighed again. It didn’t make any sense, but he knew what he had to do. He stood, picked up the guitar, and put it back into the case.

  The store was small, in a sleepy neighborhood on the outskirts of D.C., in a little commercial strip mall backed by a residential neighborhood. It was called the Fretboard. It had wrought-iron grates on the windows, curvy patterns made to look like a design element rather than bars to keep thieves out. There were several neon signs in the windows advertising products whose names Kent mostly didn’t recognize.

  A bell chimed as he entered. The place smelled like fresh-cut fir, and there were a couple of customers at the counter talking to a long-haired clerk of eighteen or nin
eteen. The clerk had a soul-patch that had been dyed green, and maybe nine piercings in his ears and nose.

  A third man stood nearby, picking out tunes on an electric guitar—he was pretty good. The guitarist was playing a collage, a medley of old rock numbers Kent mostly recognized, and the clerk was laughing.

  He looked up and saw Kent with his guitar case. “You lookin’ for Jennifer?” he asked, still smiling.

  Kent nodded.

  “In the back, down the hall, door on the right.”

  “Thanks.”

  Kent moved down the hall. He opened the door and stepped into a small practice room with thick egg-carton soundproofing on the walls and ceiling. The sound of the electric guitar went silent as he closed the door behind him.

  A woman sat on a stool with one foot propped on a little metal stand, and she would be Jennifer Hart. He had found her through the local classical guitar society. She was at least fifty, and even though that was a decade younger than he was, she was the closest teacher he could find locally anywhere near his own age. Somehow, the idea of it being somebody younger than some of the boots he owned just didn’t seem right. Certainly not some kid with lip hair dyed green and enough hardware in his face to build a waffle iron.

  The woman was trim, dressed in tennis shoes, jeans, and a button-up long-sleeved white shirt. Her hair was to her shoulders, brown, with a fair amount of gray in it. She had a lot of smile lines on her face. A classical guitar rested on her left leg.

  “Mr. Kent?”

  “Yes.” He was in civilian clothes and he hadn’t mentioned that he was in the military, much less a general.

  She put the guitar onto a stand, stood, and stuck out her hand.

  She was short, maybe five-two or -three. “Hi. I’m Jennifer Hart.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” He transferred his guitar case to his left hand and shook hands with her. She had a strong grip.

  There was a second stool and she pointed at it. “Have a seat.”

  He set his case down and then perched on the stool.

  “That’s an expensive case,” she said. “Is the guitar handmade?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Please, call me Jen. Could I see it?”

  He popped the six latches open and opened the lid, lifted the guitar free, and offered it to her.

  She took it. “What a beautiful instrument! What kind of wood is that?”

  “Port Orford cedar on top, Oregon myrtlewood on the sides and back. Made by a man named Les Stansell, out in the Pacific Northwest.”

  “May I?” She put it on her leg, preparing to play.

  “Sure.”

  She did a little run on the fretboard, adjusted the tuning a hair, then played some kind of Spanish-y thing, short but impressive.

  “Good tones. Nice basses and trebles, clean mid-range, great resonance. Sounds more like spruce than red cedar, though.” She handed it back to him. “The top hasn’t opened up yet. You haven’t had it very long, have you?”

  “No, ma’am—Jen.”

  She smiled. He liked the way her face crinkled.

  She picked up her own instrument. It had the same color top, but the sides and back were much darker than his guitar, all brown and patterned. “This is also a cedar top, different than yours, but I’ve had it a while. See if you can hear the difference.”

  She played the same piece. It was warmer this time, darker, not as bright. Both sounded great, but there was a definite difference. The bass notes seemed deeper, fuller, and the high tones somehow richer.

  Done, she said, “My instrument was made by Jason Pickard, it’s got claro walnut sides and back—makes it a little mellower.”

  “What did you mean about the top opening up?”

  “Well, that usually applies more to spruce than cedar, but basically, up to a point, classical guitars sound better with age. A brand-new one that sounds pretty good will, after a few years of playing it, usually sound better.”

  “Ah.”>

  “How far along are you in your studies?”

  He smiled. “What I know about playing it you could carve on the head of pin with a battle-ax.”

  A slight frown flitted across her face. “You’re joking.”

  “No, ma’am. I don’t even know how to tune it.”

  He had a pretty good idea of what bothered her. This guitar he had was expensive. Why would a man who didn’t know how to play the thing put out big bucks for it until he was able to do it justice?

  “The guitar was . . . a gift.”

  Now she frowned. “Somebody gave you a handmade guitar that runs what?—eight, ten thousand dollars?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “They must really like you.”

  “Not so you’d notice in this case, I don’t think.”

  She just stared, not speaking.

  “It’s a weird story.”

  “I’m not on the clock, Mr. Kent.”

  “Abe,” he said.

  She didn’t even blink. “All right. Abe.”

  She waited.

  He thought about it for a moment. He didn’t know this woman, he had no reason to sit here and spill his guts to her, but something about her manner invited intimacy. She seemed genuinely interested.

  He took a deep breath. Who would it hurt? “The man who gave it to me was moments away from dying when he did so. The reason he was dying was because I had just shot him.”

  If that bothered her, it didn’t show. “I thought you looked like police or military. Go on.”

  He wanted to grin again. He remembered a story he’d heard, about an ex-GI who had been involved in a shooting at his home. Guy had been jumped by some local bikers, so he’d pulled a piece and fired three rounds, killing one of them. Friends called later to talk to the shooter, and the comments ranged on one end from folks saying how awful it must have been to have to shoot and kill a fellow human being, to old soldiering buddies who said, “What kind of grouping did you get?” Jennifer Hart’s comment sounded more like the latter than the former.

  “I work for a government agency. The man—who was shooting at me when I shot him—was a hired killer. He was also a very good classical guitarist.”

  “And you feel that you need to learn how to play it? I don’t see the reason.”

  He didn’t blame her. He didn’t see the reason, either, exactly. And what could he tell her? Would she understand that Natadze was a good enemy? Smart, tough, adept.

  He shrugged. “It seems like the right thing to do.”

  She nodded, as if understanding exactly what moved him, though it may have simply been acceptance. For the moment, anyway. “Okay. Let’s get started, then. Can you read music?”

  He smiled again. “Not a note.”

  “TAB?”

  “That a soft drink?”

  She laughed. He enjoyed being able to make her do that. “Not exactly,” she said. “It’s a kind of notation for stringed instruments—guitars, lutes, like that. We’ll get into theory as we go. Let’s do the basic stuff first. There are six strings on your guitar, numbered usually from the thinnest and highest to the thickest and lowest. When you hold the guitar on your leg—I’ll show the basic position—the lowest bass string will be up. Going down from that toward the floor, the strings are usually tuned to E, A, D, G, B, and E, in that order. Here’s a way to remember them: Elvis Ate Dynamite, Good-Bye, Elvis. . . .”

  Kent grinned again. He could remember that. Hell, he could remember Elvis Himself. Saw him once, in Las Vegas . . .

  Louisiana Jay’s Dig

  Whispering Dunes, Egypt

  Jay stood at the top of the tallest sand dune, looking at the huge archaeology dig below. Hundreds of natives wearing flowing white robes toiled in the hot sun, carefully unmasking the ruins of the temple beneath the sand. Some used shovels, some used small hand trowels, and others used whisk brooms made of papyrus to brush away dust on the stones.

  Right out of an old adventure movie. Or maybe on
e about mummies and tomb raiders . . .

  Like most of his VR scenarios, it wasn’t really a temple but a metaphor for something else—in this case a huge comparison database.

  The work hadn’t been easy, and the pressure was on.

  Because the distributed program had mixed and matched various features of U.S. military bases around the globe to create the alien bases, the question was: How many more bases had been incorporated into the alien designs? How many more potential targets were there?

  He would be passing on what he already had to the Army’s computer people pretty soon, but another run wouldn’t hurt.

  If Jay could deconstruct the game and identify features of the bases that hadn’t been attacked, the good guys might be able to get ahead of the bad guys.

  Unfortunately, as with every solution, there were problems.

  First was finding copies of the game software. The program hadn’t been released all at once—new bases had been constructed and sent out to the game players in installments. To complicate things, the game server that had sent the files out had shut itself down when the first base was attacked. In addition, the game files were coded to stop working after a certain date.

  So not only did he have to find copies of the software, he had to keep them from shutting down as well.

  Big problems are our specialty.

  His grin grew wider, and the desert wind blew pieces of sand into his teeth.

  Several servers on I2’s West Coast backbone had been taken off-line for maintenance a week or so before. He’d managed to snag the game variants by copying their hard drives and sifting them for the program. He’d changed the computer’s date before starting them up again.

  He’d also gotten several copies from a VR site that billed itself as a multiplayer on-line game museum. The site had used similar tactics to freeze the alien games.

  After all of his efforts he figured he had about thirty percent or so of the games that had been released. He’d popped them onto a closed network loop and then had gone after problem number two.

  Jay looked over toward the main encampment. White tents fluttered in the desert wind. One was larger than the rest, and in front of it stood dozens of glass tables, each one covered with models. Scores of heavily armed guards patrolled the areas around the models.