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  He touched a control, and the table’s holoprojector clicked on. The holoproj lit the air above the table, visible from any angle. The image showed Howard and Thorn in Thorn’s office.

  “Okay if I record this?” the image of Thorn said.

  “Fine by me, long as it doesn’t leave the building today. By tomorrow, it won’t matter.”

  “Okay. So what’s on your mind, John, that you had to hurry down here?”

  Howard took a deep breath. “I don’t know if you are aware that the National Guard has had something of a budget crunch of late. They’ve got funds for Homeland Security stuff, and regular operations, but special ops, such as Net Force’s military arm, have been cut into deeply.”

  Thorn gave a faint smile. “Since I go up on the Hill to talk budget more than I like, I was aware of that, General.”

  Howard nodded. “Couple that with the fact that the Internet Fraud Complaint Center and the National White Collar Crime Center are finally up and running full-bore, and handling a lot of stuff that Net Force used to do. Add to that the fact that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff really wants Net Force to put his concerns about his VR scenario problems at the top of their to-do list. Plus the general has mondo clout across the board, and what do you think you get?”

  Thorn frowned. “I can hazard a guess, of course, John, you’ve done all but connect the dots for me, but I don’t really like guessing games. Why don’t you just say what you came here to tell me?”

  “All right, Commander. The Department of Defense is going to take over Net Force from the FBI. Your military arm will be shifted to the Marine Corps, since you’re already right here at Quantico. Nobody will be fired, everything will stay pretty much the same, at least for the time being, but your primary mission from now on will be expanded. The military’s computer problems just got a pass to the top of the pile.”

  “No way,” Thorn said.

  “Yes, sir, that’s what I’d say in your position.”

  “Can they really do this? Something this complex?”

  “Sir, I am here to tell you that it’s a done deal.”

  Thorn shut the holoproj off and looked at Kent and Gridley.

  “No way,” Jay said.

  Thorn nodded. “Oh, yes, way, Jay. DoD swings a real big stick these days, and if they want something and can convince the powers that be that they need it? They get it. Which means we have some things to think about.”

  Washington, D.C.

  When Jay got home, Saji was in the rocking chair her great-grandfather had built for her great-grandmother. The old wooden chair was hickory, and the joints creaked a little every time Saji rocked in it, but there was something apparently soothing about the motion and the noise—the baby, even if he was fussy, calmed right down every time.

  “Hey,” Jay called as he came through the door. “Daddy’s home. How’s the world’s most beautiful boy and his mother?”

  Saji smiled. “He’s almost asleep.”

  Jay nodded. “How was your day?”

  “Great.” Saji kept rocking, slow and steady, as she told him the adventures of Mark Gridley, the brightest, funniest, most gorgeous child who had ever been born. Every diaper change, every burp, every wiggle. What amazed Jay—what had amazed him from the moment he first saw his child—was that he found everything about Mark just as fascinating as Saji did. He could just sit and watch the baby do nothing. Jay’s new favorite way to spend an hour resting was to lie down with Mark sleeping on his chest. Jay had never felt anything like this before: He was a father, and he couldn’t get enough of it. Had anybody told him even a few months ago that this was how he’d be, he wouldn’t have believed it.

  “You want to hold him?”

  “Yes.”

  They switched places. Jay put the baby over his shoulder and restarted the gentle motion of the chair. Mark yawned, made one of his funny squeaks, and closed his eyes.

  “And how was your day?” Saji asked.

  “Not as much fun as yours.” He explained about the changes coming to Net Force. Mark fell asleep in the middle of this, apparently not at all interested in his father’s work. He’d sleep for at least an hour, and the drone of their voices wouldn’t wake him—once he was out, he slept like, well, a baby. . . .

  “So, what are you going to do, Jay?”

  “For now, go along and see how things shake out. I can always get another job if the military folks turn out to be a bunch of bigger idiots than I think they will be. Though I have to say I would be surprised if that’s possible.”

  The baby sighed, and added a kind of warbling moan at the end.

  His parents smiled at each other. What a wonderful child he was.

  3

  Net Force HQ

  Quantico, Virginia

  Thorn was in the gym, doing what he often did when life got more complex than he liked—practicing his fencing. The exercises were familiar, comfortable, and worked best when you just did them and didn’t think about them. Which was pretty much the way it worked in a real fencing bout, too. Thought was simply too slow. The hand was quicker than the eye, it was true, and the blade was quicker than the mind. In fact, in all the years Thorn had been fencing, he had only ever met one guy who claimed to be able to process each action on the strip as—or before—he made it. Thorn didn’t doubt the guy, but he’d never understood how he could do that.

  Right now, Thorn was working on a basic footwork drill: lunge, recover; step, lunge, recover, retreat; step, step, lunge, recover, retreat, retreat; and so on. When he’d first started, his goal was to be able to take ten steps, lunge, recover, and then retreat those same ten steps. These days he went for the entire length of the fencing strip, or piste. The idea was to end up exactly where you started. It developed footwork and form on lunges, and also helped with strength, speed, and smoothness.

  He gave up after a while. There was just too much going on inside his head to completely let go of it. The exercise was helping, but not enough. He left the strip and went over to an area of the gym where he’d hung several golf balls on strings set at different heights. He began attacking, picking a particular ball and then throwing attacks of varying complexity, from simple lunges to compound attacks involving bastinadoes and ballestras, each one ending with a strike on the golf ball he’d selected.

  Another basic exercise, this was aimed solely at the épéeist, and could greatly improve point control, among other things.

  He hit each golf ball three times, and then quit, more frustrated than relaxed. He just could not keep his concentration. Too much to think about. Like sleep on a restless night, the more he reached for that no-mind state, the further it retreated.

  When he’d taken this job, it hadn’t been a step up, insofar as money or his career went. Far from it, in fact, but that didn’t matter. He was rich enough from his software creations that he didn’t need to work another day in his life. He had taken the job as a personal challenge, and as a way of offering something to his country in return. Not a choice a lot of boys growing up on the reservation would ever have.

  But now? With the military taking over Net Force, there would be changes coming. They might say they would leave it alone, but Thorn knew better. The more hierarchy in an organization, the more it had to make things fit. If the military just barged in and said this was how things were going to be, like it or lump it, they’d find themselves holding an empty sack. The people in Net Force who ran things were all adepts—any of them could bail and have another job lined up before their chairs got cold, and even the military, which wasn’t always the most forward-thinking of organizations, had to know that. Hardware was easy; keeping people who knew how to run it right was not so easy.

  That was one of the first lessons Thorn’s grandfather had taught him about hunting: Tromp in too heavily, you spooked the game.

  So, yeah, they’d leave things alone to begin with. Except for that edict to shift priorities so their problem came first, there probably wouldn’t be much to
look at, insofar as changes went.

  But it was coming, Thorn knew. He had run his own company, and had been around the block a few times. It might be subtle at first, but there would be policy changes rolling down the pike, and one day the players at Net Force would look up and realize they weren’t in Kansas anymore. . . .

  The question was, what was Thorn going to do about it?

  For the moment, the easiest choice would be just wait and see. He could type up his resignation and be ready to leave if things went sour.

  That was the easy way. But he had a responsibility that he needed to at least try and see through; he had come here to help, and as long as he could do that without outside micromanagement, he’d stick around. That was the failing of a lot of bosses—they hired good people, but then spent too much time looking over their shoulders, poking their fingers in where they shouldn’t.

  Thorn had always been a hands-off manager himself. He figured that if you laid out good money to hire an expert, you should stay out of his way and let him do his job. An unhappy worker didn’t do as good a job as a happy one, and nothing made a skilled hand unhappier than a boss who didn’t know when to shut up and mind his own business. Especially when his help made things worse . . .

  Thorn had bought out a small software company once for less than a third what it was worth, because of that very situation. The company made a communications package, very sleek and functional, tightly written and fairly simple. The CEO, who knew less about computers than he did sales, kept coming to his programmers with demands about how to improve things. The programmers didn’t like that at all, of course; worse, when they implemented the demanded changes, the product didn’t work as well and didn’t sell as well as it had before.

  Naturally, the CEO blamed the programmers for his mistakes. People started to quit, and the stock dropped. By the time Thorn got there, there were only a few of the good people left. He bought the company, fired the CEO, stripped out the things that made the product clunky, and sales went back up. Old programmers came back, the ones who were still there stayed, and everybody was better off. Well, everybody except the fired hands-on executive . . .

  He hoped the military wouldn’t do something like that CEO, but looking at it realistically, he had to consider the possibility. And if that happened, he could either stay and fight or he could walk, but it was his bicycle they were messing with.

  He smiled at the punch line of the old joke, one his grandfather had told him back on the rez when Thorn was in his teens:

  “So the missionary is walking about the Indian village with the tribe’s chief, and teaching him English.

  “They pass a dog. The missionary points at the animal. ‘Dog,’ he says.

  “The chief nods. ‘Dog.’

  “They come to a cooking fire, and the missionary points at it. ‘Fire,’ he says.

  “ ‘Fire,’ the chief replies.

  “As they round a teepee, they see, lying in the bushes, a naked couple making love. The missionary, embarrassed, fumbles for words. Unable to bring himself to talk about sex, he says:

  “ ‘Uh . . . man . . . uh . . . riding bicycle . . . ’

  “Whereupon the chief pulls an arrow from his quiver, nocks it in his bow, draws, and lets fly. The arrow hits the man in the back of the head, killing him instantly.

  “Stunned, the missionary says, ‘Wh-what did you do that for?’

  “ ‘Man riding my bicycle,’ the chief says.”

  Thorn smiled again at the memory. He missed his grandfather. The man had been a fountain of wisdom and funnier than a busload of drunk comedians.

  Well. It was his bicycle, at least for now, and it was what it was. He’d deal with it somehow.

  Ürümqui, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region,

  Northwestern China

  Chang stood in the lobby of the hotel, waiting for the Canadian. There was a hint of jasmine in the air, and a murmur of voices in the background, speaking Chinese, English, and even what sounded like Italian.

  The hotel, the Flowering Plum, was new, built only a year ago by a Canadian investment group. Ürümqui was a modern city, and not without a certain international flair: There were Holiday Inns, Ramada Inns, and Double Tree was considering putting up a new building. Mexican restaurants. A Starbucks.

  People in the West sometimes found such things amazing—many of those who had never been here had the idea that, outside the well-known cities, China was mostly rice paddies tended by old men wearing big straw coolie hats, riding in wooden carts pulled by oxen. He could understand this—once, he had gone to Colorado, and even though he was an educated man, he had kept looking for teepees and buffalo.

  Colorado did have some of those, he learned, but only for the tourists. In the same way, China still had old men in straw hats, too. More of them than the United States had bison, to be sure. Then again, China had half as many web surfers as were in the U.S., and thirty percent more than Japan.

  Of course, when it came to computer commerce, China had constraints most other countries didn’t: fewer servers, more regulations, and the percentage of the population that was computer-literate was much smaller than in the U.S. China had a lot more Internet cafes and fewer private systems, but still, his job wasn’t the easiest in the world. . . .

  Admittedly, he was a good four hours away from Beijing by air, but airliners did fly here from the capital regularly, and with well over a million people, Ürümqui was hardly some sleepy village.

  Chang glanced at his watch, a Seiko Kinetic. Two more minutes until the Canadian—the man had a name, it was Alaine Courier, but Chang always thought of him as “the Canadian”—was due. He’d be on time—he always was.

  The reason for this visit was simple, but important. Courier had access to some cutting-edge software from America. The stuff wasn’t supposed to travel outside the U.S., but it had made it as far as Canada, and Chang wanted it in the worst way.

  But this wasn’t just a simple exchange. Courier wasn’t interested in merely selling the software to Chang. No, Courier was looking to establish his business connections in China, and he wanted Chang to help him with that. Which Chang was willing to do. He was ahead of most of the hot-rodders in his country when it came to cutting edge-gear and programs, but the race never slowed. Miss a step, and you’d be behind, and that wasn’t where Chang wanted to be.

  Chang knew that if he wanted to put Chinese net policing on the same relative footing as the United States had with Net Force, he needed more tools. He would get those however and wherever he could. His masters would turn a blind eye in his direction as long as he got the job done without causing them any loss of face. If he screwed up, well, that would be on his own head.

  “Chang!”

  There was the Canadian now. Chang smiled.

  Net Force HQ

  Quantico, Virginia

  When the summons came for Thorn to drop by the Director’s office at his convenience, it was not much of a surprise. Actually, the most surprising thing about it was how long it had taken. Still, the FBI kept things on a need-to-know basis, just as so much of the government seemed to do these days. Even from their own employees.

  Maybe especially from their own employees . . .

  Thorn told his secretary where he would be, then took a stroll. It wasn’t that long a walk.

  There had been a shake-up in the FBI only a couple of months past, and the former Director, a sharp woman named Allison, was no longer in charge. The new guy, Roland McClain, was a long-time friend of the current President, a former Army lawyer who’d worked in Iraq after the invasion in the early Oughts. McClain had then left and taken up tort litigation, going on to make millions suing large corporations for his clients. McClain was something of a jock—played tennis and handball and golf, was a very fit sixty, and a political animal to the core.

  As soon as Thorn arrived at the new Director’s office, the assistant showed him in.

  “Thomas, how are you?”

  The man’s han
dshake was firm, but not threatening. He had a tan year-round, and lots of leathery smile wrinkles. The kind of face you’d buy a used car from, if you went by looks alone.

  “Mr. Director,” Thorn said.

  “Please, Thomas, call me Mac. We’re not big on formality around here, you know. Have a seat.”

  Thorn sat on the couch, a comfortable, Western-style piece of furniture of distressed leather with a lot of brass tacks stuck into the woodwork.

  “Do you have any idea why I needed to see you, Thomas?”

  Thorn smiled. “Yes, sir, I expect so.”

  McClain raised an eyebrow. “Do tell.”

  “It probably has something to do with the fact that Net Force is being taken over by the military, courtesy of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and pretty soon we are all going to be Marines.”

  That got his attention. McClain shook his head. “And you came by this how?”

  “We are an intelligence agency, sir. We do stumble across things from time to time.”

  “Would you like to be more specific?”

  “Not really.”

  McClain frowned.

  In Washington, even more than in most places, knowledge was power, and a man who ate, slept, and breathed politics like McClain always wanted to be in the know, more so because he was the Director of the FBI. In this case, McClain didn’t have much leverage. He wasn’t going to fire Thorn, and in a very short period of time wasn’t going to be his boss any longer. At this juncture, his options were limited. McClain knew that, of course, and he knew that Thorn did, too.

  Thorn said, “Does it really matter? It’s true, isn’t it?”

  The Director nodded. “Yes. I fought against it—I think Net Force is better kept in civilian hands.”