Changing of the Guard nf-8 Read online

  He smiled.

  Jay hadn’t had much time to play with the programming. He’d mentioned that, given a few days, he could work up VR versions of any historic fencer, from the American saber fencer Peter Westbrook to the Italian épée expert Antonio D’Addario — as long as there were video archives and other data banks to pull details from.

  For now, though, all he’d been able to do was put together a sort of composite fencer, taken from various video clips and a few manuals. He’d gone for breadth rather than depth, programming in skills in multiple weapons and styles — or so he’d said, anyway — and promised more development soon.

  Jay had also coded a director for the bout, even though they were fencing “dry,” without the electrical hook-ups. Thorn didn’t need the lights for this; he didn’t even need the director; all he needed was an opponent — and the opponent didn’t even have to be very good. He was looking for exercise, not a challenge.

  He sketched another quick salute and dropped into his guard position, knees flexed, right toe pointed at his opponent, left toe pointing exactly ninety degrees off to the left, right hand extended almost completely, shoulder height, sword point aimed at his opponent’s chin. His left hand floated easily like a flag above and behind him.

  His opponent mirrored him.

  “Et vous pret?” the director asked.

  “Oui,” Thorn and his opponent said as one.

  “Allez!”

  Thorn started with a ballestra, a quick, short step to close distance followed immediately by a strong lunge. Normally, he was a counterpuncher. He liked to let his opponent take the first move and then react to it. But he could attack, too, and he was anxious to see how well Jay had done.

  As he lunged, he feinted toward his opponent’s face mask, eyes unfocused, looking at nothing but seeing everything.

  There! He felt his opponent’s blade begin to come up in a parry.

  Thorn smiled. In épée there were no rules, no right-of-way. It didn’t matter who launched the attack. It only mattered who struck first. If both struck simultaneously, both would score a point. With electronic gear, the equipment was sensitive to one twentieth of a second. With VR, there was no limit.

  He hadn’t been sure how his opponent would react. It wouldn’t have surprised him to see the other blade come toward him in a counterattack, especially one aimed at his right wrist or forearm. If that had happened, he would have tried to bind it, capturing the point and corkscrewing down the blade until he drove his own tip into his opponent.

  This was better, though.

  As the other blade came up to meet his, Thorn dropped his hand and sent his point streaking toward his opponent’s right toe. It was a risky shot, since it took his own blade far from any sort of defensive position, but in épée the entire body was a valid target, and a shot to the toe counted the same as a hit on the mask.

  Against a human, Thorn would probably have thrown this as a feint — if he even tried it this early in the bout. He likely would have reversed direction with his point one more time, as quickly and as tightly as he could, starting high, feinting toward the foot, then darting high again, aiming the final thrust at his opponent’s right wrist.

  This wasn’t a human, though, and he wasn’t so interested in scoring as in moving — and in testing — so he didn’t turn this into a feint.

  He should have.

  As his point dropped, his opponent shifted his weight slightly, drew his right foot back, and then leaped into the air.

  Thorn’s point crashed harmlessly into the floor. His opponent’s point, however, came down solidly on his mask.

  “Halt!” the director cried. “Touché.”

  Thorn nodded and acknowledged the touch.

  “Nice one, Jay,” he said.

  He returned to his guard line, saluted his opponent, and came to guard.

  “Et vous pret? Allez!”

  Thorn smiled and moved forward.

  He maintained his guard, more cautious now. He looked for an opening, a weakness, anything.

  There wasn’t much. Jay had done a good job, coding in all the basics and also giving his construct good reaction time. That would make it hard to fool him.

  Good.

  Blade extended, his right hand and wrist shielded by his bell guard, Thorn began testing his opponent. He engaged his point, throwing a fast beat at his foible, the weak part of the blade near the tip, to try and open up his wrist. He followed that with a quick thrust at the bell guard, hoping to slide off and pick up part of his cuff.

  The move didn’t work, but he hadn’t really expected it would. He’d throw that shot again and again, setting up an expectation in his opponent’s mind. With a real opponent — a human one — there was the chance that he would tire and start to get sloppy on his parries, and leave an opening for Thorn to slip through. He didn’t think that would happen here, unless Jay had programmed in a fatigue factor.

  He threw the beat again, working the interior of his opponent’s blade. Did it seem as though he was a trifle strong in his counter? Thorn nodded. He thought so, and that was something that could be exploited.

  He made the beat a third time, but now it was a feint.

  Instead of hitting his opponent’s blade, he came up and pressed it to the outside. As soon as he felt the counter pressure, he disengaged, dropping below his opponent’s point and circling, coming up on the outside. He pressed and added momentum to the parry—

  His opponent’s point drifted in just a hair too far, and Thorn extended, aiming for the outside of the wrist. He caught fabric, and felt the point of his épée sink home.

  “Halt!” the director cried. “Touché.”

  Gotcha!

  He had a sense of his opponent now. He could work with this. Give Gridley credit, it was a good simulacrum.

  He returned to his guard line, saluted, came to guard, and waited for the director’s command to begin.

  Now they were having fun…

  Cal’s Bistro Manhattan, New York

  Natadze took a sip of the beer — some kind of dark ale — and nodded. “Good,” he said.

  Cox waited. The place was crowded and noisy, they were in a booth in the back, and the lunch crowd’s babble was probably a more effective protection than debugging his office once a week was. The food and beer were good, but Cal’s, there for forty years, was on the verge of being “discovered.” Another couple of weeks and Cox would have to stop coming here because he would start running into people who knew him. Too bad.

  “I have considered the matter,” Natadze said, after another sip of the dark brew.

  Cox waited, knowing that the man would get to the subject in his own time. Part of having a highly trained expert was allowing him to present what he was being paid to present in the manner he thought best. You don’t hire Michelangelo and then try to give him lessons on how to paint a ceiling.

  “This information will be restricted,” Natadze said. “It will not be ‘Net Force’ working on it, but a man or perhaps a small team of men within the organization.”

  Cox nodded. “Right.”

  “The team leader, if there is more than one man, is the key. He will know how much progress has been made, who has made it, and any other pertinent information related to it.”

  Well, of course, Cox thought. Any idiot could figure that much. But Cox refrained from saying such aloud. Let him go where he wanted to go.

  “Therefore, we need only to secure this man’s help.”

  “Are you thinking about bribing him, Eduard?”

  “No. Collecting him.”

  Startled, Cox looked around. Nobody was watching them. “Kidnapping?”

  “It is the simplest solution. The data remains at all times within their headquarters, and a building like that will have wards. Getting inside and collecting data, while not impossible, would be complicated. It would require documents, either stolen or forged. It would require an agent who would likely be scanned, photographed, or otherwise record
ed. On top of that, even with a proper disguise and identification, simply gaining admittance would not be enough to guarantee finding and securing the data. It is very complex.”

  Cox nodded. “I understand.”

  “But the man who works upon the code? He comes and goes. He will be unprotected away from his workplace, or, at worst, will have a bodyguard or two. Much easier to deal with. There are many options. His home. In transit to or from work. Recreating. We gather him in, question him, and with the information he provides, we will be in a much better position. Maybe he takes his work home. Perhaps there are but one or two copies of it, which he can tell us how to collect. He will hand us a lever; with it, we can pry what we need into our hands. Not difficult at all, really.” He shrugged, reached for his beer.

  Cox shook his head. The thought had literally never occurred to him to kidnap a Net Force operative. This was why Eduard was so valuable to him. He easily walked down roads that Cox would never even consider taking, roads he would never even know were there.

  “Can you find out who the operative is?”

  Natadze held his beer up to the light and examined it. “I already know that.”

  “How?”

  “We live in an age of information, sir. There are many public records available — news media, government reports, Internet and web material. Certain names appear in these records with regard to their areas of expertise. The head of Net Force’s technical section is a man named Gridley. I have a researcher gathering information on him. Shortly, we will know all there is to know about this man — or at least all that is publicly available. Once I have this, it is simply a matter of choosing when, where, and how to best approach him.”

  Cox reached for his own untouched beer. He took a sip. It was warm, slightly bitter, and smelled of hops or yeast or something, but that didn’t matter. At the moment, suddenly, the taste was wonderful. “We are in something of a hurry, Eduard.”

  “It should not take long to determine what we need. A day or two at most to set it up and we will have him.”

  Cox nodded. “Do it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Natadze said. “I will.”

  Natadze left first; Cox waited for a few minutes. Could it be this simple? God, he hoped so. If they could wipe this threat away, he would sleep a lot sounder than he had in a long time. Yes, indeed. There would still be the Russians, of course, but the status quo was something with which he could live. He was still more valuable to them free and untarnished, and while they might not go to the mat to protect him, they wouldn’t toss him away as long as he was useful. The Russians were nothing if not pragmatic.

  And if this worked? Maybe it would be time to send Eduard to find the Doctor and have a little talk with him, as well. If they could determine who knew what over there and eliminate them? That would make his life just about perfect.

  He grinned. He would have to give Eduard a nice bonus. A man like him was worth his weight in diamonds.

  He raised his glass in a toast. “Go get ’em, Eduard.”

  6

  University Park, Maryland

  The house Thorn had bought was in University Park, just south of the University of Maryland, in Prince George’s County. The homes were more stately than spectacular, many of them built in the 1920s and ’30s, and most of his neighbors were either professors at the U, well-off business types, or political staff. The streets bore large pin oak and pear trees, and an occasional elm that had somehow managed to survive all the years of blight that seemed to seek out that species. There had been people living here since before the Revolutionary War, though the town itself was much younger. According to the realtor, crime was low, tiger mosquitoes sometimes got bad in the summer despite efforts to eradicate them, and just about all of the single-family homes were occupied by their owners. Upscale, but not ostentatious.

  From the outside, Thorn’s house was a two-story home, solid, and there was nothing to distinguish it from most of the others on his street, which was exactly what he had wanted when he set the real estate agent to looking.

  Inside, there was still work being done. The four-bedroom house was much larger than a man alone needed, and he was having the living room and parlor converted into a fencing salon. One of the joys of being rich was, if you couldn’t find exactly what you wanted for a home, you could have it built.

  Eventually, he would have fencing masters come to his house to teach him. He had been looking into the Japanese arts kendo and even iaido, with the live blade.

  Not that he wanted much other than that. Coming from a poor family had taught him early on to value people and small things. Yes, when he’d sold his first major piece of software and been handed a huge check, he had run out and gotten himself a bunch of new toys, ranging from top-of-the-line computer systems to fast cars to five-thousand-dollar suits. He had even bought his parents a house in Spokane.

  But that was long ago and money no longer burned a hole in his pocket. These days, he had a driver, so he didn’t need a car. He ate well enough, though he wasn’t a gourmet, and he didn’t buy his clothes at the Salvation Army Thrift Store. His one expensive hobby was collecting swords. Aside from working foils, épées, and sabers by such makers as Vniti, Leon Paul, Prieur, and Blaise, he had a collection of antique weapons ranging from Japanese katanas to Chinese broadswords to Civil War sabers. He would have these hung on the walls of the salle when it was done, and a monitored alarm service installed to keep sticky-fingered thieves from helping themselves to the weapons. Other than that, his fortune was not something he used all that much. He did like to fly first class, for the leg room, but he could have easily afforded a private jet, and first-class was a lot cheaper than that…

  He smiled at himself as the driver opened the car’s door and he alighted at the new house.

  “Good night, Mr. Thorn.”

  “Good night, Carl. See you in the morning.”

  Thorn ambled to the door, carrying his equipment bag. He thumbed the door’s lock and pushed the front door open.

  Inside, the smells of sawdust and fresh paint greeted him. He put the sword bag down and went into the kitchen. He didn’t feel like cooking, it was late, and a heavy meal before bedtime was an invitation to night-mares, but he was hungry, so he grabbed an Aussie pie from the freezer and stuck it into the microwave, opened a bottle of beer, a Samuel Adams, and went to watch the late news on the television. So far, the new job had been easy enough. He had good people, there were a few more he would eventually bring in, and he hadn’t run into anything he couldn’t handle. Of course, he didn’t expect he would run into anything he couldn’t handle.

  He sipped from the bottle as the TV lit. It was a little disappointing, really. Sure, there was always a newness factor in any kind of job. Big projects brought their challenges, but it never took him long to get up to speed, and once he did, well, then it was just a matter of time before it got boring. Most of the time, he had to invent his own challenges, and now and then he would have liked to be in a position where he had to stretch a little to keep up. Mostly, that just didn’t happen.

  The news flared on, the end of a story about another crisis in the Middle East.

  When he’d been a kid, Thorn hadn’t realized that everybody wasn’t as smart as he was. A problem would come up, he’d see the answer, and he’d assumed that everybody else had seen the answer, but for some reason he couldn’t understand, they’d pretend they hadn’t. Eventually, he realized that wasn’t the case — that in virtually every mental race he ran, he was way out in front when he crossed the finish line.

  He took another swig of the beer. The weather was up next, and it was going to be cool and rainy in the District tomorrow.

  A big part of his life had been a search for equals, people he could run with, but those were few and far between. Oh, they were out there, and it was a delight when he found one, but he no longer expected to simply run into them the way he once had. Once upon a time, he had lived with a woman who was actually smarter than he w
as. Sharp, funny, sexy, they liked the same music, the same literature and movies, mostly, but it hadn’t worked out. She’d had her career — she was a physicist — and he’d had his, tinkering with computerware, and one day they’d looked up and realized they weren’t connected anymore. They couldn’t point to any major break. They still exchanged Christmas cards, smiled and hugged each other if they met, but their paths had diverged and neither of them could see a way back. Sad.

  In sports, the NBA basketball season was in full swing. Looked as if one of the new expansion teams he hadn’t realized even existed was on a roll, ten straight victories.

  The microwave pinged. He flicked off the television and headed back to the kitchen. He’d do an hour or so on the web, check his personal e-mail and the fencing newsgroup, and then go to bed.

  Another exciting evening in the life of Thomas Thorn.

  Washington, D.C.

  Natadze watched from inside the rental car as the target turned into his driveway and stopped his own car, a three-year-old Volvo.

  Following the man had been easy enough, and even if he had lost him, he had known where he was going. He had committed all the statistics to memory. He knew things about Jay Gridley that the man probably did not know himself — his driver’s license and credit card numbers, his medical ID number, along with his phone number, address, birthday, and his wife’s maiden name.

  Proper planning prevents piss-poor performance. Knowing as much as possible about the subject was an important part of that.

  Gridley got out and walked to the door of his condo, where his wife, who taught Buddhism online, would be waiting. According to her latest medical records, she was pregnant.

  Well. If Gridley did as he was told, he would live to be a father. If not…

  Natadze put that thought from his mind. It was not good to dwell on failure. Yes, you did whatever was necessary to assure that such a thing did not happen, and that meant considering all the variables and planning for them, but you did not give them power. Failure was not allowed. Only success got you approval.