Changing of the Guard nf-8 Read online

  He looked automatically at his watch, mentally marking the time. Normally, he would follow the target for days, a week, to establish his patterns, but there was a time constraint this time and he would not be allowed that luxury on this mission. He did not like having to hurry, but it was the nature of the assignment, and one made do as best one could, given the parameters. He would do it tomorrow, when the man left work and drove home. It should not be difficult. The target was a white-collar worker, a chair-warmer who was not particularly adept physically. Natadze would use the gun, he would intimidate the man, and that would be that. Have him call his wife and tell her he would be working late. That would give him some time before he was missed at home or work, more than enough to find out what he needed to know. A piece of cake.

  He drove past the target’s residence. Time to go home. To relax and to practice. The highlight of his day.

  University Park, Maryland

  Thorn logged onto UseNet and into the newsgroup Rec.sport.fencing, where there were sometimes interesting exchanges ranging from technique to politics. Threads — follow-ups that began with a single post — tended to stay on a subject for a while, assuming they weren’t stupid to begin with or an insult to the FAQ (frequently asked questions). After twenty or fifty responses, if the original subject was sufficiently covered, then the postings in that thread tended to veer into other areas before dribbling to a stop.

  In this group, people came to discuss the French versus the Italian grip; why the Spanish grip should be allowed in competition; or where to buy the best blades and furniture. Many of the people who wrote in were knowledgeable about all aspects of fencing. Some were tyros who didn’t know an épée from an elephant. And some posters were flat-out trolls.

  A troll was somebody who logged into a newsgroup and posted something provocative purely for the sake of generating attention or starting an argument. The term supposedly came from fishing, wherein lines were set to troll for fish. Some said it came from those mythical beasts who lived under bridges and menaced passers-by. Either way, a troll on UseNet was a waste of time and space. They were almost always anonymous, posting insults under screen names so as to be insulated from reprisals, and sometimes they went past merely being annoying to offering libel online.

  Some trolls were more clever than simply shouting obscenities into the faces of anybody around; they would pose a question or comment in such a manner as to seem serious. But clever or merely loud, trolls were an annoying fact of net life.

  Sometimes very annoying.

  Thorn had attracted a couple of these pests in his years on the net, both as a programmer and as a fencer, and when he opened the thread on pistol-grip handles versus straight-grips that now ran to forty-three messages, he found that one of the more irritating trolls of recent months was there, dogging him again.

  Thorn had posted the question: Has anybody had problems with tendonitis using the straight grip that switching to a pistol grip has helped?

  There had been several helpful replies, a few more that were interested, and, invariably, the idiot who tried to hijack the thread to serve his own ends. The troll — he had several pseudonyms he hid behind, but his current netnom was “Rapier”—had entered the building:

  Tendonitis, Thorn? Must be you’re gripping your blade wrong. Or, wait. Maybe it’s just that you’re gripping the wrong blade;-)! Is that it, Thorn? So why don’t you hire somebody to give you that kind of attention? You can afford it, a rich guy like you…

  Thorn gritted his teeth. What was wrong with somebody that the only way he could get attention was to jump up and down spitting and cursing at people, acting like a two-year-old? Look at me! Look at me! See how clever I am?

  Unfortunately, yes, we see exactly how clever you are. Which isn’t at all.

  Responding only made it worse. These fools didn’t care what you said, only that you said something—anything—thus providing the attention they craved. The best way to respond was to ignore it. “Don’t feed the trolls” was the advice that seasoned UseNetters gave to newbies. If nobody reacts, they leave.

  Which, unfortunately, was not true of the really obnoxious ones. They simply changed their netnoms and came back in a new disguise, looking to get your goat.

  Generally, as soon as Thorn recognized a troll, he put the name into his “kill” filter. From then on, that name would be marked and he simply didn’t open the postings. Of course, every time a troll changed names, he would slip by for a message or two.

  The anonymity of the net had given rise to tens of thousands of such losers. If they said those things to a man’s face, they would be looking for their teeth, but safe in their homes at a keyboard they felt free to insult the world at large. Sad that this was all the life they had.

  Thorn had a huge kill file of names, and one of the worst had used a dozen aliases in the last six months. It was the same guy. The writing style — such that it was — was easy to spot. The guy didn’t shout by using all caps, and his grammar wasn’t atrocious, but the snideness was definitive, and the speech patterns didn’t vary. And here he was yet again.

  Thorn sighed, then added “Rapier” to his kill file.

  Somebody ought to do something about these idiots.

  Even as he thought it, he had the realization: He was now in a position where he could do something. He was running Net Force.

  He smiled and shook his head. Trolls weren’t illegal. Irritating, obnoxious, sometimes even pitiful or outright psychotic, but there weren’t any laws against that. If they actually threatened or libeled you, you could do something, but the smarter ones would avoid going that far. They’d step right up to the edge, but not past it. Innuendo, yes, and thinly veiled threats, but never enough to take them into court to squash.

  There were ways to backtrack e-mail and postings, perfectly legal ones to run through an Internet service provider to bring to their attention that they had people misbehaving. Some of the larger ISPs would kick an offender off if they got enough complaints. But some of the smaller ones, especially those in third-world countries, didn’t really care what their patrons did, as long as they paid their bills. Nigeria was notorious, all kinds of con-men ran schemes from there, the most famous being one about smuggling a large fortune out of the country and cutting in people who would help. A lot of folks had lost a lot of money on those schemes, even after they had been made public time and time again.

  Clever trolls could hide their identities, and some of them used anonymous machines, at libraries or Internet cafes, so even if you tracked the computer down, you wouldn’t catch them. If they were dangerous, you could install key-watch software and eventually nail them, but Net Force didn’t chase trolls; if they did, they wouldn’t have time for anything else.

  Well, it was what it was, and you just had to shrug it off. It was tempting to drop the posting into Jay Gridley’s lap and tell him to find the guy, though. Outing “Rapier” on the net would feel very satisfying. There were folks who, if they knew where the man lived, would drop by and have a few words with him.

  Of course, the “man” could be a thirteen-year-old precocious brat using his mother’s computer, and Thorn didn’t want to be responsible for some irritated stranger kicking the crap out of him. Though it would be very satisfying to have the kid’s mother do it…

  He smiled. Enough for today. Time to get to bed.

  7

  Washington, D.C.

  Natadze picked up his guitar and moved to his playing chair, a specially made stool with a footrest built in at precisely the right height for him. He was in a T-shirt and sweatpants, and he had a sleeve, made from a silk sock with the toe end cut off, over his right arm, to keep his skin from touching the instrument. The sweatpants were elastic — no buttons or zippers, nothing that might scratch the wood.

  He did not wear a watch or rings, and the only things that might possibly damage the fine finish were the fingernails on his right hand, which were kept long and filed carefully for plucking the stri
ngs. The nails on his left hand were trimmed very short, so as not to cause buzzing on the frets.

  Classical guitar was a strict discipline, and that had appealed to Natadze even when he had been introduced to it as a boy. It needed a certain position, the left leg up, the instrument’s waist on that leg, the lower bout just so, the left thumb always placed behind the neck, right hand relaxed here…

  This guitar had been made in 1967 by the luthier Daniel Friedrich, one of the most renowned guitar makers of the late twentieth century. At his peak, there had been a tenor twelve-year waiting list for one of his new instruments, which was not that uncommon among the best makers. The top was German spruce, the back and sides Brazilian rosewood, the neck a standard 650-millimeter scale and 52 millimeters at the nut. The finish was French polish, the tuners by Rodgers, and it had been in almost mint condition when Natadze had bought it — paying forty thousand U.S. dollars for it.

  A decent concert guitar could be had for a quarter of that. This was much better than decent, though. It was superb.

  He was, he knew, not a good enough player to deserve such an instrument. Yes, he could play with sufficient skill so that he probably could have earned a meager living at it. He had a fair repertoire, several memorized pieces that ran more than twenty minutes, one that was almost half an hour without repeating sections, and he could manage a better-than-average tremolo when playing Fernando Sor, even though he was largely self-taught. But his music theory was only fair, his sight-reading still slow, and he resorted to tablature when he was in a hurry to learn a new piece.

  Hard to justify the Friedrich, which had a powerful, almost haunting tone that would fill a concert hall, and was mostly played in Natadze’s living room. Such an instrument should be in the hands of a world-class artist, somebody who could coax from it degrees of subtlety far beyond an amateur such as himself.

  He had more than enough room to grow into it — he would never be good enough to fully utilize the guitar’s capabilities, certainly not practicing just two or three hours a day as he did. But he had wanted it, and he could afford it, and so he had gotten it. He had owned beautiful instruments from other expert luthiers from around the world. He had Spanish, German, French, and Italian guitars locked away in a humidity- and temperature-controlled room in his house. The last few years, he had favored American makers — he had an Oribe, a Ruck, one by Byers, a particularly sweet-toned cedar-top from J. S. Bogdanovich that had been very reasonably priced — but this guitar had, in addition to its perfect craftsmanship and construction, a history. It had been played by some of the best guitarists ever. It had called to him the moment he touched it, he could feel the sense of history, and there had been no question that he would own it.

  He settled himself upon the thin cushion on the stool. He did not need a back support, since he would sit completely upright throughout the session. One did not lean back while playing classical style.

  He had his electronic tuner on the music stand in front of him, though he could tune to A440 by ear after all these years. He had experimented with various combinations of strings over the years, but found that medium-tension La Bella’s worked well, though some of the newer composites lasted longer.

  He smiled. When you had a forty-thousand-dollar guitar, buying new strings was not a major expense.

  He tuned the instrument, plucked an E-major chord, belled all six string harmonics on the twelfth fret, and was satisfied with the sound.

  He began with his warm-up pieces, simple airs he had known since he had started playing: Bach’s “Bouree in E-minor,” the traditional Spanish piece, “Romanza,” Pachelbel’s “Canon in D.”

  Then he played McCartney’s “Blackbird.” Hardly classical, but a simple way to be sure he wasn’t being sloppy and squeaking the bass strings. Besides, it was fun, more so than scales or barres up and down the neck. Now and again, he would play down-and-dirty blues, too, and while they sounded much nastier on a dobro steel body, it was amazing how well they came out of this guitar. Not as if it were sacrilege to play other kinds of music on such an instrument, though some classical players would argue that it was.

  He smiled, and went to work on the new piece, one by Chopin. He hated Chopin, but he was determined to learn it anyway. A man had to stretch now and then.

  All thoughts of work, of anything other than the music, left him as he became one with the guitar of which he knew he was unworthy.

  Cox Estates Long Island, New York

  Most of the time, Cox stayed in the city until the weekend; he had an apartment in Manhattan, an entire floor in an exclusive co-op overlooking the park. His neighbors there were senators and Broadway producers and old oil money. He also had his current mistress, a delightful woman of thirty-four, installed in a brownstone, and if he didn’t feel like going that far, could make do in what amounted to a small apartment down the hall from his office. But now and then, he’d have his chauffeur haul him out to the estate during the week, just for a change. Sometimes Laura would be there, more often not — she was active in a dozen different charities, ran a foundation that gave grant money to starving artists, and went to see the children and grandchildren with some frequency, most of whom lived within a couple of hours of here. She had her own place in the city, and, likely as not, she would be there during the week as well — as apparently she was this evening, for she was not home.

  The house was much too large for just them — thirty rooms, not counting the baths, but when you were a billionaire in a mansion, servants were a given. Even when Laura was gone there would be a dozen people there — a butler, cooks, maids, gardeners, security and maintenance people, his driver.

  Now, as he sat in his home office, a room paneled in half-inch hand-rubbed and waxed pecan, with a desk made from flame maple and a couple million dollars worth of paintings by various Flemish masters on the walls, Cox looked at what appeared to be a rubber stamp, and allowed himself to gloat a little.

  The silicone stamp was that of a human thumbprint.

  A man in his position made a few enemies along the way. When you sat at the top of the heap, the climbers who would take your place were always scrabbling their way upward, hoping you would fall, and willing to push you if you didn’t.

  Among the business rivals were some fairly vicious men, and one of them, Hans Willem Vaughan, of Sansome Petroleum, was particularly nasty. They had clashed more than once over the years, and finally Cox had grown tired of allowing it to happen without a response.

  To attack him directly would have been dicey. But Vaughan had a weakness. He was extremely proud of the fact that his best people were beyond reproach; they were morally upright, none of them had ever been arrested, all were absolutely squeaky clean, honest, and loyal.

  That was about to change. Or at least, it would seem to change, which was just as good.

  Eduard had obtained the fingerprints of a third-level functionary in Vaughan’s organization. The man was an assistant to an assistant, a nobody, but he had access to certain sensitive material, and, like Caesar’s wife, needed to be above suspicion.

  In a few days, this functionary, a married man with children, was going to be revealed as a sex addict, and not only that, a bisexual one who slept with dozens of men and women on a regular basis, who had somehow managed to divert funds from somewhere into his personal accounts, and who was living much larger than he legally could.

  It was a carefully crafted lie, of course; as far as Cox could tell, the man was as honest and faithful as the Arctic summer nights were long. To no avail.

  Eduard would have seen to every detail — he was like that, niggling to a fault — and a trail would have been laid that, once seen, could be followed by a nearsighted blood-hound with no sense of smell. Large cash deposits to a secret account, hotel and restaurant bills, visits to private clubs wherein hetero- or homosexual liaisons were the main business, visits to known brothels, records at call-girl organizations, massage parlors, the works, would all come to light. Some of it
might be explainable to sympathetic ears, perhaps, but the entry and exit records on security computers vouched for by the man’s own fingerprints? It would be hard to explain those away.

  How is it, sir, that computer records showed you entered Fifi’s House of Pleasure at three in the afternoon and stayed until three in the morning? Does somebody else have your thumbprint, sir? Using your name? Fitting your description, right down to the mole on your thigh, sir? Sir?

  The weight of the evidence would be very heavy.

  Eduard had been very careful about faking this man’s attendance at these places only during times when the man had no reasonable alibi to show he had been elsewhere.

  In the end, the target of these machinations would be ruined, and too bad for him, but that was not the point. He was within the group of Vaughan’s workers known as the Incorruptibles. And obviously as corrupt as all get-out.

  At this level of the game, the appearance was more important than the reality. It would not be a fatal, or even particularly damaging, blow; Vaughan’s business would not be affected, save for a point or three dip in the price of his corporate stock for a few hours, if that. But that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to wound the bastard where he was the most smug. To show the world that he wasn’t infallible. A chink in the armor, however small, would do that.

  Like a single drop of black paint in a vat of white, not even visible to the human eye, Vaughan’s organization would henceforth forever be ever-so-slightly gray. And he, Cox, would know that he had been responsible. He would never let on. Gloating over his rival’s misfortune? Never — not in public, at least. He would be sympathetic in the extreme if it ever came up. What a shame. Nothing is sacred anymore, is it? What’s the world coming to? Tsk, tsk.

  Cox leaned back in his chair and smiled at the image of Vaughan being interviewed on national television, defending himself for the actions of an employee that he likely couldn’t remember, if he had ever even met him.