The Ultimate Escape Read online

  Matt thought about it for a minute. “I guess I could have been shot down,” he said. “But if I was, I didn’t see it com-ing.

  “We never do,” David said softly.

  “Of course not!” Andy said. “You didn’t see the thing that got you for the same reason that the Japanese pilots probably didn’t see Julio’s plane, and Dieter never saw Julio’s plane either: The attack came out of the sun while your attention was elsewhere.”

  “That sounds good,” Matt said. “But…”

  “Let’s go with that theory for a second,” Mark Gridley said. “It explains some things, but not others. Like why a Rift keeps forming while Julio is in the sim, and why there was no sign of Julio or his airplane when we played back the Red Baron program.”

  “Wait a minute,” David Gray said, holding up his hand. “You played back the Red Baron program?”

  “Oops,” Mark whispered.

  “Keep going, Squirt,” Megan said. “Don’t hold back now. The Holocat’s already out of the veeyar.”

  Mark and Matt exchanged guilty glances; then they confessed all. They told the other Net Force Explorers about accessing the program using Dr. Lanier’s password, and what they saw in the replay—which was nothing.

  When they were done, it was David who spoke first.

  “At least Dr. Lanier’s mystery is solved,” he said.

  “If it wasn’t for that Rift, we could replay today’s simulation and go back inside,” Andy Moore speculated.

  But Megan shook her head doubtfully.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What do you mean?” Mark Gridley asked.

  “Figure it out, Squirt,” Megan said. “When you pulled that program out of the computer’s memory banks and replayed it, what happened?”

  “We saw what we saw the first time, except for Julio not being there.” Mark paused then, his face a mask of concentration.

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “Maybe we’ve been looking at this all wrong.”

  “What do you mean, kid?” Andy asked.

  Mark stood up and began pacing as he explained his idea to them. “Maybe the Rift isn’t causing us to imagine Julio,” he said. “Maybe Julio is causing the Rift!”

  “Huh?” David Gray said. But Matt and Megan were nodding.

  “Those simulations are programmed to follow a pattern based on an actual historical event. Somebody has put the characteristics and appearance of all the equipment and all the battlefields and all the personnel of a given chunk of a war into the system—then arranged the pieces to reflect what really happened back then. We’re given characters based on actual people carrying out actual missions, but whose actions we can control; still, most of the simulation is set up to follow a prescribed path. When Julio breaks in to communicate with us, he has to haul all the action off that path to buy the time to talk to us.”

  “And you get a Rift!” Andy said, finishing their thought.

  The Net Force Explorers exchanged glances. They knew they were onto something. But suddenly Matt groaned.

  “It’s no good,” he said.

  “Why not?” Mark asked. “It all makes sense.”

  “It doesn’t all make sense,” Matt said. “I saw a news story a few days ago that featured Julio and his family. And I saw Julio. He looked fine.”

  “Any chance that it was an imposter?” David asked.

  But Matt shook his head. “It was Julio,” Matt said dejectedly. “I’m sure of it. Nobody could fool me about that.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” Megan said. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  Minutes later, Megan returned to the lounge with a two-inch datascript icon clutched in her hand. While the others watched her with mounting curiosity, Megan powered up the lounge computer and slipped the datascript icon into the machine.

  Suddenly, a two-dee picture appeared on the monitor. It was the opening image of the news story about the Corteguay elections. The same one Matt saw aired Sunday night.

  Right before the story began to unspool, Megan froze the picture. Then she turned back to her fellow Net Force Explorers.

  “I saw the same news story you did, Matt,” she said. “But I got the feeling that something was wrong with this picture. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, and then even longer to get the proof I needed to be sure I was right. Stick with me because this might get complicated.”

  Megan gave a command, and the story continued to un-spool. They all watched it to the end, and saw Ramon Cortez, his wife, and Julio on the screen. Only Julio’s little sister, Juanita, was missing.

  When the story was done, Megan reversed it and turned back to them.

  “When I get out of school— someday —I want to go into intelligence work or strategic planning,” she said. “I want to manage reality the way most of you like to manage your veeyar games and programs.”

  “What’s a strategic planner?” Andy asked.

  It was Mark who answered. “It’s someone who develops strategies for managing people, situations, policies, popular opinion, stuff like that,” he said.

  “Close enough,” Megan said. “The important thing is that I know enough about the subject to recognize when Vm being managed. And who is doing the managing.” She turned back to the flatfilm.

  “Let’s watch this story again, from the top.”

  Megan played the story once again. But this time, she froze the picture on the very first images of the crowd watching the speech.

  “Look at this,” she said, pointing to the picture. “It’s a perfectly normal shot of a milling crowd, right?”

  Everybody nodded. “Now, supposedly, this shot was taken last week, in the Dompania region of Corteguay, right?”

  Again, everyone nodded. Matt felt like he was back in school.

  “But look at this.” She pointed to the men in the crowd. They were wearing identical dirty overalls, like typical factory workers. A few of the onlookers were shielding the sun from their eyes with their hands. Megan pointed at them.

  “It’s pretty obvious from the shadows and the way they’re squinting that these guys are looking into the sun, presumably watching the podium where Ramon Cortez is speaking.”

  She fast-forwarded for a second or two. “Now look at the podium itself.”

  Matt could see that some of the men on the podium were also shielding their eyes, as if the sun were blinding them too.

  Megan froze the image. “Either the sun is in the eyes of the crowd, or it’s in the eyes of the people on the podium. It can’t be both places,” she said.

  “Sounds good, but that footage could have been taken at a different time than the first images,” David Gray said, unconvinced. ‘ ‘The men could have been shot hours before the rally began.”

  Megan nodded. “You’re absolutely right,” she said. “This evidence, by itself, is inconclusive, but it got me thinking.”

  She turned back to the computer and asked it to fast-forward again. Then she froze on the scene where Ramon Cortez was speaking. “There’s suddenly no sun in Julio’s dad’s eyes here—at least not in this shot.” She moved the image ahead, one frame at a time, then zoomed in on a clock tower in the distance. She magnified the image until they could see the time, almost two o’clock.

  But the sun was directly overhead, as if it were noontime.

  “Of course,” Megan admitted, “not every clock tower gives the right time, especially not in a poor socialist country where nothing seems to work very well.”

  Megan activated the picture again, and it continued to move ahead, one frame at a time.

  “Socialists even manage to screw up their elaborate forgeries. Watch closely.”

  Suddenly, an anomaly that was hard for anyone to miss at this speed jumped right out at them.

  “Did you see that!” David Gray said. “His tie changed color!”

  “Exactly,” Megan said, crossing her arms and looking at them. “I noticed that little glitch the first time I saw the story aired. It
made me very suspicious.”

  Megan froze the picture again.

  “After I downloaded the images, I put them through a digitizer and broke the picture up into its component parts.”

  As she spoke, she waved her hand at the computer and the picture split into pieces on the monitor, right before their eyes.

  “If you ever wondered why Corteguay forbids holo-cams, it’s because it’s a lot harder to make fakes like this with holos.”

  She pointed to the images on the monitor again.

  “This is a forgery,” she said with conviction. “And not even a good one. The shadows are all wrong. The tie changes color, and there’s sunlight reflecting off windows on opposite sides of the street at the same time.

  “And look at this.”

  She zoomed in to focus on the plate-glass window in front of a store. “There’s supposed to be a crowd outside this store, but the window is reflecting an empty street!”

  David jumped to his feet and approached the monitor. Mark and Matt leaned closer too. Then they all looked at one another.

  “It’s a fake, all right,” Matt said.

  Megan nodded. “It’s a fake, and you should have spotted it sooner, Matt!”

  “Me?” Matt said. “Why me?”

  “Because of this …” Megan gave the computer another hand signal and the flatfilm reformed and played on. When it got to the point in the story where Julio, in close-up, waved to a group of teenage girls in the front row, Megan froze the picture again.

  “Look familiar?” she asked. Matt peered at the screen for a moment, then shook his head.

  “Nope,” he said. “You lost me.”

  It was Megan’s turn to shake her head. “You disappoint me, Matt Hunter,” she said as she gestured at the screen. “I thought you were smarter than that.”

  Suddenly the image on the screen moved to the left. On the right side of the monitor another image appeared. It was a news story aired last year, at the close of the Century of Military Aviation seminar, when the awards were given out.

  Megan zoomed in on a shot of Julio Cortez, wearing his prized leather flight jacket, with “Ace of Aces” emblazoned on the back of it in glowscript. Megan froze that shot, then the shot from Corteguay. The two images were exactly the same.

  “They stole that shot!” Matt said. “Julio wasn’t at that rally at all!”

  Megan turned to Matt. “You’re right,” she said. “But if Julio Cortez wasn’t at the rally, then where was he?”

  Suddenly, the mood turned very grim. Everyone knew the answer to her question, but only Matt dared to say it.

  “In a virtual political prison, with the rest of his family,” he whispered softly.

  particular. They’d pretty much exhausted the obvious things. A call to Net Force HQ had gotten them the news that Captain James Winters, the Net Force Explorers’ liaison to Net Force, was out in the field on a special assignment and wasn’t expected back for two weeks. They’d left an urgent message for him to call them, but hadn’t heard from him so far. A call to the State Department with their news had been worse than useless—the man who’d answered the video-phone had told them to go back to playing with their dollies and let the grownups do the work. Repeated attempts to contact the United Nations had had almost identical results. The morale in the room after all these failures was not exactly at its highest point.

  When Mark heard no reply to his question, he looked up.

  Megan, Matt, David, and Andy were all staring at him as if they expected something.

  “What?” he said.

  “Why don’t we take what we know to someone with real political clout?” Megan suggested.

  “Like who?” Mark asked, obviously not liking where this conversation was heading.

  “Yeah,” Matt agreed. “Help may be just an autobus ride away.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Mark said stubbornly. But of course he knew exactly what his fellow Net Force Explorers were getting at. He’d already considered that same course of action himself, and then rejected it, for what he figured were obvious reasons.

  “How about we all go see the head of Net Force?” David Gray asked with a pearly smile.

  I knew it! Mark thought. But there was nothing he could do. He felt trapped as he scanned the other faces. Trapped and outvoted.

  It was hard being the Squirt!

  Going to Dad means admitting that I stole Dr. Lanier’s password and used it without authorization, Mark thought miserably. ,

  Matt Hunter could see the torment on his friend’s face. “Come on, Squirt,” Matt cajoled. “Confession is good for the soul. It was good for me.”

  “But it’ll be bad for me,” Mark said. “My life will be over until high school!” But Mark knew he was outvoted, and he also knew his friends were right. Finding out what had happened to the Cortez family was much more important than ducking any punishment meted out by his father.

  Well, a little more important, Mark decided, dreading his father’s wrath.

  Mark again studied the faces of his friends, searching for an out. They were all looking back at him expectantly, waiting for him to make the first move.

  “Okay, I surrender. Let’s go find my dad.” Mark sighed.

  “I just want to say how proud I am that my son is a confessed computer criminal,” Jay Gridley said, his face outwardly calm—though he was undoubtedly less than calm inside. He was fiddling with a pen as he spoke, and they could all see his knuckles whiten as he gripped it much harder than necessary. “I thought I taught you better, Mark.”

  Matt Hunter, Megan O’Malley, Andy Moore, and David Gray all stared at their feet as Mark received the quiet but firm rebuke from his father, who also happened to be the head of Net Force.

  “You know, Mark,” Jay Gridley continued. “You’re the kind of guy I’m paid to catch.”

  “I said I was sorry, Dad,” Mark said. “You don’t have to insult me.”

  Matt Hunter, standing in the corner of Mr. Gridley’s huge office and trying to act invisible, really felt for his friend. He % d confessed to using his dad’s computer, and that had been embarrassing enough when he did it alone. He didn’t want to think what Mark must be feeling as he fessed up in front of everybody.

  “And anyway, Dad,” Mark began.

  Don’t say it, Mark, Matt screamed to himself.

  “I did it for a good cause.”

  Oh, no.

  “No one ever does good by doing bad,” Jay Gridley said. “And no outcome, no matter how positive, justifies a loss of honor to get there.”

  Then Jay Gridley scanned the faces of the other Net Force

  Explorers gathered in the room. Only Megan and David Gray had the fortitude to meet the man’s gaze.

  And why not, Matt thought. They didn ‘t do anything wrong.

  Even Andy Moore, who wasn’t a part of anything— this time anyway—couldn’t look Mr. Gridley in the eyes. And Matt could see why. Though Jay Gridley hardly looked like an action HoloVid hero, he was a commanding and intimidating presence. His slender but powerful build radiated a physical and mental strength that few men possessed.

  Matt had heard some of the younger Net Force recruits refer to Jay Gridley dismissively as “the Attack Hamster,” but he doubted any of them could meet this man’s gaze without wilting.

  Dropping his pen onto the desk, Jay Gridley leaned back in his ergonomic neuro-chair.

  “For now,” he said. “I’m going to overlook my son’s indiscretion in order to investigate the bigger picture.”

  As one, the Net Force Explorers breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Are you going to seize the IEI flight simulators?” Megan asked. But Mr. Gridley shook his head.

  “I can’t,” he said. “The International Educational Institute is the sovereign territory of the United Nations. We would need an incredible emergency and incontrovertible proof to justify such an action,” he added as Megan started to interrupt. “Besides, with the elections in Corteguay sc
heduled and under U.N. observation, it would be all too possible for us to start some kind of international incident if Net Force gets involved officially. And if there’s any public flap over this, your friend and his family would probably be the first victims. It’s a lot tougher to get a straight story from dead witnesses than it is surviving ones. I’m sure the Corteguayan government would have a convincing explanation for the bodies. No, Ms. O’Malley, we’re going to have to move carefully. Corteguay is a long way from here, and your friend’s life might depend on our caution. If we startle those who are holding him captive before we’re ready to act, there’s no telling what they’ll do.”

  Then the head of Net Force smiled the smile of a natural-born law enforcement officer. “Once we’re ready, we can always cause a typhoon later, if we have to.”

  The Net Force Explorers all laughed, breaking, at last, the grip of tension in the room. Matt laughed with the rest. He admired how smoothly the head of Net Force handled this situation. Megan often told him she learned more about what she wanted to be when she was a grown-up from just watching this man in action than she ever learned in classes. Matt too longed for the day when he could work alongside such remarkable and dedicated people.

  “In the meantime, I don’t want you talking about this to anyone who doesn’t already know about it,” Gridley told them all. “The fewer people involved at this point, the better.”

  He began to scan through his mail. “I’m going to make a few calls,” he explained. “To the State Department, for one. The United States hasn’t had diplomatic ties with Corteguay for many years, so the U.S. Embassy in Adello was shut down until fairly recently. It’s still not officially open, though the U.N. is using it as a base for the election observers, and if the elections go smoothly, we’ll be resuming official relations with Corteguay and installing an ambassador and staff. But I do know the former ambassador personally, and I intend to give her a call.”

  “What do you want us to do, Mr. Gridley?” Matt asked.

  “I want you to return to the Institute on Monday as if nothing had happened, and continue your seminar,” he told them. “I want you in those simulators, looking for any sign of Julio Cortez, or the virtual guard dogs that might be hunting him. And for heaven’s sake, be careful.” Mr. Gridley added, “You’re Net Force Explorers. I know you’ll do the right thing. …” The head of Net Force looked at his son meaningfully. “Now that you’ve all been reminded what the right thing if.”