Changing of the Guard nf-8 Read online

  The detail was amazing. A mosquito buzzed by, and was eaten by a bird that swooped down to catch it. Eddies and currents in the stream moved in endless, almost-random patterns. A cool breeze touched his cheek, and the smell of pine needles wafted over him.

  She indicated a bench, and he sat on it, a smooth wooden surface that had been there so long that the front edge had been worn smooth.

  “Nice VR. This is great — even I don’t usually get this detailed. Where’d you get it?”

  She smiled, and his heart stilled for a moment — if she could still smile at him like that, the news couldn’t be that bad.

  Unless she’s dying. She did have a doctor’s appointment today.

  His stomach lurched.

  “I’m glad you like it — it’s mine.”

  He almost forgot to be worried. Saji had done this? Where had she been hiding her abilities? The VR they’d worked through during his therapy had never been this sharp. This was good.

  “Really?”

  She laughed. “Yes really. It’s my meditation spot. I’ve worked on it for years.”

  “It’s great,” he said. “Amazing. Really.”

  She grinned. “Glad that the top VR jock at Net Force approves!”

  Then: “Because I’ve got something to tell you.”

  This was it. What could be this important? What could be such serious news that she’d come to work and get him — in VR — and show him her most private meditation?

  “Saji? Is everything okay? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. You might need to take a deep breath, though.”

  “Me?”

  His face must have shown his confusion, because she smiled, and then took his hand. “Well, yeah. You’re going to be a father.”

  He felt an immense sense of relief — she was okay—

  And then: Me? A father?

  It was like being hit in the head with a hammer.

  He realized she was waiting for him to say something — anything.

  “Wow,” he said, stunned. “I mean, wow!” he added, putting some excitement into the word. “That’s… that’s… great!” He grinned.

  Saji seemed relieved. She grinned back at him.

  She took his hand and squeezed it.

  “I wanted to wait until you got home, but I just couldn’t. I’m so excited, Jay! We’re going to have a baby!”

  He grinned back at her, enjoying her excitement.

  He wasn’t completely sure about his own, but he knew he’d rather take this leap with her than anyone else.

  A baby. He was going to be a father. Whoa. Talk about unreal scenarios.

  9

  Quantico, Virginia

  Risks were unavoidable in Eduard Natadze’s line of work. He knew that and accepted that. What he would not accept were unnecessary risks — especially those caused by sloppiness or overconfidence.

  He expected no trouble from his current target. He knew Jay Gridley’s habits backward and forward, and knew that the computer jock posed no challenge for him. But still he took no chances.

  He had made sure that he was not carrying a photo of Jay Gridley, or anything else that would connect him to Net Force’s top computer jock. The only thing he did carry was an electronic receiver, but even that was simply a standard player with a couple of nonstandard tunings he could wipe with a touch. He didn’t expect to be stopped and searched — they did not do such things here in America — but still, he took no chances. Besides, he did not need any photos. He had already studied his quarry and would know the man when he saw him. He would recognize the automobile the man drove, its license number, and he knew all the likely routes from Net Force HQ to Jay’s home.

  He was prepared, at least insofar as he could foresee any problems. He had a transmitter on Jay’s car, a bug stuck under the vehicle’s rear bumper with a powerful magnet, out of sight, to be sure he wouldn’t miss him. He knew where his target was going. If he lost Jay before they reached the operations area, he would just hurry to the secondary pickup point and catch him there.

  Natadze was two hours early, just in case, and parked in a place where no one would bother him, in a lot outside a shopping area. He wore a fake moustache, not an obvious one, a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, and had a Band-Aid on his chin, all things that a potential witness would notice, and none of which would be any use to authorities. He would not have to keep a close watch; the bug would tell him as the man approached. It was, as the basketball players said, a slam dunk.

  As he waited, Natadaze mentally played a favorite guitar piece, Tarrega’s “Recuerdos de la Alhambra,” a composition generally used to separate the men from the boys when it came to demonstrations of tremolo virtuosity, that multiple strum on a single string with machinelike speed and precision. He liked Eduardo Fernandez’s version, perhaps because they shared a similar first name. Certainly he was not in that man’s class when it came to execution, but on a good day, he could get through it without too many bobbles. And, of course, in one’s imagination, there were no dropped or slurred notes, no nail noises or string squeaks.

  It was much easier to be perfect in the theater of the mind.

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  Jay was still not quite able to get his thoughts around the concept of being a father. Yes, they had discussed it in theoretical terms, but the sudden and unexpected reality of it was simply too slippery to grasp.

  Him. Jay Gridley. Some small person looking up at him, holding out his arms, saying, “Daddy, Daddy, pick me up!”

  The term “mind-boggling” was way too mild. This was astounding. Earth-shaking. A tsunami of emotion.

  When he passed the gate, the on-duty guard may have waved — Jay didn’t notice. He was running on autopilot, replaying the scenario with Saji over and over again, trying to put it into perspective. He kept enough of his attention on the road, once he started driving, so as not to hit anybody, but traffic patterns on the way home were the least of his concerns.

  A child was a major responsibility. He knew he didn’t have a clue about how it would really be, but it seemed like, all of a sudden, his life was going to change in major ways, and that was a disquieting idea. He liked to keep things under control, to have a handle on life, and a baby was a variable that might not be so easy to deal with.

  A baby. A little human being that he and Saji would make. It was an amazing thing every time he came at it again.

  He was halfway home, on a slow stretch of road with lots of stop-and-go traffic, red lights, creeping along as fast as maybe twenty-five before he had to slow down again. A car in the next lane suddenly swerved in front of him and slammed on its brakes.

  Jay shook himself from his mental fugue. He hit his own brakes and skidded off onto the shoulder, heading toward a call box on the side of the road.

  Jay screeched to a halt, barely missing both the call box and the other car. The other driver pulled to a quick stop in front of him. Breathing hard, feeling the sudden sweat on his palms, Jay got his first good look at the other car.

  It was a dark maroon full-sized sedan. As it rocked to a halt, the driver’s door opened and the driver hopped out. A medium-sized man with a moustache, he wore black glasses and a bandage on his chin. He was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt.

  The guy’s expression was bland. Jay couldn’t tell if he was coming to apologize or to take a swing at him, but he undid his seat belt and opened his own door.

  Then he noticed that the man heading his way had a gun in his hand, held low by his leg.

  For a heartbeat, Jay froze.

  He had long ago been issued a taser, a high-voltage hit from which would knock a pro wrestler on his butt, but it was in a drawer at the office.

  He had enough presence of mind to grab his virgil and thumb in the emergency code, even though Net Force would never be able to get anybody here in time to do Jay any good. Then he slammed his door shut and threw the car into reverse.

  The gun man was ten feet away as he s
pun the wheel and stomped on the gas pedal—

  Rubber burned, smoke spewed from the spinning tires. The car slewed sideways, glancing off the call box behind him with a solid clunk—

  The gunman raised the revolver and pointed it at Jay—

  The hole in the barrel looked as big as a cannon—

  The man lurched, as if he had lost his balance, and fired—

  The windshield starred, and the world went red.

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  Somebody ran into Thorn’s office in a big hurry. The man in uniform said, “Sir, we have a distress beacon. General Howard and Colonel Kent are in Situation Control and they request your presence immediately!”

  Thorn followed the man.

  In SC, a room he had seen but never been in, people were busy. He saw both John Howard and Abe Kent, on handheld Coms.

  Kent was closer. “Colonel?” Thorn said.

  Kent waved him to silence. “Yes, yes, got it.”

  Across the room, Colonel John Howard looked up from his Com and over at Kent. “Two minutes ETA, General.”

  “Copy,” Howard said. He went back to his Com.

  Kent discommed and turned to Thorn. “Sir. Jay Gridley’s distress beacon was activated two minutes ago. That spot, there, on the computer holoproj, that’s his location.”

  Thorn looked at the map. “That’s only a couple of miles from here. On the road.”

  “Yes, sir. We have a copter with a tactical team on the way.”

  “A car wreck?”

  “Unknown, sir. But it’s nearly impossible to trigger the virgil’s beacon by accident, and protocol says you don’t do it unless it is life or death. General Howard is on the horn with the state patrol.”

  Thorn nodded. “All right.” Not much else he could do. This was the military arm’s area of expertise. Best he not get in their way.

  Howard discommed and came over to where Thorn and Kent stood.

  “Commander. VSP is en route. No reports from the scene yet. We don’t have a sat in position to footprint it. Our team will be there in a minute. All we can do is wait.”

  “This happen very often?” Thorn asked.

  “No, sir,” Howard said. “It’s not something Gridley would have done for a minor accident.”

  “Lord. I hope he’s all right.”

  “Yes, sir,” Howard said. “Me, too.”

  In his car, leaving the scene, Natadze cursed long and loud in his native Georgian. The smell of gunpowder clung to his clothes, sharp and acrid. His ears still rang — he hadn’t worn plugs, there wasn’t supposed to be any shooting.

  Damnation! It had gone so unbelievably wrong. He hadn’t expected the man to try to run — it was not in his character, he was a photon pusher, a desk jockey. As soon as he saw the gun, he should have turned into a stalked rabbit and been unable to think. He didn’t have anywhere to go, anyhow, the box had been almost perfect—

  He had aimed at the front tire, to try and stop the car, but in an incredible bit of bad luck, at that exact instant, he had stepped on something on the shoulder of the road, a rock, a crushed can, something — and his ankle had buckled just as he fired. The gun went off on the upswing as he tried to regain his balance, and he saw the windshield take the round, saw it crack as if in slow motion, saw the subject’s head snap to the side as the bullet or some fragment of it hit him. Saw blood welling. Stood there stunned long enough for Jay’s car, his foot still spasming on the accelerator, to lurch around and into traffic and get T-boned by a pick-up truck, which was then rear-ended by an SUV. Tires squealed, traffic snarled to a stop, and Natadze’s chance to grab his target was over.

  He shook his head, disgusted with himself.

  Hauling a dead or dying man away made no sense. The subject wouldn’t be doing any code work, but neither was he going to be telling anybody what he had learned. Natadze had failed.

  He was screwed. He had to get out of here before the authorities showed up. He quickly tucked the gun away — most people wouldn’t know what they had seen, but he couldn’t hang around long enough for anybody to regain their wits.

  Quickly, quietly, he got in his car and drove off.

  Kent took the call from the tac team, and he put it on the speaker:

  “Sir, Operative Gridley has been wounded, looks like a single gunshot to the head. A lot of blood, he is unconscious, but still alive. Our medic says vital signs are stable. We are in the air en route to the nearest medical facility, ETA three minutes.”

  “Copy, Sergeant. Continue.”

  “No sign of the shooter. The state police arrived as we lifted, and Corporal Scates remained on-site as liaison. I can patch him in—”

  “Not necessary, Sergeant. Tender sitreps as necessary.”

  “Sir.”

  Kent looked at Howard and Thorn.

  Howard looked grim. “I’d better call Saji,” Howard said. To Thorn’s blank look, he said, “Gridley’s wife.”

  “Ah.”

  Well, wasn’t this a great way to end the day? One of his people shot by some loon in a fit of road rage. Thorn shook his head and moved over to a corner. It was going to be a long wait.

  10

  Long Island, New York

  In the back of the limo, the hour long past dark and late, Cox stared at Eduard, stunned by his news. The limo was secure, swept for bugs daily, and it was just the two of them, parked in Cox’s ten-car garage.

  “You shot him?”

  “A mistake,” Natadze said. “It should not have happened.”

  “You are damned straight about that! My God, Eduard!”

  Natadze nodded. “I am sorry.”

  Cox sighed. “Is he dead?”

  “Unknown. He was hit in the head. If he lives, he will not be doing any work in the near future.”

  Cox glared at him. “Oh, yeah, that’ll work out great! Every time Net Force brings in another replacement, you just shoot him in the head! That won’t make them suspicious at all!”

  “I am sorry,” Natadze said again. “The error was entirely mine. I will find a way to rectify it.”

  Cox shook his head. No point in beating a dead horse, done was done. And at the least, Eduard was right — a man shot in the head wasn’t likely to be doing much in the way of code-breaking anytime soon. Bullets in the brain tended to interfere with things like that.

  And Cox doubted that anybody would make the connection to what Jay was working on — as far as anybody knew, it was a case of some driver being pissed off at another and unloading on him. That’s what it had said on the news. It happened all the time. The U.S. of A. was a violent society, and armed out the wazoo. You never knew if some crazy was going to step out of his vehicle and start shooting because you didn’t use your turn signal when you changed lanes.

  “All right,” Cox said. “Find out about his condition, follow up and see what’s what. See if you can figure out who will take over for him. Get what you can, then we’ll decide what to do from there.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Natadze looked so miserable Cox felt a need to cheer him up. “Don’t take it so hard, Eduard. Mistakes happen. That’s why they put erasers on the ends of pencils. It’s not the end of the world. Let’s learn from our errors and move on.”

  “You are too kind, Mr. Cox.”

  Nobody had ever accused him of that before. He had to smile at the thought. Well. At least his secret was safe for a little while longer. Like the folks from AA said, you had to take it one day at a time. In the end — well, in the end, everybody was dead. Getting as far as you could before that happened was kind of the point, wasn’t it?

  After Eduard was gone, Cox went to have a drink. Once again, he had the house to himself, save for the servants, and given the recent events, that was probably just as well. He doubted that he would be particularly good company tonight.

  Brooklyn, New York

  Midnight had come and gone, and Natadze stood in the rented machine shop in Brooklyn, alone. The place was s
mall, but it had more than sufficient tools for his needs. He had arranged to use it after hours, and it was costing him a thousand dollars, more money down the drain, but it was necessary.

  First, he used a screwdriver to disassemble the Korth. He shook his head as he did so, marveling at the fitting. You could hardly see the joins in the revolver, so carefully fitted and polished they were. He disassembled the weapon to the frame and component parts. Then he clamped the barrel into a vise and used a hacksaw to render it into two shorter sections. It was hard work — he wore out a blade, had to replace it halfway through, and pretty much ruined the second one, too. The Rockwell on the weapon had to be around sixty. He developed a healthy sweat sawing on the thing.

  A double penance. He would also miss guitar practice tonight to deal with this.

  There was a heavy steel crucible, lined with some kind of protective ceramic. He put on heavy gloves, a welder’s mask, and lit the oxyacetylene torch. He fined the flame down and it was but the work of a few seconds to reduce the wooden stocks to ash. He dumped in the smaller parts — screws, springs, and so forth, which melted slowly under the steady play of the pale fire, flaring now and then as they went from dull red to cherry and yellow-orange to blue-white and then fluid.

  To this, he added the barrel segments, the frame, and the cylinder. It took a lot longer to finish these, especially the fat cylinder — this was not a smelter, and not what the torch was designed for, but it developed enough heat to do the job, eventually. When the steel was roiling liquid, he shut the torch off and poured this into three small molds that looked like pyramids with their tops sheared off.

  When the molds had cooled sufficiently, he removed the blocks of steel, and put them into a water trough to steam and hiss and cool further.

  He took the little chunks of steel and put them into a small leather sack. A five-thousand-dollar handgun, reduced to high-grade scrap metal.

  Nobody would be comparing rifling patterns to any bullets fired from the Korth.