Changing of the Guard

13

In his office again, Thorn considered the matter of Jay Gridley. There were technicians going over the man’s work, but some of it was inaccessible to them. Gridley, like most computer whizzes, had encrypted passwords and retinal blocks on some of his files — even though that was against Net Force policies precisely for the situation that now existed: What if something happened to an operative and nobody could get at what he’d been doing?

Gridley was good, very good, but Thorn was better. Besides, he had a big advantage — there was an override, a back door built into Net Force mainframe software that would allow the Commander to get past most of the wards. Thorn could call virtuals of any of his operatives’ retinal scans; he had the encryption codes for Net Force’s main locks, and he could probably figure out Gridley’s private codes using the Super-Cray’s breakers. Having access to that was a computer nerd’s delight — more powerful than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound…

At the very least, even though it was probably not connected, he could take a look at what the man had been working on.

“No time like the present,” he said to himself.

His office wasn’t rigged for full-VR. Gridley’s was. He’d go there. Besides, there might be something in the office that would help. You never knew but that Gridley might have his codes written down on the inside of a desk drawer.

He smiled. Top programmers didn’t do anything that stupid, though he had once known one who had used his own birthday as a password. Guy had said that nobody would be so stupid as to expect that. He’d been wrong — there were plenty of stupid people in the world, for whom subtlety was not possible. It was almost always a mistake to make that kind of assumption.

As he was tightening the G, twisting the tuning machine to raise the pitch, the string broke. The nylon went bing! as it snapped, right at the tie block, which was where they usually let go. The thing was, Natadze hadn’t broken a string on his instrument in years — he changed them regularly and never let them get so old and worn that it was apt to be a problem. These were only a couple of weeks old. It must have been defective.

He quickly grabbed the loose nylon to make sure the broken end didn’t accidentally scratch the French polish finish. The French polish was better than other finishes for tone, but it was not the most durable. A lot of luthiers had started limiting it to the front of their instruments, while using lacquers of various types on the sides and backs. The sound was much the same, but the lacquers wore much better.

Practice would be delayed. He had to change out the remaining five — replacing one at a time was, for him, something better left only for emergencies. The other strings should be good for another month before they started to sound dead, but he was a believer in the idea that birds of a feather sang better together.

It was well known that wooden instruments, at least the good ones, got better with age. A guitar’s tone, like a violin or cello, would improve with playing. Cedar tops did it faster, spruce took longer but grew in volume as well as tone; everybody knew that.

While there was no proof that strings needed to be the same age to vibrate well together, Natadze believed that this was the case. Change one, change all was his philosophy.

He fetched his winder, slipped it over the low E tuning peg, and began slackening the string. He had tried different tuners on his instruments, and he preferred those made by the late Irving Sloane. Rodgers’s and Fustero’s were prettier and much more costly, though on an instrument as expensive as this a few hundred dollars for gearheads was nothing. But the Sloanes seemed smoother, they gave an absolute lock, and they lasted forever. He had gone to them on all his guitars, save for the collectible ones that shouldn’t be altered.

Likewise with strings, he had tried all the major brands, mixing and matching the wound basses with the trebles, and eventually came to realize that D’Addario’s Pro-Arte Hard Tensions gave him the best sound on this instrument, even though the medium tensions he normally used were a bit easier on the fingers. Interesting, because they were far from the most expensive ones.

Once he had removed all the strings, he wiped the fretboard with cleaner and then lemon oil, wiped it dry again, put a piece of cardboard below the bridge to protect the finish, and began to re-string the guitar. He used a variation of John Gilbert’s method, melting a tiny ball on the ends of the nylon trebles before running them through the tie-board and looping them, starting with the high E and the other nylons, then jumped to the low E and other two basses. In theory, this gave the trebles time to adjust as you strung the wound strings, but in practice, all the strings went flat quickly for a few days until they had time to properly stretch out.

The process took half an hour. He clipped the long ends, using a small pair of blunt wire cutters, retuned all the strings, and ran a few scales. New strings, while not staying on key for long, did sound great, the sound cleaner and much more alive. Once the sweat from your fingers began to work, the strings had a limited life. You could take them off and soak them in cleaning solution, or even boil them to remove the grime, but that was troublesome, and it was much easier just to install new ones. If you had a guitar that cost as much as a new car, stinting on fifteen-dollar strings seemed fairly foolish.

Finally, after retuning for the fourth time, he was ready to play. He’d have to retune every few minutes, but that was unavoidable.

He might have screwed up his work a few times of late, but there was no reason why he couldn’t at least practice playing well. With the would-be kidnap victim in a coma in the hospital — he had checked that out personally — he wasn’t going to be causing any problems for a while. And the road rager who had shot him? Gone and no way to track him.

As he began to run his scales, a sudden unexpected thought burst into his brain, a nasty and unwelcome visitor, and one that stunned him with the force of its arrival.

Oh, no! How could he have been so stupid?!

In the small waiting room on the eighth floor, John Howard sipped at a really bad cup of machine coffee and shook his head. Julio Fernandez also nursed a paper cup of the vile brew, but seemed less bothered by the taste.

“I’m going to check with the doctors once more. If there’s no change, I’m heading out,” Howard said.

Fernandez said, “I can stick around for a while. Joanna and the boy are still at her friend’s in New York, no reason to go home except to sleep, and I can do that here.”

Howard laughed. “You can do that anywhere. I believe I once saw you fall asleep eating a bowl of hot soup.”

“Did I finish it?”

They sipped coffee.

Fernandez said, “So, tell me about Colonel Jarhead. Why’d you put him up for the new honcho?”

“Ah. Back when I was still a light colonel and in the RA, and you were probably being busted back to corporal the second or third time, you might recall that I did a rotation teaching ROTC at a U down in Georgia.”

“Yes, sir, I recall that. Goofing off at the student union, eyeballing the coeds, and grading papers. Hard work.”

Howard shook his head. “Abe Kent, a full-bird colonel, had been rotated out of the latest middle east conflict where he’d served with distinction, and stuck in charge of a shiny new Marine officer training facility outside Marietta. I’d bumped into him a few times before, various places.”

“That’s the Marines’ idea of R and R — a couple months out of the war zone teaching officer wannabes.”

Howard nodded. “So Abe is down South, dealing with the best and brightest of the jarheads.”

“Which ain’t saying much,” Julio observed. “And a full-bird back then?”

“Keep listening. One of the trainees is a very smart kid — let’s call him ‘Brown’—a champion swimmer in college before he dropped out, a black belt in karate, and sharp as a warehouse full of razor blades. He apparently joined up primarily to piss off his father, who was a millionaire, well-known U.S. Representative — and a major antimilitary dove. Guy had been in Congress for ten or twelve terms, and would go on to be reelected half a dozen more times before he retired. He had amassed major clout by this point.”

Julio nodded again. “Lemme guess — the kid had an attitude?”

Howard grinned. “Can’t get anything past you, can they, Lieutenant?”

“Smart people can.”

“Better shooters can, too.”

Julio held up his hand. “Pick a number between one and five. Sir.”

Howard ignored him. “So Brown is setting the grading curve for the recruits, first in the classroom, first in PT, kicks ass in the unarmed combat course, even outshoots the country boys on the rifle range.”

“He sounds like the perfect Marine — except for the smarts,” Julio said.

“Yes. It was too good to last, of course. Eventually, trainee Brown ran into some boneheaded hillbilly career DI who’d dropped out of the third grade to work his daddy’s moonshine still and joined the Corps the day he turned seventeen. Words were exchanged. Things got physical. Brown decked the sergeant quite handily, and decided that if he had to take orders from dillwits like that, he wasn’t going to play anymore.”

“He washed out?”

Howard shook his head. “No, he saw Colonel Kent and informed him that he was not only leaving Officer Candidate School, he was leaving the Marines altogether. It had been fun and all, but, after careful consideration, he couldn’t continue on, what with the morons with whom he’d have to serve.”

Julio laughed. “I bet that went over real well with a decorated colonel just back from combat.”

“Abe Kent informed officer-trainee Brown that, while he could bail from OCS if he so chose, he would be serving the remainder of his hitch in some way, shape, or form, period.”

“Lemme guess again: Brown dragged out his father’s clout and clonked Colonel Kent over the head with it?”

“That came later. First, he took a swing at Kent.”

“He didn’t.”

“He did.”

“What happened?”

“Kent had spent a big part of his career in combat zones and sleazy bars around the planet. He was not impressed with a would-be shavetail karate expert throwing a punch. As I understand it, he, uh, sat the boy down in his chair with some force — banking him off a wall and a file cabinet in the process. Some medical attention was required, having to do with teeth implants and resetting a broken arm.”

Julio laughed.

“Brown then informed the colonel, and with a bit more respect, I imagine, that his old man was rich, influential, and that Colonel Kent would be very sorry.”

“Got Kent’s back up,” Julio said.

“Yes. He threw the kid into the brig for decking the sergeant — he didn’t mention the altercation in the office — and told Brown that he could spend the rest of his hitch on the line or in the stockade, it was all the same to the Marines.”

“So what happened?”

“What do you think happened? Daddy sat on some big committees. He had favors to extend, money to grease anything squeaky. Even so, it took him six months to pry Brown out, and even with all his clout, the best he could get his son was a general discharge and not an honorable one.”

“Should have been dishonorable.”

“In my opinion, yes.”

“So Colonel Kent stood against the kid’s rich and powerful old man in career harm’s way all that time,” Julio said.

“Exactly. He’s a man of principle. He’d been around long enough to know the chain of command is only as bright as the dumbest link in it, and that sooner or later the kid would be sprung. But he fought every inch of the way.”

“Which is why he’s still a colonel,” Julio said.

“Yes. He resisted pressure from people with long memories. They couldn’t throw him out — he was a decorated war hero in five different theaters, and had worked his way up through the ranks — but they could make sure he never went any higher.”

Julio said, “Bastards.”

“No question. But even knowing it was going to cost him his star, he did it anyway, because it was the right thing to do.”

“Brave. Maybe not so clever.”

Howard chuckled. “And we both know we’d rather have a brave man willing to go against the odds covering our asses in the field than a clever one.”

“Amen.”

“So, that’s the reason I put Abe Kent up for the job. Net Force operations aren’t always by-the-book, and this job requires a man willing to go out on a limb for his people. Whatever else you might say about him, Colonel Kent is not a man ever going to be shot in the backside.”

Julio said, “Thanks for telling me, John.”

“Does it make any difference?”

“Well, he’s still a jarhead, but at least he’s my jarhead. For as long as I’m stuck with him, he’ll get whatever I can give him.”

“I knew that all along, Julio.”

Both men smiled.

“Sir? General Howard?”

Howard looked at the doorway and saw a young FBI agent he thought he recognized come into the room. What was his name? Rogers? Not a field guy, but a tech. What was he doing here?

“Sir. We transferred Operative Gridley’s car from the state police and went over it, just a matter of routine.”

Howard nodded. “And?”

“Sir, we found a wireless transmitter affixed under the automobile’s rear bumper.”

Howard exchanged a quick glance with Julio. “A bug?”

“And not one of ours, I take it?” Fernandez said.

“No, sir, Lieutenant. Not one of ours.”

Fernandez said what Howard was thinking: “So we’re not talking about road rage. We’re talking about a stalker.”

The agent said, “We don’t know that. Could be a coincidence.”

“You believe that?” Howard asked.

“We tend to look askance at coincidence in the labs, General.”

“I want to know everything there is to know about this bug, and I’d like it yesterday.”

“Yes, sir. As soon as we know, you will.”

Howard stared into the distance. A stalker. What had Jay been up to?

The fall day was sunny, a hint of chill in the autumn air. The alder leaves were beginning to turn, and there was a scent of wood smoke in the breeze.

Thorn, dressed in a T-shirt and Gortex windbreaker, blue jeans, and running shoes, walked the narrow trail next to the rushing water of the shallow Oregon river. It wasn’t Gridley’s scenario, it was his own, and one he liked to use. His grandfather had taken him for hikes in the forest a lot when Thorn had been a boy, and they were happy memories. He had invited a couple of people into the scenario at various times, usually women he had started dating. Their reaction to it usually gave him a good idea of whether there was much chance of the relationships going anywhere.

One woman he’d met in college had laughed and wanted to know why he wasn’t wearing moccasins and buckskins, him being an Indian and all. Another had walked for ten minutes and said, “Borrring.”

Both women had been drop-dead gorgeous and ready to spend serious time in the sack with him, but he had shut them down after that. A woman who didn’t enjoy a walk in the forest, no matter how sexy or smart she was, just wasn’t going to pan out in the long run. Not for him.

He spotted some bear scat just off the trail ahead. He stopped, squatted, and used a small stick to poke at the dung. Fairly fresh, still moist, still pungent. He smiled at the old joke that popped up in his memory: How do you protect yourself from grizzly bears when you are in the back woods? You wear little bells on your shoes to warn them you are coming, and you carry pepper spray in case they see you. And how do you tell grizzly scat from black bear scat? The grizzly scat has little bells in it, and smells like pepper spray.

This was black bear — there weren’t any grizzlies in these woods, virtual or real world, and hadn’t been for years. A black bear was much smaller and less likely to give you any trouble, but they’d go a couple hundred pounds, had teeth that could snap your arm or bite your face off, and you didn’t want to mess with a momma and cubs or a male in mating season. Most people didn’t realize that bears could outrun people in the short haul, and could climb, too.

At least he was on the right path. Gridley’s passwords were down this way, and maybe he wouldn’t need the big Cray to figure them out when he found them.

He stood and started back down the trail.

A deep voice drowned out the sound of the river bubbling over the big rocks: “Emergency override, Commander. General Howard calling.”

Thorn stopped. “End scenario,” he said.

The incoming call had visual — Howard was using his virgil, so it must be important.

“General. What’s up?”

“The FBI found a bug on Jay Gridley’s car.”

Thorn digested that and considered the implications. “You think it might not be road rage.” It was not a question.

“Somebody was tracking him. It would be passing coincidental if it was somebody else other than the guy who shot him.”

“You tell the lab guys to hit it hard?”

“Yes, sir.”

“State police know about it?”

“I expect so.”

“Keep me in the loop.”

“Yes, sir.”

After Howard discommed, Thorn went over the new input. Somebody was after Gridley in particular. Why?

Could be personal, though that didn’t seem likely. A lot of effort to bug his car and track him, then try an assassination on a major highway with witnesses all around. Did Gridley have enemies like that? He’d been here for years — nobody had said anything about him having hassles. Thorn could check with the man’s wife, but that scenario, that Gridley had personal enemies, just didn’t feel right.

So that left work. Who would want to knock off a Net Force op?

Possible answers: somebody who had suffered at his hands? Or maybe somebody who was going to suffer because of something Gridley was doing?

Now it was really important to get into his files and see what he was working on. Other than that thing for the Turkish ambassador, Thorn didn’t have any idea what the man had been up to. A supervisor needed to know what his people were doing.

Best he find out. Time to go for another walk in the woods.

“Computer, restart scenario from exit point.”