Changing of the Guard

20

Thorn had a great-uncle who had been born in West Virginia, and the man, ancient when Thorn had met him, had told some wonderful stories of his boyhood. Hillbillies and moonshine stills, the incredible landscape with its hardwood and pine forests, and the days he’d gone spotlight hunting with his bluetick and red-and-tan hounds in the dark. At some point, Thorn had decided that he would go there, but he had never managed it in the Real World — though he had eventually built himself a scenario.

So it was that he now tramped through the warm summer night following a pack of baying coon hounds, in pursuit of whatever it had been that caused Jay Gridley to be shot.

He had managed to open nearly all of Gridley’s files, and the one that held the most promise was the one from the Turkish Ambassador. As had many of the countries in the Middle East, the Turks had been on-again, off-again friends. Currently they were on-again, and Net Force’s decision to help them had not been strictly altruistic, since uncovering Russian moles still in place was in the best interests of the United States, even though the Russians were no longer the evil empire they had once been.

Ahead, the hounds called, their deep barrooos! resonant under the light of the full moon. Bright enough to read by out here, bright enough to see the sparkles in the opal ring Thorn wore, the ring that had belonged to his grandfather. Thorn wore it in VR a lot, though not so much in RW — there it was only for special occasions. His grandfather had had small hands, and it just fit on Thorn’s little finger.

The old man had believed opals were potent stones, full of magic. He had gone to Australia once, bought a small but gorgeous black boulder opal from the Cody Brothers, well-known for their outstanding stock, and had it set into a custom gold ring made by Rick Martin Snow Owl, a beautiful setting that protected the opal. It had been one of his grandfather’s criteria for a good stone — if it shines brightly under moonlight, it’s a good one.

Thorn had inherited the ring. It was an irregular-shaped red-multicolor flashfire, had blues, greens, oranges, even yellows in it, and on a sunny day, you could see the fire shining from across the street.

Not so bright in moonlight, if you wanted to keep your scenario TTL — true-to-life — but still a comforting glow. The colors reminded him of looking at a neighborhood strip mall full of neon signs at night from five hundred yards away; brilliant, electric, magic.

Opals were supposed to be unlucky, but his grandfather had laughed and told him that was a lie started by diamond merchants in London in the late 1800s. The opals were cutting into diamond sales, and what better way to discourage people from buying them than by saying they were cursed?

Thorn smiled. He missed his grandfather, a man who had been wise in the ways of the world — and who had remained kind despite his knowledge.

The dogs began calling louder, and Thorn knew from the tones they had treed a raccoon — a bit of information he had been hunting.

He passed through a grassy meadow, skirted patches of poison ivy, and tramped back into a stand of long-leaf pine. The light from his big dry-cell lamp found the dogs, who were baying and trying to climb the fat-boled tree with no success. Thorn shined the brilliant beam into the branches.

Twenty feet up, the light reflected from the eyes of a big raccoon clinging to the trunk.

Thorn grinned. Gotcha!

“All right, pups, I’ll take it from here. Back off, be quiet, and sit!”

His great-uncle had told him that hounds weren’t that easy to train, but it was Thorn’s scenario, and having dogs that would do what he wanted was simple enough to program — even if it wasn’t really TTL.

The dogs, eight of them, moved away from the tree, circled around, lined up in a row facing him, and, as neat as a military drill team, sat.

“Good dogs!”

Thorn unslung the tranquilizer rifle from his shoulder, worked the bolt, inserted a hypodermic dart, and locked the bolt shut. He snicked the safety off, raised the weapon, and lined up on the coon. He squeezed off he shot. The compressed whump! of carbon dioxide was loud in the night.

The raccoon jumped as the dart hit it, but he stayed put.

Three minutes later, the coon lost his grip on the rough pine bark and fell to the soft and mossy ground, unharmed and unconscious.

The dogs looked longingly at it, but stayed put.

Thorn went over to examine his find.

Thorn removed the sensory apparatus — the headgear, gloves, and slicksuit mesh — and considered what he had found. He had the tools for this: Using cause and effect, coupled with extrapolation, he might be able to come up with a reasoned scenario that made sense. At least it was a place to start.

Jay had not broken the entire code the Turks had gotten, but those parts he had managed to decrypt had revealed spies in Africa, the Middle East, South America, Central America, and Mexico.

In that order.

Consider that as… inertia, and extrapolate in a straight line. Do that, and it was not that great a stretch to infer that the unbroken sections would continue north, into the U.S. and maybe Canada. Everybody knew the Soviets had fielded scores of spies in the U.S. in the bad old days, and why assume that they had all folded their tents and left when the cold war was done?

Assume for the sake of argument that the still-encrypted portion of file was going to show the names of spies in the U.S., some of whom were still here.

Not a major leap to go there. So what?

So, what if one of those spies somehow found out about the file?

How?

A leak from the Turks? Or surely the Russians must have realized pretty quick their ancient agents were being collected. Would they have tipped off the ones still at large? That would make sense, if the ones remaining had any value to them.

Why attack Jay?

That one was easy. Going to prison for treason? That would be good motivation. Or maybe it was the Russians themselves. They could have a mole somewhere they absolutely did not want to lose. Just because the Russians were currently friends didn’t mean they wouldn’t still want intelligence information if they could get it. Friendly countries all spied on each other. The Russians would know about the file’s existence, they would know the Turks had intercepted it, and maybe they were trying to make sure Jay didn’t get to some valuable bit of information?

The Russians trying to protect a valuable spy, or the spy trying to protect his own hide, either of those would be enough reason to want Net Force to back off.

But, okay, assume one of these scenarios was true, then whoever it was would have to have pretty good resources. They’d know that Net Force had the file, if they had some way of getting into the Turk’s agencies, but how would they know that Jay was the man working on it? And be able to target him, get a bug on his car, and be ready to take him out the way they had? That indicated somebody with expertise, and experts cost money.

Thorn stretched. He needed a break. He decided to check his e-mail, see what had come in while he’d been working, and then get back to the problem of Jay.

It had been a pretty good day so far, considering how early it was, but when he found his personal e-mail box jammed once again with messages from the troll, he decided it was time to put a stop to it. He didn’t need this irritating crap when he had more important things to do.

He emptied the mailbox and got on-line. He wanted to check something before he went any further with this, and it didn’t take long to track down the stats he wanted. The amount of information on the web was incredible, things nobody would have ever dreamed of in the early days of the net.

He had wondered why the man who called himself Rapier felt such anger at him, and for the life of him, Thorn hadn’t been able to come up with a reason. Yes, Thorn had made a lot of money in the computer software field, and that alone engendered a certain amount of resentment, but Rapier — whose name was Dennis James McManus, he had discovered — seemed personally irritated, and Thorn didn’t know him from a hole in the wall.

What Thorn had on the holoproj in front of him were the results of fencing matches from his days in college, specifically the matches at the University of Chicago all those years ago.

It didn’t take long to find the match, one he had forgotten until this very moment. He didn’t have a great memory for names, and recalling the faces of the people he’d competed against was worse. But he remembered tourneys, and individual matches, the good ones, and when he saw that he had fought McManus in the quarterfinal match, before he had lost to the great Parker King in the semifinals, he recalled the bout.

The guy had been pretty good. They had fenced to “la belle”—a tie score one point away from victory. McManus’s style was odd — he had a great lunge, fast and strong, but his tip control was so-so, and his riposte slow. And he liked throwing flicks, too, which were legal, but irritating. Even so, he might have won the match had he not been penalized.

McManus liked to infight — and was good at it, if a bit sloppy. Early in the match he had stepped in too close and bumped Thorn with his hip, getting his touch disallowed and earning himself a warning for corps-a-corps. At la belle, when Thorn threw a feint, McManus bound his blade and stepped in close, his bell guard high, tip landing solidly on Thorn’s side, but again he came in too fast and too far. He had run into Thorn again, harder this time, and the director again disallowed the touch.

McManus had ripped off his mask to argue with the director, without asking or receiving permission. A stupid error, and inexcusable at that level of competition. When the director called him on it, he popped off and actually shook his blade at the official. McManus had been disqualified on the spot. That had cost him and his team, the match had been awarded to Thorn.

Maybe McManus could have won on points, maybe not, but the rules were the rules.

Could that be it? That much bile and anger, after all these years? Because he lost a match he felt he should have won?

Thorn could find nothing else to explain it, but it seemed so… petty. How would it be to live your life like that? Hanging on to something that small for so long?

He considered how he was going to handle it, and decided that a simple and direct response was best. He flipped on the voxax circuit and said into the microphone:

“You lost the match. Knock it off.”

He sent that to McManus’s e-mail address. It wasn’t necessary for him to say he knew who McManus was — that he was able to send him a message told the guy that. And that he referred to the long-ago match was enough to show the man that he knew why McManus was dogging him. A smart man would back away. Even a fairly thick one would see the writing on the wall.

If McManus kept sending his crap, he couldn’t say he hadn’t been given a chance. He didn’t want to use his position as a personal hammer, but Thorn had the right of every other citizen when it came to harassment, and while he would undoubtedly get a faster response because of who he was, he had the right to see that McManus didn’t keep bothering him. What the man was doing was illegal, at least technically, and a call to his server would stop it. If McManus switched servers and tried under another name, Thorn would still know who he was, and he could do worse to him if he felt like it.

Given the situation with Jay, this was a minor irritant, but at least it was one about which he could do something. Now, back to the problem at hand.