Changing of the Guard

25

Even though he knew it was theoretically possible, Thorn hadn’t really believed he’d be that lucky. Now and again, it happened, just often enough to keep him from discounting it.

The Super-Cray had come up with a match on Jay’s shooter and whoever killed the dead Russian.

Alone in his office, Thorn had his holoproj float the two images side-by-side. The picture on the left was from a bank ATM cam near the spy goods store — the man hadn’t been using the machine, but had been walking past it in the background, behind a woman withdrawing money from her account. Forty dollars, according to the ATM’s records. It was not the sharpest picture in the world, and only caught him from about the knees up, but it showed a dark-haired man of perhaps thirty-five glancing in the camera’s direction. A scale running down the size of the image showed his height in centimeters, based on the known height of a NO PARKING sign on a post behind him. He was about six feet tall.

The woman, a young and attractive brunette who was visible only from the chest up and blocking most of the frame, wore a skimpy red halter top that had trouble keeping her rather voluptuous breasts in check, and if the rear view was as interesting as the front one, Thorn guessed that this was the reason the passing man was looking over his right shoulder her way. He was checking her out.

That would mean he was heterosexual.

Or maybe he was gay, she had on designer pants, and he was admiring those.

Or maybe she had a puppy standing next to her and he was a dog breeder…?

Leave that for now.

The second image was taken by a traffic cam covering an intersection in southern Connecticut, the town of Bridgeport, four miles away from where the Russian spy’s body had been found. A car was halfway through the intersection, making a clear right-hand turn on a red light, right next to a NO TURN ON RED sign. The traffic cam had snapped an image, showing the driver and the front of the car with its license plate, all neat for the local authorities to run the plate and mail the driver a ticket. The picture was date and time stamped.

The driver was an elderly woman, white-haired, and barely able to see over the top of the full-sized Cadillac’s steering wheel.

But: Behind that car, stopped behind the crosswalk, was a new Dodge, and seated at the wheel of that car was a dark-haired man whose head was surrounded by a pulsing red circle.

“Enlarge two hundred percent. Unsharp mask, selected field, on image two,” Thorn said. “Apply reasonable extrapolation generator.”

The computer obeyed, doubling the size of the image inside the circle, sharpening it, and augmenting the colors and shapes rendered based on a specialized enhancement program, the REG.

It looked like the same man to Thorn, but the big thing was that the Cray thought so, too. It had a much higher accuracy rating than Thorn’s eyes.

“List facial feature matches, normal tolerances.”

A pair of grids showing sizes blossomed, one under each image. The computer brought the two grids together into one image in the middle. All the features that were plus or minus a millimeter lit in flashing red for a beat, then locked. There were twelve matches of the eighteen factors scanned.

Same size nose, same size right ear, same distance between pupils, same ratio of forehead to ear height to chin angle…

Thorn didn’t need to go any further. Once you hit five major facial points, it was either the same guy or his twin brother, and Thorn didn’t think that was likely.

This was the guy who had bugged Jay’s car, shot him, and who had killed the Russian spy. Thorn was sure of it.

“Ha!” he said. “You are mine, pal!”

Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be that easy. He searched the rest of the file, but there was no obvious way to identify the man — at least none that the Super-Cray had been able to come up with. The Cadillac in the foreground blocked the bottom of the car the shooter had been in, so there was no license plate visible. No other images of that car were in the traffic cam, and if the Cray hadn’t seen him elsewhere in its strain, then it wasn’t like a set of human eyes would do any better.

“Print images,” he said.

Thorn passed out hard copies of the holographs to General Howard, Colonel Kent, and Lieutenant Fernandez.

“This is the guy?” Howard said.

Thorn nodded. “I believe so, yes. What’s the word on Jay?”

Fernandez said, “He’s checked himself out of the hospital and gone home. We have guards watching the house. Saji says he’s planning to head back into VR and start looking.”

Thorn frowned. “VR? I would think the doctors would want him to stay out of that for a while.”

Howard nodded. “They do, but Jay’s more stubborn than they are.”

Thorn said, “I’ll call him and pass this along when we’re done. “I’ve run the driver’s license databases from all fifty states through the mainframe. The Super-Cray is checking all military photo records, current passports, and federally incarcerated prisoners — nothing yet. NCIC and CopRec databases are matching the image through local and state jail and prison systems, and that will take a while even with big crunchers. If he’s in the system, we’ll find him. Eventually.”

“You want us to go out on the streets looking?” Fernandez asked.

Thorn smiled. “The regular FBI is doing that already. They’ve got agents flashing these pictures in the vicinity of the spy store, the area where Jay was shot, and in the dead Russian’s neighborhood.”

“Good. At least that’ll give them something to do,” Fernandez said. “What’s this on his fingernails?”

Thorn frowned. “What?”

Fernandez pointed at the picture. “Looks like he is wearing nail polish on his right hand, see?”

The picture was too small to see more than a little gleam.

Thorn tapped the computer console on the conference table, called up the ATM image, and had it focus on the right hand — the left was behind him and out of sight. The computer enlarged and enhanced the hand.

A little fuzzy, but sure enough, it looked like the guy had fairly long fingernails, neatly manicured, and they did seem awfully shiny. Kind of an odd, slanted shape, angled to one side. That didn’t mean anything to Thorn, though.

“What’s the other hand look like?” Kent said.

“Can’t see it,” Howard said. “Miz Halter Top there is blocking it.”

Thorn called up the other picture, in the car. The man’s left hand was on the car’s steering wheel, at about ten o’clock. He had the computer magnify and enhance the image. It was grainy, not as sharp as the ATM image of the right hand, but it appeared as if the nails on that hand were much shorter and duller. Odd…

“He’s a guitarist,” Kent said.

“What?” Thorn said.

“I have a nephew, in Tucson, Arizona, my sister’s oldest son, who teaches music at the local U. He plays classical guitar, and that’s what his hands look like. Nails on his right hand are long, polished, and angled, and the ones on his left are clipped short — it’s how you play the instrument.”

The others looked at him.

“You pluck the strings with your nails, but if you have long nails on the other hand, the strings buzz when you fret them — at least that’s what my nephew told me.”

“So maybe he’s a country-western guy, or bluegrass or folk music player,” Fernandez said. “Even a rock star.”

Kent said, “Could be, but rock stars mostly flat-pick, and acoustic guitars have steel strings. Fingernails simply don’t hold up against those, so those guys wear curved finger-picks or have fake nails. Classical guitars have nylon strings.”

“How do you know all this?” Thorn asked.

“When I was stationed outside Atlanta, one of my sergeants was a serious blues guitarist. I used to go and listen to him play at local clubs, and I picked up a few things here and there.”

“And you remembered it?” Julio asked.

Kent looked at him. “Not everybody older than you is automatically senile, Lieutenant.”

“No, sir,” Fernandez said. “Point demonstrated and taken.”

General Howard grinned.

“Does this help us?” Kent asked.

Thorn nodded. “Absolutely. If nothing else, it’s another place to look. And something tells me there are not a lot of classical guitarist hit men around.”

Jay sat in the command chair of the Deep Flight V, and stared out at the inky black water over two miles below the surface of the ocean.

He tapped instructions on the keyboard and the deep-sea submersible tilted to the right — starboard — and headed toward an odd-looking pile of silt. At this depth there wasn’t much moving except him. Vaguely nautical-sounding music played out over the stereo, and there were odd creaks and groans from the structure around him caused by intense pressure from the ocean.

Except that he just didn’t feel it. He wasn’t there. It wasn’t real.

He frowned and shook his head. I was sure this would work.

Even as he thought it, he knew that it wasn’t true. He’d wanted it to work, but he hadn’t really believed it would.

He sat in the media room of the apartment he and Saji lived in, the 270-degree panorama projection screens at one end of the room lit up with images from his VR simulation. He was looking for a Spanish treasure fleet lost in the late 1500s. But when he leaned back, he could feel the upholstery of the chair, and hear the purr of the ventilation system. He even thought he could hear Saji rattling around in the kitchen, though that could be his imagination.

He frowned again.

You’re going to have to do it, Gridley.

After spending subjective months inside his head, in a world similar to VR but not as controlled, he found that he was loathe to leave reality. No, more than that. He was afraid—if only a little bit — to leave reality. He knew you couldn’t get trapped in VR. It just wasn’t possible. But then he’d always believed that you couldn’t get trapped inside your own head, either.

He’d devised a non-VR metaphor to break the code that had put him in the hospital. He’d built a simulation he could run from a flatscreen, a remotely operated vehicle sim that searched the ocean floor while he sat in his desk. He’d been hopeful that it might work, that it would let him wait a while before going back into artificial reality.

But it just didn’t do the job. Not even close.

So he’d taken the next step, programmed the media room for near-full VR immersion, and created a sim that put him inside a submarine. That worked better. He was more engaged. But it still was not enough.

No, not nearly enough.

Jay’s edge, his best trick, was using all of his senses in VR. Limiting himself to vision only, or even audio and visual, was like cutting off his arms or legs. It felt wrong.

He took a deep breath and saved his location before killing the sim. He stared at the VR gear hanging on the rack, feeling a slight chill.

Can’t be a VR jock unless you do VR, Jay, said a voice in his head. Was he ready to give it all up? Not go back because he was afraid?

No.

Besides, he had to find the guy who had done this to him. Before he came back and found a way to put Jay back inside his own head permanently.

He called up several research databases and began to construct what he needed. He took his time, writing code segments that added to the reality of the VR, making it more detailed than necessary. One of the things he’d realized from his experience was that most VR wasn’t as good as his unconscious — even his.

But after a while he realized he was just stalling.

“Saji,” he called out. “I’m going in.”

“I know.” Her voice was faint from the kitchen, but he smiled at the sound. She knew. She always knew. And she’d be there to help him if somehow, someway he got into trouble. Not that he would, but…

He closed the file window and pulled his stims off the rack. The movement was familiar and practiced, and within seconds he was ready to jack in. He reached inside his desk drawer and got a large binder clip. He pried it open and clamped it on the loose flesh behind and above his left elbow.

Ow.

It didn’t hurt too much, but the pressure was there. He jacked in and suddenly found himself on the floor of the ocean.

It was cold and dark. He looked down, pointing some of the bright LED lamps on his modified Mark 27 Navy diving helmet at the ground, and watched his feet sinking into the muck. He adjusted his buoyancy so that he was just touching the surface.

He’d forgotten to breathe. He inhaled sharply, feeling a push into his lungs from the flow amplifier in the helmet. He nearly coughed, which wouldn’t have accomplished much, except to push more of the Perfluorocarbon fluid filling the helmet out of his lungs just a little faster.

The fluid he was breathing made diving at this depth a little easier, because it didn’t compress the same way a gas would. Although it still hadn’t been approved for general use, military and special research units all over the world had started using Perfluorocarbon fluid for deep dives once they’d solved the carbon dioxide removal and inertia problems.

Weird.

He felt like he should be choking, but he had plenty of air, didn’t feel faint at all.

The silt pile he’d identified earlier was just ahead on the right. Jay activated the deep-dive Sea-Doo seascooter he’d brought with him, and it pulled him toward the pile of silt.

As he neared it, he could see that it seemed to be regularly shaped, which gave him hope; the regularity of man-made shapes was a big part of finding salvage in the sea.

He cut the forward motion of the seascooter and let it hang in the water. Green and red lights circled it, so he could find it at this depth, even if his suit lights went out.

The cold dug at the suit, trying to get in.

His left arm was still feeling clamped, and he had a moment where he knew he was in his own home. For that moment, everything seemed artificial before he suspended his disbelief and let himself come back to the VR scenario as his baseline reality.

He shook his head. He was still fighting this, as bad as a first-timer exploring the near edge of VR.

Jay let himself sink toward the silt pile, careful to move slowly. He wasn’t just looking for lost treasure; he was searching for a specific gold bar from a specific sunken chest — one that was shaped like an octagon. Part of a shipment of Incan gold intended for Spanish royalty, the conquistadors had chosen the mold shape to distinguish it from gold being brought back from Mexico.

Of course he wasn’t really looking for gold at all. That was just the VR equivalent. He was really hunting for the man who’d shot him.

The metal detector built into his boots signaled a positive. There was metal down there, all right.

He touched down on the sea floor and took a few seconds to look around. He’d done a good job on this — there were little eddies of water moving the silt slightly, tiny, ugly lichen-like things, and a very real feeling of desolation.

He reached for the pain from the binder clip on his arm again, and suffered a slight disorientation.

He was down.

He let his feet and then his ankles sink into the silt, and before long found himself up to his knees.

Whoa, there…

He adjusted his buoyancy again, and once he’d stopped, he reached slowly into the silt pile. He could feel something hard in there, and heavy. He pulled it out with both hands, and saw that it was a gold bar.

But not the right one.

He let it fall behind him and reached in again. There were more bars in there, but he couldn’t tell them apart.

The binder clip.

He stopped moving. If he removed the binder clip he’d be able to focus on the gold bars, and might be able to find just the right one. But of course, that would remove any connection to the outside world.

Now that I’ve moved some of the bars, I might lose this spot.

He’d been in such a hurry to get this over with, and so focused on the details, he hadn’t built in the functionality to stop mid-program; no save point.

How bad do I want to do this?

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Cut off from visual, it was easier to reach over and pull the clamp off his arm. He let it drop, and imagined he could hear it clatter to the floor of his office.

Then he opened his eyes and looked at the silt pile again.

The VR seemed clearer and sharper than it had before. He reached into the muck again and fished around, feeling bar after bar of Spanish treasure. Only now, he could feel their shapes.

Rectangle, rectangle, rectangle…

Jay kept it up, enjoying the feel of the soft muck and the hard contrast provided by the gold.

Man, I’m good.

So when he found it, one slightly differently than the rest, larger, heavier, and shaped like an octagon, he was already grinning.

He pulled the bar out and shook the accumulated muck of over four hundred years off of it.

Gotcha!

He felt pretty good about this. Of course, he knew he’d had something to prove. Being shot was bad enough, but it was how he had felt just before the gun had gone off that bothered Jay the most: He’d been terrified. Worse, after being stuck inside his own head, he had been afraid to go back into VR — him, Jay Gridley!

Yeah, well that was then. This was now!

And now, Jay had vengeance to inflict.

Now to call and let everybody know.

He routed the Com to the office through his virgil, to make sure it was properly scrambled, and logged into a VR conference room at HQ. It only took a few minutes for Thorn to get the crew together and call him back.

“Okay, Jay, we’re here.”

Jay shifted into VR, and found himself sitting in the conference room at the virtual table with Thorn, Howard, Kent, and Fernandez.

Jay said, “I got the guy.”

Thorn said, “You sure?”

“Positive, Boss.”

“Run it down for us.”

Virtual Jay tapped a control on his virtual flatscreen. The images of the man they believed to be the man who’d shot him and later killed a suspected Russian spy appeared and floated holographically over the tabletop. A ’proj within a VR, nice.

“We came up empty on matches from any official government sites — no driver’s license or check-cashing ID, no service record, nothing from the passport folks, jails, prisons, like that. So either the guy hasn’t got any records there, or he’s wearing a disguise that hides enough facial features that the Cray can’t tag him. You might be able to tell, but the computer can’t.”

“That seems stupid of the computer,” Julio said.

Jay grinned. “Said the man who hates the things with a passion. It has to do with how a machine looks at something, which is different than how people do. You see a brand new Corvette tooling through an intersection, even if you’ve never seen it before, and you can’t read the name, and even if it isn’t the same size or design as last year’s model, you still know it’s a ’vette, right?”

“Sure.”

“How?”

“Because it looks like a ’vette.”

“Right, to you. There are design elements that give it away. But if the car is longer, lower, has slightly different angles, a computer matching it to last year’s model might not make the connection. It depends on what you give it for reference. Open the tolerances, factor in silhouette profile, and then maybe it does, or maybe it offers up the nearest match, like a search engine might give you. But if you give it last year’s stats and tell it to match, it will miss the new car.”

“So you’re telling me I’m better than a computer,” Julio said. “I already knew that.”

Jay grinned but let it pass. “In facial recognition software, you have numbers. Put a blob of mortician’s putty on the earlobes or the top curve, and the ears aren’t the same size anymore. Polarizing glasses hide eye color and spacing, and part of the nose. Plugs can make the nostrils wider. If you comb your hair down, you can screw up the forehead sizing. A thick moustache and beard hides the chin and lips. On and on — anybody who knows what the computer looks for can get around it. We have to assume this guy knows that. Whatever the reason, he isn’t in the system where we’ve looked.”

“But…?” Thorn said.

“But the guitar thing was the key. There aren’t that many classical guitarists in the country, relatively speaking — I’m talking hundreds of thousands, and that includes everybody from guys who make a living doing it to kids taking their first lesson.”

“Only hundreds of thousands?” Howard said.

“When it comes to computer work, that’s nothing,” Jay said. “Google or Gotcha! can scan what? Three, four million webpages in fractions of a second. And we’ve got better hardware.”

Howard shook his head. He wasn’t a big computer fan either, Jay knew.

“I did some fast research on the subject, talked in RW to an expert, and then I made some assumptions for a baseline.”

“What assumptions?” Thorn asked.

“One, that the guy was fairly serious, because according to those who know, players who aren’t serious usually don’t bother with the fingernail thing.”

Thorn nodded. “According to the FBI and cops who ran this thing, they say the guy is a pro, very careful. Only reason we found images off him is sheer dumb luck — he didn’t make any big mistakes.”

“One, anyway,” Julio said. “Jay’s still alive, isn’t he?”

Jay grinned. “Maybe he wasn’t planning to kill me. The more I think about it, the more I think maybe he might have wanted to kidnap me.”

“Based on?” Howard asked.

“If he’d wanted to kill me, there were fifty places better than the one he picked, and I’d have never seen it coming.”

“Kidnapping you on a major highway wasn’t a mistake?”

“We’d never have ID’d him from the eyewitnesses, would we? I think something happened. Maybe he didn’t even mean to shoot me in the head. Maybe he was just trying to scare me.”

Thorn said, “Go ahead, Jay.”

“Thanks. It doesn’t really matter what he had in mind, though — I just needed a place to set up shop.”

Thorn nodded. “We’re with you so far.”

“So, we assume he’s a good guitar player. That narrows it down to, say, ten thousand, people who practice a couple hours a day, at least. My expert says it’s actually probably fewer than that. I also assumed for the sake of the search that fairly serious classical guitarists not only study the instrument, they keep up with related material — magazines, either treeware or e-zines, sheet music sites, guitar competitions, concerts, guitar makers, and music stores, all like that.

“Then I gridded the country and checked by region. I’m thinking that the guy must be a local — living somewhere on the eastern seaboard.”

“Why?” Kent asked. “He could live anywhere, couldn’t he? We have quite a national transportation system. It sure seems you’re making a lot of assumptions, son.”

Virtual Jay glanced at virtual Thorn, who smiled. He was a player himself, and a good one. He knew the old researchers’ adage: Assumptions were the mothers of information.

Jay said, “You have to start somewhere. Did you ever work a hard crossword puzzle? Sometimes, you just have to put letters in, to see if it sparks anything. You can always erase and change things.”

“All right,” Kent said. “Stipulated.”

Jay continued: “When you strain classical guitar magazines, websites, UseNet groups, concert tickets, and luthiers — those are the guys who make guitars — you come up with plenty of duplicates, but now we’re down to a few thousand names who recur in three or four arenas. These are the serious folks. If we eliminate the women, those we can ID immediately as being too old or too young, and those outside of the east coastal states, we’re down to a few hundred serious guys. Running checks on their pix, using national, state, and local images we can access, gets down to twelve without easily found visual ID’s.”

“Twelve?” Julio asked.

“Yep. Then we dig a little deeper, checking guitar websites, high school yearbooks, newspapers — we have their names, so it’s easier — and we have four possibles left. Remember, we restricted the search to people who live on the east coast, but that’s just their permanent address, not their current one. It turns out two of the four are overseas right now. One is a soldier stationed in the Middle East, the other is a guy working in Japan.”

He paused, enjoying the drama of the moment.

“One of remaining two is in a wheelchair.”

He paused again.

“Jay,” Howard said.

Jay grinned. “And the last one…” He touched a control on the flatscreen. A third image, full-face and a close view, appeared next to the others, and it was obviously the same man.

“Tah-dah!”

Julio snorted. “Why didn’t you just show us the picture in the first place?”

Jay laughed. “It’s not enough just to get the answer, Julio, you also have to show your work.”

Julio shook his head and muttered softly. Jay didn’t quite catch what he said, but it didn’t exactly sound like a compliment.

Jay kept going: “This image was taken at a box office in Washington, D.C., two months ago, by a QuikTix machine that sold him the admission to a classical guitar concert. He paid with a debit card. We have the bank and the ID on the account. The name is fake — he calls himself ‘Francisco Tárrega,’ which is a giveaway — Tárrega was a famous Spanish guitarist who died a hundred years ago. The address is also bogus, but he does have an active mailbox at a Mail Store in the District where the bank sends his statements. We can get a team of feebs to watch the place. When he goes to fetch his mail, we’ve got him.”

“Great work, Jay,” Howard said.

“But wait, it gets better. I also sent copies of the picture to classical guitarists and instrument makers and sellers and all like that, once I was sure he wasn’t one of them. I’ve got half a dozen people who recognize the guy, and we have a first name — Edward. We also know he probably is foreign-born. Our witnesses say he has an accent. He sounds like a Russian, Ukranian, something like that. Nobody claims to know the guy well; they do say he seems to know guitars and can talk the talk. One shop owner in New York City says from what this guy has told him, he owns at least a few fairly expensive custom-made instruments.”

At home, but also there, Jay grinned and relaxed. He felt a little better about this, but he’d feel better still once the guy was in custody.

Or on a slab.

“Welcome back, man,” Julio said.

“Thanks,” Jay said. “It’s good to be back.”

Or anywhere, for that matter.