Changing of the Guard

1

Alex Michaels put the gold ink pen given to him by the late Steve Day into the box, next to a laser pointer and a couple of mechanical pencils. Amazing how much crap you picked up when you sat behind a desk in the same spot for a few years: rubber bands, paper clips, batteries, flashmem cards… It was not as if he hadn’t cleared out a desk before, but this time was different. He was leaving government service for the private sector, moving far away in time and space, into a new life with his wife and son.

It felt strange. Unreal, somehow.

Would he miss running Net Force? Sure, no question. There was a great satisfaction in being part of the solution to America’s problems. Under his direction, the organization had nailed some very bad people, and, however briefly, made the world a safer place. Given the times, that was not a bad thing. But it was time to move on. There were some things more important than a job — any job — and his family was one of those things.

His work had put them at risk, and that simply wasn’t acceptable. He didn’t mind dying for his country, if it came to that, but he was not going to let his wife and child die — not for any reason. If a man didn’t take care of his family, he wasn’t much of a man, no matter how well the rest of the world might think of him.

He opened the drawer on the right side, saw the kerambit case nestled there. That pair of short, hooked knives had saved his life and that of his family, when Toni had been pregnant. Coupled with his knowledge of the esoteric Indonesian fighting art called pentjak silat, he had been able to stop a madman bent on rape and murder. But such occasions should not arise, should not have to be dealt with, and removing his family from harm’s way was much smarter than contending with such adversaries.

He had done his part. Now let somebody else stand in the line of fire. He would not miss that aspect of it.

“Commander?” came his secretary’s voice over the intercom.

“Yes?”

“Thomas Thorn is here.”

“Ah. Send him in.”

Michaels looked around. Being here had been good. Leaving was good, too…

The secretary showed Thorn into the office. Michaels, on his feet and apparently packing personal belongings into boxes, came from around his desk and extended his hand. When they shook, Michaels used his left as well, clasping Thorn’s hand in a firm grip, but not a crusher.

“Commander Michaels,” Thorn said. “I’m Tom Thorn. A pleasure to finally meet you, sir.”

Michaels smiled, showing a lot of laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. “Just ‘Alex’,” he said. “You’re the Commander now. I’ve heard a lot about you. Have a seat.”

Thorn started for the couch. “No,” Michaels said. “Behind the desk. It’s yours.”

Thorn paused.

“I’m serious,” Michaels said. “When I walk out the door, I might look back, but I’m essentially gone. I’ve got all my stuff almost cleaned out.” He waved at a box on the desk. “It’s your house now.”

Thorn nodded. “Okay.” He moved around the desk. Michaels sat on the couch.

“I’m not sure I’m ready for this,” Thorn admitted.

Michaels laughed again. “You came up with the basic VR interface most people still use. Half of our high-end software packages here are systems you wrote, or based on those you did. You’ll feel right at home.”

Thorn smiled. Well, yes, that was true. And it was also true he wasn’t that worried — he had run his own company until he sold it, and had been on the boards of several major corporations since. How different was managing a government computer agency from running a private one? People were the same.

“Any questions I can answer, just ask. For computer stuff, you have Jay Gridley; he is the best there is. General John Howard will still be on board at military operations for another week or so, and his replacement, Colonel Abe Kent, is, by all accounts, a first-class military man. I don’t have an assistant at the moment, but there’s a pretty good pool of qualified folks who know the systems, either here or over at the regular FBI shop.”

Thorn thought about it. He did have one question, but asking it would no doubt make Commander Michaels uncomfortable at the very least. After a moment, he decided to ask it anyway. He needed to know.

“I understand that you are leaving for personal reasons, Commander,” he said, “and that John Howard’s departure is also by his choice for the same rationale. And your assistant — your wife — gives the same justification. Do you mind if I ask what those are? I don’t want to step into a hornet’s nest of politics here — if you’re being dumped because you screwed up or peed in somebody’s Frosted Flakes, I’d rather know it coming in. It seems awfully coincidental that the Commander of an agency and his top lieutenants all decide to bail at the same time.”

That got him a big grin.

“Good question,” Alex said. “But there’s no conspiracy to worry about. I was a little more hands-on as Commander than I should have been. Got into the field a few times when it would have been smarter to stay in the office. Mostly, computer criminals are chair-warmers, not known for their exploits in RW. A few of them are more… active. A couple of times, I found myself in situations that were physically dangerous. When I was single, that wasn’t a problem. Once I got married and had a child at home, going into harm’s way wasn’t just about me.”

Thorn waited. He had heard that Michaels was a cowboy who liked to go into the field, and that he had some kind of martial arts training he had used a few times. Not a good idea for the head of the agency to be doing that. Not smart. Not something he was going to be guilty of, for certain. Leave the field work to those who got paid to do it.

Michaels paused. A cloud seemed to pass over his face as he obviously remembered something unpleasant. “We had a couple of incidents involving deranged criminals, and the last one put my wife and son in some danger. Toni and I decided that was not going to happen again.”

“You could have stayed in the office from then on,” Thorn offered.

Michaels shook his head. “Too late. The criminals involved didn’t really know me, only that I was Net Force’s Commander. They found out where I lived and went to my home because they had seen or heard who I was from my public appearances.”

“You surely rated bodyguards?”

“Yes. Had some, for a time.”

There was another pause. Thorn waited, not speaking.

“You aren’t married, are you? No children?”

“No,” Thorn said. “But I understand your point.”

“With all due respect, Commander, no, you don’t. Having your two-year-old need an armed guard to go to the park? No job is worth that if you have a choice. I was a target just by being the man in charge, and that put my family at risk. Life is too short.”

Thorn nodded.

“I can’t speak for General Howard,” Alex went on, “but he also has a wife and son he wants to see grow up, and he’s been into the field enough times to prove to himself and anybody else that he’s a brave man. Not to mention he can get twice the money he makes now as a consultant in private industry. So can I, for that matter.”

Thorn smiled again. Was that a dig? Was he saying that it was easy for Thorn to take this job because he was already a wealthy man?

Michaels said, “We did our job, did a little good now and then, and now it’s our time to move on. Nothing sinister — although the politics of the job are a bitch. Some of the hearings up on the Hill you’ll have to attend, you’ll need an iron bladder.”

Thorn chuckled politely.

“My advice is for you to do what you do best and leave the heavy lifting in the field to the regular feebs or the military arm. Stay in front of the computer, work Congress to keep the wheels oiled, and you’ll do fine.”

Thorn nodded. “Thank you, Alex. I appreciate the advice.” Not that he needed it. He had his fencing, but you didn’t get to carry an épée or saber around in polite society these days, and facing off with thugs was not his forte. His mind was his most valuable tool, not his fists. Muscle was easy to hire.

“Well, I’m about ready,” Alex said. “You’ll want your own people, of course, but you have a pretty good team here already. I would stay and help you in the transition, but I have only a couple of weeks before I have to be at my new job, and we need to get moved and settled. Jay Gridley can answer any questions you might have.”

“I know Gridley’s work,” he said. “Thank you, Alex.”

“You’re welcome. I hope the job is what you want, Commander.”

Me, too, Thorn thought.

Jay Gridley sat in his office and stared at the zip disk. Another day, another top-secret code to unravel. Ho, hum.

Change was in the air: Alex and Toni were leaving; John Howard, too, and new faces were coming in. Soon just about the only familiar face around here would be Jay’s own. Which was odd — he had never thought of himself as the survivor type.

He supposed he could be worried about that. New bosses sometimes cleaned out the cupboards when they came on board, re-shuffling the deck and dealing in their people. But Jay wasn’t too concerned about that. He was Jay Gridley after all — there weren’t any people who could replace him — well, at least not on this side of the law. Besides, if he had to, he could always do what Alex and Colonel Howard were doing: get another job somewhere else. He could find another one, and for a lot more money, at the drop of a hat. It would be their loss…

Either way, though, he was going to miss the old crew. They were his friends. Oh, they’d probably stay in contact, but it wouldn’t be the same. It might be better. It might be worse. But it was for sure that it wouldn’t be the same.

He glanced at the zip disk. It wasn’t often he got to play with old-style media these days, what with flash memory and cardware being so cheap, and data disks so wonderfully dense.

Shoot, the thing held less than a half gig. Hardly worth going into VR for. It would barely touch his desktop’s CPU for sifting, much less require the mainframe.

But that was the way it was in third-world countries — most of the toys they got to play with were outdated cast-offs. Which did make his job easier when he was trying to pry information from its hiding place.

A cheap, rough-looking, dot-matrix-printed label covered the hard plastic protecting the disk. It was really ugly, too — blocky black-and-white dots portrayed a cartoonlike lion’s head, with an even uglier-looking border surrounding it. Arabic numerals and script proclaimed “Mosque-by-the-sea Tourist Photos disk 11.” At least that was what the neat hand-written print in English underneath the script said.

A Turkish spy in Iran had died just after delivering the disk. Jay didn’t think that the Turkish ambassador himself would be asking Net Force to dig around in it if all it held was tourist photos.

Jay slid the disk into the drive he had dug up from a storage closet and jacked into VR…

He stood next to a cold and muddy stream, dressed in period Levi’s, the pants held up by suspenders over a faded red-flannel shirt, a battered leather cap jammed tight onto his head. Next to him was a gold sluice, water tricking over its riffled surface. Behind this was a large pile of ore.

Of course that wasn’t what it really was — but visual metaphors took on some serious substance in VR.

In this case, the data on the disk was the ore, and the sluice was a complicated search engine he’d put together with code lifted from the NSA, with some of his own special touches. Running the ore through the sluice would wash away the dirt, uncovering objects on the disk. Regular files would show up as rocks, and encoded ones — the kind he wanted to find — would appear to be gold nuggets.

Far more fun than a command-line process.

He smiled — a gap-toothed smile in this VR scenario, unkempt whiskers brushing his lips. Kids these days thought a command-line was some kind of military authority.

He shoveled ore sand into the sluice, enjoying the sensation. The new stim units he’d put in would actually stress his muscles in RW as he worked in VR. If he worked out here, he’d get the benefit there. He hummed the tune for “My Darling Clementine.”

The sun shone brightly in the pre-pollution California of the 1850s, birds tweeted, and the creek burbled. He let himself flow into the “is” state he and Saji had been practicing, allowing himself a brief stab of pride at the craftsmanship of his scenario. Not everyone would bother with such touches.

In very little time he’d sluiced all the ore. He dropped the shovel he’d been using, enjoying the thunk it made in the damp sand of the riverbed, and went to see what he’d found, walking alongside the sluice.

Rocks… more rocks… yet more rocks…

Huh.

Which shouldn’t be. The disk had been recovered from a dead man, just seconds before a couple of his killers had died trying to collect it. If it was worth that many people dying for, it must have something on it…

Jay snapped his fingers and was suddenly in a brightly lit kitchen, wearing a huge chef’s hat and the associated double-breasted white top.

A bag of flour sat on the countertop. Next to it was a bowl and a sifter.

Carefully he scooped flour from the bag and dumped it into the sifter. A crank turned a wire whisk in the device, brushing only the tiniest particles through a wire mesh set in the bottom and into the bowl, keeping anything else.

The dry, yeasty smell of flour filled the air as he worked.

Nice touch, he thought. I’d forgotten that one.

Straining the stuff through the sifter would give him the closest inspection possible of the data on the disk. This program, unlike the prospector, used more CPU power, tapping into the mainframe and taking up a large portion of Net Force’s available processing power. Word processors on Net Force’s network wouldn’t feel it, but anyone doing anything complicated right now would probably be cursing him.

Sorry, guys.

He paid close attention, inspecting everything that stuck to the bottom of the mesh.

Which was nothing: If it was hiding here, it was microscopic.

Damn! Apparently the third world was stumping him. Had they given him something he couldn’t crack?

Not bloody likely.

He remembered a line he’d read in a newspaper article once, a quote from Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine. “You can only fail if you give up too soon.”

He killed the chef scenario.

Back in his office, Jay blinked. What was he missing here? Could there be something hidden within the pictures on the disk?

He jacked back into VR…

Jay slipped into a viewer program modeled after a movie theater he’d liked as a kid. His shoes stuck and released as he walked on the gummy concrete floor. When he sat, he felt the rough fabric of the old cloth seat against his back.

The disk was full of pictures exactly as advertised — a beautiful old mosque near the sea. A few video clips showed worshippers bowing toward Mecca, kneeling and bowing on beautifully woven prayer rugs, and others showed old-style stitched-photo VR views of various points around the temple.

The program he’d used would have detected any hidden steg-artifacts in the compressed images, and he didn’t see any obvious here-it-is! clues. All of the images had been shot within a single day — a filter he ran on the backgrounds checked visual cues, sun angle, clouds, repeated tourists and the like, so no new images were hidden with the rest that might be worthy of further study.

Double damn.

Hmm. Maybe that was it. Could there be a slim data-fiche built into the surface of the disk?

Jay killed the scenario—

Back in RW, Jay ejected the disk. He scrutinized the surface, looking for any pits or depressions that could be a disguised interface for a film of nanotransistor RAM. Maybe he’d underestimated the resources of the third world.

It looked as smooth as the proverbial baby’s butt. Not a dimple, a scratch, nothing.

He scanned the disk for the third time. Come on, Gridley, think outside the box!

And finally, it came to him. So simple. So… obvious.

No way!

He pulled his hi-res cam from its holster on the side of his ancient flat panel and captured a scan of the ugly dot-matrix label.

He yanked his VR goggles down—

Jay strode into his electronics-lab scenario. Once there, he tapped a console, and the scan of the label appeared as a holoproj in midair.

Look at that. Two-dimensional code. Son of a bitch!

It was like Poe’s purloined letter, right there in plain sight. The dots making up the border and the lion made an ugly picture, but they served a hidden purpose as well — they filled a two-dimensional data matrix with information.

He smiled, feeling a thrill of pleasure, admiring whoever had come up with the code scheme. Gotcha, sucker!

In the late eighties and nineties, programmers had devised ways of storing data by printing it. Primitive UPC barcodes evolved into data structures that were read up-and-down as well as left-and-right. The result was that several pages of data could be stored in a tiny space, looking like nothing so much as a series of dots.

The technology had advanced as printer technology and CCDs had gotten more powerful, and had included basic error corrections that allowed part of the matrix to be lost without loss of information.

As a boy, Jay had had a battered and much-loved Nintendo Gameboy that had featured a card reader. Games were “printed” on the back of the card in 2-D formats and “read” by the handheld. Run the card through the reader, and pow! — you got game.

Of course no one did that anymore, it was more trouble than it was worth given flashmem and cardware.

Well. Almost no one did it, apparently. So old and hoary, it was like shaving the head of a slave and tattooing a message there, waiting for the hair to grow back, then sending him on his way.

He zoomed the scan and took a closer look. A lot of 2-D codes had been developed, each with different characteristics and different baseline reference points — bullseyes or L-shaped lines used to orient the camera reader. The programmer of this one had been smart. There were no reference points at all. Which made things more difficult — unless he read the code from the exact direction it had been intended to be read from, he’d get nothing.

And that was before any decoding of whatever he found.

Well, well. It looked like this was going to be more interesting than he’d figured. He might even have to think about it.

He laughed aloud at that. It was so much more fun if you had to stretch a little now and then.