Changing of the Guard

30

Thorn stripped away the VR gear and blew out a big sigh. This Natadze guy was getting to be a major pain. Thorn had expected to have found something else on him by now, but the man was just not there. He loved guitars and he shot people, that was pretty much it.

Clearly, Net Force would have to come up with some other approach. But what?

He looked at the clock. He’d been under for two hours, and he felt stiff and stale. Time to go to the gym for a little R&R.

As he got there, he saw Colonel Kent arriving at the same moment. In his left hand, he held his sheathed katana.

“Commander.”

“Colonel. Going to work out?”

“I thought I might wave this old blade around a little, yes.”

“Would you mind if I watched?”

“No, sir.” A pause. “Tom.”

Thorn grinned and followed Kent into the gym, which was empty save for them.

“If you had a sword, I could show you some of the basics,” Kent said.

Thorn grinned again. “As it happens, I do have a Japanese sword in my locker.”

Kent nodded, as if he wasn’t particularly surprised.

Thorn went to fetch the weapon, a katana he had bought from the great-granddaughter of a man who had been a Japanese general in WWII. The blade was almost four hundred years old and still mirror-bright.

When he got back, Kent had stripped to his T-shirt and trousers, his feet also bare. He looked to be in good shape for a man his age. Or for a man Thorn’s age. He knelt on the mat in that butt-on-heels position called seiza, his sheathed sword set next to him on the left.

“Can you get into this pose?”

Thorn nodded.

Kent pointed to his right. “Better sit over on that side. About six feet away.”

Thorn kneeled, placing his own sword to his left on the mat.

“My grandfather knew all the Japanese terminology,” Kent said, “but what it boils down to is essentially a very few actions you perform with the sword — everything else is built on those.”

He bowed, touching his head to the mat, his palms down forming a triangle with his thumbs and forefingers on the surface. He came back upright, picked the sword up with his left hand, and turned it so the edge-curve faced outward. He pressed against the guard with his thumb.

“You loosen the blade in the sheath, like so.”

Thorn leaned forward a little to see better.

“The first move is the draw—”

Kent pulled the sword’s blade free in a single, fluid motion, whipped it outward to his left in a flat arc toward his right. At the same time, he came up on his right foot, his left knee still on the ground. As the sword passed in front of him, he circled the blade, twisting it from a horizontal slash from left to right into an overhead curve that came down straight in front of his body. During this, he set the sheath down, and brought his left hand to the sword’s handle, well behind his right hand. The final part of the motion was much like a man with an axe splitting a log:

“The cut.”

He opened his right hand, maintaining his grip with the left, and made his right hand into a fist. He hammered once lightly on the back ridge of the blade just ahead of the guard with the little-finger side of his right fist.

“The shaking of blood.”

He opened his right fist, caught the handle in a reverse grip, let go with his left hand, swung the blade so that the point angled to his left, arced downward and then up, almost 270 degrees, to point at the back wall. Meanwhile, he used his left hand to catch the mouth of the scabbard, thumb on one side, forefinger on the other, as if about to pinch. He moved the sword backward, touched the sheath’s mouth with the back edge of the blade, six inches above the guard. He drew the blade forward, right arm passing across his belly, sliding the spine along the sheath’s opening. His thumb and forefinger looked as if they were wiping the steel. When the point reached the mouth, he moved his right hand forward, angled and inserted the tip into the sheath, then slid the blade slowly home. He used his forefinger to snug the weapon into place.

He did not look at the sword when he did any of this.

“And the re-sheath,” he said.

Thorn grinned. Right out of Seven Samurai.

He put the sword back down, bowed again, then looked at Thorn.

“That’s basically it. Four moves — pull it, cut, knock the blood off, and put it away. You can do it standing, squatting, kneeling, or even lying on your side. There are a bunch of ways to cut, various angles and targets, other ways to sling the blood and re-sheath, and you can use the point to stick somebody, but that’s pretty much the core of iai. There are ‘ways’—do, or fighting versions, jutsus. Schools are a lot more formal — you wear gi and hakama, get into the rituals, tie your sleeves up, start with the sword in your sash, but my grandfather taught me that the heart of the art was: draw, cut, shake, and re-sheath. Kind of the Eastern version of the cowboy fast draw. The iai gets the blade into play; after that, it is kendo.”

“Fascinating,” Thorn said.

“The idea is to cultivate a sense of awareness of everything, zanshin, they call it. You don’t think, you just do. After ten or twenty thousand draws, according to my grandfather, you can just get to a place where you just… manifest the sword. It just is there.”

“Not much like western fencing,” Thorn said.

“The Japanese have a different mind-set,” Kent said. “Kill or be killed — or both, it didn’t much matter to the warriors. ‘The way of the samurai is found in death.’ If you were going to die, you wanted to be sure to take your enemy with you if you could, but dying yourself was of little consequence. Your life belonged to your lord, and he could do whatever he wanted with it. Everybody knew that. It makes for a different kind of match.”

“I can see that.”

“Want to try it?”

“Very much.”

“Okay. Here’s how you bow…”

Jay Gridley rode the dragon. He was seated atop the hundred-foot-long beast, just behind his ears, and whatever fear he had felt about going into VR was waaay gone. He was back and he was in control — well, at least here in VR, anyhow.

Though the setting was Europe, his dragon had a definite Chinese look to him, much more interesting than the standard European model. In China, dragons weren’t just animals, they were wise, clever, could assume the shape of a man, and were often very sneaky. Sometimes that was what you needed from a dragon. But they could do brute force as well, when you needed that.

Jay watched as enemies fled, left, right, and center. Now and then, a bowman would loose an arrow, but his steed would blast the incoming missile with a whuff! of flame — said fire usually consuming not only the arrow, but the man who’d fired it, roasting him into a crispy critter on the spot.

It was not Jay’s most peaceful construct, but it suited his mood. The arrows were queries, the archers firewalls, and the dragon Jay’s best rascal-and-enter program. Against the fortified and nearly blast-proof walls of a first-class firewall, even the dragon’s fiery breath would be useless, but here in the corporate realm, not everybody subscribed to the idea that such things were necessary. Some had what they thought was top-of-the-line software or hardware protecting their systems, but had been suckered. Some had what had been the best, but which had not been kept updated, and was no longer sufficient against the sharpest cutting-edge stuff. Jay’s dragon was reborn regularly — he had access to the best, and he incorporated it into the eggs that hatched as needed.

Ahead, the French castle lay, surrounded by a moat, the drawbridge up.

The dragon stopped on the edge of the water.

“What say?” Jay said. “Can we do this?”

“We can,” the dragon said. His voice was deep, almost a metallic rumble, a giant iron plate dragged across a sidewalk.

The dragon took a slow, full breath and blasted the moat with a terrific gout of fire. The flow of it went on and on — thirty seconds, a minute, two minutes.

The water began to bubble as it boiled. Giant green and scaled monsters, looking like crosses between alligators and sharks, floated to the surface, cooked, still thrashing in their death-throes.

“Cook ’em, Dan’l,” Jay said.

A few moments later, the dragon dipped his taloned toe into the water, decided it was cool enough, then stepped into the moat.

The water came up only to his hips — the castle’s defenders had not reckoned on such an assault. They reached the door, and the dragon thrust his fore-claws into the wood, the sound of it like a pile driver working. With a mighty effort, the dragon flexed his shoulder and ripped the thick door apart as if it were balsa. Splinters flew everywhere as the door shattered and fell away.

The dragon stalked through the opening.

Jay slid down the dragon’s neck and side. “Thanks, I’ll take it from here. If the King’s Army shows up, give me a yell.”

The dragon nodded. He blew a smoke ring the size of a tractor tire. The ring floated gently into the morning air.

Jay headed for the keep’s library. He saw no one, the librarian had fled, and it was but a matter of moments before he found the lambskin scroll for which he had come. He looked it over, saw the information he needed, and nodded to himself. He left the scroll where he’d found it — it would do no good to take it, he couldn’t show it to anybody in the real world. Possession of the information on it in the RW would make him guilty of a crime, and he couldn’t use it as evidence in any event. But he wasn’t looking for evidence, he was looking for knowledge. Different critter.

“I have you now!” he said, trying for Darth Vader’s resonant voice.

“The King’s Army approaches,” called the dragon.

“End scenario,” he said.

Jay sat, and without a word, touched a control on his flatscreen.

The holoproj appeared over the computer, and he turned the instrument around so that Thorn could get a view of the image from the front.

“Natadze,” Thorn said.

“Yes. I used the three pictures we had and had the SC run a scan on images from television, newspapers, and magazines, and there he is. It’s from American Businessman, six months ago.”

Thorn looked at the picture. Natadze, in a dark gray business suit, stood among a group of other men dressed similarly.

“Watch this,” Jay said. He tapped at the flatscreen and the image shifted so that Natadze and the others shrank and were relegated to the background. In the foreground, two men appeared. One of them was obviously presenting some kind of plaque to the other. They were smiling and shaking hands for the camera.

Thorn knew who one of the men was. “Samuel Walker Cox,” he said. “The oilman.”

Jay nodded. “Yep. The other one is Andre Arpree, of the International Chamber of Commerce, based in Paris. The award is for fostering business relations between Europe and the U.S.”

“And what is our man Natadze doing there, watching such a thing, do you think?”

“He works for somebody connected to the event.”

Thorn nodded. “Yes, that would be my guess, too.”

Jay didn’t say anything for a moment. He looked nervous.

Softly, Thorn said, “But you aren’t guessing, are you, Jay?”

Jay sighed, then seemed to come to a decision. “I figured that Natadze worked for Cox or for Arpree. The thing is, neither of their corporate records are, um, accessible without a federal warrant.”

“Uh huh.” Thorn had an idea where this was going.

“And getting a warrant based on a picture of a guy standing in the background of an award ceremony is likely to be, um, difficult.”

Thorn nodded. “Yes. If it was my company, I’d have a platoon of lawyers screaming bloody murder, trying to convince a judge that Net Force didn’t have anything, they were just fishing and hoping.”

“That’s what I figured. We can’t really make this guy into a terrorist, so the country isn’t really at risk. Opening up the records of two major corporations, one of them French? Not likely.”

Thorn’s expertise was in computers, and he had been a hacker before he started selling the software that eventually made him rich. He knew where this was going.

“And even if you got it, we couldn’t use it in court, Jay.”

“I know.”

“Legally, they’d fry us.”

“Yeah.”

Thorn took a deep breath, let half of it out. There was the law. And there was justice.

“So, okay. Who does he work for?”

Jay couldn’t suppress a slight smile. “Cox. Our hitman Eduard Natadze is head of Special Security for Samuel Walker Cox.”

Thorn stared at the holoproj. Wow. Wasn’t that an ugly can of worms?