Changing of the Guard

2

Samuel Walker Cox spared a glance at the timer on the stair-stepper, even though he was sure he had four minutes and a few seconds left before he was done.

The timer, flashing down from twenty-six minutes to zero, read 04:06.

He smiled. The internal clock he carried was still working pretty well for a man in his mid-sixties. Well, all right, to be technically accurate, sixty-six. Even better.

The stair-stepper, which was the top-of-the-line DAL Industries model, was a marvel of hydraulic and electrical engineering. It was essentially a set of endless risers, and worked like a treadmill: You climbed stairs, but you never went anywhere.

He had no idea what it cost — probably a couple of thousand dollars. His assistant had bought it and had it installed in his office on the fortieth floor of the TPC building. Every workday, for twenty-six minutes, he used the device. Coupled with a quick shower and fresh clothes, it worked out to thirty-five minutes exactly that he spent on his conditioning, which was sufficient. He was not a threat to any Olympic athlete, but neither was he going to run out of steam if he needed to take the stairs to the lobby in the event of a fire or terrorist attack on his building. He had talked to personal trainers and sports doctors and determined that twenty-six minutes was the amount of time he needed to maintain optimum health at his age, and that was what he gave it, no more, no less.

During his workout, no phones rang, no computer voices announced incoming mail, and nobody came through the Chinese carved-cherry double doors into his office. He did go so far as to opaque the de-stressed triple-layered Lexan windows, which formed an L-shaped floor-to-ceiling panorama looking out over Manhattan. The windows were three inches thick and bulletproof, and would stop anything short of an armor-piercing rocket. A special service came and cleaned the windows’ exterior once a week, and once every three months they polished the surfaces to remove any scratches from dust or nearsighted birds.

Cox didn’t know how much that cost, either, nor did he care. When your worth was measured in the billions, you didn’t worry about the small stuff.

Two minutes remaining. He kept his pace even. There were all kinds of monitors he could have hooked to himself — pulse rate, blood pressure, temperature, and the like — but he didn’t bother. He was sweating, his muscles were working hard and he knew it, and he wasn’t going to cheat himself out of a full effort. A man who wasn’t disciplined enough to exercise without somebody standing over him counting cadence didn’t have any fire in his belly.

Usually, he managed to avoid going off on mental voyages while he trod upon the never-ending stairway — concentration was supposed to help the body benefit fully — but now and then, something would be pressing enough so that he could not help but think about it.

Now was one of those times. He had gotten a coded message from Vrach—“the Doctor”—and as usual, the Russian wanted something from him: a small matter of some pressure against a reluctant oil executive in one of the Middle Eastern countries. It was nothing Cox couldn’t do with a come-hither of one finger and a few words in the right ear. Still, it was annoying, even after all these years. Especially after all these years.

He shook his head. Of all his regrets, this one was the biggie. While still in college, he had made the dumbest mistake of his life. He had been young, idealistic — another word for stupid — and full of himself. He had drifted into a crowd of socialistic types, and the next thing he knew, he was a spy. For the Soviets.

It was the sixties, times were turbulent, nobody trusted the government, and maybe he could be excused. At least he hadn’t been out in some hippie commune smoking dope and talking to the trees. He had, however briefly, believed that what he was doing might be part of the solution instead of the problem. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the idea of a nuclear war felt way too real, and the U.S. was way too aggressive. Or so he had believed at the time.

Young, ignorant, and stupid — that had been him.

Of course, he had never really done much spying. His control had explained he would be more useful as a mole, and they would wait to activate him. They gave him a little money. It had seemed like a fortune at the time. Now, if that much fell out of his pocket, it wouldn’t be worth the time and energy to stoop and pick it up. But still, he had been on the payroll.

As the years passed, the Soviet Union eventually went belly-up, as did his idealistic and foolish notions, and eventually he found himself running a major corporation and richer than a small country. Unfortunately, he didn’t get lost in the shuffle when the Soviet Union fell apart. The Russians had long memories, and one day, after he hadn’t thought about them in a decade, they gave him a little heads-up: Ho, Comrade! How are you? Ready to serve the cause?

At first, Cox had been amused. Cause? What cause? Communism is dead, pal. The war is over. You lost. Get over it.

Perhaps that is so. We have moved on. But we have new objectives.

I’m happy for you, he had said. Go away.

But of course, they had not. They were capitalists now, and they laid it out flat and straight: Help us — or we’ll tell everybody how you betrayed your country…

Blackmail! Son of a bitch, he couldn’t believe it—!

The timer chimed, interrupting his bad memory. He stopped climbing the stairs, grabbed a towel, and headed for the shower. The phones would start ringing again in nine minutes, and he needed to clean up and put on fresh clothes.

Done was done. Maybe someday he could figure out a way to get clear of them. Isolate the few who knew about him, have Eduard pay them a visit and shut down their memories, permanently.

Yes, he was rich, he was powerful, but the scandal would ruin his name, wreck his family, and he couldn’t live with the looks he’d see in all those faces. Sam Cox, a commie spy?

No. He couldn’t have that. No matter what it cost. He didn’t like having to dance to their tune, but it was better than the alternative. For now, at least.

John Howard stood in the underground firing range looking down the lane as Julio Fernandez approached. The smell of burned gunpowder was an old and familiar one. He was going to miss it. Not that he’d have to stop coming, but, working in the city, he knew he wouldn’t get out here nearly as often.

“Lieutenant,” Howard said. “You’re running late.”

“Sorry, General. I had to have Gunny update my ring.” He held his hand up and waggled his fingers. What looked like an ordinary gold band gleamed on his right middle finger. All Net Force personnel who carried weapons had them, and each gun coded to a broadcast ring that had to be reset every thirty days. If somebody picked up a Net Force weapon without the correct ring on his hand, the gun simply wouldn’t fire.

“How are Joanna and little Hoo?”

“Pretty good, both of them. He’s completely potty-trained now, goes all night without an accident.” He paused. “Lord, I can’t believe I’m talking about such things!”

Howard chuckled. “I understand.”

“How about yours? Tyrone coming back to the pistol team?”

“I think so. I think he’s finally accepted he didn’t have any choice in what he had to do.”

“He’s a good man.”

“Yes, he is.” Still a teenager, Tyrone was not really old enough to be a man, but he had gotten a big push in that direction when he’d had to step up to do something a boy ought not have to do.

Howard pushed the unpleasant thought out of his mind.

“You want to warm up before we get serious?” he said.

Fernandez laughed. “Get serious? I do believe I outshot you the last three times we were here. How serious do I need to be to beat one old armchair soldier and his ancient wheelgun?”

Howard smiled. The sidearm he carried, a P&R Medusa, was about as high-tech as revolvers got — it could fire twenty different calibers — but the basic technology was a hundred and fifty years old. Indeed, his “modern” weapon was not so far from Sam Colt’s original design that, were the old boy still alive, he would have any trouble recognizing it. Still, the K-frame black-Teflon-coated Medusa was smooth, accurate, made of hardened steel, and when loaded with RBCD.357 Magnum rounds as it usually was, would knock ninety-six of a hundred men down and out of the fight with a single shot, as good as you could do with a handgun. Howard felt very comfortable with it in his holster.

“So, in that case, you want to up the usual wager?”

Fernandez raised an eyebrow. “What’d you have in mind?”

“You win, you activate your retirement status now and come to work for me at the think tank next month — but with a week of paid vacation before you have to show up and put on a suit. You lose, you stay here for eight weeks and make sure Colonel Kent has a smooth transition before you bail.”

“Good Lord, John, you want me to stay and work two whole months for a jarhead? I’ll be lucky if I don’t deck him after two days.”

“When he takes over, he’ll be reactived as National Guard, just like us.”

“Sure, technically he will. But once a jarhead, always a jarhead, you know that. Never met a Marine officer who wasn’t Semper Fi to the core. The right way, the wrong way, and the Marine way…”

Howard smiled. “Yes. But if you think you are such a hot hand with that old Beretta of yours, with those cheating laser-beam handgrips and all, why would you have anything to worry about?”

“Well, that’s true. A week off with pay, huh?”

“Versus two months more here. Your new job’ll wait — I can stumble along on my own that long.”

“I doubt it.” There was a pause. “You owe Abe Kent something, General?”

“In a manner of speaking. I don’t want him to start out in a hole.”

“They shoulda thought of that before they picked a Marine to run the show. Them people dig their own holes wherever they go.”

“You gonna fish, or you gonna cut bait, Lieutenant?”

“Rack ’em up, General. I’ll try not to embarrass you too bad.”

Howard grinned again. He touched a control on the lane’s computer. The first scenario was a pair of single attackers who would holographically appear thirty feet away in the double lane. Each man would fire at his own target, and the computer would mark the elapsed time and zones where the bullets hit.

This was a simple Stonewall Jackson dueling set: Whoever got there firstest with the mostest won the round. You could be a hair quicker, but if you drifted your point of aim out of the A-zone into the B- or C-zone, you would lose. If you shot too soon, trying to anticipate the target’s appearance, you got a clean miss. The computer was state-of-the-art and it wouldn’t let you cheat. Fast was good; fast and accurate were better.

Howard relaxed, dropped his hand by his side—

His attacker, a big bald man in a jumpsuit waving a tire iron, blinked on like a light, and started to run toward Howard. Howard pulled his revolver and thrust it at the attacker with one hand, point shooting, indexing with the entire gun rather than using the sights, squeezing the trigger double-action twice as he did—

Bam! Bam!

The sound was muted by the earplugs he wore, and it was already much quieter than normal — instead of.357 Magnums, which went off like bombs, he was loading.38 Special wadcutters, an accurate, mild target round with considerably less power, and thus much less recoil, making recovery for the second shot faster. Point shooting was a hair quicker than searching for the front sight, and he didn’t need to look to know he had beaten Fernandez by at least a quarter-second.

Fernandez knew it, too, and he knew he’d been suckered. “Talk to me about cheating!” Fernandez said. “You’re shooting mouse-load paper-punchers over there!”

Howard smiled. “Not my fault your old issue piece only likes one caliber. You could shoot flatnose target rounds, too; I wouldn’t mind.”

“Start it up, General Backstabber, sir. We got nine more runs. I’ll whip your perfidious old ass anyhow!”

“ ‘Perfidious’? Is that any way for a lieutenant to talk to a general?”

“When the general is a hustler, yes, sir, it is.”

Howard smiled again. “Did I mention as how I might have been letting you win the last couple times we shot? Just so you’d think you could do it again?”

“You lie!”

Howard chuckled. The seed of doubt was planted. He had the edge and he knew it. All he had to do was stay one round ahead, and he and Julio usually were pretty close. Six out of ten would be good enough.

Of course, he could have just asked Julio to stay for two months and his old friend would have done it, no questions. They went way back together. Either one of them would take a bullet for the other, and had. But it was much more fun this way…

The pyramid before him held the ruined throne room he needed. Jay stood at the entrance, planning his attack.

At its peak, the room must have been stunning, but hundreds of years in the warm jungle climate had taken its toll. There were still beautiful stone carvings on the less exposed sections of the walls, and the huge pillars holding up the sagging roof maintained a sense of grandeur despite the clinging vines and cracks that marred them. But mold and decay permeated the ancient stones, from which an almost visceral miasma seemed to whisper the demise of all things man-made.

He grinned at himself. Not bad, Gridley, not bad at all.

Whatever force had caused the end of the ancient kingdom had motivated the fleeing king to install traps in the room — it was a maze of death. To encourage his ancient foes to enter this trap, the king had left his jeweled scepter on the throne.

All Jay had to do was cross the floor to get it.

The problem was that the large blocks of stone that made up the floor of the room weren’t all solid. If he stepped on the wrong block, he’d fall into a pit filled with who knew what.

Well, actually, he did know what — snakes. Lots and lots of snakes.

Of course he wasn’t really traversing an ancient throne room. He was trying to crack the data he’d found. Unfortunately, the printed label had vastly increased the difficulty of the decoding process.

In most code-breaking scenarios, the encoded data was run through a sifter that would find patterns, which revealed letters. But there were several factors complicating this particular code.

First, Iran had over seventy living languages — picking the right one to sift was a critical part of the process, and not the most difficult. The majority of the languages in the country used Arabic script as an alphabet, which had twenty-eight letters instead of English’s twenty-six. Western Farsi, the most commonly used language, added an extra five characters to that, taking it to thirty-three — and making the code-breaking several orders of magnitude more difficult.

On top of that, the Arabic/Farsi alphabet had been represented by three different encoding systems since it had migrated to the computer. In the late twentieth century, back in the days when computer standards were still up for grabs, there had been no less than two different character sets for Arabic — one for Unix and Macintosh systems, and another for the Windows world. Then unicode had come along — a larger character set that made it easier to standardize. And the letters could be in any of the three, depending on the hardware used to generate them.

But all of that was relatively easy compared to the way the data had been encoded.

None of the 2-D codes he’d examined so far matched the ones on the zip disk label. Treating the border as four long strips of data had proven fruitless, which meant it had to be in blocks. Before he could sift it, he had to get it into the computer.

Without orientation markers, he couldn’t tell which way the blocks ran — and to get enough data to make up an encoded sequence, he’d have to get several blocks in a row, so that he could see if it was encoded sequentially.

To make matters worse, he wasn’t even sure that the blocks were on an axis that was parallel or perpendicular to the borders of the label. Many 2-D encoding schemes had enough error correction that they could lose up to 25 percent of their visual area and still be decoded at 100 percent accuracy. This code could have been rotated off-axis to make things really tough.

He grinned, his tanned-and-grizzled face wrinkling. His old brown leather bomber jacket creaked as he leaned forward to stare at the gray stones. He had an urge to hum the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he refrained.

Which way, which way…?

He stared at the mortar between the stones. Did it look newer on the right or left?

Left.

Carefully, he began to put his weight on the stone to the left of the entry. Slowly he increased the pressure until nearly all of it rested on the stone he’d selected.

He enjoyed a moment’s satisfaction before the block abruptly fell out from underneath him. Jay toppled, started to fall, and lashed out with the twelve-foot bullwhip he was carrying, wrapping it around a stone outcropping on the wall nearby and yanking. The effort pulled him back to where he’d started.

I guess it’s not to the left.

The trap was clever — it wouldn’t trigger until a heavy weight rested upon it. If he’d been standing there with both feet, it would have been “So long, Gridley.”

He peered over the edge of the broken-off stones — more than one had fallen, to widen the danger area — and saw nothing but blackness. But there was a hint of sound — was it hissing? Slithering? Yes, definitely, both. He couldn’t hope that the falling block had killed all the nasty wigglers down there.

He could brute-force it — drop weights on all the stones in the room and see which ones were left, but the idea offended his sense of style.

Someone clever had put the code together, and Jay wanted to figure out the key to the puzzle. There was a key, of course, there had to be. Any programmer who played the game this well always left a way in.

After all, he would.

So while he could easily run the numbers through the machine, he wanted to beat it himself.

He took a closer look around the room. As he usually did when he created VR based on a puzzle, he’d let a freeform algorithm give substance to the puzzle pieces after supplying base parameters. This was, as he saw it, the real advantage of a VR structure — a place that could have clues, things that hadn’t been programmed consciously, to give his other senses a chance to help crack it. If he could cross the room, he’d have gotten enough blocks in a row to identify at least a part of the code.

Think, Jay, think!

He could go right, or angle off diagonally…

He stopped and thought for a moment about the programmer. The man was clever — he’d hidden the code in plain sight.

But he’d hidden it on a disk about a Muslim mosque. What kind of man would have such a disk in his possession to use as camouflage?

A devout one.

Jay stepped to the east, the direction of Mecca, the way Muslims face during their prayers every day. He kept his whip ready to sling out and grab onto something if necessary.

The stone was safe. No trap, no danger.

Aha!

There was still room to continue in the direction he’d started, so he took another step, glancing down at the floor as he did so.

The stone gave way, and he just managed to lurch backward to safety.

Damn!

Now he could go forward, angle left, or angle right.

The direction of Mecca.

A thought came unbidden into his mind as he was looking at the scepter.

Maybe the scepter is Mecca.

A burst of excitement came with that idea. If he was right, there was only one way to traverse the puzzle — by looking toward the scepter the entire time. On any of the blocks.

A thrill ran through him.

Now that would be a cool paradigm shift. It would probably map in RW to having a central point on the label as a focal point to focus the direction of each data block. He’d been staring at the scepter when he took his first step, so that matched as well.

It felt right. It fit with the way the label instead of the disk had been used to hold data. It was his sense of intuition that made him more than just a good programmer, after all — he didn’t just code from pure logic — he could feel solutions sometimes, take jumps that leapfrogged him to the same place he would eventually get by working it out.

But there was only one way to find out.

I’ve got you now, sucker, he thought, thinking of the programmer.

I won’t need this anymore. Jay threw the bullwhip to his right and heard it hit — eventually. Faint hissing sounds came up from the pit below the throne room.

Jay fixed his gaze on the scepter, grinned, and ran all the way across the throne room.

No stones fell, and no other traps were triggered.

“Hah!”

As he laid his hand on the scepter and picked it up, a rumbling came from the back wall of the throne room, and he looked up, startled.

The wall had opened up onto another room, this one crisscrossed by a wicked-looking maze of spikes.

Across that room lay something else glinting gold.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I’ve only cracked part of it.”

Well. Half a loaf, and all that. This was what it was all about, matching wits in a virtual world.

And winning.

He grinned. “Bring it on,” he said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”