Changing of the Guard

6

The house Thorn had bought was in University Park, just south of the University of Maryland, in Prince George’s County. The homes were more stately than spectacular, many of them built in the 1920s and ’30s, and most of his neighbors were either professors at the U, well-off business types, or political staff. The streets bore large pin oak and pear trees, and an occasional elm that had somehow managed to survive all the years of blight that seemed to seek out that species. There had been people living here since before the Revolutionary War, though the town itself was much younger. According to the realtor, crime was low, tiger mosquitoes sometimes got bad in the summer despite efforts to eradicate them, and just about all of the single-family homes were occupied by their owners. Upscale, but not ostentatious.

From the outside, Thorn’s house was a two-story home, solid, and there was nothing to distinguish it from most of the others on his street, which was exactly what he had wanted when he set the real estate agent to looking.

Inside, there was still work being done. The four-bedroom house was much larger than a man alone needed, and he was having the living room and parlor converted into a fencing salon. One of the joys of being rich was, if you couldn’t find exactly what you wanted for a home, you could have it built.

Eventually, he would have fencing masters come to his house to teach him. He had been looking into the Japanese arts kendo and even iaido, with the live blade.

Not that he wanted much other than that. Coming from a poor family had taught him early on to value people and small things. Yes, when he’d sold his first major piece of software and been handed a huge check, he had run out and gotten himself a bunch of new toys, ranging from top-of-the-line computer systems to fast cars to five-thousand-dollar suits. He had even bought his parents a house in Spokane.

But that was long ago and money no longer burned a hole in his pocket. These days, he had a driver, so he didn’t need a car. He ate well enough, though he wasn’t a gourmet, and he didn’t buy his clothes at the Salvation Army Thrift Store. His one expensive hobby was collecting swords. Aside from working foils, épées, and sabers by such makers as Vniti, Leon Paul, Prieur, and Blaise, he had a collection of antique weapons ranging from Japanese katanas to Chinese broadswords to Civil War sabers. He would have these hung on the walls of the salle when it was done, and a monitored alarm service installed to keep sticky-fingered thieves from helping themselves to the weapons. Other than that, his fortune was not something he used all that much. He did like to fly first class, for the leg room, but he could have easily afforded a private jet, and first-class was a lot cheaper than that…

He smiled at himself as the driver opened the car’s door and he alighted at the new house.

“Good night, Mr. Thorn.”

“Good night, Carl. See you in the morning.”

Thorn ambled to the door, carrying his equipment bag. He thumbed the door’s lock and pushed the front door open.

Inside, the smells of sawdust and fresh paint greeted him. He put the sword bag down and went into the kitchen. He didn’t feel like cooking, it was late, and a heavy meal before bedtime was an invitation to night-mares, but he was hungry, so he grabbed an Aussie pie from the freezer and stuck it into the microwave, opened a bottle of beer, a Samuel Adams, and went to watch the late news on the television. So far, the new job had been easy enough. He had good people, there were a few more he would eventually bring in, and he hadn’t run into anything he couldn’t handle. Of course, he didn’t expect he would run into anything he couldn’t handle.

He sipped from the bottle as the TV lit. It was a little disappointing, really. Sure, there was always a newness factor in any kind of job. Big projects brought their challenges, but it never took him long to get up to speed, and once he did, well, then it was just a matter of time before it got boring. Most of the time, he had to invent his own challenges, and now and then he would have liked to be in a position where he had to stretch a little to keep up. Mostly, that just didn’t happen.

The news flared on, the end of a story about another crisis in the Middle East.

When he’d been a kid, Thorn hadn’t realized that everybody wasn’t as smart as he was. A problem would come up, he’d see the answer, and he’d assumed that everybody else had seen the answer, but for some reason he couldn’t understand, they’d pretend they hadn’t. Eventually, he realized that wasn’t the case — that in virtually every mental race he ran, he was way out in front when he crossed the finish line.

He took another swig of the beer. The weather was up next, and it was going to be cool and rainy in the District tomorrow.

A big part of his life had been a search for equals, people he could run with, but those were few and far between. Oh, they were out there, and it was a delight when he found one, but he no longer expected to simply run into them the way he once had. Once upon a time, he had lived with a woman who was actually smarter than he was. Sharp, funny, sexy, they liked the same music, the same literature and movies, mostly, but it hadn’t worked out. She’d had her career — she was a physicist — and he’d had his, tinkering with computerware, and one day they’d looked up and realized they weren’t connected anymore. They couldn’t point to any major break. They still exchanged Christmas cards, smiled and hugged each other if they met, but their paths had diverged and neither of them could see a way back. Sad.

In sports, the NBA basketball season was in full swing. Looked as if one of the new expansion teams he hadn’t realized even existed was on a roll, ten straight victories.

The microwave pinged. He flicked off the television and headed back to the kitchen. He’d do an hour or so on the web, check his personal e-mail and the fencing newsgroup, and then go to bed.

Another exciting evening in the life of Thomas Thorn.

Natadze watched from inside the rental car as the target turned into his driveway and stopped his own car, a three-year-old Volvo.

Following the man had been easy enough, and even if he had lost him, he had known where he was going. He had committed all the statistics to memory. He knew things about Jay Gridley that the man probably did not know himself — his driver’s license and credit card numbers, his medical ID number, along with his phone number, address, birthday, and his wife’s maiden name.

Proper planning prevents piss-poor performance. Knowing as much as possible about the subject was an important part of that.

Gridley got out and walked to the door of his condo, where his wife, who taught Buddhism online, would be waiting. According to her latest medical records, she was pregnant.

Well. If Gridley did as he was told, he would live to be a father. If not…

Natadze put that thought from his mind. It was not good to dwell on failure. Yes, you did whatever was necessary to assure that such a thing did not happen, and that meant considering all the variables and planning for them, but you did not give them power. Failure was not allowed. Only success got you approval.

He looked automatically at his watch, mentally marking the time. Normally, he would follow the target for days, a week, to establish his patterns, but there was a time constraint this time and he would not be allowed that luxury on this mission. He did not like having to hurry, but it was the nature of the assignment, and one made do as best one could, given the parameters. He would do it tomorrow, when the man left work and drove home. It should not be difficult. The target was a white-collar worker, a chair-warmer who was not particularly adept physically. Natadze would use the gun, he would intimidate the man, and that would be that. Have him call his wife and tell her he would be working late. That would give him some time before he was missed at home or work, more than enough to find out what he needed to know. A piece of cake.

He drove past the target’s residence. Time to go home. To relax and to practice. The highlight of his day.

Thorn logged onto UseNet and into the newsgroup Rec.sport.fencing, where there were sometimes interesting exchanges ranging from technique to politics. Threads — follow-ups that began with a single post — tended to stay on a subject for a while, assuming they weren’t stupid to begin with or an insult to the FAQ (frequently asked questions). After twenty or fifty responses, if the original subject was sufficiently covered, then the postings in that thread tended to veer into other areas before dribbling to a stop.

In this group, people came to discuss the French versus the Italian grip; why the Spanish grip should be allowed in competition; or where to buy the best blades and furniture. Many of the people who wrote in were knowledgeable about all aspects of fencing. Some were tyros who didn’t know an épée from an elephant. And some posters were flat-out trolls.

A troll was somebody who logged into a newsgroup and posted something provocative purely for the sake of generating attention or starting an argument. The term supposedly came from fishing, wherein lines were set to troll for fish. Some said it came from those mythical beasts who lived under bridges and menaced passers-by. Either way, a troll on UseNet was a waste of time and space. They were almost always anonymous, posting insults under screen names so as to be insulated from reprisals, and sometimes they went past merely being annoying to offering libel online.

Some trolls were more clever than simply shouting obscenities into the faces of anybody around; they would pose a question or comment in such a manner as to seem serious. But clever or merely loud, trolls were an annoying fact of net life.

Sometimes very annoying.

Thorn had attracted a couple of these pests in his years on the net, both as a programmer and as a fencer, and when he opened the thread on pistol-grip handles versus straight-grips that now ran to forty-three messages, he found that one of the more irritating trolls of recent months was there, dogging him again.

Thorn had posted the question: Has anybody had problems with tendonitis using the straight grip that switching to a pistol grip has helped?

There had been several helpful replies, a few more that were interested, and, invariably, the idiot who tried to hijack the thread to serve his own ends. The troll — he had several pseudonyms he hid behind, but his current netnom was “Rapier”—had entered the building:

Tendonitis, Thorn? Must be you’re gripping your blade wrong. Or, wait. Maybe it’s just that you’re gripping the wrong blade;-)! Is that it, Thorn? So why don’t you hire somebody to give you that kind of attention? You can afford it, a rich guy like you…

Thorn gritted his teeth. What was wrong with somebody that the only way he could get attention was to jump up and down spitting and cursing at people, acting like a two-year-old? Look at me! Look at me! See how clever I am?

Unfortunately, yes, we see exactly how clever you are. Which isn’t at all.

Responding only made it worse. These fools didn’t care what you said, only that you said something—anything—thus providing the attention they craved. The best way to respond was to ignore it. “Don’t feed the trolls” was the advice that seasoned UseNetters gave to newbies. If nobody reacts, they leave.

Which, unfortunately, was not true of the really obnoxious ones. They simply changed their netnoms and came back in a new disguise, looking to get your goat.

Generally, as soon as Thorn recognized a troll, he put the name into his “kill” filter. From then on, that name would be marked and he simply didn’t open the postings. Of course, every time a troll changed names, he would slip by for a message or two.

The anonymity of the net had given rise to tens of thousands of such losers. If they said those things to a man’s face, they would be looking for their teeth, but safe in their homes at a keyboard they felt free to insult the world at large. Sad that this was all the life they had.

Thorn had a huge kill file of names, and one of the worst had used a dozen aliases in the last six months. It was the same guy. The writing style — such that it was — was easy to spot. The guy didn’t shout by using all caps, and his grammar wasn’t atrocious, but the snideness was definitive, and the speech patterns didn’t vary. And here he was yet again.

Thorn sighed, then added “Rapier” to his kill file.

Somebody ought to do something about these idiots.

Even as he thought it, he had the realization: He was now in a position where he could do something. He was running Net Force.

He smiled and shook his head. Trolls weren’t illegal. Irritating, obnoxious, sometimes even pitiful or outright psychotic, but there weren’t any laws against that. If they actually threatened or libeled you, you could do something, but the smarter ones would avoid going that far. They’d step right up to the edge, but not past it. Innuendo, yes, and thinly veiled threats, but never enough to take them into court to squash.

There were ways to backtrack e-mail and postings, perfectly legal ones to run through an Internet service provider to bring to their attention that they had people misbehaving. Some of the larger ISPs would kick an offender off if they got enough complaints. But some of the smaller ones, especially those in third-world countries, didn’t really care what their patrons did, as long as they paid their bills. Nigeria was notorious, all kinds of con-men ran schemes from there, the most famous being one about smuggling a large fortune out of the country and cutting in people who would help. A lot of folks had lost a lot of money on those schemes, even after they had been made public time and time again.

Clever trolls could hide their identities, and some of them used anonymous machines, at libraries or Internet cafes, so even if you tracked the computer down, you wouldn’t catch them. If they were dangerous, you could install key-watch software and eventually nail them, but Net Force didn’t chase trolls; if they did, they wouldn’t have time for anything else.

Well, it was what it was, and you just had to shrug it off. It was tempting to drop the posting into Jay Gridley’s lap and tell him to find the guy, though. Outing “Rapier” on the net would feel very satisfying. There were folks who, if they knew where the man lived, would drop by and have a few words with him.

Of course, the “man” could be a thirteen-year-old precocious brat using his mother’s computer, and Thorn didn’t want to be responsible for some irritated stranger kicking the crap out of him. Though it would be very satisfying to have the kid’s mother do it…

He smiled. Enough for today. Time to get to bed.