Springboard

10

Instinct was like inspiration. Neither were things they taught in computer school, though a few of Jay’s teachers had spoken about one or the other. Nor were they things you should depend upon with any regularity; then again, they weren’t things you should ignore when they tweaked you, either.

Jay felt that tweak again now — a sixth sense of somehow knowing he was close. It was different from wishful thinking — he’d experienced that often enough to recognize the feeling.

The scenario wasn’t a complicated one. It was an old standby he’d built years ago, a town in the Old West, with cowboys and shopkeepers and schoolmarms, and that atmospheric High Noon twang underlying it. He had changed names and places and upgraded the sensoria, and it was one of his favorites.

Jay strode along the boardwalk, tipping his hat to the ladies he passed, inhaling the odors of dust and horse dung. Tumbleweeds had gathered in the alleyways, and the sun-bleached storefronts and graying wood buildings baked in dryness.

Ahead, at the entrance to the town saloon, the Hickory Branch, a figure suddenly moved from the boardwalk and into the place.

Jay wasn’t sure who he was hunting, but he knew, he knew that this was his quarry. His realization at the park with his baby son had pointed him in this direction, and it felt right.

He hurried toward the saloon. There were two ways into the Hickory Branch — the front door, which, unlike so many movies, wasn’t a pair of useless swinging doors that did nothing to keep out the heat, dust, and flies, but a wooden-framed etched-glass panel that closed just like any other door. There was also a back door, plain old wood, and generally kept locked save for when trash — of one sort or another — needed to be hauled out.

Jay left the walk at the gun shop, went down the alley to the back, and moved two buildings down to the Branch.

He tested the saloon’s back door. It was locked. Good.

Jay circled back to the street, passed the hitching post, which was empty — smart men didn’t leave their horses tied up there during the heat of the day, even, though there was a trough with water where the animals could reach it. If you lived in town, you walked to the saloon; if you came from elsewhere, you paid the livery stable boy a nickel to put your horse in the shade, and make sure he had food and water.

Jay opened the door and stepped inside.

It was Saturday, and the place was crowded, smoky, and not much cooler than outside. The beer was warm, too, but if you drank enough of it, you didn’t mind the heat, and these frontier towns were full of what would later be called “alcoholics”—men and women both.

The piano player didn’t pause, but kept on tinkling away at the off-key instrument, playing some kind of New York show tune from the late 1870s.

Jay didn’t look particularly threatening. He wore a shopkeeper’s duds — boiled shirt and starched collar over a pair of gray pinstriped trousers and low-heeled English-style riding books. His coat — even in the heat, men often wore coats when they went out — was a cutaway frocklike thing of gray wool. His hat was closer to a derby style than a cowboy ten-gallon.

He didn’t want to look threatening, not like some pistolero with low-slung strapped-down Peacemakers. More like a mild-mannered shopkeeper.

He had his gun, of course. The coat’s right-hand low pocket was heavy canvas stiffened with leather, and in it was a chrome-plated 1877 Colt.38 “Lightning,” with a two-and-a-half-inch barrel. The revolver looked like the Peacemaker, sort of, though the butt was rounded. It was a somewhat delicate machine compared to some weapons, but it had the advantage of being double-action, which meant that you didn’t have to manually cock the hammer for each shot. You could just point it and pull the trigger repeatedly until you ran out of ammunition. The hammer spur had been removed, so as not to catch on the pocket during the draw.

Billy the Kid had owned a similar gun. Pat Garrett had carried a larger model, the “Thunderer,” in.41 caliber. And John Wesley Hardin, one of the meanest of the gunslingers, had gotten one just like Jay’s as a gift from his brother-in-law, Jim Miller.

Definitely not a gun for shooting at targets twenty-five meters away. It was for taking out a bad guy ten or fifteen feet away. The short barrel made it easier to get out and working.

Jay moved to the bar, pretending a nonchalance he didn’t feel, while searching the faces for his quarry. The person he’d glimpsed out front had been a man, he was pretty sure — or a woman dressed like a man. That meant he could discount the three trulls in low-cut dresses who worked the crowd, and the woman playing cards in the side room with four men. He could probably eliminate those men, too, since the one he was after wouldn’t have had time to break into an ongoing game — there was usually a waiting list for poker on a Saturday.

Jay grinned. His scenarios were a mix of fantasy and genuine history, but when he put real stuff in, he usually had it from two or three sources.

“What’ll you have, friend?” the bartender said.

He was, like Jay, wearing a coat, white shirt and tie, and wool trousers.

“Beer.”

“Two for two bits, special.”

“Draw two.”

Jay took his hat off and hung it on a rack mounted on the wall next the bar. There were maybe thirty people sitting at tables or standing next to the long wooden bar, which was made from gleaming and well-waxed hickory, albeit stained and scratched in places. A big looking glass in a horizontal oval frame took up much of the wall behind the bar, and next to that, a painting of, of all things, a sea battle between sailing ships, blasts of smoke from the ships’ cannons and a raging fire on one of the vessels giving the painting a sense of action.

The beers came, in heavy glasses. Jay put a quarter on the bar, picked up one of the beers, and sipped at it. Warm, acrid, sudsy, the way beer used to be drunk. He used the mirror to see what he could, then turned slightly to regard the smoky room.

Every other person in here smoked. Hand-rolled cigarettes, cigars, pipes. Some chewed and spit at strategically placed bell-mouthed brass spittoons, and some of the spitters were very accurate, the local equivalent of NBA three-point shooters.

Twenty years from now, if they survived the other ills of the frontier, a lot of these folks would have emphysema, lung cancer, or throat cancer. Jay shook his head.

He started eliminating suspects mentally as he sipped at the beer, which he held in his left hand so as to keep his gun hand free. Just in case.

Anybody who was obviously part of a group that seemed to have been there a while — easy enough to judge from empty glasses on their tables — was out. Jay’s quarry had just come in, so he looked for men with glasses that were mostly full.

That dropped the numbers to maybe six or seven on the floor, and two at the bar besides himself.

Then Jay looked for men who seemed to be alone, not part of a conversation. This wasn’t a sure thing, but — and this was where his intuition came in — Jay was sure that the man he wanted wasn’t a local, but somebody passing through.

Right away, that narrowed it down to the men at the bar.

Of the two, one was a tall, greasy-looking cowboy with a full beard, wearing leather chaps over canvas pants, a patterned flannel shirt with a dark blue bandanna at the throat, and a short stag-handled sheath knife on his belt. No hat, and no gun, and no place to hide a shooter of any size, at least not that Jay could see. He might have a little revolver or a derringer in his pants pocket, but if so, neither would be coming out with any speed, judging from the cut of those trousers. Six months away from his last bath, easy.

The second man was shorter and paler. He was hunched over his beer so that Jay couldn’t get a good look at his face, but from what Jay could see the man looked clean-shaven. Like Jay, he wore a cutaway-style coat over dark trousers, and low-top shoes with buckles.

Jay glanced away, trying to see the shorter man’s face by using the mirror. At that moment, the fellow looked up at the mirror himself, and Jay had the feeling he was also using the mirror to check the patrons.

Jay cut his gaze away, so as not to be caught looking. But before he did, he had the impression of something odd about the man’s eyes. Nothing he could pin down immediately, but… something.

It was one of these two. He was sure of it.

But — which? Cowboy, or Buckles?

In his quarry’s position, Jay wouldn’t be going around in any scenario unarmed — in this case, “armed” being a metaphor for defensive programs that would be apparent to anybody bright enough to be here. Since Cowboy didn’t seem to be packing — and that knife would only be good at close quarters, unless he was an expert at throwing, and even then, he’d only have one chance — then that pointed to Buckles.

Then again, maybe the quarry was banking on the idea that somebody looking for him would assume he’d be armed, and the fact that he wasn’t would allay suspicion.

Buckles could be carrying a hand-cannon in that big floppy coat pocket, or have a hidden belt holster under it, though he, too, could be unarmed.

Jay took another long pull at the beer. It was a problem.

He wanted this guy alive, to question, whichever one he was, and so drawing his revolver and potting them both was out.

If he drew down on the wrong one, the other would be forewarned, and Jay would be behind the power curve.

If he did nothing, eventually one or both would leave, and he would have to choose which one to stay with, since he obviously couldn’t follow them both.

Not unless they hooked up, which wasn’t likely in this scenario. Men who came out of the closet in these times were not regarded fondly in such a town where they’d surely be thought an abomination.

So. Which is it gonna be, Jay?

The bartender came over and wiped at the already clean wood with a rag. “You want some pickled eggs? Free lunch.”

Jay shook his head. “You know those two down at the other end of the bar?”

The bartender didn’t look at the men, but smiled at Jay. He had a big, droopy moustache stained with tobacco, as were his teeth.

Jay caught the inference. He pulled a silver dollar from his pocket and put the cartwheel onto the bar. He slid it toward the bartender.

The man laid his hand over the coin and neatly palmed it.

“The big fellow is Bob Talley. He’s foreman at the Rocking K ranch south of town. I don’t know the little Chinaman.”

“Chinaman?”

“I’m guessing he’s got some Chinee in him. Slanty eyes. Not supposed to be in here, we don’t usually serve their kind, but he looks white enough nobody’s noticed, and his money is good.”

Jay nodded. Being part Thai, he had a little Asian epicanthic variation, too, but in this kind of scenario, he usually altered his appearance to be as bland white-bread as possible. He didn’t want to draw any attention.

“You’re a bounty hunter, ain’t ’cha?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Stranger comes in, you right behind him. You’re carrying something heavy hidden in your right-hand coat pocket, dollar to a dime it’s a pistol. I don’t see a badge on your shirt. Plus you give me a dollar, no lawman would do that. So, bounty hunter. What’d the little Chinaman do?”

“Shot a nosy bartender,” Jay said.

The man grinned and moved off. He had his dollar.

Jay took a deep breath. There were times when social engineering — bribing somebody — was the way to go. Not the most elegant method, maybe, but Jay was to the point with this hunt that he was past worrying about elegance. He wanted results and he didn’t care how he got them.

He sipped his beer. He had his quarry identified. Now, he’d wait to make his move—

The bartender stopped in front of Buckles and said something.

Buckles jammed his hand into his coat pocket, fast.

Jay knew immediately what had happened. That double-crossing bartender had given him up!

Jay dropped the beer and went for his own pocket. His move was smoother and faster — he came out with his revolver and thrust it toward Buckles, stopped with his arm extended, ready to shoot.

Buckles froze, his own weapon but halfway out of his pocket.

The other man was maybe fifteen, eighteen feet away — an easy target for somebody with Jay’s skill.

“Let it go and put your hands up,” Jay ordered. “We’ll talk, nobody has to get hurt—”

Buckles shook his head, grinned, and jerked his gun from his pocket. He tried to get it lined up on Jay—

Jay squeezed the.38 Lightning’s trigger, one, two, three—!

The bullets hit Buckles solidly in the chest. The man collapsed.

Jay frowned in disgust. Didn’t people know when they’d been beaten?

As he looked at the dying sub-routine, he had to shake his head. Apparently not.

Still shaking his head, Jay turned his revolver on the bartender and shot him, too. The rat.

But at least it wasn’t a total loss. He knew something now he hadn’t known before.

Thorn looked at Jay. “Chinese? Are you sure?”

Jay, in the flesh, nodded. “Yep. I did as much backwalking as I could after the scenario, and knowing better where to look, I found some signs. He might not be Chinese, but he’s operating from there.”

Thorn shook his head. This was… unexpected. And in less than an hour, the head of the Chinese version of Net Force was supposed to be walking into Thorn’s office. How weird was that?

“So, what does this give us?”

“It narrows down the search pattern. I can start the Super-Cray straining access to the net from China. That’s a lot of hits, and disguised, I’m sure, but it’s a place to start. I can also start checking around. If the attacker is Chinese, he sure didn’t get that good over there, so he must have studied in Europe or the States. I can run sieves on that.”

Thorn nodded. “Good. Go for it.”

“When is the CyberNation guy getting here?”

“This afternoon, right after lunch. And guess who else is scheduled for a meeting an hour from now — Chang.”

“Huh. There’s a coincidence.” Jay paused. “He could help. He’s got ways of getting in and out of Chinese systems we’d have to go the long way to reach. Maybe I could talk to him?”

“I’ll let you know when he arrives.”

“Thanks, Boss.”

“Keep at it, Jay. I have every confidence in you.”

Jay grinned. “I wish I did. This one is a bear.”

“And you’ll hang around for Seurat later?”

“Yeah. If I have to.”

After Jay was gone, Thorn decided he didn’t have enough time to eat and go work out before Chang arrived. Well, it wasn’t as if he didn’t have a boatload of e-paperwork that needed attention. He’d simply have lunch at his desk. The Republic had more than one computer problem nipping at its heels, and just because overall control of Net Force had been shifted didn’t mean any of those things had gone away…