Springboard

16

Jay wandered through a cityscape that looked like Metropolis, Gotham, and the Blade Runner version of L.A., all rolled into one, with a little Tokyo sprinkled in for flavor. The architecture ranged from modern to Gothic to art deco, from 1890s San Francisco to skyscrapers taller than the twin towers in Kuala Lumpur.

Whatever else it might offer, CyberNation had an infrastructure that was something to see. It was huge. Nothing but city, as far as you could see, farther than you could walk in two days.

And Jay now had the keys to the buildings.

Well, not all of them, but enough to keep him busy for the next couple of years, even if he didn’t feel like picking locks or kicking in doors — which he could always do.

It was gigantic, but not evenly built. Most of it looked fuzzy through Jay’s new viewer, though there were parts where it seemed as if somebody else had gotten their hands on a pair of those same glasses and started smoothing things. As he walked down the sidewalk, which, in this scenario, appeared to be a lot like Fifth Avenue in New York on a busy afternoon, full of pedestrians, the road clogged with cars, trucks, bicycles, and Segways, Jay tried to take it all in.

He passed sensoria, where customers could step in and experience canned fantasies — be an action hero, a great lover, explore another planet, or whatever struck your fancy.

There were restaurants, bars, schools, stores, everything you’d find in an RW city, plus things available only in VR: sex shops where your partner could be a particular movie star or group of stars; clubs where you could hunt down and shoot the most dangerous game — other humans. Russian Roulette parlors where you could bet your VR life.

Behold the vices for your enjoyment…

Jay hadn’t begun to see it all, but he was willing to bet that anything legal in VR anywhere would be available in CyberNation, and probably some stuff that wasn’t legal. Kiddie porn wasn’t legal, though there were some weird cartoon exceptions to that, but Jay didn’t expect to find that here. The whole issue was too emotionally charged, and the chance of it backfiring against them was too great.

Drug-dispensing VR gear accessories for your suit were in the same category — prohibited by CyberNation, he thought — but for different reasons. These actually were legal, but they required a doctor’s prescription. Jay knew there were ways around that, and he was sure that CyberNation knew all of them, but he doubted they offered them. CyberNation wasn’t strong enough to flout the laws of RW.

Not yet, anyway.

There were any number of other esoteric perversions that CyberNation probably didn’t want to risk as well. Other than those, the sky was the limit — or not; you could fly to Mars or Alpha Centauri, if you wanted. In VR.

He passed a huge library with the word “Knowledge” over the door.

He paused in front of a map shop that offered views from spysats — you gave them your GPS coordinates and they could zoom into your backyard with enough resolution to see what newspaper your wife was reading on your deck.

It was easy to see the selling points for a place like this. Why waste your time in the RW, which was messy and dangerous, when you could come to CyberNation and experience everything you ever desired, and all from the comfort of your own home? Don full sensory gear with penile or vaginal accessories — delivered to you as part of your sign-up package — and you could have any kind of sex you wanted with anybody, without the risk of catching some disease.

It was true that VR food didn’t offer any sustenance, but that was part of the appeal — you could eat all you wanted and never get fat. Yes, the stims for food weren’t perfect yet, the electrode cap that cranked up your brain centers had a way to go, but the wireless taste-bud lozenges were getting up there. They could deliver a fairly good approximation of a lot of things using the basic sweet-sour-salty-bitter tropes, along with the nares odor-gen gear. And CyberNation’s proprietary suitware was cutting-edge — Jay had some of it in his own sense-suits.

In top-grade mesh, you could experience tropical heat, arctic cold, or any temperature you considered perfect. With the best sensory-stim, you could feel the sand under your feet, the hard coolness of a rock face you were climbing, or the water around you as you flippered along in your scuba gear to explore for sunken treasure. Still not as good as the RW in a lot of cases, but without the risk — or the discomfort — and getting better all the time. For many, the dream was better than the reality. And Jay was hardly one to point fingers, given the time he spent suited up and in VR.

There was, however, trouble in the city, otherwise Jay wouldn’t be here.

He caught a taxi and gave it the location Seurat had provided: “Take me to the Garden of Perpetual Bliss,” he said.

The cabbie nodded and turned on his sat-radio. “Any kind of music you wanna hear?”

“How about classic rock, late sixties? Beatles? Rolling Stones?”

“You got it, pal.”

Paul McCartney began singing and playing “Black-bird.” An antiracist song, according to Sir Paul, and easy to see from a distance, though apparently at the time few had understood the message.

Wasn’t that always the way?

In his office, Thorn listened to Abe Kent’s report on his encounter with Natadze, nodding but not speaking. When the colonel had finished, Thorn said, “You’re sure it was him.” It wasn’t a question.

“No doubt in my mind. I don’t see how it could have been anybody else. Who would take a guitar and leave the exact amount he owed the builder in its place? Who could know how much that was?”

Thorn sighed. “I don’t see how there was any way you could have known he’d follow you — I wouldn’t have bet a penny against a dollar he’d have even been there.”

“I would have won the small bet, but I lost the game.”

“Don’t blame yourself, Abe.”

“I’d love to have somebody else to lay it off on, but it was my mistake. I should have had a contingency plan. It never crossed my mind, and it should have.”

“Done is done,” Thorn said. “What now?”

“I know where he was, and when. If it’s okay with you, I’ll get Gridley’s people to run a search on security cams in the area — motels, car-rental places, the whole package. He was at the guitar thing in Lincoln, he followed me — maybe he missed a step along the way.”

“You think there’s much chance of that?”

“Frankly, no. It was a fluke that we tied him to the Cox deal in the first place. A lucky break that he happened to be passing by a bank machine while somebody was using it, and that some woman ran a red light in front of him and we got pictures. Can’t bank on luck again.”

“Cox paid for it all,” Thorn said. “Blown to pieces in his own car. We’ve officially moved on.”

“Natadze is a loose end. And we’re sure he was the guy who took Cox out.”

“Depending on how you look at it, he did us a favor. Given the politics and money involved, Cox would have died of old age before we could have put him away, and even that was iffy.”

“He’s still a killer. And I owe him.”

Thorn nodded again. He understood that. “All right. Pass it along to Jay’s group and see what they come up with. Good luck.”

“Thank you, Commander.”

After Kent was gone, Thorn thought about that case. What a mess it had been. Old Soviet Union spies, hit men, a crooked billionaire…

His intercom buzzed. “Sir? Marissa Lowe on one.”

Thorn smiled. “Got it.”

He waved the phone to life and got a visual. Marissa, who did several things for the CIA, including being the liaison between that spook group and Net Force, was a strikingly handsome woman with skin the color of coffee and just a little cream.

“Hey, Tommy.”

“Hey, yourself. How’s…? Where are you again?”

“Classified, I’m afraid. You don’t need to know.”

He laughed. She was a funny woman. Smart, too, though she tried to play that down.

“When are you coming back to town?”

“More classified information, my boy.”

“But eventually?”

“I believe I can stipulate to that much, yes.”

“What a terrible operative you are — see, I just wormed information out of you. What if I were a spy? I could set up a surveillance, knowing you’d be coming to Washington sooner or later. Catch you, just like that!” He snapped his fingers.

She laughed, and he liked being able to make her do that.

“I want to see the requisition you put in for your surveillance team, Tommy. The little box where they ask for approximate cost and time for the team to be in the field. You gonna write ‘eventually’?”

“I’m the boss, I don’t need to fill out no stinkin’ report.”

She laughed again.

“I hear there’s a new restaurant opening up in Foggy Bottom,” he said. “Italian, being run by the guy who used to be the chef at Gianelli’s.”

“Ah. And…?”

“Well, if I had some idea when you’d be back, I could make reservations. Treat you to dinner.”

“Must be nice to be rich,” she said. “But I wouldn’t know, being a lowly GS-13 barely scraping by.”

“Oh, yeah, rich is good. You could marry me, then when we divorce, you could get half, then you’d see.”

“You put that in writing?”

They both laughed.

“Hypothetically speaking,” she said after a moment, “if you were to make a reservation at this new restaurant for, say, Thursday, maybe you wouldn’t have to dine alone.”

“Thursday’s bowling league night,” he said.

“Uh-huh. I can’t even imagine you in a pair of bowling shoes.”

“I was the lowest scorer in my junior high class,” he said. “A solid ninety-six average. Shall I pick you up?”

“Nah. If I’m back, I’ll meet you there. Eight o’clock?”

“Assuming I can get reservations.”

“Big-time bureau commander and rich man like yourself? No problem. Eight o’clock.”

She discommed, and Thorn grinned to himself again. He did like smart, funny, beautiful women. What was not to like?

Unlike some of his colleagues, Seurat didn’t mind going into the city when he had a good reason. He left his car at home and took the Metro — nothing of worth in the city was more than five hundred yards from a Metro station, so the saying went, and parking in the city, like a pay telephone, was impossible to find. Nobody with a brain drove into Paris, and since the advent of mobile phones, the government assumed everybody would have one, so why have the clutter of phone kiosks everywhere?

Today was a meeting with a potential new client — a Saudi prince and businessman who was looking to start a new server in that country, and who wanted a link with CyberNation. Being a prince was not as impressive coming from that country as it was, say, from England. There were scores, hundreds, maybe thousands of them down in the desert atop the oil pools, the result of royal families in which the men could have as many wives as they could afford. An oil sheik could afford a considerable harem.

The Saudis were not as pure as they liked to pretend; much of that Muslim strait-lacing offered publicly disappeared in private. Yes, they were currently French allies, of a sort, and there was a quid pro quo, but some of the hardest drinkers, biggest womanizers, and consumers of pornography Seurat had ever met had been Saudis. If you had enough money, there was usually a way to get what you wanted, if you wanted it enough, and to make sure that people looked the other way while you enjoyed it.

And in VR, it didn’t count — since you weren’t actually drinking or screwing around…

He glanced at his watch. Running a little later today than he wished. No time to stop at a museum or gallery. Seurat liked to drop round the Musée d’Orsay every so often and see Le Cirque. Georges Seurat had done many drawings, but only a few major paintings, and they were all over the world. Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, his most famous, and the inspiration for a musical play, Sunday Afternoon in the Park with George, was at the Art Institute in Chicago. Others were in London, New York, San Francisco. Too few of them were in Paris. A shame, that, but buyers with enough money to afford such things lived where they lived.

His connection to his famous relative was known and accepted by some, if the legitimacy was sometimes argued by others. Though Georges had died a young man, only thirty-one, of meningitis or diptheria, depending on whom you believed, he had two hidden families. Most knew about Madeline Knobloch, of course, but few knew of his other mistress, from whom the director of CyberNation was himself descended…

The day was warm and sunny, and Seurat enjoyed the bustle and sounds of the city as he walked along the Rue Vernet, toward the Elysees Star Hotel. There was a woman he had met there once, a Spanish countess, ah…

He saw the Saudi prince lounging in a cast-iron chair at the outdoor cafe down from the hotel, a cup of tea or coffee on the small table before him. Such cafes were traditional in Paris, of course, though Seurat himself thought that drinking coffee and having croissants with a steady stream of noisy automobiles passing by was hardly relaxing. There were cafes on some of the pedestrian malls, streets that had been closed to vehicular traffic but not those on foot, that he found much more appealing. It was hard to appreciate the swaying walk of a beautiful woman in high heels when a moving van with a loud muffler crept past and belched smelly exhaust at you.

The prince was in a business suit that had probably cost more than the price of the average car. The prince, who liked to downplay that and be called Said, saw Seurat strolling in his direction. He raised his cup in salute.

Seurat smiled and nodded.

A sudden darkness rolled over the street. Seurat frowned and looked up, to see a rain cloud blotting the sun. That had come up fast—

A lightning bolt lanced down from the cloud, struck a group of walkers waiting to cross at an intersection, and scattered them as if a bomb had gone off in their midst.

A demonic voice began to laugh loudly as more lightning played over the street. Hail started to fall, clumps as big as golf balls, smashing down; hurricane winds blew, and people on the street screamed and ran for cover—

Merde! The bastard whoreson hacker was at it again—!

Seurat stripped the sensory gear off, still enraged. Losing a potential client was bad, but not major. That the hacker was still able to attack CyberNation seemingly at will was major. He had already called his technical people and they were on the hunt, but he did not hold out much hope for a quick taking of prey.

This had to stop. And when the man responsible was caught, Seurat wanted to see him put into a hole so far down that the light of day would never touch him again.

Merde!