Springboard

26

The dead man’s guitar — his now, if Natadze’s dying wish was to be honored — was stowed in the luggage bin over Kent’s head. The commercial jet droned along, somewhere over the Midwest — Kansas, maybe. Once, there had been websites you could access that showed the progress of every commercial flight in the country. Log on, type in the flight number, and you’d get a nice visual of a little aircraft superimposed on a map, showing you exactly where it was, where it had been, and its projected flight path to where it was going.

Those days were long gone. After 9/11, a lot of such information had been shut down. Too risky. Even National Parks data was restricted. And if you started trying to run down where the nation’s water supplies were, or the exact geographic locations of military bases, nuclear power plants, or chemical factories, you might well hear a knock on your door with a curious federal agent behind it wanting to know just why you needed such information.

Interesting times, that was the Chinese curse, and certainly that’s what had come to pass in the United States. When he’d been a boy, you could catch a bus downtown, wander around alone all day, and your parents didn’t need to worry about you. You could walk onto a plane carrying a loaded pistol in your pocket and there weren’t any metal detectors between you and the aircraft because nobody ever considered hijacking the craft to Cuba, or flying it into a building and killing thousands. Things you might conceivably put into your mouth were not protected by security seals with instructions that, if broken, you shouldn’t eat it. Terrorists didn’t sit around planning ways to release poison gas, blow up bridges, or set off an atomic bomb in an American city, except in the movies or in books. And you didn’t need to stamp warnings on the barrels of guns that they were dangerous.

Of course, you could still get polio, and his mother had warned him against playing in ditches because she still thought that was how you caught it. The shadow of nuclear war loomed large, and they told schoolchildren to hide under their desks if the Russians dropped the bomb, as if that would help. And institutionalized racism and sexism were still the norm.

No men on the moon back in the 1950s — but also no AIDS.

A lot of things had changed during Kent’s lifetime, most for better, but some for worse. Things didn’t sit still, that was a given, and the good old days were always better in memory than they’d actually been, but still, now and then, Kent wondered if the new millennium really was much better than the one just past.

He got reflective like this after a battle. And even though it had been just him and Natadze in this one, it had ended with guns working. Yes, he had walked away, which was always better than the alternative, but he hadn’t won the victory he’d wanted. If he had been a little sharper, if he had really known what he was doing, it might have gone better.

He remembered his grandfather. Paw-Paw had been in the Second World War, had been on the islands in the South Pacific fighting against the Japanese — that’s where Kent had gotten the samurai sword and the interest in it. But Paw-Paw had also been a master craftsman when it came to building things.

When Kent had been a kid, his parents moved into the first house they ever owned. It was a small place, and his room had been converted from a den — it had no closets or shelves. His grandfather had come to the house with a yardstick — one of those cheap wooden things the paint companies used to give away if you bought a gallon of paint — and a pencil and spiral notebook.

Paw Paw talked to Kent’s mother, then went into the den and made some measurements with that old yardstick, jotted down some notes, then went back to his shop and started cutting plywood.

When he came back a week later, he put together a desk, two closets, and a bunch of shelves, using a screwdriver and a handful of wood screws. When he was finished, you couldn’t slip a piece of paper into any of the joints — everything fit together as tightly as a Swiss watch.

The man had known what he was doing. He had been an expert at it.

Going after Natadze alone had been a mistake. Kent hadn’t had the skill necessary to pull it off. An expert would have figured out a way to bring him back alive. Yeah, Kent had resolved his earlier mistakes, in that Natadze wasn’t running around loose anymore, but it was like burning down a barn to get rid of rats. It had cost a lot more than necessary.

Kent sighed. Well. There was nothing to be done for it now, save to go back to work and explain it to his commander. Who might decide to fire him for it, and if so, Kent wouldn’t blame him. He had screwed up. And if you can’t do the time, you don’t do the crime…

In China, the VR marathon races in which Chang ran were always run at night, and usually in the fog or rain, with the visibility never more than a few meters. It was a long race, a marathon, twenty-six miles, 385 yards, supposedly the distance a long-ago messenger had run in Greece on the plains of Marathon to deliver some important news, just before dropping dead from exhaustion. Over forty-two kilometers, and these days, crippled men, old women, and nine-year-old children ran it regularly, and few of them ever died.

When Chang ran here, he was faster than many, but still slower than some. Now and again, he would pass a runner close enough to see him in the gloom. Occasionally, one would pass him near enough for him to make out. There could be hundreds or even thousands of others in the race. Sometimes he felt them out there, but he didn’t see them, didn’t hear their footsteps. Now and again, Chang might stumble over something in the darkness — something he couldn’t detect until he was too close to stop.

Chang had equipped himself with a flashlight that could extend his vision a few more meters. It would be so much better were these contests held on bright and sunny days, but he had grown used to the fog and rain and moonless dark, and had learned to navigate it, albeit sometimes he was more tentative than he would have liked. It was hard to run full-out, knowing you might trip over something you couldn’t spot waiting in the road ahead. But, it was what it was, and there was little to be done about it.

So now, as he stood at the starting line, amidst a crowd of which he could see but a few close to him, he was familiar with the situation.

But: The American, Petrie, had added a wrinkle to the fabric of night. Now, in this scenario, Chang wore a special headset, with goggles that slipped over his eyes, a device that approximated sixth-gen spookeyes — starlight scopes that would gather the faintest light and intensify it, amplify it, transmit it to the lenses, and in doing so, also computer-augment colors to an approximation of normal.

That was the theory, anyway.

As he stood there, waiting for the signal to start, Chang touched a control on the headset…

Light flared brightly, causing him to blink against it. When his vision cleared, he beheld a miracle:

He could see!

It was as if he had stepped into a football stadium in the dark and someone had switched on the lights. The colors were perhaps a hair too intense, but before, where he had been able to see but a handful of those lined up with him to run, now he could see nearly all of them! The road ahead was visible for blocks, the buildings lining the street, the sky, everything was open to his gaze.

The beauty of it was awesome.

The starter’s gun fired, and the crowd surged. Chang ran with them, marveling at his ability to take it all in.

He looked at a runner fifty meters ahead — a man in a purple unitard that covered him from his knees to his neck, leaving his arms bare. Here was a man Chang would have never known was there before, for he was moving at a pace that Chang normally did not match. Once ahead, Chang would never catch him.

Chang sped up, fell in behind the man, matching his pace, staying two meters back. It was a bit of a strain, but he could manage it for a short time. Long enough to manage something he’d never managed before.

Who was he? Chang didn’t know, but he could deduce much from all those details he observed. The man was fit — his muscles lean and hard. He ran easily, denoting a serious amount of training. He was wealthy or he had a sponsor — the shoes were the latest Adidas SmartShoe, with a computer built in to adjust the foot cushion, and those cost four times what a normal pair of decent running shoes would run. The unitard was a Nike wind-cheater, custom-fitted, made from polypropyl and cloned silk, and cost nearly as much as the shoes. The man wore a Rolex watch or a well-made knockoff. He had a tiny Optar-plus pulse monitor strapped to the other wrist — another expensive toy — and even though it was nighttime, he sported top of the line Ferami photogray RunnerShades, and they didn’t give those away, either. A thousand, maybe twelve hundred U.S. dollars for his outfit, easy — not counting the Rolex.

So much knowledge from just being able to see somebody.

Before, in the dark, even if Chang had been within a few meters, he could not have gathered all that, not in such fine detail. And he would have never known where to look.

Chang’s game had just improved in a major way. Knowledge was power, and with the new software that Petrie had supplied him with, he was going to have options he’d never had before. He’d be able to see individual racers, notice patterns in the crowd, he’d know who was gaining and who was falling back. Runners ahead of him he’d never known were there? He could spot them, track them, maybe catch them.

This was going to make things a lot different in his job. Men who had counted on the fog and rain and darkness to cloak them were about to lose that protection.

Now, Chang was going to be able to find them, chase them down, and catch them. Soon, there were going to be some very surprised computer criminals in his homeland.

Allah be praised for such a gift.

Chang sat in his hotel room, staring at the program mini-disk he had just tried for the first time. It was tiny — the size of a U.S. quarter. He could slip it into his pocket and walk through a dozen airport security checkpoints and nobody would know he had it. He could stick it in an envelope and mail it to himself in a normal-size letter, and nobody would bother to worry over it. But — he did not have to do these things, because it was a legal purchase. It would vastly improve his ability to find miscreants in China, but it was not forbidden for him to own, to take home, because it was old-hat here, something anyone living here could get for his home computer if he had the money to buy it.

Amazing. Americans truly did not know how good they had things. What they took for granted that other societies would see as a miracle.

Chang looked at his watch. He had a few hours before he was supposed to see Gridley, at Net Force. Might as well use the time productively. He would go back into VR, log into his system at home, and do a little hunting. Now that he had this, who knew what manner of crook he might find?

Ah, how wonderful this was!

Abe Kent sat at his desk, staring at nothing. The meeting with Thorn couldn’t have gone better. The Commander had listened to his story, then shrugged it off. “This guy was a killer, Abe. You went out there and took him down. A man like that? He wasn’t going to give us anything if you’d brought him back alive. He was a bad man, and in a just society he would have paid for it with his life in court. You saved us all a lot of time and money to the same end.”

Kent had nodded, relieved some, but still troubled. It wasn’t a total personal failure, but it hadn’t been up to his standards. All he could do was try to do better in the future.

His secure line cheeped.

“Abe Kent.”

The voice on the other end was low, calm, and quiet. He hadn’t heard it in a while. He listened, made a comment, and listened some more. Finally, he said, “I’ll take care of it. I owe you one.”

“No,” the voice had said. “I’m paying back one I owe you. We’re even.”

Kent discommed. After a long moment he shook his head and tapped his intercom button. “Would you see if you could get Jay Gridley to drop by here?” he asked his assistant.

When Jay got the call to drop by Colonel Kent’s office, he was surprised. RW face time was mostly unnecessary, but Kent was the same generation as Jay’s parents, and they had never been as comfortable with VR as somebody who grew up in it as Jay had.

Kent’s secretary smiled and waved him in. Kent was in his chair, not doing anything Jay could tell but sitting there.

“Colonel.”

“Jay. Have a seat.”

“I heard you got Natadze,” Jay said. He plopped onto the couch facing the desk. Hard, not very comfortable. Perfect for a Marine guy. “Congratulations.”

“Not the way I wanted, but as the Commander has pointed out, at least he’s not still on the street.”

Jay nodded. “What can I do you for?” he asked.

Kent took a deep breath. “I got a call from an old friend of mine, used to be a spook in the Company. He’s, uh, moved to another agency. It was regarding your breathing.”

“My breathing?”

“Yes. Whether or not you are going to keep doing it.”

That got Jay’s attention. “What?”

“You went somewhere you weren’t supposed to, and you were noticed.”

“I left a footprint somewhere?”

“Not a footprint — you left an image detailed enough to show the size, shape, and number of your freckles. I don’t care that it was illegal — I suspect you stopped worrying about that a long time ago. But where you walked was in a black-ops system that isn’t supposed to exist. They don’t want anybody who isn’t supposed to know about them to even dream they are there.”

Jay was stunned. Probably looked it, too. Then he started to get just a little irritated.

Kent saw something in his face. He paused for a moment, then said, “Long ago and far away, when I was very young and stupid, there was a foolish game we used to play. On a Saturday night, a bunch of boys would pile into somebody’s car and go cruising. We’d hit all the local water holes — drive-in restaurants, bars that would let underage teenagers sneak in, empty stretches of road where they’d drag-race hot cars. And all the time looking for girls to try and impress. We smoked cigarettes because we thought it made us look older. Of course, what that made us look like was a bunch of sixteen-year-old boys trying to pass for eighteen. We thought we were so cool.”

Jay laughed politely. Where was this going?

“Anyway, the game was this: We’d head out into the suburbs away from town and look for a guy walking alone. If we spotted one, we’d go past a hundred yards or so, as if we hadn’t seen him. Whoever was driving would pull the car over, and a couple of us would hop out and lift one of the guys out of the car, as if he were dead. We’d haul him to the side of the road and put him down, just as if we were dumping a body. The guy would lie there not moving. We’d start back to the car, then one of us would look up, and pretend that we’d just noticed the pedestrian back there.

“Look!” We’d yell. “He saw us! Git ’im!”

Jay grinned and shook his head. “There used to be a television show like that. They’d set somebody up with some kind of scenario just to scare the daylights out of him, then record it. I forget what it was called — I used to watch it when I was in college. Funny stuff.”

“Funny, but really, really stupid. What we did was back in the days before video cams were around or we’d probably have taped it, too. We thought it was a hoot — we did it four or five times, chased guys a little ways, amazed at how fast somebody who thought he’d just seen a body dumped could run from what he thought was a bunch of killers. Then, once the guy was gone, we’d all hop back into the car and head back to the bars. If the guy reported it, the cops must have laughed pretty good — they’d have heard the story every summer.”

Jay smiled and nodded.

“We were lucky beyond measure. All it would have taken would have been for one of our prey to have been a security guard on his way home, a new, off-duty cop who’d never heard the story, or maybe just a guy worried about being mugged. Somebody packing a handgun and deciding he could become a hero by dropping four or five murderers dead in their tracks. It was dark, he wouldn’t have seen us smiling as we ran at him, and if he had, probably thought we were homicidal maniacs. No jury in the world would have convicted him for mowing us down — we would have gotten what we deserved.”

Jay thought about that for a second.

“If kids tried that game these days, more than likely they would get shot — there are a lot of concealed weapon permits out there, a lot more than when I was a teenager.”

Jay said, “So you’re saying what?”

“I’m saying that just because you have these great abilities to dance in and out of high-security computer systems without worrying that you’ll get caught, it is sometimes a mistake.” He paused for a moment, letting that sink in, then went on. “It happens some people there know me, and it just happens one of them owes me a favor, so I got a call and I fixed it. But you’re lucky — just like we were on those hot summer nights back in my day. Nobody will show up at your door in the middle of the night and disappear you. This time.”

Jay’s eyes went wide. “No.”

“Yes. It doesn’t matter that you work for the government. If you go somewhere you shouldn’t go, you had better make damn sure you don’t get seen. There are some nasty things out there in the world, meaner, hungrier, and some of them are smarter than you are, Jay. I know you don’t think so, but it’s true, and if you cross one of them at the wrong time, you could leave a widow and child alone and always wondering what happened to you. If I hadn’t been here, if somebody hadn’t owed me, you’d be in deep trouble. Keep that in mind.”

Jay blew out a sigh. He felt a chill ripple through him.

“Jay, remember this: If you get to thinking you’re Superman, you will eventually find a guy with a barrel full of kryptonite.”

And all Jay could think of to say to that was, “My God.”

“Amen, son.”