Springboard

32

Seurat was most unhappy about the insistent demand of his cell phone. There was a naked woman in his shower, a woman that he was, he was sure, in love with, and he was about to join her — when the phone started playing “Love Is Blue,” the Paul Mauriat instrumental version. Since that was his Priority One ring, he couldn’t just let it go. Merde!

The caller ID was blocked, but since anybody who knew his private number was somebody he would usually — usually — want to speak with, he answered it. Not all that graciously:

“What?”

“I need full access to your system, no playing around with pitfalls and hidden stuff, I need your security code and I need it now.”

Gridley. Seurat recognized the voice — who could forget that arrogant tone? Not a hello-how-are-you? Just a demand for something he should not have.

“Va te faire foutre! Why should I do that?”

“You want me to get stuffed? I have the guy who screwed your network in my sights! He ran into your system to hide and the longer it takes me to get after him, the more likely it is he might get away!”

“My people can—”

“—get stuffed themselves! We don’t have time for this! Give me the number!”

“Listen, Gridley, if you think—”

“Seurat, the clock is running. The guy is Chinese. He is in China. The Chinese are about to have a guy in custody who can give them the hacker’s name — what do you think they’ll do once they know who he is?”

Seurat felt a cold roiling in his belly. “Merde—”

“Exactly. They will grab the guy who was able to penetrate CyberNation and United States military hardware and give both of us all kinds of grief. You think they won’t squeeze everything he learned since he was born out of him? You want the Chinese to do that?”

Seurat had not gotten to where he was by dithering when he needed to move. He rattled off his personal security code, one that would allow the bearer to go anywhere in CyberNation.

“Got it. Thanks.”

“Go, go! Let me know!”

“Bet on it.”

Seurat discommed, and put the phone down. He looked into the bathroom at the fogged-up shower glass. The future of his company might be riding on what Gridley could do. How could a man relax under such worry?

Then again, there was a beautiful, sexy woman in the shower waiting for him. There was nothing he could do to help Gridley at the moment anyway, non? He stood and began to undress.

C’est la vie…

The Japanese village was gone and now Jay found himself in a gritty Los Angeles ninety years in the future. It wasn’t exactly like Blade Runner, but it was not a world anybody wanted to live in — the streets were grimy, the people dirty, and it looked more like Saigon in the ’60s than L.A. a hundred odd years past that. It was very noisy, crowded, and it stank of something Jay couldn’t identify exactly — like some combination of mold, dust, synthetic lube, and sweaty humanity.

It gave Jay some hope that maybe — maybe — he could still find this guy. A true pro — not one just with experience in VR and with rascaling scenarios, but one who was used to playing cat and mouse with the police — would not still be in this scenario. A true pro would have bounced once, twice, three times already, leaving no trail for Jay to follow.

Jay grinned bitterly and shook his head. A true pro, he realized, wouldn’t have done that at all. No, he would have simply ended the scenario, unjacking and leaving VR entirely, and giving Jay absolutely no way to track him.

But if this guy wasn’t a pro, if he wasn’t smart enough — or scared enough — to bail, this would be a nice place to hide. Who’d want to come here looking for you?

And Jay had one other small hope to cling to: He knew what he would have done in the guy’s place. Even knowing the smart thing, Jay would have stayed, playing with his chaser, confident in his own abilities.

He already knew this guy wasn’t as good as Jay Gridley. No one was, after all. But he could hope the guy was every bit as confident.

Ahead of him on the street, two men who looked to be in their early fifties were talking about some disaster. The taller man was dressed in an orange coverall with some kind of high-tech sandals that flashed red and blue diodes with each step; the second man wore a silky cape over shorts, and what looked like sprayed-on booties.

“—Ivan Noskil Aisee was just outside the Red Zone when the comet smashed into Oakland,” Booties said. “He dropped round yesterday and talked about it.”

“Terrible thing,” Sandals said. “So many people.” He said it as if he was talking about a fender-bender on the freeway.

“Crater was almost a hundred miles in diameter. Anybody within that range was vaporized immediately. Outside that, for another hundred miles, you got killed several times — the heat wave from the fireball fried you where you stood, the earthquake shook your building down, the ejecta buried it all, and the wind blew anything still standing on top of the mound flat.”

“Could have been worse,” Sandals said.

“Yeah, how?”

“Could have hit here.”

“I grok that.”

Jay shook his head. He did science-fiction and fantasy scenarios now and then, though he preferred to avoid the stuff with dragons and trolls and wizards and all. Too easy.

Jay had seen his quarry move, and he had a handle on what he’d look like, no matter what disguise he adopted here. And he was close, Jay was sure.

He rounded a corner and saw some kind of street theater. A magic show, and a gory one — somebody was lopping arms and legs off three people, blood flying everywhere, but the crowd — and the victims — were all laughing. It was a pretty good trick, Jay thought.

“I’m new here,” Jay said to a woman who looked as if she had been tattooed and surgically altered to look like a two-legged cat. She had feline features, body hair so thick it looked like pale gray fur, for God’s sake, and save for that, wore no clothes. “What is going on?”

“Public Vengeance,” the cat-lady said. “The guy with the sword, his cube was retinal-burned by those three. He gets to kill them any way he wants.”

“Why are they laughing if he’s killing them?”

She stared at him as if he had turned into a giant cockroach. “Why wouldn’t they be? How far away are you from, Dizzy?”

Jay shook his head again. Not a magic trick, and he didn’t understand anything she had said. Apparently retinal-burning was bad, whatever that was. Definitely not a world he’d want to inhabit.

Jay moved off, scanning the crowd. Too much time had passed. Seurat had delayed too long in giving up the code. He was starting to lose what little hope he had of finding his quarry.

Wait. There, ahead, on the fringe of the crowd, watching the killings… there he was! A short, very Chinese-looking man in his late twenties, laughing at the gore.

The time for finesse was past. Jay sprinted toward the man as fast as he could. The guy didn’t see him until Jay was three feet away. Before he could do more than blink, Jay was on him. He grabbed him, whipped his arm around the man’s neck, and applied a triangle-choke, shutting off the carotid blood supply to his brain. The guy struggled, but after a few seconds, he went limp, out cold.

“You’re mine, now, sucker!”

Figuratively, anyway.

Thorn said, “You’re sure.”

“No question, Boss. But Chang will pass the watcher on to his security people, if he hasn’t already, and the Chinese will beat us to him. I’m trying to hold him off with promises of gear and programs he can’t get over there, but I don’t know how long that will work. He’ll have to give the guy up sooner or later and they’ll grab him.”

“Maybe not.” Thorn waved his hand over his virgil, moving his fingers in a command sig. “Call General Hadden, Priority One. Patch him into the holoproj on my desk.”

The connection took all of three seconds, and General Hadden appeared over the desk in three-dee at quarter-scale.

“Commander. You have something for me?”

“Yes, sir. Jay Gridley has the ID on the computer hacker.”

“Outstanding.”

“The problem, sir, is that the man is Chinese, and in Macao, China, at the moment. And the local authorities will likely have his ID fairly soon.”

“Give me his name and information,” Hadden said.

“We have people in Macao?” Jay asked.

“Son, these days, we have people everywhere.”

“This could be tricky,” Thorn began.

“Not in the least. We aren’t going to let the Chinese get their hooks on this guy — he knows too much about us.”

“I’m uploading the file now,” Jay said.

“Good job,” Hadden said. “We’ll let you know how it goes. Hadden out.”

The image disappeared.

“So that’s it? We have some M.I. ops or spooks over there who drop by and collect this guy Shing and what? Somehow sneak him out of the country and back here?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, but, yeah, I expect something like that. Maybe they debrief him there, but I don’t think they want to leave him in Macao to tell stories to the Chinese.”

Jay nodded.

“Of course, this is just the first part of it,” Thorn said.

“Huh?”

“We know who he is and, pretty soon, probably how he did it, thanks to you. But the big question is… why did he do it? That’s what we really need.”

Jay blinked, and Thorn realized he probably had never even considered that part of it. That was the thing about technical people — turn them loose on a problem and they could move heaven and earth to solve it, but they sometimes didn’t see the big picture.

Somebody had attacked the U.S. military computer system and done bad things to it. You found out who so you could find out why. Otherwise, what was to stop the brains behind it from trying again? You had to get to the source.

If Hadden’s people got to the guy before the Chinese did, Thorn was pretty sure this fellow Shing would tell them what they wanted to know. Once upon a time, the United States would have played it differently. These days, whatever it took to protect the country was what got done. Scary, in some ways, but it made would-be terrorists realize that being captured by Americans when you were a danger to them was not going to be a walk in the park anymore.