Springboard

3

Thorn was in the gym, doing what he often did when life got more complex than he liked — practicing his fencing. The exercises were familiar, comfortable, and worked best when you just did them and didn’t think about them. Which was pretty much the way it worked in a real fencing bout, too. Thought was simply too slow. The hand was quicker than the eye, it was true, and the blade was quicker than the mind. In fact, in all the years Thorn had been fencing, he had only ever met one guy who claimed to be able to process each action on the strip as — or before — he made it. Thorn didn’t doubt the guy, but he’d never understood how he could do that.

Right now, Thorn was working on a basic footwork drill: lunge, recover; step, lunge, recover, retreat; step, step, lunge, recover, retreat, retreat; and so on. When he’d first started, his goal was to be able to take ten steps, lunge, recover, and then retreat those same ten steps. These days he went for the entire length of the fencing strip, or piste. The idea was to end up exactly where you started. It developed footwork and form on lunges, and also helped with strength, speed, and smoothness.

He gave up after a while. There was just too much going on inside his head to completely let go of it. The exercise was helping, but not enough. He left the strip and went over to an area of the gym where he’d hung several golf balls on strings set at different heights. He began attacking, picking a particular ball and then throwing attacks of varying complexity, from simple lunges to compound attacks involving bastinadoes and ballestras, each one ending with a strike on the golf ball he’d selected.

Another basic exercise, this was aimed solely at the épéeist, and could greatly improve point control, among other things.

He hit each golf ball three times, and then quit, more frustrated than relaxed. He just could not keep his concentration. Too much to think about. Like sleep on a restless night, the more he reached for that no-mind state, the further it retreated.

When he’d taken this job, it hadn’t been a step up, insofar as money or his career went. Far from it, in fact, but that didn’t matter. He was rich enough from his software creations that he didn’t need to work another day in his life. He had taken the job as a personal challenge, and as a way of offering something to his country in return. Not a choice a lot of boys growing up on the reservation would ever have.

But now? With the military taking over Net Force, there would be changes coming. They might say they would leave it alone, but Thorn knew better. The more hierarchy in an organization, the more it had to make things fit. If the military just barged in and said this was how things were going to be, like it or lump it, they’d find themselves holding an empty sack. The people in Net Force who ran things were all adepts — any of them could bail and have another job lined up before their chairs got cold, and even the military, which wasn’t always the most forward-thinking of organizations, had to know that. Hardware was easy; keeping people who knew how to run it right was not so easy.

That was one of the first lessons Thorn’s grandfather had taught him about hunting: Tromp in too heavily, you spooked the game.

So, yeah, they’d leave things alone to begin with. Except for that edict to shift priorities so their problem came first, there probably wouldn’t be much to look at, insofar as changes went.

But it was coming, Thorn knew. He had run his own company, and had been around the block a few times. It might be subtle at first, but there would be policy changes rolling down the pike, and one day the players at Net Force would look up and realize they weren’t in Kansas anymore…

The question was, what was Thorn going to do about it?

For the moment, the easiest choice would be just wait and see. He could type up his resignation and be ready to leave if things went sour.

That was the easy way. But he had a responsibility that he needed to at least try and see through; he had come here to help, and as long as he could do that without outside micromanagement, he’d stick around. That was the failing of a lot of bosses — they hired good people, but then spent too much time looking over their shoulders, poking their fingers in where they shouldn’t.

Thorn had always been a hands-off manager himself. He figured that if you laid out good money to hire an expert, you should stay out of his way and let him do his job. An unhappy worker didn’t do as good a job as a happy one, and nothing made a skilled hand unhappier than a boss who didn’t know when to shut up and mind his own business. Especially when his help made things worse…

Thorn had bought out a small software company once for less than a third what it was worth, because of that very situation. The company made a communications package, very sleek and functional, tightly written and fairly simple. The CEO, who knew less about computers than he did sales, kept coming to his programmers with demands about how to improve things. The programmers didn’t like that at all, of course; worse, when they implemented the demanded changes, the product didn’t work as well and didn’t sell as well as it had before.

Naturally, the CEO blamed the programmers for his mistakes. People started to quit, and the stock dropped. By the time Thorn got there, there were only a few of the good people left. He bought the company, fired the CEO, stripped out the things that made the product clunky, and sales went back up. Old programmers came back, the ones who were still there stayed, and everybody was better off. Well, everybody except the fired hands-on executive…

He hoped the military wouldn’t do something like that CEO, but looking at it realistically, he had to consider the possibility. And if that happened, he could either stay and fight or he could walk, but it was his bicycle they were messing with.

He smiled at the punch line of the old joke, one his grandfather had told him back on the rez when Thorn was in his teens:

“So the missionary is walking about the Indian village with the tribe’s chief, and teaching him English.

“They pass a dog. The missionary points at the animal. ‘Dog,’ he says.

“The chief nods. ‘Dog.’

“They come to a cooking fire, and the missionary points at it. ‘Fire,’ he says.

“ ‘Fire,’ the chief replies.

“As they round a teepee, they see, lying in the bushes, a naked couple making love. The missionary, embarrassed, fumbles for words. Unable to bring himself to talk about sex, he says:

“ ‘Uh… man… uh… riding bicycle… ’

“Whereupon the chief pulls an arrow from his quiver, nocks it in his bow, draws, and lets fly. The arrow hits the man in the back of the head, killing him instantly.

“Stunned, the missionary says, ‘Wh-what did you do that for?’

“ ‘Man riding my bicycle,’ the chief says.”

Thorn smiled again at the memory. He missed his grandfather. The man had been a fountain of wisdom and funnier than a busload of drunk comedians.

Well. It was his bicycle, at least for now, and it was what it was. He’d deal with it somehow.

Chang stood in the lobby of the hotel, waiting for the Canadian. There was a hint of jasmine in the air, and a murmur of voices in the background, speaking Chinese, English, and even what sounded like Italian.

The hotel, the Flowering Plum, was new, built only a year ago by a Canadian investment group. Ürümqui was a modern city, and not without a certain international flair: There were Holiday Inns, Ramada Inns, and Double Tree was considering putting up a new building. Mexican restaurants. A Starbucks.

People in the West sometimes found such things amazing — many of those who had never been here had the idea that, outside the well-known cities, China was mostly rice paddies tended by old men wearing big straw coolie hats, riding in wooden carts pulled by oxen. He could understand this — once, he had gone to Colorado, and even though he was an educated man, he had kept looking for teepees and buffalo.

Colorado did have some of those, he learned, but only for the tourists. In the same way, China still had old men in straw hats, too. More of them than the United States had bison, to be sure. Then again, China had half as many web surfers as were in the U.S., and thirty percent more than Japan.

Of course, when it came to computer commerce, China had constraints most other countries didn’t: fewer servers, more regulations, and the percentage of the population that was computer-literate was much smaller than in the U.S. China had a lot more Internet cafes and fewer private systems, but still, his job wasn’t the easiest in the world…

Admittedly, he was a good four hours away from Beijing by air, but airliners did fly here from the capital regularly, and with well over a million people, Ürümqui was hardly some sleepy village.

Chang glanced at his watch, a Seiko Kinetic. Two more minutes until the Canadian — the man had a name, it was Alaine Courier, but Chang always thought of him as “the Canadian”—was due. He’d be on time — he always was.

The reason for this visit was simple, but important. Courier had access to some cutting-edge software from America. The stuff wasn’t supposed to travel outside the U.S., but it had made it as far as Canada, and Chang wanted it in the worst way.

But this wasn’t just a simple exchange. Courier wasn’t interested in merely selling the software to Chang. No, Courier was looking to establish his business connections in China, and he wanted Chang to help him with that. Which Chang was willing to do. He was ahead of most of the hot-rodders in his country when it came to cutting edge-gear and programs, but the race never slowed. Miss a step, and you’d be behind, and that wasn’t where Chang wanted to be.

Chang knew that if he wanted to put Chinese net policing on the same relative footing as the United States had with Net Force, he needed more tools. He would get those however and wherever he could. His masters would turn a blind eye in his direction as long as he got the job done without causing them any loss of face. If he screwed up, well, that would be on his own head.

“Chang!”

There was the Canadian now. Chang smiled.

When the summons came for Thorn to drop by the Director’s office at his convenience, it was not much of a surprise. Actually, the most surprising thing about it was how long it had taken. Still, the FBI kept things on a need-to-know basis, just as so much of the government seemed to do these days. Even from their own employees.

Maybe especially from their own employees…

Thorn told his secretary where he would be, then took a stroll. It wasn’t that long a walk.

There had been a shake-up in the FBI only a couple of months past, and the former Director, a sharp woman named Allison, was no longer in charge. The new guy, Roland McClain, was a long-time friend of the current President, a former Army lawyer who’d worked in Iraq after the invasion in the early Oughts. McClain had then left and taken up tort litigation, going on to make millions suing large corporations for his clients. McClain was something of a jock — played tennis and handball and golf, was a very fit sixty, and a political animal to the core.

As soon as Thorn arrived at the new Director’s office, the assistant showed him in.

“Thomas, how are you?”

The man’s handshake was firm, but not threatening. He had a tan year-round, and lots of leathery smile wrinkles. The kind of face you’d buy a used car from, if you went by looks alone.

“Mr. Director,” Thorn said.

“Please, Thomas, call me Mac. We’re not big on formality around here, you know. Have a seat.”

Thorn sat on the couch, a comfortable, Western-style piece of furniture of distressed leather with a lot of brass tacks stuck into the woodwork.

“Do you have any idea why I needed to see you, Thomas?”

Thorn smiled. “Yes, sir, I expect so.”

McClain raised an eyebrow. “Do tell.”

“It probably has something to do with the fact that Net Force is being taken over by the military, courtesy of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and pretty soon we are all going to be Marines.”

That got his attention. McClain shook his head. “And you came by this how?”

“We are an intelligence agency, sir. We do stumble across things from time to time.”

“Would you like to be more specific?”

“Not really.”

McClain frowned.

In Washington, even more than in most places, knowledge was power, and a man who ate, slept, and breathed politics like McClain always wanted to be in the know, more so because he was the Director of the FBI. In this case, McClain didn’t have much leverage. He wasn’t going to fire Thorn, and in a very short period of time wasn’t going to be his boss any longer. At this juncture, his options were limited. McClain knew that, of course, and he knew that Thorn did, too.

Thorn said, “Does it really matter? It’s true, isn’t it?”

The Director nodded. “Yes. I fought against it — I think Net Force is better kept in civilian hands.”

For which Thorn, who was also passing familiar with politics and clout, heard: “Better kept in my hands.”

“But,” McClain continued, “I’m a long way from the top of the food chain, and the big carnivores have made a firm decision. Practically speaking, not much will change, at least to look at.”

Thorn gave a very small smile at that, but didn’t say anything.

McClain ignored it. “You’ll stay where you are,” he went on, “but instead of reporting to me, you’ll be talking to the DoD via a Marine connection. I’m not sure exactly who that will be yet, but if I had to guess I’d say it would be General Roger Ellis, who is the Corps’ Special Projects Commander at the Pentagon these days.”

Thorn nodded. This situation must have really angered McClain. Only on the job a couple of months and already they were carving away at his empire. Thorn would bet that Mac’s buddy the Prez had gotten an earful about this; obviously, it hadn’t done any good.

“You’ll be hearing from these people soon. Technically, the transfer of command won’t happen immediately, but as of now, whatever they want at DoD, you give them.”

Thorn nodded again. “Yes, sir.” Even though McClain had offered his nickname, he didn’t correct Thorn’s respectful “sir.” The man had came out of the Ivy League, and his just-one-of-the-boys routine was for show. He was not a bad guy, from what Thorn knew, but the story was, he was like a cat — dropped from anywhere, he always landed on his feet, and any business friendships were pragmatic before anything else. Not “What have you done for me lately?” but “What can you do for me now?”

“I’ll pass along whatever I hear,” the Director said. “Assuming you don’t hear it elsewhere first.”

Thorn gave the man another small and brief smile and left. It wouldn’t be that hard for him to find out about John Howard coming to visit — nobody had tried to hide it. But knowing it was Howard and being able to do anything with that was a horse of a different color. Howard was a private consultant now, not subject to Ellis’s command.

As he walked back toward Net Force HQ, Thorn rolled it around in his thoughts. Still too early to tell. He’d have to wait until he started getting calls from the DoD.

When he got back to his office, his secretary, who was on the phone, waved at him. She put the caller on hold. “General Ellis’s office for you,” she said.

Thorn smiled. “I’ll take it.”

No moss growing on the Marines…

Jay Gridley was annoyed. More than that, he was angry. He drummed his fingers on the clear plastic table in the holo room as he waited to meet the HPCMP’s liaison and thought about how irritated he was.

So it had finally happened. Net Force was moving out of the feds’ grip and into the military’s. Although Thorn hadn’t had the details, Jay knew that there had been a major systems failure during big simulations. Apparently the powers that be felt there could have been some outside cause of the crash and had been sweating blood trying to track it down. So much so that they’d arranged to take Net Force under their aegis just to make it a priority. That meant it had to be a truly huge event.

What was most irritating was, he’d had to come over here to meet someone physically for a briefing. Hadn’t they ever heard of VR and secure channels? He’d be stuck in traffic for at least an hour on the way home.

Plus, once he arrived, he had to walk the gauntlet: metal detector, explosives sniffer, bio-telltale. Had to take off the belt Saji had given him for his birthday and let it be examined by guards who let him have it back reluctantly, watching him as though they thought he planned to throttle their computer scientists with it. This on top of having to carry a smart-card badge that would set off an alarm if he went anywhere he wasn’t cleared to go, as well as an armed escort who had walked him to meet the HPCMP’s liaison and who was just across the room, waiting. It was like having a baby-sitter, and it was insulting, to say the least.

Jay knew that it had been that way at many military and government buildings since the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon, of course, and he could understand that — U.S. security had been very lax in the good old days. Unfortunately, those days were long ago and far away.

He could even agree with the heightened security measures and the extreme caution. What bothered him the most, though, was the baby-sitter. Jay was a cleared, high-security employee and had been checked seven ways to Sunday, so what was the point of putting an armed guard on him? Jay wasn’t going to do anything. He was on their side. He was one of the good guys. He was here to help them find a computer breach.

If there had even been a breach. From what Jay knew of the HPCMP’s networks, sneaking in would be tough. For the last year or so, the Department of Defense had operated under new network protocols on their high-speed internal network. These were similar to but incompatible with commercial routers and networks. Any connection to an outside network had to be translated to standard packet protocols, and every such translation point was watched very carefully. Since the system was designed only for military projects, the efficiency and incompatibility were both desirable.

All of which made the entire process he was going through now seem like closing the barn door after the cow had gotten out.

Come on, Gridley, cut them some slack.

He smiled to himself, ignoring the guard. It was true that Thorn hadn’t given him much background about Net Force’s forced move into the military, but that didn’t mean Jay didn’t have it.

Smokin’ Jay Gridley did not go walking blindly down the garden path — not when he could find out what kind of grass grew in the garden, the names of the flowers, the name of the gardener, and the pH of the soil. And he could. Several hours of trekking through cyberspace had given him the background of the HPCMP’s mission, their current projects, and the name of the man he was going to see, George Bretton.

He knew Bretton, of course — you didn’t get to be one of the top cyber-jocks in the country without bumping into those few who could run with you. Or actually, a little behind you. Bretton was good — more a specialist in simulations and Human Behavior Modeling than security — but he had some chops.

One of the things Jay had found out was that the HPCMP didn’t just do sims. They coordinated immense computing power for other uses as well — modeling of new missiles, design of new weapons and vehicles, and other R&D. If there had been a break in to their network, the potential for espionage could be serious indeed.

Okay, so maybe they had reason to be paranoid.

He glanced at his watch, which wore an old analog face — an Omega Seamaster Chronograph Professional. When you looked closer, you could see that it was a pixel job — a datastore that also doubled as a watch, the display showing any one of hundreds of styles.

And right now it was showing that he’d been waiting for fifteen minutes.

Which started him fuming again.

Cool down, Gridley.

It was another five minutes before a short, muscular man in uniform who looked like a recruiting poster walked in Bretton.

Jay tried not to let his irritation show. All the agencies were supposed to exude brotherly love these days, however their people felt.

“George — glad you could make it.”

Apparently his skills at acting were worse than he had thought, or else Bretton was just as unhappy.

“Yeah, thanks for coming, Jay.” Not much enthusiasm there. Practically deadpan.

This was great. All the hassle of getting here and the guy he came to help didn’t even want him here.

Jay wanted to sigh, but held it. This was why he liked cyberspace. What was it Saji said? Sometimes the journey of a thousand steps had to go the extra mile? He waited for a few seconds and tried to imagine how he’d feel if Bretton had been brought in to check up on Net Force security.

Not too good.

Let it go. Give the man some face.

“Yeah, well, I don’t know why they dragged me over here when they’ve got you,” he said, shrugging. “It’s not like I have a bigger hammer.”

Bretton grinned and the tension level dropped.

“Thanks, Jay, I appreciate that. The thing is, I haven’t found the problem yet, and as much as I hate to say it, I may not be able to. I’ve looked under more rocks than litter the surface of Mars.”

Hmm. If Bretton couldn’t find anything, it might be worth looking into.

“You’re sure it’s a break-in?”

“Yeah.”

Bretton tapped on the table and instantly the empty room disappeared. They were on a crowded street, packed crowds of tourists looking up into the sky where the huge flower of a nuclear fire had just begun to blossom. Everything was still; the scene frozen. The light was harsh and actinically bright, and Jay squinted to protect his eyes.

Bretton unfroze the tableau and the people began to die in slow motion, melting into shadows on the sidewalk. Buildings exploded, glass flew, and steel beams buckled and bent. There was no sound.

“You can see the simulation was going okay,” said Bretton.

Jay wondered if the man had kids. Watching the families snuffed out like candles, he felt a sense of helplessness and fear he’d never felt before. A phrase his mom used to say popped into his head. “When you love someone, they become a hostage to fortune.” He understood that now like he never had before. He had a new son.

Clinically, he noted the accuracy of the physics models. They would be the primary focus of the sim, after all. The orange-red mushroom cloud forming after the initial event was beautiful, though, in its way.

Bretton waved his hand again and things slowed down even more. The explosions expanded almost imperceptibly, feathers of flame blooming in stop motion. The 3-D imaging in the room was perfect — crystal-clear and sharp. And suddenly the scene started missing pieces. Tourist bodies disappeared, and then part of the explosion vanished, revealing blue sky. Some of the buildings went away, then the cars, and finally the remaining people and landscape, leaving nothing but darkness.

The HPCMP liaison made a motion and they were back to the moment just after the explosion, frozen again.

Jay got it immediately. The sim was so huge that it had to use the power of more than one supercomputer, each running different pieces. At real-time speed, the effect would have been like a light going off, but in bullet-time, it was visible how each piece of the network had failed — had been switched off by something.

“Can I see the background AI data?” he asked.

Bretton nodded, a look of quiet approval on his face at the question. Jay had often found it useful to impress people in their own specialties, so he’d done some studies on the background HBM and AI modeling before coming over. The code that appeared to replace the landscape was the inside of the sim model — what made it work, the physics and lighting, the object scripting.

By looking at this information, they could monitor more carefully the impact of the intruding virus.

The lines of code executed rapidly as Bretton took the speed up a notch, rolling upward like parts on a conveyer belt. And then suddenly, they started to change.

“The key modeling factors just went crazy,” said Bretton.

Within seconds errors began bringing down parts of the simulation.

Jay nodded. It was a virus all right. Someone had introduced it into the system, it had waited for the right moment, and then, pow.

Knockout.

The question was, how?

He looked at Bretton.

“I’m stumped,” the man admitted. “I’ve been all over the I/O going back for the last year, and there’s nothing. The transducer network routers haven’t sent anything across, timed or not. They’re clean.”

“Physical memory?” asked Jay. “A disk? Flashmem stick?”

“Locked out without authentication and logging,” Bretton said. “And smuggling one in or out would be… difficult.”

Jay stared at the screens, thinking. There was no other way in. But something had gotten in.

The old Sherlock Holmes adage came to mind. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

There had to be some other way.

All irritation forgotten, Jay sat down and started thinking.

A locked-room mystery. Oh, my.

This looks like a job for Jay Gridley.

He smiled.