Springboard (20 page)

The stupid-Frenchman accent had vanished. His English was now as crisp as an icicle at thirty degrees below zero, with barely a trace of any accent.

Aha! Shades of the Tennessee chess champion!

Seurat said, “I understand you have some familiarity with VR?”

Some familiarity?
Jay wanted to stand and spit on the man. Which was, of course, exactly why the man had said it.
Don’t let him get your goat, Jay.

“Yes, I have some small knowledge of it,” said Jay, thinking,
More in my little finger than in your entire programming team.
“Perhaps we can help train your people to discover what went wrong. After all, the U.S. did invent VR, and not everyone has the same understanding.”

“Or perhaps we might show you a way to keep your military’s very expensive war scenarios from going into the toilet?”

Seurat smiled, his expression as bland as Jay’s.

Oh, he wanted to play?

“I don’t expect we need any help there. I’m on the trail of the perpetrator. Only a matter of time until I get him.”

“Time is money, is it not?”

Jay smiled. The man was smooth. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

Seurat shook his head, and the smile, this time, seemed genuine. “Mr. Gridley, I will acknowledge that you are better than I, better than any of our people when it comes to chasing VR criminals and terrorists. And that I am an arrogant Frenchman and you have put me in my place. Now that we have both waved our weenies at each other, perhaps we can get past the posturing
merde
and down to business?”

Despite himself, Jay had to laugh. The guy had it nailed. Score a point for him.

“Go ahead, Mr. Seurat.” He pronounced the name correctly this time. “I’m listening.”

Seurat continued. “Our most recent incursion was just a few hours ago, when a VR dragon entered one of our shared-space utopias and began attacking our citizens.”

“A dragon?”

“Oui.
I was sent a copy of the attack from one of our VR security monitors on my way to Washington. Here is a link to a secure CyberNation storehouse where a copy has been set aside for you.”

He handed Jay a slip of paper with a VR address on it.

The form of the dragon might add weight to the clue he’d uncovered at the VR saloon. Jay looked at the address and nodded.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” he said, then added, “but I may need unrestricted access to your network.”

The unasked question hung in the air.

The Frenchman seemed to reach a decision, and nodded to himself.

“I shall see that you are allowed whatever access you need, Mr. Gridley.”

Jay nodded. That was true, the guy had just made a big decision.

Jay made a decision of his own. “Call me Jay,” he said.

Seurat nodded. “And I am Charles. I will be at the Watergate until tomorrow morning. Please contact me if you have any trouble with network access.”

“The Watergate,” said Jay. “Of course.” He smiled. This time Seurat smiled back at him.

Jay didn’t like CyberNation, but he had to give Seurat points for style. And balls.

He wasn’t sure he’d be able to help the virtual nation, nor even if he wanted to help it, but he was certainly going to enjoy walking through their systems while he tried.

Kent attended to his paper- and e-work, always a bigger part of his job than he liked. When he couldn’t put it off any longer, he would just plow into the requisition forms, assorted order-postings, and such, and make an attempt to catch up on his perpetual backlog. Much as he hated it, there were times when he had to get into the grind.

While deep in the minutiae of a report on uniform grades and current in-house stocks of same, his computer
pinged.
For a moment, he didn’t recall what that meant; then it came to him: It was a searchbot attention-sig.

He had the system set up for voxax, so he said, “Searchbot report.”

The file on uniforms collapsed and shrank as if being sucked down a drain, leaving a small icon in the bottom of the computer screen. The bot’s report appeared in its place, and the bot started to read it aloud in a voice that reminded Kent of a particularly boring professor whose course Kent had once taken at the War College. “Stop vocal,” he said. He could still read.

The report, which on the face of it seemed innocuous enough, was about a classical guitar competition in, of all places, Lincoln, Nebraska. The solo finals were being held this coming Saturday at seven in the evening, and would consist of four contestants. Their names were Emile Domenicio, Sarah Pen Jackson, Richard Justice, and Phillip Link.

None of these names meant anything to Kent.

The listed programs included works by Bach, Rivera, Barrios, Sor, Scarlatti, Berkeley, and Pujol, also names that, until recently, would mostly have meant little to him. But, since the operation in which the Georgian hired killer, one Eduard Natadze, had managed to screw up Kent’s initial fieldwork for Net Force, the colonel had made it his business to learn about classical guitars and the music associated with them. That was because Natadze had been, by all reports, a talented amateur classical guitarist. That was in addition to his day job: strong-arm and hit man for the late Samuel Walker Cox, a rich man who’d once been a Soviet spy.

Natadze was a man who had beaten Kent at every turn, always a half step ahead, and who had escaped. Oh, how that had rankled.

It was still impossible for Kent to think about it without building a head of steam that threatened to blow his head off. Abe Kent flat did not like to lose.

The case was officially closed—there had been some high-level sweeping under the rug, for political and financial reasons—but Kent hadn’t just smiled and let it go. He might not be able to spend any official energy on it, but he hadn’t quit looking.

A few seachbots that kept eyes open for material concerning classical guitar music and instruments didn’t cost anything, and there was always the hope something might pop up that would be useful.

Offhand, he couldn’t see what it was here, other than the most general anything-classical connection.

But, at the bottom of the scroll, there was a notation that several luthiers would be on hand for a showing of their classical instruments. One of these guitar-builders was Otto Bergman, who, according to the article, hadn’t shown his works in public for more than three years.

Bergman. Kent nodded at the name, remembering it.

When they had been searching for Natadze and had a general idea about him, before they had known specifically who he was, they’d been cross-checking guitar-makers who specialized in concert-quality instruments. They’d eventually run the hit man’s home address to ground this way, by backtracking an instrument he’d bought from a world-class maker in California, a guy named Bogdanovich.

There had been a mysterious explosion at Natadze’s house shortly thereafter, and that instrument, along with several others, had been destroyed. A shame, that. The official line was that Natadze had done it, but Kent had never quite accepted that—a guy who spent that much on guitars and who loved to play them would have pulled them out before he blew the house up.

Later, after the investigation had been pretty much shut down, Jay Gridley had found that Natadze had another guitar on order, which, at the time, had been several months away from completion. This particular one was being built by Otto Bergman, who lived in Colorado, Kent recalled.

Naturally, Natadze hadn’t been stupid enough to send in a new address to take delivery of his guitar, even though it had set him back about eight grand, if Kent’s memory was accurate. That would be a dead end, except that Kent had an idea that if somebody wanted a handmade instrument bad enough to pay eight thousand dollars for it, he might try to find a way to collect it.

Natadze was on the run, and it would be stupid of him to show up at Bergman’s virtual or real door with cash in hand asking for the guitar made for his pseudonym—he’d have to assume that Net Force had made that connection, he was too smart not to figure that.

But Bergman still had that guitar, because Net Force had paid him the five thousand dollars Natadze still owed on it, and told him to hang on to it. Kent assumed that Natadze knew Bergman still had the guitar, but not that Net Force had paid the tab on it—though he would not be surprised if Natadze had figured that out, too. Nobody had ever called for it, and Kent hadn’t really expected that anybody would, but it had been the only bait they’d had for a trap, weak as it was.

Kent stared at the guitar competition notice. Natadze couldn’t buy the guitar he’d wanted, not under his name, nor the phony handle he’d used, but if old Otto was showing his wares at a public place for the first time in years, there was no reason Natadze couldn’t just walk up and try to buy one on the spot. He liked the man’s work enough to have put up three thousand bucks against eight, and he hadn’t gotten anything for it.

A man strolls up to your display, nods at the guitars.

Put it in the case, sir, I’ll take it
. . . .

Order anything by mail or the web, there were ways to track you and find out where you were—credit cards, phone numbers, delivery services. Walk up in person, give the salesman a phony name and a sheaf of clean bills, and there was no trail, no way to trace you, or even know you’d
been
there, unless you happened to walk in front of a surveillance cam and somebody bothered to look at the image.

Given the tens of thousands of cams available to Homeland Security, and the millions of images that they provided, the chances of coming across somebody like Natadze again without real specific places to look were slim and snowball.

It would be a smart move, cash and carry, and low-risk, especially if you had any idea the search for you had been effectively shut down months ago.

Kent leaned back his chair. Natadze apparently had enough money so that a few thousand dollars wasn’t worth risking his freedom over. But more than the money itself, the passion Natadze felt for his music might make a guitar like this something to take a chance on. And besides, from what Kent had learned about the man, he might be the kind of guy who, once he set his mind on something, kept going until he got it. And it wasn’t as if they had anything else that would lead to him. . . .

Kent considered it. It was a reach, a very long shot, but not a costly one. The competition was a few days away, and things were quiet here. It would be on a weekend, too, so he’d be on his own time. And there were a lot of military aircraft in the air on any given day. More than one branch of the service owed him a favor or two, not to mention that he was back in the Corps now. He could snag a flight heading that way, take in a classical guitar competition, and browse the luthier’s display afterward, couldn’t he? It wasn’t like he had a hot date this Saturday, or anything else on his plate he needed to worry about.

And if Eduard Natadze showed up looking for a new guitar?

Boy, wouldn’t that be worth the trip?

Locke had spent four days in and out of a motel not far from Net Force Headquarters at Quantico. It had been a productive time. Seurat had stayed another day in D.C., then gone home, and Locke had stuck around and done research, a bit of social engineering, and had learned some disturbing information.

None of which was nearly as disturbing as what was happening in his room right at the moment. . . .

In his late twenties, Locke had had a paramour whose family had inherited a membership in Hong Kong’s Empire Gun Club. The club was made up of well-to-do Brits, ex-pats, and wealthy Chinese who could afford the five-thousand-pound-a-year membership fee. You didn’t even have to own a gun to use the place—there was an incredible variety of weapons locked away at the main range that they would allow members to shoot.

The woman with whom Locke had been having a professional liaison, Rowena, was fifty-something, well-made, and enjoyed firing off various handguns three or four times a month. She also took it upon herself to teach Locke all about the things: not only how to aim and shoot them, but how to take them apart, the differences between pistols and revolvers, the strengths and weaknesses of the different calibers, and a wide range of ballistic and other information. Locke had shown a professional interest—Rowena got very passionate after a session at the range, and she liked to slake her excitement in bed—but he hadn’t thought he would ever have much use for the ability to fire a pistol accurately.

Back in his days in the street gangs, it would have been useful, for those rare times when guns came out. Even in Hong Kong twenty-five years ago, handguns had been easy enough to come by, if you had enough money. But they were bad for business. Most of the boys who ran with Locke used their fists, sometimes augmented with clubs, knives, or even hatchets, but rarely firearms.

In the days before the English pulled out, the police, who might not raise an eyebrow if two rival gangs thumped each other bloody and filled up a local hospital, took a dim view of anything that might threaten tourists. A stray bullet that wounded a rich visitor from Japan would mean a lot of street criminals would be spending time in jail until the police sorted it out.

Many of the gang members had picked up odd bits of Chinese martial arts—kung fu,
wushu
—along the way. The town was thick with old Chinese men who danced those dances, and the techniques that worked on the street were passed along to fellow members. Locke was no Bruce Lee, but he could handle himself, and he’d never played with guns until he’d met Rowena.