Changing of the Guard

  Jay was alive, but the doctors didn’t know when—or if—he would come back. The man who had shot him was still at large. Witnesses had described the man and his car, but the police had not found him.

  By the time he left it was already past two A.M., and there didn’t seem to be much point in going home. He would barely have time to get to sleep before he’d have to get up and head back to Net Force HQ. Besides, he was too wired to sleep.

  Hospitals did that to him, ever since his grandfather had passed away. At the end, the old man had checked himself out of the hospital and gone home to die in his own bed surrounded by his family, but he had spent a week full of tubes and needles before he’d had enough, and Thorn had spent much of that week there with him. The smells, the look, they came back every time he had to go to one of those places.

  Halls of the dead and dying, his grandfather had called hospitals, and if he was going to die anyway, what point was there in spending large amounts of somebody’s money to do it?

  No, Thorn didn’t want to go home to an empty house, but, outside of his Net Force office, he didn’t really have anywhere else to go. Heading to his house, he opened a beer and went on-line, hoping for a distraction.

  He found one.

  His mailbox was stuffed with more than three hundred e-mails.

  He opened the first one. It, and most of the others, were from his troll.

  Wonderful.

  Rapier, the troll who haunted him, had apparently generated a repeating message that was, if unchecked, eventually going to fill Thorn’s hard drive with his drivel:

  “Hahahhaa, Thorn! Touché!”

  That was all it said, repeated fifty times per message, and continuing to come in one e-mail at a time every few minutes. If Rapier had tried to dump more than two megabytes at once, Thorn’s filters would have stopped it, but dribbling in as short e-mail with different return addresses—all false ones, Thorn was sure—the spam- and size-filters let them pass.

  Thorn took a sip of his beer and glared at the screen. Given how the rest of his day had been, he did not need this.

  He deleted the e-mails, reset his filters to stop anything from the e-mail server Rapier was using, and decided that maybe hunting this guy down and getting him tossed off his server was the least he could do.

  The basic process was fairly simple to start. First, you did the obvious check—the sender’s e-mail return address. Thorn had noted several of the ones Rapier had used, all from the same IP.

  Thorn blipped a quick message cc:ed to the addresses he’d noted. After a few seconds he got a bounce from the server, in this case, boohoo.com, that his messages were undeliverable.

  Big surprise there.

  He pulled up the troll’s most recent posting to the newsgroup and checked the header, next to the HELO sig. There was a ten-digit number, broken by dots, that identified the sending machine. Of course, that couldn’t be relied upon, since there were ways it could also be faked, but it was a place to start. Next to that was the receipt date that the ID’d server showed, followed by the routing info as the posting was shuttled into UseNet.

  Thorn logged into the Internet registries, starting with the American Registry—ARIN. From his language and spelling, Thorn figured that Rapier was an American.

  Once on the ARIN site, he ran a WHOIS search on the IP address and sure enough, the address was in the ARIN database.

  The WHOIS came up, and at least it was a legitimate addy—the inetnum, netnam, and description showed it to be a small server located outside of Chicago, BearBull.com. What he was looking for were the contacts for the IP, and there they were, two of them.

  Using his official Net Force address, Thorn fired off an e-mail to both:

  Dear Sirs,

  I am seeking your assistance in locating a client of yours who has apparently violated federal law regarding use of the Internet. I would appreciate any assistance you might render in this matter.

  He listed the particulars of the e-mail, and then he signed it, “Thomas Thorn, Commander, Net Force.”

  This was a big hammer to use. Yes, technically the troll was breaking the law—stuffing a mailbox was illegal, under the denial-of-service statutes, though hardly something Net Force was going to go after, and if the IP didn’t want to provide the information, Thorn wasn’t going to run to Legal and get a warrant. Then again, he’d probably get a reply in a day or so, and maybe—

  His e-mail program chinged! and an incoming message header appeared: From BearBull.com.

  Look at that—must be an automatic response—

  Nope, apparently the BearBull Webmaster was a night owl:

  Commander Thorn—

  Sir, our records indicate that the machine you asked about belongs to Access & Eats, a cybercafe located west of Chicago in the Oak Brook Mall, in the city of Oak Brook. The owner’s name is Dennis James McManus. . . .

  There was a phone number, e-mail address, and a webpage listed under the name, along with an offer to do anything to help Net Force that they could.

  Thorn shook his head and smiled. Well, so much for tracking down his troll. The guy was clever enough to use a public computer, and that made it a lot harder to finger him. Of course, had he been a real terrorist, Thorn could have called upon the FBI to trot field agents out to the mall to find the guy, but for a troll? No way. Not a good idea to start one’s tenure as head of a law enforcement agency by indulging in a personal vendetta. . . .

  Then again, there was nothing wrong with asking questions as a private citizen. He could drop Mr. McManus an e-mail, ask him if he had a regular customer who maybe talked about fencing. Certainly Rapier spent a lot of time on-line, he must be in and out of the cybercafe often enough so maybe somebody would have noticed him?

  As Thorn recalled, the University of Chicago had a pretty good fencing team, at least it had been back when Thorn had been competing in college. He’d gone to a tournament there once, got to the semifinals in épée before he lost to Parker King, which had been no shame, since King had gone on to win the NCAA finals and, eventually, a Bronze in the Olympics.

  Maybe somebody there knew Rapier?

  He shook his head. Say, do you know a troll who bugs people on UseNet, calls himself “Rapier?”

  For all he knew, anybody he asked could be the guy, and wouldn’t that be an unpleasant experience? Having Rapier field his call and know he had gotten to him?

  Of course, it might scare him off, getting a call from Thorn, but then again, maybe not, and he didn’t want to give the troll the satisfaction of knowing he had rattled Thorn’s cage.

  Time to give it up, Tom. You have other things to occupy your time. It’s just a troll, a pathetic man with no life. Let him stew in his own juices.

  Before he shut down, he tapped in the URL for the cybercafe’s webpage.

  The splash page came up, with a directory, and Thorn clicked on the biography for the cafe’s operator.

  Dennis James McManus was a slight, fair-skinned red-head, balding, about Thorn’s age, a serious, almost scowling expression on his face. He leaned against a dark wall, arms crossed, practically glaring at the camera.

  An unhappy man, Thorn reflected. Looked familiar, somehow, though Thorn couldn’t place him. Oh, well.

  He was about to log off, had, in fact, hit the quit button on his browser, when he noticed a word in the bio, just a quick flash as the page blinked off:

  Epée.

  Hello?

  Thorn quickly logged back on and read the bio.

  Apparently, Mr. McManus had been a collegiate fencing champion in Ohio.

  Well, well, well. How about that . . . ?

  Gotcha!

  Walter Reed Army Medical Center Washington, D.C.

  John Howard was talking to Julio when he looked up and saw Alex and Toni Michaels heading toward them.

  “Alex, Toni. I thought you were in Colorado.”

  “We almost were,” Michaels said. “We caught a flight back as soon as we heard. How is he??
??

  “Julio talked to Saji a few minutes ago—she’s in the ICU with him.”

  Fernandez nodded. “No change. He’s unconscious. The bullet apparently broke apart when it hit the windshield, and about a third of it glanced off his forehead, just above the right eye, dug a bloody groove, but did not penetrate the skull. It hit him hard enough to rattle his brain, and he is in shock. Everything else seems to be working okay, but he hasn’t come around and nobody is quite sure why.”

  Michaels nodded. “What about the guy who shot him?”

  Howard shook his head. “No sign of him.”

  “Why did he do it?” Toni asked.

  Again, Howard shook his head. “We don’t know. We’ve got some witnesses who said a car cut him off, a guy hopped out and headed for Jay. He had a gun. Jay tried to back his car away and the guy opened up on him. One shot—ballistics says it looks like a Thirty-eight Special or Three fifty-seven Magnum round, from the pieces they dug out of the car.”

  “Road rage?” Toni said.

  “Looks like,” Howard said.

  “Cops have any idea who they are looking for?”

  “A tall-short-fat-thin-blond-brunette-white-black guy,” Fernandez said. “Joe Average, wearing glasses, moustache, had a band-aid on his chin.”

  Michaels said, “Anybody thinking that maybe it wasn’t some angry commuter? Maybe somebody targeting Jay in particular?”

  Julio and Howard glanced at each other. “The thought had crossed our minds. We’ve got somebody going over Jay’s e-mail and phone log, checking on all the projects he was working on, like that. Thing is, Jay isn’t the kind of guy whose enemies pack guns—most people who’d be after him would use software at ten paces.”

  “Anything we can do to help?” Michaels asked.

  Howard shrugged. “The new Commander was here—the doctors told us all to go home, and he did. We’re running down everything we can think of now. We were just fixin’ to head out ourselves.”

  “Can we see him?” Toni asked.

  “Yeah. Check with the nurse’s station, he can have two or three people in at a time. I’m sure Saji will be glad to see you.”

  “Who’s watching your son?” Fernandez said.

  “Guru,” Toni said. “He’ll be fine.”

  Howard smiled a little. The old lady they called “Guru” was the woman who had taught Toni the martial art silat, at which she was a deadly expert. The woman had to be pushing ninety, and Howard wouldn’t want to mess with her if he had a ball bat and a knife. That little old lady could kill you with either hand and never work up a sweat.

  “We’ll go check on him,” Michaels said.

  “You need a place to stay?” Howard said.

  “Hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

  “You can stay with us. The guest room hasn’t got too much crap stored in it at the moment.”

  “Thanks, John.”

  As he watched them head for the nurse’s station, Howard found himself pleased. They didn’t have to be here. It would have been easy for them to say they hadn’t heard about it, or that they had to get settled in their new lives, that they couldn’t do anything anyhow. But that’s what friends did—when you had trouble, they came to offer their help.

  To Julio, he said, “Make sure whoever is going over Jay’s life looks real close. I want the man who did this. Before I leave, after I leave, whenever.”

  “I hear you, John. But you’ll have to stand in line behind me to have a chat with him.”

  12

  In the Forest Primeval

  Jay woke up with a headache. At least, “woke up” was the best term he could think of to describe it. It was as if he’d been dozing, only vaguely aware of his surroundings, until something brought him back to a more active mode of being.

  Weird.

  The scenario had changed—if indeed it was a scenario—the beach had given way to a dense northern forest with moss on all sides of some of the trees, huge primeval ferns, and pine needles scattered under the canopy of the great woods.

  He’d never been here before, yet he had the strangest sense that he had made everything—had seen the trees come into being, watching them sprout and grow into their huge adult forms, had seeded each bush, eroded the soil shapes in the ground, all over an immense time.

  As if he were God Himself. God with a headache.

  He stood there, zoning out, staring at the trees, each leaf a perfection of fractal form, replicating the entire tree on a small scale. He probably would have stood there all day, except the sharp stabbing pain in his head kept dragging him back to action.

  Headaches weren’t something you got in VR. Stim units only affected the sensory nerves. Pain from something inside of his head shouldn’t be possible. And even if it had been, not something he would have inflicted on himself—what would be the point?

  He frowned. A thought seemed to come close to the surface of his consciousness—something important about that. . . .

  The pain intruded on his focus, and he shook his head, letting the thought slip away. It didn’t matter why he had a headache, only that he had it.

  He was nearing the edge of panic. He could not tie down where he was: dream, VR, or . . . reality?

  He was almost certain nothing was real. The scenes changed too rapidly, days into night, trees into flowers, the beach into this forest.

  And he hadn’t felt hungry or needed to eat.

  But the headache—you just didn’t get headaches in VR.

  Unless it’s some experimental technique?

  He remembered something he’d seen in an MIT chat-room. A grad student had claimed he could generate a realistic internal pain by simultaneously stimming acupressure points while keeping surface nerves stimmed to provide a focal point for whatever location he wanted. The problem was that the sensation was entirely subjective and hard to replicate from person to person.

  Okay. Go with that idea.

  If it wasn’t real, then it had to be either VR or a dream.

  What if this were real? What if he’d . . . gone insane and was hallucinating all of what he’d seen, mixing it with reality?

  Maybe he was stumbling around in a forest somewhere, brain damaged.

  He shuddered.

  But he wasn’t a forest kind of guy, generally. How would he have gotten there?

  Another possibility occurred which was almost as terrifying: Perhaps he’d been kidnapped by one of Net Force’s many enemies and was being softened up for torture? Not particularly smart, since he couldn’t give them much except how to run computers. Most of what he did wasn’t particularly top secret—at least the process wasn’t.

  There was something about that, enemies, but he couldn’t quite reach it. . . .

  Drifting again. Keep it together, Jay.

  “Hey!” he called out. “If you want me to talk, I’ll talk! Let’s go!”

  The scene shifted suddenly, and he stood on a dock near the waterfront. He wore a black trench coat and a long red scarf. A fedora was pulled low over his eyes.

  Now what?

  He remembered this scene, though. It was from a VR module he’d used to track some of CyberNation’s money a while back.

  He looked at his hand. There was the girasol, an opal, he’d created to cloud men’s minds in the pulp-fiction-based scenario.

  But there was no one to use it on, and his mind was cloudy enough, thank you.

  He looked at the jewel for a moment. Maybe he could hypnotize himself, maybe figure out where he was. He pulled it away from his face, but it changed.

  The opal became the glittering, nickel-plated barrel of a Colt Single-Action Army revolver. He looked down at himself again and saw chaps and spurs over blue jeans. He was wearing a silver star.

  The cowboy scenario. It had to be VR. This was another one of his.

  The transition had been flawless, completely without flicker, no sense of data upload, no shimmer, a perfect cut.

  He looked up and saw that the docks had becom
e a ghost town. There was a frightening sense of bleakness, isolation. He was alone.

  He shook his head again. Even ghosts would be welcome about now—

  Wait a minute. What if I’m dead?

  He looked around at the scene and frowned.

  Shootout at the pearly gates?

  The pain behind his eyes intensified and he figured if he hurt this much he couldn’t be dead yet.

  He walked around the town looking for something—anything that would give him a thread, a clue, something that would give him an idea as to why this was all happening.

  Through the swinging doors of a saloon he saw a carpet bag on a plain wooden table. He glanced around once, then approached the bag, his spurs jangling with each step. The bat wing doors creaked behind him in the wind.

  In the carpet bag was a hardback book by Rudyard Kipling.

  A sudden, mouth-drying fear came to him. He really didn’t want to open this book. Really.

  I’ve got to know. I’ve got to find out.

  The book was an old one, with baroque, detailed color illustrations on the left side of the page at the beginning of each story.

  He flipped through the pages and stopped to look at a painting of a jungle, with thick banana plants and lush greenery surrounding dark tree trunks. The artist had done a good job of rendering: There was an almost hyper-real, photographic quality to the scene, yet the colors were reminiscent of watercolor, vivid and clear.

  As he admired it, his sense of worry grew stronger. He was staring at a portion of the jungle, a hanging vine that had been painted on a tree to the left of the illustration, when he noticed the frame of the picture grow larger, opening wider, and wider. As he stood there, amazed, the borders expanded past him, closing, swallowing him into it.

  He was in the jungle.

  And there, way in the back between two fronds, was a slice of orange color. Not the color of a fruit, but of fur.