Changing of the Guard

  “List facial feature matches, normal tolerances.”

  A pair of grids showing sizes blossomed, one under each image. The computer brought the two grids together into one image in the middle. All the features that were plus or minus a millimeter lit in flashing red for a beat, then locked. There were twelve matches of the eighteen factors scanned.

  Same size nose, same size right ear, same distance between pupils, same ratio of forehead to ear height to chin angle . . .

  Thorn didn’t need to go any further. Once you hit five major facial points, it was either the same guy or his twin brother, and Thorn didn’t think that was likely.

  This was the guy who had bugged Jay’s car, shot him, and who had killed the Russian spy. Thorn was sure of it.

  “Ha!” he said. “You are mine, pal!”

  Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be that easy. He searched the rest of the file, but there was no obvious way to identify the man—at least none that the Super-Cray had been able to come up with. The Cadillac in the foreground blocked the bottom of the car the shooter had been in, so there was no license plate visible. No other images of that car were in the traffic cam, and if the Cray hadn’t seen him elsewhere in its strain, then it wasn’t like a set of human eyes would do any better.

  “Print images,” he said.

  Thorn passed out hard copies of the holographs to General Howard, Colonel Kent, and Lieutenant Fernandez.

  “This is the guy?” Howard said.

  Thorn nodded. “I believe so, yes. What’s the word on Jay?”

  Fernandez said, “He’s checked himself out of the hospital and gone home. We have guards watching the house. Saji says he’s planning to head back into VR and start looking.”

  Thorn frowned. “VR? I would think the doctors would want him to stay out of that for a while.”

  Howard nodded. “They do, but Jay’s more stubborn than they are.”

  Thorn said, “I’ll call him and pass this along when we’re done. “I’ve run the driver’s license databases from all fifty states through the mainframe. The Super-Cray is checking all military photo records, current passports, and federally incarcerated prisoners—nothing yet. NCIC and CopRec databases are matching the image through local and state jail and prison systems, and that will take a while even with big crunchers. If he’s in the system, we’ll find him. Eventually.”

  “You want us to go out on the streets looking?” Fernandez asked.

  Thorn smiled. “The regular FBI is doing that already. They’ve got agents flashing these pictures in the vicinity of the spy store, the area where Jay was shot, and in the dead Russian’s neighborhood.”

  “Good. At least that’ll give them something to do,” Fernandez said. “What’s this on his fingernails?”

  Thorn frowned. “What?”

  Fernandez pointed at the picture. “Looks like he is wearing nail polish on his right hand, see?”

  The picture was too small to see more than a little gleam.

  Thorn tapped the computer console on the conference table, called up the ATM image, and had it focus on the right hand—the left was behind him and out of sight. The computer enlarged and enhanced the hand.

  A little fuzzy, but sure enough, it looked like the guy had fairly long fingernails, neatly manicured, and they did seem awfully shiny. Kind of an odd, slanted shape, angled to one side. That didn’t mean anything to Thorn, though.

  “What’s the other hand look like?” Kent said.

  “Can’t see it,” Howard said. “Miz Halter Top there is blocking it.”

  Thorn called up the other picture, in the car. The man’s left hand was on the car’s steering wheel, at about ten o’clock. He had the computer magnify and enhance the image. It was grainy, not as sharp as the ATM image of the right hand, but it appeared as if the nails on that hand were much shorter and duller. Odd . . .

  “He’s a guitarist,” Kent said.

  “What?” Thorn said.

  “I have a nephew, in Tucson, Arizona, my sister’s oldest son, who teaches music at the local U. He plays classical guitar, and that’s what his hands look like. Nails on his right hand are long, polished, and angled, and the ones on his left are clipped short—it’s how you play the instrument.”

  The others looked at him.

  “You pluck the strings with your nails, but if you have long nails on the other hand, the strings buzz when you fret them—at least that’s what my nephew told me.”

  “So maybe he’s a country-western guy, or bluegrass or folk music player,” Fernandez said. “Even a rock star.”

  Kent said, “Could be, but rock stars mostly flat-pick, and acoustic guitars have steel strings. Fingernails simply don’t hold up against those, so those guys wear curved finger-picks or have fake nails. Classical guitars have nylon strings.”

  “How do you know all this?” Thorn asked.

  “When I was stationed outside Atlanta, one of my sergeants was a serious blues guitarist. I used to go and listen to him play at local clubs, and I picked up a few things here and there.”

  “And you remembered it?” Julio asked.

  Kent looked at him. “Not everybody older than you is automatically senile, Lieutenant.”

  “No, sir,” Fernandez said. “Point demonstrated and taken.”

  General Howard grinned.

  “Does this help us?” Kent asked.

  Thorn nodded. “Absolutely. If nothing else, it’s another place to look. And something tells me there are not a lot of classical guitarist hit men around.”

  Washington, D.C.

  Jay sat in the command chair of the Deep Flight V, and stared out at the inky black water over two miles below the surface of the ocean.

  He tapped instructions on the keyboard and the deep-sea submersible tilted to the right—starboard—and headed toward an odd-looking pile of silt. At this depth there wasn’t much moving except him. Vaguely nautical-sounding music played out over the stereo, and there were odd creaks and groans from the structure around him caused by intense pressure from the ocean.

  Except that he just didn’t feel it. He wasn’t there. It wasn’t real.

  He frowned and shook his head. I was sure this would work.

  Even as he thought it, he knew that it wasn’t true. He’d wanted it to work, but he hadn’t really believed it would.

  He sat in the media room of the apartment he and Saji lived in, the 270-degree panorama projection screens at one end of the room lit up with images from his VR simulation. He was looking for a Spanish treasure fleet lost in the late 1500s. But when he leaned back, he could feel the upholstery of the chair, and hear the purr of the ventilation system. He even thought he could hear Saji rattling around in the kitchen, though that could be his imagination.

  He frowned again.

  You’re going to have to do it, Gridley.

  After spending subjective months inside his head, in a world similar to VR but not as controlled, he found that he was loathe to leave reality. No, more than that. He was afraid—if only a little bit—to leave reality. He knew you couldn’t get trapped in VR. It just wasn’t possible. But then he’d always believed that you couldn’t get trapped inside your own head, either.

  He’d devised a non-VR metaphor to break the code that had put him in the hospital. He’d built a simulation he could run from a flatscreen, a remotely operated vehicle sim that searched the ocean floor while he sat in his desk. He’d been hopeful that it might work, that it would let him wait a while before going back into artificial reality.

  But it just didn’t do the job. Not even close.

  So he’d taken the next step, programmed the media room for near-full VR immersion, and created a sim that put him inside a submarine. That worked better. He was more engaged. But it still was not enough.

  No, not nearly enough.

  Jay’s edge, his best trick, was using all of his senses in VR. Limiting himself to vision only, or even audio and visual, was like cutting off his arms or legs. It felt wrong. r />
  He took a deep breath and saved his location before killing the sim. He stared at the VR gear hanging on the rack, feeling a slight chill.

  Can’t be a VR jock unless you do VR, Jay, said a voice in his head. Was he ready to give it all up? Not go back because he was afraid?

  No.

  Besides, he had to find the guy who had done this to him. Before he came back and found a way to put Jay back inside his own head permanently.

  He called up several research databases and began to construct what he needed. He took his time, writing code segments that added to the reality of the VR, making it more detailed than necessary. One of the things he’d realized from his experience was that most VR wasn’t as good as his unconscious—even his.

  But after a while he realized he was just stalling.

  “Saji,” he called out. “I’m going in.”

  “I know.” Her voice was faint from the kitchen, but he smiled at the sound. She knew. She always knew. And she’d be there to help him if somehow, someway he got into trouble. Not that he would, but . . .

  He closed the file window and pulled his stims off the rack. The movement was familiar and practiced, and within seconds he was ready to jack in. He reached inside his desk drawer and got a large binder clip. He pried it open and clamped it on the loose flesh behind and above his left elbow.

  Ow.

  It didn’t hurt too much, but the pressure was there. He jacked in and suddenly found himself on the floor of the ocean.

  It was cold and dark. He looked down, pointing some of the bright LED lamps on his modified Mark 27 Navy diving helmet at the ground, and watched his feet sinking into the muck. He adjusted his buoyancy so that he was just touching the surface.

  He’d forgotten to breathe. He inhaled sharply, feeling a push into his lungs from the flow amplifier in the helmet. He nearly coughed, which wouldn’t have accomplished much, except to push more of the Perfluorocarbon fluid filling the helmet out of his lungs just a little faster.

  The fluid he was breathing made diving at this depth a little easier, because it didn’t compress the same way a gas would. Although it still hadn’t been approved for general use, military and special research units all over the world had started using Perfluorocarbon fluid for deep dives once they’d solved the carbon dioxide removal and inertia problems.

  Weird.

  He felt like he should be choking, but he had plenty of air, didn’t feel faint at all.

  The silt pile he’d identified earlier was just ahead on the right. Jay activated the deep-dive Sea-Doo seascooter he’d brought with him, and it pulled him toward the pile of silt.

  As he neared it, he could see that it seemed to be regularly shaped, which gave him hope; the regularity of man-made shapes was a big part of finding salvage in the sea.

  He cut the forward motion of the seascooter and let it hang in the water. Green and red lights circled it, so he could find it at this depth, even if his suit lights went out.

  The cold dug at the suit, trying to get in.

  His left arm was still feeling clamped, and he had a moment where he knew he was in his own home. For that moment, everything seemed artificial before he suspended his disbelief and let himself come back to the VR scenario as his baseline reality.

  He shook his head. He was still fighting this, as bad as a first-timer exploring the near edge of VR.

  Jay let himself sink toward the silt pile, careful to move slowly. He wasn’t just looking for lost treasure; he was searching for a specific gold bar from a specific sunken chest—one that was shaped like an octagon. Part of a shipment of Incan gold intended for Spanish royalty, the conquistadors had chosen the mold shape to distinguish it from gold being brought back from Mexico.

  Of course he wasn’t really looking for gold at all. That was just the VR equivalent. He was really hunting for the man who’d shot him.

  The metal detector built into his boots signaled a positive. There was metal down there, all right.

  He touched down on the sea floor and took a few seconds to look around. He’d done a good job on this—there were little eddies of water moving the silt slightly, tiny, ugly lichen-like things, and a very real feeling of desolation.

  He reached for the pain from the binder clip on his arm again, and suffered a slight disorientation.

  He was down.

  He let his feet and then his ankles sink into the silt, and before long found himself up to his knees.

  Whoa, there . . .

  He adjusted his buoyancy again, and once he’d stopped, he reached slowly into the silt pile. He could feel something hard in there, and heavy. He pulled it out with both hands, and saw that it was a gold bar.

  But not the right one.

  He let it fall behind him and reached in again. There were more bars in there, but he couldn’t tell them apart.

  The binder clip.

  He stopped moving. If he removed the binder clip he’d be able to focus on the gold bars, and might be able to find just the right one. But of course, that would remove any connection to the outside world.

  Now that I’ve moved some of the bars, I might lose this spot.

  He’d been in such a hurry to get this over with, and so focused on the details, he hadn’t built in the functionality to stop mid-program; no save point.

  How bad do I want to do this?

  He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Cut off from visual, it was easier to reach over and pull the clamp off his arm. He let it drop, and imagined he could hear it clatter to the floor of his office.

  Then he opened his eyes and looked at the silt pile again.

  The VR seemed clearer and sharper than it had before. He reached into the muck again and fished around, feeling bar after bar of Spanish treasure. Only now, he could feel their shapes.

  Rectangle, rectangle, rectangle . . .

  Jay kept it up, enjoying the feel of the soft muck and the hard contrast provided by the gold.

  Man, I’m good.

  So when he found it, one slightly differently than the rest, larger, heavier, and shaped like an octagon, he was already grinning.

  He pulled the bar out and shook the accumulated muck of over four hundred years off of it.

  Gotcha!

  He felt pretty good about this. Of course, he knew he’d had something to prove. Being shot was bad enough, but it was how he had felt just before the gun had gone off that bothered Jay the most: He’d been terrified. Worse, after being stuck inside his own head, he had been afraid to go back into VR—him, Jay Gridley!

  Yeah, well that was then. This was now!

  And now, Jay had vengeance to inflict.

  Now to call and let everybody know.

  He routed the Com to the office through his virgil, to make sure it was properly scrambled, and logged into a VR conference room at HQ. It only took a few minutes for Thorn to get the crew together and call him back.

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  “Okay, Jay, we’re here.”

  Jay shifted into VR, and found himself sitting in the conference room at the virtual table with Thorn, Howard, Kent, and Fernandez.

  Jay said, “I got the guy.”

  Thorn said, “You sure?”

  “Positive, Boss.”

  “Run it down for us.”

  Virtual Jay tapped a control on his virtual flatscreen. The images of the man they believed to be the man who’d shot him and later killed a suspected Russian spy appeared and floated holographically over the tabletop. A ’proj within a VR, nice.

  “We came up empty on matches from any official government sites—no driver’s license or check-cashing ID, no service record, nothing from the passport folks, jails, prisons, like that. So either the guy hasn’t got any records there, or he’s wearing a disguise that hides enough facial features that the Cray can’t tag him. You might be able to tell, but the computer can’t.”

  “That seems stupid of the computer,” Julio said.

  Jay grinned. “Said the
man who hates the things with a passion. It has to do with how a machine looks at something, which is different than how people do. You see a brand new Corvette tooling through an intersection, even if you’ve never seen it before, and you can’t read the name, and even if it isn’t the same size or design as last year’s model, you still know it’s a ’vette, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “How?”

  “Because it looks like a ’vette.”

  “Right, to you. There are design elements that give it away. But if the car is longer, lower, has slightly different angles, a computer matching it to last year’s model might not make the connection. It depends on what you give it for reference. Open the tolerances, factor in silhouette profile, and then maybe it does, or maybe it offers up the nearest match, like a search engine might give you. But if you give it last year’s stats and tell it to match, it will miss the new car.”

  “So you’re telling me I’m better than a computer,” Julio said. “I already knew that.”

  Jay grinned but let it pass. “In facial recognition software, you have numbers. Put a blob of mortician’s putty on the earlobes or the top curve, and the ears aren’t the same size anymore. Polarizing glasses hide eye color and spacing, and part of the nose. Plugs can make the nostrils wider. If you comb your hair down, you can screw up the forehead sizing. A thick moustache and beard hides the chin and lips. On and on—anybody who knows what the computer looks for can get around it. We have to assume this guy knows that. Whatever the reason, he isn’t in the system where we’ve looked.”

  “But . . . ?” Thorn said.

  “But the guitar thing was the key. There aren’t that many classical guitarists in the country, relatively speaking—I’m talking hundreds of thousands, and that includes everybody from guys who make a living doing it to kids taking their first lesson.”

  “Only hundreds of thousands?” Howard said.

  “When it comes to computer work, that’s nothing,” Jay said. “Google or Gotcha! can scan what? Three, four million webpages in fractions of a second. And we’ve got better hardware.”

  Howard shook his head. He wasn’t a big computer fan either, Jay knew.