Changing of the Guard

  But all of that was relatively easy compared to the way the data had been encoded.

  None of the 2-D codes he’d examined so far matched the ones on the zip disk label. Treating the border as four long strips of data had proven fruitless, which meant it had to be in blocks. Before he could sift it, he had to get it into the computer.

  Without orientation markers, he couldn’t tell which way the blocks ran—and to get enough data to make up an encoded sequence, he’d have to get several blocks in a row, so that he could see if it was encoded sequentially.

  To make matters worse, he wasn’t even sure that the blocks were on an axis that was parallel or perpendicular to the borders of the label. Many 2-D encoding schemes had enough error correction that they could lose up to 25 percent of their visual area and still be decoded at 100 percent accuracy. This code could have been rotated off-axis to make things really tough.

  He grinned, his tanned-and-grizzled face wrinkling. His old brown leather bomber jacket creaked as he leaned forward to stare at the gray stones. He had an urge to hum the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he refrained.

  Which way, which way . . . ?

  He stared at the mortar between the stones. Did it look newer on the right or left?

  Left.

  Carefully, he began to put his weight on the stone to the left of the entry. Slowly he increased the pressure until nearly all of it rested on the stone he’d selected.

  He enjoyed a moment’s satisfaction before the block abruptly fell out from underneath him. Jay toppled, started to fall, and lashed out with the twelve-foot bullwhip he was carrying, wrapping it around a stone outcropping on the wall nearby and yanking. The effort pulled him back to where he’d started.

  I guess it’s not to the left.

  The trap was clever—it wouldn’t trigger until a heavy weight rested upon it. If he’d been standing there with both feet, it would have been “So long, Gridley.”

  He peered over the edge of the broken-off stones—more than one had fallen, to widen the danger area—and saw nothing but blackness. But there was a hint of sound—was it hissing? Slithering? Yes, definitely, both. He couldn’t hope that the falling block had killed all the nasty wigglers down there.

  He could brute-force it—drop weights on all the stones in the room and see which ones were left, but the idea offended his sense of style.

  Someone clever had put the code together, and Jay wanted to figure out the key to the puzzle. There was a key, of course, there had to be. Any programmer who played the game this well always left a way in.

  After all, he would.

  So while he could easily run the numbers through the machine, he wanted to beat it himself.

  He took a closer look around the room. As he usually did when he created VR based on a puzzle, he’d let a freeform algorithm give substance to the puzzle pieces after supplying base parameters. This was, as he saw it, the real advantage of a VR structure—a place that could have clues, things that hadn’t been programmed consciously, to give his other senses a chance to help crack it. If he could cross the room, he’d have gotten enough blocks in a row to identify at least a part of the code.

  Think, Jay, think!

  He could go right, or angle off diagonally. . . .

  He stopped and thought for a moment about the programmer. The man was clever—he’d hidden the code in plain sight.

  But he’d hidden it on a disk about a Muslim mosque. What kind of man would have such a disk in his possession to use as camouflage?

  A devout one.

  Jay stepped to the east, the direction of Mecca, the way Muslims face during their prayers every day. He kept his whip ready to sling out and grab onto something if necessary.

  The stone was safe. No trap, no danger.

  Aha!

  There was still room to continue in the direction he’d started, so he took another step, glancing down at the floor as he did so.

  The stone gave way, and he just managed to lurch backward to safety.

  Damn!

  Now he could go forward, angle left, or angle right.

  The direction of Mecca.

  A thought came unbidden into his mind as he was looking at the scepter.

  Maybe the scepter is Mecca.

  A burst of excitement came with that idea. If he was right, there was only one way to traverse the puzzle—by looking toward the scepter the entire time. On any of the blocks.

  A thrill ran through him.

  Now that would be a cool paradigm shift. It would probably map in RW to having a central point on the label as a focal point to focus the direction of each data block. He’d been staring at the scepter when he took his first step, so that matched as well.

  It felt right. It fit with the way the label instead of the disk had been used to hold data. It was his sense of intuition that made him more than just a good programmer, after all—he didn’t just code from pure logic—he could feel solutions sometimes, take jumps that leapfrogged him to the same place he would eventually get by working it out.

  But there was only one way to find out.

  I’ve got you now, sucker, he thought, thinking of the programmer.

  I won’t need this anymore. Jay threw the bullwhip to his right and heard it hit—eventually. Faint hissing sounds came up from the pit below the throne room.

  Jay fixed his gaze on the scepter, grinned, and ran all the way across the throne room.

  No stones fell, and no other traps were triggered.

  “Hah!”

  As he laid his hand on the scepter and picked it up, a rumbling came from the back wall of the throne room, and he looked up, startled.

  The wall had opened up onto another room, this one crisscrossed by a wicked-looking maze of spikes.

  Across that room lay something else glinting gold.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I’ve only cracked part of it.”

  Well. Half a loaf, and all that. This was what it was all about, matching wits in a virtual world.

  And winning.

  He grinned. “Bring it on,” he said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  3

  Washington, D.C.

  Eduard Natadze sat in the rental car outside the 7-Eleven, just inside the line from Virginia, waiting. He was dressed in a pair of thin wool slacks and a dark gray Harris Tweed sport coat—decent clothes, but not expensive and nothing to draw attention. He wore a pale blue cotton-blend Arrow shirt and a ten-dollar blue silk tie. His shoes were black leather Nunn Bush, with rubber soles, dressy enough so they didn’t look like running shoes, but functional if he needed to move in a hurry. His watch was a basic Seiko, nothing special. His hair was cut to medium length, he was in decent physical shape, but not bulky, and just an inch or two over average height. Nothing about him screamed for a second look. He was, to a casual gaze, just another thirty-something businessman with a serviceable leather briefcase, on his way to or from work; nobody to notice at all.

  Which, of course, was exactly as he wanted it.

  His only real extravagance was in the satchel-type case, which was closed with a rip-strip of velcro and accessible in a hurry: A Korth Combat Magnum revolver, a German gun, and worth more than his clothes, watch, shoes, and briefcase put together, by a wide margin. It was the most expensive production handgun made—though “production” was perhaps something of a misnomer. There was a lot of hand-polishing and fitting on the weapon, which cost four times as much as a decent L-frame revolver from Smith & Wesson.

  More than five thousand dollars for a double-action six-shot might seem excessive to some, but the one thing he never stinted on was his equipment. When your life was on the line, you did not want to lose it because you went cheap on your gear. Any revolver or pistol that would group three inches or less at twenty meters was sufficient for most combat situations. The Korth could, if you were adept enough, keep a grouping less than half that, using Federal Premium 130-grain Personal Defense loads, his personal choice.

&nb
sp; When you could cover five shots with a quarter coin at that range, you had a precision instrument. When the instrument was what stood between you and the Reaper, you wanted the best you could afford. And when you worked on special projects for a billionaire who cared only for results and not the manner in which they were achieved, you could afford the best.

  Natadze had two of the Korths. If he had to shoot somebody with one—and he had not had to do so yet—that gun would have to be destroyed, to avoid any possible ballistic connection to him. It was unlikely that investigators would think of the Korth as a possible weapon. They would examine any spent rounds they might find in a body, but the rifling was standard and not the European hexagonal often used in German guns. If he did have to shoot it, there would be no expended shells to worry about, since revolvers did not eject those. And if the authorities did by some chance suspect a Korth, they would hardly expect the shooter to destroy such an expensive machine. It would break his heart to do so, but in the end, it was a tool, and tools could be replaced. Dead was dead forever.

  Not that he would need the gun for this mission. His preferred weapon at close range was a roll of quarters in his left hand—his left hand, never his right. He had to be too careful about the fingernails on his right hand, and so, over the years, had learned to punch left-handed. He also liked to wrap his hard fist in a leather glove. A roll of coins gripped to add heft and mass to his fist was a formidable weapon, especially against someone not expecting it. And burning a pair of twenty-dollar gloves was much cheaper and easier than getting rid of a revolver or pistol. But if he needed it, he had the gun, and he could get to it in a matter of a second if things did not look as he thought they should look.

  He should not need his fists for this, either, though. Only his wits.

  He smiled at the thought of what they would think back home if they knew that he was willing to smash and grind to bits a five-thousand-dollar handgun. A family in rural Sakartvelo—formerly Soviet Georgia—could live on half that for a year. Then again, the authorities in his homeland did not have the resources that the United States had at its beck. There, if you weren’t noticed in the act of shooting somebody by a dozen witnesses, you might stay free forever. Of course, you also might be unjustly accused of some other crime, tried, convicted, and executed for it. That happened all the time. If they needed a criminal and could not find the right man, anyone nearby would serve. There was a kind of balance, if not one that was fair.

  As he waited for the target, he checked to make certain there was nobody watching him. This was a public parking lot and he had been parked here for less than a minute, so it was unlikely anybody would have paid him any mind. Part of the reason he had been able to operate outside the law for as long as he had without being caught was adherence to the Six-P Principle he had learned from an American movie: Proper planning prevents piss-poor performance. The less you left to chance, the less that bad luck had to work with. Think of everything that could go wrong, then have a way to deal with that; and a way to deal with the back-up going wrong, as well.

  In this case, the job was simple, and chances of failure small; still, it paid to be as certain of every detail as possible.

  The target arrived and alighted from his automobile—an expensive late-model whatever—and walked the few meters to the 7-Eleven’s entrance. He did this every morning—or at least he had every morning for the week that Natadze had observed him. Inside, the target would buy a cup of bad coffee, a sugary confection—usually a doughnut, sometimes a cinnamon twist or a danish—and a morning newspaper. He would then return to his car and drive to work, sipping coffee and eating the empty calories of his breakfast, and often trying to read the newspaper as he drove. Dangerous and stupid, this process, but one he had apparently been managing for some time.

  The man entered the store.

  Natadze exited his own car and headed for the market, walking behind the target’s auto. He had untied his shoe lace before he left his car, and now he stopped, squatted, and began to re-tie the lace. His briefcase covered the right rear tire from view, and it was the work of only a couple of seconds to pull the cut-down ice pick from where it was tucked away in his sock. Only three inches of the shaft remained on the handle, filed to a needle point, plenty long enough. He thrust the point into the tire—once, twice, thrice—between the treads, and heard the hiss of escaping air. Self-sealing tires would have likely stopped the leaks, but the target did not have those on his car, Natadze had checked the brand and model the day before to be certain.

  He put the pick back into his sock, re-covered it with his trouser cuff, and stood. Nobody was near. He went into the market and to the rear of the place, selecting a bottle of water from the cooler. Part one was complete.

  After the target checked out his purchase, Natadze paid for the water and returned to his car. The tire was flat, and the target stood next to it, glaring at it as if that might matter.

  Natadze moved toward his car slowly, opening the cap of the bottled water.

  The target pulled a small cell phone from his jacket pocket.

  As he did, Natadze reached into his own jacket pocket and triggered a cell-phone jammer. This was of Japanese manufacture, not legal to use in the U.S., but with quite a following in more civilized countries. Larger models were utilized in restaurants, theaters, and anywhere else people were unwilling to listen to their fellows yammering on a mobile phone, especially in Japan. The devices produced a signal that made wireless phones useless. This small one would work for a short range, enough for this.

  The target grumbled something and slapped his phone closed.

  “I beg your pardon?” Natadze said. His intonation was a studied and much-practiced British. Maybe not enough to fool somebody with a genuine posh accent, but it had gulled plenty of Americans.

  “Oh, sorry. My tire is flat, I need to call Triple-A, and my cell phone isn’t working!”

  “Oh, dear,” Natadze said, frowing. “You can use my phone if you would like.” Natadze retrieved the little Motorola phone inside its leather case from his shirt pocket, took it from the case, and offered it to the target.

  “Thank you,” the target said, as he took the phone. Natadze reached into his pocket and shut the jammer off.

  The target made his call, and handed the phone back. Natadze carefully replaced the phone in its case, then put it back in this shirt pocket.

  “Thanks, friend.”

  “No trouble at all.”

  Natadze went to his car, entered it, and carefully drove away. He waved at the target as he left.

  He smiled as he departed. He could have done it one of several other ways—could have slipped into the man’s condo when he was gone, or to his office, but this was easy, involved no real risk, and it amused him to have the man hand him his fingerprints.

  The phone had been treated with a special surfactant that would promote a good impression. A little super-glue vapor and he would have the print he needed. Some adapto-gel and a mold, some silicone, and he would have a fake thumb that would fool most of the print readers made—including the one that admitted the target to places where computers would record his coming and going. That would be the really easy part.

  Mr. Cox, he knew, would be pleased.

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  Colonel Abraham Kent arrived at General Howard’s outer office thirty seconds early. He paused outside the door for almost that long, took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and went in.

  Through the open door to Howard’s inner office, he saw Howard glance up, then down at his watch, then smile.

  There wasn’t a secretary in evidence. Howard stood and waved him in.

  “Abe. Come on in.”

  Kent tried to keep it from being a march, but it certainly wasn’t a stroll. Thirty years in the Corps gave you a posture that was hard to abandon.

  “And don’t salute, you old jarhead.”

  Kent grinned. He and Howard had known each other for twenty ye
ars, and they had a mutual respect. Howard hadn’t gotten into combat when he’d been Regular Army, but he’d had a few dustups since joining this organization and had, by all accounts, acquitted himself well. One could never be sure—once the bullets began to fly, many a paper tiger turned pale and hugged the ground. He was glad that his old friend had been made of sterner stuff. And that there was still action to be had somewhere.

  Howard gestured at the chair next to his desk. Kent nodded and sat in the hard-backed chair, his own back straight enough so he didn’t need the support.

  “You ready to do this, Abe?”

  “Yes, sir, I believe I am.”

  “It won’t be like the Marines.”

  “I don’t see how it could be, John.”

  “But you could make General here. They reward results.”

  Kent nodded. Howard didn’t need to mention what that meant. Kent had been a Colonel for years. Unless a shooting war broke out, he was never going to get his star in the Corps. There were too many other birds roosting and waiting for the same thing.

  “I’ll give you the fifty-cent tour,” Howard said, “as soon as my secretary gets back. You know Julio Fernandez?”

  “That scrounger?” Kent said with a grin. “You bust him from sergeant lately?”

  Howard didn’t smile back. “Actually,” he said, “I promoted him. Lieutenant, now. He got married, has a son, and has settled down considerably. I know you’ll want your own team, but he’ll be sticking around a few weeks to make sure you get settled in.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  Howard nodded. “The new boss should be in his office,” he said. “Have you two met yet?”

  Kent shook his head. “Not formally. I saw him at some political thing once.”

  “He seems okay, for a civilian. Michaels was a good man—backed me up every turn, and was willing to get his own hands dirty. I hope you do as well with Thorn.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Ah, there’s Betty. Come on, I’ll show you your new toy.”