by Tom Clancy
A moment later, unbidden, Paddington appeared. “Milord?”
“Yes, have Stephens bring the car round, will you?”
“Of course, milord. Some tea and sandwiches for the trip?”
“No, I have a dinner when we get to the country.” He waved one hand in airy dismissal.
Paddington left to find the chauffeur. Goswell stood, pulled his watch from his vest pocket, and checked its time against the club’s clock.
Harry looked up from his paper again. “Off, are we?”
“Yes, a meeting with my scientist at the country house.”
“Scientists.” Harry delivered the word in the same way he would have said “thieves” or “whores.” He shook his head. “Well. Cheerio, then. By the way, have you cut down that bloody yew behind the greenhouse yet?”
“Certainly not. I expect to nourish its roots with you any time now.”
Harry gave a wheezy smoker’s laugh. “I’ll dance on your grave, you young upstart. And warm my hands from that bloody yew as it burns merrily in my fireplace, too.”
The two men smiled. It was an old joke. Yews were often planted in graveyards and, because they seemed to always grow largest in such locations, it was thought that the minerals from the decomposing bodies were good for the plants’ roots. The big yew behind the greenhouse on Goswell’s estate was eighty-five feet tall, if it was an inch, and probably four hundred years old. He had been threatening to feed Harry to it for years.
He glanced at his watch. A minute or so fast, but close enough. The watch was a gold Waltham, of no great value, but it had belonged to his Uncle Patrick, who had died during the Blitz, and it had come to him as a lad. He had better timepieces that ran dead-on, Rolexes and Cartiers and a couple of the handmade Swiss things that cost as much as a new car. The Waltham was a simple machine. It did not offer the date nor the market news nor could it be held to one’s ear and used as a telephone. It was no more than a watch, and he rather liked that.
He slipped the Waltham back into his vest pocket and started for the exit. By the time he reached the street, Stephens would have the ’54 Bentley waiting. He preferred the Bentley to the Rolls, as well. It was basically the same automobile, without that ostentatious grill, and being ostentatious was not something a gentleman did, now was it?
He would listen to the BBC news on the way out of the city. See if the wogs in India and Pakistan had started shooting at each other over that little . . . entertainment he had arranged. That would be lovely, if they would just bomb each other back to the time of the Raj, and the Empire had to come back and bring them along to civilization again.
There would be justice, wouldn’t it?
Friday, April 1st
Somewhere in the British Raj, India
Jay Gridley rode the net, master of all he surveyed.
Right at the moment, he was in a VR—virtual reality—scenario he had designed especially for this new assignment Alex Michaels had called him about. In RW—the real world—he sat at his computer console inside Net Force HQ in Quantico, Virginia, his eyes and ears covered with input sensors, his hands and chest wired so that his smallest movements could be turned into control pulses. But in VR, Jay wore a pith helmet, khaki shorts, and a starched khaki shirt, along with kneesocks, stout walking shoes, and a Webley Mark III .38 revolver strapped around his waist. He sat upon the back of an Indian elephant, inside a howdah, next to the local rajah. Overhead, the afternoon sun broiled everything it saw, smiting men and beasts and vegetation alike with withering heat. Ahead of them, brown-skinned natives in loincloths beat upon metal plates with sticks, rattled rocks inside cans, and chanted loudly to spook and drive from the chest-high grasses the tiger who might be hidden therein.
Jay smiled at the image, knowing it was not politically correct, but he wasn’t worried. He wasn’t likely to run into anybody he knew while playing this scenario, and besides, he was half Thai, wasn’t he? Once upon a time, one of his great-great-grandfathers or uncles would probably have been barefoot down there in the grass, in what had been Siam, making noise, praying to assorted gods that the tiger would go the other way. All things considered, it was better to be in the shaded little hut up on the back of a ten-foot-tall elephant, with a Nitro Express double rifle racked right next to you, than it was to be on the ground beating a plate with a stick. And there was that extra, a small boy perched on the elephant’s rump waving a fan on the end of a big pole to provide a warm but welcome breeze for him and the rajah.
First class all the way. The only way to travel.
What Jay was actually hunting was information, but keyboarding or voxaxing queries for coded binary hex packets wasn’t nearly as much fun as stalking a maneating Bengal tiger.
Of course, they hadn’t seen the big tiger yet, and the beaters had been thumping and rattling for a long time, relativistically speaking. The rajah was apologetic. “So sorry, sahib,” he alliterated, but it wasn’t his fault. You couldn’t flush it out if it wasn’t there.
Oh, yeah, there were lesser beasts running from the hunters. Jay had seen deer, pigs, all manner of slithering snakes, including a couple of eight-foot cobras, and even a young tiger, but not the big cat he’d hoped to find. The tiger had come and gone—maybe burning bright, but certainly leaving no easy trail—had gutted its prey and disappeared. The VR prey in this case was a goat inside a stainless steel and titanium cage with bars as big as a bodybuilder’s legs. A tyrannosaur couldn’t chop through those barriers, even if his big ole teeth were made from diamonds, no way, no how. The goat—actually an encrypted file giving the time, location, and other particulars of a train shipment in Pakistan early today—should have been monster-proof. But something had ripped the bars open as if they were overcooked noodles, gotten inside, and Mr. Goat was history.
Jay hadn’t believed it at first. He thought surely somebody had managed to get a copy of the one-time key, which was how these encryptions worked, but after he’d gotten a look at the cage—the mathematical encryption—he could see it had been brute-forced open, no key involved. This was not some kid’s DES, used to hide a porno file from his parents, but a decent military-grade encryption, and while not unbreakable in the long run, whoever had cracked it had done so in less than a day.
And that, of course, was just not possible. No computer on earth could do that. A dozen SuperCrays working in parallel might manage it in, oh, say, ten thousand years, but in the few hours since the message was sent and it was broken, it couldn’t be done. Period. End of story. Here, let me tell you another one . . .
Jay took off his pith helmet and wiped the sweat off his forehead with one arm. Hot out here in the Punjab and, shade notwithstanding, the little elephant house didn’t have AC. He could have designed that in, of course, but what was the point? Anybody could cobble together a bastard scenario full of anachronisms; artists had to maintain a certain kind of purity. Well, at least every now and then they did, just to show they still could.
How could this break-in have been done? It couldn’t—at least not using any physics he knew.
It reminded him of the old story during the early days of aeronautics. Some engineers had done studies on bumblebees. Based on the surface area of the bee’s wings, the weight and shape of the insect, and the amount of muscle and force it had available, they had determined, after much slide rule and pencil-on-paper activity, that it was flatly impossible for such a creature to fly.
Bzzzzt! Oops, there went another one.
It must have been terribly frustrating to look at a paper filled with precise mathematical calculations about flow and lift and drag, to know that bees couldn’t fly, and then have to watch them flitting from flower to flower, oblivious to man’s certainty that they simply couldn’t do that.
The obvious deduction was that the researchers had missed something. They went back to their bamboo slide rules and pencil stubs, did more observations, filled dozens of legal pads, and eventually they figured out how the synergism of bee flight worked.
If you already have the answer, you damn sure ought to be able to at least figure out the question. Bees had been flying about their business for millions of years, despite what anybody thought otherwise, and that had to be factored in.
So here was a file that couldn’t be brute-forced, and it had been broken open like an eggshell in the hands of a giant. What was it Sherlock Holmes had said? “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
This break-in couldn’t be done by any method Jay Gridley knew about and, modesty aside, he was as good as anybody when it came to computer rascalry. But since it had been done, then there must be a new tiger out there in the tall grass. All he had to do was figure out what it looked like, find it, and capture it. Without getting eaten.
He grinned again. That brought up another bit of hunting wisdom. The recipe for rabbit stew?
First, you catch a rabbit.
Friday, April 1st
Stonewall Flat, Nevada
Mikhayl Ruzhyó squinted into the desert sun. Although he was relatively fair-skinned, he had tanned since he’d moved here, and now he was the color of good holster leather, lines etched into his face, veins prominent on his bare arms. The days were not as hot here in Nevada as they would be in a couple of months, and the nights were still chilly, but it was warm enough out. He stood in front of the small Airstream trailer he had purchased and towed to the five-acre plot of sand and scrub weed he had also bought, feeling the hot wind play over him. He was more or less alone. Only one of the other five-acre “estates” within a mile had a structure on it, and that was a green plastic dome lined with what appeared to be aluminum foil, full of packets of freeze-dried food, like campers and hikers used. Ruzhyó had picked the simple padlock keeping the place shut and checked it out within a few hours of locating this property. Every couple of months, an old man who drove a large GMC pickup truck would arrive at the dome, unload more of the freeze-dried packets from the vehicle and store them in the building, then lock up and drive away. Ruzhyó wondered why the old man brought the stuff out. Was he storing it against some future catastrophe? Worried about a war? Or plague? Or was it part of some commercial venture?
It was hard to determine the motivations of Americans at times. Back home in Chetsnya, even in Russia, he had never seen old men hoarding this kind of food. Of course, maybe that was because nobody thought such things were worth hoarding. Or they couldn’t get it if they did think that.
Ruzhyó shrugged mentally. No matter. The dome was the only building close, and the next structure past that was a cabin near the small river that was a dry bed most of the year, almost three miles away. The cabin belonged to a Methodist church, and it had been used by hardy campers but three times since Ruzhyó had lived here, never for more than two nights at a time. None of the campers had hiked close enough to speak to him.
He was grateful for the solitude. Since retiring from wetwork, he’d had few occasions to even talk to people, much less have to kill them. He had money banked he could retrieve as needed, using a computer card. Once a week or so, he drove almost two hours into town and bought his supplies in one of several large supermarkets where he was totally anonymous; he did not chat with the clerks when he checked out. He would fill the car’s tank with gasoline and drive home. He would pass Death Valley on the west, and turn off the highway onto a dirt road that led to his trailer. The nearest town—if it could be called such—was Scotty’s Junction. A military gunnery range dominated the land to the east.
Ruzhyó had paid cash for his car, a Dodge SUV, used but not too old, and had done the same for the trailer, both of which he had purchased through classified ads in a Las Vegas newspaper. The land he had acquired using one of the safe names he held and, to avoid arousing undue interest, had given a substantial down payment to the seller and paid monthly notes from the same account since, automatically deducted on the first of each month. His profile could hardly be much lower.
The trailer had a generator and batteries, even airconditioning, but he used the cooler rarely. He relished the heat.
He could not say he was happy—he had not been happy since the cancer had claimed Anna, and he did not ever expect to be so again—but he could say he was content. His life was simple, his needs few. The biggest project on his agenda was building a natural stone wall along the perimeter of his property. It might take ten years, but that hardly mattered.
Or he had been content, until today. As he scanned the rock terrain, the dust and heat-hazed hills in the distance, he knew something was wrong.
There were no signs he could see to tell him what the problem was. No helicopters overflew him, no dust clouds betrayed vehicles trying a stealthy approach. He lifted the powerful binoculars and did a slow scan of the surrounding countryside. His five acres was on a rise, slightly higher than most of the area, and he had a good view. He could see the old man’s dome from the front of the trailer. He looked at it now. Nothing.
He walked a few yards up the gentle incline behind the trailer, until he could see the roof of the Methodists’ cabin and the dry riverbed. No activity there.
He lowered the binoculars. Nothing to be seen, no cause for concern, but in his gut he felt that something was wrong. He headed for the trailer. He had weapons in a flat box hidden under the floor in the bedroom. Perhaps it was time to take them out and keep them handy.
No. Not yet, he decided. There was nothing at which to shoot. Perhaps the feeling was wrong; perhaps his gut was merely troubled by a badly digested meal or a parasite.
He gave himself a tight smile. He had not survived as long as he had by entertaining such rationalizations. At his best, he had been like a roach seeing a sudden light in the night. Run first, worry later. It had kept him alive when many others in his profession had died. He had learned to trust it over the years. No, something was wrong. Whatever it was would manifest itself sooner or later. Then he would deal with it.
He went into the trailer.
3
Saturday, April 2nd
Las Vegas, Nevada
Colonel John Howard, the commanding officer in Net Force’s military arm, had two surprises waiting for him at the airport when he exited one of the old, refitted business Lears they used for short hops in-country. The first surprise was that U.S. Army Tactical Satellite Operations-shortened to USAT, or sometimes informally called Big Squint—had definitely ID’ their target as the man Net Force sought.
This was not a major eyebrow-raiser, since Net Force already suspected this, or they wouldn’t have asked USAT to route a bird to footprint the guy. It was, however, good to have it confirmed.
However, the second surprise was something of an unexpected shock: Howard was about to be promoted.
Military rank was a strange beast in Net Force. Officially, all of the officers and men under his command were “detached” National Guard, no matter what their prior branch of service. This was a name-only organization, a place for the paper-pushers and mouse-wavers to slot them, and unconnected to the Guard or U.S. Army in any real sense. It had to do with using military troops in civilian situations as much as anything, generally not allowed in domestic situations, but it also had to do with some strange tax law that came out in the new code’s recent revisions. He didn’t understand it, his boss didn’t seem to understand it, and his accountant didn’t understand it, but there it was.
Because of this, Net Force officer rank was more or less frozen. As CO, he could promote grunts, but only up to NCO. Howard knew he could have stayed in the regular army and, even in peacetime, eventually retired a grade or two up from where he was. Being an African-American helped that, there still being enough white liberal guilt floating around to slant things his way now and again. He never expected to get any higher than bird colonel when he retired and joined Net Force, even though the money—and, more importantly, the opportunities for action—were much better. His direct boss was a civilian, so when it came to brass, he was pretty
much it.
Julio Fernandez, his top kick for as long as he’d been with Net Force and for a long time before that, delivered the news with obvious glee.
“Say again, Sergeant?” Howard said.
Fernandez stood in the hard shade of the gamp leading to the private hangar. He grinned. “Which part didn’t the general understand, sir?”
“Let me rephrase that, and be succinct, it’s already getting warm out here: What the hell are you talking about?”
The two of them walked toward the hangar.
Fernandez laughed. “Well, sir, the word is that the colonel will be, within thirty days from one April, offered the rank of Brigadier—that’s a grade superior to colonel and inferior to major general, sir—in this bastard National Guard outfit he dragged me into.”
“Held a gun to your head, did I?”
“If memory serves, sir.”
Howard smiled. “Come on, Julio, what are you talking about? I haven’t heard squat about any promotion, not a whisper.” He tried to keep the excitement from his voice. Fernandez could be funny, but he wouldn’t joke about something like this. Howard had always wanted to be a general, of course, but he’d given that hope up when he bailed from the RA.
“That’s ’cause you ain’t engaged to the most beautiful and bright woman in the western hemisphere—and probably the eastern hemisphere, too, John. A woman who can make a computer sing, dance, and do back flips without straining her pinkie. I saw the order myself, and it’s as official as can be.”