by Tom Clancy
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 sizi
ng. 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.
“I did some fast research on the subject, talked in RW to an expert, and then I made some assumptions for a baseline.”
“What assumptions?” Thorn asked.
“One, that the guy was fairly serious, because according to those who know, players who aren’t serious usually don’t bother with the fingernail thing.”
Thorn nodded. “According to the FBI and cops who ran this thing, they say the guy is a pro, very careful. Only reason we found images off him is sheer dumb luck — he didn’t make any big mistakes.”
“One, anyway,” Julio said. “Jay’s still alive, isn’t he?”
Jay grinned. “Maybe he wasn’t planning to kill me. The more I think about it, the more I think maybe he might have wanted to kidnap me.”
“Based on?” Howard asked.
“If he’d wanted to kill me, there were fifty places better than the one he picked, and I’d have never seen it coming.”
“Kidnapping you on a major highway wasn’t a mistake?”
“We’d never have ID’d him from the eyewitnesses, would we? I think something happened. Maybe he didn’t even mean to shoot me in the head. Maybe he was just trying to scare me.”
Thorn said, “Go ahead, Jay.”
“Thanks. It doesn’t really matter what he had in mind, though — I just needed a place to set up shop.”
Thorn nodded. “We’re with you so far.”
“So, we assume he’s a good guitar player. That narrows it down to, say, ten thousand, people who practice a couple hours a day, at least. My expert says it’s actually probably fewer than that. I also assumed for the sake of the search that fairly serious classical guitarists not only study the instrument, they keep up with related material — magazines, either treeware or e-zines, sheet music sites, guitar competitions, concerts, guitar makers, and music stores, all like that.
“Then I gridded the country and checked by region. I’m thinking that the guy must be a local — living somewhere on the eastern seaboard.”
“Why?” Kent asked. “He could live anywhere, couldn’t he? We have quite a national transportation system. It sure seems you’re making a lot of assumptions, son.”
Virtual Jay glanced at virtual Thorn, who smiled. He was a player himself, and a good one. He knew the old researchers’ adage: Assumptions were the mothers of information.
Jay said, “You have to start somewhere. Did you ever work a hard crossword puzzle? Sometimes, you just have to put letters in, to see if it sparks anything. You can always erase and change things.”
“All right,” Kent said. “Stipulated.”
Jay continued: “When you strain classical guitar magazines, websites, UseNet groups, concert tickets, and luthiers — those are the guys who make guitars — you come up with plenty of duplicates, but now we’re down to a few thousand names who recur in three or four arenas. These are the serious folks. If we eliminate the women, those we can ID immediately as being too old or too young, and those outside of the east coastal states, we’re down to a few hundred serious guys. Running checks on their pix, using national, state, and local images we can access, gets down to twelve without easily found visual ID’s.”
“Twelve?” Julio asked.
“Yep. Then we dig a little deeper, checking guitar websites, high school yearbooks, newspapers — we have their names, so it’s easier — and we have four possibles left. Remember, we restricted the search to people who live on the east coast, but that’s just their permanent address, not their current one. It turns out two of the four are overseas right now. One is a soldier stationed in the Middle East, the other is a guy working in Japan.”
He paused, enjoying the drama of the moment.
“One of remaining two is in a wheelchair.”
He paused again.
“Jay,” Howard said.
Jay grinned. “And the last one…” He touched a control on the flatscreen. A third image, full-face and a close view, appeared next to the others, and it was obviously the same man.
“Tah-dah!”
Julio snorted. “Why didn’t you just show us the picture in the first place?”
Jay laughed. “It’s not enough just to get the answer, Julio, you also have to show your work.”
Julio shook his head and muttered softly. Jay didn’t quite catch what he said, but it didn’t exactly sound like a compliment.
Jay kept going: “This image was taken at a box office in Washington, D.C., two months ago, by a QuikTix machine that sold him the admission to a classical guitar concert. He paid with a debit card. We have the bank and the ID on the account. The name is fake — he calls himself ‘Francisco Tárrega,’ which is a giveaway — Tárrega was a famous Spanish guitarist who died a hundred years ago. The address is also bogus, but he does have an active mailbox at a Mail Store in the District where the bank sends his statements. We can get a team of feebs to watch the place. When he goes to fetch his mail, we’ve got him.”
“Great work, Jay,” Howard said.
“But wait, it gets better. I also sent copies of the picture to classical guitarists and instrument makers and sellers and all like that, once I was sure he wasn’t one of them. I’ve got half a dozen people who recognize the guy, and we have a first name — Edward. We also know he probably is foreign-born. Our witnesses say he has an accent. He sounds like a Russian, Ukranian, something like that. Nobody claims to know the guy well; they do say he seems to know guitars and can talk the talk. One shop owner in New York City says from what this guy has told him, he owns at least a few fairly expensive custom-made instruments.”
At home, but also there, Jay grinned and relaxed. He felt a little better about this, but he’d feel better still once the guy was in custody.
Or on a slab.
“Welcome back, man,” Julio said.
“Thanks,” Jay said. “It’s good to be back.”
Or anywhere, for that matter.
26
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Thorn stripped off the VR gear and smiled, very much pleased with himself. Jay had come up with the guy’s name, but Thorn had just discovered where he lived!
He reached for the com, to call Jay at home. Jay had a personal stake in this.
Jay’s face appeared on the computer’s screen. “Hey, Boss. What’s up?”
“We got his house, Jay.”
“We did? How?”
Thorn smiled. Spoken like a true information hound — the “how” was as important as the fact it was done.
“From your info. One of the interviewees, a music store owner, said our man claimed to own some expensive handmade instruments. Said he was passionate about them, prized them highly, and knew enough particulars so that the store owner was sure he was telling the truth. The guy loves fine guitars.”
“And?”
“So, I did an on-line survey of American luthiers who produce classical guitars costing more than a couple thousand dollars, and asked if any of them had shipped one to somebody with the first name ‘Edward’ in the New York or Washington, D.C., area in the last few months. I got three hits. On one of them, from a luthier in Portland, Oregon, the sp
elling was different — it was E-D-U-A-R-D. I checked with the carriers the guitar-makers used, ran down the three addresses. Two of them checked out to be people who couldn’t be our man. The third one, the “u” spelling, that’s our guy — I talked to the truck driver who delivers air freight to the house. He’s trucked several guitars there in the past year. It’s him.”
“Cool,” Jay said. “But I should have thought of that.”
“You were just out of a coma from being shot in the head, Jay. Cut yourself a little slack getting back up to steam.”
“Yeah, I guess.” But it didn’t sound as if he meant it.
“Anyway, we have a home address, and a last name to go with Eduard — Natadze.”
“ ‘Not-see?’ What kind of a name is that?”
“Na-tad-ze. He’s from Georgia.”
“A Russian from Georgia?”
“No, Georgia the country. A web search shows the name is Georgian. They have their own language, but a lot of them speak Russian, given as how it used to be part of the Soviet Union.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Jay said. “You sicced the feebs on him yet?”
“Not yet. I’ve run down ownership of the house, and it’s a circle of holding companies and paper-only corporations, no way to connect to him. I was thinking maybe the fewer people who know about this, the better — that maybe we should check it out further to be sure we’re not mistaken, before we call in the regular FBI.”
There was a pause. “You’re turning Howard and Kent loose.” It wasn’t a question.
“Technically, I’m not supposed to do that,” Thorn said. “But maybe it wouldn’t hurt if somebody from Net Force did a recon and checked the situation out. Kind of a… training exercise.”
Another pause. “And if they happened to spot this guy walking out his front door, they might feel compelled to detain him and then call the FBI field guys.”
“That would seem a reasonable decision. To make sure he didn’t escape.”
Jay grinned. “You are going to fit in just fine around here, boss.” A pause, then: “Listen, I’m not a field guy myself, but do you suppose I might ride along, as an observer?”