Changing of the Guard nf-8

by Tom Clancy

  “Can you get into this pose?”

  Thorn nodded.

  Kent pointed to his right. “Better sit over on that side. About six feet away.”

  Thorn kneeled, placing his own sword to his left on the mat.

  “My grandfather knew all the Japanese terminology,” Kent said, “but what it boils down to is essentially a very few actions you perform with the sword — everything else is built on those.”

  He bowed, touching his head to the mat, his palms down forming a triangle with his thumbs and forefingers on the surface. He came back upright, picked the sword up with his left hand, and turned it so the edge-curve faced outward. He pressed against the guard with his thumb.

  “You loosen the blade in the sheath, like so.”

  Thorn leaned forward a little to see better.

  “The first move is the draw—”

  Kent pulled the sword’s blade free in a single, fluid motion, whipped it outward to his left in a flat arc toward his right. At the same time, he came up on his right foot, his left knee still on the ground. As the sword passed in front of him, he circled the blade, twisting it from a horizontal slash from left to right into an overhead curve that came down straight in front of his body. During this, he set the sheath down, and brought his left hand to the sword’s handle, well behind his right hand. The final part of the motion was much like a man with an axe splitting a log:

  “The cut.”

  He opened his right hand, maintaining his grip with the left, and made his right hand into a fist. He hammered once lightly on the back ridge of the blade just ahead of the guard with the little-finger side of his right fist.

  “The shaking of blood.”

  He opened his right fist, caught the handle in a reverse grip, let go with his left hand, swung the blade so that the point angled to his left, arced downward and then up, almost 270 degrees, to point at the back wall. Meanwhile, he used his left hand to catch the mouth of the scabbard, thumb on one side, forefinger on the other, as if about to pinch. He moved the sword backward, touched the sheath’s mouth with the back edge of the blade, six inches above the guard. He drew the blade forward, right arm passing across his belly, sliding the spine along the sheath’s opening. His thumb and forefinger looked as if they were wiping the steel. When the point reached the mouth, he moved his right hand forward, angled and inserted the tip into the sheath, then slid the blade slowly home. He used his forefinger to snug the weapon into place.

  He did not look at the sword when he did any of this.

  “And the re-sheath,” he said.

  Thorn grinned. Right out of Seven Samurai.

  He put the sword back down, bowed again, then looked at Thorn.

  “That’s basically it. Four moves — pull it, cut, knock the blood off, and put it away. You can do it standing, squatting, kneeling, or even lying on your side. There are a bunch of ways to cut, various angles and targets, other ways to sling the blood and re-sheath, and you can use the point to stick somebody, but that’s pretty much the core of iai. There are ‘ways’—do, or fighting versions, jutsus. Schools are a lot more formal — you wear gi and hakama, get into the rituals, tie your sleeves up, start with the sword in your sash, but my grandfather taught me that the heart of the art was: draw, cut, shake, and re-sheath. Kind of the Eastern version of the cowboy fast draw. The iai gets the blade into play; after that, it is kendo.”

  “Fascinating,” Thorn said.

  “The idea is to cultivate a sense of awareness of everything, zanshin, they call it. You don’t think, you just do. After ten or twenty thousand draws, according to my grandfather, you can just get to a place where you just… manifest the sword. It just is there.”

  “Not much like western fencing,” Thorn said.

  “The Japanese have a different mind-set,” Kent said. “Kill or be killed — or both, it didn’t much matter to the warriors. ‘The way of the samurai is found in death.’ If you were going to die, you wanted to be sure to take your enemy with you if you could, but dying yourself was of little consequence. Your life belonged to your lord, and he could do whatever he wanted with it. Everybody knew that. It makes for a different kind of match.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Want to try it?”

  “Very much.”

  “Okay. Here’s how you bow…”

  The Dark Ages Southern France

  Jay Gridley rode the dragon. He was seated atop the hundred-foot-long beast, just behind his ears, and whatever fear he had felt about going into VR was waaay gone. He was back and he was in control — well, at least here in VR, anyhow.

  Though the setting was Europe, his dragon had a definite Chinese look to him, much more interesting than the standard European model. In China, dragons weren’t just animals, they were wise, clever, could assume the shape of a man, and were often very sneaky. Sometimes that was what you needed from a dragon. But they could do brute force as well, when you needed that.

  Jay watched as enemies fled, left, right, and center. Now and then, a bowman would loose an arrow, but his steed would blast the incoming missile with a whuff! of flame — said fire usually consuming not only the arrow, but the man who’d fired it, roasting him into a crispy critter on the spot.

  It was not Jay’s most peaceful construct, but it suited his mood. The arrows were queries, the archers firewalls, and the dragon Jay’s best rascal-and-enter program. Against the fortified and nearly blast-proof walls of a first-class firewall, even the dragon’s fiery breath would be useless, but here in the corporate realm, not everybody subscribed to the idea that such things were necessary. Some had what they thought was top-of-the-line software or hardware protecting their systems, but had been suckered. Some had what had been the best, but which had not been kept updated, and was no longer sufficient against the sharpest cutting-edge stuff. Jay’s dragon was reborn regularly — he had access to the best, and he incorporated it into the eggs that hatched as needed.

  Ahead, the French castle lay, surrounded by a moat, the drawbridge up.

  The dragon stopped on the edge of the water.

  “What say?” Jay said. “Can we do this?”

  “We can,” the dragon said. His voice was deep, almost a metallic rumble, a giant iron plate dragged across a sidewalk.

  The dragon took a slow, full breath and blasted the moat with a terrific gout of fire. The flow of it went on and on — thirty seconds, a minute, two minutes.

  The water began to bubble as it boiled. Giant green and scaled monsters, looking like crosses between alligators and sharks, floated to the surface, cooked, still thrashing in their death-throes.

  “Cook ’em, Dan’l,” Jay said.

  A few moments later, the dragon dipped his taloned toe into the water, decided it was cool enough, then stepped into the moat.

  The water came up only to his hips — the castle’s defenders had not reckoned on such an assault. They reached the door, and the dragon thrust his fore-claws into the wood, the sound of it like a pile driver working. With a mighty effort, the dragon flexed his shoulder and ripped the thick door apart as if it were balsa. Splinters flew everywhere as the door shattered and fell away.

  The dragon stalked through the opening.

  Jay slid down the dragon’s neck and side. “Thanks, I’ll take it from here. If the King’s Army shows up, give me a yell.”

  The dragon nodded. He blew a smoke ring the size of a tractor tire. The ring floated gently into the morning air.

  Jay headed for the keep’s library. He saw no one, the librarian had fled, and it was but a matter of moments before he found the lambskin scroll for which he had come. He looked it over, saw the information he needed, and nodded to himself. He left the scroll where he’d found it — it would do no good to take it, he couldn’t show it to anybody in the real world. Possession of the information on it in the RW would make him guilty of a crime, and he couldn’t use it as evidence in any event. But he wasn’t looking for evidence, he was looking for knowledge. D
ifferent critter.

  “I have you now!” he said, trying for Darth Vader’s resonant voice.

  “The King’s Army approaches,” called the dragon.

  “End scenario,” he said.

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  Jay sat, and without a word, touched a control on his flatscreen.

  The holoproj appeared over the computer, and he turned the instrument around so that Thorn could get a view of the image from the front.

  “Natadze,” Thorn said.

  “Yes. I used the three pictures we had and had the SC run a scan on images from television, newspapers, and magazines, and there he is. It’s from American Businessman, six months ago.”

  Thorn looked at the picture. Natadze, in a dark gray business suit, stood among a group of other men dressed similarly.

  “Watch this,” Jay said. He tapped at the flatscreen and the image shifted so that Natadze and the others shrank and were relegated to the background. In the foreground, two men appeared. One of them was obviously presenting some kind of plaque to the other. They were smiling and shaking hands for the camera.

  Thorn knew who one of the men was. “Samuel Walker Cox,” he said. “The oilman.”

  Jay nodded. “Yep. The other one is Andre Arpree, of the International Chamber of Commerce, based in Paris. The award is for fostering business relations between Europe and the U.S.”

  “And what is our man Natadze doing there, watching such a thing, do you think?”

  “He works for somebody connected to the event.”

  Thorn nodded. “Yes, that would be my guess, too.”

  Jay didn’t say anything for a moment. He looked nervous.

  Softly, Thorn said, “But you aren’t guessing, are you, Jay?”

  Jay sighed, then seemed to come to a decision. “I figured that Natadze worked for Cox or for Arpree. The thing is, neither of their corporate records are, um, accessible without a federal warrant.”

  “Uh huh.” Thorn had an idea where this was going.

  “And getting a warrant based on a picture of a guy standing in the background of an award ceremony is likely to be, um, difficult.”

  Thorn nodded. “Yes. If it was my company, I’d have a platoon of lawyers screaming bloody murder, trying to convince a judge that Net Force didn’t have anything, they were just fishing and hoping.”

  “That’s what I figured. We can’t really make this guy into a terrorist, so the country isn’t really at risk. Opening up the records of two major corporations, one of them French? Not likely.”

  Thorn’s expertise was in computers, and he had been a hacker before he started selling the software that eventually made him rich. He knew where this was going.

  “And even if you got it, we couldn’t use it in court, Jay.”

  “I know.”

  “Legally, they’d fry us.”

  “Yeah.”

  Thorn took a deep breath, let half of it out. There was the law. And there was justice.

  “So, okay. Who does he work for?”

  Jay couldn’t suppress a slight smile. “Cox. Our hitman Eduard Natadze is head of Special Security for Samuel Walker Cox.”

  Thorn stared at the holoproj. Wow. Wasn’t that an ugly can of worms?

  31

  Net Force HQ

  Quantico, Virginia

  General John Howard was not surprised that Gridley had come up with the information; nor was he surprised that Thorn was being very circumspect about how such knowledge had come into their possession. Howard lived by a moral code based on the Ten Commandments, he was a religious man, and he knew that morality and Caesar’s Law sometimes diverged. When in doubt, he followed God’s laws — come Judgment Day, those would be the ones that counted the most. The wicked should be punished, and this man Natadze, and whoever set him upon his immoral chores, would certainly be among them.

  On the other hand, if he and Net Force could be the instrument of that punishment in this world, he had no problem with that.

  “The government will need a lot more evidence before this gets turned over to the AG for prosecution,” Thorn said. “You don’t kick in a billionaire’s door and arrest him without a case as solid as a block of depleted uranium.”

  The others in the room — Jay, Abe, and Julio — nodded.

  “So, here is the situation. We know who the shooter is, and we know — but can’t prove — who holds his leash. We’ve done what we were supposed to do. What we should do now is turn it over to the FBI and let them run it down.”

  Every man in the room must have heard the unspoken but implied word.

  Abe got to it first. “But?”

  Thorn looked around. “This is tricky. For one thing, we have a personal stake in it—”

  “Amen,” Gridley said.

  Thorn continued without speaking to that: “—and it would be nice if we could package it up neatly before handing it off to the FBI and the locals in whose jurisdiction these events took place. The fed gets first whack at it, but the city and county will have felony charges, too.”

  “And is our personal involvement enough reason not to turn it over?” Abe said.

  Howard spoke up: “Well, I see where the Commander is going. It’s not that we don’t trust the feebs and the locals to do a good job, it’s just that we don’t trust them as much as we do our own people.”

  Abe didn’t say anything, but it was obvious he had some problem with the idea.

  Thorn said, “So, we can hand it off, or… gather a little more information ourselves first.”

  Howard smiled. Alex Michaels would have made the latter choice, and he’d have suited up and gone out into the field, too. Howard said, “You’re the Commander, and it’s your choice, but if my opinion counts, I’d say we collect a little more data on our own.”

  He saw Julio and Jay nod. Abe kept his face carefully neutral.

  Thorn said, “There’s more to it, as well. This guy, Natadze, came after Jay for a reason. What’s more, the guy he works for sicced him on Jay for a reason. That means that they knew what Jay was working on, and that means that somehow they have access to information they shouldn’t.”

  Again, heads around the room nodded.

  “You guys have worked with the regular FBI more than I have,” Thorn went on, “but I haven’t seen anything in the files to indicate they could be the source of a leak.”

  “They’ve always been solid, if not quite as good as our own people,” Howard said.

  “Still, once this goes over to them, there will be records. In short, people, once this gets out beyond us, it becomes more likely that the guy we’re after might just learn that we’re on to him. And if that happens, he’ll crawl into some deep dark hole and hide. We’ll never get him, then.”

  “So we keep it, then?” Howard asked.

  Thorn nodded. “For now. We know the players. We know where they live. The shooter isn’t likely to go home and just let us collect him, but if we can put the two men together, that will give us something substantial. Why don’t we see if we can do that much?”

  East Suffolk, Long Island

  Their van was disguised as a plumbing truck, parked not far from the front entrance to the rich man’s estate. The vehicle smelled like pizza, which is what the driver had gotten for lunch on the way there. Not as luxurious as the RV they’d used before, but a better fit for this area.

  They had been on-site for an hour, in an upper-class neighborhood on Long Island far enough away so Cox’s security patrol company wouldn’t bump into them, but close enough and in position to see what they needed to see. The local police had been advised there was a federal operation in place, but not told the details, and nobody ought to bother them. If the Georgian showed up, he would have to pass them to reach the front gate. If he came from any other direction, to the back or side entrances, for examples, other units were in place to pick him up before he reached them. Even if he arrived by helicopter, they should be able to track that with the radar the RV carr
ied to the south of them. It was possible he could arrive on foot and sneak past, but not likely. It was a long way to town.

  “What do you think, General?”

  Howard looked at Abe Kent. “It’s your show, Colonel. I’m just along for the ride.”

  “Bull,” Colonel Kent replied. “Sir.”

  Howard smiled. “I think you’ve covered all your bases, Abe. Approach, fields-of-fire, good use of cover and concealment. Your strategy is good, tactics appropriate.”

  “Anything you would do differently?”

  Howard looked through the mirrored windows of the van. “Offhand, I can’t think of anything. The trap is set. All you can do now is wait.”

  Kent nodded. “Yes.” He paused, seemed about to say something, but didn’t.

  “Go ahead,” Howard said, “spit out the rest.”

  Kent gave him a tight smile. “I’m still not entirely comfortable with this procedure. We ought to be letting the FBI or the locals handle this. This doesn’t fall within our purview.”

  “Technically, no. But you’re covered, since I’m still officially running things. Buck stops with me — and Thorn, of course.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know. I’m just saying it.” Howard thought about it for a second, then said, “Net Force runs on different rules than the Corps or the Regular Army, Abe. Sometimes, to get the job done, we have to… push the boundaries a little. Stretch the rules to cover the situation.”

  “I understand. I don’t like it, but I hear you.”

  “Just like I understand that when the hot steel is flying and the bombs are going off, you do what you have to do and worry about defending your decisions later. The thing is, this bastard-unit of the National Guard kind of has to make it all up as we go along. Computer crime would seem pretty cut and dried, geeks in thick glasses pushing buttons and rearranging electrons and photons, but in my experience, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve come across lots of guys who would just as soon shoot you as diddle a keyboard, and the problem with trusting the locals or even the regular feebs to handle them is just that, trust. There are local PDs that can knock a bad guy in the dirt faster than the Flash on speed, and some of the FBI field guys can run with the best, too, but when you’re working with others you just don’t know that you’ll get the A-team. With your own people, you know what you have, and your troops are first-class. You have leeway to operate, given the Guard status, that you don’t have in regular service units.”