by Mark Alpert
Before Graddick could respond, Mannheimer leaned forward to get the corporal’s attention. “Hey, Murph,” he called cheerily. “We’re just going to the PX to do a little shopping.”
Murph saluted halfheartedly. From the expression on his face, David could see that he didn’t think much of the sergeant. “We got new orders from the post commander, sir. All visitors have to show ID.”
“Don’t sweat it, buddy. These guys are with me.”
“No exceptions, sir. That’s what the commander said.”
A second MP approached the car’s passenger side. This one wore a helmet and carried an M-16. David reached for the door handle, but he knew it was all over. In three minutes they would all be in handcuffs.
Sergeant Mannheimer slid to the edge of his seat, moving closer to the suspicious corporal. He lowered his voice. “Okay, Murph, here’s the deal. You see Beth over here?” He pointed his thumb at Elizabeth. “Well, she and the black girl are scheduled to give a little performance today. A private performance for the SecDef after he finishes his speech.”
The corporal stared at Elizabeth, who licked her lips and stuck out her chest. His mouth fell open. “You got strippers for the SecDef?”
Mannheimer nodded. “Hey, the man works hard. He needs a break every now and then.”
“Holy shit.” Murph looked at his superior with newfound respect. “Does the commander know about this?”
“No, these orders came straight from the Pentagon.”
The corporal grinned. “Damn, this is too much. The SecDef is getting his freak on.” Then he stepped back from the car and waved them through the gate.
AS SOON AS LUCILLE SAW the records of Gupta’s Internet activity—in particular, the Web page showing the location of 3617 Victory Drive—she issued new orders for the Bureau’s Learjet. Two hours later she and Agent Crawford strode into the Night Maneuvers Lounge, which had already been secured by a team of agents from the Atlanta office. About thirty customers—mostly drunk soldiers with weekend passes—milled about the club’s tables, while the employees—five dancers, a bartender, and a bouncer—sat at the bar. The bouncer and bartender had recognized David Swift when the agents showed them his photograph, and the bartender said he’d seen the suspect leave the club with another dancer who’d just finished her shift. This dancer, as it turned out, was Beth Gupta, the professor’s daughter. Unfortunately, the Atlanta agents failed to find the woman when they searched her temporary residence at a motel across the street. The bartender, a skeevy character named Harlan Woods who was also the club’s manager, said he had no idea where Beth could be, but Lucille suspected otherwise.
She spotted Harlan right away, a short, fat, bearded man wearing a T-shirt that said I GIVE MUSTACHE RIDES. Lucille went to the bar and folded her arms across her chest. “So you’re the man in charge of this lovely establishment?”
He nodded rapidly. Perched on his chair by the bar, he looked like a dissolute gnome on a toadstool. “I want to help you, okay? But like I said before, I don’t know where Beth is. She just works here, that’s all. Where she goes during her spare time, I have no fucking idea.”
Harlan was obviously on speed. He was talking a mile a minute and stank like a locker room. Lucille frowned. She detested addicts. “Slow down, Bubba. Does Beth have any friends here in town?”
He pointed at the dancers lined up at the bar, shivering in their G-strings. “Sure, the girls are all friends. Talk to Amber or Britney. Maybe they know where Beth is.”
“Any other friends? Besides the girls you’re pimping, I mean?”
“Fuck, I ain’t a pimp! I’m just—”
“Don’t bullshit me, Harlan. You better think fast, or else—”
“Okay, okay!” New beads of sweat leaked from the creases in his forehead. Like all addicts, he folded quickly. “There’s a girl named Sheila, a real stuck-up bitch. She came in here once to give me hell. She and Beth used to work together on the base.”
This was news to Lucille. The only information the Atlanta agents had given her was Elizabeth Gupta’s arrest record. “Beth had a civilian job at Fort Benning?”
“Yeah, before she came here. Working with computers, she said. Some relative got her the job, but it didn’t work out.”
Lucille thought of the wrecked computer she saw in the cabin in West Virginia. The suspects were following a digital trail and she could make a good guess as to their next destination.
She turned to Agent Crawford, who was standing behind her as always. “Get me the commander at Benning,” she ordered. “And that dumb-ass Colonel Tarkington.”
THE FIRST THINGS DAVID SAW were the jump towers, three tall spires looming over the barracks and administrative buildings of Fort Benning. They looked like the famous Coney Island parachute jump, the amusement-park ride that shut down decades ago, but these towers were still very much in use. Paratroopers were leaping from the arms of the spires and floating to the ground like seedpods from an enormous steel flower.
Sergeant Mannheimer instructed Graddick to park the station wagon behind a sprawling yellow building called Infantry Hall. The Virtual Combat Simulation office was in the building’s western wing. David had concocted a story explaining why they needed to go there—Monique had a younger brother in basic training who was suffering anxiety attacks and needed to talk to someone in private, and so on and so forth. It was clear that Mannheimer didn’t believe a word of it, but fortunately the sergeant didn’t seem to care. Eager for his freebie, he only cared about finding an empty room where he could hump Elizabeth. He pulled her out of the car and led her toward the building’s rear entrance.
Monique, David, and Michael also stepped out of the car. Graddick, who remained in the driver’s seat, looked at them with concern. “What’s going on, brother?”
David gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “Just stay here till we get out. It’ll only be a few minutes. Then we’ll get to work on Elizabeth’s soul, all right?”
Graddick nodded. Monique and David flanked Michael, each gripping one of the teenager’s elbows, and hurried to catch up to Elizabeth and Mannheimer. David wished they could leave the boy in the car; it was appalling how his mother plied her trade right in front of him. But Michael was the only one who knew how to play Warfighter.
They rushed through the entrance and up the stairs to the third floor. Elizabeth and the sergeant stopped at an unmarked door at the end of a deserted hallway. Mannheimer began to rummage through the pockets of his fatigues. “So you’re sure there’s a couch?” he asked.
“Yeah, there’s one in the director’s office,” Elizabeth answered. “I remember it, a big brown couch.”
“But that was four years ago. Maybe they moved it since then.”
“Jesus, just open the door!”
The sergeant finally found the skeleton key, but before he could slip it into the lock David heard something coming down the hall. It was a mechanical noise, oddly familiar. He turned around and saw a Dragon Runner, the boxy, silver surveillance robot that Professor Gupta had developed for the army. Riding on caterpillar treads like a miniature tank, the machine pointed its bulblike sensor at them. David froze. “Shit! They found us!”
Mannheimer chuckled. “At ease, soldier. Those things ain’t operational yet.”
“What?” David’s heart thumped as the robot rolled past.
“They’re still working out the bugs. It’s like everything else the army does. They’ll test the system for ten years and then decide it costs too much.” Chuckling again, Mannheimer opened the door and nudged Elizabeth inside. “Okay, baby, where’s the director’s office?”
David followed them into the room. It was a big space, maybe forty feet long. At one end were several racks of servers that hummed and blinked on their steel shelves. Opposite them was a desktop PC with an extra-large flat-panel screen, and in the center of the room were two huge, hollow, transparent spheres, each at least nine feet high and resting on a platform studded with metal rollers.
Monique stood in the doorway and stared at the spheres, just as befuddled as David. But Michael bounded into the room, heading straight for a cabinet at the far end. While his mother and the sergeant disappeared into an adjoining office, he opened the cabinet and removed a bulky black device that looked like a stereoscopic viewer. David recognized the thing: it was a pair of virtual-reality goggles. Once you strapped them on, they displayed a simulated landscape; if you turned your head to the left or right, you’d see different parts of the virtual world. Michael beamed with joy as he adjusted the VR goggles, then dashed to the computer and began tapping its keyboard.
David and Monique went to the terminal and looked over Michael’s shoulder. In a few seconds the screen showed an image of a soldier standing in the middle of a wide green field. The soldier wore a khaki uniform and a helmet emblazoned with a number, a big red 1.
“That’s Warfighter,” David whispered. “He’s loading the program.”
After a few more seconds the words READY TO START? appeared on the screen. Michael returned to the cabinet and pulled out a plastic rifle, a mock-up of an M-16. Then he approached one of the giant spheres, opened a hatch in its side, and wriggled into the transparent ball.
“Damn,” Monique cried. “What’s he doing in there?”
Michael closed the hatch from the inside and donned the VR goggles. Holding the plastic rifle like a real infantryman, he started walking forward, but of course he didn’t get anywhere—the sphere just spun around him, rotating in place like a monstrous trackball. After a while Michael quickened his pace and the sphere rotated faster. Pretty soon the teenager was galloping like a hamster in an exercise wheel. When David looked at the computer screen he saw the khaki-clad soldier running across the field.
“Shit, this is fantastic.” He put his hand on Monique’s back and pointed at the platform below the sphere. “You see those rollers under the ball? They measure how fast the sphere is turning and the direction of its rotation. Then they send the data to the computer, which makes the soldier move just as fast as Michael is moving. And Michael can see the whole simulation on his goggles. He’s running inside a virtual world.”
“That’s great, but where is he going?”
“It looks like he’s just having fun. I guess he’ll go up through the expertise levels like he always does.”
“And what’s going to happen when he reaches Level SVIA/4?”
“I don’t know. There may be a way to download the theory from the server. But I bet you have to use the VR interface to access it.”
David studied the icons at the bottom of the computer screen until he found the one he wanted: TWO-PLAYER GAME. He clicked on it and the words READY TO START? flashed on the screen again. While Monique gaped at him, he went to the cabinet and found another pair of VR goggles and another plastic rifle.
“I’m going in,” he said. Then he stepped toward the second sphere and opened the hatch.
SIMON STOOD GUARD IN THE testing lab at Mid-South Robotics while Professor Gupta studied surveillance videos on the lab’s computer. The screen was divided into a dozen squares, each showing a live feed from one of the Dragon Runners deployed at Fort Benning. Just before noon, the computer let out a ping—the face-recognition program had found a match in one of the videos. Gupta identified the robot’s location and expanded its surveillance feed so that it filled the screen. Simon moved a bit closer to the terminal and saw a tall, ugly soldier with his arm around the waist of a chesty slattern. Then he saw the targets: Swift, Reynolds, and Gupta’s grandson.
“Interesting,” the professor muttered. “They’re at the VCS office.”
“VCS?”
“Virtual Combat Simulation. I did some work for them, developing the VR interface for Warfighter.” He paused, deep in thought. “And that’s where Elizabeth worked. The job Hans found for her.”
On the screen, the targets entered a room and closed the door behind them, cutting off the surveillance. Gupta quickly exited the program, stabbing at the keyboard. “Kleinman!” he shouted. “That old fool!”
“What is it?”
The professor shook his head. “He thought he was being clever! Hiding the thing right under my nose!”
“You mean the Einheitliche Feldtheorie?”
A new window popped up on the screen and Gupta typed in a user name and a password. He was trying to log on to some kind of network. “Luckily, it’s not too late. All the VCS programs are designed for remote access. The army wanted soldiers at different bases to compete against one another in the virtual battles.”
There was a delay of several seconds. Then the screen showed a long list of military servers and their activity reports. “Just as I thought,” Gupta said. “They’re running Warfighter.”
Gazing over the professor’s shoulder, Simon felt a tinge of anxiety. “Can they download the theory? Can they delete it?”
Gupta clicked on one of the servers. While the network established the connection, he turned around and glared at Simon. “Go into the supply room! There’s no VR equipment here, but there might be a joystick.”
DAVID STOOD IN A WIDE FIELD bordered by southern pines. Turning to the right, he saw a landscape of forested hills stretching to the horizon. When he turned left, the VR display showed a break in the trees and a cluster of low buildings. The graphics were amazingly realistic. He even heard birdcalls through the headset, which included miniature speakers and a microphone for communicating with other players. There was something strangely familiar about the simulated landscape, and after a couple of seconds he realized that the virtual world had been designed to look like the wooded training grounds of Fort Benning. Above the tops of the trees he could see the jump towers, which seemed to be several miles away.
“What are you waiting for?”
David raised his rifle when he heard the voice through the headphones. He could see the barrel of his M-16 on the display, but there were no other figures in the field or the woods. “Hey!” he called. “Who’s there?”
“It’s me, dummy.” Monique’s voice. “I’m at the terminal, watching you on the computer screen. You look just like Michael’s soldier, but you got a big red 2 on your helmet.”
“How did you…?”
“You seemed a little lost, so I found a microphone at the terminal to tell you which way to go. Michael’s in the village.”
“The village?” He pointed his rifle at the cluster of buildings. “You mean over there?”
“Yeah, and he’s already reached Level B2, so you better move your ass. From what I can tell, you have to get closer to Michael before he reaches SVIA/4. Otherwise you won’t be able to enter the final level and download the theory.”
Very gingerly, David took a step forward. The sphere turned effortlessly under his feet. He stepped to the left and the sphere turned sideways. He began to walk toward the break in the trees, slowly at first, then with greater confidence. “This isn’t so bad. After a while it feels almost normal.”
“Try running. You got a long way to go.”
He broke into a trot. The VR display showed the landscape advancing: as David charged across the field, the buildings ahead loomed larger and he started to see dark figures lying facedown in the grass. They were the computer-generated enemy soldiers—dressed like terrorists, in black jackets and bandannas—that David had seen before on the Game Boy. “It looks like Michael took care of these guys.”
“Keep your eyes open,” Monique warned. “He didn’t get all of them.”
“What happens if they shoot me? How many lives do you get in this game?”
“Let me check the instruction file.” There was a pause. “Okay, if you get shot in the body, you can’t move anymore but you can still fire your gun. If you get shot in the head, you automatically go back to the start.”
“And that’s not good, right?”
“Not if you want to catch up with Michael. He just made it to Level B3.”
David picked up the pace, zigza
gging around the dead soldiers. After a few seconds he reached the edge of the village, which looked drab and desolate. On one side of the main street was a row of two-story buildings with sloping roofs; on the other was a simple white church with a bell tower. The street was empty except for the fallen soldiers, which clearly marked the path Michael had taken. David ran down the middle of the street until he came to a blocky yellow warehouse. Half a dozen simulated corpses lay just outside the building’s entrance. Struggling to keep his balance inside the spinning sphere, he slowed and peered through the doorway. It was dark but he could make out shapes on the floor, more prostrate bodies.
He was just about to take a step inside when he heard gunshots. They seemed to be coming from behind, so he wheeled around. An enemy soldier was racing down the street, firing an AK-47. For a moment David forgot that he was watching a simulation; in a panic he crouched and pulled the trigger of the plastic rifle, aiming at the figure in the black jacket. The shots boomed in his headphones and David tumbled backward. He landed on his butt at the bottom of the sphere, which rocked back and forth. His VR display showed nothing but blue sky and the warehouse’s yellow wall. But when he scrambled to his feet he saw the enemy soldier on his hands and knees, grimacing in pain but still clutching his rifle.
“Shoot him in the head!” Monique yelled in his headphones. “Quick, in the head!”
David fired at the soldier’s skull and the figure sank to the ground. “Jesus!” he cried, sweeping his M-16 in a wide angle, scanning for any other enemies on the street. He was breathing fast. He heard more gunfire but couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
“Go inside the building! Michael’s on the second floor!”
He turned back to the doorway and stepped over the bodies inside. The display darkened as he went down a long, narrow corridor. His legs were wobbly now and he began to feel queasy. Sweat trickled down his forehead and collected at the rims of his goggles. “Shit, I can’t see a thing!”
“Go left, LEFT! There’s a stairway!”