Springboard nf-9

by Tom Clancy

  Not yet, anyway.

  There were any number of other esoteric perversions that CyberNation probably didn’t want to risk as well. Other than those, the sky was the limit — or not; you could fly to Mars or Alpha Centauri, if you wanted. In VR.

  He passed a huge library with the word “Knowledge” over the door.

  He paused in front of a map shop that offered views from spysats — you gave them your GPS coordinates and they could zoom into your backyard with enough resolution to see what newspaper your wife was reading on your deck.

  It was easy to see the selling points for a place like this. Why waste your time in the RW, which was messy and dangerous, when you could come to CyberNation and experience everything you ever desired, and all from the comfort of your own home? Don full sensory gear with penile or vaginal accessories — delivered to you as part of your sign-up package — and you could have any kind of sex you wanted with anybody, without the risk of catching some disease.

  It was true that VR food didn’t offer any sustenance, but that was part of the appeal — you could eat all you wanted and never get fat. Yes, the stims for food weren’t perfect yet, the electrode cap that cranked up your brain centers had a way to go, but the wireless taste-bud lozenges were getting up there. They could deliver a fairly good approximation of a lot of things using the basic sweet-sour-salty-bitter tropes, along with the nares odor-gen gear. And CyberNation’s proprietary suitware was cutting-edge — Jay had some of it in his own sense-suits.

  In top-grade mesh, you could experience tropical heat, arctic cold, or any temperature you considered perfect. With the best sensory-stim, you could feel the sand under your feet, the hard coolness of a rock face you were climbing, or the water around you as you flippered along in your scuba gear to explore for sunken treasure. Still not as good as the RW in a lot of cases, but without the risk — or the discomfort — and getting better all the time. For many, the dream was better than the reality. And Jay was hardly one to point fingers, given the time he spent suited up and in VR.

  There was, however, trouble in the city, otherwise Jay wouldn’t be here.

  He caught a taxi and gave it the location Seurat had provided: “Take me to the Garden of Perpetual Bliss,” he said.

  The cabbie nodded and turned on his sat-radio. “Any kind of music you wanna hear?”

  “How about classic rock, late sixties? Beatles? Rolling Stones?”

  “You got it, pal.”

  Paul McCartney began singing and playing “Black-bird.” An antiracist song, according to Sir Paul, and easy to see from a distance, though apparently at the time few had understood the message.

  Wasn’t that always the way?

  Net Force HQ

  Quantico, Virginia

  In his office, Thorn listened to Abe Kent’s report on his encounter with Natadze, nodding but not speaking. When the colonel had finished, Thorn said, “You’re sure it was him.” It wasn’t a question.

  “No doubt in my mind. I don’t see how it could have been anybody else. Who would take a guitar and leave the exact amount he owed the builder in its place? Who could know how much that was?”

  Thorn sighed. “I don’t see how there was any way you could have known he’d follow you — I wouldn’t have bet a penny against a dollar he’d have even been there.”

  “I would have won the small bet, but I lost the game.”

  “Don’t blame yourself, Abe.”

  “I’d love to have somebody else to lay it off on, but it was my mistake. I should have had a contingency plan. It never crossed my mind, and it should have.”

  “Done is done,” Thorn said. “What now?”

  “I know where he was, and when. If it’s okay with you, I’ll get Gridley’s people to run a search on security cams in the area — motels, car-rental places, the whole package. He was at the guitar thing in Lincoln, he followed me — maybe he missed a step along the way.”

  “You think there’s much chance of that?”

  “Frankly, no. It was a fluke that we tied him to the Cox deal in the first place. A lucky break that he happened to be passing by a bank machine while somebody was using it, and that some woman ran a red light in front of him and we got pictures. Can’t bank on luck again.”

  “Cox paid for it all,” Thorn said. “Blown to pieces in his own car. We’ve officially moved on.”

  “Natadze is a loose end. And we’re sure he was the guy who took Cox out.”

  “Depending on how you look at it, he did us a favor. Given the politics and money involved, Cox would have died of old age before we could have put him away, and even that was iffy.”

  “He’s still a killer. And I owe him.”

  Thorn nodded again. He understood that. “All right. Pass it along to Jay’s group and see what they come up with. Good luck.”

  “Thank you, Commander.”

  After Kent was gone, Thorn thought about that case. What a mess it had been. Old Soviet Union spies, hit men, a crooked billionaire…

  His intercom buzzed. “Sir? Marissa Lowe on one.”

  Thorn smiled. “Got it.”

  He waved the phone to life and got a visual. Marissa, who did several things for the CIA, including being the liaison between that spook group and Net Force, was a strikingly handsome woman with skin the color of coffee and just a little cream.

  “Hey, Tommy.”

  “Hey, yourself. How’s…? Where are you again?”

  “Classified, I’m afraid. You don’t need to know.”

  He laughed. She was a funny woman. Smart, too, though she tried to play that down.

  “When are you coming back to town?”

  “More classified information, my boy.”

  “But eventually?”

  “I believe I can stipulate to that much, yes.”

  “What a terrible operative you are — see, I just wormed information out of you. What if I were a spy? I could set up a surveillance, knowing you’d be coming to Washington sooner or later. Catch you, just like that!” He snapped his fingers.

  She laughed, and he liked being able to make her do that.

  “I want to see the requisition you put in for your surveillance team, Tommy. The little box where they ask for approximate cost and time for the team to be in the field. You gonna write ‘eventually’?”

  “I’m the boss, I don’t need to fill out no stinkin’ report.”

  She laughed again.

  “I hear there’s a new restaurant opening up in Foggy Bottom,” he said. “Italian, being run by the guy who used to be the chef at Gianelli’s.”

  “Ah. And…?”

  “Well, if I had some idea when you’d be back, I could make reservations. Treat you to dinner.”

  “Must be nice to be rich,” she said. “But I wouldn’t know, being a lowly GS-13 barely scraping by.”

  “Oh, yeah, rich is good. You could marry me, then when we divorce, you could get half, then you’d see.”

  “You put that in writing?”

  They both laughed.

  “Hypothetically speaking,” she said after a moment, “if you were to make a reservation at this new restaurant for, say, Thursday, maybe you wouldn’t have to dine alone.”

  “Thursday’s bowling league night,” he said.

  “Uh-huh. I can’t even imagine you in a pair of bowling shoes.”

  “I was the lowest scorer in my junior high class,” he said. “A solid ninety-six average. Shall I pick you up?”

  “Nah. If I’m back, I’ll meet you there. Eight o’clock?”

  “Assuming I can get reservations.”

  “Big-time bureau commander and rich man like yourself? No problem. Eight o’clock.”

  She discommed, and Thorn grinned to himself again. He did like smart, funny, beautiful women. What was not to like?

  Paris, France

  Unlike some of his colleagues, Seurat didn’t mind going into the city when he had a good reason. He left his car at home and took the Metro — nothing of wo
rth in the city was more than five hundred yards from a Metro station, so the saying went, and parking in the city, like a pay telephone, was impossible to find. Nobody with a brain drove into Paris, and since the advent of mobile phones, the government assumed everybody would have one, so why have the clutter of phone kiosks everywhere?

  Today was a meeting with a potential new client — a Saudi prince and businessman who was looking to start a new server in that country, and who wanted a link with CyberNation. Being a prince was not as impressive coming from that country as it was, say, from England. There were scores, hundreds, maybe thousands of them down in the desert atop the oil pools, the result of royal families in which the men could have as many wives as they could afford. An oil sheik could afford a considerable harem.

  The Saudis were not as pure as they liked to pretend; much of that Muslim strait-lacing offered publicly disappeared in private. Yes, they were currently French allies, of a sort, and there was a quid pro quo, but some of the hardest drinkers, biggest womanizers, and consumers of pornography Seurat had ever met had been Saudis. If you had enough money, there was usually a way to get what you wanted, if you wanted it enough, and to make sure that people looked the other way while you enjoyed it.

  And in VR, it didn’t count — since you weren’t actually drinking or screwing around…

  He glanced at his watch. Running a little later today than he wished. No time to stop at a museum or gallery. Seurat liked to drop round the Musée d’Orsay every so often and see Le Cirque. Georges Seurat had done many drawings, but only a few major paintings, and they were all over the world. Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, his most famous, and the inspiration for a musical play, Sunday Afternoon in the Park with George, was at the Art Institute in Chicago. Others were in London, New York, San Francisco. Too few of them were in Paris. A shame, that, but buyers with enough money to afford such things lived where they lived.

  His connection to his famous relative was known and accepted by some, if the legitimacy was sometimes argued by others. Though Georges had died a young man, only thirty-one, of meningitis or diptheria, depending on whom you believed, he had two hidden families. Most knew about Madeline Knobloch, of course, but few knew of his other mistress, from whom the director of CyberNation was himself descended…

  The day was warm and sunny, and Seurat enjoyed the bustle and sounds of the city as he walked along the Rue Vernet, toward the Elysees Star Hotel. There was a woman he had met there once, a Spanish countess, ah…

  He saw the Saudi prince lounging in a cast-iron chair at the outdoor cafe down from the hotel, a cup of tea or coffee on the small table before him. Such cafes were traditional in Paris, of course, though Seurat himself thought that drinking coffee and having croissants with a steady stream of noisy automobiles passing by was hardly relaxing. There were cafes on some of the pedestrian malls, streets that had been closed to vehicular traffic but not those on foot, that he found much more appealing. It was hard to appreciate the swaying walk of a beautiful woman in high heels when a moving van with a loud muffler crept past and belched smelly exhaust at you.

  The prince was in a business suit that had probably cost more than the price of the average car. The prince, who liked to downplay that and be called Said, saw Seurat strolling in his direction. He raised his cup in salute.

  Seurat smiled and nodded.

  A sudden darkness rolled over the street. Seurat frowned and looked up, to see a rain cloud blotting the sun. That had come up fast—

  A lightning bolt lanced down from the cloud, struck a group of walkers waiting to cross at an intersection, and scattered them as if a bomb had gone off in their midst.

  A demonic voice began to laugh loudly as more lightning played over the street. Hail started to fall, clumps as big as golf balls, smashing down; hurricane winds blew, and people on the street screamed and ran for cover—

  Merde! The bastard whoreson hacker was at it again—!

  Rue de Soie

  Marne-la-Vallée France

  Seurat stripped the sensory gear off, still enraged. Losing a potential client was bad, but not major. That the hacker was still able to attack CyberNation seemingly at will was major. He had already called his technical people and they were on the hunt, but he did not hold out much hope for a quick taking of prey.

  This had to stop. And when the man responsible was caught, Seurat wanted to see him put into a hole so far down that the light of day would never touch him again.

  Merde!

  17

  Quantico, Virginia

  Getting rid of a body was not nearly as worrisome as all the forensic television shows and movies made it out to be. The main trick was to make sure the corpse wasn’t discovered before you were far enough away that the authorities couldn’t possibly link it to you. And not to leave anything really obvious around that pointed in your direction — DNA, fingerprints, or your business card…

  All that stuff where they took a hair and put it into some medical machine that whirred and fifteen seconds later spit out a picture of the killer? Total fabrication.

  Locke had wrapped the blackmailer up in the bed’s top sheet, waited until dark, and taken the corpse to his rental car, where he put it into the trunk. He’d located the motel’s cleaning woman, waited until she had gone into an empty room to clean it, and taken a clean sheet from the stack on the cart to replace the missing one.

  The next morning — one did not want to skulk around late at night with a body in one’s car trunk and risk being pulled over by a bored policeman — Locke drove to a nearby industrial district and scouted it. It took but half an hour for him to find what he was looking for. He found the number of a real estate agent on the sign in front of the building, made a call from a pay telephone, and determined the information he needed. Luck ran his way — the place was perfect.

  From there, he drove to a local mall and bought supplies. From a hardware store, he purchased a hand-truck dolly, a battery-powered Skil Saw, a tree saw, and a hammer, along with a small machete, a painter’s drop cloth, and a box of green plastic leaf bags. He also picked up a set of painter’s coveralls, shoe covers, and rubber gloves, and several bottles of spray cleaner and paint thinner.

  At an art supply store, he bought a large roll of plastic wrap and another of white butcher’s paper, along with a black marking crayon.

  He found a cyber cafe, bought an hour on a computer, and logged on to the Internet. There, he found an appliance store, and using a PayPal account into which he had deposited several thousand dollars under a phony name months before, bought a chest freezer and arranged to have it delivered immediately to the address he had found in the industrial district.

  At a long-term parking lot near a new commuter airport, he stole a minivan, swapping the license plates on it with the car parked next to it. He wore a basic disguise when he did this — a hat, a pair of sunglasses, and a fake moustache — and paid the lot fee on the stolen car at an automated exit teller. He drove back to his rental car, parked in a lot next to a cinema complex, and transferred the body and supplies to the new vehicle.

  He drove out into the Virginia countryside, found what looked like an old and mostly unused logging road in a pine forest, and drove until he was several miles away from the main road.

  He got out, dressed in the coveralls and shoe covers, and put the gloves on.

  He carried the rest of his supplies and the body into the woods. He laid out the drop cloth and unwrapped the body onto it. He removed the clothes and put them into a trash bag.

  It took a couple of hours to get the body reduced to packages of five pounds or less, fifteen minutes alone to saw the head into small bits and knock all the teeth out. Each part was wrapped in plastic, then in butcher’s paper and marked with a crayon: steaks, roasts, ribs, chops.

  When he was done, he rolled the bloody drop cloth up and put it into a plastic bag, cleaned the saws and machete carefully, then loaded these into three different plastic bags. He
removed the coveralls, gloves, and shoe protectors, and put them into another bag.

  He packed up and left.

  Back at the industrial site, which was a recently emptied building, he parked in the back where he’d had the freezer delivered. He picked the lock on the door, and used the hand truck to move the small freezer into the building. He removed the freezer from its corrugated cardboard box, and took the styrofoam packaging out. As the real estate agent had told him, the electricity was still on, and was supposed to stay on for at least a month, because there was a new tenant due to move into the building then. He found an outlet and plugged in the freezer.

  He transferred the packages from the van and put them into the freezer, all except the bits of head and fingers, closed the freezer, relocked the door, and drove away. It wasn’t recommended, to load a freezer that way before it got cold, but if the meat was burned a little, that didn’t really matter. Eventually it would go solid.

  At a Dumpster behind a butcher shop, he put the leaf bag with the drop cloth in it.

  At an apartment complex eight miles away, he got rid of the bag with the dead man’s clothes. He kept the wallet, watch, and keys, along with a ring.

  The freezer’s packaging went into a different trash bin.

  The wallet, empty, and the watch, ring, keys, and saws went into a lake in a park, heaved far enough from shore that nobody was apt to step on them if they went wading, which they probably wouldn’t, since there was a sign that forbade swimming. He tossed the teeth into the water, too. Even if somebody found any of them with the fillings, there was no way to put them into context to match a dental chart.

  The rest of the supplies went into trash bins or Dumpsters in four different locations. The last bags, containing his coveralls and gloves and the contents of the dead man’s wallet, he set afire in an old oil drum behind a junk yard, using the paint thinner to get them flaming good. He made sure the gloves burned — no fingerprints left there.