by Tom Clancy
Kent sighed. Well. There was nothing to be done for it now, save to go back to work and explain it to his commander. Who might decide to fire him for it, and if so, Kent wouldn’t blame him. He had screwed up. And if you can’t do the time, you don’t do the crime…
The Summer Festival Marathon Race Beijing, China
In China, the VR marathon races in which Chang ran were always run at night, and usually in the fog or rain, with the visibility never more than a few meters. It was a long race, a marathon, twenty-six miles, 385 yards, supposedly the distance a long-ago messenger had run in Greece on the plains of Marathon to deliver some important news, just before dropping dead from exhaustion. Over forty-two kilometers, and these days, crippled men, old women, and nine-year-old children ran it regularly, and few of them ever died.
When Chang ran here, he was faster than many, but still slower than some. Now and again, he would pass a runner close enough to see him in the gloom. Occasionally, one would pass him near enough for him to make out. There could be hundreds or even thousands of others in the race. Sometimes he felt them out there, but he didn’t see them, didn’t hear their footsteps. Now and again, Chang might stumble over something in the darkness — something he couldn’t detect until he was too close to stop.
Chang had equipped himself with a flashlight that could extend his vision a few more meters. It would be so much better were these contests held on bright and sunny days, but he had grown used to the fog and rain and moonless dark, and had learned to navigate it, albeit sometimes he was more tentative than he would have liked. It was hard to run full-out, knowing you might trip over something you couldn’t spot waiting in the road ahead. But, it was what it was, and there was little to be done about it.
So now, as he stood at the starting line, amidst a crowd of which he could see but a few close to him, he was familiar with the situation.
But: The American, Petrie, had added a wrinkle to the fabric of night. Now, in this scenario, Chang wore a special headset, with goggles that slipped over his eyes, a device that approximated sixth-gen spookeyes — starlight scopes that would gather the faintest light and intensify it, amplify it, transmit it to the lenses, and in doing so, also computer-augment colors to an approximation of normal.
That was the theory, anyway.
As he stood there, waiting for the signal to start, Chang touched a control on the headset…
Light flared brightly, causing him to blink against it. When his vision cleared, he beheld a miracle:
He could see!
It was as if he had stepped into a football stadium in the dark and someone had switched on the lights. The colors were perhaps a hair too intense, but before, where he had been able to see but a handful of those lined up with him to run, now he could see nearly all of them! The road ahead was visible for blocks, the buildings lining the street, the sky, everything was open to his gaze.
The beauty of it was awesome.
The starter’s gun fired, and the crowd surged. Chang ran with them, marveling at his ability to take it all in.
He looked at a runner fifty meters ahead — a man in a purple unitard that covered him from his knees to his neck, leaving his arms bare. Here was a man Chang would have never known was there before, for he was moving at a pace that Chang normally did not match. Once ahead, Chang would never catch him.
Chang sped up, fell in behind the man, matching his pace, staying two meters back. It was a bit of a strain, but he could manage it for a short time. Long enough to manage something he’d never managed before.
Who was he? Chang didn’t know, but he could deduce much from all those details he observed. The man was fit — his muscles lean and hard. He ran easily, denoting a serious amount of training. He was wealthy or he had a sponsor — the shoes were the latest Adidas SmartShoe, with a computer built in to adjust the foot cushion, and those cost four times what a normal pair of decent running shoes would run. The unitard was a Nike wind-cheater, custom-fitted, made from polypropyl and cloned silk, and cost nearly as much as the shoes. The man wore a Rolex watch or a well-made knockoff. He had a tiny Optar-plus pulse monitor strapped to the other wrist — another expensive toy — and even though it was nighttime, he sported top of the line Ferami photogray RunnerShades, and they didn’t give those away, either. A thousand, maybe twelve hundred U.S. dollars for his outfit, easy — not counting the Rolex.
So much knowledge from just being able to see somebody.
Before, in the dark, even if Chang had been within a few meters, he could not have gathered all that, not in such fine detail. And he would have never known where to look.
Chang’s game had just improved in a major way. Knowledge was power, and with the new software that Petrie had supplied him with, he was going to have options he’d never had before. He’d be able to see individual racers, notice patterns in the crowd, he’d know who was gaining and who was falling back. Runners ahead of him he’d never known were there? He could spot them, track them, maybe catch them.
This was going to make things a lot different in his job. Men who had counted on the fog and rain and darkness to cloak them were about to lose that protection.
Now, Chang was going to be able to find them, chase them down, and catch them. Soon, there were going to be some very surprised computer criminals in his homeland.
Allah be praised for such a gift.
Washington, D.C.
Chang sat in his hotel room, staring at the program mini-disk he had just tried for the first time. It was tiny — the size of a U.S. quarter. He could slip it into his pocket and walk through a dozen airport security checkpoints and nobody would know he had it. He could stick it in an envelope and mail it to himself in a normal-size letter, and nobody would bother to worry over it. But — he did not have to do these things, because it was a legal purchase. It would vastly improve his ability to find miscreants in China, but it was not forbidden for him to own, to take home, because it was old-hat here, something anyone living here could get for his home computer if he had the money to buy it.
Amazing. Americans truly did not know how good they had things. What they took for granted that other societies would see as a miracle.
Chang looked at his watch. He had a few hours before he was supposed to see Gridley, at Net Force. Might as well use the time productively. He would go back into VR, log into his system at home, and do a little hunting. Now that he had this, who knew what manner of crook he might find?
Ah, how wonderful this was!
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Abe Kent sat at his desk, staring at nothing. The meeting with Thorn couldn’t have gone better. The Commander had listened to his story, then shrugged it off. “This guy was a killer, Abe. You went out there and took him down. A man like that? He wasn’t going to give us anything if you’d brought him back alive. He was a bad man, and in a just society he would have paid for it with his life in court. You saved us all a lot of time and money to the same end.”
Kent had nodded, relieved some, but still troubled. It wasn’t a total personal failure, but it hadn’t been up to his standards. All he could do was try to do better in the future.
His secure line cheeped.
“Abe Kent.”
The voice on the other end was low, calm, and quiet. He hadn’t heard it in a while. He listened, made a comment, and listened some more. Finally, he said, “I’ll take care of it. I owe you one.”
“No,” the voice had said. “I’m paying back one I owe you. We’re even.”
Kent discommed. After a long moment he shook his head and tapped his intercom button. “Would you see if you could get Jay Gridley to drop by here?” he asked his assistant.
When Jay got the call to drop by Colonel Kent’s office, he was surprised. RW face time was mostly unnecessary, but Kent was the same generation as Jay’s parents, and they had never been as comfortable with VR as somebody who grew up in it as Jay had.
Kent’s secretary smiled and wav
ed him in. Kent was in his chair, not doing anything Jay could tell but sitting there.
“Colonel.”
“Jay. Have a seat.”
“I heard you got Natadze,” Jay said. He plopped onto the couch facing the desk. Hard, not very comfortable. Perfect for a Marine guy. “Congratulations.”
“Not the way I wanted, but as the Commander has pointed out, at least he’s not still on the street.”
Jay nodded. “What can I do you for?” he asked.
Kent took a deep breath. “I got a call from an old friend of mine, used to be a spook in the Company. He’s, uh, moved to another agency. It was regarding your breathing.”
“My breathing?”
“Yes. Whether or not you are going to keep doing it.”
That got Jay’s attention. “What?”
“You went somewhere you weren’t supposed to, and you were noticed.”
“I left a footprint somewhere?”
“Not a footprint — you left an image detailed enough to show the size, shape, and number of your freckles. I don’t care that it was illegal — I suspect you stopped worrying about that a long time ago. But where you walked was in a black-ops system that isn’t supposed to exist. They don’t want anybody who isn’t supposed to know about them to even dream they are there.”
Jay was stunned. Probably looked it, too. Then he started to get just a little irritated.
Kent saw something in his face. He paused for a moment, then said, “Long ago and far away, when I was very young and stupid, there was a foolish game we used to play. On a Saturday night, a bunch of boys would pile into somebody’s car and go cruising. We’d hit all the local water holes — drive-in restaurants, bars that would let underage teenagers sneak in, empty stretches of road where they’d drag-race hot cars. And all the time looking for girls to try and impress. We smoked cigarettes because we thought it made us look older. Of course, what that made us look like was a bunch of sixteen-year-old boys trying to pass for eighteen. We thought we were so cool.”
Jay laughed politely. Where was this going?
“Anyway, the game was this: We’d head out into the suburbs away from town and look for a guy walking alone. If we spotted one, we’d go past a hundred yards or so, as if we hadn’t seen him. Whoever was driving would pull the car over, and a couple of us would hop out and lift one of the guys out of the car, as if he were dead. We’d haul him to the side of the road and put him down, just as if we were dumping a body. The guy would lie there not moving. We’d start back to the car, then one of us would look up, and pretend that we’d just noticed the pedestrian back there.
“Look!” We’d yell. “He saw us! Git ’im!”
Jay grinned and shook his head. “There used to be a television show like that. They’d set somebody up with some kind of scenario just to scare the daylights out of him, then record it. I forget what it was called — I used to watch it when I was in college. Funny stuff.”
“Funny, but really, really stupid. What we did was back in the days before video cams were around or we’d probably have taped it, too. We thought it was a hoot — we did it four or five times, chased guys a little ways, amazed at how fast somebody who thought he’d just seen a body dumped could run from what he thought was a bunch of killers. Then, once the guy was gone, we’d all hop back into the car and head back to the bars. If the guy reported it, the cops must have laughed pretty good — they’d have heard the story every summer.”
Jay smiled and nodded.
“We were lucky beyond measure. All it would have taken would have been for one of our prey to have been a security guard on his way home, a new, off-duty cop who’d never heard the story, or maybe just a guy worried about being mugged. Somebody packing a handgun and deciding he could become a hero by dropping four or five murderers dead in their tracks. It was dark, he wouldn’t have seen us smiling as we ran at him, and if he had, probably thought we were homicidal maniacs. No jury in the world would have convicted him for mowing us down — we would have gotten what we deserved.”
Jay thought about that for a second.
“If kids tried that game these days, more than likely they would get shot — there are a lot of concealed weapon permits out there, a lot more than when I was a teenager.”
Jay said, “So you’re saying what?”
“I’m saying that just because you have these great abilities to dance in and out of high-security computer systems without worrying that you’ll get caught, it is sometimes a mistake.” He paused for a moment, letting that sink in, then went on. “It happens some people there know me, and it just happens one of them owes me a favor, so I got a call and I fixed it. But you’re lucky — just like we were on those hot summer nights back in my day. Nobody will show up at your door in the middle of the night and disappear you. This time.”
Jay’s eyes went wide. “No.”
“Yes. It doesn’t matter that you work for the government. If you go somewhere you shouldn’t go, you had better make damn sure you don’t get seen. There are some nasty things out there in the world, meaner, hungrier, and some of them are smarter than you are, Jay. I know you don’t think so, but it’s true, and if you cross one of them at the wrong time, you could leave a widow and child alone and always wondering what happened to you. If I hadn’t been here, if somebody hadn’t owed me, you’d be in deep trouble. Keep that in mind.”
Jay blew out a sigh. He felt a chill ripple through him.
“Jay, remember this: If you get to thinking you’re Superman, you will eventually find a guy with a barrel full of kryptonite.”
And all Jay could think of to say to that was, “My God.”
“Amen, son.”
27
Marissa dropped by the office unannounced, which pleased Thorn no end. And one of the first things she did when she got there was to ask him about fencing, which pleased him even more. She was curious about what he did. That must mean something.
He hoped.
He escorted her down to the gym on the theory that it was always better to show than to tell. On the way there, he tried to tell himself that no, he wasn’t showing off at all.
The Net Force gym was empty. Thorn opened his locker and started removing his gear, very conscious that Marissa was watching him. He’d been fencing for a long time, he was comfortable with it, but most of the women he’d been with — save for the few who were fencers themselves — hadn’t shown any particular interest in it.
Marissa had.
“So,” she said as he finished suiting up, “other than knowing that the Germans used to scar each other in places like Heidelberg with these things, and D’Artagnan and all, I don’t know from swords. Tell me about them.”
“Well,” Thorn said, “in Western, or collegiate, fencing, there are three different weapons: foil, épée, and saber. Eastern fencing, like kendo, uses a shinai, and other martial arts use a variety of weapons, but for now we’re going to focus just on the Western version.”
She nodded.
“Some of what I’m going to say comes from books I’ve read over the years, some from conversations with other fencers and history buffs. I’ve said most of this at one time or another over the years, putting on fencing demos and such. I don’t swear that everything I’m going to say is one-hundred-percent accurate, but it’s how I see it.”
She nodded again.
“I have also found that I can go on at length about this, so let me know if your eyes start to glaze.”
She grinned at that. He smiled, too, and began. “Fencing goes back pretty much to when they first outlawed dueling as a sport — if you could say that it ever was a sport. A lot of people don’t know it, but most duels were not to the death; they were to first blood: Whoever drew blood from his opponent, no matter how much or where the wound occurred, satisfied his honor and won the duel.”
She frowned. “They didn’t have much in the way of medicine back then. Was infection much of a problem?”
He raised an eyebrow. F
ew people thought of that. “Yes. In fact, most sword-related battle casualties were from infection, not from the actual sword cuts.”
Thorn picked up the foil. “This was the first practice weapon they came up with. They wanted a system to teach people to parry, to respect their opponent’s attacks. After all, it might settle honor for you to prick your opponent first, but if you nicked him on his wrist and, a moment later, he stabbed you through the heart, you would have won the duel but lost your life.”
“Not much of a trade-off,” she said.
“Exactly. So, they came up with the foil. A lighter weapon, with a smaller bell guard than the épée, but the biggest difference was that this weapon had restrictions.”
“Restrictions?”
He nodded. “Yep. Two kinds. One was the target area. In épée, the entire body — your head, the little finger on your off hand, your back, even your toes — are all valid targets. With the foil — which, remember, was designed as a practice weapon, not as a simulation of the real thing — the target area is the jacket”—he gestured to the one he was wearing—“excluding the sleeves. Everything else on the jacket — the back, the groin flap, the sides — is all valid. When you fence competitively — or even in practice, in many clubs — you wear a vest made of metal mesh, called a lame, that exactly covers your target area.”
She reached out and touched his foil. “And how do you score?”
He moved the blade to show her the tip. “The foil, like the épée, is a point weapon. See this button here at the end of the blade? It takes five hundred grams of pressure to set that point. Fencing electrically, that opens a circuit through a wire embedded in this groove in the top of the blade, which connects to a body cord running through your sleeve and out the bottom of your jacket, to a floor reel and then to a scoring machine. Pressing the button against your opponent’s lame sets off your colored light, usually green or red. Hitting him off-target — like on the leg, say — sets off a white one. Hitting him flat, with the side of the blade, or having your point slide along the target area, does not depress the point, and so those count as misses.”