by Tom Clancy
She shook her head. “What you say about Beijing’s reaction seems valid, but I am not political. And if the Republic does not act as you hope…”
Wu nodded. “The Taiwanese will. For the ROC to turn down the chance at collecting all that a most-respected general of the People’s Army can bring with his defection? No, they will offer me asylum. Even if I do not grease the ramp — which I will — they could not pass it up.”
“And the North Koreans?” she said. “You believe they will go forward?”
“They have been poised at the gate too long. The mad-man who rules them would kick it open tomorrow if he thought he had the advantage. With a couple of operational nuclear weapons in his hands? He will leap on the South as a starving tiger does a deer.”
“The Americans—”
“—will have enough distraction that they won’t know what is going on until it is too late. Their military computers will be crashing, and they will not be focused on the Koreans. They won’t be altogether asleep, but their current President is a cautious man. With the long and slow drain of Iraq and the problems with Syria still fresh in their memory, he won’t be in a hurry to get into a shooting war in Korea.”
“Even if the North uses atomic weapons?”
“I don’t think the Koreans will use them — not unless the battle turns against them, and even so, they will not aim those at American troops, but against their Southern kin. Many old hatreds there, and jealousy. Ever see a satellite picture of Korea after dark? The lights of the cities in the South are easily seen; the North is very nearly dark.”
He paused, thinking, then shrugged. “Of course, the Americans have the capability to squash the North Korean Army flat, albeit at a huge cost, but — I do not believe they have the will at this point in history.”
“And if you are wrong?”
He smiled now, most pleased. “That is the best part — if they do, it does not matter to my plans. If the Americans are willing to join the battle with serious intent, the North Koreans will find themselves mired in a great and stinking pigsty, and they will suffer large misery. Too bad for them. None of it will be linked to me. The bombs will be surplus Soviet Union, from one of the hungry and broke countries that still has them — but delivered by people who won’t be around to speak of the deed afterward. By the time the bombs are transferred and the Koreans ready to move, I will be on Taiwan, with hundreds of millions of British pounds at my disposal, nobody will be the wiser, and the path to power before me without obstacles I cannot overcome.”
“What of your family?”
“They will remain here,” he said. “Beijing will know what I have done, but they will lose so much face if it is known in the West that they will try to keep it quiet. My family will be safe enough — Beijing will be informed that if anything happens to my family, I will reveal all. I can show a Chinese link to the nuclear bombs, and I will let that fact be whispered into certain ears as well. The last thing Beijing will wish is that the United States believes they had anything to do with the Koreans’ attack. Beijing will swallow it and say nothing. The casinos lost money? Too bad for them. They can make more.”
She shook her head slowly, and was impressed, he could tell. “So you will be rich and respected and alone, living in Taipei?”
“Not alone,” he said. He reached across the table and took her hand.
They both smiled.
It was good to have a helpmate such as Mayli. A formidable woman who did not even blink at the idea of using a little nuclear war to cover one’s tracks.
The Cherry Blossom Pleasure House
Edo, Japan, 170 °C.E.
Jay drank warm sake and watched the men — mostly samurai, but he was sure there were a couple of daimyo in disguise, and at least one ninja — as they laughed and flirted with the courtesans and geisha. Behind a screen, somebody played a shakahashi flute, something simple but bright.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the thickening clouds made the lamps in the large room necessary as the sky darkened. Rain soon.
This was the place that Leigh was watching. His quarry, and Jay’s, was in here.
Jay, also disguised as a samurai, shifted his position a little and smiled at the young woman attending him. She wore a flower-patterned kimono, and her face and neck were made up to be chalk white, with cherry-red lips painted on. When she smiled, her teeth were stained almost black. It was the look, but it wasn’t one that appealed to Jay. She was just cover, so that he could figure out which of the men in the pleasure house was his prey.
It was a good metaphor, Jay thought. There were people who lived in fortresses, massive, well-protected constructs that were so solidly built that getting into them took great skill. There were few such places that Jay couldn’t eventually crack, one way or another — stealth, bribery, even direct assault — though some would take a lot longer than others. If his quarry was inside one of those, that was the disadvantage. The advantage was, such forts were usually not that hard to find. The bigger and more elaborate they were, the easier they were to spot. You had to give up one thing to have another.
Harder, in Jay’s mind, was the quarry who lived in a small shack amidst hundreds or thousands just like it, with nothing to set it apart from those around it. The only way to find the man you wanted was to open each door and look inside. While the doors were flimsy and opening them was no problem, doing it a hundred or a thousand times was no small job. And a clever enough prey might step outside just before you kicked in his door and found an empty room, then sneak back in after you were gone.
A ranked samurai swaggered down the street arrogantly for all to see, the two swords in his sash, able to chop off the head of a lesser man — a farmer, artisan, or merchant— with impunity, if he so desired. Easy to see such samurai and mark them.
A ninja, on the other hand, never wore his black suit in public — the ninja’s stock in trade was stealth. He would be disguised — as a samurai, farmer, artisan, merchant — and the best of them would offer no clue as to their real identity. The ninja suit was worn for night assassinations or spying, and designed to blend into the darkness unseen. If you saw a ninja in this mode, he wasn’t very good at it.
If you could penetrate the disguise, however, you were halfway to defeating a ninja. Yes, they had weapons and dirty tricks, but if you knew that, you had the advantage. A man pretending to be a sake merchant on a rainy Edo street would have to go for a hidden weapon, and Jay could pull out his katana and lop off the man’s head before the ninja could come up with a shuriken to fling at him.
First man to move had the advantage.
Somewhere in this collection of warriors was a fake, and as soon as Jay figured out which one it was, he would have the Chinese hacker. A mistake would give Jay away as well, however, and so he had to be very careful before he moved.
He had managed to sneak onto the Chinese junk on the Yellow River, but the boat had been empty. Somebody had been there recently, there were signs of occupation, but Jay had just missed him. And because the boat had been easy to clamber up and into, he did not figure that the man who’d been there would be coming back. He was more certain than ever it was the hacker he sought.
It was easier to find Leigh, and once he found him, he knew his real target couldn’t be far away. He was right. Leigh had led him to this place, and the hunt was back on.
Jay had asked Chang to hold off having Leigh arrested and sweated, for two reasons. First, Jay wanted a shot at finding the hacker on his own. Second, if the Chinese got the guy, they would pry things out of him that the U.S. military surely would not want them to have.
If this didn’t work, he’d have to give Chang the go-ahead — if he hadn’t already decided to do it anyhow — and they’d get the ID from Leigh, who surely must know who it was he had been watching.
But Jay wanted his chance first. It wouldn’t take long — he’d either pass or fail in a hurry. Pass — and it would go a long way to making him feel as if he’d done hi
s job; fail — and they could always take the other road. But they’d have to give up some things to do it. If Jay could catch him, it would be better.
Jay didn’t intend to fail. He sipped at his sake, and watched the men in the room. Which one?
The front door opened, revealing the gloomy outside. Rain began to splatter against the tile roof at that same moment. A samurai on the porch stepped into the building, and as he did, a fierce gust of wind blew in as a nearby lightning strike strobed and a loud boom of thunder vibrated the room. The wind blew the lamps out, and for a couple of seconds, the room was dim. The patrons laughed and cracked jokes as one of the serving girls relit a lamp.
When the lights came back up, it took Jay a moment to realize that one of the samurai, a short and somewhat swarthy fellow sitting to his right, near the door, was gone.
Jay scrambled to his feet and hurried for the door. The guy was onto him!
Outside, the storm raged; hard winds drove rain almost horizontally at Jay, blinding him. Where was the guy?
Jay caught a peripheral movement. He turned and saw the samurai running, splashing through puddles already ankle-deep, one hand holding his swords steady as he sprinted away.
No doubt about it, that was him!
Jay took off after the fleeing man.
He started gaining immediately. The guy was slow compared to Jay — of course, so were most people — and already Jay was grinning. Guy might look like a samurai, but he was a fake, and in this scenario, Jay was on a par with Miyamoto Musashi. He’d slice the guy into hamburger, figuratively, anyway—
The rainy air ahead of the ninja rippled and it was as if the man had stepped through time and space — he just… vanished, as if running behind a curtain—
What ninja trick was this?!
Jay skidded to a stop just short of the rent in the air, which, even as he watched, faded back into the rainy night.
Jay looked around, wiping the water from his eyes, hoping to spot some clue—
And there one was: a scrap of what looked like blue silk, flattened and soaked by the downpour. Jay moved to it, bent, and picked it up. A scarf of some kind. There was a tag in one corner, tiny, with writing on it, so small he could barely read it.
It said, “CyberNation.”
Jay shook his head. Somehow, the guy had slipped away from him by using CyberNation protocols. Shouldn’t be able to do that, but there it was.
Bag that. “End scenario!” Jay said.
He wasn’t out of moves yet.
Washington, D.C.
Jay grabbed his virgil from the desk — he was still fully suited — and said, “Call Charles Seurat. Priority One.”
32
Rue de Soie
Marne-la-Vallée France
Seurat was most unhappy about the insistent demand of his cell phone. There was a naked woman in his shower, a woman that he was, he was sure, in love with, and he was about to join her — when the phone started playing “Love Is Blue,” the Paul Mauriat instrumental version. Since that was his Priority One ring, he couldn’t just let it go. Merde!
The caller ID was blocked, but since anybody who knew his private number was somebody he would usually — usually — want to speak with, he answered it. Not all that graciously:
“What?”
“I need full access to your system, no playing around with pitfalls and hidden stuff, I need your security code and I need it now.”
Gridley. Seurat recognized the voice — who could forget that arrogant tone? Not a hello-how-are-you? Just a demand for something he should not have.
“Va te faire foutre! Why should I do that?”
“You want me to get stuffed? I have the guy who screwed your network in my sights! He ran into your system to hide and the longer it takes me to get after him, the more likely it is he might get away!”
“My people can—”
“—get stuffed themselves! We don’t have time for this! Give me the number!”
“Listen, Gridley, if you think—”
“Seurat, the clock is running. The guy is Chinese. He is in China. The Chinese are about to have a guy in custody who can give them the hacker’s name — what do you think they’ll do once they know who he is?”
Seurat felt a cold roiling in his belly. “Merde—”
“Exactly. They will grab the guy who was able to penetrate CyberNation and United States military hardware and give both of us all kinds of grief. You think they won’t squeeze everything he learned since he was born out of him? You want the Chinese to do that?”
Seurat had not gotten to where he was by dithering when he needed to move. He rattled off his personal security code, one that would allow the bearer to go anywhere in CyberNation.
“Got it. Thanks.”
“Go, go! Let me know!”
“Bet on it.”
Seurat discommed, and put the phone down. He looked into the bathroom at the fogged-up shower glass. The future of his company might be riding on what Gridley could do. How could a man relax under such worry?
Then again, there was a beautiful, sexy woman in the shower waiting for him. There was nothing he could do to help Gridley at the moment anyway, non? He stood and began to undress.
C’est la vie…
Los Angeles
2105 C.E.
The Japanese village was gone and now Jay found himself in a gritty Los Angeles ninety years in the future. It wasn’t exactly like Blade Runner, but it was not a world anybody wanted to live in — the streets were grimy, the people dirty, and it looked more like Saigon in the ’60s than L.A. a hundred odd years past that. It was very noisy, crowded, and it stank of something Jay couldn’t identify exactly — like some combination of mold, dust, synthetic lube, and sweaty humanity.
It gave Jay some hope that maybe — maybe — he could still find this guy. A true pro — not one just with experience in VR and with rascaling scenarios, but one who was used to playing cat and mouse with the police — would not still be in this scenario. A true pro would have bounced once, twice, three times already, leaving no trail for Jay to follow.
Jay grinned bitterly and shook his head. A true pro, he realized, wouldn’t have done that at all. No, he would have simply ended the scenario, unjacking and leaving VR entirely, and giving Jay absolutely no way to track him.
But if this guy wasn’t a pro, if he wasn’t smart enough — or scared enough — to bail, this would be a nice place to hide. Who’d want to come here looking for you?
And Jay had one other small hope to cling to: He knew what he would have done in the guy’s place. Even knowing the smart thing, Jay would have stayed, playing with his chaser, confident in his own abilities.
He already knew this guy wasn’t as good as Jay Gridley. No one was, after all. But he could hope the guy was every bit as confident.
Ahead of him on the street, two men who looked to be in their early fifties were talking about some disaster. The taller man was dressed in an orange coverall with some kind of high-tech sandals that flashed red and blue diodes with each step; the second man wore a silky cape over shorts, and what looked like sprayed-on booties.
“—Ivan Noskil Aisee was just outside the Red Zone when the comet smashed into Oakland,” Booties said. “He dropped round yesterday and talked about it.”
“Terrible thing,” Sandals said. “So many people.” He said it as if he was talking about a fender-bender on the freeway.
“Crater was almost a hundred miles in diameter. Anybody within that range was vaporized immediately. Outside that, for another hundred miles, you got killed several times — the heat wave from the fireball fried you where you stood, the earthquake shook your building down, the ejecta buried it all, and the wind blew anything still standing on top of the mound flat.”
“Could have been worse,” Sandals said.
“Yeah, how?”
“Could have hit here.”
“I grok that.”
Jay shook his head. He did science-fiction and
fantasy scenarios now and then, though he preferred to avoid the stuff with dragons and trolls and wizards and all. Too easy.
Jay had seen his quarry move, and he had a handle on what he’d look like, no matter what disguise he adopted here. And he was close, Jay was sure.
He rounded a corner and saw some kind of street theater. A magic show, and a gory one — somebody was lopping arms and legs off three people, blood flying everywhere, but the crowd — and the victims — were all laughing. It was a pretty good trick, Jay thought.
“I’m new here,” Jay said to a woman who looked as if she had been tattooed and surgically altered to look like a two-legged cat. She had feline features, body hair so thick it looked like pale gray fur, for God’s sake, and save for that, wore no clothes. “What is going on?”
“Public Vengeance,” the cat-lady said. “The guy with the sword, his cube was retinal-burned by those three. He gets to kill them any way he wants.”
“Why are they laughing if he’s killing them?”
She stared at him as if he had turned into a giant cockroach. “Why wouldn’t they be? How far away are you from, Dizzy?”
Jay shook his head again. Not a magic trick, and he didn’t understand anything she had said. Apparently retinal-burning was bad, whatever that was. Definitely not a world he’d want to inhabit.
Jay moved off, scanning the crowd. Too much time had passed. Seurat had delayed too long in giving up the code. He was starting to lose what little hope he had of finding his quarry.
Wait. There, ahead, on the fringe of the crowd, watching the killings… there he was! A short, very Chinese-looking man in his late twenties, laughing at the gore.
The time for finesse was past. Jay sprinted toward the man as fast as he could. The guy didn’t see him until Jay was three feet away. Before he could do more than blink, Jay was on him. He grabbed him, whipped his arm around the man’s neck, and applied a triangle-choke, shutting off the carotid blood supply to his brain. The guy struggled, but after a few seconds, he went limp, out cold.