Los Angeles, California
The jet began its final descent, and Junior put up his magazine and looked out the window. The plane was half-full, and though he was in the tourist cabin, he had three seats to himself.
Junior didn't much like to fly, but getting from the east coast to the west pretty much meant you had to do it. The only real option was to spend the better part of a week driving it, or on a train. The drive was murder, but the train wasn't a bad way to travel. You got to see interesting stuff, hang out where nobody could get you as long as you turned your phone off, and the rocking motion helped you sleep. You could sit in front of the big picture window in the club car drinking a beer and watching the country go by. And you didn't have to worry about somebody hijacking the sucker and taking it to Cuba or into a building.
But having a couple weeks for a round-trip wasn't in the cards this time. He had to get there, do his business, and get back, and he had exactly two days, so it was fly or nothing.
The flight was a hassle with all the security and lines, but that was just how it was. He always took his hardware to FedEx in a big box marked "Survey Equipment," insured the box for ten grand, and put down that it contained expensive electronic gear for survey work. When a box was insured for ten thousand dollars, FedEx didn't lose it. He sent it same-day delivery, to be picked up at the FedEx place nearest the airport, and his guns were waiting for him when he got wherever he was going, since they didn't have to put it on a truck to go elsewhere.
Some shooters simply packed their weapons in their checked baggage. Some had even found ways around the security and actually carried them right onto the planes. Junior didn't do that. As a convicted felon, he couldn't risk being caught, and since the airlines did random hand-searches of checked baggage now and then, even a small chance was more than he wanted to take.
He didn't much like being without his revolvers on a jet--you never knew when some whacko was going to go nine-eleven--but he wasn't completely unarmed. He had a pair of short knives he carried tucked into his socks. Made of hard plastic--they were called CIA letter openers--the metal detectors didn't see them. He could walk right though the security checkpoint, no problem.
He'd also been meaning to get himself one of those Israeli two-barreled derringers. Made out of what was essentially layers of carbon fiber and superglue, with scandium barrel liners and titanium springs and firing pins, they shot some kind of boron-epoxy round. The barrel itself was essentially the shell, like an old-time black powder weapon.
Like the knives, metal detectors didn't spot them, but you had to take them apart to reload. They weren't rifled, either, but smoothbores, so they were only accurate up close. Expensive little devils, too. They ran three grand each, if you could find 'em, which was also a problem.
Still, any gun was better than no gun when the shooting started. That's all he'd need, to have his jet taken over by someone who thought he was on a mission from God. If that ever happened, and if the guy didn't have a gun of his own, Junior was going to slice the fool like he was a watermelon.
One good thing you could learn in prison was how to do nasty stuff with a shiv, even a plastic one. While he was in the Louisiana pen in Angola, he'd met some South African guys who could make a knife do everything but stand up and whistle "Dixie," and unless the terrorist was one of those, he was going to be dead real fast if he struck at a flight Junior was on.
Junior knew he could gut the guy and be a hero for doing it. If they questioned him about the plastic knife, he would say he found it in the bathroom--the terrorist must have dropped it while doing whatever it was terrorists did to psyche themselves up for their suicide missions. He could plant the second one on the body to make sure. The way he figured it, if a guy saved a plane full of people, nobody was going to give him too hard a time about how he did it.
They landed, and Junior collected his carry-on bag. In and out, quick and dirty, that was the drill. He'd get a car, go collect his guns, and then make a call on a certain congressman who was getting too big for his britches. He'd give him some advice the congressman would be hard-pressed to refuse, what with the pictures Junior had of him with a woman other than his wife at a motel in Maryland and all.
Another day, another dollar.
He smiled. Wonder what the poor folks are doin' today.
20
Avalokiteshvara Monastery
Himalayan Mountains, Tibet
Alone, Jay Gridley meditated in the Place of the Dead.
Or, rather, he tried to meditate. He shivered as he exhaled. His eyes were closed, but he knew if he opened them he would see his breath cloud the air before him. It was always cold here at the top of the world, where the snows lay deep and eternal. In the summer the top layers were stale and crisp, crusted into snow-cone ice, and the daylight hours were longer--but the cold never went away. Even inside, out of the wind, with fires and lamps burning, warmth was far more illusion than reality.
Jay smiled ruefully. It was all an illusion, of course, but it made Saji happy, and he was glad he had created this scenario for her. He just wished he could get the place to work for him as well as it did for her.
Seated upon a reed mat worn thin by generations of student monks, Jay felt the smooth rock floor claim what meager heat his flesh generated: It was cold.
The patchouli incense smoldered in a big clump on the altar in front of him. Along with the rendered-yak-fat oil lamps, they sent entwined tendrils of greasy smoke up to paint yet another layer of soot on the already tar-colored ceiling forty feet up. The carbon must be a centimeter thick up there, Jay thought.
Most of the lamps in the monastery used kerosene or white petrol. The fuel for them had to be carried dozens of miles up the mountain trails in ten-liter plastic bottles. Here in the traditional meditation chambers, however, the ancient, smelly, smoky oil lamps were still used. The combined aroma of bundled incense and burning fat was an oily, metallic odor, powerful but not unpleasant.
Nice touches, if he did say so himself.
Jay took another deep breath and exhaled slowly. He was supposed to be calm. He was also supposed to be finding out about the Supreme Court justice's clerk, and not focused on some small-time programmer's inconsequential net viruses. But it was personal now, after his own computer was infected--
He would never achieve a still mind this way. He opened his eyes.
The legions of the dead surrounded him.
The four walls were lined with shelves made of long planks stained a dark green, from a time when wood was not so scarce in the region. And on those shelves were--artifacts, Jay thought, repressing another shiver. Artifacts--a safely ambiguous term.
Artifacts--which had once been human beings.
Tibetan Buddhism taught that there was no worth in a dead body, except whatever use it might be to those left behind to dispose of it. A corpse was like a house destroyed in a storm--once the spirit was gone, a body was not to be revered any more than an empty, wrecked building would be. And if somebody had need of the timbers or shingles or window glass of that building? Why, then, let them make what use they could of it.
Which is what the monks of the Avalokiteshvara Monastery had done. There on the top shelf, visible in the flickering yellow light of the largest of the brass lamps, was a prayer wheel. It was an ingeniously constructed device, a cylinder inscribed with prayers and litanies designed to spin during devotions.
The shaft of the wheel had been made from the thigh bone of the first head of the Avalokiteshvara Order. The wheel itself was cleverly carved from sections of that same holy man's skull. Both had been overlaid with fine layers of hammered gold leaf, but there was no mistaking what they had once been. Next to the prayer wheel was a drinking cup, also made from the trepanned top of a monk's skull. And next to that was a scroll composed of human skin, counting beads made from finger bones, a necklace fashioned of yellowed teeth. . . .
The shelves surrounding him were full of such mementos mori, dozens of them, all neat
ly dusted and arranged.
Brrr. Jay shivered again, but this time the involuntary reflex was not caused entirely by the cold. He was alone physically, but not spiritually. The dead swirled around him unseen, traces of their essences clinging to that which had once been part of them.
Of course, before he met Saji, his western, rational, scientific mind would have been amused at such things, would have laughed at the idea of ghosts and revenants. But here in the depths of the monastery, science ran into its limits. Here, in this charnel dug deep into the raw stone heart of Mount Changjunga, here, in the bottom levels of these labyrinthine tunnels and chambers, here, in the Place of the Dead, Jay had more than once thought he heard the spirits call to him when, on rare occasions, he had managed to still his thoughts long enough to slip into meditation.
Spooky.
To sit alone in the Place of the Dead was definitely that.
Some of those who had left parts of themselves here had not been quite so holy as their contemporaries had thought them to be. Some of them had not advanced so far along the path as they had pretended. Their essences were strong and sinister, it was whispered, still full of unfinished business, of lusts and hatreds and fears, and woe to the initiate who sat among them unprepared. Legend had it that they would beat upon the walls of a student's mind, clamoring to be let in, to experience once more the red pulse of life, to leach warmth from his spirit as the floor did from his body.
Saji had spoken to him of the fear Jay had felt on such occasions, especially when he had been recovering from his stroke.
"But of course you will be afraid," she had said. "Fear is natural. Confront it often enough and it will lose its power over you. There will come a day when you will embrace fear as you would a woman, and it will serve you as well as the warmest love."
Uh-huh. Right.
Jay realized that his breathing had become more rapid and shallow. He could feel fear rising in him like the mercury in a thermometer. He concentrated on breathing deeply and slowly, focusing his awareness on his breath.
It seemed to him that the light had grown even more wan and pallid, that the darkness was pressing in hungrily around him. He noticed the skull of some ancient monk sitting on a nearby shelf at eye level. An unnamed artisan--perhaps existing at the same time as the monk, perhaps centuries later, there was no way of knowing--had outlined the skull's eye sockets with filigreed silver and placed within them a pair of faceted rubies, each worth a king's ransom. The gems glittered in the weak light, seeming somehow to focus on Jay with malign intensity. . . .
Jeez, how good were you at creating a scenario when you could scare yourself with something you had made?
Jay turned his gaze from the skull, trying to still his mind, to concentrate on following the breath as it entered and left his body.
He sighed. There was no denying it--the monkey mind was in full control now. His thoughts scampered from one subject to another like primates leaping from tree to tree. Before his mental eye arose the image of his own infected computer, and of the anger he had felt at that. He wanted to hurt somebody. Oh, boy, did he.
He also wanted very much to be able to be calm, and to not let his emotions run away with him, and so he kept trying to get there. And if that had to include sitting on a frigid stone floor among human body parts, meditating and fighting off the attacks of restless spirits, then so be it. Saji could do it. He could learn how to do it, too.
Jay closed his eyes again. He blew his breath out through his left nostril, inhaled slowly through his right nostril. Once more he blanked his mind as best he could and sought the "om," the sound of all sounds, the drone of the entire universe as it spoke with a single voice.
In the embrace of the "om," it was said, all things were possible.
Even tracking down the lowly little hacker who'd created that virus--
He shook his head. There he went again. He was never going to get this. Never. Maybe he should--
His priority alarm chimed, kicking him abruptly out of the meditation scenario--
Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia
"What?"
"WE HAVE FOUND THE EVIL ONE," his tracker imp said.
Jay grinned. He could get his head together later. Right now, he had a criminal to catch and a very personal score to settle.
21
Summer 1973
Disco Beat Dance Club
San Francisco, California
"Smokey Jay" Gridley leaned against the cool blue tuck-and-roll Naugahyde cushion in a back booth in the disco, doing his best to appear relaxed as he watched the drug dealer and his buddies in a booth a dozen feet away. Thick smoke drifted through the air, with much of the bluish haze coming from low-grade marijuana, to judge from the smell.
The dealer was a pig. Jay guessed he weighed three, three hundred fifty pounds at least. His bald, bullet-shaped head gleamed in the flashing lights from the dance floor. Three sets of heavy gold chains glittered on his chest in the large gap of the lime-green polyester shirt he wore unbuttoned down to his navel. He moved his hands in the air, tracing a Coke-bottle shape, and laughed.
His two friends, who looked as if they could have been cast in a Superfly movie, laughed uproariously at his apparently obscene comments. One man wore a black hat with big peacock feathers in the band, a poster boy for "pimp of the week," and the other sported black leather pants and a jacket, both studded with chrome buttons. A few safety pins through his cheek and a mohawk and he'd be a punk rocker. Thankfully, they weren't quite to that era yet.
A few people moved on the dance floor, fairly graceful considering the platform shoes they all wore. The chukkita-chukkita-chukkita of the disco beat was underscored by a lot of percussion, particularly cymbals, and a nasally male singer.
What awful music.
Jay glanced around the room and caught a view of himself in one of the mirrored pillars that framed the dance floor. He wore amber-tinted horn-rimmed glasses and a brown leather jacket. A thick gold medallion with an up-raised fist lay on his chest, framed in a gap that was nearly the equal of the fat man's, and his dark blue bell-bottomed jeans almost completely hid the snakeskin boots he was wearing.
He'd combed his hair into a huge pompadour, the front of the ridge extending a good inch out from his forehead, and held in place by the strongest hair spray you could find in 1973--which was almost shellac. You could bounce quarters off his hair, he was sure.
Jay Gridley, human chameleon.
A burst of static echoed in his right ear. He wore an earpiece there that was 1973's version of a high-tech receiver.
Jay pushed the fist in the middle of the medallion--the microphone--and spoke: "Yeah?"
"Hey, hey, Smokey Jay, looks like the connection has done arrived."
It was the undercover cop outside. Jay knew that he needed help on a major bust like this--not because he couldn't handle a simple pickup like this one. No, it was more political than that. Whenever possible, Net Force tried to bring in the locals, share some of the credit as it were, especially on the big busts.
A crew of undercover officers also ringed the inside of the club. The guy in the big afro on the edge of the dance floor and the foxy chick in the bright orange micro were another pair from metro.
"I read you. Keep an eye on his ride, and leave the rest to me."
"You got it, Smokey--and hey, uh, leave a little for us, will you?"
Gridley grinned and pressed the fist again.
"We'll see what goes down."
Naturally, what was going on here wasn't really a bust in the traditional sense, but the analogy was apt enough.
What they were waiting on was the hacker who had been creating viruses.
After running the imp for about a day, Jay had gathered information on the start points for all three viruses, but the data had been inconclusive. This guy was smart. He had launched from several different places geographically, all with quick-start AOL accounts that he'd registered with cash cards, paying a full year in advan
ce. The trail had gone cold pretty quick.
Not ready to give up, Jay had started analyzing the virus trail. And in the curious and backward non-barking-in-the-night-dog manner--and thank you kindly, Mr. Sherlock Holmes--he'd found something lacking.
Deep within some of the heaviest concentrations of the virus, he'd found a scattering of computers that hadn't been infected. These machines weren't just free of one or two of the viruses. They were free of all three, which seemed to Jay to stretch coincidence a bit.
There were possible explanations for such anomalies, of course. Those machines could all have great firewalls or antivirals. They could have been off-line when the viruses hit. They could be new systems that hadn't been up until yesterday. There were a lot of reasons, and some of them were even logical.
Well, he'd thought. Let's just see which it was.
Jay had refined another tracker, this one even more subtle, and hit the unaffected systems with it.
He found that while most of the immune systems had pretty good firewalls and bug squashers, several of them had off-the-shelf stuff that should have let at least one of the bugs past, which pretty well shot the first theory.
All of them had been on-line at the time of the general infection, which took care of the second theory.
But most interesting of all, he found that there was a fair amount of traffic between most of the unaffected machines.
Aha. That gave him an even better reason why they hadn't been hit:
It was a hackers' ring.
Oh, it was nothing obvious. It wasn't like the website said anything like, "Geek Friends of Computer Viruses," but visiting the on-line VR chat rooms where some of these SysOps hung out, it was easy to read between the lines. These were virus fan boys.
Which could only mean one thing. Someone in the network of unaffected websites, or someone close to them, had made the viruses Jay was tracking. And, like many hacker rings, these guys would send out immunizations of anything they made to everyone else in the group.
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