by Tom Clancy
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 waved 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. Few 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.”
She nodded. “Interesting,” she said. “But you said there were two differences. Target area is one. What’s the other?”
He grinned. “Rules,” he said. “Specifically, something called right-of-way. In épée, whoever hits first wins the touch—and bouts used to be to one touch only, just like real duels. In foil, if your opponent has right-of-way, defined as his elbow straight or in the process of coming straight, and his point on line with your target or in the process of coming on line, then you have to respond to his attack before you can claim right-of-way and make an attack of your own. You can parry it, or evade it, or retreat out of distance, or do something to make him break the definition of right-of-way—pumping his arm, for example, so his elbow is no longer straight or coming straight. If you do that, you can counterattack and, if you both hit each other, you win the point. If you don’t deal with his attack first, however, and simply counter into it, you would lose the touch if you both hit.”
“And épée?”
He replaced the foil and brought out an épée. “This is the closest to a ‘real’ weapon in Western fencing. Note how much heavier the blade is than the foil. That’s to make it more like the rapier, which it’s modeled on. A larger bell guard protects the hand and wrist because, unlike foil, those are valid touches. Also, it takes a heavier touch to score—seven hundred fifty grams instead of five hundred to depress the point. No rules. Whoever touches his opponent first wins the point. If you both hit within a twentieth of a second, you both lose a touch. Used to be, back when a bout only had one touch, you could both lose the bout on a double touch.”
He paused. “The épée is my weapon of choice, by the way.”
“Mine’s a handgun,” she said with a smile, “but to each his own, I guess.”
He grinned. “The last weapon is the saber, and it’s not much like the other two. Patterned after the cavalry saber, it’s an edge weapon. You can use the point, and do, sometimes, in a bout, but mostly for a change of pace or a surprise move. Historically, the valid parts of the blade were the entire front edge and the top third of the back edge. The flat of the blade was not legal, and hitting your opponent with that did not score a touch. That changed a couple of decades ago when they electrified the saber, and now the entire blade is valid. Personally, I prefer the old way.”
He pulled a saber out and made a couple of quick cuts with it, whipping the air. “It has essentially the same right-of-way rules as foil but, since it’s designed to replicate a cavalry weapon, and assumes that the combatants are on horseback, the target area is everything from the waist up.”
“Wouldn’t do much good to hit your opponent in the thigh if he’s riding a horse.”
“Exactly,” he said. “He might die later, of infection, but that wouldn’t stop him from taking your head off with his counterattack.”
She touched his saber, then looked over at the foil and épée he’d pulled out. “So,” she said, “feel like giving a girl some lessons?”
He smiled. “Absolutely.”
Washington, D.C.
There was nothing he had to do at the office he couldn’t do from his home system, and Jay was rattled enough by his meeting with Kent that he wanted to go home. More than that, he needed to go home.
When he got there Saji was sitting seiza on the floor, just finishing her meditation. She looked up at him and smiled.
“How’s the boy?” Jay asked. He was still shaken, both from being spotted when he had been sure he’d been invisible, and from the idea of being “disappeared.” That somebody could do that. That they would.
“Fine,” Saji said. “Been alert, smiling, perky all day. No fever, ate like a pig. Sleeping like a rock at the moment.”
That was what he wanted to hear, of course, but the serpent was in the garden, and things were never going to be the same. Before, he had known it intellectually, but now, he knew it in his soul: His son would always be at risk. Worse, past a certain point of prevention and basic first aid, there was nothing Jay could do about that. It was an awful feeling.
The baby monitor on the coffee table was quiet, the viewscreen showing Mark asleep in his crib, so everything was all right, but . . .
Jay smiled. “I’m going to go check on him.”
He walked down the hall and crept into Mark’s room. There he was, an angel, out like a light. Jay leaned down and made sure he was breathing. The boy had that healthy, clean-baby smell. Later, when they went to bed, Mark would sleep with them. If he woke up in the middle of the night, they’d both be with him. They had been doing that since he’d been born.
The thought of something happening to his son, or that he wouldn’t be here to see him grow up? Bad juju.
Jay moved quietly out of the room and back to where Saji now sat on the couch. He sat next to her.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
She smiled. “I’m fine. It was unexpected, all that happ
ened, but it brought home what I already believed.”
“Which is?”
“The Four Noble Truths,” she said.
Jay shook his head. He knew what those were, at least: There is suffering in the world. The cause of that suffering is attachment to things that will all ultimately pass. There is a way to stop this suffering. The way to that attainment lies in the Eightfold Path. Simple. Not easy, but simple.
Part of what had drawn him to Saji in the first place was her Buddhist philosophy. It wasn’t really a religion, in that the existence of a God wasn’t necessary to the precepts. You could believe in a deity or not, but Buddhism was about morality and ethics in the here and now, not whatever afterlife there might be. But this was their son!
“Saji—”
She cut him off, gently. “I know what you’re going to say. This is Mark, our baby, our child. How can we not be attached to him?”
“Took the words right out of my mouth.”
“Nonattachment does not mean that we don’t love and cherish Mark as much as humanly possible. I would step in front of a bus to save him, and I know you would, too. But unless we can let go of that craving, that clinging, we’ll always be in fear for our son. All things must pass.”
Jay shook his head again. “With any luck, we’ll pass before he does. That’s how it is supposed to work.”
She reached out and took his hand. “But sometimes it doesn’t work that way. What if Mark had died?”
“I don’t want to go there.” That thought on top of the rest of his day made him feel ill.
“Nor do I,” she said. “I was never so terrified in my life as when I saw our baby convulsing and I thought he might leave. And he didn’t go. But it is possible. And if that moment had come—if it comes within our lifetimes . . .”