by Tom Clancy
The penguin made its way to one of the pyramid entrances and disappeared inside. Now all Jay had to do was wait for the penguin to come back.
There were thousands of penguins here, and they all looked alike. How was he going to know when his came back out?
The request paper. The VR resolution was sharp enough that he could see the coded order number.
Penguins waddled back and forth, in and out of the pyramid, through the entrance, which was about halfway up. The steps up the side were incredibly shallow, made for the tiny strides the penguins took, which meant the pyramid was much wider than it was tall.
Jay took his time, soaring up and down the walkway, tracking each penguin that came out, dialing his vision in to check the order numbers.
There.
There was his tuxedoed bird.
Skua gulls were the natural predators of Adelie penguins, but they tended to only attack young or old and sickly ones—healthy adults were not usually on the menu.
So while the sight of a diving gull might not stand out in the scenario, seeing one dive on a full-grown healthy penguin would probably set off some kind of alarm.
Then again, once he had his data he could drop out of the scenario. He just had to get it and boogie.
Jay dove.
Some avian sense warned the little waddler. It tilted its head to the side and saw him coming. The penguin leaped over the edge of the walkway and belly-first onto the icy pyramid, using its stomach like a sled.
Jay tightened his wings and increased his speed.
Almost there . . .
The penguin shot up a short incline and then was airborne.
What?
Penguins couldn’t fly—!
And this one didn’t either—it coasted briefly before falling and splashing into the water below.
Damn!
Jay dove into the water, morphing from Skua gull to leopard seal as he hit.
If the penguin had seemed fast on land when it was sledding, it was like a rocket now, little wings flipping out, propelling it like some kind of formal-wear torpedo.
Jay focused on his seal body.
They swam around submerged pieces of ice, through silvery schools of fish, faster and faster.
Jay realized that he wasn’t going to catch it.
Well, hell. How did leopard seals get by without starving?
Wait a second—something he’d read about cautious penguins—how they didn’t want to jump into the water and risk being eaten. But . . .
Jay slowed and let the penguin swim on ahead.
Most successful attacks happened when the penguins were least cautious—coming back onto land.
Jay circled back, went up for a fresh breath, then sank and hid behind a chunk of iceberg. He waited with a predator’s patience.
Thinking he had outrun his attacker, Tux eventually made a big loop and headed back to shore. Jay spotted him a couple minutes later—fortunately, the paper was waterproof, the number still visible. It was his, all right.
Jay waited until the penguin was almost to the ice before he made his move.
Compared to the earlier chase, it was easy. He pounced and grabbled the little bird with his seal teeth.
Gotcha, Opus!
Unfortunately, after all that, catching Tux didn’t do him any good. The bird turned out to be hollow—a simulacrum. Not a real data carrier, but a fake. It took Jay all of two seconds to determine that it wasn’t a penguin at all—it was a mouthful of red herring.
Damn!
The guy who had built the Troy scenario was good. Too good. Why would he have done this? Unless he had known he was going to use the game for nefarious purposes that far in advance? That was a hell of a long-range plan. Who had that kind of patience? That kind of forethought? That he would leave false clues years in advance?
Jay shook his head.
Something was not right about this. What? And how to find it?
26
Offices of the USMC SpecProjCom
The Pentagon
Washington, D.C.
Abe Kent looked at General Roger Ellis. Roger was a couple years younger, but his hair had gone white, he’d picked up a few more pounds around the middle, and he looked ten years older. Being in command of the Marines’ Special Project section at the Pentagon was apparently more than a little stressful.
“New desk?”
“Yes. Made out of pecan.” With his Southern twang, he pronounced the last word “puh-kahn,” not “pee-can,” and had always insisted that his version was correct. A pee-can, he liked to say, was a toilet. . . .
Kent agreed with him—he’d spent time in Louisiana as a boy, and “puh-kahn” was how they said it down there, too.
Roger leaned back in his chair, which creaked a little. “You know the shit has hit the fan big-time over these Army base break-ins.” It was not a question.
“Yes, sir, I got that impression.”
“General Hadden is having fits over this. The only good thing about it is that the terrorists have confined themselves to the Army and not bothered the Navy, Air Force, or the Corps.”
Kent knew this was going somewhere, but since Roger was his boss and had two stars to his one, he wasn’t going to try and hurry him along. Ellis would get to it.
“The thing is, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is responsible for ’em all, and he is, as I’m sure you realized, highly perturbed even if it is just the Army. He was big on getting all the high-tech stuff on-line, and this is making him look bad.”
Kent nodded. “I hear you.”
“Maybe you can help.”
Kent said, “I don’t see how. I’d be more than happy to lead a team of my troops to hunt these guys down and slap them into a collective coma, but I wouldn’t know where to start looking.”
“Neither does anybody else. But you’re connected directly to the people who are most likely to find out.”
Kent nodded, but said, “Not exactly my area of expertise, Roger.”
“I know that.”
“And it’s not like I can march into the computer geek’s office and order him to hurry up, find the bad guys. He’s not one of mine.”
Ellis rubbed at his eyes with one hand and nodded. “I know that, too. But when the big dog barks, the puppies sit up and take notice. Hadden wants something done and he wants it done yesterday, and you don’t just tell the man to piss off and die.”
Kent grinned at that thought. “Be guarding a warehouse of rancid seal blubber up above the Arctic Circle the rest of your career, if you did.”
“If you were lucky. The thing is, the way I heard it, that’s what your immediate supervisor Mister—ah, I mean General—Thorn did. Not in so many words, but pretty much that’s what he meant.”
“Man’s got balls, got to give him that.”
“So do we, and I’d like to keep mine, thank you very much. I know and you know there’s nothing you can do to hurry things along, but I will now be able to report to General Hadden that I have leaned on you. If there is anything you can think of, anything at all that will be part of the solution, I want you to effect it at the earliest.”
Kent nodded. “I understand.” And he did. He had been in the service of his country for a long time, and he knew how the chain of command worked—or, sometimes, didn’t work. He knew he couldn’t do anything substantial. Ellis and Hadden both knew they couldn’t, either, but that didn’t stop the effort down the line. Sometimes, the pressure added some incentive. It wouldn’t here, since the man running the search on the computer end, Jay Gridley, wasn’t really amenable to that kind of impetus. Push him too hard, he’d give you the finger and walk away, because he could. Even if they could draft him and keep his ass in the chair, they couldn’t compel his best effort, and with a man like Gridley, he could look like he was working his tail off 24/7 and be doing exactly nothing useful. How would anybody outside know? It would take somebody as good as he was to keep tabs on him, and the truth was, they didn’t have anybody as
good as he was. He knew, they knew, and that was how that song went.
Kent smiled again at the idea of a musical metaphor. It reminded him of his date with Jen. Now that had been a major event. Neither one of them was a dewy-eyed adolescent, and although the magic had certainly been there for him, there was a certain no-nonsense air about her that came from experience. She liked him, he liked her, and the dinner had progressed to something he hadn’t really expected—certainly not on a first date.
It had been a long, long time for him before that.
Did anybody even use that term anymore? Dating?
“Abe?”
He pulled his attention back to Ellis. “Sir. Sorry. I was wool-gathering.”
“Yeah, well, go home, take a nap. If you can light a fire under anybody, even a tiny one, it would help.”
“I’ll do what I can. Either way, I’m sure the eventual result will come back up the chain.” Which meant at the least he could probably get Gridley to confirm that some impetus had come from Ellis’s office to speed him along, and that datum would eventually find its way to Hadden’s desk. It wouldn’t mean an awful lot, but every little bit helped.
Ellis gave him a tired smile. “I appreciate it.”
As Kent left, following the Marine sergeant escort toward the exit, he considered the best way to approach Gridley. Straight on, he decided. Drop by his office, lay it out that Thorn’s boss had leaned on Thorn, then on him, and allow as how he knew it wouldn’t make Gridley go any faster than the flat-out speed at which he was already going, but that this was how the military mind worked. Gridley wouldn’t get his jockey shorts in a wad about it, if Kent presented it that way.
He wasn’t too worried about it; besides, he had a guitar lesson this evening, and however that turned out, given his new connection with Jen, it was going to be much more interesting than the rest of his day.
When they reached the exit, the sergeant said, “Congratulations on your promotion, General Kent.”
“Thank you, son.”
He still hadn’t gotten used to that rank, but he didn’t mind hearing his name with it attached.
“Semper fi, sir.”
“Always, Sergeant. Always.”
The escort gave him a crisp and perfect salute, and Kent returned it with one almost as good. He gave the man his ID badge and exited the building.
Outside, the day was cool, but sunny. It felt almost like an early spring day. Of course, this was Washington, D.C. If you didn’t like the weather, all you had to do was wait—it would change soon enough.
Lewis General Hospital
Maternity Floor
Washington, D.C.
When Jay logged into Lewis’s scenario, he was surprised to find himself walking down the hall of a hospital. It was a well-built visualization—there was that too-clean antiseptic smell, and that soft echo-stopping sound of carpeted floors and thick walls. Jay looked around, saw mothers walking with tiny babies, or in wheelchairs, holding infants on their laps. The maternity floor.
He saw Lewis up ahead, standing with her arms crossed, staring through a wall of glass into a large room marked NURSERY.
Jay approached, not speaking.
“Well-baby nursery,” Lewis said.
There were rows of plastic cribs with babies in them, all kinds, and it made Jay smile to see them. He remembered going to see his son in just such a place.
Not looking at him, Lewis said, “The road partially taken.”
Jay didn’t say anything.
“I was engaged once. My fiancé and I got started a little early on our family. I got pregnant, and we decided to wait until after the baby was born before we had the wedding.”
She kept watching the infants behind the glass.
“Sean was a seven-pound, healthy, pink boy. Or so we thought.”
Jay blinked. She had never mentioned having a child before.
“He had a rare condition, he was born with an aneurysm. A congenital defect. His aorta just . . . burst when he was two days old. He died in a few minutes. Right in the RW version of there.”
Jay was stunned by this news. “I’m so sorry.”
She shrugged. “Wasn’t anything that could be done. No way to tell until it was too late. Well. I found out later that this had happened several times in my fiancé’s family—apparently it was a genetic thing. One baby in four or five had it.”
“How awful.”
“What was awful was that the son of a bitch didn’t tell me about it. If I had known, I never would have allowed myself to become pregnant—I wouldn’t have risked my baby’s life with those kinds of odds.”
Jay stared at the floor.
“I come here from time to time,” she said. She looked grave for a second. Then she gave him a sad smile. “Well. No point in us standing here being morose. It was a long time ago. I can’t change it.”
Jay nodded. The thought of his little boy dying was beyond painful. His own experience when the baby had developed pneumonia and had to be rushed to the hospital would be with him until, he was sure, he died, even if he lived to be a hundred. He had thought he was smart and powerful—that incident had made him realize just how helpless he was when it came to such things. He couldn’t imagine how Rachel Lewis must feel. How terrible it must be. . . .
“So, what is the scenario you have on tap for us today?”
Distracted by his own thoughts, Jay said, “Uh, well, I thought we might take a run at the cowboy.”
“Cowboy?”
“Um, yeah, I didn’t have a chance to tell you about that yet. FBI came up with a ballistics match. The gun that killed the G.I. on the Kentucky base is the same one that was used to kill two Metro cops. A great big piece, shoots elephant-stopper bullets. There aren’t that many of them around, and I think I’ve got it narrowed down to the right guy.”
She looked surprised. “Really? That—that’s great.”
“Maybe. It might be a dead end—might be that the terrorist they found in the burning truck after Kentucky, Stark, is the guy who bought the gun, but it’s a place to start. The cowboy image is one I came up with once I got it winnowed.”
“Let’s go find him,” she said. “Lead on. The scenario is yours.”
Jay nodded.
Galactic Science Fiction Convention
Art Show Phoenix,
Arizona
Lewis was furious. The stupid son of a bitch Carruth had shot two Metro policemen and never said squat about it—she could understand that, because she would have dumped his ass in a hurry had she known that. But he had kept the fucking gun he used to do it, and shot somebody else! And between the FBI and Gridley, they were about to run the bastard down.
This was bad.
She didn’t know how stand-up Carruth would be if they pulled him in for murder. The District didn’t have the death penalty, though life without parole wasn’t a walk in the park. Kentucky still fried people, though, and if they caught Carruth, he’d have to answer for the soldier killed on the base there as well as the ones in the chase car he’d blown up, and it would be in a civilian court, not the Army’s. She couldn’t remember if they used lethal injection or the electric chair down there. Not that it would matter much.
If he knew he was going to be sent to ride ole Sparky or dance with the Needle, would Carruth give her up to save himself?
Maybe not, but she couldn’t take that chance.
Carruth was, all of a sudden, a liability. Maybe a fatal one.
She couldn’t let the authorities get to him.
And she definitely couldn’t let Jay here find him.
How lucky was it that he had come to her with this instead of nailing it on his own? It was his construct, but she had some control, since she was allowed into it. If she had to, she would use it.
Next to her, Jay said, “I could get you a costume, if you want.”
“I’ll pass. What are we looking for?”
Jay always like to have his basic research clean, so the displays in t
he sci-fi art show were taken from the real thing. He had also learned that true fans hated the term “sci-fi,” too, but that was too bad, ’cuz that’s what people in the real world called it.
Pieces ranged from pencil drawings to oil paintings to sculptures, some of the last kinetic or motorized. Much of it was first-class and professional work—book covers, trading cards, game or magazine illustrations. There was what appeared to be the skeleton of a gargoyle, cast in plaster or some kind of plastic that looked like old bone, and from what Jay could tell it certainly looked as if it could have been real. Next to that crouched a giant robotic frog that was amazing.
He saw Rachel taking it all in, and while she didn’t laugh or sneer, he didn’t get the impression she was all that hot on the scenario. She looked distracted. Probably remembering her baby son. He was still thinking about her revelation. So sad. It made him want to put his arm around her and comfort her. At the least.
But—they had work to do.
They cruised through the art show.
Jay saw an oil painting of a centaur with glowing red eyes that looked so creepy Jay couldn’t imagine living in the same house with it—those eyes did seem to watch every move you made. He stood next to the painting and watched people as they came upon it, and that was interesting in itself.
If it bothered Rachel, it didn’t show.
There was a quarter-size bronze sculpture of a gorgeous black woman in spandex who had some kind of high-tech guns mounted on the backs of her hands, the barrels extending in a line with her index fingers. It was a beautiful piece of work, and the ten-thousand-dollar price reflected that.
There were some funny drawings—covers for Stephen King books that he never wrote, with titles like Big Hairy Monsters! or Huge Yellow Fangs!
There were altogether too many unicorns and cute fantasy animals—tigers with butterfly wings, winged horses, even flying dogs—and a whole bunch of badly rendered fairies, sprites, Hobbits, and characters from Star Trek and Star Wars, some of them sans clothes. Some of the artists had great imaginations and talent, and some were obviously not folks you’d want to find yourself trapped with in close quarters. . . .