32
Net Force Gym
Quantico, Virginia
Thorn stepped out of the shower in the Net Force gym he had pretty much turned into his private practice salle, dried himself, and began to re-dress. Other people still came by to work out, but almost never when he was here.
He didn’t expect he would be working out here that much longer. As his grandfather used to say, you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The zephyrs of change were about to start roaring through Net Force like a small hurricane. What had started out as a civilian-run group under the aegis of the FBI had been co-opted by the DoD into another arm of the military, and its mission had radically changed. A tank just didn’t run the same way a Corvette did.
So far, the military had left most things as they were, but eventually they would alter things. It was in their nature. Like a corporate raider forcing a company merger, the powers-that-be were going to look around and notice there was a lot of duplication of effort—and it would be cheaper, simpler, and smarter to eliminate that duplication—why have four when two were plenty?
Why have two when one could do the job?
Thorn finished dressing. He checked himself in the mirror, ran a comb through his hair. He had come out of private industry, he had been involved in his share of buyouts and takeovers, and he knew how things worked. Things changed, and for all kinds of reasons: Buggy whips weren’t made anymore because there were no buggies. There came a time when the old gray mare was put out to pasture because she couldn’t keep up. That was how it had always been, and Thorn didn’t see that stopping anytime soon.
When the DoD took over Net Force, the agency’s days were numbered, and, as he looked at it, that number wasn’t very large. Six months, a year, maybe longer, but his guess was sooner rather than later. It didn’t make any sense otherwise. Net Force would be broken into components and the chunks sold or traded or given away, and in the end, nothing would be left. The name might stick around for a time, but the heart and soul would be gone. It wasn’t about the hardware, but about the people, and if they left, the party was over.
Thorn had an older cousin who had been a paper company manager twenty-five years or so past. The company, thinking ahead, always replanted the trees it harvested, put three in the ground for every one they chopped down. They were cutting third-growth, fourth-growth wood now. And they were adding new kinds of trees that grew faster and made better pulp, but now and again they would screw up the timing. A region would start to be harvested and trees replanted as they went, but they would cut down all the viable timber before the new plantings matured. There would be a five-year, sometimes a ten-year gap. When that happened, all the local loggers and support people were laid off. Thorn’s cousin had been the manager of one such area, up in Alaska. He’d had to shut the operation down to a few caretakers; a couple hundred workers, most of whom had been working the woods all their lives, thirty, forty years some of them, were let go. The little mill town had no other industry, and property values went into the toilet. Those people who couldn’t make it farming or fishing or hunting had to leave and find work elsewhere. The town effectively died.
Thorn’s cousin would tell the story at family gatherings, how the heart went out of the people who worked for him. How there had been suicides, divorces, vandalism against the company. It was a terrible experience, his cousin would say, taking another drink from his beer. Awful to be part of, depressing to watch. A way of life being lost. Much like what had happened to the Indians.
The listeners in the room would mutter and nod, and take sips of their beers. Yah, but who could have sympathy for the white men who went through it? Their own fault. Not like being herded onto a reservation and kept there by force.
Even though it was nearly as dramatic in this situation, Thorn wasn’t going to do that with Net Force. He had no intention of leading a funeral march. The party was winding down. It was time to think about getting his coat and taking his leave.
Pentagon Annex
Lewis called Jay, using the private number to his virgil this time. She was past trying to rattle Jay’s wife. It was time to get down to serious business.
“Rachel?”
“I need to see you,” she said. “I’ve got a break in the hunt.”
“Now?”
“As soon as you can. I figured out who designed the game. But I can’t ship you the file.”
“I’m on my way. It’ll take me an hour or so.”
“I’ll be here.”
She leaned back in her form-chair and smiled. She had a another red herring for him. Roy “Max” Waite, a fellow student who had graduated the same year she had. He’d gone into design for one of the big entertainment companies, built a couple of movie-tie-in games, had several other good game credits. In one of those lovely bits of good luck that sometimes happened at just the right time, Max Waite had been killed in an auto accident recently—only a few weeks ago. She had come across this just yesterday; somebody sent her an e-mail of a posting on an alumni website, lamenting the man’s early departure from life.
Big, fat, ole Max was dead. What a shame.
She’d seen immediately that she could use this. She’d gone through the system files, through her backdoor into the original game, and found what would look like a clue pointing to the dear departed Max, whom she remembered as a very stout man who’d spent most of his time in the computer labs perched precariously on a sturdy, but complaining, chair. It wasn’t real, the clue, but Jay wouldn’t know that, and he’d have no reason not to believe her. And even better, it would be almost impossible for him to check it further. Perfect.
Earlier, it could have been another wild hair for Jay to hunt down and tug at, but that wasn’t the reason she wanted him to come and see her. Once she got him behind the locked door of her office today, she was going to go for something much more primal. And she was sure he would be up for it.
Jay’s escort tapped on Lewis’s door. “Come on in.”
Jay did, and the sergeant ambled away. He shut the door behind him. “Gear up,” she said. “I’ll show you what I’ve got.” All crisp business, which was good.
He went to the guest chair and started slipping into sensors. He was already wearing his mesh under his clothes. He had taken the time to put it on so he wouldn’t have to do that here.
He jacked in, and the scenario blossomed. This time, it was a 1950s version of a big-city newspaper’s newsroom—copy boys bustled back and forth carrying typed sheets of papers; reporters, mostly men, smoked cigarettes or cigars at their desks and pounded away on old manual typewriters. The place even smelled like pulp paper and ink and cigar smoke. Nice.
Rachel said, “This way.”
Jay followed her down the hall to a door with a brass plate on it bearing the word MORGUE.
They went inside. An elderly woman in a gray wool suit and sensible shoes behind a scarred wooden counter smiled and handed Rachel a manila file folder. Rachel led Jay to a nearby table, and sat in an armless wooden chair, then patted the seat of the one next to that. He sat.
She spread the file out on the table in front of them. It was full of newspaper clippings in black and white.
She tapped one of the clippings with a fingernail. “Here.”
Jay read it. It was dated about three weeks ago:
NOTED GAME DESIGNER DIES IN AUTO ACCIDENT
Jobsville, CA—Roy B. “Max” Waite, 31, died in a two-vehicle traffic accident at the corner of Her-man Avenue and Ishmael Road in Jobsville early this morning. Witnesses say that Waite’s car, a Volkswagen Beetle, was struck when a tractor-trailer driven by Al Huxley, 43, ran a stop sign and hit the VW broadside. Police say alcohol was not a factor, but that Huxley’s truck was traveling at an estimated 40 mph when it crashed into Waite’s car.
“I spilled my coffee on my lap and I was trying to blot it up—I didn’t see the sign until too late,” a tearful Huxley said, according to witnesses at the scene. Police are investigating the incident. No arrests have been made.
Waite, unmarried, worked for ICG Corporation, headquartered in Lucasville, and was the creator of several popular and best-selling computer games, including “Tentacles” and “Lords of the Galaxy.”
This is the third traffic fatality in Jobsville thus far this year, the second at this location. Local authorities are considering the installation of a traffic signal at the intersection.
If the trucker hadn’t stopped at the stop sign, would a red light have made any difference?
Jay looked at Rachel, whose leg was, he noticed, now pressed warmly against the side of his own leg.
“Graduated MIT/CIT same year I did,” she said. “And look at this.”
She slipped a flat color photograph out of her purse, and slid it over to where Jay could see it. It was a video still lifted from the bug game. There was an alien standing by some kind of machinery, a vehicle, parked on a raised platform. The bug was looking at a readout of orange, alien hieroglyphs on the edge of the platform.
“What am I seeing?”
“That’s a scale. The bug is weighing the car. See what it says on the read?”
Jay frowned at her. “It’s in what I assume is bug,” he said. “Not a language I know.”
“It translates to a number—thirty thousand. And the last part says, ‘Maximum Weight.’ ”
“Ahh.” Jay got it immediately. The dead programmer’s nickname—“Max Waite.” Of course. Every programmer signed his or her work. But if you didn’t know who had built it, it was often hard to find, much less decipher, the in-joke.
Even taken as a whole, this wasn’t anything you could take into a court of law and prove, but it all fell together: Game designer who built space games, his nickname hidden in a glyph? This was the guy. He would have had the chops. Shoot, Jay even remembered Tentacles. It had been all the rage when it first came out.
Of course, Waite being dead wasn’t going to help them a whole lot. He wouldn’t be telling them anything unless Jay could find a spiritual medium who could reach beyond the grave. . . .
Crap.
It was good work, though. He told her so.
“Thank you, Jay. That’s something, coming from you.”
At which point she slid her hand up his leg to his crotch.
Startled, Jay bailed from the scenario.
But that wasn’t much help. Rachel squatted next to his chair in her office, and her real hand was on his real lap.
“Rachel! What are you doing?!”
“Clever man like you can’t figure that out?” She smiled. Rubbed a little.
Jay shook his head. “Not a good idea,” he said. He tried to back his chair away, but the wheels seemed stuck.
“Oh, it’s a great idea. The door is locked. Nobody will interrupt us.”
“I’m married!”
“Good for you. This won’t hurt your wife, Jay. Nobody but us ever has to know. I won’t tell.” She squeezed him again. “You want it.”
She was right—he did want it—and that fact was more than a little obvious to her, given where her hand was. And nobody would know. . . .
For a few heartbeats, Jay sat balanced on the razor edge of choice. She reached for his zipper, smiling. . . .
He caught her hand. “No. I can’t.”
“It’s already evident that you can, Jay. And that you definitely want to.” She leaned in, to kiss him. . . .
He got the wheels working on the chair, and it rolled back suddenly, leaving her a couple feet away as he slammed into the wall, hard.
He leaped to his feet. “I’m sorry, Rachel. I just can’t do this!”
He practically ran for the door.
And part of him kept saying, “Idiot! Go back! She wants you! And you damn sure want her!”
Yeah, and that was the problem!