33
The Bizarre Bazaar
Jay had bagged the sci-fi convention scenario to try something different. He was still rattled by his visit with Rachel, really rattled. He felt as if he had developed a sudden case of some tropical fever; he was alternately hot and cold and on the edge of throwing up. He didn’t want to think about it, and work was the best way to avoid that, but even so, it kept coming up in his thoughts.
How close it had been. Way too close. He was ashamed of himself for letting it get that far. For even considering it.
So here he was, in fantasy Arabia, looking at a hookah when the alarms went off. The hookah was big, maybe three feet tall, and VR text hanging in the air in front of it advertised it as suitable for flavored tobacco or “other substances.” The hose of the hookah had been customized to look like snakeskin, and the mouthpiece had been molded appropriately to match.
“Other substances.” Yeah, right.
The alarms sounded like air-raid sirens. All around him vendors grabbed their cash boxes and headed for the exits. The VR commerce center had been modeled like a cross between something from the Arabian Nights and a 1940s Hollywood movie about Damascus in Glorious Living Technicolor—baskets, tables covered with colorful cloth, and brightly decorated awnings inside a huge, cavernous, walled marketplace. A bizarre bazaar, indeed . . .
It was mostly a gray market—products which were illegal in some countries, but not here, as well as questionable transfers of supposedly legal items.
Like, say, firearms.
If he could figure out for sure who bought the BMF, they’d be one step closer to nailing the terrorists attacking the bases.
Unfortunately, while the information was here, the site containing the information was international—which meant he had no jurisdiction to demand anything. How what he wanted had come to be here, Jay didn’t know, but he was sure that it was.
The problem was the way the records were kept. There were hundreds of vendors, each of whom had their own unique files. And most of those were only internal—to follow the money outside the market, their transactions had to be cross-checked with the site’s commerce engine. He could easily hack the individual sellers, but getting to the money transfers was somewhat more difficult. The guy who had bought the gun had used a swiped ID, but he had come, for some odd reason, through here to do it. Jay was betting his real name was here somewhere.
The data he wanted was kept behind a major firewall—one designed to Net Force specifications. Which meant that even being Jay Gridley wasn’t enough to get into it.
If only I could get the good guys to protect their stuff like that.
So he had followed what one of his professors had called the “Prophet Tactic”—if you couldn’t go to the mountain, maybe you could get the mountain to come to you. . . .
He’d run two quick tests, triggering the site’s security. During each test he’d seen the site’s crisis measures in action.
Rather than wiping every dangerous piece of data, the site database was split and fired off into different directions. After a set time the pieces would be reassembled and business would begin as usual at YAVA—Yet Another VR Address.
Jay had twice watched the burnoose-wearing VR metaphor for the cash records haul ass down a dark alley toward the back of the market and out through an arched doorway.
So all he had to do was trigger the alarms again, grab the records from the avatar—who looked like a middle-aged accountant in faux-Arabic robes—and he’d be in good shape.
There he goes. . . .
Exactly as predicted, the cash records guy hustled out the firewall entrance—which looked like a concrete bunker pasted with advertisements in Farsi or something—and toward the rear of the marketplace.
And here I go. . . .
This was where it could get iffy. Up until now, he’d been a bystander, no one who would catch the attention of site security.
If site security ID’d him quickly enough, they could start unraveling his net disguise and track him back to U.S. law enforcement.
Which would be embarrassing.
Not that the United States wasn’t used to being embarrassed—but Net Force’s top VR jock certainly wasn’t.
And I don’t want to start now.
Jay ran past the hookah vendor’s long table toward an intersection the records carrier would cross before turning into the alley. By not following the carrier directly, he hoped he was less likely to catch unwanted attention.
But—no. Someone had programmed the marketplace’s security with a predictive network filter. They weren’t common, and ate up a lot of processing power, but apparently the site’s owners were willing to spend it to protect their records. He’d been identified as a threat. Dozens of black-robed security avatars, each carrying long, shiny scimitars, came running toward him. They sounded like extras from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. . . .
Damn!
The carrier was still a good twenty yards or so ahead and the blade-wavers were coming up fast.
Bullet time . . .
Jay triggered a subroutine he’d prepared as a “just-in-case” and instantly everything slowed—including himself.
He was in the air, running, front foot on the way earth-ward again. All around him everything had slowed to a barely perceptible crawl. . . .
Although he couldn’t move any faster, he was able to sit back from his avatar and examine the scene like a three-dimensional model—himself running, the carrier ahead, the security guys closing in.
He only had a few seconds—the slowdown routine would be blocked by the VR site, since speed was to their advantage—so he had to think fast.
Come on, Gridley!
He could see he wasn’t gonna make it. The security team would have him trapped before he intercepted the carrier.
Should he abort?
Normally, he wouldn’t even consider it. But being caught raiding an international site in U.S. colors would be ugly. Real egg-on-the-face stuff. Crap!
Unless there’s another way—
There were too many guards, and too many bystanders between himself and the carrier. The spacing of the tables in the marketplace funneled things too tightly. He couldn’t get to the carrier fast enough going around the tables—
But nobody said he couldn’t go over them.
He jumped up onto a table holding a variety of decorative daggers and kicked a display out of the way. Blades flew left and right and he saw one of the security guards duck.
The seller yelled what was surely a nasty curse.
Jay jumped to the next table, this one full of cartoon collectibles, and knocked over boxes filled with mugs and figurines as he kept moving. He glanced down and saw a red-garbed dog with a black U on its chest go flying.
Do not fear, I am here. . . .
The guards couldn’t recover fast enough. The network predictor was confused just a hair, and that was enough.
By running the tables, he gained enough time to be just in front of his quarry at the mouth of the alley. He leaped, knocked the guy down, grabbed the papers and started shuffling in a big hurry. C’mon, c’mon—!
All he needed was—there it was, the name!
Carruth. He recognized it from the prison scenario.
Gotcha!
As the guards closed in to behead him, he laughed and gave them the finger. “End scenario!” he yelled.
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Jay knocked on Thorn’s door, and didn’t wait to be invited in.
Thorn was on the com, but he said, “Let me call you back.”
Jay said, “Boss, I got one of the terrorists ID’d. And it’s the guy who iced the Metro cops, too.”
“Carruth,” Thorn said.
Jay looked as if he’d been punched in the gut. “How did you know? You got spyware in my system?” There was a scary thought. What else might he know? About Rachel?
“No. The Army got an anonymous tip about another base going to be hit. The caller identified Carruth and gave Army Intelligence particulars—where and when. Said the guy coming in would be wired with explosives and was not going to let himself be captured.”
“Damn. All that work and somebody just . . . gave him up?”
“The confirmation is important, Jay. The guy just hit the base, right on schedule.”
“He dead?”
Thorn shook his head. “No. He got away.”
Jay frowned. “What? How’d he do that if they knew he was coming?”
“I don’t know. According to what I just heard”—he nodded at the com—“he was on the base and heading toward his target—supposed to kidnap some colonel—when all of a sudden he spun his car around and boogied. They weren’t expecting that. They hadn’t sealed things up tight yet. He got off the base and they couldn’t catch him.”
“Crap. What morons!” Yeah, he was still upset about the Rachel thing, no question.
“We have a location,” Thorn said. “In the District. The tipster called back and gave the Army an address. The FBI and local police are rolling on it. Abe Kent and a team are going along as ‘advisers.’ We’ll collect him if he went home.”
Jay nodded.
“You can ride along with General Kent in the mobile command center if you want. He’s leaving in about two minutes.”
“Thanks, but I’ll pass. Not my area of expertise, and this guy has a gun that will drop a charging Kodiak bear. I don’t want somebody explaining to my wife how I was hit by a stray bullet that will require a closed coffin at the funeral.”
Especially before he had a chance to see her and come clean about Rachel. He had to do that.
“Smart,” Thorn said.
“Some days I think so. Other days, maybe not. Lemme know how it goes.”
Jay stood.
“What are you working on now?”
Jay shrugged. “A loose end. Probably not anything, but a thought came up I want to run down.”
“Break a leg.”
“Not mine, I hope.”
There was no need to build a complicated scenario for this, and Jay didn’t really feel up for it. What he felt was sick, and what he hoped was that he was wrong. He wasn’t looking to entertain himself; he just needed the facts.
Carruth, however many people he might have killed, wasn’t the brains of this operation. That became obvious the more Jay looked at it. The guy didn’t have a net presence to speak of, and nothing in his background indicated any great computer skills. He was an ex-Navy SEAL. He could stomp you to mush, or shoot you, or blow you up, and he could do it falling out of a plane, on the ground, or underwater, too, but there was just no way he had built the alien-bug game, and no way he could have hacked into Army computers and gotten squat. That a dead guy made the game and might have been running the show made sense, but it was awfully convenient—maybe too convenient—and now Jay wasn’t so sure about that, either.
Carruth was a pawn, maybe even a knight, but not the king for whom Jay had been searching.
Or, as it had finally dawned on him, maybe he wasn’t looking for the king at all.
Maybe he should have been trying to find the queen. . . .
Jay used a stock VR library, went to the front desk, got the location, and went to find the biography of Captain Rachel Lewis, United States Army.
He took to the book to a table and opened it.
The facts and figures were there—DOB, family, schools, like that, but what Jay wanted was going to be beyond the public facts; fortunately, he had access to things most people couldn’t get to, and the index in the Book of Rachel was very thick.
Some of it came from odd angles, but there was a lot of information there if you knew how to look, and certainly Jay knew that.
It bothered him that he was doing it. No, that wasn’t strictly true—what bothered him was that he believed he had a reason to do it. It was an ugly suspicion, and maybe he had it for the wrong reasons.
Was it just guilt? At how he had felt as she was rubbing his crotch? Or shame at how hard it had been to jump up and run out of her office?
Because that had been tempting. Lord, it had. He could have just . . . let go, pretended it was VR, that it wasn’t really happening, and he had a feeling it would have been absolutely dynamite sex, too. Blond, beautiful, brainy, everything to like . . .
But the image of Saji holding their child had bloomed in his mind, and he couldn’t see past that to the woman wetting her lips for him and reaching for his zipper. . . .
Sure, a lot of men had affairs after they were married. None of them seemed to think it was that big a deal, a little on the side, but Jay realized that he wasn’t like most people. He had been a computer geek for a long time—he’d had a couple of girlfriends—but nobody had ever loved him like Saji. She had been there for him while he was lying in a coma, she had given him a son, and what he felt for her was beyond his ability to put into words.
Yes, Rachel Lewis was smart, she was sexy, and she wanted him, no question, but if he had gone down that road, how would he have felt about himself afterward? Were a few minutes of sexual pleasure, no matter how hot, worth his self-esteem? Worth risking his marriage?
The answer was simple: No.
Once he had realized that, once he had made that decision, even in the panic in which it had taken place, things had . . . shifted. There was an old saying he had seen somewhere, from the I-Ching or the Tao or something: “The Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.”
When it had been a fanciful possibility that he might have fallen into bed with Rachel, he hadn’t looked at her as critically as he might have done otherwise. He didn’t like that, but he had to accept it. She’d had a free pass.
On some level, he had been enjoying the flirting, the idea of it, the risk. But when push came to shove, he couldn’t do it. It would have been wrong.
And now? Now his vision wasn’t being blocked by the image of Rachel lying naked on a bed. And he had started wondering.
Now, all those little things he had accumulated that he had ignored? They suddenly seemed bigger than they had before.
Who had given him the information on the URL that he’d wasted so much time chasing, only to find it a red herring?
Who had been with him when his scenario crashed as he was about to catch the Alien Cowboy?
Who had access to all the Army’s sensitive information, and the ability to use it without being suspected?
From whose unit had the original information supposedly been hacked?
Who, if she hadn’t been beautiful and sexy and smart, would have been at the top of Jay’s check-’em-out list, once he got rolling?
The answers to all the questions were the same.
There was a tendency to separate people into good guys and bad guys, and since Lewis had been on the same side—and gorgeous—that made her ipso facto one of the good guys. But there had always been bad cops, and they were harder to catch because nobody started out looking at them.
Now, there were too many fingers pointing that way for Jay to stay blind any longer.
He came across the entry on Rachel’s father. He turned to that page, began reading. A career Army man, just as she had told him. Died young . . . hmmm.
A sub-index on Sergeant Robert Bridger Lewis turned up the cause of death: suicide.
As Jay read the file, he felt a cold sensation begin gathering in his belly.
Sergeant R.B. Lewis had been court-martialed and convicted of killing a soldier, and had been awaiting sentencing when he shot himself.
Records of the trial told the story: The soldier had allegedly assaulted the then-seventeen-year-old Rachel Lewis, a date rape. Her father had gone to find the young man and had killed him with his side arm.
The cold in his gut turned into a hard and icy lump.
Jay leaned back and stared at the book. That might tend to make for a screwed-up view of the Army, that they prosecuted your father for taking out your rapist. But it wasn’t proof.
Jay thumbed back to the index, and to the medical records section.
There was no record of Rachel Lewis ever having a child. That didn’t mean all that much—could be she had avoided giving her real name. He could strain the records looking for live births about the time it would have happened, and death certificates due to the cause she had told him, a burst aorta. That would take a while. . . .
No, wait, hold on. Here was a sealed record of a medical exam just last year, a routine physical, and a copy of the doctor’s exam notes: “Well-developed, well-nourished sthenic Caucasian female, gravida 0, para 0, appearing to be about the stated age of . . .”
Jay grabbed a medical dictionary and leafed through it.
Gravida and para . . .
Pregnancy and delivery . . .
Whoa.
If, after a physical examination and lab tests and all, a doctor had written down that Captain Lewis had never been pregnant, much less had a baby?
That meant she had lied to Jay about her baby. Why?
Well, if she had been trying to get his sympathy, certainly that had worked. He had wanted to hug her and comfort her when he’d heard that, and if she had designs on him to keep his mind from churning along a certain path—
If? All those sexual images in her scenarios? That fallen towel during that phone call? Her hand in his lap?
She wanted to sleep with him—but not because she thought he was God’s gift to women. It was to put him off her trail!
What a moron he was! Why hadn’t he seen that before?
Jay was certain of it in that moment. Rachel Lewis was behind the attacks on the Army bases. The only question was, how was he going to get enough evidence to prove it?
Maybe Carruth, if they got him alive, would roll over and give her up. But Jay couldn’t depend on that. He had to get what he needed in case Carruth blew himself to pieces when the authorities came to call.
Then again, once you were convinced of something, once you knew it was the truth, finding evidence to back that belief was easier than fumbling around in the dark looking for it in the first place.
Well. He had plenty of material to look at. Everything she had told him needed to be checked. She had been lying to him all along, and somewhere in that mess might be just the thread he needed to unravel it.
Rachel was the bad guy. Damn.