36
The Virtual Library
Jay was blurry from all the input. He had run down every fact and factoid on Rachel that he could find. He was sure he knew more about her than anybody alive did—if anybody had put data into a system that was linked to the web anywhere, he was pretty sure he had seen it, from her grades in primary school to her date for the junior high school prom, to every posting she had ever made to Usenet under her own name.
It had been like wading through a heavy surf. It would surge, roll in, and just about knock him down. He would regain his footing, and in would come another wave. Even skimming, it was a lot to see. And the little things kept piling up.
Item: Rachel had been in school when the Troy game had been posted on that server, and she’d had both the access and the skill to have done it.
Item: There was no translation on any fan website of the bug language that supposedly was Max Waite’s signature, zip, so that splotch of hieroglyphs could say anything—or nothing.
Item: It needed somebody with very good access to the Army computers to have gotten the information about the bases. And there was still no sign of an external hack.
Item: Jay’s version of the bug game, saved from an old site, was slightly different than the new version in which Rachel had supposedly found that old desert-scenario web page. That bit was missing from the older version, indicating it had been put in later. Somebody with a hidden door could do that, and backdate their input. It was easy if you knew how—and if you had a back door into the program.
She had never been pregnant, much less had a baby. She had no reason to love the Army, which had convicted her father of murder.
She had been actively trying to seduce Jay, and, let’s face it, he knew he wasn’t God’s gift to women.
She was the bad guy. That sucked, but he was sure.
None of it was solid proof. Yeah, she was a liar, but that wasn’t enough to put her away. Jay was sure—he knew she was the one behind all this—but his certainty by itself wasn’t nearly enough, and he hadn’t found a solid link to anything criminal.
He shut down the library. He was tired. He would go home, get some rest. Talk to Saji, much as he wasn’t looking forward to that, and hit it again as soon as he could. If it was there, he’d eventually find it. If it wasn’t there, he was screwed.
His com beeped.
“Yeah?”
“Jay? Can you come to my office?” Thorn.
“On my way. Good news?”
“Yes and no.”
At Thorn’s office, the boss waved him in and at the couch.
“There was a shooting today on the Mall. Park rangers and local police found a dead guy on lawn,” Thorn said. “Shot four times with a .38 Special revolver by a tall-short-fat-thin-black-white-man-woman-teenage-boy-or-girl, depending on which tourist you believe.”
He paused, his gaze steady on Jay. “The good news is, the corpse is Carruth, and he’s all paid up for his crimes. The bad news is, he won’t be helping us with our investigation.”
“Aw, crap,” Jay said. “What time?”
Thorn looked at his holoproj’s clock. “A couple hours ago. It took a while to ID him. They found a gun lying next to him they are pretty sure was the one used to kill the Metro cops and Army guy, but they’re waiting on FBI ballistics to get back to them.”
“Where was Captain Lewis when this happened? Can we get the Pentagon Annex logs?”
Thorn frowned. “Captain Lewis?”
“Yeah. She’s the one behind this.”
“Really?” Thorn sat up straighter in his chair. “You have something we can take to the Army and FBI?”
“Not enough.”
“But you have good reasons to believe it?”
“Yeah.”
Thorn waited.
“She . . . came on to me,” Jay said.
“Well, yeah, I guess that’s reason to hang her for treason.” He smiled. He started tapping his keyboard.
“I’m serious, Boss. I started doing some backtracking. Every time I hit a dead end, she was behind it. She’s been leading me around by my . . . nose. When I was about to out Carruth, she was with me when my scenario mysteriously crashed. She lied to me about all kinds of things. She had the skill to build the game, she had access to the information that was supposedly grabbed by a hacker. She has a reason to hate the Army. I don’t have a direct link between her and Carruth, but I know she did it.”
Thorn looked at his holoproj screen. “I just got the logs from the Annex. Captain Lewis checked out shortly after you did. She’s not back yet.”
“She went to meet Carruth and she iced him,” Jay said. “I’d bet every computer I’ll ever own on that. But I don’t know if there’s any way to nail her on it. I’ve been reading stuff for hours, and so far all I’ve got is a bunch of circumstantial stuff. She didn’t leave anything obvious lying around.”
Thorn said, “Maybe that’s all we need.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I have to call this in. Now that you’ve brought this to me—which is exactly what you should have done, of course—I can’t sit on this. But if I call General Hadden and tell him we are sure that Captain Lewis is behind the attacks on his bases, he’ll have his MPs grab her right away. After all, he doesn’t need absolute proof. She’s in the Army, and not subject to the same search-and-seizure protections as a civilian. Hadden will most likely have her reassigned to sentry duty inside a maximum-security prison until he sorts it out. If she tries to run, there’s surely some antiterrorism statute he can unlimber and hold her on. At the very least, it would stop her from doing whatever else she might have planned.”
Jay nodded. “Yeah . . .”
“But—?”
“It’s a slippery slope, Boss. I know she’s guilty, but if you can just throw anybody into jail that you want without due process, who’s next? If they can do that to her, then somebody could look at you or me and decide we are bad guys and put us away for years, too.”
“Like I said, she’s in the Army, so it’s not quite the same thing, but I understand your point, Jay. I even agree with you, but I don’t see an alternative here. It’s an imperfect system, Jay. Some folks’ll tell you that sometimes the ends do justify the means.”
“And sometimes they don’t.”
“That’s true, and I know you’d rather have ironclad evidence. So would I. But you’re sure she’s guilty, which means she’s still a threat.”
“Yeah. But I could be wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time, much as it pains me to admit that.” Like he’d been wrong about Rachel, up to a few hours ago . . .
“You don’t think you are, though.”
Jay shook his head. “No. I know what I know. But—”
“What do you want, then, Jay? Would you rather see her skate? Get away? Maybe swipe a tactical nuke from the Army next time and blow up half a city full of innocent people?”
“No, but—”
“If we err, shouldn’t we err on the side of safety? If Captain Lewis has to spend a few days in detention, is that worse than ten thousand people going up in a fireball?”
Jay sighed. “Of course not, but that doesn’t mean I have to like choosing between evils. Either way, they’re both still bad choices.”
“Do you have a better choice to offer?”
Jay shook his head.
“Then I don’t really have any choice, Jay. I’m sorry.” Thorn waved his hand over the com. “Get me General Hadden,” he said.
Jay got up. He was going to head home, but his virgil blinked, indicating he had an incoming call. He looked at the caller ID.
He felt a deep chill.
Thorn looked up at him.
“I’ll be in my office,” Jay said. “One more thing I need to do before I go.”
The Perfect Beach
The Perfect Sea
It was her scenario, and Jay was invited, but he hacked in without using a password, brute-forcing. He’d been there before, he knew where to hit it. No way he was waiting for her to open the door.
It was the beach, with the warm sun and white sand, the breeze, the perfect waves rolling in from the electric blue sea. He saw Rachel, sitting at the waterline, her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms around her legs, staring into the far ocean. She looked mostly bare from this angle, though she could be wearing a bikini.
Gulls soared and wheeled and crawed and he heard the sound of the gentle waves as they lapped on the beach. So peaceful. So serene.
So big a lie . . .
He walked barefoot through the sand, listening to the little squeaks his feet made. It really was a well-built scenario. She really had talent. It was really too bad.
He stopped ten feet behind her.
Without turning to look, she said, “Well, well. Smokin’ Jay Gridley has arrived. Took you long enough. I left a hole in the wall big enough to drive a train through.”
He didn’t say anything.
She stood. As she uncoiled, he saw that she was completely naked. Slowly, she turned to face him, her stance going wide. She smiled, stretched her arms out into a dramatic pose. She did a slow three-sixty turn. “Take a last look, Jay. This is who I am. Just like I am in the RW, no air-brushing, no augmentation; what you see is a near-perfect copy of the real me.”
She ended up facing him, smiling real big.
Jay’s mouth would have been extremely dry in RW, he knew. He nodded, still not speaking.
“You could have had me. In the Real World. It would have been the best you ever experienced—the best you ever would experience.”
She certainly was gorgeous, no argument. But he shook his head. “No. No matter how great you are in bed, it would have been missing something.”
She lowered her hands and laughed. “What?”
“It was all a sham. You would only have done it to keep me from looking too closely at you. Fake. Bogus. Just like this beach.”
“You’re wrong. Maybe that’s how it started, but along the way, I got to like you. I would have enjoyed it. You would have, too. And you wanted me.”
“Yes. But that still wouldn’t have been enough,” he said.
“Oh, really?” Her voice was thick with sarcasm. “What else was missing?”
“Love. That’s something you can’t replace.”
She laughed. “Love is bullshit, Jay. My boyfriend said he loved me, but then he couldn’t wait for what I was going to give him anyway and he took me by force. My father said he loved me, but then he killed himself. ‘Love’ is just ‘sex’ prettied up, a fairy tale to keep the masses entertained. It doesn’t compare to a warm and willing body lying next to you, ready to do anything you want to make you feel good.”
He shook his head again. “I’m sorry for you, Rachel. Life handed you some hard hits, but what you did was wrong. You lied, cheated, stole, and you killed people. You shot your partner in the middle of the damned Mall, gunned him down like it was nothing. That’s cold.”
“Not admitting anything here, Jay, but this Carruth was a killer, right? He had a gun, didn’t he? He would have shot whoever killed him if he could, so whoever did it—they were just better than he was.”
“Whoever. Right,” he said.
“I’m not any worse than anybody else trying to make her way in the world.”
“Yeah, you are. You’re bright, talented, you could have risen to the top on your own merit, but you got bent. You could have gotten a job at a civilian company making three times what you do in the Army, been running the place in a couple years. You threw it all away. That’s worse than if you never had anything going in the first place.”
She laughed again. “You think?”
“Yeah, I think. I wanted to see you first, but you’re about to have visitors coming through your door. It’s all over, Captain.”
She gave him that angelic smile. “What makes you think I’m on the other side of any door that ‘visitors’ are about to kick open?”
Jay shook his head. The bad guys always thought they were going to get away.
“You know, you are always going to wonder about how it would have been with us. It will always be somewhere in the back of your mind, the road not taken, the field not plowed. You won’t ever be completely rid of me. When you are an old man, sitting in your rocking chair, you’ll remember me, and you’ll wonder if you made the right choice. I know you will.”
She lowered her arms. “Good-bye, Jay.”
She kept smiling. A second later, her scenario vanished.
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Back in his office, Jay stripped off his gear. What a waste. So smart, so talented, so beautiful. And now going to prison for the rest of her life.
He looked up and saw Thorn standing in the doorway. “Boss?”
“The FBI and local police just raided Captain Lewis’s home. She wasn’t there. It appears she packed up and left.”
It took Jay a second to process that. “She got away?”
“For now, that’s what it looks like.”
Jay blinked. She was a user, a killer, she would have caused more death and destruction. She was dangerous, and she needed to be put where she couldn’t hurt anybody. He knew that. But, for just the briefest of moments, something in him wanted to smile.
She’d gotten away.
He was ashamed of the part of him that felt that. He had to try and make up for it.
He would have to catch her.