6
Vermillion. River, Lafayette, Louisiana
Michaels sat in the stern of a twelve-foot aluminum bateau, his hand on the control arm of the little electric trolling motor. The sluggish waters of the bayou flowed past, the motor just strong enough to hold the boat’s backward movement to a slow drift. The boat had been dark green once, but was rain- and sun-faded to a chalky, lighter shade. It was hot here, probably in the low nineties, even on the water, and the humidity of the air wasn’t much drier than the bayou itself. On the shores to either side, huge live oaks loomed, gray Spanish moss hanging down like ragged, organic curtains. A three-foot-long alligator gar broke the surface half a body length, fell back, and splashed the murky water next to a bobbing incandescent lightbulb somebody had thrown in somewhere upstream.
Michaels pulled on the rubber handle of the Mercury outboard motor’s starter. The starter rope was nylon, and had once been white, but was now soaked with enough two-cycle oil and grease so it was nearly black. The fifteen-horsepower motor caught, burbled, and rumbled. He shut off the electric, geared the Mercury, and twisted the throttle. The smell of gasoline and lubricant enveloped him.
The bateau surged against the slow flow. He angled toward the east bank to avoid a half-submerged log floating toward him. Or was that a gator?
On the shore, a big snapping turtle sunned itself on a rock. The approaching boat made it nervous, and the turtle slid from the rock and vanished into the dark water.
Michaels smiled. Jay had done a terrific job on this scenario. It felt so real.
Ahead, the virtual reality construct that represented the HAARP facility’s computer system stood on the east bank of the bayou, the image of a backwoods bar, a juke joint. The building was wooden, painted white with a slanting, corrugated metal roof, and the exterior walls were hung with metal beer and soft-drink signs whose paint was flaking and peeling: Falstaff, Jax, Royal Crown Cola, Dr Pepper. A small mountain of rusting steel cans avalanched toward the riverbank to the side of the ramshackle building. Michaels was close enough to see that the empty cans had pairs of triangular-shaped holes punched into the tops—opened with what his father used to call a church key, long before pull- or pop-tops were invented.
He guided the boat toward the shore.
Virtual reality hadn’t turned out quite the way the early computer geeks had imagined. With the power and input devices available, virtual reality could be, well, virtually anything—it was up to the person who designed the scenario. The constructs were analogies, of course, but configured so that people could relate to them intuitively. Normal people didn’t want to push buttons or click on icons, no matter how cute these things were. What they really wanted was to be surrounded by a setting in which they could behave like people. Instead of tapping at a keyboard, they could hike a mountain trail, ride a horse through the Old West, or—like Michaels—take a small boat down a dark and slow-flowing bayou. There were no limits to what you could do in VR, save those of imagination. You could buy off-the-shelf software, have it custom designed by somebody who knew about such things, or do it yourself. Michaels was the head of Net Force, so he had to at least have a passing familiarity with doing it himself, and he did, but it was much easier to let Jay Gridley or one of the other hotshot ops build them. These guys were detail oriented, and they really got into it.
You could go places, interact with other people, get into computer systems, and what you saw and did might have no relationship to what other people in the same location saw or did. It was personal, unless you opted for the default scenario, or agreed to a consensus reality. A lot of people did that, picked one setting, in order to have a common experience, but Michaels liked his or Jay’s imagery better. If you could do it, then why not?
The bateau bumped against the pilings of the little dock, and Michaels killed the outboard and hopped up onto the creosoted wooden planks. He tied the boat up and started for the bar. From this angle, he could see the name of the place: The Dewdrop Inn.
Oh, boy.
In reality, he was sitting in his office more than fifty years away from this place, wearing ear and eye bands, hands in skeletal sensory gloves, seeing and feeling the computer’s imagery, and he was aware of that on some level, though he had learned to tune the “real” reality out, as had most people who spent any time in VR.
Normally, he would have had Jay or one of the other serious players investigating this. But the truth was, he needed the diversion; otherwise, he’d have to pack up and go home, and while work wasn’t always a cure for what ailed you, sometimes it was better than nothing.
He ambled toward the juke joint. A swarthy, bearded man wearing overalls, no shirt, and no shoes leaned against the wall next to the entrance. The man spat a stream of chewing tobacco juice at a little chameleon perched on a stump nearby, missed. The man smiled, showing gaps in his mostly rotten teeth.
In VR, fire walls came in all kinds of configurations.
Well, yeehaw, Michaels thought. Welcome to the shallow end of the gene pool, boy.
“Ain’t open,” Overalls said.
Michaels nodded. “Uh huh. Guess I’ll have to come back later.”
“Reckon so.”
Michaels smiled and walked away. He retreated to the small dock, got into his boat, cast off, and cranked the motor. Around the next bend in the bayou, maybe three hundred yards farther upstream, he put back into shore, tied the bateau to a low-hanging willow tree branch, and hiked back toward the Dewdrop Inn. He circled around behind it, being careful not to let Overalls see him.
The back door was of unpainted wooden planks, crude, but solid. He fished around his pocket and pulled out a skeleton key. In reality, the key was a password provided by Dr. Morrison, but one couldn’t expect to have a coded keypad lock in this kind of scenario; it wouldn’t be appropriate.
The spring lock clicked open. Michaels quickly stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
The inside of the place was pretty much a match for the outside, a 1950s backwoods bar. There were scarred wooden tables, beat-up cane-bottomed bent back chairs, and a row of stools in front of a bar that had seen decades of spilled beers and misplaced cigarettes. Two big rectangular coolers marked with beer logos were behind the bar, and a single shelf under a long, cracked mirror held bottles of bourbon, gin, sloe gin, scotch, and vodka.
It took only a minute or so for Michaels to find the built-in lockbox under the bar, a steel plate with a huge Master Lock padlock on a finger-thick brass hasp.
Michaels had a key to the padlock, but since he didn’t know what was normally in the lockbox, it wouldn’t much matter what he’d find in it if he bothered to look. If something was missing, he wouldn’t be able to tell by looking.
It was dim behind the bar, light shining through two grimy windows on the sides of the building, hardly enough to see by. He pulled a small flashlight from his back pocket and shined it at the lock.
Sure enough, there were fresh scratches on the lock and on the hasp. Somebody had been at it, trying to pry or pick it open. No way to tell if they had managed it, but it confirmed Morrison’s story, at least in part.
Michaels stood, brushed off his hands, and started for the back door. Morrison could have done it, of course. Somebody yelled “Fire!” a big part of the time he was the guy with the match. Then again, why bring it up? Nobody would have noticed without Morrison’s report, at least nobody in Net Force. And Morrison had access to the lockbox—which was, of course, nothing more than a protected set of files inside the HAARP computer system. He could open it whenever he wanted, there was no need for him to break into it.
Well. At least it gave Michaels something to go on. He’d have to call Morrisoh back, get some more specific information. It didn’t seem particularly vital, whatever was in the box, no reason to break a leg hurrying to get to it. There were people he could pass it off to, or he could wait until Jay got back from his vacation; he was only going to be gone for a week.
It had been a nice little exercise, maybe helped keep his VR muscles from atrophying completely, but nothing earthshaking.
He could drop out of VR now and unplug, but what the hell, might as well finish the bateau ride, enjoy the sights a little more, hey?
Monday, June 6th
Mammoth Cave, Kentucky
John Howard smiled as the guide turned the lights off and the inside of the cave went black, a darkness deeper than most people had ever seen. The only things visible were phosphorescent or tritium watch dials, and they seemed really bright against the inky jet so tangible you felt it hang on you like a damp coat.
In the gloom, the guide said, “No sunlight ever gets down here, and yet people explored this cave much farther along than we are now using only candles and burning torches. Before the electric lights were wired in, everybody carried a lot of spare batteries and bulbs for their flashlights, believe it.”
The tourists, unseen in the dark, chuckled nervously. Somebody punched a digital phone’s keypad and a green light went on; somebody else tapped a control on his or her wristwatch and lit the face up.
The guide switched the lights back on, and there was a collective sigh of relief to be able to see again. She said, “We guides have a standing bet that anybody leading a tour group that doesn’t light a phone or watch or even a cigarette lighter or key ring flash during the thirty seconds of darkness here gets treated to lunches for a week. Nobody has won the pool in six months.”
Again, the small crowd laughed, a little less nervously this time.
Howard looked at his wife and son, saw Tyrone smile at his girlfriend, Nadine—who just happened to have the same name as Howard’s wife. Howard resisted the urge to smile at how cute they looked. Besides, early teens were dangerous, they were either a million miles—or a single step—away from adulthood at any given moment. Right now, Ty and his friend were boomerang-throwing buddies. A month from now they could be either indifferent or trying some entirely new game that Howard knew they were much too young to be trying. Not that it had stopped him from trying at their age.
Nadine—his Nadine—slipped her hand under his arm. “Where’d you go? You just developed the long stare.”
He did smile at his wife. “Just watching the kids.”
“Feeling old?”
“Oh, yeah. But that’s only half of it. Feeling helpless is the hard part. I have all this accumulated wisdom—”
“You wish.”
“—okay, experience, then, and Tyrone doesn’t want to take advantage of it.”
“You still talk. He still listens.”
“Mostly on autopilot. I don’t think he’s paying much attention to the actual content.”
“Of course not. Did you pay much attention to what your parents had to say at his age? Every generation has to reinvent the wheel, hon.”
“It seems like such a waste.”
“But that’s how it is. Rain’s gonna come down no matter what you want, you can’t stop it. You can stay inside, go out and get wet, or take an umbrella, the rain doesn’t care.”
“I knew there was a reason I married you,” he said. “Your mind.”
“That’s not what you used to say.”
“Well, I suppose you had a couple other attractions.”
“You mean you used to think so before I got fat and ugly?”
He turned and looked around behind him.
“What are you looking for?”
“For whoever you must be talking to. You sure ain’t talking to me. You better lookin’ than the day we met. Going senile and losing your mind, maybe, but fat and ugly? Sheeit, woman, gimme a break.”
She smiled. He liked making her do that. Even after more than fifteen years, it still made him feel good.
“It’s good for us to get away for a while,” she said. “I’m having a good time.”
“Me, too,” he said. And he was. He hadn’t thought about Net Force for the better part of an hour, easy.
Seattle, Washington
Morrison pushed an electronic card across the table to Ventura. “Here is the retainer. A hundred thousand.” He’d had to drain his savings and take out a second mortgage on his house to get the money. Ventura’s services weren’t cheap—thirty thousand a month for the basic plan, and it went up from there—but he was supposedly the best there was, and Morrison knew he needed the best. He’d be broke by the end of July if the deal didn’t happen, but there wasn’t any real doubt that it would, only with whom and for how much. He needed to stay alive until then, of course.
Ventura took the card with its embedded credit chip, turned it in his fingers, then tucked it into the inside pocket of his sport coat. “Beginning when?”
“Immediately,” Morrison said.
Ventura took a small phone from his pocket, touched a button, and said, “We’re on,” then put the phone away.
Morrison couldn’t help but look around. The restaurant was not all that crowded, but he couldn’t see anybody who looked like a bodyguard lurking about.
Ventura smiled. “You won’t see them.”
“Them?”
“There are two ops in here with us, two more outside. Now, I need some information if I am going to protect you properly. Let’s start with the level of threat and the reason. Who might be wanting to kidnap or kill you, and why?”
Morrison nodded. Here’s where it got tricky. He could offer a good story and probably have the man buy it. Or he could tell the truth. Since his life was going to be on the line, he did not want to make a misstep here.
“I’m not certain of the ‘who’ yet. Probably the Chinese, but it could be the Russians or maybe the Israelis. The ‘why’ is because I am in possession of certain, ah, highly useful information they would like to get their hands on.”
“From HAARP?”
Morrison blinked, taken aback for a moment. Well. Of course, the man would have checked him out. And it really wasn’t all that much of a leap to that assumption. Still, his estimate of Ventura’s abilities did go up a notch.
Morrison considered his response, and while he was doing it, Ventura said, “Doctor, I don’t much care what it is you are doing, but if I am going to keep you alive, I want to know what I am apt to be dealing with. It makes a big difference in how we proceed, you understand? If you boinked somebody’s wife and he wants to beat you to a pulp, that’s one thing. If we are going to be dealing with the secret police of a major foreign country, that’s something else. I’ll take the job either way, but I need to know everything. We’re talking about your life, and the lives of my crew.”
Morrison nodded. Yes. He understood. He took a deep breath. “All right.” And for the next fifteen minutes, he laid it out, answering questions as he did so. Ventura did not take notes. He also did not seem disturbed to hear what Morrison had to say.
When he was done, Ventura said, “All right. I’ll need your itinerary. Anywhere you go, I will make the travel arrangements. In matters of security, I am God. If I think a situation is too risky, I will tell you, and you will follow my recommendations without question—is this a problem?”
“No, no problem.”
“Fine. The situation probably isn’t hot yet, but we have to assume that somebody might be able to figure out who you are, so from this point on, we’re on alert. What are your immediate plans?”
“I have to go up to the project. We’re on hiatus, officially, but I am running some, ah, ‘calibrations.’ Over the next couple of weeks, I need to do at least two more of these. Possibly three.”
“What is the situation with security at the facility? Can I bring my people in?”
“No. I can get you in as an observer from one of the universities—we can fabricate enough background to pass the Navy and Air Force checks—but that’s it. There are armed guards patrolling the perimeter of the project, gates, guards at the door, and so forth. It’s not exactly a worry that somebody is going to drop by and steal the antennas or the generators.”
Ventura nodded.
“There is one complicating factor you should know about. The facility and its computers are being investigated by Net Force.”
“Net Force. The FBI suspects what you’ve done?”
“No. They are being guided down a path I’ve provided for them.”
“Ah, I see. Smart. But they will suspect the messenger, you know, they always do. That’s standard procedure.”
“I expected they would. I’m covered.”
Ventura shrugged. “I hope so. I might be able to keep you from being shot by the Chinese, but I can’t keep you out of jail if you have the feds after you—unless you are willing to go completely underground—and leaving the country would be better.”
“I understand.” Morrison felt a cold hand clutching his bowels. He had started down a dangerous road. He wasn’t some absentminded professor who thought about the universe only in abstract theory; he knew that the world was not always a nice place. He had taken this into account, had made the assumption that the people with whom he would be dealing would be treacherous, as trustworthy as foxes guarding a henhouse. Even at this point, he could scrap the whole deal and walk away without being caught, he was certain of it. But no risk, no gain—and the gain here was enormous. People would buy a lottery ticket when the odds were millions to one against them winning. How many people would buy the ticket if they could get their hands on the winning numbers before the drawing?
No, he was committed. He was going to step very carefully, and when he left, it wouldn’t be walking, it would be in a solid gold limousine with diamonds for headlights.
There was a price to be paid in human life, of course, but he was willing to pay it—well ... as long as it wasn’t his.