Changing of the Guard (14 page)

He glanced to his left and saw it. The swell had jumped up in size, the seabed forcing higher as it approached. He had seen some surfers once on TV, riding on sixty-foot waves, monsters that dwarfed them, making them look like toys.

This wave was bigger.

A lot bigger.

He screamed Saji’s name again, and this time she heard him. She looked over, her eyes widening in surprise, and a smile beamed across her face.

He gestured frantically toward the sea, and finally, chillingly, she looked.

Her face went pale, her eyes wide, and her mouth opened to scream. She turned away from the oncoming wave, tried to shelter the baby, but it was useless—

They were swept away—

Jay braced himself as best he could as the wave hit. He expected to be crushed, but some freak variation of the shoreline must have saved him: The water thundered down, tossed him into the air, then carried him away, but somehow, he came to the surface, alive, uninjured.

Except for the emotional horror of it all. His wife and new baby hit by a wall of water! And him unable to do a thing about it!

It wasn’t real. He clung to that small solace. It couldn’t be real—but . . . what
was
it? It certainly wasn’t VR as he knew it.

His face felt as if it had been set in stone. This was not good. He was supposed to be in control.

He floated in the water, the taste of salt harsh in his mouth.

What was happening?

Thorn didn’t want to go home. The doctors at the hospital where Jay Gridley was lying in a coma had told him there wasn’t much point in hanging around. Gridley was in no danger of dying—at least they didn’t think so—and if he awoke, they would call.

Jay was alive, but the doctors didn’t know when—or if—he would come back. The man who had shot him was still at large. Witnesses had described the man and his car, but the police had not found him.

By the time he left it was already past two A.M., and there didn’t seem to be much point in going home. He would barely have time to get to sleep before he’d have to get up and head back to Net Force HQ. Besides, he was too wired to sleep.

Hospitals did that to him, ever since his grandfather had passed away. At the end, the old man had checked himself out of the hospital and gone home to die in his own bed surrounded by his family, but he had spent a week full of tubes and needles before he’d had enough, and Thorn had spent much of that week there with him. The smells, the look, they came back every time he had to go to one of those places.

Halls of the dead and dying, his grandfather had called hospitals, and if he was going to die anyway, what point was there in spending large amounts of somebody’s money to do it?

No, Thorn didn’t want to go home to an empty house, but, outside of his Net Force office, he didn’t really have anywhere else to go. Heading to his house, he opened a beer and went on-line, hoping for a distraction.

He found one.

His mailbox was stuffed with more than three hundred e-mails.

He opened the first one. It, and most of the others, were from his troll.

Wonderful.

Rapier, the troll who haunted him, had apparently generated a repeating message that was, if unchecked, eventually going to fill Thorn’s hard drive with his drivel:

“Hahahhaa, Thorn! Touché!”

That was all it said, repeated fifty times per message, and continuing to come in one e-mail at a time every few minutes. If Rapier had tried to dump more than two megabytes at once, Thorn’s filters would have stopped it, but dribbling in as short e-mail with different return addresses—all false ones, Thorn was sure—the spam- and size-filters let them pass.

Thorn took a sip of his beer and glared at the screen. Given how the rest of his day had been, he did not need this.

He deleted the e-mails, reset his filters to stop anything from the e-mail server Rapier was using, and decided that maybe hunting this guy down and getting him tossed off his server was the least he could do.

The basic process was fairly simple to start. First, you did the obvious check—the sender’s e-mail return address. Thorn had noted several of the ones Rapier had used, all from the same IP.

Thorn blipped a quick message cc:ed to the addresses he’d noted. After a few seconds he got a bounce from the server, in this case,
boohoo.com
, that his messages were undeliverable.

Big surprise there.

He pulled up the troll’s most recent posting to the newsgroup and checked the header, next to the HELO sig. There was a ten-digit number, broken by dots, that identified the sending machine. Of course, that couldn’t be relied upon, since there were ways it could also be faked, but it was a place to start. Next to that was the receipt date that the ID’d server showed, followed by the routing info as the posting was shuttled into UseNet.

Thorn logged into the Internet registries, starting with the American Registry—ARIN. From his language and spelling, Thorn figured that Rapier was an American.

Once on the ARIN site, he ran a WHOIS search on the IP address and sure enough, the address was in the ARIN database.

The WHOIS came up, and at least it was a legitimate addy—the inetnum, netnam, and description showed it to be a small server located outside of Chicago,
BearBull.com
. What he was looking for were the contacts for the IP, and there they were, two of them.

Using his official Net Force address, Thorn fired off an e-mail to both:

 

He listed the particulars of the e-mail, and then he signed it, “Thomas Thorn, Commander, Net Force.”

This was a big hammer to use. Yes, technically the troll was breaking the law—stuffing a mailbox was illegal, under the denial-of-service statutes, though hardly something Net Force was going to go after, and if the IP didn’t want to provide the information, Thorn wasn’t going to run to Legal and get a warrant. Then again, he’d probably get a reply in a day or so, and maybe—

His e-mail program
chinged!
and an incoming message header appeared: From
BearBull.com
.

Look at that—must be an automatic response—

Nope, apparently the BearBull Webmaster was a night owl:

 

There was a phone number, e-mail address, and a webpage listed under the name, along with an offer to do anything to help Net Force that they could.

Thorn shook his head and smiled. Well, so much for tracking down his troll. The guy was clever enough to use a public computer, and that made it a lot harder to finger him. Of course, had he been a real terrorist, Thorn could have called upon the FBI to trot field agents out to the mall to find the guy, but for a troll? No way. Not a good idea to start one’s tenure as head of a law enforcement agency by indulging in a personal vendetta. . . .

Then again, there was nothing wrong with asking questions as a private citizen. He could drop Mr. McManus an e-mail, ask him if he had a regular customer who maybe talked about fencing. Certainly Rapier spent a lot of time on-line, he must be in and out of the cybercafe often enough so maybe somebody would have noticed him?

As Thorn recalled, the University of Chicago had a pretty good fencing team, at least it had been back when Thorn had been competing in college. He’d gone to a tournament there once, got to the semifinals in épée before he lost to Parker King, which had been no shame, since King had gone on to win the NCAA finals and, eventually, a Bronze in the Olympics.

Maybe somebody there knew Rapier?

He shook his head.
Say, do you know a troll who bugs people on UseNet, calls himself “Rapier?”

For all he knew, anybody he asked could be the guy, and wouldn’t that be an unpleasant experience? Having Rapier field his call and know he had gotten to him?

Of course, it might scare him off, getting a call from Thorn, but then again, maybe not, and he didn’t want to give the troll the satisfaction of knowing he had rattled Thorn’s cage.

Time to give it up, Tom. You have other things to occupy your time. It’s just a troll, a pathetic man with no life. Let him stew in his own juices.

Before he shut down, he tapped in the URL for the cybercafe’s webpage.

The splash page came up, with a directory, and Thorn clicked on the biography for the cafe’s operator.

Dennis James McManus was a slight, fair-skinned red-head, balding, about Thorn’s age, a serious, almost scowling expression on his face. He leaned against a dark wall, arms crossed, practically glaring at the camera.

An unhappy man,
Thorn reflected. Looked familiar, somehow, though Thorn couldn’t place him. Oh, well.

He was about to log off, had, in fact, hit the quit button on his browser, when he noticed a word in the bio, just a quick flash as the page blinked off:

Epée
.

Hello?

Thorn quickly logged back on and read the bio.

Apparently, Mr. McManus had been a collegiate fencing champion in Ohio.

Well, well, well. How about that . . . ?

John Howard was talking to Julio when he looked up and saw Alex and Toni Michaels heading toward them.

“Alex, Toni. I thought you were in Colorado.”

“We almost were,” Michaels said. “We caught a flight back as soon as we heard. How is he?”

“Julio talked to Saji a few minutes ago—she’s in the ICU with him.”

Fernandez nodded. “No change. He’s unconscious. The bullet apparently broke apart when it hit the windshield, and about a third of it glanced off his forehead, just above the right eye, dug a bloody groove, but did not penetrate the skull. It hit him hard enough to rattle his brain, and he is in shock. Everything else seems to be working okay, but he hasn’t come around and nobody is quite sure why.”

Michaels nodded. “What about the guy who shot him?”

Howard shook his head. “No sign of him.”

“Why did he do it?” Toni asked.

Again, Howard shook his head. “We don’t know. We’ve got some witnesses who said a car cut him off, a guy hopped out and headed for Jay. He had a gun. Jay tried to back his car away and the guy opened up on him. One shot—ballistics says it looks like a Thirty-eight Special or Three fifty-seven Magnum round, from the pieces they dug out of the car.”

“Road rage?” Toni said.

“Looks like,” Howard said.

“Cops have any idea who they are looking for?”

“A tall-short-fat-thin-blond-brunette-white-black guy,” Fernandez said. “Joe Average, wearing glasses, moustache, had a band-aid on his chin.”

Michaels said, “Anybody thinking that maybe it wasn’t some angry commuter? Maybe somebody targeting Jay in particular?”

Julio and Howard glanced at each other. “The thought had crossed our minds. We’ve got somebody going over Jay’s e-mail and phone log, checking on all the projects he was working on, like that. Thing is, Jay isn’t the kind of guy whose enemies pack guns—most people who’d be after him would use software at ten paces.”

“Anything we can do to help?” Michaels asked.

Howard shrugged. “The new Commander was here—the doctors told us all to go home, and he did. We’re running down everything we can think of now. We were just fixin’ to head out ourselves.”

“Can we see him?” Toni asked.

“Yeah. Check with the nurse’s station, he can have two or three people in at a time. I’m sure Saji will be glad to see you.”

“Who’s watching your son?” Fernandez said.

“Guru,” Toni said. “He’ll be fine.”

Howard smiled a little. The old lady they called “Guru” was the woman who had taught Toni the martial art
silat
, at which she was a deadly expert. The woman had to be pushing ninety, and Howard wouldn’t want to mess with her if he had a ball bat and a knife. That little old lady could kill you with either hand and never work up a sweat.

“We’ll go check on him,” Michaels said.

“You need a place to stay?” Howard said.

“Hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

“You can stay with us. The guest room hasn’t got too much crap stored in it at the moment.”

“Thanks, John.”

As he watched them head for the nurse’s station, Howard found himself pleased. They didn’t have to be here. It would have been easy for them to say they hadn’t heard about it, or that they had to get settled in their new lives, that they couldn’t do anything anyhow. But that’s what friends did—when you had trouble, they came to offer their help.

To Julio, he said, “Make sure whoever is going over Jay’s life looks real close. I want the man who did this. Before I leave, after I leave, whenever.”

“I hear you, John. But you’ll have to stand in line behind me to have a chat with him.”

Jay woke up with a headache. At least, “woke up” was the best term he could think of to describe it. It was as if he’d been dozing, only vaguely aware of his surroundings, until something brought him back to a more active mode of being.

The scenario had changed—if indeed it was a scenario—the beach had given way to a dense northern forest with moss on all sides of some of the trees, huge primeval ferns, and pine needles scattered under the canopy of the great woods.