Changing of the Guard (16 page)

Kent said, “The furniture—the handle, guard, spacers, and such—are World War Two issue. The blade is a family heirloom, dressed down so the officer—a lieutenant, my grandfather said—could carry it into battle. The blade itself is more than four hundred years old. Probably worth twenty, thirty thousand dollars. Under the handle, chiseled into the steel, it tells the name of the smith who made it, when, where, and for whom it was made, the temple where it was dedicated, and the result of the cutting test. You know about the test?”

Thorn shook his head.

“After a blade was finished, and the furniture put on, it was used on condemned criminals to check for sharpness and durability. Sometimes they were already dead, sometimes not. They were piled on top of each other, and a man with strong arms took a whack at the pile. The measure was how many bodies the blade could cut through before it stopped. A one-body sword was not much, a two-body sword okay, and a three-body sword excellent. This is a four-body sword, according to the inscription.”

“Man,” Thorn said.

“Maybe they were all skinny. It doesn’t say. Apparently, condemned criminals who had a nasty streak would sometimes start swallowing stones a day or two before their scheduled execution. They’d fill their belly with rocks so that when the executioner came to try his blade he had a good chance of breaking it when he cut through them.”

“Lord.”

“Yep. A different culture over there. Makes you wonder what would have happened if they’d won the war.”

Thorn stared at the mirrorlike steel.

“My grandfather found all this so fascinating that at the age of sixty-four he took up the study of the thing from a Japanese expert in San Francisco. There are two main arts—
kendo
, with the bamboo and armor and all, and
iaido
, practiced with the live blade.”

Thorn nodded again. Yes, he knew that much.

“When I was a boy, my grandfather showed me some of the basic
iaido
stuff. The old boy used to practice this for an hour or so every day, rain or shine, cold, heat, whatever. It seemed to steady him, somehow, made him calmer. He was pushing ninety when he passed away. He did his sword work that morning, went in and took a nap, and died in his sleep.”

Thorn slid the blade back into the scabbard and offered it to Kent, who took it. “You still practice, Colonel?”

The man shrugged. “Now and then. My grandfather taught me a couple of forms.”

Thorn said, “I do a little fencing. Western-style, foil, épée, saber, like that. Maybe you could show me some of the
iai
stuff sometime.”

Kent regarded him, as if suddenly seeing him for the first time since he’d come into the office. “Yes, I could do that. Meanwhile, what else can I do for you, sir?”

“Well, to start, drop the ‘sir,’ business, Colonel. I’ll answer to ‘Thorn,’ or ‘Tom,’ or ‘Hey, you!’ but I was appointed to this job, not elected.”

Kent almost grinned. “All right. I can manage that. Any word on Gridley?”

“Still in a coma.”

“Terrible thing,” Kent said.

“Yes.”

In his office again, Thorn considered the matter of Jay Gridley. There were technicians going over the man’s work, but some of it was inaccessible to them. Gridley, like most computer whizzes, had encrypted passwords and retinal blocks on some of his files—even though that was against Net Force policies precisely for the situation that now existed: What if something happened to an operative and nobody could get at what he’d been doing?

Gridley was good, very good, but Thorn was better. Besides, he had a big advantage—there was an override, a back door built into Net Force mainframe software that would allow the Commander to get past most of the wards. Thorn could call virtuals of any of his operatives’ retinal scans; he had the encryption codes for Net Force’s main locks, and he could probably figure out Gridley’s private codes using the Super-Cray’s breakers. Having access to that was a computer nerd’s delight—more powerful than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. . . .

At the very least, even though it was probably not connected, he could take a look at what the man had been working on.

“No time like the present,” he said to himself.

His office wasn’t rigged for full-VR. Gridley’s was. He’d go there. Besides, there might be something in the office that would help. You never knew but that Gridley might have his codes written down on the inside of a desk drawer.

He smiled. Top programmers didn’t do anything that stupid, though he had once known one who had used his own birthday as a password. Guy had said that nobody would be so stupid as to expect that. He’d been wrong—there were plenty of stupid people in the world, for whom subtlety was not possible. It was almost always a mistake to make that kind of assumption.

As he was tightening the G, twisting the tuning machine to raise the pitch, the string broke. The nylon went
bing!
as it snapped, right at the tie block, which was where they usually let go. The thing was, Natadze hadn’t broken a string on his instrument in years—he changed them regularly and never let them get so old and worn that it was apt to be a problem. These were only a couple of weeks old. It must have been defective.

He quickly grabbed the loose nylon to make sure the broken end didn’t accidentally scratch the French polish finish. The French polish was better than other finishes for tone, but it was not the most durable. A lot of luthiers had started limiting it to the front of their instruments, while using lacquers of various types on the sides and backs. The sound was much the same, but the lacquers wore much better.

Practice would be delayed. He had to change out the remaining five—replacing one at a time was, for him, something better left only for emergencies. The other strings should be good for another month before they started to sound dead, but he was a believer in the idea that birds of a feather sang better together.

It was well known that wooden instruments, at least the good ones, got better with age. A guitar’s tone, like a violin or cello, would improve with playing. Cedar tops did it faster, spruce took longer but grew in volume as well as tone; everybody knew that.

While there was no proof that strings needed to be the same age to vibrate well together, Natadze believed that this was the case. Change one, change all was his philosophy.

He fetched his winder, slipped it over the low E tuning peg, and began slackening the string. He had tried different tuners on his instruments, and he preferred those made by the late Irving Sloane. Rodgers’s and Fustero’s were prettier and much more costly, though on an instrument as expensive as this a few hundred dollars for gearheads was nothing. But the Sloanes seemed smoother, they gave an absolute lock, and they lasted forever. He had gone to them on all his guitars, save for the collectible ones that shouldn’t be altered.

Likewise with strings, he had tried all the major brands, mixing and matching the wound basses with the trebles, and eventually came to realize that D’Addario’s Pro-Arte Hard Tensions gave him the best sound on this instrument, even though the medium tensions he normally used were a bit easier on the fingers. Interesting, because they were far from the most expensive ones.

Once he had removed all the strings, he wiped the fretboard with cleaner and then lemon oil, wiped it dry again, put a piece of cardboard below the bridge to protect the finish, and began to re-string the guitar. He used a variation of John Gilbert’s method, melting a tiny ball on the ends of the nylon trebles before running them through the tie-board and looping them, starting with the high E and the other nylons, then jumped to the low E and other two basses. In theory, this gave the trebles time to adjust as you strung the wound strings, but in practice, all the strings went flat quickly for a few days until they had time to properly stretch out.

The process took half an hour. He clipped the long ends, using a small pair of blunt wire cutters, retuned all the strings, and ran a few scales. New strings, while not staying on key for long, did sound great, the sound cleaner and much more alive. Once the sweat from your fingers began to work, the strings had a limited life. You could take them off and soak them in cleaning solution, or even boil them to remove the grime, but that was troublesome, and it was much easier just to install new ones. If you had a guitar that cost as much as a new car, stinting on fifteen-dollar strings seemed fairly foolish.

Finally, after retuning for the fourth time, he was ready to play. He’d have to retune every few minutes, but that was unavoidable.

He might have screwed up his work a few times of late, but there was no reason why he couldn’t at least
practice
playing well. With the would-be kidnap victim in a coma in the hospital—he had checked that out personally—he wasn’t going to be causing any problems for a while. And the road rager who had shot him? Gone and no way to track him.

As he began to run his scales, a sudden unexpected thought burst into his brain, a nasty and unwelcome visitor, and one that stunned him with the force of its arrival.

Oh, no! How could he have been so stupid?!

In the small waiting room on the eighth floor, John Howard sipped at a really bad cup of machine coffee and shook his head. Julio Fernandez also nursed a paper cup of the vile brew, but seemed less bothered by the taste.

“I’m going to check with the doctors once more. If there’s no change, I’m heading out,” Howard said.

Fernandez said, “I can stick around for a while. Joanna and the boy are still at her friend’s in New York, no reason to go home except to sleep, and I can do that here.”

Howard laughed. “You can do that anywhere. I believe I once saw you fall asleep eating a bowl of hot soup.”

“Did I finish it?”

They sipped coffee.

Fernandez said, “So, tell me about Colonel Jarhead. Why’d you put him up for the new honcho?”

“Ah. Back when I was still a light colonel and in the RA, and you were probably being busted back to corporal the second or third time, you might recall that I did a rotation teaching ROTC at a U down in Georgia.”

“Yes, sir, I recall that. Goofing off at the student union, eyeballing the coeds, and grading papers. Hard work.”

Howard shook his head. “Abe Kent, a full-bird colonel, had been rotated out of the latest middle east conflict where he’d served with distinction, and stuck in charge of a shiny new Marine officer training facility outside Marietta. I’d bumped into him a few times before, various places.”

“That’s the Marines’ idea of R and R—a couple months out of the war zone teaching officer wannabes.”

Howard nodded. “So Abe is down South, dealing with the best and brightest of the jarheads.”

“Which ain’t saying much,” Julio observed. “And a full-bird back then?”

“Keep listening. One of the trainees is a very smart kid—let’s call him ‘Brown’—a champion swimmer in college before he dropped out, a black belt in karate, and sharp as a warehouse full of razor blades. He apparently joined up primarily to piss off his father, who was a millionaire, well-known U.S. Representative—and a major antimilitary dove. Guy had been in Congress for ten or twelve terms, and would go on to be reelected half a dozen more times before he retired. He had amassed major clout by this point.”

Julio nodded again. “Lemme guess—the kid had an attitude?”

Howard grinned. “Can’t get anything past you, can they, Lieutenant?”

“Smart people can.”

“Better shooters can, too.”

Julio held up his hand. “Pick a number between one and five. Sir.”

Howard ignored him. “So Brown is setting the grading curve for the recruits, first in the classroom, first in PT, kicks ass in the unarmed combat course, even outshoots the country boys on the rifle range.”

“He sounds like the perfect Marine—except for the smarts,” Julio said.

“Yes. It was too good to last, of course. Eventually, trainee Brown ran into some boneheaded hillbilly career DI who’d dropped out of the third grade to work his daddy’s moonshine still and joined the Corps the day he turned seventeen. Words were exchanged. Things got physical. Brown decked the sergeant quite handily, and decided that if he had to take orders from dillwits like that, he wasn’t going to play anymore.”

“He washed out?”

Howard shook his head. “No, he saw Colonel Kent and informed him that he was not only leaving Officer Candidate School, he was leaving the Marines altogether. It had been fun and all, but, after careful consideration, he couldn’t continue on, what with the morons with whom he’d have to serve.”

Julio laughed. “I bet that went over real well with a decorated colonel just back from combat.”

“Abe Kent informed officer-trainee Brown that, while he could bail from OCS if he so chose, he
would
be serving the remainder of his hitch in some way, shape, or form, period.”

“Lemme guess again: Brown dragged out his father’s clout and clonked Colonel Kent over the head with it?”

“That came later. First, he took a swing at Kent.”

“He didn’t.”

“He did.”

“What happened?”

“Kent had spent a big part of his career in combat zones and sleazy bars around the planet. He was not impressed with a would-be shavetail karate expert throwing a punch. As I understand it, he, uh, sat the boy down in his chair with some force—banking him off a wall and a file cabinet in the process. Some medical attention was required, having to do with teeth implants and resetting a broken arm.”

Julio laughed.

“Brown then informed the colonel, and with a bit more respect, I imagine, that his old man was rich, influential, and that Colonel Kent would be very sorry.”

“Got Kent’s back up,” Julio said.