Changing of the Guard (22 page)

The demise of the Soviet Union had not, unfortunately, dulled its agents’ paranoia. Even low-tech tradecraft and off-the-shelf technology could foil most people trying to trace them electronically.

Vrach—Cox didn’t know his real name—had not called him directly, at least not since Cox had begun trying to find him. Instead he’d phoned through a network-access setup, encrypting his voice into an Internet datastream which could be bounced all over the world. The data would leave the network at an exit point, and be turned into a phone call.

Cox looked at an LCD inset in the desk and noted that the exit point chosen this time was Brazil.

Should the Internet data be traced to the point where it entered the network, a tracker would discover that the Russian had used a cell phone, making a trace more difficult still. And Vrach called on
disposable
cell phones, never using the same one twice. Backwalking and finding him, using electronic tracking alone, was nearly impossible.

There were, however, other ways. It had taken a team of Cox’s agents quite a while to get as far back along the trail as they were now; these men were always on call, waiting to move at any time.

Vrach had been tricky, routing his communications from access points all over the world. The man could be thousands of miles away—or right next door.

So Cox’s hackers had designed and distributed a computer virus specifically designed for the hardware that tracked incoming and outgoing calls on Internet-phone connections. This had allowed Cox’s hounds instant access to the network where the call originated. Once they were inside the firewall, they could trace the call over the Internet back to the true origin.

“I have good news.”

The only good news the Doctor could have worth being happy about would be that every record of him as a Soviet agent had been destroyed. Since that wasn’t likely, Cox wasn’t too excited.

“Really?”

The final, and largest problem in finding the Doctor was that his cell phone calls not only originated from different cities, but from
moving
locations: buses, trains, subways, and once even a ferry.

He could almost hear the Doctor grin into the mouthpiece.

“The Net Force agent assigned to decode the captured file has been severely injured, in what the authorities have been led to believe was an incident of road rage. He had decoded but a small portion of the information, and you were not on it.”

Cox did not feel relief, he felt irritated. That the Russian’s not-so-subtle hint suggested the incident had been the Russian’s doing. Cox
knew
better.

Sooner or later, he would find the man. Cox had spread men across the eastern seaboard and the Midwest, at each place where the Doctor had originated a cell call. Helicopters waited in every city, and with the press of the blue button on this phone, were launched moments after a call came in, cellular-direction finders in each one.

Aloft, these copters would triangulate the calls as soon as the hackers provided the relevant information. It took time to get close, however, and even if the helicopters had found which boat, train, or bus the doctor was on, it wouldn’t show them who was behind the phone, or where he lived.

Which was why an army of detectives constantly rode buses, trains, and ferries in several metropolitan areas. Those alone cost him nearly a million dollars a month.

Cox tried to imagine how it would be to have such a job, waiting all the time, on a train where he might have to track someone identified as a target.

It would be mostly boring, he decided, but that didn’t matter. They were well-paid for their time. They could read, or listen to music, or whatever, he didn’t care, as long as they were there when he needed them.

A text screen lit up on the dedicated computer attached to the phone. Amber letters scrolled across it:

Fantastic. They hadn’t had a hit this good so quickly before.

“This does not seem to help me much,” Cox said. It wouldn’t do to cut the call short.

“But it does—and it shows that we are still looking out for you,
da?
”

Cox shook his head in disgust. Vrach
was
trying to assume credit for Natadze’s action. It obviously never even occurred to him that Cox would have taken matters into his own hands. The man was not nearly as clever as he thought he was. Few men were.

“I see.”

Agent in place at next stop,
read the text.

Excellent!
thought Cox. Even with the call terminated, they would be able to find the phone—Cox didn’t know how, but his technicians had told him they could, as long as it was still powered.

“I should think that this would convince you to keep helping us. There is a Senator we would like to know more about.”

He could hear a rustling as the Russian talked. It sounded as if the man was moving around.

Train stopping,
said the text onscreen.

Cox sighed, making it sound as if he were exasperated. “All right. Tell me his name.”

The Doctor did so.

“You will do what you can?”

A green LED lit up on his caller ID box, and the display now read, “Subject Identified,” as the instant message screen popped up a confirmation.

“But of course,” said Cox. “Don’t I always?”

“You see? I knew my call would cheer you.”

Cox smiled. “You have no idea how much better I feel now, Doctor.”

“We will speak later.”

After the disconnect, Cox didn’t even put the receiver down before he called Eduard. Yes, by God, things were finally beginning to look up. They had the Russian. And after Eduard got to him, they would have everything he knew about Cox’s situation.

This was how empires were built: one brick at a time.

Thorn had a great-uncle who had been born in West Virginia, and the man, ancient when Thorn had met him, had told some wonderful stories of his boyhood. Hillbillies and moonshine stills, the incredible landscape with its hardwood and pine forests, and the days he’d gone spotlight hunting with his bluetick and red-and-tan hounds in the dark. At some point, Thorn had decided that he would go there, but he had never managed it in the Real World—though he had eventually built himself a scenario.

So it was that he now tramped through the warm summer night following a pack of baying coon hounds, in pursuit of whatever it had been that caused Jay Gridley to be shot.

He had managed to open nearly all of Gridley’s files, and the one that held the most promise was the one from the Turkish Ambassador. As had many of the countries in the Middle East, the Turks had been on-again, off-again friends. Currently they were on-again, and Net Force’s decision to help them had not been strictly altruistic, since uncovering Russian moles still in place was in the best interests of the United States, even though the Russians were no longer the evil empire they had once been.

Ahead, the hounds called, their deep
barrooos!
resonant under the light of the full moon. Bright enough to read by out here, bright enough to see the sparkles in the opal ring Thorn wore, the ring that had belonged to his grandfather. Thorn wore it in VR a lot, though not so much in RW—there it was only for special occasions. His grandfather had had small hands, and it just fit on Thorn’s little finger.

The old man had believed opals were potent stones, full of magic. He had gone to Australia once, bought a small but gorgeous black boulder opal from the Cody Brothers, well-known for their outstanding stock, and had it set into a custom gold ring made by Rick Martin Snow Owl, a beautiful setting that protected the opal. It had been one of his grandfather’s criteria for a good stone—if it shines brightly under moonlight, it’s a good one.

Thorn had inherited the ring. It was an irregular-shaped red-multicolor flashfire, had blues, greens, oranges, even yellows in it, and on a sunny day, you could see the fire shining from across the street.

Not so bright in moonlight, if you wanted to keep your scenario TTL—true-to-life—but still a comforting glow. The colors reminded him of looking at a neighborhood strip mall full of neon signs at night from five hundred yards away; brilliant, electric, magic.

Opals were supposed to be unlucky, but his grandfather had laughed and told him that was a lie started by diamond merchants in London in the late 1800s. The opals were cutting into diamond sales, and what better way to discourage people from buying them than by saying they were cursed?

Thorn smiled. He missed his grandfather, a man who had been wise in the ways of the world—and who had remained kind despite his knowledge.

The dogs began calling louder, and Thorn knew from the tones they had treed a raccoon—a bit of information he had been hunting.

He passed through a grassy meadow, skirted patches of poison ivy, and tramped back into a stand of long-leaf pine. The light from his big dry-cell lamp found the dogs, who were baying and trying to climb the fat-boled tree with no success. Thorn shined the brilliant beam into the branches.

Twenty feet up, the light reflected from the eyes of a big raccoon clinging to the trunk.

Thorn grinned.
Gotcha!

“All right, pups, I’ll take it from here. Back off, be quiet, and sit!”

His great-uncle had told him that hounds weren’t that easy to train, but it was Thorn’s scenario, and having dogs that would do what he wanted was simple enough to program—even if it wasn’t really TTL.

The dogs, eight of them, moved away from the tree, circled around, lined up in a row facing him, and, as neat as a military drill team, sat.

“Good dogs!”

Thorn unslung the tranquilizer rifle from his shoulder, worked the bolt, inserted a hypodermic dart, and locked the bolt shut. He snicked the safety off, raised the weapon, and lined up on the coon. He squeezed off he shot. The compressed
whump!
of carbon dioxide was loud in the night.

The raccoon jumped as the dart hit it, but he stayed put.

Three minutes later, the coon lost his grip on the rough pine bark and fell to the soft and mossy ground, unharmed and unconscious.

The dogs looked longingly at it, but stayed put.

Thorn went over to examine his find.

Thorn removed the sensory apparatus—the headgear, gloves, and slicksuit mesh—and considered what he had found. He had the tools for this: Using cause and effect, coupled with extrapolation, he might be able to come up with a reasoned scenario that made sense. At least it was a place to start.

Jay had not broken the entire code the Turks had gotten, but those parts he had managed to decrypt had revealed spies in Africa, the Middle East, South America, Central America, and Mexico.

Consider that as . . . inertia, and extrapolate in a straight line. Do that, and it was not that great a stretch to infer that the unbroken sections would continue north, into the U.S. and maybe Canada. Everybody knew the Soviets had fielded scores of spies in the U.S. in the bad old days, and why assume that they had all folded their tents and left when the cold war was done?

Assume for the sake of argument that the still-encrypted portion of file was going to show the names of spies in the U.S., some of whom were still here.

Not a major leap to go there. So what?

So, what if one of those spies somehow found out about the file?

How?

A leak from the Turks? Or surely the Russians must have realized pretty quick their ancient agents were being collected. Would they have tipped off the ones still at large? That would make sense, if the ones remaining had any value to them.

Why attack Jay?

That one was easy. Going to prison for treason? That would be good motivation. Or maybe it was the Russians themselves. They could have a mole somewhere they absolutely did not want to lose. Just because the Russians were currently friends didn’t mean they wouldn’t still want intelligence information if they could get it. Friendly countries all spied on each other. The Russians would know about the file’s existence, they would know the Turks had intercepted it, and maybe they were trying to make sure Jay didn’t get to some valuable bit of information?

The Russians trying to protect a valuable spy, or the spy trying to protect his own hide, either of those would be enough reason to want Net Force to back off.

But, okay, assume one of these scenarios was true, then whoever it was would have to have pretty good resources. They’d know that Net Force had the file, if they had some way of getting into the Turk’s agencies, but how would they know that Jay was the man working on it? And be able to target him, get a bug on his car, and be ready to take him out the way they had? That indicated somebody with expertise, and experts cost money.

Thorn stretched. He needed a break. He decided to check his e-mail, see what had come in while he’d been working, and then get back to the problem of Jay.

It had been a pretty good day so far, considering how early it was, but when he found his personal e-mail box jammed once again with messages from the troll, he decided it was time to put a stop to it. He didn’t need this irritating crap when he had more important things to do.

He emptied the mailbox and got on-line. He wanted to check something before he went any further with this, and it didn’t take long to track down the stats he wanted. The amount of information on the web was incredible, things nobody would have ever dreamed of in the early days of the net.