“You outdid yourself this time,” Carruth said. “Coffee tastes like it was made out of old cigarette butts.”
She waved that off. She didn’t want to tell him that Jay was hot on his trail, but she allowed as how Gridley had something, only he hadn’t shared it with her, and it sounded big, to see what Carruth would say. Give him a chance to come clean. Not, at this point, that it would really matter, but just to see.
He didn’t bite. He said, “So if this clown is such a linchpin at Net Force and the whole place revolves around him, why don’t I just put one behind his ear and let’s get rid of the problem?”
Lewis shook her head. “Once upon a time that might have worked, but not anymore. Apparently, Mr. Gridley used to play his cards pretty close to his vest and something like that happened—a guy Net Force was chasing ran Gridley off the road and shot him. He was in the hospital unconscious for a time and there was some doubt he was going to make it. He had vital data locked up in his head nobody could get to. After that, he started backing up his files and leaving them where his boss could get to them. Take him out, they don’t lose any of Gridley’s input— somebody else picks up the ball and runs with it. Maybe not quite as fast, but eliminating him doesn’t help us much.”
“And you don’t know what he’s got?”
“Only that he thinks it is going to break this open.”
“Can you get him to tell you?”
“I’m working on it.”
She was still hoping to maneuver Jay into her bed. And once she did, she’d make that knowledge public, and that would take Jay out of the action. He would be so busy running around trying to save his marriage that work would be the last thing on his mind.
That her last try hadn’t quite done the trick was irritating, but it was still an option. Real pheromones and a warm and willing body were still better than anything anybody had come up with in VR. He wanted her, she was sure of that, she could feel it, and she had primed his pump about as well as she could. She’d have to see if she could get it going soon.
She also didn’t bring it up that it was Carruth who was going to get killed. Stupid son of a bitch, she still couldn’t believe it. It was just a matter of setting it up and doing it, and soon. Next meeting, or the one after that, they’d meet somewhere nobody would be around. She’d come up with a good reason, and then Carruth here was going to become a major fall guy. They’d find him, and maybe that enormous gun he’d used, something to tie him to it. He was a dead man walking, he just didn’t know it yet.
Carruth nodded. “Okay. You’re the boss. But why tell me if you don’t want him erased? You’re the computer girl. You didn’t need a sit-down for that.”
“That’s not the reason. I’ve got another buyer interested,” she said. “A new player.” A lie, but how would he know? “He wants a demonstration, so we need one last raid.”
“What’s he want? A fucking tank?”
“No. He wants a colonel.”
“Say what?”
“He wants us to kidnap a bird colonel and turn him over.”
“Why?”
“What do you care? We deliver the guy, we have a deal.”
“Dead or alive?”
“Alive. Apparently, he has a history with the guy and wants to speak harshly to him.”
Carruth shook his head. “This is gettin’ old, Lewis.”
“Almost over,” she said. She wanted to smile, but kept her face as expressionless as she could.
“Details?”
“I’ll get those to you next meeting. I still have some codes to collect, plus some background information on the target. Here’s the new meeting place. I’ll call with the day and time.”
She handed him the sticky note. He glanced at it. “Vickers Crossing? Where is that?”
“In the country. The GPS coordinates are there at the bottom.”
“More crappy coffee. Great.”
Not this time, Carruth. No coffee, because the little country store in question was closed. Nobody would be there except them.
And only one of them was going to be leaving under her own power when that meeting was over.
Too bad it had come to this. It was going to make the rest of the project a bastard—she’d need new muscle, another shooter, and that would be tricky—though with new guys, she wouldn’t be so forthcoming. She’d learned that lesson, at least. There were a couple candidates, mercs she had lined up second and third before she’d hired Carruth. Hire a couple, pay them a flat fee, don’t tell them any more than they had to know.
She watched Carruth leave. Too bad. But better him than her.
28
Jay hadn’t figured out why his sci-fi convention scenario had crashed, but he didn’t have time to sit down and debug the software—it wasn’t as if he didn’t have other things on his plate. He’d get back to it later, or maybe he’d just crank up something totally different and bag the convention imagery.
Sometimes, half the fun in finding information was in coming up with a new scenario for VR. Jay had to admit that he did more of that than was absolutely necessary, but he figured, if he couldn’t have fun, why bother? Any hack could use off-the-shelf software and filters—Jay liked to think of himself as at least a good craftsman, if not an artist. . . .
So it was that to hunt down a connection for the dead terrorist Stark, he had spent a couple hours building a scenario. Sure, it was easier to do these days, because a lot of the construction material was prepackaged, but that was kind of like buying a steak at the store instead of going out and hunting down your own cow. He had no problem with taking that shortcut; after all, it was the way you cooked the meat that made the difference. The proof was in the meal—nobody cared if you’d butchered the beef yourself or had somebody else do it.
Over the years, Jay had VR’d to many corners of the world, from Africa to Java, from Japan to Australia, China to Canada, you name it. Not only in the present, but throughout history. And he had built more than a few fantasy scenarios—and not just here on Earth. The solar system, the galaxy, the universe—shoot, the next universe over—Jay had explored all kinds of territory, real and imagined. Sometimes, the trick was more about how to keep it interesting than it was to find what he was after. That was part of the challenge.
This time, he had come up with one he thought was a hoot: He had gone to the planet Omega, in a stellar system far, far away, to the galaxy’s toughest prison. Ordinarily, this was a one-way ticket. Nobody was paroled, all the sentences were for life, and nobody had ever escaped—not and lived to tell of it.
While Richard Lovelace had it that stone walls did not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage, a joint with fifteen-meter-high walls painted with slick-ex too slippery to allow a fly to land, armed guards who’d just as soon shoot you as look at you, and set smack-dab in the middle of a pestilent, tropical swamp full of quicksand pits and man-eating critters that flew, ran, crawled, or slithered all over looking for a two-legged meal? Those made for a pretty good cage. Even if you
Jay, in his guise as a notorious drug smuggler sentenced to The Cage, as it was known, had arrived, beaten the crap out of the bully who had been sent to test him, and integrated himself into the population.
Stark was dead in this reality, too, but he’d been in the prison a while, and there were people who had known him. Jay needed to find them and get them to tell all. Which meant running down e-mails or postings or URLs or
