Of course, Waite being dead wasn’t going to help them a whole lot. He wouldn’t be telling them anything unless Jay could find a spiritual medium who could reach beyond the grave. . . .
Crap.
It was good work, though. He told her so.
“Thank you, Jay. That’s something, coming from you.”
At which point she slid her hand up his leg to his crotch.
Startled, Jay bailed from the scenario.
But that wasn’t much help. Rachel squatted next to his chair in her office, and her real hand was on his real lap.
“Rachel! What are you doing?!”
“Clever man like you can’t figure that out?” She smiled. Rubbed a little.
Jay shook his head. “Not a good idea,” he said. He tried to back his chair away, but the wheels seemed stuck.
“Oh, it’s a great idea. The door is locked. Nobody will interrupt us.”
“I’m married!”
“Good for you. This won’t hurt your wife, Jay. Nobody but us ever has to know. I won’t tell.” She squeezed him again. “You want it.”
She was right—he did want it—and that fact was more than a little obvious to her, given where her hand was. And nobody would know. . . .
For a few heartbeats, Jay sat balanced on the razor edge of choice. She reached for his zipper, smiling. . . .
He caught her hand. “No. I can’t.”
“It’s already evident that you
He got the wheels working on the chair, and it rolled back suddenly, leaving her a couple feet away as he slammed into the wall, hard.
He leaped to his feet. “I’m sorry, Rachel. I just can’t do this!”
He practically ran for the door.
And part of him kept saying,
33
Jay had bagged the sci-fi convention scenario to try something different. He was still rattled by his visit with Rachel, really rattled. He felt as if he had developed a sudden case of some tropical fever; he was alternately hot and cold and on the edge of throwing up. He didn’t want to think about it, and work was the best way to avoid that, but even so, it kept coming up in his thoughts.
How close it had been. Way too close. He was ashamed of himself for letting it get that far. For even considering it.
So here he was, in fantasy Arabia, looking at a hookah when the alarms went off. The hookah was big, maybe three feet tall, and VR text hanging in the air in front of it advertised it as suitable for flavored tobacco or “other substances.” The hose of the hookah had been customized to look like snakeskin, and the mouthpiece had been molded appropriately to match.
The alarms sounded like air-raid sirens. All around him vendors grabbed their cash boxes and headed for the exits. The VR commerce center had been modeled like a cross between something from the Arabian Nights and a 1940s Hollywood movie about Damascus in Glorious Living Technicolor—baskets, tables covered with colorful cloth, and brightly decorated awnings inside a huge, cavernous, walled marketplace. A bizarre bazaar, indeed . . .
It was mostly a gray market—products which were illegal in some countries, but not here, as well as questionable transfers of supposedly legal items.
Like, say, firearms.
If he could figure out for sure who bought the BMF, they’d be one step closer to nailing the terrorists attacking the bases.
Unfortunately, while the information was here, the site containing the information was international—which meant he had no jurisdiction to demand anything. How what he wanted had come to
The problem was the way the records were kept. There were hundreds of vendors, each of whom had their own unique files. And most of those were only internal—to follow the money outside the market, their transactions had to be cross-checked with the site’s commerce engine. He could easily hack the individual sellers, but getting to the money transfers was somewhat more difficult. The guy who had bought the gun had used a swiped ID, but he had come, for some odd reason, through here to do it. Jay was betting his real name was here somewhere.
The data he wanted was kept behind a major firewall—one designed to Net Force specifications. Which meant that even being Jay Gridley wasn’t enough to get into it.
So he had followed what one of his professors had called the “Prophet Tactic”—if you couldn’t go to the mountain, maybe you could get the mountain to come to you. . . .
He’d run two quick tests, triggering the site’s security. During each test he’d seen the site’s crisis measures in action.
Rather than wiping every dangerous piece of data, the site database was split and fired off into different directions. After a set time the pieces would be reassembled and business would begin as usual at YAVA—Yet Another VR Address.
Jay had twice watched the burnoose-wearing VR metaphor for the cash records haul ass down a dark alley toward the back of the market and out through an arched doorway.
So all he had to do was trigger the alarms again, grab the records from the avatar—who looked like a middle-aged accountant in faux-Arabic robes—and he’d be in good shape.
Exactly as predicted, the cash records guy hustled out the firewall entrance—which looked like a concrete bunker pasted with advertisements in Farsi or something—and toward the rear of the marketplace.
This was where it could get iffy. Up until now, he’d been a bystander, no one who would catch the attention of site security.
If site security ID’d him quickly enough, they could start unraveling his net disguise and track him back to U.S. law enforcement.
Which would be embarrassing.
Not that the United States wasn’t
Jay ran past the hookah vendor’s long table toward an intersection the records carrier would cross before turning into the alley. By not following the carrier directly, he hoped he was less likely to catch unwanted attention.
But—no. Someone had programmed the marketplace’s security with a predictive network filter. They weren’t common, and ate up a lot of processing power, but apparently the site’s owners were willing to spend it to protect their records. He’d been identified as a threat. Dozens of black-robed security avatars, each carrying long, shiny scimitars, came running toward him. They sounded like extras from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. . . .
