The carrier was still a good twenty yards or so ahead and the blade-wavers were coming up fast.
Jay triggered a subroutine he’d prepared as a “just-in-case” and instantly everything slowed—including himself.
He was in the air, running, front foot on the way earth-ward again. All around him everything had slowed to a barely perceptible crawl. . . .
Although he couldn’t move any faster, he was able to sit back from his avatar and examine the scene like a three-dimensional model—himself running, the carrier ahead, the security guys closing in.
He only had a few seconds—the slowdown routine would be blocked by the VR site, since speed was to their advantage—so he had to think fast.
He could see he wasn’t gonna make it. The security team would have him trapped before he intercepted the carrier.
Should he abort?
Normally, he wouldn’t even consider it. But being caught raiding an international site in U.S. colors would be ugly. Real egg-on-the-face stuff. Crap!
There were too many guards, and too many bystanders between himself and the carrier. The spacing of the tables in the marketplace funneled things too tightly. He couldn’t get to the carrier fast enough going around the tables—
He jumped up onto a table holding a variety of decorative daggers and kicked a display out of the way. Blades flew left and right and he saw one of the security guards duck.
The seller yelled what was surely a nasty curse.
Jay jumped to the next table, this one full of cartoon collectibles, and knocked over boxes filled with mugs and figurines as he kept moving. He glanced down and saw a red-garbed dog with a black U on its chest go flying.
The guards couldn’t recover fast enough. The network predictor was confused just a hair, and that was enough.
By running the tables, he gained enough time to be just in front of his quarry at the mouth of the alley. He leaped, knocked the guy down, grabbed the papers and started shuffling in a big hurry.
All he needed was—there it was, the name!
As the guards closed in to behead him, he laughed and gave them the finger. “End scenario!” he yelled.
Jay knocked on Thorn’s door, and didn’t wait to be invited in.
Thorn was on the com, but he said, “Let me call you back.”
Jay said, “Boss, I got one of the terrorists ID’d. And it’s the guy who iced the Metro cops, too.”
“Carruth,” Thorn said.
Jay looked as if he’d been punched in the gut. “How did you know? You got spyware in my system?” There was a scary thought. What else might he know? About Rachel?
“No. The Army got an anonymous tip about another base going to be hit. The caller identified Carruth and gave Army Intelligence particulars—where and when. Said the guy coming in would be wired with explosives and was not going to let himself be captured.”
“Damn. All that work and somebody just . . . gave him up?”
“The confirmation is important, Jay. The guy just hit the base, right on schedule.”
“He dead?”
Thorn shook his head. “No. He got away.”
Jay frowned. “What? How’d he do that if they knew he was coming?”
“I don’t know. According to what I just heard”—he nodded at the com—“he was on the base and heading toward his target—supposed to kidnap some colonel—when all of a sudden he spun his car around and boogied. They weren’t expecting that. They hadn’t sealed things up tight yet. He got off the base and they couldn’t catch him.”
“Crap. What morons!” Yeah, he was still upset about the Rachel thing, no question.
“We have a location,” Thorn said. “In the District. The tipster called back and gave the Army an address. The FBI and local police are rolling on it. Abe Kent and a team are going along as ‘advisers.’ We’ll collect him if he went home.”
Jay nodded.
“You can ride along with General Kent in the mobile command center if you want. He’s leaving in about two minutes.”
“Thanks, but I’ll pass. Not my area of expertise, and this guy has a gun that will drop a charging Kodiak bear. I don’t want somebody explaining to my wife how I was hit by a stray bullet that will require a closed coffin at the funeral.”
Especially before he had a chance to see her and come clean about Rachel. He had to do that.
“Smart,” Thorn said.
“Some days I think so. Other days, maybe not. Lemme know how it goes.”
Jay stood.
“What are you working on now?”
Jay shrugged. “A loose end. Probably not anything, but a thought came up I want to run down.”
“Break a leg.”
“Not mine, I hope.”
There was no need to build a complicated scenario for this, and Jay didn’t really feel up for it. What he felt was sick, and what he hoped was that he was wrong. He wasn’t looking to entertain himself; he just needed the facts.
Carruth, however many people he might have killed, wasn’t the brains of this operation. That became obvious the more Jay looked at it. The guy didn’t have a net presence to speak of, and nothing in his background indicated any great computer skills. He was an ex-Navy SEAL. He could stomp you to mush, or shoot you, or blow you up, and he could do it falling out of a plane, on the ground, or underwater, too, but there was just no way he had built the alien-bug game, and no way he could have hacked into Army computers and gotten squat. That a dead guy made the game and might have been running the show made sense, but it was awfully convenient—maybe too convenient—and now Jay wasn’t so sure about that, either.
Carruth was a pawn, maybe even a knight, but not the king for whom Jay had been searching.
Or, as it had finally dawned on him, maybe he wasn’t looking for the king at all.
Maybe he should have been trying to find the queen. . . .
Jay used a stock VR library, went to the front desk, got the location, and went to find the biography of Captain Rachel Lewis, United States Army.
He took to the book to a table and opened it.
The facts and figures were there—DOB, family, schools, like that, but what Jay wanted was going to be beyond the public facts; fortunately, he had access to things most people couldn’t get to, and the index in the Book of Rachel was very thick.
