“Abe,” he said.
She didn’t even blink. “All right. Abe.”
She waited.
He thought about it for a moment. He didn’t know this woman, he had no reason to sit here and spill his guts to her, but something about her manner invited intimacy. She seemed genuinely interested.
He took a deep breath. Who would it hurt? “The man who gave it to me was moments away from dying when he did so. The reason he was dying was because I had just shot him.”
If that bothered her, it didn’t show. “I thought you looked like police or military. Go on.”
He wanted to grin again. He remembered a story he’d heard, about an ex-GI who had been involved in a shooting at his home. Guy had been jumped by some local bikers, so he’d pulled a piece and fired three rounds, killing one of them. Friends called later to talk to the shooter, and the comments ranged on one end from folks saying how awful it must have been to have to shoot and kill a fellow human being, to old soldiering buddies who said, “What kind of grouping did you get?” Jennifer Hart’s comment sounded more like the latter than the former.
“I work for a government agency. The man—who was shooting at me when I shot him—was a hired killer. He was also a very good classical guitarist.”
“And you feel that you need to learn how to play it? I don’t see the reason.”
He didn’t blame her. He didn’t see the reason, either, exactly. And what could he tell her? Would she understand that Natadze was a good enemy? Smart, tough, adept.
He shrugged. “It seems like the right thing to do.”
She nodded, as if understanding exactly what moved him, though it may have simply been acceptance. For the moment, anyway. “Okay. Let’s get started, then. Can you read music?”
He smiled again. “Not a note.”
“TAB?”
“That a soft drink?”
She laughed. He enjoyed being able to make her do that. “Not exactly,” she said. “It’s a kind of notation for stringed instruments—guitars, lutes, like that. We’ll get into theory as we go. Let’s do the basic stuff first. There are six strings on your guitar, numbered usually from the thinnest and highest to the thickest and lowest. When you hold the guitar on your leg—I’ll show the basic position—the lowest bass string will be up. Going down from that toward the floor, the strings are usually tuned to E, A, D, G, B, and E, in that order. Here’s a way to remember them: Elvis Ate Dynamite, Good-Bye, Elvis. . . .”
Kent grinned again. He could remember that. Hell, he could remember Elvis Himself. Saw him once, in Las Vegas . . .
Jay stood at the top of the tallest sand dune, looking at the huge archaeology dig below. Hundreds of natives wearing flowing white robes toiled in the hot sun, carefully unmasking the ruins of the temple beneath the sand. Some used shovels, some used small hand trowels, and others used whisk brooms made of papyrus to brush away dust on the stones.
Right out of an old adventure movie. Or maybe one about mummies and tomb raiders . . .
Like most of his VR scenarios, it wasn’t really a temple but a metaphor for something else—in this case a huge comparison database.
The work hadn’t been easy, and the pressure was on.
Because the distributed program had mixed and matched various features of U.S. military bases around the globe to create the alien bases, the question was: How many more bases had been incorporated into the alien designs? How many more potential targets were there?
He would be passing on what he already had to the Army’s computer people pretty soon, but another run wouldn’t hurt.
If Jay could deconstruct the game and identify features of the bases that hadn’t been attacked, the good guys might be able to get ahead of the bad guys.
Unfortunately, as with every solution, there were problems.
First was finding copies of the game software. The program hadn’t been released all at once—new bases had been constructed and sent out to the game players in installments. To complicate things, the game server that had sent the files out had shut itself down when the first base was attacked. In addition, the game files were coded to stop working after a certain date.
So not only did he have to find copies of the software, he had to keep them from shutting down as well.
His grin grew wider, and the desert wind blew pieces of sand into his teeth.
Several servers on I2’s West Coast backbone had been taken off-line for maintenance a week or so before. He’d managed to snag the game variants by copying their hard drives and sifting them for the program. He’d changed the computer’s date before starting them up again.
He’d also gotten several copies from a VR site that billed itself as a multiplayer on-line game museum. The site had used similar tactics to freeze the alien games.
After all of his efforts he figured he had about thirty percent or so of the games that had been released. He’d popped them onto a closed network loop and then had gone after problem number two.
Jay looked over toward the main encampment. White tents fluttered in the desert wind. One was larger than the rest, and in front of it stood dozens of glass tables, each one covered with models. Scores of heavily armed guards patrolled the areas around the models.
In order to figure out which military bases made up the alien bases, he needed their specifications, security, entrances, and exits.
And no one had wanted to give him the information. He turned and spit the grit out of his mouth.
It was a classic military move, closing the barn door after the horse had gotten out. Here he was, trying to track down terrorists who had attacked their bases, but no one would give him information to do it.
He’d been tempted to hack their database, but had decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble. So he’d e-mailed General Ellis instead, taking him up on his offer of more resources. In the meantime, he had gone after the information through conventional means, compiling lists of military bases from FBI archives and gathering site plans filed with land-use and planning commissions.
After all, one could take many paths to the same destination.
He’d started a team of techs transferring the data to VR, and then he’d adapted the desert scene to actively deconstruct each of the bases in the game.
And then, wonder of wonders, Ellis had come through. True to his word, the old man had freed up stats on every Army base in the country: buildings, security orders-of-the-day, and even electronic passwords—all as of the date of the first attacks, of course—nothing current. Still, it wasn’t a bad compromise, all things considered. Jay had his data, and the military kept its secrets.
Right now his VR scenario was running on the first or second iteration of the game. The sun beat down and white-robed workers measured features of the temple—which was actually the alien base—and scurried to carry those measurements to others who were near the models. The measurements would be adjusted to scale, and then compared to each model, one piece at a time.
It was a huge amount of information to process, exactly what VR was best at.
“Dr. Jay, Dr. Jay!” One of the natives by the model waved.
Jay headed over, feeling sweat bead on his back in the hot sun.
The man pointed at one of the models, a squared-off base set against a hillside. There was a main entrance, well guarded, and along the side was another entrance, which looked like it was used for vehicles.
The native gestured at the entrance and handed Jay the piece of paper.
Jay read the measurements on the scrap of paper and looked over at the entrance. He pulled a set of calipers from his pocket and measured the doorway.
