Savage was still only slapping Sean around when Matt reached them. But the Irish boy couldn’t even defend himself. He was wobbling on his feet.
And when he went down, Savage pounced, his hands going for a stranglehold.
“Are you crazy?” Matt demanded, trying to haul Savage off.
For a reply, Savage merely swept a heavy arm into Matt’s chest.
It felt like being hit by a pebble-studded wrecking ball. He stumbled backward, trying to breathe.
Soft hands caught Matt, holding him up. It was Cat Corrigan.
“You’ve got to do something!” The face of her vampiress proxy was a mask of terror. “He’s going to kill that boy!”
Chapter 12
“Help?” Cat was almost babbling. “How?”
“Give me a hand.” Matt went to the wreckage of Sean McArdle’s virtual desk, hauling out a large, splintered slab of wood. Caitlin joined him as he dragged it to where Gerry Savage was single-mindedly strangling the Irish ambassador’s son.
“Okay,” Matt panted. “I’m letting go. You make this fall on Savage, then jump on it.”
“Me?”
“
He released the piece of wreckage. For a second it wobbled. Then Caitlin threw her weight against it. The heavy wooden desk fragment seemed to fall in slow motion. But Gerry the Savage didn’t even seem to be aware of it — until it landed across his back.
Savage felt the impact, even through his jewel-tough skin. He screamed in pain, then screamed again as Caitlin leapt onto the piece of wreckage now pinning him.
Grunting, Savage levered himself around. One good heave freed him from the wooden wreckage — and sent Caitlin flying.
Matt managed to catch her and keep her on her feet. But his eyes were focused beyond Savage, on Sean McArdle. The Irish boy scrambled up, one hand on his throat. The instant he realized he was free, he vanished from the veeyar.
Turning to resume his unfinished business, the Savage made the kind of noise lions do after being cheated out of a kill. “You let him get away!” he screamed, his voice thick with blood-lust.
Fists clenched, he advanced on Matt and Caitlin.
“Trashing a veeyar is one thing!” Matt shouted. “Killing someone is another!”
“However it happened, he’s out now,” Luc Valery said. He and Serge had finally stopped their vandalism at Savage’s scream and run to join the others. “Security will be here any second.”
Serge didn’t even comment on that. His cartoon cowboy proxy was simply gone, like a blown-out candle flame.
The thought of consequences finally penetrated Savage’s fury. “Right,” he finally said. Then he jutted a finger at Matt. “But I’m not done with you.”
The British boy vanished; then Luc winked out.
Cat grabbed Matt’s hand. “Let’s get out of here.”
He let Caitlin do the piloting, wondering if they’d wind up back at Bradford’s chem lab again. Instead, they popped up in another library.
“Library of Congress,” Cat explained. “Even at this time of night — or morning, they get a lot of queries.”
“Saves on the phone bill,” Matt said.
They bounced through a series of heavily trafficked Net nodes until they arrived at last at Casa Corrigan.
Matt noticed, however, that Cat landed them on the virtual lawn outside the replica of Mount Vernon, not in her own veeyar. Somewhere along the way, she’d shed her Madame Dracula proxy. It was a teenaged girl who faced him — pretty, disheveled…and very scared.
“Thanks for doing what you did,” Caitlin said. “I couldn’t even think — and there was no way I could have moved that chunk of wood by myself.” She shuddered. “The Savage really lost it this time. I was afraid he was going to squish that guy like an overripe tomato.”
“Look, Savage isn’t the boss of this gang, is he?” Matt asked.
Caitlin shook her head. “He’s just the biggest of us — and the loudest.”
“I wouldn’t think he had the brains to find his way out of a paper bag — unless he tore it.” Matt gave the girl a long, hard look. “And from the way he talks about computers, he doesn’t have the programming smarts to create the bag of tricks you guys have been using. But then, we already know about that. Savage blabbed about him — it had to be a him, didn’t it? Old Gerry called him a ‘dangerous sort of chap’ before he realized what he was doing.”
He looked into Caitlin’s eyes. “The big brain is also your boss, isn’t he, Cat? The one who really calls the shots?”
“Sometimes,” Caitlin admitted. “We get a bunch of labels — trapdoors. Some we’re supposed to drop on certain kids or places. The rest are for us to use any way we like.”
“So you visit them later and trash ’em.”
She shook her head. “Some we’re not supposed to. The Irish kid — McArdle — we weren’t supposed to go back there.”
“And that thing in the baseball stadium…that wasn’t just a trapdoor.”
“When he told us — when I first heard, I thought it would be a joke. Just shooting down a bunch of simulated baseball players, right?” Caitlin looked sick. “But then people in the stands began falling. I never realized how many people came to those games in holo.”
“So is this ‘he’ you’re talking about as dangerous as Savage says?” Matt asked. “If he is, why don’t you just bail out?”
His questions seemed to snap Caitlin out of her cooperative mood. “Yes, he is,” she replied, both angry and scared. Then she sounded sad. “And, no, I can’t.”
A second later, she’d disappeared inside the imitation Mount Vernon.
Matt knew better than to try following her. If the security systems didn’t get him, the systems crash would. And if he was going to end up back home, he might as well get there without a pounding headache.
He bounced out of the Corrigans’ virtual estate, taking yet another complicated route until he finally opened his eyes back in his own room. But Matt didn’t get out of his computer-link chair. He just sat there, his chin resting on his clasped hands.
He’d done a couple of good things this night — identifying the virtual vandals, shaking them up, and learning a little bit about the still-shadowy figure who provided their technology — and their orders. On the minus side, he hadn’t found out about the programming trick that allowed the vandals to hurt people in veeyar. He’d let himself be pressured into going along on a trashing expedition where a victim had almost gotten killed.
Last and most worrying, he’d turned himself into a definite blip on the Genius’s enemy-detection scanners. Before, he’d just been a wannabe trying to find a place with the in-crowd. Now, however, he’d definitely rocked the boat, identifying the vandals, causing Gerald Savage to disobey the Genius’s orders. And he’d seen the vandals in action.
