Virtual Vandals

“It was the re-creation of a famous battle. But some of the soldiers departed from their programming and began attacking us.”

Cat’s eyes went wide. “Oh, no!” She turned back to the office. “Where’s Sandy?”

“He’s going to the hospital. As far as I can tell, he’s no worse off than the people who got shot at Camden Yards.” Matt’s voice was grim. “I don’t know how I’d have ended up, though, with three guys with bayonets coming after me.”

Whatever color was left in Caitlin’s face just drained away. “Rob!” she whispered fiercely. “It has to be Rob!” She looked sick. “One of the first places we stuck trapdoors was in the school’s veeyar system. I never thought —”

“Neither did I,” Matt admitted. “I should have been more careful, especially since we passed through one of the veeyar system sites on our way to see Sean McArdle.”

Still, Caitlin looked as if she blamed herself for the ordeal Sandy and Matt had gone through.

Matt took her arm. “Where’s your car?”

“In the lot out back,” Caitlin said. “I was kinda late getting in today.”

“I’ll walk you out.” Matt’s brain was going into overdrive. The cops would be arriving any minute. It was now or never to convince Cat to cooperate with the police and Net Force.

“This has gotten way out of control,” he told Caitlin as they stepped out of the rear exit of the school. “You know already that you can’t control Rob Falk. Isn’t it time to admit you can’t keep protecting him, either?”

“It’s not like I have a choice!” Cat cried. “Rob is—”

“Rob’ll be mad at you, if you keep flappin’ your mouth about him,” a voice interrupted.

Matt turned from Caitlin in complete shock. He hadn’t expected to find anyone in the school parking lot during classes.

Instead, there were three kids surrounding the doorway. And no way were they Bradford students. They wore ripped jeans and armless shirts over T-shirts, bandannas, and gold jewelry. The one who’d spoken was a big, husky kid with dirty-blond hair — the accent of the mountains was still thick in his voice. To his right was a wiry Asian youth, while the boy on the left seemed to mix several nationalities and races.

Though these street kids all looked wildly different, Matt noticed that each of them was wearing some combination of green and black.

Gang members.

Matt couldn’t believe that they were being confronted by gangbangers at the doors of Bradford Academy. But there was no arguing with the evidence of his own eyes.

And there was no arguing with the gun the blond kid suddenly whipped from behind his baggy shirt. “Let’s have the car keys, honey.”

They were marched across the pavement to Caitlin’s car. It was lucky she hadn’t taken the Copperhead this day. Even so, it was a tight squeeze for the five of them. The blond boy sat in front behind the steering wheel with Cat beside him. Matt was in the backseat, wedged between the other two.

“Tuck your hands under your butt,” the blond boy had ordered as Matt sat down. “I don’t want to see you moving a muscle. ’Cause if you do, Ng here will have to use this.” He handed the pistol to the Asian boy. “And what he’ll do is blow a big ol’ hole through the front seat and right into this pretty li’l girl here.”

The big guy nodded at Caitlin, who sat frozen in the passenger’s seat.

“Wh-where are you taking us?” she asked in a strangled voice.

“Why, we’re takin’ you to see Rob Falk,” the big blond boy said as he twisted the key in the ignition and started the engine. “Seems only fair, with you takin’ such an interest in him an’ all.”

Chapter 16

Sitting on his hands in the backseat of Caitlin’s car, Matt could only watch helplessly as the blond boy pulled out of the Bradford Academy parking lot.

If I were alone, I might just make a try for old Ng over there, Matt thought, looking at the wiry Asian boy with the pistol. Net Force instructors were Marine-trained, and expected everyone connected with the agency — even the young Explorers — to have some self-defense ability. Matt had done fairly well in his unarmed-combat courses. If he only had himself to worry about, he might have been able to get the gun from Ng’s hand.

But he couldn’t be sure of getting the gun before one shot went off. And the way things were set up, that shot would go into Cat Corrigan’s back.

So Matt sat where he was, grimly trying to memorize the route they were taking.

They quietly wove their way through local streets until they reached the Rock Creek Parkway. The blond boy pulled onto a northbound entrance ramp.

Sure, Matt thought. The Beltway.

Many years before, city planners had completely ringed the District of Columbia with highways, so that drivers could avoid the traffic of the city’s center. Improved transportation had also started a boom in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. Housing developments were laid out, malls, office complexes — by the 1980s, sharp Washington business and government types were known as “Beltway Bandits.”

But even by the turn of the century, things were changing. As improvements were made in the city, problems emerged in the inner suburbs — those inside the ring of roads. Ironically, they were the sort of “city problems” that people had moved to suburbia to ignore. Immigrants. Poverty. Drugs. Gangs.

Cities, in spite of their problems, have business districts and lots of people to act as a tax base. The suburban towns found their police and social services overwhelmed.

Wherever they were going, Matt was sure it would be somewhere inside the Beltway.

The boy behind the wheel upped the speed, moving along with the flow of highway traffic.

“Nice,” said the boy at Matt’s left. “Is a nice car, Willy, no?”

“Nice car, yes,” Willy, the blond boy, said from behind the wheel. “Light-years past my daddy’s pickup. Too bad we have to dump it.”

On Matt’s right, Ng jumped in surprise. “We don’t keep?”

Willy jerked his head at Caitlin. “This little girl is a Senator’s daughter. Word gets out she’s been snatched, we’re gonna have the FBI and all the rest of the alphabet after us. Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, who knows what-all?”

The other boy made a disappointed sound.

“No way, Mustafa. We don’t want to be anywhere near this car when the gov-boys find it. So we leave it where other folks will find it first. Leave them to get the blame.”

Willy exited the Beltway and drove along an access road to a seedy-looking mall. The place had probably been built before the turn of the century, and whatever shine the buildings might have had once was long gone. Half the storefronts were empty, and some of those had holes in the windows. The other places were what Matt’s father would call “junk stores,” full of cheap, shoddy merchandise with big signs about bargains in the windows.

Matt noticed a phony-looking electronics store with a banner screaming about the tremendous buys inside. The glaring colors had faded in the sunshine, and there were tears in the plastic.

This is exactly the kind of place where you could buy a cheap antique of a computer, he suddenly thought. Except they’d probably try to hold you up for too high a price.

They thudded their way across the cracked concrete parking lot until Willy brought them to a halt next to a beat-up sedan.

It was hard to tell what color the car had been originally. One door was bluish-gray, and a fender was green. The rest seemed to be beige, except for the leprous gray spots of body putty.

“Everybody out,” Willy ordered.

Willy hopped from behind the wheel and got a firm hold on Caitlin’s arm. In his other hand he had a Bowie knife, which he quickly showed to Matt, then lowered the weapon to the side of his leg where it wasn’t so obvious to the people passing by on the street. “Just so you don’t try anything stupid-like,” the boy said in his back-country drawl.