Jay himself wore a white linen suit and a tan planter's hat. He nodded at the shopkeeper. 'You have other newspapers?' He waved at the
'Yes, sir, we have them in the back, next to the humidor,' the man said, in that singsong lilt of a native Indian who'd learned English only as an adult. He exhaled smoke with the words.
Jay touched his hat brim and moved to the shelves to the left of the counter, next to the closed glass door that led into the humidor room where the good tobacco and cigars were kept.
He glanced at the papers. There was
He thumbed through the cheap newsprint and smudged the ink, getting it on his fingers. Well, at least that was a nice touch.
Ah, there it was. The reference he had been trying to run down. The article was ostensibly about Danes come to visit India, but there in the fluffy travel piece was the name he wanted: The
Once upon a time, Jay would have thought it was odd to find a bit of information about Denmark in an Indian infonet, but not anymore. Information was like dust; it blew around in the wind and wound up in places you'd never think it would. The logical place to start hunting for information on a Danish terrorist organization would be in Denmark, or at least in the Scandinavian countries, and certainly he had combed through those nets with the best search engines and squeekbots Net Force had, but he'd come up empty. So he'd widened his search, and this was the first real hit he'd had. Time was passing — it had been a week without any real leads — and while it had been quiet, there was no guarantee it would stay that way. He took the paper to the front, paid for it, and went out into the Indian afternoon. It was overcast. What time of year was it? Monsoon season? He was getting slack in his old age. There was a time when such a detail would never have gotten past his scenario research, even if he'd been in a hurry. Oh, well. Things changed. While it was still important to look good, getting the job done counted for more.
Jay had switched from his tropical linens into an Abercrombie & Fitch khaki outfit, shorts and a short- sleeved shirt, complete with stout walking shoes and a pinned-up Australian bush hat. His next stop was a small library in Blacktown, just north and west of Sydney. It was the middle of summer, and warm, and the library was not air-conditioned, even though he'd picked a contemporary time to run his scenario.
Not a bad transition for a couple minutes' work.
'Can I help you, sir?' the librarian asked. Jay loved Australian accents. He used them for secondary characters all the time.
'Yes, ma'am, I'm looking for this periodical.' He put a slip of paper onto the woman's desk. She put on her reading glasses and looked at it.
'Oh, right. In the magazine section, go past the record kiosk, on your left, about halfway down the rack.'
'Thank you, ma'am.'
'You're American, right?'
'Yes, ma'am.'
'Nice to make your acquaintance then.'
Jay smiled, tipped his hat, then headed for the magazine racks. This was perhaps a little more time- consuming than a non-VR search, but if he couldn't have fun, why bother?
Jay found a mention of
In a police station in Boksburg, a man arrested for stealing a car had been searched. There had been nothing in the arrestee's wallet save a business card, upon the back of which was the handwritten word
A quick check of the dates on the information showed that it had been in the police system for five months. A pix of the card had a day and time stamp on it as verification of the item's log into the evidence locker at the central storage vault in Johannesburg.
Jay collected the card. He grinned. These terrorists didn't know who they were messing with. He was Jay Gridley, the man who had run the mad Russian programmer to ground. These balrogs didn't have a prayer.
At a beef ranch in Kobe, somebody had broken in and stolen, of all things, a case of beer, which was to be fed to the cattle. Investigating policemen had no clues, save one: Scrawled on the wall next to ten cases of beer that had been left behind was the word
Jay made note of that.
So it went, a tiny bit here, an even smaller bit there. This was sometimes the way of computer sievework. You strained slowly, but very fine. If you did it right, you might come up with a bunch of pieces so small that none of them would mean anything but, puzzled together, you might have something. Jay was gathering his ducks. When he had enough of them, he would put them into a row. And when he had enough ducks in a neat row, he would get some answers. And then?
Platt strolled along one of the touristy streets near the canal, enjoying the seventy-degree weather. Around him, people walked, dressed in all the bright colors of the rainbow, plus a bunch of colors not found anywhere naturally. Old, young, white, black, domestic, foreign, Miami Beach was always cookin', there was always action. It might be snowin' like a sonofabitch up north, in Washington or New York City, and still be practically summer down here in the land of sin.
Life was sure grand when you could just pick up and go to where you could walk around in a T-shirt and shorts in the middle of the winter.
Platt ambled along, not going anywhere in particular, just strolling, soaking up a few minutes of the warm sunshine before he had to go back into his room and plug into the net.
He watched a black girl in a tank top and short shorts stride by, and smiled at her big and tight backside after she passed. Fine-lookin' woman.
A tall man in a purple crushed-velvet jumpsuit passed on in-line skates, laughing. He was throwing quarters every which way, and had a passel of children chasing him, scooping up the change.
Platt passed two window-shopping old ladies, all in lime green and hot pink, baggy Bermuda shorts and halters, both of them burned leathery and the color of dark toast, but with silicone implants that were the only things not sagging on them. The old broads must be in their seventies or eighties, and their faces were pulled so tight by plastic surgery that their fake boobs probably bobbed up and down when they smiled.
If there were some kind of big disaster that destroyed a lot of civilization's records, then maybe a thousand years from now, when some scientist got to digging up old coffins or shit, he might scratch his head and wonder when he opened them: Why were there so many caskets with these two little plastic sacks of Dow Jell-O in there with all the bones?
Fake boobs didn't do it for Platt. Didn't matter how big they were if they weren't real. Hell, if he wanted to handle stuff like that, he'd just go on down to the hardware store and buy himself a couple of tubes of bathtub caulk. Go on home, squirt a couple of big blobs into bowls and let them dry, squeeze that. Sheeit…
Platt grinned again. He was just stalling, so he wouldn't have to go back to work. He sighed. Might as well get to it.
He didn't have any illusions about how good he was on the net. He was better than some, but not as sharp as the real experts. In VR, some of the Net Force players would dance circles around him in a head-to-head match.
