Night Moves

British way, and then there were all the… other ways. Well, they are Americans, aren't they? Or French, or German, or for God's sake, Spanish. What else could one expect from foreigners, save the wrong way of doing things?

'Mmph.' Harry lifted the paper and went back to his reading.

Goswell glanced at the big, round clock over the bookcase. Half-past five already. He should have Paddington call Stephens, he supposed. It would be a slow drive to The Yews, especially on a Friday evening, with all the rabble streaming out of the city for their weekly two-day holiday, but there was no help for it. Normally, he would just stay at Portman House in the city until Saturday, then enjoy the leisurely drive to his estate in Sussex, but that scientist fellow of his, Peter Bascomb-Coombs, was arriving for dinner at half-nine, so there was no help for it. Given the traffic, Goswell would be lucky to make it in time as it was. He folded the financial section and put it next to his gin and tonic, picked up the drink, and took a large sip. Ah. He put the glass down.

A moment later, unbidden, Paddington appeared. 'Milord?'

'Yes, have Stephens bring the car round, will you?'

'Of course, milord. Some tea and sandwiches for the trip?'

'No, I have a dinner when we get to the country.' He waved one hand in airy dismissal.

Paddington left to find the chauffeur. Goswell stood, pulled his watch from his vest pocket, and checked its time against the club's clock.

Harry looked up from his paper again. 'Off, are we?'

'Yes, a meeting with my scientist at the country house.'

'Scientists.' Harry delivered the word in the same way he would have said 'thieves' or 'whores.' He shook his head. 'Well. Cheerio, then. By the way, have you cut down that bloody yew behind the greenhouse yet?'

'Certainly not. I expect to nourish its roots with you any time now.'

Harry gave a wheezy smoker's laugh. 'I'll dance on your grave, you young upstart. And warm my hands from that bloody yew as it burns merrily in my fireplace, too.'

The two men smiled. It was an old joke. Yews were often planted in graveyards and, because they seemed to always grow largest in such locations, it was thought that the minerals from the decomposing bodies were good for the plants' roots. The big yew behind the greenhouse on Goswell's estate was eighty-five feet tall, if it was an inch, and probably four hundred years old. He had been threatening to feed Harry to it for years.

He glanced at his watch. A minute or so fast, but close enough. The watch was a gold Waltham, of no great value, but it had belonged to his Uncle Patrick, who had died during the Blitz, and it had come to him as a lad. He had better timepieces that ran dead-on, Rolexes and Cartiers and a couple of the handmade Swiss things that cost as much as a new car. The Waltham was a simple machine. It did not offer the date nor the market news nor could it be held to one's ear and used as a telephone. It was no more than a watch, and he rather liked that.

He slipped the Waltham back into his vest pocket and started for the exit. By the time he reached the street, Stephens would have the '54 Bentley waiting. He preferred the Bentley to the Rolls, as well. It was basically the same automobile, without that ostentatious grill, and being ostentatious was not something a gentleman did, now was it?

He would listen to the BBC news on the way out of the city. See if the wogs in India and Pakistan had started shooting at each other over that little… entertainment he had arranged. That would be lovely, if they would just bomb each other back to the time of the Raj, and the Empire had to come back and bring them along to civilization again.

There would be justice, wouldn't it?

Friday, April 1st

Somewhere in the British Raj, India

Jay Gridley rode the net, master of all he surveyed.

Right at the moment, he was in a VR — virtual reality — scenario he had designed especially for this new assignment Alex Michaels had called him about. In RW — the real world — he sat at his computer console inside Net Force HQ in Quantico, Virginia, his eyes and ears covered with input sensors, his hands and chest wired so that his smallest movements could be turned into control pulses. But in VR, Jay wore a pith helmet, khaki shorts, and a starched khaki shirt, along with knee-socks, stout walking shoes, and a Webley Mark III.38 revolver strapped around his waist. He sat upon the back of an Indian elephant, inside a howdah, next to the local rajah. Overhead, the afternoon sun broiled everything it saw, smiting men and beasts and vegetation alike with withering heat. Ahead of them, brown-skinned natives in loincloths beat upon metal plates with sticks, rattled rocks inside cans, and chanted loudly to spook and drive from the chest-high grasses the tiger who might be hidden therein.

Jay smiled at the image, knowing it was not politically correct, but he wasn't worried. He wasn't likely to run into anybody he knew while playing this scenario, and besides, he was half Thai, wasn't he? Once upon a time, one of his great-great-grandfathers or uncles would probably have been barefoot down there in the grass, in what had been Siam, making noise, praying to assorted gods that the tiger would go the other way. All things considered, it was better to be in the shaded little hut up on the back of a ten-foot-tall elephant, with a Nitro Express double rifle racked right next to you, than it was to be on the ground beating a plate with a stick. And there was that extra, a small boy perched on the elephant's rump waving a fan on the end of a big pole to provide a warm but welcome breeze for him and the rajah.

First class all the way. The only way to travel.

What Jay was actually hunting was information, but keyboarding or voxaxing queries for coded binary hex packets wasn't nearly as much fun as stalking a man-eating Bengal tiger.

Of course, they hadn't seen the big tiger yet, and the beaters had been thumping and rattling for a long time, relativistically speaking. The rajah was apologetic. 'So sorry, sahib,' he alliterated, but it wasn't his fault. You couldn't flush it out if it wasn't there.

Oh, yeah, there were lesser beasts running from the hunters. Jay had seen deer, pigs, all manner of slithering snakes, including a couple of eight-foot cobras, and even a young tiger, but not the big cat he'd hoped to find. The tiger had come and gone — maybe burning bright, but certainly leaving no easy trail — had gutted its prey and disappeared. The VR prey in this case was a goat inside a stainless steel and titanium cage with bars as big as a bodybuilder's legs. A tyrannosaur couldn't chop through those barriers, even if his big ole teeth were made from diamonds, no way, no how. The goat — actually an encrypted file giving the time, location, and other particulars of a train shipment in Pakistan early today — should have been monster-proof. But something had ripped the bars open as if they were overcooked noodles, gotten inside, and Mr. Goat was history.

Jay hadn't believed it at first. He thought surely somebody had managed to get a copy of the one-time key, which was how these encryptions worked, but after he'd gotten a look at the cage — the mathematical encryption — he could see it had been brute-forced open, no key involved. This was not some kid's DES, used to hide a porno file from his parents, but a decent military-grade encryption, and while not unbreakable in the long run, whoever had cracked it had done so in less than a day.

And that, of course, was just not possible. No computer on earth could do that. A dozen SuperCrays working in parallel might manage it in, oh, say, ten thousand years, but in the few hours since the message was sent and it was broken, it couldn't be done. Period. End of story. Here, let me tell you another one…

Jay took off his pith helmet and wiped the sweat off his forehead with one arm. Hot out here in the Punjab and, shade notwithstanding, the little elephant house didn't have AC. He could have designed that in, of course, but what was the point? Anybody could cobble together a bastard scenario full of anachronisms; artists had to maintain a certain kind of purity. Well, at least every now and then they did, just to show they still could.

How could this break-in have been done? It couldn't — at least not using any physics he knew.

It reminded him of the old story during the early days of aeronautics. Some engineers had done studies on bumblebees. Based on the surface area of the bee's wings, the weight and shape of the insect, and the amount of muscle and force it had available, they had determined, after much slide rule and pencil-on-paper activity, that it was flatly impossible for such a creature to fly.

Bzzzzt! Oops, there went another one.

It must have been terribly frustrating to look at a paper filled with precise mathematical calculations about flow and lift and drag, to know that bees couldn't fly, and then have to watch them flitting