Night Moves

Chapter 35

Thursday, April 14th Upper Cretaceous

What will be Western France

'Looks as if it can swim,' Saji said.

Jay pulled the Humvee to a halt and shut the engine off. The monster's tracks led to the edge of a sea and disappeared into the water. Small, silky waves with pristine whitecaps rolled machinelike tubes onto the shore. 'Looks like,' he said.

'What now?'

'We change vehicles. Boat or helicopter. I'm favoring the copter.'

'I can understand that. Better to be a few hundred feet above it than sailing along and having it come up under us like Moby-Dick.'

Jay nodded. 'The disadvantage is that we can arm the boat better than we can the helicopter. We're limited to weapons we can physically carry, so if we see it from the air, one of us has to lean out and shoot at it. You don't want a rocket launcher going off inside a copter. The exhaust gases would cook us as dead as if we got hit by the rocket itself.'

'There's a pleasant image. Why the limits on weaponry?'

'Well. Even in sim, you have to think about what the real situation is like. This thing is bigger and stronger and faster than we are, and we can't just lob a nuke at it, 'cause we don't have one vis a vis the hardware and software we are up against.' He stepped out of the car and looked at the shore. He pulled a GPS handheld from his jacket and consulted it. 'This is a cheat in this scenario,' he said. 'I should be looking at a paper map, since there are no global positioning satellites in this time. But we can get away with this. Not with a Seawolf-class sub, though. Too bad. And I'm not really sure this body of water would be here, either. My knowledge of geological history is not that great.'

Saji climbed out of the car, stretched, and said, 'Where is here?'

'Coast of France. What will be Great Britain is over the horizon thataway.'

'So in RW, that's where the trail leads?'

'That's what it looks like, yeah.'

'Is that any help to your theory?'

Jay nodded. 'Yeah. Maybe.'

'Are we going after it?'

'Oh, yeah. I want to drop out of VR for a while to check some stuff and give the boss a call, first. I think it would be a good idea to run my theory past him. Just in case.'

Thursday, April 14th

MI-6, London, England

In the MI-6 conference room, Michaels sat waiting for Jay's visual to appear on the call-waiting holoproj that floated bluely over the table. With him were Toni, Howard, Fernandez, and Angela Cooper.

Michaels said, 'I wanted you all to hear this, so I had them route Jay's com in here. We'll get to him in a minute. Any other business in the meanwhile?'

Howard said, 'We've got an appointment to see the retired major out at his employer's estate in…' he looked down at his flatscreen.'… in Sussex this afternoon.'

'A lovely drive,' Angela said. 'Beautiful country, if somewhat narrow roads.'

'No more attacks on major webs or military systems to note,' Toni said. 'Looks as if our hacker has backed off, at least for the time being.'

'I'll take any good news I can get,' Michaels said. 'Let's get Jay off hold.'

The holoproj flickered, and Jay Gridley's face appeared in the air. 'Hey, boss.' His voice sounded almost normal, just a trace of a slur. He was recovering fast.

'Jay. This is Angela Cooper, of MI-6. You know everybody else.'

Jay murmured greetings.

'Okay, tell us what you've got.'

Jay sighed. 'Well, it's not much. We — I have been on the program's track, and it looks as if it's leading in your direction. Could be passing through, could be it lives there, I dunno. I'll get back after it as soon as we discom.

'I've been thinking about the problem. No working computers we know about could brute force prime number encoding the way this thing has, even working in multiple-series-parallel, so it's got to be something else. The first thing that comes to mind when you ask yourself what kind of computer could do it is, of course, a QC — a quantum computer. We talked about that before. The thing is, none of those are past the small experimental stages, so none of them would have the power needed to pull off what has happened.'

'I'm dense,' Fernandez said. 'What is a quantum computer?'

Jay gave them a short lecture, explaining about Qubits and multiple quantum states. Michaels was familiar with the concept, but, as Jay had pointed out, nobody had come up with a full-size working QC, so it wasn't something they had seriously considered.

'But what if somebody had one?' Jay continued. 'A fully operational model? Something with a hundred or two hundred Qubits? It would blow through prime-number encryptions like a tornado through a straw house.'

'Big if,' Toni said.

'Yeah, but I've done a little poking around. None of the various militaries and corps who have gone to the new AMPD standard — that's abstract multidimensional point-distance encryption — were bothered by these attacks. Could be coincidence, but a QC wouldn't be able to crack those. It wouldn't matter how fast it could crunch numbers, AMPD standard would be immune. Of course, only a handful of people have shifted to the new method.'

'All right,' Michaels said. 'But if somebody had created such a thing, wouldn't we know about it?'

'Eventually. You couldn't keep it hidden forever, but maybe you could for a while. The technology and gear necessary wouldn't be something you could cook up in a high school computer lab or in the corner of your Uncle Albert's electronics hobby shop. We're talking a multimillion-dollar operation, custom-made hardware, lots of bells and whistles, a support staff, programmers, all like that. Sooner or later, somebody will stumble into this from outside; it's not something you can hide with a piece of camo net. But even if you knew where it was, as long as it was the only one out there, it'd sure be a big damned wolf among the sheep.'

'A QC seems kind of slim,' Toni said. 'Any corroborative information?'

'Nothing I can lay on a table and prove,' Jay said. 'Then again, if such a thing existed, it would perfectly fit the parameters.'

'And in your expert opinion, this is what you think it is?' That from Howard.

'Yes, sir. Nothing else comes close. I've searched the web and found everybody serious who's ever published anything in the field. On the list are a couple of guys in the U.K. One of whom — a man named Peter Bascomb- Coombs — did some flat-out brilliant theoretical work a couple of years back. He's head and shoulders above most, and I can't begin to stay with him. I don't even know anybody who can stay with him. He used to be in London, but he's dropped out of sight.'

Howard said, 'Are we looking at him as somebody to help us out? Or as a suspect?'

'Either way, I'd talk to him if I was there. I can't find a public e-address for him. It seems odd a guy that sharp would just disappear. He was too young to retire, and if he'd croaked, there would have been something about it in the news.'

'Give us what you have on him, and we'll check it out locally,' Michaels said.

'Already uploaded,' Jay said. There was a short pause, then he said, 'I've got to get back to the hunt. I think I'm gonna be able to run this beast down. I'm close.'

'Be careful, Jay,' Toni said. There was no need to remind him why. If anybody knew, he did.

'Yeah. Thanks. I'll keep you posted.'

Angela had been tapping commands into her flatscreen, and she looked up as Jay discommed. 'Got the