one. They weren’t common devices, not in the version Michaels had, and it hadn’t taken him long to figure out that the FBI had his virgil monitored and sat-tracked 24/ 7. They said this was for the safety of high-level personnel. If you had a powered FBI-issue virgil attached to your belt, you could run, but you couldn’t hide, and unlike the civilian models with fudge-factors built in to keep terrorists from using them to guide ballistic missiles to targets, the military GPS was accurate to within a couple of feet. Michaels was fairly sure it would work even if it was turned off.
If you actually went to the rest room and took the virgil with you, they could tell which stall you were in.
“Battery is dead,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” Becky said. “Right. And there aren’t a half-dozen new batteries in your top desk drawer where they always are?”
“I’ll replace it when I get back.”
“Chicken.”
“That’s me. Bye.”
The night was alive with flashing lights, fading sirens, and the crackle of fire dining on everything it could chew and consume.
The building, a five-story job built after the big quake of 1906, was burning like, well, like a big house on fire. Black smoke poured from the upper two stories, flames shot out through imploded windows on the third floor. Pumper engines filled the street with red lights and throaty mechanical drones. A hook-and-ladder with a mounted inch-and-halfer giraffe line blew water into the upper story, while ground-based hydrant-fed three-inchers as stiff as wooden beams spewed water into the third and fourth floors. Cops kept the lookie-loos back, and firefighters ran back and forth, moving hoses, gearing up with air tanks and masks, doing what they were supposed to do.
Jay Gridley, dressed in a stiff and clumsy fireman’s turnout suit — coat, bunker pants, gloves, boots, and helmet, light reflecting off the glo-flex strips on the clothing — stood with a group of other firefighters near one of the building’s entrances.
A captain stood there in front of a chart on a stand. He listened to a handheld tactical radio, looked at the team, and said, “Okay, here’s the situation. We got the building cleared of people so far as we know. Fire started on the third floor, which is two-thirds engulfed, and is spreading laterally and going up fast, but the first two floors are still cool. I want your line here.” He pointed at the chart. “Baker and Charlie squads are entering the structure from the east and south, and setting up here, and here.”
Gridley wasn’t up to speed on real fire fighting tactics. He’d started creating this scenario a few days back, but hadn’t had time to do the research, so he doubted this was how it would work in RW. Would they go into a building on the ground floor if the floors above it were burning? Not something he’d want to do. His scenario was based on entertainment vids he’d seen, and everybody knew the movies never let truth get in the way of a story.
Fortunately, in VR, it didn’t actually have to mirror reality. It didn’t even have to look that good, unless you wanted to invite somebody else in to play. It was only the anal-retentive types like Jay who wanted the scenario to be as real as possible — most people didn’t bother. For Jay, the test of his creation would be to bring in a squad of real firefighters and have them look around, nod, then say, “Yeah, this is how it really is.” He figured if you could fool somebody who really knew what it was like, you had a decent scenario.
Most people could buy off-the-shelf software and be perfectly happy. Most people weren’t Net Force’s top VR honcho, Smokin’ Jay Gridley. If he couldn’t do it right, he didn’t want to do it.
The captain finished his directions. The team started into the building, dragging a stiff and heavy pressurized hose. The power was out, so they switched on helmet and hand-carried lanterns. The sounds they made were loud in the darkness, and the roar of the fire a couple of stories up was muted but audible, the building vibrating as it was being eaten alive by the orange monster. A lot of firefighters anthropomorphized fire, Jay knew that much. They talked about it as if it were some kind of malevolent creature rather than what was essentially a real fast version of rust-oxidation and combustion…
Back at Net Force HQ, Jay and his team were working their computers, trying to find the source of the problem at Blue Whale — and they weren’t alone — but in this scenario, he was about to take a turn up a dark hallway by himself to get closer to the source of the fire. Not something any sane fireman would do, and certainly not alone, he knew at least that much.
As the team moved to the location where it was supposed to deploy its hose, Jay slipped into the stairway and started climbing. The smell of burning material and the hint of smoke in the stairwell was a nice touch, he thought, congratulating himself.
As he climbed to the second floor landing, then past it, he suddenly thought about Saji. Despite her life-is- about-suffering Buddhist thing, she was very excited about their upcoming wedding. And while the idea of being without her and back like he’d been before they had met was as bleak a scenario as Jay could imagine, he had to confess to himself that he’d had some second thoughts. Getting married had never really been in Jay’s life plan. Oh, sure, he had figured there’d be women in his life, maybe even children someday, but the reality of it was different than the vague imaginings he’d had. That he would marry a Buddhist he’d met on-line while recovering from an induced-stroke — a woman whose net persona had been that of an old Tibetan lama — had never figured into his fastasies. And now that the actual date had been set and the plans were being carefully laid, the idea that he was going to be
One woman, for the rest of his life. Day in, day out, always around…
Yeah, the sex was great, and yeah, he loved her, couldn’t really imagine being alone, no Saji around; still, there was this… finality about the idea of saying “I do” and signing a lifelong contract that had never really occurred to him until it was actually staring him in the face…
He got to the third floor. Took off his right glove, pressed it against the door. The door was cool to the touch. He took a couple of deep breaths of the stale-tasting compressed air from his bottle, then reached for the doorknob. Worry about getting married later. Right now, he had a job to do. Some guys were screwing with the web, and he was the guy who was going to track them down and stop them.
They obviously didn’t know who they were messing with…
The fire scenario was okay, but overblown. Jay had always been too gaudy about such things, spending too much time on how good something looked when he should have been concentrating on how well it worked. Style and not substance.
Still, as Keller stood there in his fireman’s gear, watching Jay work, he had to give him credit. He was sniffing in the right direction.
Keller waited until Jay went past, heading for the source of the “fire.” Maybe he could figure something out, maybe not, but he wasn’t going to get the chance. Keller followed Jay up the stairwell, being careful to stay out of sight, tracking him by the sound of his boots on the steps.
Once Jay was on the right floor, Keller moved in. It was dark, smoky, hot, all in all, a pretty good representation, as such things went. Jay was always big on details. But that was the curse of a small picture man, wasn’t it? Couldn’t see the forest for the trees in the way. No long-range vision.
From a cabinet near the door, Keller pulled a thermite bomb, shaped like a bowling ball. He triggered the timer for ten seconds, then rolled it across the floor toward the unseen Jay Gridley. Heard Jay stop and listen.
The bomb went off in a flare that destroyed the scenario as Keller dropped out of VR and back into his cabin on the
11
An old man, maybe seventy-five or so, sat in a recliner in a low-rent room, pointing a remote at a battered
