Springboard

“Assuming I can get reservations.”

“Big-time bureau commander and rich man like yourself? No problem. Eight o’clock.”

She discommed, and Thorn grinned to himself again. He did like smart, funny, beautiful women. What was not to like?

Paris, France

Unlike some of his colleagues, Seurat didn’t mind going into the city when he had a good reason. He left his car at home and took the Metro — nothing of worth in the city was more than five hundred yards from a Metro station, so the saying went, and parking in the city, like a pay telephone, was impossible to find. Nobody with a brain drove into Paris, and since the advent of mobile phones, the government assumed everybody would have one, so why have the clutter of phone kiosks everywhere?

Today was a meeting with a potential new client — a Saudi prince and businessman who was looking to start a new server in that country, and who wanted a link with CyberNation. Being a prince was not as impressive coming from that country as it was, say, from England. There were scores, hundreds, maybe thousands of them down in the desert atop the oil pools, the result of royal families in which the men could have as many wives as they could afford. An oil sheik could afford a considerable harem.

The Saudis were not as pure as they liked to pretend; much of that Muslim strait-lacing offered publicly disappeared in private. Yes, they were currently French allies, of a sort, and there was a quid pro quo, but some of the hardest drinkers, biggest womanizers, and consumers of pornography Seurat had ever met had been Saudis. If you had enough money, there was usually a way to get what you wanted, if you wanted it enough, and to make sure that people looked the other way while you enjoyed it.

And in VR, it didn’t count — since you weren’t actually drinking or screwing around…

He glanced at his watch. Running a little later today than he wished. No time to stop at a museum or gallery. Seurat liked to drop round the Musee d’Orsay every so often and see Le Cirque. Georges Seurat had done many drawings, but only a few major paintings, and they were all over the world. Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, his most famous, and the inspiration for a musical play, Sunday Afternoon in the Park with George, was at the Art Institute in Chicago. Others were in London, New York, San Francisco. Too few of them were in Paris. A shame, that, but buyers with enough money to afford such things lived where they lived.

His connection to his famous relative was known and accepted by some, if the legitimacy was sometimes argued by others. Though Georges had died a young man, only thirty-one, of meningitis or diptheria, depending on whom you believed, he had two hidden families. Most knew about Madeline Knobloch, of course, but few knew of his other mistress, from whom the director of CyberNation was himself descended…

The day was warm and sunny, and Seurat enjoyed the bustle and sounds of the city as he walked along the Rue Vernet, toward the Elysees Star Hotel. There was a woman he had met there once, a Spanish countess, ah…

He saw the Saudi prince lounging in a cast-iron chair at the outdoor cafe down from the hotel, a cup of tea or coffee on the small table before him. Such cafes were traditional in Paris, of course, though Seurat himself thought that drinking coffee and having croissants with a steady stream of noisy automobiles passing by was hardly relaxing. There were cafes on some of the pedestrian malls, streets that had been closed to vehicular traffic but not those on foot, that he found much more appealing. It was hard to appreciate the swaying walk of a beautiful woman in high heels when a moving van with a loud muffler crept past and belched smelly exhaust at you.

The prince was in a business suit that had probably cost more than the price of the average car. The prince, who liked to downplay that and be called Said, saw Seurat strolling in his direction. He raised his cup in salute.

Seurat smiled and nodded.

A sudden darkness rolled over the street. Seurat frowned and looked up, to see a rain cloud blotting the sun. That had come up fast—

A lightning bolt lanced down from the cloud, struck a group of walkers waiting to cross at an intersection, and scattered them as if a bomb had gone off in their midst.

A demonic voice began to laugh loudly as more lightning played over the street. Hail started to fall, clumps as big as golf balls, smashing down; hurricane winds blew, and people on the street screamed and ran for cover—

Merde! The bastard whoreson hacker was at it again—!

Rue de Soie

Marne-la-Vallee France

Seurat stripped the sensory gear off, still enraged. Losing a potential client was bad, but not major. That the hacker was still able to attack CyberNation seemingly at will was major. He had already called his technical people and they were on the hunt, but he did not hold out much hope for a quick taking of prey.

This had to stop. And when the man responsible was caught, Seurat wanted to see him put into a hole so far down that the light of day would never touch him again.

Merde!

17

Quantico, Virginia

Getting rid of a body was not nearly as worrisome as all the forensic television shows and movies made it out to be. The main trick was to make sure the corpse wasn’t discovered before you were far enough away that the authorities couldn’t possibly link it to you. And not to leave anything really obvious around that pointed in your direction — DNA, fingerprints, or your business card…

All that stuff where they took a hair and put it into some medical machine that whirred and fifteen seconds later spit out a picture of the killer? Total fabrication.

Locke had wrapped the blackmailer up in the bed’s top sheet, waited until dark, and taken the corpse to his rental car, where he put it into the trunk. He’d located the motel’s cleaning woman, waited until she had gone into an empty room to clean it, and taken a clean sheet from the stack on the cart to replace the missing one.

The next morning — one did not want to skulk around late at night with a body in one’s car trunk and risk being pulled over by a bored policeman — Locke drove to a nearby industrial district and scouted it. It took but half an hour for him to find what he was looking for. He found the number of a real estate agent on the sign in front of the building, made a call from a pay telephone, and determined the information he needed. Luck ran his way — the place was perfect.

From there, he drove to a local mall and bought supplies. From a hardware store, he purchased a hand-truck dolly, a battery-powered Skil Saw, a tree saw, and a hammer, along with a small machete, a painter’s drop cloth, and a box of green plastic leaf bags. He also picked up a set of painter’s coveralls, shoe covers, and rubber gloves, and several bottles of spray cleaner and paint thinner.

At an art supply store, he bought a large roll of plastic wrap and another of white butcher’s paper, along with a black marking crayon.

He found a cyber cafe, bought an hour on a computer, and logged on to the Internet. There, he found an appliance store, and using a PayPal account into which he had deposited several thousand dollars under a phony name months before, bought a chest freezer and arranged to have it delivered immediately to the address he had found in the industrial district.

At a long-term parking lot near a new commuter airport, he stole a minivan, swapping the license plates on it with the car parked next to it. He wore a basic disguise when he did this — a hat, a pair of sunglasses, and a fake moustache — and paid the lot fee on the stolen car at an automated exit teller. He drove back to his rental car, parked in a lot next to a cinema complex, and transferred the body and supplies to the new vehicle.

He drove out into the Virginia countryside, found what looked like an old and mostly unused logging road in a pine forest, and drove until he was several miles away from the main road.

He got out, dressed in the coveralls and shoe covers, and put the gloves on.