Springboard

you could get Jay Gridley to drop by here?” he asked his assistant.

When Jay got the call to drop by Colonel Kent’s office, he was surprised. RW face time was mostly unnecessary, but Kent was the same generation as Jay’s parents, and they had never been as comfortable with VR as somebody who grew up in it as Jay had.

Kent’s secretary smiled and waved him in. Kent was in his chair, not doing anything Jay could tell but sitting there.

“Colonel.”

“Jay. Have a seat.”

“I heard you got Natadze,” Jay said. He plopped onto the couch facing the desk. Hard, not very comfortable. Perfect for a Marine guy. “Congratulations.”

“Not the way I wanted, but as the Commander has pointed out, at least he’s not still on the street.”

Jay nodded. “What can I do you for?” he asked.

Kent took a deep breath. “I got a call from an old friend of mine, used to be a spook in the Company. He’s, uh, moved to another agency. It was regarding your breathing.”

“My breathing?”

“Yes. Whether or not you are going to keep doing it.”

That got Jay’s attention. “What?”

“You went somewhere you weren’t supposed to, and you were noticed.”

“I left a footprint somewhere?”

“Not a footprint — you left an image detailed enough to show the size, shape, and number of your freckles. I don’t care that it was illegal — I suspect you stopped worrying about that a long time ago. But where you walked was in a black-ops system that isn’t supposed to exist. They don’t want anybody who isn’t supposed to know about them to even dream they are there.”

Jay was stunned. Probably looked it, too. Then he started to get just a little irritated.

Kent saw something in his face. He paused for a moment, then said, “Long ago and far away, when I was very young and stupid, there was a foolish game we used to play. On a Saturday night, a bunch of boys would pile into somebody’s car and go cruising. We’d hit all the local water holes — drive-in restaurants, bars that would let underage teenagers sneak in, empty stretches of road where they’d drag-race hot cars. And all the time looking for girls to try and impress. We smoked cigarettes because we thought it made us look older. Of course, what that made us look like was a bunch of sixteen-year-old boys trying to pass for eighteen. We thought we were so cool.”

Jay laughed politely. Where was this going?

“Anyway, the game was this: We’d head out into the suburbs away from town and look for a guy walking alone. If we spotted one, we’d go past a hundred yards or so, as if we hadn’t seen him. Whoever was driving would pull the car over, and a couple of us would hop out and lift one of the guys out of the car, as if he were dead. We’d haul him to the side of the road and put him down, just as if we were dumping a body. The guy would lie there not moving. We’d start back to the car, then one of us would look up, and pretend that we’d just noticed the pedestrian back there.

“Look!” We’d yell. “He saw us! Git ’im!”

Jay grinned and shook his head. “There used to be a television show like that. They’d set somebody up with some kind of scenario just to scare the daylights out of him, then record it. I forget what it was called — I used to watch it when I was in college. Funny stuff.”

“Funny, but really, really stupid. What we did was back in the days before video cams were around or we’d probably have taped it, too. We thought it was a hoot — we did it four or five times, chased guys a little ways, amazed at how fast somebody who thought he’d just seen a body dumped could run from what he thought was a bunch of killers. Then, once the guy was gone, we’d all hop back into the car and head back to the bars. If the guy reported it, the cops must have laughed pretty good — they’d have heard the story every summer.”

Jay smiled and nodded.

“We were lucky beyond measure. All it would have taken would have been for one of our prey to have been a security guard on his way home, a new, off-duty cop who’d never heard the story, or maybe just a guy worried about being mugged. Somebody packing a handgun and deciding he could become a hero by dropping four or five murderers dead in their tracks. It was dark, he wouldn’t have seen us smiling as we ran at him, and if he had, probably thought we were homicidal maniacs. No jury in the world would have convicted him for mowing us down — we would have gotten what we deserved.”

Jay thought about that for a second.

“If kids tried that game these days, more than likely they would get shot — there are a lot of concealed weapon permits out there, a lot more than when I was a teenager.”

Jay said, “So you’re saying what?”

“I’m saying that just because you have these great abilities to dance in and out of high-security computer systems without worrying that you’ll get caught, it is sometimes a mistake.” He paused for a moment, letting that sink in, then went on. “It happens some people there know me, and it just happens one of them owes me a favor, so I got a call and I fixed it. But you’re lucky — just like we were on those hot summer nights back in my day. Nobody will show up at your door in the middle of the night and disappear you. This time.”

Jay’s eyes went wide. “No.”

“Yes. It doesn’t matter that you work for the government. If you go somewhere you shouldn’t go, you had better make damn sure you don’t get seen. There are some nasty things out there in the world, meaner, hungrier, and some of them are smarter than you are, Jay. I know you don’t think so, but it’s true, and if you cross one of them at the wrong time, you could leave a widow and child alone and always wondering what happened to you. If I hadn’t been here, if somebody hadn’t owed me, you’d be in deep trouble. Keep that in mind.”

Jay blew out a sigh. He felt a chill ripple through him.

“Jay, remember this: If you get to thinking you’re Superman, you will eventually find a guy with a barrel full of kryptonite.”

And all Jay could think of to say to that was, “My God.”

“Amen, son.”

27

Marissa dropped by the office unannounced, which pleased Thorn no end. And one of the first things she did when she got there was to ask him about fencing, which pleased him even more. She was curious about what he did. That must mean something.

He hoped.

He escorted her down to the gym on the theory that it was always better to show than to tell. On the way there, he tried to tell himself that no, he wasn’t showing off at all.

The Net Force gym was empty. Thorn opened his locker and started removing his gear, very conscious that Marissa was watching him. He’d been fencing for a long time, he was comfortable with it, but most of the women he’d been with — save for the few who were fencers themselves — hadn’t shown any particular interest in it.

Marissa had.

“So,” she said as he finished suiting up, “other than knowing that the Germans used to scar each other in places like Heidelberg with these things, and D’Artagnan and all, I don’t know from swords. Tell me about them.”

“Well,” Thorn said, “in Western, or collegiate, fencing, there are three different weapons: foil, epee, and saber. Eastern fencing, like kendo, uses a shinai, and other martial arts use a variety of weapons, but for now we’re going to focus just on the Western version.”

She nodded.

“Some of what I’m going to say comes from books I’ve read over the years, some from conversations with