State of War

action.

He shrugged it off. A minor thing, a broken lamp.

However, should anyone look up, they’d see no more than a wraith, and that not for long. It would seem a trick of the light. Nothing more than their imagination…

Moving quickly, he hand-over-handed his way down the rope until he was on the docks. The smell of creosote sharp and pungent in the damp air.

A sailor stood guard at the gangway to the ship, waiting, no doubt, for Customs to come and clear their cargo.

Gridley moved slowly toward the man, removing the glove on his right hand as he did so. A gold ring featuring a large girasol, an orange-yellow variety of precious opal, gleamed faintly in the light. Intricate whirls of fire played over the deeply hued stone.

The sailor glanced at Jay and reacted immediately, reaching for the oversized pistol holstered at his belt.

Jay moved his fingers, a subtle movement that caused the opal to glitter in the dim light.

Carefully… slowly…

The sailor froze, his hand stopping inches away from the black leather holster. His eyes moved from Jay to focus intently on the gem in front of him. Jay moved the ring slightly in a pattern known only to a few in the Far East, concentrating the man’s attention, hypnotizing him, placing him in a trance.

There.

In RW, Jay was simultaneously firing hundreds and thousands of passwords and protocol requests to a watchdog program, overloading its capacity to prevent intrusion. Boring. Playing the role of a pulp-fiction hero was much more interesting.

Silently, he oozed his way up the gangplank and onto the ship. There he straightened up and pulled off his black cloak and hat, revealing a navy greatcoat and a watch cap underneath. He hid his fedora and cloak behind a lifeboat, and to all appearances became just another sailor on the ship.

Clouding men’s minds with girasols was all well and good when you were spotted and challenged. But if he looked as if he belonged here, if he could avoid being challenged at all, that was even better.

Jay found a posted copy of the manifest showing the cargo hold he was looking for and made his way there. A single bare, low-wattage electrical bulb cast a thin light upon the scene, just enough to see that which he had come for: The box was unmarked, a plain wooden crate with only an ID number stenciled on it.

Working quickly, Jay pried open one end of the box, careful not to bend the nails. Then he opened his coat and pulled out a cigar box-sized transmitter that he slipped inside the crate.

He grinned. Ah, historical accuracy! He loved it. That was one of the many things that set Jay Gridley apart from other sim writers. It would have been so easy to simply cheat and make the transmitter more modern. It would have been even easier to simply tag the package electronically, avoiding the need for all this skulking about.

But where was the fun in that?

Instead, he had made every single detail as historically accurate as possible. The vacuum tubes that made up the transmitter’s circuits couldn’t get any smaller. The technology was one hundred percent appropriate to 1935. And the materials were all true to the time period.

He thought about the sailor he had hypnotized with a few mystical gestures and grinned to himself. Well, okay, so maybe the details weren’t all true to history, but they were all true to the scenario he was working in.

Reaching into the box, he threw a large toggle switch on the device, activating it. He wiggled the transmitter slightly, nestling it in solid among thousands of green-backs. The tubes couldn’t take much shaking.

Carefully he closed the crate and used the rubber-coated handle end of the pry bar he’d brought with him to quietly tap the nails back in. When he was finished, there was no sign anyone had opened the crate.

Naturally.

He took out a small crystal bottle of liquid with a tiny atomizer on the top and misted the crate several times.

He reversed his path, and within minutes was back on the rooftop. He went to the portable receiver he’d left there and turned it on. A faint glow came from the analog meter on the device showing the signal strength of the transmitter.

Using tracking devices, particularly in this era, wasn’t as simple as people thought. Unlike modern GPS devices, older ones relied on signal strength and triangulation to be accurate. With only one receiver, he would be able to tell if the transmitter moved away from him, but he would not be able to trace its direction.

Ideally he’d have placed three receivers around the New York and New Jersey countryside with teams relaying signal strengths from each so that he could triangulate the precise position of the money he was tracking. But as the lone avenger of evil, he only had time to place one on the other side of the river. He had set that one to automatically relay the signal strength of the distant receiver on another frequency, however, so that he could, in effect, have two parts of the triangle. Not the best option, perhaps, but for Jay Gridley, master of the virtual realm, it should be more than enough.

He glanced out at the water, admiring the fog there. The stuff was so thick you could almost cut it with a knife. A tendril wisped past him and he reached out to touch it — and did.

The fog had solid form, it felt like cotton candy, and that was all wrong. It was supposed to be vapor.

And it had an odor, too. It smelled like — like…

A sewer.

Hmm, Jay thought. Must be a problem with those new drivers.

Now and then there’d be a failure in the hardware/software interface in VR. Usually that happened when something was being upgraded. And, Jay had found, it was generally the drivers for the hardware that had some glitch in them, some incompatibility problem. It certainly wasn’t his code.

He waved at the offending fog, shoving it, smell and all, away.

Oh, well. When you lived on the cutting edge of technology, sometimes you got a little bloody.

He grinned. Such things did not deter a pulp hero, nosiree…

On the dock there was activity. Customs had cleared the ship. Longshoremen moved here and there. The process went fairly fast, cargo being offloaded with a speed that surprised him, it being 1935 and all.

He periodically checked the meter. The signal strength didn’t move. Were they going to take all night to get to his box?

As if his thoughts had provoked them, the meters on his receiver jumped. The distant one gained strength, and the closer one lost a bit.

He stared at the cargo neatly stacked on the dock in front of him. If the box was among the items there, the signal on the closer meter should have gotten stronger instead of weaker.

They’re moving it in the other direction — away from the dock!

But there was nothing there — no, wait, there was another ship at anchor a short way off, not yet docked.

This one was Portuguese.

Aha!

Quickly Jay fumbled in the bag near the transmitter for the goggles he’d placed there. He pulled them out, huge fish-eye things that covered his eyes completely, making him look like a mad scientist. He flicked a switch on the goggles and the world suddenly stood out in sharp shades of red. He scanned the other ship—

There! The crate glowed brightly in his field of view. The clear solution he’d sprayed it with contained faintly radioactive particles that would only show up when wearing goggles like his. He could see that a quartet of sailors was moving the crate to the other ship.

CyberNation was slick, he had to give them that. Here in VR they were simply moving the crate to another ship. In reality they were sending the money on another trip around the world. It wouldn’t actually hit the U.S. until this Portuguese ship reached the docks. Once there, though, Jay would be able to trace the package easily.

He bet they would transfer it again. Maybe several more times, to further cloud the trail.

Jay left his post at the edge of the rooftop and went to the aircraft he’d stashed deeper in the shadows. In