“Halt!” the director cried.
Thorn nodded and acknowledged the touch.
“Nice one, Jay,” he said.
He returned to his guard line, saluted his opponent, and came to guard.
Thorn smiled and moved forward.
He maintained his guard, more cautious now. He looked for an opening, a weakness, anything.
There wasn’t much. Jay had done a good job, coding in all the basics and also giving his construct good reaction time. That would make it hard to fool him.
Good.
Blade extended, his right hand and wrist shielded by his bell guard, Thorn began testing his opponent. He engaged his point, throwing a fast beat at his foible, the weak part of the blade near the tip, to try and open up his wrist. He followed that with a quick thrust at the bell guard, hoping to slide off and pick up part of his cuff.
The move didn’t work, but he hadn’t really expected it would. He’d throw that shot again and again, setting up an expectation in his opponent’s mind. With a real opponent — a human one — there was the chance that he would tire and start to get sloppy on his parries, and leave an opening for Thorn to slip through. He didn’t think that would happen here, unless Jay had programmed in a fatigue factor.
He threw the beat again, working the interior of his opponent’s blade. Did it seem as though he was a trifle strong in his counter? Thorn nodded. He thought so, and that was something that could be exploited.
He made the beat a third time, but now it was a feint.
Instead of hitting his opponent’s blade, he came up and pressed it to the outside. As soon as he felt the counter pressure, he disengaged, dropping below his opponent’s point and circling, coming up on the outside. He pressed and added momentum to the parry—
His opponent’s point drifted in just a hair too far, and Thorn extended, aiming for the outside of the wrist. He caught fabric, and felt the point of his epee sink home.
“Halt!” the director cried.
He had a sense of his opponent now. He could work with this. Give Gridley credit, it was a good simulacrum.
He returned to his guard line, saluted, came to guard, and waited for the director’s command to begin.
Natadze took a sip of the beer — some kind of dark ale — and nodded. “Good,” he said.
Cox waited. The place was crowded and noisy, they were in a booth in the back, and the lunch crowd’s babble was probably a more effective protection than debugging his office once a week was. The food and beer were good, but Cal’s, there for forty years, was on the verge of being “discovered.” Another couple of weeks and Cox would have to stop coming here because he would start running into people who knew him. Too bad.
“I have considered the matter,” Natadze said, after another sip of the dark brew.
Cox waited, knowing that the man would get to the subject in his own time. Part of having a highly trained expert was allowing him to present what he was being paid to present in the manner he thought best. You don’t hire Michelangelo and then try to give him lessons on how to paint a ceiling.
“This information will be restricted,” Natadze said. “It will not be ‘Net Force’ working on it, but a man or perhaps a small team of men within the organization.”
Cox nodded. “Right.”
“The team leader, if there is more than one man, is the key. He will know how much progress has been made, who has made it, and any other pertinent information related to it.”
“Therefore, we need only to secure this man’s help.”
“Are you thinking about bribing him, Eduard?”
“No.
Startled, Cox looked around. Nobody was watching them. “Kidnapping?”
“It is the simplest solution. The data remains at all times within their headquarters, and a building like that will have wards. Getting inside and collecting data, while not impossible, would be complicated. It would require documents, either stolen or forged. It would require an agent who would likely be scanned, photographed, or otherwise recorded. On top of that, even with a proper disguise and identification, simply gaining admittance would not be enough to guarantee finding and securing the data. It is very complex.”
Cox nodded. “I understand.”
“But the man who works upon the code? He comes and goes. He will be unprotected away from his workplace, or, at worst, will have a bodyguard or two. Much easier to deal with. There are many options. His home. In transit to or from work. Recreating. We gather him in, question him, and with the information he provides, we will be in a much better position. Maybe he takes his work home. Perhaps there are but one or two copies of it, which he can tell us how to collect. He will hand us a lever; with it, we can pry what we need into our hands. Not difficult at all, really.” He shrugged, reached for his beer.
Cox shook his head. The thought had literally never occurred to him to kidnap a Net Force operative. This was why Eduard was so valuable to him. He easily walked down roads that Cox would never even consider taking, roads he would never even know were
“Can you find out who the operative is?”
Natadze held his beer up to the light and examined it. “I already know that.”
“How?”
“We live in an age of information, sir. There are many public records available — news media, government reports, Internet and web material. Certain names appear in these records with regard to their areas of expertise. The head of Net Force’s technical section is a man named Gridley. I have a researcher gathering information on him. Shortly, we will know all there is to know about this man — or at least all that is publicly available. Once I have this, it is simply a matter of choosing when, where, and how to best approach him.”
Cox reached for his own untouched beer. He took a sip. It was warm, slightly bitter, and smelled of hops or yeast or something, but that didn’t matter. At the moment, suddenly, the taste was wonderful. “We are in something of a hurry, Eduard.”
“It should not take long to determine what we need. A day or two at most to set it up and we will have him.”
Cox nodded. “Do it.”
“Yes, sir,” Natadze said. “I will.”
Natadze left first; Cox waited for a few minutes. Could it be this simple? God, he hoped so. If they could wipe this threat away, he would sleep a lot sounder than he had in a long time. Yes, indeed. There would still be the Russians, of course, but the status quo was something with which he could live. He was still more valuable to them free and untarnished, and while they might not go to the mat to protect him, they wouldn’t toss him away as long as he was useful. The Russians were nothing if not pragmatic.
And if this worked? Maybe it would be time to send Eduard to find the Doctor and have a little talk with him, as well. If they could determine who knew what over there and eliminate them? That would make his life just about perfect.
He grinned. He would have to give Eduard a nice bonus. A man like him was worth his weight in diamonds.
He raised his glass in a toast. “Go get ’em, Eduard.”
6
