Quickly, quietly, he got in his car and drove off.
Kent took the call from the tac team, and he put it on the speaker:
“Sir, Operative Gridley has been wounded, looks like a single gunshot to the head. A lot of blood, he is unconscious, but still alive. Our medic says vital signs are stable. We are in the air en route to the nearest medical facility, ETA three minutes.”
“Copy, Sergeant. Continue.”
“No sign of the shooter. The state police arrived as we lifted, and Corporal Scates remained on-site as liaison. I can patch him in—”
“Not necessary, Sergeant. Tender sitreps as necessary.”
“Sir.”
Kent looked at Howard and Thorn.
Howard looked grim. “I’d better call Saji,” Howard said. To Thorn’s blank look, he said, “Gridley’s wife.”
“Ah.”
Well, wasn’t this a great way to end the day? One of his people shot by some loon in a fit of road rage. Thorn shook his head and moved over to a corner. It was going to be a long wait.
10
In the back of the limo, the hour long past dark and late, Cox stared at Eduard, stunned by his news. The limo was secure, swept for bugs daily, and it was just the two of them, parked in Cox’s ten-car garage.
“You
“A mistake,” Natadze said. “It should not have happened.”
“You are damned straight about that! My God, Eduard!”
Natadze nodded. “I am sorry.”
Cox sighed. “Is he dead?”
“Unknown. He was hit in the head. If he lives, he will not be doing any work in the near future.”
Cox glared at him. “Oh, yeah, that’ll work out great! Every time Net Force brings in another replacement, you just shoot him in the head! That won’t make them suspicious at all!”
“I am sorry,” Natadze said again. “The error was entirely mine. I will find a way to rectify it.”
Cox shook his head. No point in beating a dead horse, done was done. And at the least, Eduard was right — a man shot in the head wasn’t likely to be doing much in the way of code-breaking anytime soon. Bullets in the brain tended to interfere with things like that.
And Cox doubted that anybody would make the connection to what Jay was working on — as far as anybody knew, it was a case of some driver being pissed off at another and unloading on him. That’s what it had said on the news. It happened all the time. The U.S. of A. was a violent society, and armed out the wazoo. You never knew if some crazy was going to step out of his vehicle and start shooting because you didn’t use your turn signal when you changed lanes.
“All right,” Cox said. “Find out about his condition, follow up and see what’s what. See if you can figure out who will take over for him. Get what you can, then we’ll decide what to do from there.”
“Yes, sir.”
Natadze looked so miserable Cox felt a need to cheer him up. “Don’t take it so hard, Eduard. Mistakes happen. That’s why they put erasers on the ends of pencils. It’s not the end of the world. Let’s learn from our errors and move on.”
“You are too kind, Mr. Cox.”
Nobody had ever accused him of that before. He had to smile at the thought. Well. At least his secret was safe for a little while longer. Like the folks from AA said, you had to take it one day at a time. In the end — well, in the end, everybody was dead. Getting as far as you could before that happened was kind of the point, wasn’t it?
After Eduard was gone, Cox went to have a drink. Once again, he had the house to himself, save for the servants, and given the recent events, that was probably just as well. He doubted that he would be particularly good company tonight.
Midnight had come and gone, and Natadze stood in the rented machine shop in Brooklyn, alone. The place was small, but it had more than sufficient tools for his needs. He had arranged to use it after hours, and it was costing him a thousand dollars, more money down the drain, but it was necessary.
First, he used a screwdriver to disassemble the Korth. He shook his head as he did so, marveling at the fitting. You could hardly see the joins in the revolver, so carefully fitted and polished they were. He disassembled the weapon to the frame and component parts. Then he clamped the barrel into a vise and used a hacksaw to render it into two shorter sections. It was hard work — he wore out a blade, had to replace it halfway through, and pretty much ruined the second one, too. The Rockwell on the weapon had to be around sixty. He developed a healthy sweat sawing on the thing.
A double penance. He would also miss guitar practice tonight to deal with this.
There was a heavy steel crucible, lined with some kind of protective ceramic. He put on heavy gloves, a welder’s mask, and lit the oxyacetylene torch. He fined the flame down and it was but the work of a few seconds to reduce the wooden stocks to ash. He dumped in the smaller parts — screws, springs, and so forth, which melted slowly under the steady play of the pale fire, flaring now and then as they went from dull red to cherry and yellow- orange to blue-white and then fluid.
To this, he added the barrel segments, the frame, and the cylinder. It took a lot longer to finish these, especially the fat cylinder — this was not a smelter, and not what the torch was designed for, but it developed enough heat to do the job, eventually. When the steel was roiling liquid, he shut the torch off and poured this into three small molds that looked like pyramids with their tops sheared off.
When the molds had cooled sufficiently, he removed the blocks of steel, and put them into a water trough to steam and hiss and cool further.
He took the little chunks of steel and put them into a small leather sack. A five-thousand-dollar handgun, reduced to high-grade scrap metal.
Nobody would be comparing rifling patterns to any bullets fired from the Korth.
He would cautiously and carefully drop these blocks into the East River later, where they would spend however many thousands of years it took before they rusted away. Even if they were found, nobody would ever be able to connect them to a weapon used to shoot a federal agent. Just more junk at the bottom of the river, good for nothing, of no concern to anyone.
What an awful shame it was to do such a thing to a weapon like the Korth.
Jay stood in the sand, watching the surf come in. Everything was gorgeous: The waves lapping at the shoreline were a deep blue, the sun overhead gave the sand a glow that made it seem pure gold, and a gentle breeze caressed his skin.
After a few moments, he realized he must be in VR.
The phrase had originated with his instructor in VR 101, an undergrad course that had been new when he’d been in college. The old man had always said it: “Reality bites. Nothing is perfect. Remember that.”
Even the most beautiful beaches had sand mites, stinking seaweed, or rotting fish that marred their perfection. A good VR programmer would include details like this, little teeth, to at least nibble a bit at a VR viewer and thus make it seem more real. Well, except for fantasy VR guys — in those, reality wasn’t
Had he accidentally jacked into someone else’s datastream? Grabbed an old datafile he’d used for research by mistake?
