Changing of the Guard

Mnumba’s monitor thousands of miles and halfway around the globe from here.

“John Simon, how are you? Good. Family okay? Good. Listen, reason I called, it’s about those leases. Yes, yes, I know, but listen, John Simon, that’s how it has to be. If I don’t get those, I can’t go forward, simple as that. Yes, I understand. I appreciate your position, and naturally, I wouldn’t want you to do anything that makes you uncomfortable. Yes. Great to hear that, Mr. President. Have your man call mine when they are ready. You take care.”

Cox smiled at the image of the African on his screen as it faded.

“Bertrand on four.”

Cox touched the control again. No image this time, Bertrand was on a vox-only phone.

“Sir. We have… collected the material we wanted.”

“Excellent. No problems?”

“An omelet’s worth, nothing major.”

Bertrand was in the Baltics, doing some industrial espionage. Odd as it seemed, the Croats or the Serbs or somebody there had come up with a new petroleum flow process that was more efficient than the industry standard. Cox had to have that. An omelet meant there were a few broken eggs — or broken heads. All the same to Cox.

“Good. I look forward to seeing the new material.” He broke the connection.

The incoming e-mail alert pinged, and it only did that when there was something of import from somebody who had the private address.

“Jennie, I’m on-line!” he yelled.

“Sir.” She would start cycling and rerouting phone calls until he was done.

He logged onto his mail server. There was a single message, sent from a public machine, no signature.

“Cleaned up,” it said. “Moving forward.”

Eduard. Good. Cox nodded to himself.

“Off-line!”

“Ambassador Foley on three.”

“Jim, how are you? Your daughter have that baby yet?”

This was what Cox lived for. The game, the hunt, the wheeling and dealing that kept the engines rumbling, moving forward. Sometimes he had to take a detour, now and then, even stop occasionally, but mostly it was onward, ever onward. He’d never get to the destination, he knew that, the road never ended, it would circle back on itself, like an equator, but that didn’t matter. As long as he was in control, driving it all, that was the thing. That was the important thing.

Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

Thorn pushed back from his desk and stood. One of the crew had just called from the hospital — no change in Gridley’s condition.

He shook his head. Terrible thing, a man being shot like that.

So far, the state police hadn’t come up with the man who had done it, and apparently the witnesses weren’t much help. The shooter might never be found. Meanwhile, Net Force’s best computer jock was in a coma, and nobody knew when — or even if — he was coming out of it. Lord.

Other than that, things were pretty quiet.

Thorn decided to take a walk around the building. He still wasn’t quite used to this all being his domain.

He wandered down the hall, nodding at passersby.

After a while, he found himself outside Colonel Kent’s office. He stepped inside, nodded at the receptionist, and through the open door saw that the colonel was hanging a katana on the wall behind his desk. At least that was what it looked like to Thorn — he was no expert when it came to the Japanese samurai blades, but it seemed to be the right shape and length. Might be a daito, which was a little longer, but it was one or the other.

The blade was mounted in a plain wooden sheath, painted in black lacquer. Kent set the curved sword edge- up onto the two hooks he had affixed to the wall behind his desk, then stepped back to look at it.

“Interesting,” Thorn said. “You study the sword, Colonel?”

Kent turned. “Commander. Not really. My grandfather was a Marine. He brought it back from the campaign against the Japanese in the Pacific. Took it from the dead hand of an officer who held out alone against the American forces for twelve days on one of those nasty tropical islands. The soldier kept moving from cave to cave, hiding in the trees. When he ran out of ammunition for his sidearm at the end, he made a final charge against two squads with nothing left but this sword. Straight into a wall of rifle and submachine-gun fire, and he kept going after he should have been knocked down. My grandfather had no love for the Japanese — his brother went down on a ship sunk at Pearl Harbor — but he respected bravery in an enemy.”

Thorn nodded.

“When he was getting on in years, my grandfather — his name was Jonathan — took it upon himself to do a little research on the sword. The Japanese had buyers traveling around the U.S., going to gun shows, putting ads in magazines and whatnot, trying to buy back a lot of the things G.I.s had brought home from the war, so he figured he might have something valuable.”

Kent reached up and retrieved the sword, then tendered it to Thorn.

“Take a look.”

There was an etiquette for this, the proper way to accept and remove a Japanese sword for viewing, but Thorn had only the vaguest notion of how it worked. He gave the colonel a short, military nod, took the weapon, and slid the blade a few inches from the sheath.

The steel gleamed like a mirror, and there was a faint but distinct swirly temper line along the edge. Thorn knew that the smith put clay along the edge during the tempering process so that it would be harder than the body of the blade, which needed to be more flexible. When the blade was polished, the harder portion became whiter than the rest of the metal, which was usually folded and hammered flat many times, making a high quality, fine- grained “watered” or Damascus steel. The Turks had a similar process for swords, as had the Spanish, and even the Norse.

Kent said, “The furniture — the handle, guard, spacers, and such — are World War Two issue. The blade is a family heirloom, dressed down so the officer — a lieutenant, my grandfather said — could carry it into battle. The blade itself is more than four hundred years old. Probably worth twenty, thirty thousand dollars. Under the handle, chiseled into the steel, it tells the name of the smith who made it, when, where, and for whom it was made, the temple where it was dedicated, and the result of the cutting test. You know about the test?”

Thorn shook his head.

“After a blade was finished, and the furniture put on, it was used on condemned criminals to check for sharpness and durability. Sometimes they were already dead, sometimes not. They were piled on top of each other, and a man with strong arms took a whack at the pile. The measure was how many bodies the blade could cut through before it stopped. A one-body sword was not much, a two-body sword okay, and a three-body sword excellent. This is a four-body sword, according to the inscription.”

“Man,” Thorn said.

“Maybe they were all skinny. It doesn’t say. Apparently, condemned criminals who had a nasty streak would sometimes start swallowing stones a day or two before their scheduled execution. They’d fill their belly with rocks so that when the executioner came to try his blade he had a good chance of breaking it when he cut through them.”

“Lord.”

“Yep. A different culture over there. Makes you wonder what would have happened if they’d won the war.”

Thorn stared at the mirrorlike steel.

“My grandfather found all this so fascinating that at the age of sixty-four he took up the study of the thing from a Japanese expert in San Francisco. There are two main arts—kendo, with the bamboo and armor and all, and iaido, practiced with the live blade.”

Thorn nodded again. Yes, he knew that much.

“When I was a boy, my grandfather showed me some of the basic iaido stuff. The old boy used to practice this for an hour or so every day, rain or shine, cold, heat, whatever. It seemed to steady