Changing of the Guard

him, somehow, made him calmer. He was pushing ninety when he passed away. He did his sword work that morning, went in and took a nap, and died in his sleep.”

Thorn slid the blade back into the scabbard and offered it to Kent, who took it. “You still practice, Colonel?”

The man shrugged. “Now and then. My grandfather taught me a couple of forms.”

Thorn said, “I do a little fencing. Western-style, foil, epee, saber, like that. Maybe you could show me some of the iai stuff sometime.”

Kent regarded him, as if suddenly seeing him for the first time since he’d come into the office. “Yes, I could do that. Meanwhile, what else can I do for you, sir?”

“Well, to start, drop the ‘sir,’ business, Colonel. I’ll answer to ‘Thorn,’ or ‘Tom,’ or ‘Hey, you!’ but I was appointed to this job, not elected.”

Kent almost grinned. “All right. I can manage that. Any word on Gridley?”

“Still in a coma.”

“Terrible thing,” Kent said.

“Yes.”

13

In his office again, Thorn considered the matter of Jay Gridley. There were technicians going over the man’s work, but some of it was inaccessible to them. Gridley, like most computer whizzes, had encrypted passwords and retinal blocks on some of his files — even though that was against Net Force policies precisely for the situation that now existed: What if something happened to an operative and nobody could get at what he’d been doing?

Gridley was good, very good, but Thorn was better. Besides, he had a big advantage — there was an override, a back door built into Net Force mainframe software that would allow the Commander to get past most of the wards. Thorn could call virtuals of any of his operatives’ retinal scans; he had the encryption codes for Net Force’s main locks, and he could probably figure out Gridley’s private codes using the Super-Cray’s breakers. Having access to that was a computer nerd’s delight — more powerful than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound…

At the very least, even though it was probably not connected, he could take a look at what the man had been working on.

“No time like the present,” he said to himself.

His office wasn’t rigged for full-VR. Gridley’s was. He’d go there. Besides, there might be something in the office that would help. You never knew but that Gridley might have his codes written down on the inside of a desk drawer.

He smiled. Top programmers didn’t do anything that stupid, though he had once known one who had used his own birthday as a password. Guy had said that nobody would be so stupid as to expect that. He’d been wrong — there were plenty of stupid people in the world, for whom subtlety was not possible. It was almost always a mistake to make that kind of assumption.

New York City

As he was tightening the G, twisting the tuning machine to raise the pitch, the string broke. The nylon went bing! as it snapped, right at the tie block, which was where they usually let go. The thing was, Natadze hadn’t broken a string on his instrument in years — he changed them regularly and never let them get so old and worn that it was apt to be a problem. These were only a couple of weeks old. It must have been defective.

He quickly grabbed the loose nylon to make sure the broken end didn’t accidentally scratch the French polish finish. The French polish was better than other finishes for tone, but it was not the most durable. A lot of luthiers had started limiting it to the front of their instruments, while using lacquers of various types on the sides and backs. The sound was much the same, but the lacquers wore much better.

Practice would be delayed. He had to change out the remaining five — replacing one at a time was, for him, something better left only for emergencies. The other strings should be good for another month before they started to sound dead, but he was a believer in the idea that birds of a feather sang better together.

It was well known that wooden instruments, at least the good ones, got better with age. A guitar’s tone, like a violin or cello, would improve with playing. Cedar tops did it faster, spruce took longer but grew in volume as well as tone; everybody knew that.

While there was no proof that strings needed to be the same age to vibrate well together, Natadze believed that this was the case. Change one, change all was his philosophy.

He fetched his winder, slipped it over the low E tuning peg, and began slackening the string. He had tried different tuners on his instruments, and he preferred those made by the late Irving Sloane. Rodgers’s and Fustero’s were prettier and much more costly, though on an instrument as expensive as this a few hundred dollars for gearheads was nothing. But the Sloanes seemed smoother, they gave an absolute lock, and they lasted forever. He had gone to them on all his guitars, save for the collectible ones that shouldn’t be altered.

Likewise with strings, he had tried all the major brands, mixing and matching the wound basses with the trebles, and eventually came to realize that D’Addario’s Pro-Arte Hard Tensions gave him the best sound on this instrument, even though the medium tensions he normally used were a bit easier on the fingers. Interesting, because they were far from the most expensive ones.

Once he had removed all the strings, he wiped the fretboard with cleaner and then lemon oil, wiped it dry again, put a piece of cardboard below the bridge to protect the finish, and began to re-string the guitar. He used a variation of John Gilbert’s method, melting a tiny ball on the ends of the nylon trebles before running them through the tie-board and looping them, starting with the high E and the other nylons, then jumped to the low E and other two basses. In theory, this gave the trebles time to adjust as you strung the wound strings, but in practice, all the strings went flat quickly for a few days until they had time to properly stretch out.

The process took half an hour. He clipped the long ends, using a small pair of blunt wire cutters, retuned all the strings, and ran a few scales. New strings, while not staying on key for long, did sound great, the sound cleaner and much more alive. Once the sweat from your fingers began to work, the strings had a limited life. You could take them off and soak them in cleaning solution, or even boil them to remove the grime, but that was troublesome, and it was much easier just to install new ones. If you had a guitar that cost as much as a new car, stinting on fifteen- dollar strings seemed fairly foolish.

Finally, after retuning for the fourth time, he was ready to play. He’d have to retune every few minutes, but that was unavoidable.

He might have screwed up his work a few times of late, but there was no reason why he couldn’t at least practice playing well. With the would-be kidnap victim in a coma in the hospital — he had checked that out personally — he wasn’t going to be causing any problems for a while. And the road rager who had shot him? Gone and no way to track him.

As he began to run his scales, a sudden unexpected thought burst into his brain, a nasty and unwelcome visitor, and one that stunned him with the force of its arrival.

Oh, no! How could he have been so stupid?!

Walter Reed Army Medical Center Washington, D.C.

In the small waiting room on the eighth floor, John Howard sipped at a really bad cup of machine coffee and shook his head. Julio Fernandez also nursed a paper cup of the vile brew, but seemed less bothered by the taste.

“I’m going to check with the doctors once more. If there’s no change, I’m heading out,” Howard said.

Fernandez said, “I can stick around for a while. Joanna and the boy are still at her friend’s in New York, no reason to go home except to sleep, and I can do that here.”

Howard laughed. “You can do that anywhere. I believe I once saw you fall asleep eating a bowl of hot soup.”

“Did I finish it?”

They sipped coffee.