“I want to know everything there is to know about this bug, and I’d like it yesterday.”
“Yes, sir. As soon as we know, you will.”
Howard stared into the distance. A stalker. What had Jay been up to?
The fall day was sunny, a hint of chill in the autumn air. The alder leaves were beginning to turn, and there was a scent of wood smoke in the breeze.
Thorn, dressed in a T-shirt and Gortex windbreaker, blue jeans, and running shoes, walked the narrow trail next to the rushing water of the shallow Oregon river. It wasn’t Gridley’s scenario, it was his own, and one he liked to use. His grandfather had taken him for hikes in the forest a lot when Thorn had been a boy, and they were happy memories. He had invited a couple of people into the scenario at various times, usually women he had started dating. Their reaction to it usually gave him a good idea of whether there was much chance of the relationships going anywhere.
One woman he’d met in college had laughed and wanted to know why he wasn’t wearing moccasins and buckskins, him being an Indian and all. Another had walked for ten minutes and said, “Borrring.”
Both women had been drop-dead gorgeous and ready to spend serious time in the sack with him, but he had shut them down after that. A woman who didn’t enjoy a walk in the forest, no matter how sexy or smart she was, just wasn’t going to pan out in the long run. Not for him.
He spotted some bear scat just off the trail ahead. He stopped, squatted, and used a small stick to poke at the dung. Fairly fresh, still moist, still pungent. He smiled at the old joke that popped up in his memory: How do you protect yourself from grizzly bears when you are in the back woods? You wear little bells on your shoes to warn them you are coming, and you carry pepper spray in case they see you. And how do you tell grizzly scat from black bear scat? The grizzly scat has little bells in it, and smells like pepper spray.
This was black bear — there weren’t any grizzlies in these woods, virtual or real world, and hadn’t been for years. A black bear was much smaller and less likely to give you any trouble, but they’d go a couple hundred pounds, had teeth that could snap your arm or bite your face off, and you didn’t want to mess with a momma and cubs or a male in mating season. Most people didn’t realize that bears could outrun people in the short haul, and could climb, too.
At least he was on the right path. Gridley’s passwords were down this way, and maybe he wouldn’t need the big Cray to figure them out when he found them.
He stood and started back down the trail.
A deep voice drowned out the sound of the river bubbling over the big rocks: “Emergency override, Commander. General Howard calling.”
Thorn stopped. “End scenario,” he said.
The incoming call had visual — Howard was using his virgil, so it must be important.
“General. What’s up?”
“The FBI found a bug on Jay Gridley’s car.”
Thorn digested that and considered the implications. “You think it might not be road rage.” It was not a question.
“Somebody was tracking him. It would be passing coincidental if it was somebody else other than the guy who shot him.”
“You tell the lab guys to hit it hard?”
“Yes, sir.”
“State police know about it?”
“I expect so.”
“Keep me in the loop.”
“Yes, sir.”
After Howard discommed, Thorn went over the new input. Somebody was after Gridley in particular. Why?
Could be personal, though that didn’t seem likely. A lot of effort to bug his car and track him, then try an assassination on a major highway with witnesses all around. Did Gridley have enemies like that? He’d been here for years — nobody had said anything about him having hassles. Thorn could check with the man’s wife, but that scenario, that Gridley had personal enemies, just didn’t feel right.
So that left work. Who would want to knock off a Net Force op?
Possible answers: somebody who had suffered at his hands? Or maybe somebody who was
Now it was really important to get into his files and see what he was working on. Other than that thing for the Turkish ambassador, Thorn didn’t have any idea what the man had been up to. A supervisor needed to know what his people were doing.
Best he find out. Time to go for another walk in the woods.
“Computer, restart scenario from exit point.”
14
Jay paced, his thoughts fragmented. He was back on the beach where he’d started his nightmare. But he had a theory, now.
Like most answers, it was incomplete, just a tiny bit of information that resolved only a part of the larger questions:
He didn’t have to worry that he’d been kidnapped by the enemy, he wasn’t in a dream, and he probably wasn’t crazy. All good news. On the other hand, he couldn’t wake up, was trapped deep inside his body, and couldn’t be sure about whether he was in a new coma or the one that had nearly crippled him before.
What if everything that had happened since the tiger was all part of a delusion? What if he had never come back? That Saji, work, his life, none of it had actually happened?
That thought terrified him. The idea of waking up to find that Saji was not part of his life, that he was not about to become a father… That would be unbearable.
He had made some progress, however. He’d gone from “Where am I and how do I get out of here?” to “I know where I am, now how do I get out of a coma?” One of his college professors had said something along those lines a few times during a software app class: “When you move from ‘what’ to ‘how,’ you’re on your way.”
Of course he didn’t know
He looked at the water and willed it to stop, picturing each wavelet stilled in motion, a sudden death to the motion of the sea.
The scene flickered for a minute, but water kept flowing, rolling in as before.
He frowned, but nodded. Something, anyway, but not enough.
He was in his own body, his mind was his own — should be a piece of cake, shouldn’t it? He should be able to control his environment like he’d done in dreams before. But it didn’t work. Which meant that something was wrong.
Two answers presented themselves, neither pleasant.
The first was that his head had been hurt so badly that he couldn’t focus his will sharply enough to create solid images.
The second was worse: Maybe some part of his consciousness didn’t want to have control. That idea, extrapolated, meant that he didn’t really want to come out of it.
Why wouldn’t he want to wake up?
