Changing of the Guard

“Good question,” Alex said. “But there’s no conspiracy to worry about. I was a little more hands-on as Commander than I should have been. Got into the field a few times when it would have been smarter to stay in the office. Mostly, computer criminals are chair-warmers, not known for their exploits in RW. A few of them are more… active. A couple of times, I found myself in situations that were physically dangerous. When I was single, that wasn’t a problem. Once I got married and had a child at home, going into harm’s way wasn’t just about me.”

Thorn waited. He had heard that Michaels was a cowboy who liked to go into the field, and that he had some kind of martial arts training he had used a few times. Not a good idea for the head of the agency to be doing that. Not smart. Not something he was going to be guilty of, for certain. Leave the field work to those who got paid to do it.

Michaels paused. A cloud seemed to pass over his face as he obviously remembered something unpleasant. “We had a couple of incidents involving deranged criminals, and the last one put my wife and son in some danger. Toni and I decided that was not going to happen again.”

“You could have stayed in the office from then on,” Thorn offered.

Michaels shook his head. “Too late. The criminals involved didn’t really know me, only that I was Net Force’s Commander. They found out where I lived and went to my home because they had seen or heard who I was from my public appearances.”

“You surely rated bodyguards?”

“Yes. Had some, for a time.”

There was another pause. Thorn waited, not speaking.

“You aren’t married, are you? No children?”

“No,” Thorn said. “But I understand your point.”

“With all due respect, Commander, no, you don’t. Having your two-year-old need an armed guard to go to the park? No job is worth that if you have a choice. I was a target just by being the man in charge, and that put my family at risk. Life is too short.”

Thorn nodded.

“I can’t speak for General Howard,” Alex went on, “but he also has a wife and son he wants to see grow up, and he’s been into the field enough times to prove to himself and anybody else that he’s a brave man. Not to mention he can get twice the money he makes now as a consultant in private industry. So can I, for that matter.”

Thorn smiled again. Was that a dig? Was he saying that it was easy for Thorn to take this job because he was already a wealthy man?

Michaels said, “We did our job, did a little good now and then, and now it’s our time to move on. Nothing sinister — although the politics of the job are a bitch. Some of the hearings up on the Hill you’ll have to attend, you’ll need an iron bladder.”

Thorn chuckled politely.

“My advice is for you to do what you do best and leave the heavy lifting in the field to the regular feebs or the military arm. Stay in front of the computer, work Congress to keep the wheels oiled, and you’ll do fine.”

Thorn nodded. “Thank you, Alex. I appreciate the advice.” Not that he needed it. He had his fencing, but you didn’t get to carry an epee or saber around in polite society these days, and facing off with thugs was not his forte. His mind was his most valuable tool, not his fists. Muscle was easy to hire.

“Well, I’m about ready,” Alex said. “You’ll want your own people, of course, but you have a pretty good team here already. I would stay and help you in the transition, but I have only a couple of weeks before I have to be at my new job, and we need to get moved and settled. Jay Gridley can answer any questions you might have.”

“I know Gridley’s work,” he said. “Thank you, Alex.”

“You’re welcome. I hope the job is what you want, Commander.”

Me, too, Thorn thought.

Jay Gridley sat in his office and stared at the zip disk. Another day, another top-secret code to unravel. Ho, hum.

Change was in the air: Alex and Toni were leaving; John Howard, too, and new faces were coming in. Soon just about the only familiar face around here would be Jay’s own. Which was odd — he had never thought of himself as the survivor type.

He supposed he could be worried about that. New bosses sometimes cleaned out the cupboards when they came on board, re-shuffling the deck and dealing in their people. But Jay wasn’t too concerned about that. He was Jay Gridley after all — there weren’t any people who could replace him — well, at least not on this side of the law. Besides, if he had to, he could always do what Alex and Colonel Howard were doing: get another job somewhere else. He could find another one, and for a lot more money, at the drop of a hat. It would be their loss…

Either way, though, he was going to miss the old crew. They were his friends. Oh, they’d probably stay in contact, but it wouldn’t be the same. It might be better. It might be worse. But it was for sure that it wouldn’t be the same.

He glanced at the zip disk. It wasn’t often he got to play with old-style media these days, what with flash memory and cardware being so cheap, and data disks so wonderfully dense.

Shoot, the thing held less than a half gig. Hardly worth going into VR for. It would barely touch his desktop’s CPU for sifting, much less require the mainframe.

But that was the way it was in third-world countries — most of the toys they got to play with were outdated cast-offs. Which did make his job easier when he was trying to pry information from its hiding place.

A cheap, rough-looking, dot-matrix-printed label covered the hard plastic protecting the disk. It was really ugly, too — blocky black-and-white dots portrayed a cartoonlike lion’s head, with an even uglier-looking border surrounding it. Arabic numerals and script proclaimed “Mosque-by-the-sea Tourist Photos disk 11.” At least that was what the neat hand-written print in English underneath the script said.

A Turkish spy in Iran had died just after delivering the disk. Jay didn’t think that the Turkish ambassador himself would be asking Net Force to dig around in it if all it held was tourist photos.

Jay slid the disk into the drive he had dug up from a storage closet and jacked into VR…

He stood next to a cold and muddy stream, dressed in period Levi’s, the pants held up by suspenders over a faded red-flannel shirt, a battered leather cap jammed tight onto his head. Next to him was a gold sluice, water tricking over its riffled surface. Behind this was a large pile of ore.

Of course that wasn’t what it really was — but visual metaphors took on some serious substance in VR.

In this case, the data on the disk was the ore, and the sluice was a complicated search engine he’d put together with code lifted from the NSA, with some of his own special touches. Running the ore through the sluice would wash away the dirt, uncovering objects on the disk. Regular files would show up as rocks, and encoded ones — the kind he wanted to find — would appear to be gold nuggets.

Far more fun than a command-line process.

He smiled — a gap-toothed smile in this VR scenario, unkempt whiskers brushing his lips. Kids these days thought a command-line was some kind of military authority.

He shoveled ore sand into the sluice, enjoying the sensation. The new stim units he’d put in would actually stress his muscles in RW as he worked in VR. If he worked out here, he’d get the benefit there. He hummed the tune for “My Darling Clementine.”

The sun shone brightly in the pre-pollution California of the 1850s, birds tweeted, and the creek burbled. He let himself flow into the “is” state he and Saji had been practicing, allowing himself a brief stab of pride at the craftsmanship of his scenario. Not everyone would bother with such touches.

In very little time he’d sluiced all the ore. He dropped the shovel he’d been using, enjoying the thunk it made in the damp sand of the riverbed, and went to see what he’d found, walking alongside the sluice.

Rocks… more rocks… yet more rocks…

Huh.

Which shouldn’t be. The disk had been recovered from a dead man, just seconds