Changing of the Guard

He’d hung a number of golf balls on long strings from the high, vaulted ceiling. Each golf ball was a target. His normal work-out routine started with him addressing a single golf ball, coming to guard before it and simply thrusting at it, over and over, until he hit it fifty times in a row. It got significantly harder after the first hit, since the ball would be moving, swinging back and forth like a pendulum, after each successful strike.

After fifty consecutive hits, he would move back far enough to add a lunge to his strike. Twenty consecutive hits later he would move back still farther, adding a quick step and turning his lunge into a ballestra.

That was his normal routine, and he did it with either foil or epee, depending on which weapon he was concentrating on at the time. It was good for practicing aim, for developing speed, and for working on timing. Some days it was simply warm-up for other drills. Other days that was all he did. Today he wanted something more.

He raised the first golf ball, shortening its string so it hung at about shoulder height. Another golf ball hung a couple of feet behind the first one. He lowered this so that it hung near his hip. Then he stepped back and dropped into guard position.

Go!

He lunged, striking at the first golf ball, simulating an attack upon an imaginary opponent. As the tip of his epee struck home, he turned the move into a prise de fer, keeping his point low and sweeping his guard through a hook and lift, visualizing his opponent’s blade being lifted and carried above his left shoulder. His guard held near his left ear, pinning his imaginary attacker’s blade away from his body; he brought his point on line and stepped forward with his right foot, driving his tip into the second golf ball.

He smiled at the thunk of the tip. Not bad, but that was the easy one.

Stepping back, he waited for the golf balls to stop swinging and then did it again. And again.

When he felt he had the rhythm down, he rehung both golf balls, adjusting their strings so they were both chest high.

Now for the hard one.

He came to guard closer to the first ball. In this drill, the first ball would be his opponent’s blade, the second ball would be his target.

Go!

He beat, once, fast and hard, knocking the first golf ball to the left with the side of his blade. In the same motion, he stepped forward with his left foot and brought his blade around the back of his head, whipping his point at the second ball.

He missed. Badly.

He stood there a moment longer, feeling the strain in his right shoulder, until the first ball, swinging on its string, hit him in the back.

Nice one, Thorn, he thought.

Grinning, he shook his head and set up once again.

Twenty minutes later, having hit the ball only three times, he sighed and took off his mask. He was still a long ways from where he wanted to be, but at least he’d made a start.

Feeling as if he had addressed the problem, if not completely solved it, Thorn went to take a shower.

19

Net Force HQ

Quantico, Virginia

Thorn wasn’t doing anything illegal, but he still felt a little guilty as he ran the computer check on Marissa. He wasn’t using his status with Net Force to gain access to any classified or secret information — he would never do that; the material he found on the web was public information, available to anybody who bothered to look. That was legal. But still…

Some of it he already knew, but he was definitely intrigued by her, and curious about the rest.

In her academic records, he came across a set of scores on assorted exams, for college, government service, and the like, and one of them was a standardized IQ test. Thorn had always done well on those himself, since his IQ edged into what was considered genius range on such scales.

He blinked at Marissa’s number:

Five points higher than his.

She was smarter than he was!

He shook his head. He hadn’t even considered that before. He had assumed that she was a feeler, not a thinker.

That she was brighter or quicker didn’t threaten him — he liked smart women, he liked to be challenged — but that he hadn’t seen it did bother him. Slipped right past him, that did.

This was an old lesson, one he should have gotten by now: What you see isn’t always what you get.

What else was he missing because he accepted it at face value?

New York City

It was early, the domestic market hadn’t opened yet, and Cox was attending to business that had piled up during the night. Business never slept when you dealt with people around the globe.

The scrambled phone rang. He knew who it was; there was only one caller who used this line.

He pushed a blue button on the unit, picked up the receiver, and leaned back in his custom-built Aeron form- chair, the specialized pellicle flex-plastic shifting under his weight. Most people wouldn’t think of paying several hundred dollars for a chair, much less the several thousand this one had cost him.

Most people were shortsighted.

“Cox.”

“Good day, Comrade.”

Of course, it was the Russian, making his tired little joke again.

Cox’s tone needed to be consistent, otherwise the Russian would start to wonder. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?” He kept his voice dry.

Cox knew the intricate chain of events he’d set off by pushing the blue button. The good Doctor had been most cautious — understandably so — when he’d awakened his sleeper, preferring to contact him by phone and infrequently. He’d been smart enough to realize that if Cox figured out where he was, that might not be a good thing for him. But if being rich had taught Cox anything, it was a special kind of patience, the ability to see beyond the present.

Patience, along with money, could buy all manner of things. The chair upon which he sat, for instance, was more than just a comfortable seat. The quality of it, the fine materials and the beauty of its design — all added to the pleasure of using it. The arete of such a fine mechanism improved his life.

It was a matter of value. His time was priceless, as it was the only thing he could not buy — although he had some tame scientists working on antiaging drugs which might pan out. The chair increased his pleasure by being well-constructed, beautiful, and functional, all at once. It gave him satisfaction. The expense was nothing. He would have bought it even if he couldn’t afford it, and figured out a way to pay for it later.

So, too, had he invested quite a bit in the Doctor. He had decided that he would need to speak to the man on his terms someday, and had started tracing his controller’s phone calls as a matter of course almost as soon as they had begun.

The demise of the Soviet Union had not, unfortunately, dulled its agents’ paranoia. Even low-tech tradecraft and off-the-shelf technology could foil most people trying to trace them electronically.

Vrach — Cox didn’t know his real name — had not called him directly, at least not since Cox had begun trying to find him. Instead he’d phoned through a network-access setup, encrypting his voice into an Internet datastream which could be bounced all over the world. The data would leave the network at an exit point, and be turned into a phone call.

Cox looked at an LCD inset in the desk and noted that the exit point chosen this time was Brazil.

Should the Internet data be traced to the point where it entered the network, a tracker would discover that the Russian had used a cell phone, making a trace more difficult still. And Vrach called on