Jay Gridley rode the dragon. He was seated atop the hundred-foot-long beast, just behind his ears, and whatever fear he had felt about going into VR was waaay gone. He was back and he was in control — well, at least here in VR, anyhow.
Though the setting was Europe, his dragon had a definite Chinese look to him, much more interesting than the standard European model. In China, dragons weren’t just animals, they were wise, clever, could assume the shape of a man, and were often very sneaky. Sometimes that was what you needed from a dragon. But they could do brute force as well, when you needed that.
Jay watched as enemies fled, left, right, and center. Now and then, a bowman would loose an arrow, but his steed would blast the incoming missile with a
It was not Jay’s most peaceful construct, but it suited his mood. The arrows were queries, the archers firewalls, and the dragon Jay’s best rascal-and-enter program. Against the fortified and nearly blast-proof walls of a first-class firewall, even the dragon’s fiery breath would be useless, but here in the corporate realm, not everybody subscribed to the idea that such things were necessary. Some had what they thought was top-of-the-line software or hardware protecting their systems, but had been suckered. Some had what had been the best, but which had not been kept updated, and was no longer sufficient against the sharpest cutting-edge stuff. Jay’s dragon was reborn regularly — he had access to the best, and he incorporated it into the eggs that hatched as needed.
Ahead, the French castle lay, surrounded by a moat, the drawbridge up.
The dragon stopped on the edge of the water.
“What say?” Jay said. “Can we do this?”
“We can,” the dragon said. His voice was deep, almost a metallic rumble, a giant iron plate dragged across a sidewalk.
The dragon took a slow, full breath and blasted the moat with a terrific gout of fire. The flow of it went on and on — thirty seconds, a minute, two minutes.
The water began to bubble as it boiled. Giant green and scaled monsters, looking like crosses between alligators and sharks, floated to the surface, cooked, still thrashing in their death-throes.
“Cook ’em, Dan’l,” Jay said.
A few moments later, the dragon dipped his taloned toe into the water, decided it was cool enough, then stepped into the moat.
The water came up only to his hips — the castle’s defenders had not reckoned on such an assault. They reached the door, and the dragon thrust his fore-claws into the wood, the sound of it like a pile driver working. With a mighty effort, the dragon flexed his shoulder and ripped the thick door apart as if it were balsa. Splinters flew everywhere as the door shattered and fell away.
The dragon stalked through the opening.
Jay slid down the dragon’s neck and side. “Thanks, I’ll take it from here. If the King’s Army shows up, give me a yell.”
The dragon nodded. He blew a smoke ring the size of a tractor tire. The ring floated gently into the morning air.
Jay headed for the keep’s library. He saw no one, the librarian had fled, and it was but a matter of moments before he found the lambskin scroll for which he had come. He looked it over, saw the information he needed, and nodded to himself. He left the scroll where he’d found it — it would do no good to take it, he couldn’t show it to anybody in the real world. Possession of the information on it in the RW would make him guilty of a crime, and he couldn’t use it as evidence in any event. But he wasn’t looking for evidence, he was looking for knowledge. Different critter.
“I have you now!” he said, trying for Darth Vader’s resonant voice.
“The King’s Army approaches,” called the dragon.
“End scenario,” he said.
Jay sat, and without a word, touched a control on his flatscreen.
The holoproj appeared over the computer, and he turned the instrument around so that Thorn could get a view of the image from the front.
“Natadze,” Thorn said.
“Yes. I used the three pictures we had and had the SC run a scan on images from television, newspapers, and magazines, and there he is. It’s from
Thorn looked at the picture. Natadze, in a dark gray business suit, stood among a group of other men dressed similarly.
“Watch this,” Jay said. He tapped at the flatscreen and the image shifted so that Natadze and the others shrank and were relegated to the background. In the foreground, two men appeared. One of them was obviously presenting some kind of plaque to the other. They were smiling and shaking hands for the camera.
Thorn knew who one of the men was. “Samuel Walker Cox,” he said. “The oilman.”
Jay nodded. “Yep. The other one is Andre Arpree, of the International Chamber of Commerce, based in Paris. The award is for fostering business relations between Europe and the U.S.”
“And what is our man Natadze doing there, watching such a thing, do you think?”
“He works for somebody connected to the event.”
Thorn nodded. “Yes, that would be my guess, too.”
Jay didn’t say anything for a moment. He looked nervous.
Softly, Thorn said, “But you aren’t guessing, are you, Jay?”
Jay sighed, then seemed to come to a decision. “I figured that Natadze worked for Cox or for Arpree. The thing is, neither of their corporate records are, um, accessible without a federal warrant.”
“Uh huh.” Thorn had an idea where this was going.
“And getting a warrant based on a picture of a guy standing in the background of an award ceremony is likely to be, um, difficult.”
Thorn nodded. “Yes. If it was my company, I’d have a platoon of lawyers screaming bloody murder, trying to convince a judge that Net Force didn’t have anything, they were just fishing and hoping.”
“That’s what I figured. We can’t really make this guy into a terrorist, so the country isn’t really at risk. Opening up the records of two major corporations, one of them French? Not likely.”
Thorn’s expertise was in computers, and he had been a hacker before he started selling the software that eventually made him rich. He knew where this was going.
“And even if you got it, we couldn’t use it in court, Jay.”
“I know.”
“Legally, they’d fry us.”
“Yeah.”
Thorn took a deep breath, let half of it out. There was the law. And there was justice.
“So, okay. Who does he work for?”
Jay couldn’t suppress a slight smile. “Cox. Our hitman Eduard Natadze is head of Special Security for Samuel Walker Cox.”
Thorn stared at the holoproj. Wow. Wasn’t
31
General John Howard was not surprised that Gridley had come up with the information; nor was he surprised that Thorn was being very circumspect about how such knowledge had come into their possession. Howard lived by a moral code based on the Ten Commandments, he was a religious man, and he knew that morality and Caesar’s Law sometimes diverged. When in doubt, he followed God’s laws — come Judgment Day, those would be the ones
