“You want us to go out on the streets looking?” Fernandez asked.
Thorn smiled. “The regular FBI is doing that already. They’ve got agents flashing these pictures in the vicinity of the spy store, the area where Jay was shot, and in the dead Russian’s neighborhood.”
“Good. At least that’ll give them something to do,” Fernandez said. “What’s this on his fingernails?”
Thorn frowned. “What?”
Fernandez pointed at the picture. “Looks like he is wearing nail polish on his right hand, see?”
The picture was too small to see more than a little gleam.
Thorn tapped the computer console on the conference table, called up the ATM image, and had it focus on the right hand — the left was behind him and out of sight. The computer enlarged and enhanced the hand.
A little fuzzy, but sure enough, it looked like the guy had fairly long fingernails, neatly manicured, and they did seem awfully shiny. Kind of an odd, slanted shape, angled to one side. That didn’t mean anything to Thorn, though.
“What’s the other hand look like?” Kent said.
“Can’t see it,” Howard said. “Miz Halter Top there is blocking it.”
Thorn called up the other picture, in the car. The man’s left hand was on the car’s steering wheel, at about ten o’clock. He had the computer magnify and enhance the image. It was grainy, not as sharp as the ATM image of the right hand, but it appeared as if the nails on that hand were much shorter and duller. Odd…
“He’s a guitarist,” Kent said.
“What?” Thorn said.
“I have a nephew, in Tucson, Arizona, my sister’s oldest son, who teaches music at the local U. He plays classical guitar, and that’s what his hands look like. Nails on his right hand are long, polished, and angled, and the ones on his left are clipped short — it’s how you play the instrument.”
The others looked at him.
“You pluck the strings with your nails, but if you have long nails on the other hand, the strings buzz when you fret them — at least that’s what my nephew told me.”
“So maybe he’s a country-western guy, or bluegrass or folk music player,” Fernandez said. “Even a rock star.”
Kent said, “Could be, but rock stars mostly flat-pick, and acoustic guitars have steel strings. Fingernails simply don’t hold up against those, so those guys wear curved finger-picks or have fake nails. Classical guitars have nylon strings.”
“How do you know all this?” Thorn asked.
“When I was stationed outside Atlanta, one of my sergeants was a serious blues guitarist. I used to go and listen to him play at local clubs, and I picked up a few things here and there.”
“And you remembered it?” Julio asked.
Kent looked at him. “Not everybody older than you is automatically senile, Lieutenant.”
“No, sir,” Fernandez said. “Point demonstrated and taken.”
General Howard grinned.
“Does this help us?” Kent asked.
Thorn nodded. “Absolutely. If nothing else, it’s another place to look. And something tells me there are not a lot of classical guitarist hit men around.”
Jay sat in the command chair of the Deep Flight V, and stared out at the inky black water over two miles below the surface of the ocean.
He tapped instructions on the keyboard and the deep-sea submersible tilted to the right — starboard — and headed toward an odd-looking pile of silt. At this depth there wasn’t much moving except him. Vaguely nautical-sounding music played out over the stereo, and there were odd creaks and groans from the structure around him caused by intense pressure from the ocean.
Except that he just didn’t feel it. He wasn’t there. It wasn’t real.
He frowned and shook his head. I was sure this would work.
Even as he thought it, he knew that it wasn’t true. He’d wanted it to work, but he hadn’t really believed it would.
He sat in the media room of the apartment he and Saji lived in, the 270-degree panorama projection screens at one end of the room lit up with images from his VR simulation. He was looking for a Spanish treasure fleet lost in the late 1500s. But when he leaned back, he could feel the upholstery of the chair, and hear the purr of the ventilation system. He even thought he could hear Saji rattling around in the kitchen, though that could be his imagination.
He frowned again.
You’re going to have to do it, Gridley.
After spending subjective months inside his head, in a world similar to VR but not as controlled, he found that he was loathe to leave reality. No, more than that. He was afraid—if only a little bit — to leave reality. He knew you couldn’t get trapped in VR. It just wasn’t possible. But then he’d always believed that you couldn’t get trapped inside your own head, either.
He’d devised a non-VR metaphor to break the code that had put him in the hospital. He’d built a simulation he could run from a flatscreen, a remotely operated vehicle sim that searched the ocean floor while he sat in his desk. He’d been hopeful that it might work, that it would let him wait a while before going back into artificial reality.
But it just didn’t do the job. Not even close.
So he’d taken the next step, programmed the media room for near-full VR immersion, and created a sim that put him inside a submarine. That worked better. He was more engaged. But it still was not enough.
No, not nearly enough.
Jay’s edge, his best trick, was using all of his senses in VR. Limiting himself to vision only, or even audio and visual, was like cutting off his arms or legs. It felt wrong.
He took a deep breath and saved his location before killing the sim. He stared at the VR gear hanging on the rack, feeling a slight chill.
Can’t be a VR jock unless you do VR, Jay, said a voice in his head. Was he ready to give it all up? Not go back because he was afraid?
No.
Besides, he had to find the guy who had done this to him. Before he came back and found a way to put Jay back inside his own head permanently.
He called up several research databases and began to construct what he needed. He took his time, writing code segments that added to the reality of the VR, making it more detailed than necessary. One of the things he’d realized from his experience was that most VR wasn’t as good as his unconscious — even his.
But after a while he realized he was just stalling.
“Saji,” he called out. “I’m going in.”
“I know.” Her voice was faint from the kitchen, but he smiled at the sound. She knew. She always knew. And she’d be there to help him if somehow, someway he got into trouble. Not that he would, but…
He closed the file window and pulled his stims off the rack. The movement was familiar and practiced, and within seconds he was ready to jack in. He reached inside his desk drawer and got a large binder clip. He pried it open and clamped it on the loose flesh behind and above his left elbow.
Ow.
It didn’t hurt too much, but the pressure was there. He jacked in and suddenly found himself on the floor of the ocean.
It was cold and dark. He looked down, pointing some of the bright LED lamps on his modified Mark 27 Navy diving helmet at the ground, and watched his feet sinking into the muck. He adjusted his buoyancy so that he was just touching the surface.
He’d forgotten to breathe. He inhaled sharply, feeling a push into his lungs from the flow amplifier in the helmet. He nearly coughed, which wouldn’t have accomplished much, except to push more of the Perfluorocarbon fluid filling the helmet out of his lungs just a little faster.