He grinned, his tanned-and-grizzled face wrinkling. His old brown leather bomber jacket creaked as he leaned forward to stare at the gray stones. He had an urge to hum the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he refrained.
Which way, which way…?
He stared at the mortar between the stones. Did it look newer on the right or left?
Left.
Carefully, he began to put his weight on the stone to the left of the entry. Slowly he increased the pressure until nearly all of it rested on the stone he’d selected.
He enjoyed a moment’s satisfaction before the block abruptly fell out from underneath him. Jay toppled, started to fall, and lashed out with the twelve-foot bullwhip he was carrying, wrapping it around a stone outcropping on the wall nearby and yanking. The effort pulled him back to where he’d started.
I guess it’s not to the left.
The trap was clever — it wouldn’t trigger until a heavy weight rested upon it. If he’d been standing there with both feet, it would have been “So long, Gridley.”
He peered over the edge of the broken-off stones — more than one had fallen, to widen the danger area — and saw nothing but blackness. But there was a hint of sound — was it hissing? Slithering? Yes, definitely, both. He couldn’t hope that the falling block had killed all the nasty wigglers down there.
He could brute-force it — drop weights on all the stones in the room and see which ones were left, but the idea offended his sense of style.
Someone clever had put the code together, and Jay wanted to figure out the key to the puzzle. There was a key, of course, there had to be. Any programmer who played the game this well always left a way in.
After all, he would.
So while he could easily run the numbers through the machine, he wanted to beat it himself.
He took a closer look around the room. As he usually did when he created VR based on a puzzle, he’d let a freeform algorithm give substance to the puzzle pieces after supplying base parameters. This was, as he saw it, the real advantage of a VR structure — a place that could have clues, things that hadn’t been programmed consciously, to give his other senses a chance to help crack it. If he could cross the room, he’d have gotten enough blocks in a row to identify at least a part of the code.
Think, Jay, think!
He could go right, or angle off diagonally…
He stopped and thought for a moment about the programmer. The man was clever — he’d hidden the code in plain sight.
But he’d hidden it on a disk about a Muslim mosque. What kind of man would have such a disk in his possession to use as camouflage?
A devout one.
Jay stepped to the east, the direction of Mecca, the way Muslims face during their prayers every day. He kept his whip ready to sling out and grab onto something if necessary.
The stone was safe. No trap, no danger.
Aha!
There was still room to continue in the direction he’d started, so he took another step, glancing down at the floor as he did so.
The stone gave way, and he just managed to lurch backward to safety.
Damn!
Now he could go forward, angle left, or angle right.
The direction of Mecca.
A thought came unbidden into his mind as he was looking at the scepter.
Maybe the scepter is Mecca.
A burst of excitement came with that idea. If he was right, there was only one way to traverse the puzzle — by looking toward the scepter the entire time. On any of the blocks.
A thrill ran through him.
Now that would be a cool paradigm shift. It would probably map in RW to having a central point on the label as a focal point to focus the direction of each data block. He’d been staring at the scepter when he took his first step, so that matched as well.
It felt right. It fit with the way the label instead of the disk had been used to hold data. It was his sense of intuition that made him more than just a good programmer, after all — he didn’t just code from pure logic — he could feel solutions sometimes, take jumps that leapfrogged him to the same place he would eventually get by working it out.
But there was only one way to find out.
I’ve got you now, sucker, he thought, thinking of the programmer.
I won’t need this anymore. Jay threw the bullwhip to his right and heard it hit — eventually. Faint hissing sounds came up from the pit below the throne room.
Jay fixed his gaze on the scepter, grinned, and ran all the way across the throne room.
No stones fell, and no other traps were triggered.
“Hah!”
As he laid his hand on the scepter and picked it up, a rumbling came from the back wall of the throne room, and he looked up, startled.
The wall had opened up onto another room, this one crisscrossed by a wicked-looking maze of spikes.
Across that room lay something else glinting gold.
“Oh, no,” he said. “I’ve only cracked part of it.”
Well. Half a loaf, and all that. This was what it was all about, matching wits in a virtual world.
And winning.
He grinned. “Bring it on,” he said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
3
Eduard Natadze sat in the rental car outside the 7-Eleven, just inside the line from Virginia, waiting. He was dressed in a pair of thin wool slacks and a dark gray Harris Tweed sport coat — decent clothes, but not expensive and nothing to draw attention. He wore a pale blue cotton-blend Arrow shirt and a ten-dollar blue silk tie. His shoes were black leather Nunn Bush, with rubber soles, dressy enough so they didn’t look like running shoes, but functional if he needed to move in a hurry. His watch was a basic Seiko, nothing special. His hair was cut to medium length, he was in decent physical shape, but not bulky, and just an inch or two over average height. Nothing about him screamed for a second look. He was, to a casual gaze, just another thirty-something businessman with a serviceable leather briefcase, on his way to or from work; nobody to notice at all.
Which, of course, was exactly as he wanted it.
His only real extravagance was in the satchel-type case, which was closed with a rip-strip of velcro and accessible in a hurry: A Korth Combat Magnum revolver, a German gun, and worth more than his clothes, watch, shoes, and briefcase put together, by a wide margin. It was the most expensive production handgun made — though “production” was perhaps something of a misnomer. There was a lot of hand-polishing and fitting on the weapon, which cost four times as much as a decent L-frame revolver from Smith & Wesson.
More than five thousand dollars for a double-action six-shot might seem excessive to some, but the one thing he never stinted on was his equipment. When your life was on the line, you did not want to lose it because you went cheap on your gear. Any revolver or pistol that would group three inches or less at twenty meters was sufficient for most combat situations. The Korth could, if you were adept enough, keep a grouping less than half that, using Federal Premium 130-grain Personal Defense loads, his personal choice.
When you could cover five shots with a quarter coin at that range, you had a precision instrument. When the instrument was what stood between you and the Reaper, you wanted the best you could afford. And when you worked on special projects for a billionaire who cared only for results and not the manner in which they were achieved, you could afford the best.