“Or perhaps we might show you a way to keep your military’s very expensive war scenarios from going into the toilet?”
Seurat smiled, his expression as bland as Jay’s.
Oh, he wanted to play?
“I don’t expect we need any help there. I’m on the trail of the perpetrator. Only a matter of time until I get him.”
“Time is money, is it not?”
Jay smiled. The man was smooth. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.
Seurat shook his head, and the smile, this time, seemed genuine. “Mr. Gridley, I will acknowledge that you are better than I, better than any of our people when it comes to chasing VR criminals and terrorists. And that I am an arrogant Frenchman and you have put me in my place. Now that we have both waved our weenies at each other, perhaps we can get past the posturing merde and down to business?”
Despite himself, Jay had to laugh. The guy had it nailed. Score a point for him.
“Go ahead, Mr. Seurat.” He pronounced the name correctly this time. “I’m listening.”
Seurat continued. “Our most recent incursion was just a few hours ago, when a VR dragon entered one of our shared-space utopias and began attacking our citizens.”
“A dragon?”
“Oui. I was sent a copy of the attack from one of our VR security monitors on my way to Washington. Here is a link to a secure CyberNation storehouse where a copy has been set aside for you.”
He handed Jay a slip of paper with a VR address on it.
Dragon. Western or Chinese?
The form of the dragon might add weight to the clue he’d uncovered at the VR saloon. Jay looked at the address and nodded.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” he said, then added, “but I may need unrestricted access to your network.”
The unasked question hung in the air.
The Frenchman seemed to reach a decision, and nodded to himself.
“I shall see that you are allowed whatever access you need, Mr. Gridley.”
Jay nodded. That was true, the guy had just made a big decision.
Jay made a decision of his own. “Call me Jay,” he said.
Seurat nodded. “And I am Charles. I will be at the Watergate until tomorrow morning. Please contact me if you have any trouble with network access.”
“The Watergate,” said Jay. “Of course.” He smiled. This time Seurat smiled back at him.
Of course. What better place for a rival nation’s leader to stay than the site of one of our worst scandals?
Jay didn’t like CyberNation, but he had to give Seurat points for style. And balls.
But I get more points for getting full network access.
He wasn’t sure he’d be able to help the virtual nation, nor even if he wanted to help it, but he was certainly going to enjoy walking through their systems while he tried.
Jay Gridley wins again.
14
Kent attended to his paper- and e-work, always a bigger part of his job than he liked. When he couldn’t put it off any longer, he would just plow into the requisition forms, assorted order-postings, and such, and make an attempt to catch up on his perpetual backlog. Much as he hated it, there were times when he had to get into the grind.
While deep in the minutiae of a report on uniform grades and current in-house stocks of same, his computer pinged. For a moment, he didn’t recall what that meant; then it came to him: It was a searchbot attention-sig.
He had the system set up for voxax, so he said, “Searchbot report.”
The file on uniforms collapsed and shrank as if being sucked down a drain, leaving a small icon in the bottom of the computer screen. The bot’s report appeared in its place, and the bot started to read it aloud in a voice that reminded Kent of a particularly boring professor whose course Kent had once taken at the War College. “Stop vocal,” he said. He could still read.
The report, which on the face of it seemed innocuous enough, was about a classical guitar competition in, of all places, Lincoln, Nebraska. The solo finals were being held this coming Saturday at seven in the evening, and would consist of four contestants. Their names were Emile Domenicio, Sarah Pen Jackson, Richard Justice, and Phillip Link.
None of these names meant anything to Kent.
The listed programs included works by Bach, Rivera, Barrios, Sor, Scarlatti, Berkeley, and Pujol, also names that, until recently, would mostly have meant little to him. But, since the operation in which the Georgian hired killer, one Eduard Natadze, had managed to screw up Kent’s initial fieldwork for Net Force, the colonel had made it his business to learn about classical guitars and the music associated with them. That was because Natadze had been, by all reports, a talented amateur classical guitarist. That was in addition to his day job: strong-arm and hit man for the late Samuel Walker Cox, a rich man who’d once been a Soviet spy.
Natadze was a man who had beaten Kent at every turn, always a half step ahead, and who had escaped. Oh, how that had rankled.
It was still impossible for Kent to think about it without building a head of steam that threatened to blow his head off. Abe Kent flat did not like to lose.
The case was officially closed — there had been some high-level sweeping under the rug, for political and financial reasons — but Kent hadn’t just smiled and let it go. He might not be able to spend any official energy on it, but he hadn’t quit looking.
A few seachbots that kept eyes open for material concerning classical guitar music and instruments didn’t cost anything, and there was always the hope something might pop up that would be useful.
Offhand, he couldn’t see what it was here, other than the most general anything-classical connection.
But, at the bottom of the scroll, there was a notation that several luthiers would be on hand for a showing of their classical instruments. One of these guitar-builders was Otto Bergman, who, according to the article, hadn’t shown his works in public for more than three years.
Bergman. Kent nodded at the name, remembering it.
When they had been searching for Natadze and had a general idea about him, before they had known specifically who he was, they’d been cross-checking guitar-makers who specialized in concert-quality instruments. They’d eventually run the hit man’s home address to ground this way, by backtracking an instrument he’d bought from a world-class maker in California, a guy named Bogdanovich.
There had been a mysterious explosion at Natadze’s house shortly thereafter, and that instrument, along with several others, had been destroyed. A shame, that. The official line was that Natadze had done it, but Kent had never quite accepted that — a guy who spent that much on guitars and who loved to play them would have pulled them out before he blew the house up.
Later, after the investigation had been pretty much shut down, Jay Gridley had found that Natadze had another guitar on order, which, at the time, had been several months away from completion. This particular one was being built by Otto Bergman, who lived in Colorado, Kent recalled.
Naturally, Natadze hadn’t been stupid enough to send in a new address to take delivery of his guitar, even though it had set him back about eight grand, if Kent’s memory was accurate. That would be a dead end, except that Kent had an idea that if somebody wanted a handmade instrument bad enough to pay eight thousand dollars for it, he might try to find a way to collect it.