“Look!” We’d yell. “He saw us! Git ’im!”
Jay grinned and shook his head. “There used to be a television show like that. They’d set somebody up with some kind of scenario just to scare the daylights out of him, then record it. I forget what it was called — I used to watch it when I was in college. Funny stuff.”
“Funny, but really, really stupid. What we did was back in the days before video cams were around or we’d probably have taped it, too. We thought it was a hoot — we did it four or five times, chased guys a little ways, amazed at how fast somebody who thought he’d just seen a body dumped could run from what he thought was a bunch of killers. Then, once the guy was gone, we’d all hop back into the car and head back to the bars. If the guy reported it, the cops must have laughed pretty good — they’d have heard the story every summer.”
Jay smiled and nodded.
“We were lucky beyond measure. All it would have taken would have been for one of our prey to have been a security guard on his way home, a new, off-duty cop who’d never heard the story, or maybe just a guy worried about being mugged. Somebody packing a handgun and deciding he could become a hero by dropping four or five murderers dead in their tracks. It was dark, he wouldn’t have seen us smiling as we ran at him, and if he had, probably thought we were homicidal maniacs. No jury in the world would have convicted him for mowing us down — we would have gotten what we deserved.”
Jay thought about that for a second.
“If kids tried that game these days, more than likely they would get shot — there are a lot of concealed weapon permits out there, a lot more than when I was a teenager.”
Jay said, “So you’re saying what?”
“I’m saying that just because you have these great abilities to dance in and out of high-security computer systems without worrying that you’ll get caught, it is sometimes a mistake.” He paused for a moment, letting that sink in, then went on. “It happens some people there know me, and it just happens one of them owes me a favor, so I got a call and I fixed it. But you’re lucky — just like we were on those hot summer nights back in my day. Nobody will show up at your door in the middle of the night and disappear you. This time.”
Jay’s eyes went wide. “No.”
“Yes. It doesn’t matter that you work for the government. If you go somewhere you shouldn’t go, you had better make damn sure you don’t get seen. There are some nasty things out there in the world, meaner, hungrier, and some of them are smarter than you are, Jay. I know you don’t think so, but it’s true, and if you cross one of them at the wrong time, you could leave a widow and child alone and always wondering what happened to you. If I hadn’t been here, if somebody hadn’t owed me, you’d be in deep trouble. Keep that in mind.”
Jay blew out a sigh. He felt a chill ripple through him.
“Jay, remember this: If you get to thinking you’re Superman, you will eventually find a guy with a barrel full of kryptonite.”
And all Jay could think of to say to that was, “My God.”
“Amen, son.”
27
Marissa dropped by the office unannounced, which pleased Thorn no end. And one of the first things she did when she got there was to ask him about fencing, which pleased him even more. She was curious about what he did. That must mean something.
He hoped.
He escorted her down to the gym on the theory that it was always better to show than to tell. On the way there, he tried to tell himself that no, he wasn’t showing off at all.
The Net Force gym was empty. Thorn opened his locker and started removing his gear, very conscious that Marissa was watching him. He’d been fencing for a long time, he was comfortable with it, but most of the women he’d been with — save for the few who were fencers themselves — hadn’t shown any particular interest in it.
Marissa had.
“So,” she said as he finished suiting up, “other than knowing that the Germans used to scar each other in places like Heidelberg with these things, and D’Artagnan and all, I don’t know from swords. Tell me about them.”
“Well,” Thorn said, “in Western, or collegiate, fencing, there are three different weapons: foil, épée, and saber. Eastern fencing, like kendo, uses a shinai, and other martial arts use a variety of weapons, but for now we’re going to focus just on the Western version.”
She nodded.
“Some of what I’m going to say comes from books I’ve read over the years, some from conversations with other fencers and history buffs. I’ve said most of this at one time or another over the years, putting on fencing demos and such. I don’t swear that everything I’m going to say is one-hundred-percent accurate, but it’s how I see it.”
She nodded again.
“I have also found that I can go on at length about this, so let me know if your eyes start to glaze.”
She grinned at that. He smiled, too, and began. “Fencing goes back pretty much to when they first outlawed dueling as a sport — if you could say that it ever was a sport. A lot of people don’t know it, but most duels were not to the death; they were to first blood: Whoever drew blood from his opponent, no matter how much or where the wound occurred, satisfied his honor and won the duel.”
She frowned. “They didn’t have much in the way of medicine back then. Was infection much of a problem?”
He raised an eyebrow. Few people thought of that. “Yes. In fact, most sword-related battle casualties were from infection, not from the actual sword cuts.”
Thorn picked up the foil. “This was the first practice weapon they came up with. They wanted a system to teach people to parry, to respect their opponent’s attacks. After all, it might settle honor for you to prick your opponent first, but if you nicked him on his wrist and, a moment later, he stabbed you through the heart, you would have won the duel but lost your life.”
“Not much of a trade-off,” she said.
“Exactly. So, they came up with the foil. A lighter weapon, with a smaller bell guard than the épée, but the biggest difference was that this weapon had restrictions.”
“Restrictions?”
He nodded. “Yep. Two kinds. One was the target area. In épée, the entire body — your head, the little finger on your off hand, your back, even your toes — are all valid targets. With the foil — which, remember, was designed as a practice weapon, not as a simulation of the real thing — the target area is the jacket”—he gestured to the one he was wearing—“excluding the sleeves. Everything else on the jacket — the back, the groin flap, the sides — is all valid. When you fence competitively — or even in practice, in many clubs — you wear a vest made of metal mesh, called a lame, that exactly covers your target area.”
She reached out and touched his foil. “And how do you score?”
He moved the blade to show her the tip. “The foil, like the épée, is a point weapon. See this button here at the end of the blade? It takes five hundred grams of pressure to set that point. Fencing electrically, that opens a circuit through a wire embedded in this groove in the top of the blade, which connects to a body cord running through your sleeve and out the bottom of your jacket, to a floor reel and then to a scoring machine. Pressing the button against your opponent’s lame sets off your colored light, usually green or red. Hitting him off-target — like on the leg, say — sets off a white one. Hitting him flat, with the side of the blade, or having your point slide along the target area, does not depress the point, and so those count as misses.”