The Archimedes Effect (30 page)

He didn’t bite. He said, “So if this clown is such a linchpin at Net Force and the whole place revolves around him, why don’t I just put one behind his ear and let’s get rid of the problem?”

Lewis shook her head. “Once upon a time that might have worked, but not anymore. Apparently, Mr. Gridley used to play his cards pretty close to his vest and something like that happened—a guy Net Force was chasing ran Gridley off the road and shot him. He was in the hospital unconscious for a time and there was some doubt he was going to make it. He had vital data locked up in his head nobody could get to. After that, he started backing up his files and leaving them where his boss could get to them. Take him out, they don’t lose any of Gridley’s input—somebody else picks up the ball and runs with it. Maybe not quite as fast, but eliminating him doesn’t help us much.”

“And you don’t know what he’s got?”

“Only that he thinks it is going to break this open.”

“Can you get him to tell you?”

“I’m working on it.”

She was still hoping to maneuver Jay into her bed. And once she did, she’d make that knowledge public, and that would take Jay out of the action. He would be so busy running around trying to save his marriage that work would be the last thing on his mind.

That her last try hadn’t quite done the trick was irritating, but it was still an option. Real pheromones and a warm and willing body were still better than anything anybody had come up with in VR. He wanted her, she was sure of that, she could feel it, and she had primed his pump about as well as she could. She’d have to see if she could get it going soon.

She also didn’t bring it up that it was Carruth who was going to get killed. Stupid son of a bitch, she still couldn’t believe it. It was just a matter of setting it up and doing it, and soon. Next meeting, or the one after that, they’d meet somewhere nobody would be around. She’d come up with a good reason, and then Carruth here was going to become a major fall guy. They’d find him, and maybe that enormous gun he’d used, something to tie him to it. He was a dead man walking, he just didn’t know it yet.

Carruth nodded. “Okay. You’re the boss. But why tell me if you don’t want him erased? You’re the computer girl. You didn’t need a sit-down for that.”

“That’s not the reason. I’ve got another buyer interested,” she said. “A new player.” A lie, but how would he know? “He wants a demonstration, so we need one last raid.”

“What’s he want? A fucking tank?”

“No. He wants a colonel.”

“Say what?”

“He wants us to kidnap a bird colonel and turn him over.”

“Why?”

“What do you care? We deliver the guy, we have a deal.”

“Dead or alive?”

“Alive. Apparently, he has a history with the guy and wants to speak harshly to him.”

Carruth shook his head. “This is gettin’ old, Lewis.”

“Almost over,” she said. She wanted to smile, but kept her face as expressionless as she could.

“Details?”

“I’ll get those to you next meeting. I still have some codes to collect, plus some background information on the target. Here’s the new meeting place. I’ll call with the day and time.”

She handed him the sticky note. He glanced at it. “Vickers Crossing? Where is that?”

“In the country. The GPS coordinates are there at the bottom.”

“More crappy coffee. Great.”

Not this time, Carruth. No coffee, because the little country store in question was closed. Nobody would be there except them.

And only one of them was going to be leaving under her own power when that meeting was over.

Too bad it had come to this. It was going to make the rest of the project a bastard—she’d need new muscle, another shooter, and that would be tricky—though with new guys, she wouldn’t be so forthcoming. She’d learned that lesson, at least. There were a couple candidates, mercs she had lined up second and third before she’d hired Carruth. Hire a couple, pay them a flat fee, don’t tell them any more than they had to know.

She watched Carruth leave. Too bad. But better him than her.

Jay hadn’t figured out why his sci-fi convention scenario had crashed, but he didn’t have time to sit down and debug the software—it wasn’t as if he didn’t have other things on his plate. He’d get back to it later, or maybe he’d just crank up something totally different and bag the convention imagery.

Sometimes, half the fun in finding information was in coming up with a new scenario for VR. Jay had to admit that he did more of that than was absolutely necessary, but he figured, if he couldn’t have fun, why bother? Any hack could use off-the-shelf software and filters—Jay liked to think of himself as at least a good craftsman, if not an artist. . . .

So it was that to hunt down a connection for the dead terrorist Stark, he had spent a couple hours building a scenario. Sure, it was easier to do these days, because a lot of the construction material was prepackaged, but that was kind of like buying a steak at the store instead of going out and hunting down your own cow. He had no problem with taking that shortcut; after all, it was the way you cooked the meat that made the difference. The proof was in the meal—nobody cared if you’d butchered the beef yourself or had somebody else do it.

Over the years, Jay had VR’d to many corners of the world, from Africa to Java, from Japan to Australia, China to Canada, you name it. Not only in the present, but throughout history. And he had built more than a few fantasy scenarios—and not just here on Earth. The solar system, the galaxy, the universe—shoot, the next universe over—Jay had explored all kinds of territory, real and imagined. Sometimes, the trick was more about how to keep it interesting than it was to find what he was after. That was part of the challenge.

This time, he had come up with one he thought was a hoot: He had gone to the planet Omega, in a stellar system far, far away, to the galaxy’s toughest prison. Ordinarily, this was a one-way ticket. Nobody was paroled, all the sentences were for life, and nobody had ever escaped—not and lived to tell of it.

While Richard Lovelace had it that stone walls did not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage, a joint with fifteen-meter-high walls painted with slick-ex too slippery to allow a fly to land, armed guards who’d just as soon shoot you as look at you, and set smack-dab in the middle of a pestilent, tropical swamp full of quicksand pits and man-eating critters that flew, ran, crawled, or slithered all over looking for a two-legged meal? Those made for a pretty good cage. Even if you
could
get out, the nearest port was a thousand kilometers away—how would you get there?

Jay, in his guise as a notorious drug smuggler sentenced to The Cage, as it was known, had arrived, beaten the crap out of the bully who had been sent to test him, and integrated himself into the population.

Stark was dead in this reality, too, but he’d been in the prison a while, and there were people who had known him. Jay needed to find them and get them to tell all. Which meant running down e-mails or postings or URLs or newsfeeds where somebody had mentioned Stark. At least enough so he could make a connection between Stark and whoever else might have been on the raids at the Army bases. Every new lead he found would need to be checked out.

He thought about calling Rachel and inviting her into his hunt, but since she was military and restricted to using their systems on this project, that would mean he’d have to go to the Pentagon and set it up there, and at the moment, the only place he wanted to deal with Rachel was in VR, not the Real World. Not that he was repelled by her, no, that was the problem. She was altogether too attractive. It was way too easy for him to visualize her with her hair spread out on a pillow. Something he had certainly thought about.

He wanted her, and he knew he wanted her, but he didn’t
want
to want her. He was married—happily—and in love with his wife. This thing with Rachel—no, it wasn’t a thing, not yet, and it wasn’t ever going to be. This would-be thing with Rachel was a temptation, a distraction, a fantasy—albeit a very pleasant fantasy. But no way was he going to let it be more than that.

Fortunately, they couldn’t hang you for thinking—not yet anyhow.

But she had rubbed his neck. And it had felt really good. . . .

Jay drifted across the exercise area, looking at the yard monsters lifting weights. The temperature out here was well above body heat. Some of the iron-pumpers had arms as big around as Jay’s head, and looked as if they could pick themselves and all the weights on the bench next to them up with one hand. Jay was here to find information on a guy who’d lived in the same barracks as Stark when they’d gone through basic training. His contact-metaphor, whose name here was “Jethro,” wasn’t a weight lifter, but a boxer who was working the heavy bag.

High-tech as the prison was here in the future, there were still some old-style technologies extant, and a stuffed bag hung from a steel frame was among them.

Jethro was muscular in the way of a heavyweight boxer, and he wore bag gloves and shorts and boxing shoes. Here in the sticky heat, sweat beaded and ran down his torso to stain the waistband of his shorts, and more perspiration ran in rivulets along his legs to soak his socks. He had a few interesting scars on his body, along with a few tattoos. He hammered the bag, chuffing and breathing hard, grunting with effort. Jab, jab, cross. Jab, cross, hook! Overhand, jab, uppercut . . .

Jay stood by, not speaking, watching Jethro work. And maybe patting himself on the back a little at how good his sensory details were.

After a few minutes, the man paused to drink something colored a phosphorescent orange from a plastic bottle, and to wipe his face with a towel.

“What?” he said.

“We had a friend in common.”

“Yeah? Who?”

“Stark.”

Jethro shook his head. “Stark didn’t have any friends.”

“It was more of a work arrangement,” Jay said.

“So?”

“So I need to know something he knew.”

“Too bad. Why would I care?”

“I cut a deal with somebody. I find out this information he knew and pass it along.”

“And this buys you what?”

Here Jay had but one thing of any real value to sell. Everybody here was a lifer. The only way to leave The Cage was to die, get recycled, and flushed through narrow sewage pipes into the swamp. Hardly a glorious exit.

“A way out.”

“Sheeit.”

Jay shrugged.

Jethro wiped at his face again. “How?”

“A door is going to be left unlocked, a guard will be looking the other way. I’ll have a weapon. Not much chance I’ll survive the run to Port Tau, but at least it’s a shot. Better to die on my feet free and running than in here.”

Jethro considered that. “Say I buy this. How long is that door going to be unlocked? How long is the guard gonna be blind?”

Jay shrugged. “Could be long enough for two guys to pass.”

The boxer shook his head. “You know that’s how Stark got it? He was trying to run, got a needler bolt in the back.”

“I heard.”

“Been a while since Stark and I were tight.”

“I just got here,” Jay said. “More likely you can talk to people than I can.”

“What do I have to pay them with?”

“Two, three fast guys can run through an open door as quick as one, if they hurry.”

Jethro considered it. Nodded. “I can maybe talk to a couple people. Of course, if this is bunta-crap, you’re a dead man.”

“Of course. Whaddya got to lose?”

“That’s the prongin’ truth.” Jethro hung the towel over a steel strut, stepped back up to the bag. Hit it with a short right, hard. “I’ll find you if I get something.”

“I ain’t goin’ anywhere,” Jay said. “For a while, anyway.”

Jethro smiled at that one.

Lewis had picked the little country store because it had recently closed. She had happened across the place while out driving one day, feeling too cooped up after a long VR session and needing to move. The store was for sale, and there was a sign up over the front window saying so. Who owned it? Why had they shut it down? Where were they now? Those things didn’t really matter.

The place was not exactly the middle of nowhere—the sun didn’t come up between it and town—but it was an hour and some away from the District, half a mile from any other building, and the closest of those was a farmhouse off the road and mostly screened by trees. If she could get in and out fast, there wouldn’t be a problem. She rented a car, switched license plates with a vehicle parked in the back of an apartment complex that was the same make and model, and wore her standard disguise—baseball cap with her hair tucked under, sunglasses, dark T-shirt, jeans, running shoes, and a Windbreaker. Plus she had a new revolver, another S&W Chief .38 Special.

She didn’t want to be parked out in the boondocks long enough for anybody driving past to take notice. Her intent was to arrive five minutes before the meeting time, pull in, and wait for Carruth. As soon as he showed up, she would put two into his head before he could get out of the car. She hoped he had that big handgun with him, but if not, she would make sure there was something in the car to lead the state troopers who worked the case to his house. He’d rented that under a phony name, and she didn’t know if his driver’s license matched the address or not, but a wadded-up piece of paper with the street number and name on it dropped onto the floor would be enough, and they’d find it. They tended to search the cars of murdered folks very carefully. If Carruth still had the cop-killing gun, it would be on his hip, in the car, or stashed at his home somewhere.

She was tempted to run past his house and make sure there wasn’t anything she didn’t want the cops to find, but she didn’t think there would be. Carruth was pretty good about stuff like that.