State Of War (2003) Read online

  Tyrone shook his head.

  "You don't agree?"

  "I hear you, Dad. But you make everything sound so . . . mercenary."

  "There's not a thing wrong with being a mercenary, son. That's how I make my living. In fact, that's how most people make their living. If you do a job, you get paid for it. What's wrong is making somebody do a job and then not paying them for it. That's your CyberNation's basic premise. What you get from them isn't free. They stole it."

  Tyrone sat silent for a moment.

  "Something?"

  "No, what you say makes sense, but I get the feeling there's something else here I'm missing, some argument for my side."

  Howard chuckled. Tyrone really was getting better at this. But he wasn't there yet. "You're right, Ty. There is."

  "Well, what is it?"

  Howard chuckled again. "Oh, no, that's for you to figure out. I'm not going to just give it to you. After all, haven't you heard? There's no such thing as a free argument."

  "Dad!" Tyrone groaned.

  "Think about it some and you'll get to it. It's a good exercise."

  Tyrone went off, muttering to himself and shaking his head.

  Howard felt a sense of pride as he watched the boy leave. Was there a valid argument against TANSTAAFL? Maybe. He couldn't think of one offhand, but let his son believe there was, and he would keep looking. And sooner or later, he'd find it, bring it back, and hit his old man with it. Which was a good thing. Part of raising your child was teaching him how to take care of himself once he got out on his own. If you could take care of yourself physically, mentally, and spiritually, you had a leg up on most of the world.

  November 1935 Port of Newark, New Jersey

  Jay Gridley, sworn nemesis of evil, crouched low on the roof of the warehouse overlooking the Kill Van Kull, the waterway connecting New York Harbor with Newark Bay. He looked down upon the south docks, hidden in the shadows.

  "Follow the money" was the classic investigative advice, but first, of course, you had to find the money.

  If Jay was right, he was about to do just that.

  It was a foggy night, cold, with the promise of yet colder days ahead. The chill brushed at him with icy fingers as the mist drifted up in slow gray billows, shrouding the farther lights into dim globes. Below, illuminated by fog-edged floods, floated the Corona, a rust-streaked tramp steamer just arrived from Spain. Faint trails of coal smoke still drifted from the stacks of the ship, tracing whorls that mixed with the natural mist in the night sky.

  In another twenty years they'd call that smog. . . .

  He pulled his wide-brimmed slouch hat lower on his head. A carmine-hued scarf covered his mouth and chin. A dark cloak shrouded him. Thin, black leather gloves covered his hands. He blended into the night, nearly invisible, no more than a shadow.

  He'd put a high-level watchbot on CyberNation's wire transfers over the last few days. His sniffer had strained thousands of transactions, looking for relatively small chunks of money coming to the United States. CyberNation made all sorts of payments, naturally, so he'd set the bot's sensors to filter out those that went to known companies, leaving only those that seemed to have no immediately legitimate destination, regardless of their size.

  The rusted ship Corona docked below him was, in the real world, a large squirt of information coming over the net. Within it was a particular electronic payment from CyberNation that Jay wanted to trace. But to do that, he would have to get closer.

  Noiselessly, he padded to the edge of the wall facing the river and climbed down the knotted black silk rope he'd placed there earlier. Earlier in the day, he had broken the single mercury-vapor lamp in the immediate area, so his movements now were in near-total darkness. The Port Authority, flush with more money than they'd ever had, despite the Depression, had been refitting the lights to the docks. They would, no doubt, be unhappy with his action.

  He shrugged it off. A minor thing, a broken lamp.

  However, should anyone look up, they'd see no more than a wraith, and that not for long. It would seem a trick of the light. Nothing more than their imagination . . .

  Moving quickly, he hand-over-handed his way down the rope until he was on the docks. The smell of creosote sharp and pungent in the damp air.

  A sailor stood guard at the gangway to the ship, waiting, no doubt, for Customs to come and clear their cargo.

  Gridley moved slowly toward the man, removing the glove on his right hand as he did so. A gold ring featuring a large girasol, an orange-yellow variety of precious opal, gleamed faintly in the light. Intricate whirls of fire played over the deeply hued stone.

  The sailor glanced at Jay and reacted immediately, reaching for the oversized pistol holstered at his belt.

  Jay moved his fingers, a subtle movement that caused the opal to glitter in the dim light.

  Carefully . . . slowly . . .

  The sailor froze, his hand stopping inches away from the black leather holster. His eyes moved from Jay to focus intently on the gem in front of him. Jay moved the ring slightly in a pattern known only to a few in the Far East, concentrating the man's attention, hypnotizing him, placing him in a trance.

  There.

  In RW, Jay was simultaneously firing hundreds and thousands of passwords and protocol requests to a watchdog program, overloading its capacity to prevent intrusion. Boring. Playing the role of a pulp-fiction hero was much more interesting.

  Silently, he oozed his way up the gangplank and onto the ship. There he straightened up and pulled off his black cloak and hat, revealing a navy greatcoat and a watch cap underneath. He hid his fedora and cloak behind a lifeboat, and to all appearances became just another sailor on the ship.

  Clouding men's minds with girasols was all well and good when you were spotted and challenged. But if he looked as if he belonged here, if he could avoid being challenged at all, that was even better.

  Jay found a posted copy of the manifest showing the cargo hold he was looking for and made his way there. A single bare, low-wattage electrical bulb cast a thin light upon the scene, just enough to see that which he had come for: The box was unmarked, a plain wooden crate with only an ID number stenciled on it.

  Working quickly, Jay pried open one end of the box, careful not to bend the nails. Then he opened his coat and pulled out a cigar box-sized transmitter that he slipped inside the crate.

  He grinned. Ah, historical accuracy! He loved it. That was one of the many things that set Jay Gridley apart from other sim writers. It would have been so easy to simply cheat and make the transmitter more modern. It would have been even easier to simply tag the package electronically, avoiding the need for all this skulking about.

  But where was the fun in that?

  Instead, he had made every single detail as historically accurate as possible. The vacuum tubes that made up the transmitter's circuits couldn't get any smaller. The technology was one hundred percent appropriate to 1935. And the materials were all true to the time period.

  He thought about the sailor he had hypnotized with a few mystical gestures and grinned to himself. Well, okay, so maybe the details weren't all true to history, but they were all true to the scenario he was working in.

  Reaching into the box, he threw a large toggle switch on the device, activating it. He wiggled the transmitter slightly, nestling it in solid among thousands of green-backs. The tubes couldn't take much shaking.

  Carefully he closed the crate and used the rubber-coated handle end of the pry bar he'd brought with him to quietly tap the nails back in. When he was finished, there was no sign anyone had opened the crate.

  Naturally.

  He took out a small crystal bottle of liquid with a tiny atomizer on the top and misted the crate several times.

  He reversed his path, and within minutes was back on the rooftop. He went to the portable receiver he'd left there and turned it on. A faint glow came from the analog meter on the device showing the signal strength of the transmitter.

  Usi
ng tracking devices, particularly in this era, wasn't as simple as people thought. Unlike modern GPS devices, older ones relied on signal strength and triangulation to be accurate. With only one receiver, he would be able to tell if the transmitter moved away from him, but he would not be able to trace its direction.

  Ideally he'd have placed three receivers around the New York and New Jersey countryside with teams relaying signal strengths from each so that he could triangulate the precise position of the money he was tracking. But as the lone avenger of evil, he only had time to place one on the other side of the river. He had set that one to automatically relay the signal strength of the distant receiver on another frequency, however, so that he could, in effect, have two parts of the triangle. Not the best option, perhaps, but for Jay Gridley, master of the virtual realm, it should be more than enough.

  He glanced out at the water, admiring the fog there. The stuff was so thick you could almost cut it with a knife. A tendril wisped past him and he reached out to touch it--and did.

  The fog had solid form, it felt like cotton candy, and that was all wrong. It was supposed to be vapor.

  And it had an odor, too. It smelled like--like . . .

  A sewer.

  Hmm, Jay thought. Must be a problem with those new drivers.

  Now and then there'd be a failure in the hardware/software interface in VR. Usually that happened when something was being upgraded. And, Jay had found, it was generally the drivers for the hardware that had some glitch in them, some incompatibility problem. It certainly wasn't his code.

  He waved at the offending fog, shoving it, smell and all, away.

  Oh, well. When you lived on the cutting edge of technology, sometimes you got a little bloody.

  He grinned. Such things did not deter a pulp hero, nosiree. . . .

  On the dock there was activity. Customs had cleared the ship. Longshoremen moved here and there. The process went fairly fast, cargo being offloaded with a speed that surprised him, it being 1935 and all.

  He periodically checked the meter. The signal strength didn't move. Were they going to take all night to get to his box?

  As if his thoughts had provoked them, the meters on his receiver jumped. The distant one gained strength, and the closer one lost a bit.

  He stared at the cargo neatly stacked on the dock in front of him. If the box was among the items there, the signal on the closer meter should have gotten stronger instead of weaker.

  They're moving it in the other direction--away from the dock!

  But there was nothing there--no, wait, there was another ship at anchor a short way off, not yet docked.

  This one was Portuguese.

  Aha!

  Quickly Jay fumbled in the bag near the transmitter for the goggles he'd placed there. He pulled them out, huge fish-eye things that covered his eyes completely, making him look like a mad scientist. He flicked a switch on the goggles and the world suddenly stood out in sharp shades of red. He scanned the other ship--

  There! The crate glowed brightly in his field of view. The clear solution he'd sprayed it with contained faintly radioactive particles that would only show up when wearing goggles like his. He could see that a quartet of sailors was moving the crate to the other ship.

  CyberNation was slick, he had to give them that. Here in VR they were simply moving the crate to another ship. In reality they were sending the money on another trip around the world. It wouldn't actually hit the U.S. until this Portuguese ship reached the docks. Once there, though, Jay would be able to trace the package easily.

  He bet they would transfer it again. Maybe several more times, to further cloud the trail.

  Jay left his post at the edge of the rooftop and went to the aircraft he'd stashed deeper in the shadows. In 1935 they didn't have helicopters--they had the autogyro. Like a helicopter, the autogyro used rotors for lift. Unlike it, however, it was driven by a propeller, like a plane. The push from the propeller made the rotors spin, generating lift. A Spanish mathematician, Juan de la Cierva, had made the first successful flight in 1923. The autogyro didn't make a true vertical takeoff and landing--it did have to be pushed forward a little before lifting off, unless there was a stiff wind blowing--but it was good enough for his purposes. Gridley's model was a Pitcairn-Cierva PCA-2, the same kind used for mail delivery by some of the post offices of the era.

  God, he loved research!

  He fired up the tightly muffled Wright R-975-E2 Whirl-wind engine and the craft lurched forward, its thirty-foot rotors beginning to spin. It worked best into the wind, the stiffer the better, but with fog you didn't get much breeze.

  Within seconds he was airborne, tracking the crate.

  It was easy with the goggles, and he used the transmitter every now and then to confirm its route. These guys were good. The crate went to a Libyan freighter next, then a French steamer, followed by one out of Rio, and then to one from Greece.

  Then, at last, it was placed on the docks.

  Jay used a feature of the goggles to magnify the crate. A clear destination was now imprinted on the box: Washington, D.C. There was an account number, and even the name of the bank branch.

  He laughed, a low chuckle building to a sinister rumble: Moohoohahaaaaaaa!

  He had them now.

  5

  Washington, D.C.

  Three blocks from home, Toni watched Little Alex toddle down the sidewalk, his lurching run just a hair short of a fall with each step that he took. He was fearless, her son. Every time he tripped and went to his hands and knees on the concrete, scraping himself bloody, he got right back up and charged off again. Well, usually after a few tears, just to make sure she was paying attention.

  At the moment, the object of his attention was a sparrow. The small bird was cautious enough to keep hopping away as the boy lumbered toward it, but not frightened enough to take wing.

  Toni smiled. Somewhere in the back of an old photo album, there was a picture of her as a small child, maybe two or a little younger, sitting on the steps of her parents' place in the Bronx. Sitting perched on the stoop in front of her, not six inches away, was a bird--it had looked like a blue jay--easily within her reach. How had that bird come to be there? Why hadn't it been afraid of her?

  When she'd first seen the picture and asked her father about it, he had laughed and said it was a stuffed bird. Mama told her different, though. Mama was the one who had taken the picture, and she said the bird had just dropped down and alighted next to her, watching her. Toni hadn't tried to catch it, and it had stayed there for a long time. Mama was convinced that animals knew when there was a threat and when there wasn't, and believed that the bird had known that little Toni meant it no harm.

  Alex shambled off the sidewalk onto the lawn, and the sparrow did its little two-foot hop three or four times to one side and turned to look at him again. It wasn't as if the bird seemed to be afraid, except maybe about being accidentally stepped on--which was a real enough danger. It seemed more like it was curious.

  A mutual thing, that.

  Her virgil beeped at her. She unbelted it and saw it was Alex calling.

  "Hey, hon," she said. "What's up?"

  "Not much. Just calling to see how your day is going."

  "Great. I got home, and now the baby and I are out for a walk. Guru has gone to a movie."

  "Really?" Alex laughed. "What did she go to--some action-adventure thing with exploding heads?"

  "No, the new Tanya Clements romantic comedy."

  "Our Guru? The old lady who can beat up three Marines and a pro boxer at the same time?"

  "The very same."

  "I'm amazed. Mm." He paused, then changed the subject. "Listen, hon, I'm going to be running a little late. I have to be deposed by the lawyers on that CyberNation lawsuit. What did you have in mind for supper?"

  Toni smiled. "Whatever you were planning on bringing home from takeout."

  "Ah, I see. How's Indian?"

  "Sounds good. Get me the Chicken Masala. And
don't forget the dal and nan."

  "Your wish is my command, O mistress. Kiss our boy for me. I should be there around seven thirty."

  "Good. Love you."

  "I love you, too, Toni."

  After he discommed, Toni stuck the com back onto her belt and watched as the sparrow took off, having finally decided this monster about to fall on it might best be avoided at a greater distance. The bird flew into a tree, landing on a branch about ten feet up.

  Little Alex turned to look at her, his face clouding up. He pointed at the tree. "Mama! Bird! Get bird! Get bird!"

  As if she could. And as if he had every right to ask. He wanted it, therefore he should have it.

  She laughed. "Sorry, baboo, but Mama can't fly."

  He shook his head and looked very determined. "Mama. Get bird."

  She laughed again. What a wonderful child he was. Utterly convinced that he was the center of the universe. And why not? she thought. After all, she hadn't done much to disabuse him of the notion. She'd have to start doing that at some point. Otherwise, he was going to have problems when he ran into the other two-year-olds who were just as convinced that they were the sun around which all worlds revolved.

  More amazing, maybe, was that the boy had become the center of her universe. A career woman, marital artist, take-no-prisoners gal who now got mushy whenever her little baboo smiled at her. Who would have thought it?

  The sparrow took off again and vanished through the cherry trees.

  "Bird go bye-bye," Alex said. He looked crushed.

  "Yes. Bird go bye-bye."

  But the sparrow wasn't the only amusement on the block. A man walking a happy-looking German shepherd dog came toward them, and Alex's gloom at having lost the bird vanished in a big smile. "Woof-woof!" he said.