Changing of the Guard (24 page)

He walked carefully, feet close to the walls to be sure he didn’t cause the floor to squeak.

The bathroom door was just ahead, the sound of the shower louder now.

The door was open slightly, and Natadze used a tiny fiber-optic lens to peer around the gap. Should the target be looking, he would see only the tiny end of a glass fiber, almost invisible. The shower door was frosted glass, inside a tiled enclosure. There was no sign of anything else, anything to worry about. Clouds of vapor rose and flowed along the ceiling.

Was the man singing?

No matter. There would never be a better time.

He crept into the bathroom, quiet and smooth. Before the target could sense the change in air pressure in the room, he leveled his Korth at the shower and yanked the glass door open.

The man was old, very pale, covered in soap suds, liver spots and saggy flesh making for a most uninspiring picture.

The Russian jumped. To give him credit, though, the man didn’t scream, faint, or attempt to run. He merely sighed slightly and wiped some soap from his face.

He muttered something in Russian. Eduard lost most of it in the noise of the running water but it didn’t sound much like a warm greeting.

Natadze nodded. He pulled the towel from the rack with one hand, keeping his gun rock-steady with the other.

“Dry yourself,” he said. “We need to talk, you and I.”

John Howard talked to the Net Force guard outside Jay’s hospital room. One of four who were on duty at all times guarding Jay, he was the one people were supposed to see, perched on a chair in his uniform. Another guard, in a hospital gown and bathrobe and pushing an IV roller stand up and down the hall, was considerably less conspicuous, if no less well-trained and armed. There were two more guards in strategic locations on the floor who were, for all intents and purposes, invisible, using electronics for their surveillance. Anybody who wanted to pay a visit to Gridley and who wasn’t cleared wasn’t going to make it.

So far, no one who wasn’t supposed to be there had made any attempt to get into Jay’s room, but none of the Net Force personnel had relaxed their guard in the slightest.

Behind Howard, Alex Michaels waited. When Howard had finished talking to the guard, he turned back to his ex-boss.

“All quiet on the Gridley front?” Michaels asked.

“Actually, he’s talking up a storm. And even if somebody got past our people, Toni is still in there, right?”

Michaels smiled. “Oh, yeah.”

Howard said, “You and she heading off soon?”

“We’ll stick around until they let Jay go home. Doctor said a couple days.”

“It was good of you to stay.”

Michaels shrugged.

Howard said, “I talked to Thorn while you were in visiting. He’s on his way over. He’s also got a theory about why Jay got hit. He thinks it was the file the Turks gave us.”

“The Soviet spy list?”

“Yes. The revelations were moving toward the U.S. He thinks maybe one of the moles might have gotten wind of it somehow.”

“That would be a trick in itself.”

It was Howard’s turn to shrug. “Turkish security might not be as good as Net Force’s, and the Russians are still selling everything that isn’t nailed down—and some stuff that is. Maybe that information was valuable to somebody here.”

“A Soviet mole who didn’t want to be outed?”

Howard nodded. “Makes as much sense as anything else. We ran checks on the violent bad guys we’ve put away in the last couple of years. Anybody Jay took down who would likely be ticked off enough to want to shoot him is still in prison, as near as I can tell.”

“We didn’t get them all,” Alex said. “Remember CyberNation?”

Howard frowned. “I remember. The scar still itches when it gets hot and sunny. But they would probably try to hit you or me; we were a lot higher on that list.”

“Yeah. So what is Thorn doing about it?”

Howard shook his head. “Computer things. Digging in Jay’s files, looking for clues. He’ll probably be happy to have Gridley back in harness to help out—Jay will know more about his own stuff.”

“You’ll be keeping him guarded?”

“Of course. In addition to these guys, we’ve already got sub rosa people on Jay’s place. He won’t go anywhere without an armed Net Force shadow until we get this cleared. That goes for his wife, too.”

“Interesting that Saji is pregnant.”

Howard smiled. “That it is.”

“From what Toni said, those were the first words out of Jay’s mouth when he woke up.”

“Good for him. Hard to think of Jay Gridley as a father, though.”

“It ought to settle him down some. Teach him some patience.”

Howard and Michaels both grinned. Kids did that, no question.

Still in his office, Thorn read the FBI report again. He had heard that Jay was out of his coma, and had, in fact, been on the way out the door to go and see him, when his computer priority-one notice had chimed. He went back to check it.

It seemed that a man the Bureau strongly suspected was a Russian spy—a control—had been found dead in his home in Bridgeport, Connecticut, only a few minutes before. The locals were working the incident, but the Russian connection had the Bureau involved. It looked like an accident, according to the very sketchy on-line preliminary report by the Special Agent in Charge of the case, but he was suspicious. There was nothing specific, but the AIC was not convinced that the man, a doctor, had slipped in the bathtub and cracked his skull.

Even if the Agent in Charge was correct and this was more than a simple accident, there was nothing to connect it to the attack on Jay. Still, considering Thorn’s theories about Jay’s shooter, the report bothered him.

Jay had been working on a coded file that exposed hidden Russian spies around the world, and would likely have revealed more, right here in the U.S.

A man known to the FBI as a Russian agent, and more, one suspected of being a control—one who ran other spies—had died in a freak accident? Or maybe been killed in such a way as to make it look like an accident? That was . . . odd, to say the least. Enough to stick in Thorn’s mind.

The common term was “Russian spies,” which is what Thorn had set his tripbot to note when new law enforcement reports came in.

This was Thorn’s gift—that he could sometimes take two things that did not seem directly related and he could see a correlation. It had helped him come up with new ideas about software, it had even helped in his fencing bouts, and he had learned to trust it over the years.

These two events were connected. He knew it—in his gut, if not his mind.

But how?

The obvious thing was, somebody had killed one man, made it look like an accident, and tried to kill the other. How many assassins or would-be assassins could there be in this area?

Who could say for sure? Maybe there were dozens of them running around looking for victims. But he didn’t believe that, and—

What if there was just the one?

Forget for a minute the why of it. Just run with the idea that the guy who shot Jay also killed the Russian. What would
that
mean?

Thorn shook his head. What
would
it mean?

Well, it would mean that if you found one, you found the other.

And if you got him, you could maybe find out why he had done it, and maybe who had put him up to it. . . .

A hint of something touched him, as might his opal ring catching a ray of sunlight at just the right angle to gleam with a sudden bright flash of color:

Maybe there was a way to figure out who the assassin was—by the process of deduction.

Thorn knew he had to think large, to encompass all the possibilities. First, assume it was just one guy. He was obviously dealing with a professional who wouldn’t leave anything obvious with which to track him. The bug on Jay’s car had been a mistake, maybe, and they had done what they could with that—the records from every traffic cam, bank ATM machine, and Homeland Security invisible in the area of the spy electronic store had been accessed for the day the transmitter had been sold, but all that had given them were thousands of faces. They had run those against the ones in the law-enforcement archives, and the FFR—the Facial Feature Recognition software—had come up with a few bad guys who happened to be passing by, but none they could tie to the assassination attempt on Jay.

Of course, it could be that the shooter didn’t have a criminal record, any kind of security clearance, a passport, or even a driver’s license, so maybe his picture wasn’t accessible.

Can’t match what isn’t there.

What they needed was a cross-reference. If a camera anywhere near the dead Russian agent held an image of somebody who matched one of the faces in the electronics store?
Then
they’d have something. Neither set of images alone would do it, but together, the chances of a coincidence, of matching faces? That would be unlikely.

Gridley was awake and Thorn really needed to get by there to see him, but he could get this rolling before he headed for the hospital.

Thorn put in a call to the Intel Section of Homeland Security and got the woman in charge of the surveillance cams to provide Net Force with the Connecticut records on the day the Russian was killed.

Then he called the State Police, the Department of Transportation, and the local Sheriff’s office. Finally, he got a street directory of businesses around the location, and sent a blanket e-mail, asking them for their visual records on that date. He didn’t have a court order, but in these days, people felt that helping the government find somebody who was a killer and who might be a terrorist or a spy was worth doing.

The records would start to come in pretty quick, and the Super-Cray would run the matching software, looking for two identical peas in a very large pod.

There were a lot of things that could mess it up. Maybe it wasn’t the same guy. Or his image hadn’t been captured on one or both cameras. Or maybe it had been, but the shot was the back of his head or too fuzzy to make a match.

Those images that did look similar enough would kick out and ask for a human interpretation. All Thorn could do until then was wait. It could take weeks, or even months, and it could always come up empty.

But at least it was a place to start.

Now, to go pay a hospital visit. Maybe Jay himself had something to add to this.

 

Thorn had only known Jay for a short time before the shooting, but the man sitting in the bed in front of him didn’t seem like the man he remembered.

He looked the same physically, but the Jay Gridley he’d first met had a brash cockiness that had grated, particularly before he’d walked Jay’s VR stuff and realized Jay really
was
that good.

This man seemed a lot less sure of himself.

“Jay. How are you doing?”

“Commander. Other than being shot in the head and in a coma? I’m fine.”

He didn’t sound fine at all.

Thorn had arranged to have an FBI expert with identikit software come to the hospital—having Jay go into VR this early wasn’t, his doctor said, a good idea.

Thorn was trying not to be too hopeful, but if he could match the face he’d yanked from the traffic cam in New York with any kind of ID that Gridley could provide, that would be good.

“Thanks for agreeing to do this so soon—I’m hoping we can get a handle on this guy.”

“Me, too.”

The door behind him opened. A thin man with a slightly dreamy expression entered and smiled.

“Commander. Mr. Gridley. I’m Adrian Heuser, the ID artist.”

The artist sat down in one of the visitor’s chairs and pulled a rolling tray over so that Gridley could see it. “I understand you had a little trauma after you saw your, ah, shooter?”

Jay indicated his bandage. “Yeah. You could say that.”

I guess the lab rats don’t get out much,
Thorn thought.

“Normally we do this in VR, but we’ve got a flatscreen for you.” He put a small flat panel on a stand in front of Jay on the tray, “and one for me.” The second panel must have had a digitizer, because Heuser pulled out a stylus and tapped it several times.

“As much as you can, I want you to relax, and focus. I want you to go back to just before you were hurt, back to when you were watching. What are you doing?”

“Sitting in the car wondering why this jerk had cut me off.”

Heuser took Jay through it, asking questions, getting Jay’s input. The man’s stylus danced over his tablet, tapping out menus and putting down textures and color. He asked what Jay’s attacker was doing, what he was holding, how he stood, how he walked.

Jay was vague. Understandable, if frustrating.

A picture began to take shape on the flatscreen, a face with a gun alongside it. But it wasn’t all that clear. It could have been any generic white man, wearing a Band-Aid on his chin and thick glasses.

Not much help.

Heuser came at it from different directions; he was very smooth, but it was obvious that Jay had given him all he had. He saved the file and said he’d pipe it over to Thorn.

“Sorry I didn’t do better,” Jay said.

“You did fine, Jay. Don’t worry about it.”

Gridley smiled and nodded. “No problem there,” he said. “I’m
awake
. Not much to worry about after that.”

Cox had breakfast with the Natural Resources Minister of one of those emerging African states that had gone under three or four different names in the last fifty years. It didn’t much matter what the locals called it, only that they would be willing to deal with his companies for oil reserves they couldn’t really afford to exploit themselves.