No way. VR or dream, or whatever. He was Jay Gridley Jay Gridley , he was not going to let this happen! , he was not going to let this happen!

Jay ran, using every trick he could think of to alter the scene: imagery, focus points, meditation, and VR conjurations.

Nothing worked. The wave kept coming.

He ran faster, figuring that at least his body-or what pa.s.sed for it, wherever he was-was operating with a set of consistent physics.

But he wasn't going to make it. He got closer, though, close enough to see little fingers grasping his wife's shoulder as she started to breast-feed.

She doesn't see the danger.

The sound of the water coming had grown, and there was a feel of imminent threat, death coming, everybody out!

"Saji!" he yelled, as loud as he could, "Get out of here! Run! Run!"

He kept yelling as he ran, getting closer and closer. He thought about what he would do if and when he reached her. Run with her toward high ground, or at least try to find some kind of shelter- He glanced to his left and saw it. The swell had jumped up in size, the seabed forcing higher as it approached. He had seen some surfers once on TV, riding on sixty-foot waves, monsters that dwarfed them, making them look like toys.

This wave was bigger.

A lot bigger.

He screamed Saji's name again, and this time she heard him. She looked over, her eyes widening in surprise, and a smile beamed across her face.

No, no! Run! Run!

He gestured frantically toward the sea, and finally, chillingly, she looked.

Her face went pale, her eyes wide, and her mouth opened to scream. She turned away from the oncoming wave, tried to shelter the baby, but it was useless- They were swept away- Jay braced himself as best he could as the wave hit. He expected to be crushed, but some freak variation of the sh.o.r.eline must have saved him: The water thundered down, tossed him into the air, then carried him away, but somehow, he came to the surface, alive, uninjured.

Except for the emotional horror of it all. His wife and new baby hit by a wall of water! And him unable to do a thing about it!

It wasn't real. He clung to that small solace. It couldn't be real-but . . . what was was it? It certainly wasn't VR as he knew it. it? It certainly wasn't VR as he knew it.

His face felt as if it had been set in stone. This was not good. He was supposed to be in control.

He floated in the water, the taste of salt harsh in his mouth.

What was happening?

11.

University Park, Maryland Thorn didn't want to go home. The doctors at the hospital where Jay Gridley was lying in a coma had told him there wasn't much point in hanging around. Gridley was in no danger of dying-at least they didn't think so-and if he awoke, they would call.

Jay was alive, but the doctors didn't know when-or if-he would come back. The man who had shot him was still at large. Witnesses had described the man and his car, but the police had not found him.

By the time he left it was already past two A.M., and there didn't seem to be much point in going home. He would barely have time to get to sleep before he'd have to get up and head back to Net Force HQ. Besides, he was too wired to sleep.

Hospitals did that to him, ever since his grandfather had pa.s.sed away. At the end, the old man had checked himself out of the hospital and gone home to die in his own bed surrounded by his family, but he had spent a week full of tubes and needles before he'd had enough, and Thorn had spent much of that week there with him. The smells, the look, they came back every time he had to go to one of those places.

Halls of the dead and dying, his grandfather had called hospitals, and if he was going to die anyway, what point was there in spending large amounts of somebody's money to do it?

No, Thorn didn't want to go home to an empty house, but, outside of his Net Force office, he didn't really have anywhere else to go. Heading to his house, he opened a beer and went on-line, hoping for a distraction.

He found one.

His mailbox was stuffed with more than three hundred e-mails.

He opened the first one. It, and most of the others, were from his troll.

Wonderful.

Rapier, the troll who haunted him, had apparently generated a repeating message that was, if unchecked, eventually going to fill Thorn's hard drive with his drivel: "Hahahhaa, Thorn! Touche!"

That was all it said, repeated fifty times per message, and continuing to come in one e-mail at a time every few minutes. If Rapier had tried to dump more than two megabytes at once, Thorn's filters would have stopped it, but dribbling in as short e-mail with different return addresses-all false ones, Thorn was sure-the spam- and size-filters let them pa.s.s.

Thorn took a sip of his beer and glared at the screen. Given how the rest of his day had been, he did not need this.

He deleted the e-mails, reset his filters to stop anything from the e-mail server Rapier was using, and decided that maybe hunting this guy down and getting him tossed off his server was the least he could do.

The basic process was fairly simple to start. First, you did the obvious check-the sender's e-mail return address. Thorn had noted several of the ones Rapier had used, all from the same IP.

Thorn blipped a quick message cc:ed to the addresses he'd noted. After a few seconds he got a bounce from the server, in this case, boohoo.com, that his messages were undeliverable.

Big surprise there.

He pulled up the troll's most recent posting to the newsgroup and checked the header, next to the HELO sig. There was a ten-digit number, broken by dots, that identified the sending machine. Of course, that couldn't be relied upon, since there were ways it could also be faked, but it was a place to start. Next to that was the receipt date that the ID'd server showed, followed by the routing info as the posting was shuttled into UseNet.

Thorn logged into the Internet registries, starting with the American Registry-ARIN. From his language and spelling, Thorn figured that Rapier was an American.

Once on the ARIN site, he ran a WHOIS search on the IP address and sure enough, the address was in the ARIN database.

The WHOIS came up, and at least it was a legitimate addy-the inetnum, netnam, and description showed it to be a small server located outside of Chicago, BearBull.com. What he was looking for were the contacts for the IP, and there they were, two of them.

Using his official Net Force address, Thorn fired off an e-mail to both:

Dear Sirs,I am seeking your a.s.sistance in locating a client of yours who has apparently violated federal law regarding use of the Internet. I would appreciate any a.s.sistance you might render in this matter.

He listed the particulars of the e-mail, and then he signed it, "Thomas Thorn, Commander, Net Force."

This was a big hammer to use. Yes, technically the troll was breaking the law-stuffing a mailbox was illegal, under the denial-of-service statutes, though hardly something Net Force was going to go after, and if the IP didn't want to provide the information, Thorn wasn't going to run to Legal and get a warrant. Then again, he'd probably get a reply in a day or so, and maybe- His e-mail program chinged! chinged! and an incoming message header appeared: From and an incoming message header appeared: From BearBull.com.

Look at that-must be an automatic response- Nope, apparently the BearBull Webmaster was a night owl:

Commander Thorn-Sir, our records indicate that the machine you asked about belongs to Access & Eats, a cybercafe located west of Chicago in the Oak Brook Mall, in the city of Oak Brook. The owner's name is Dennis James McMa.n.u.s. . . .

There was a phone number, e-mail address, and a webpage listed under the name, along with an offer to do anything to help Net Force that they could.

Thorn shook his head and smiled. Well, so much for tracking down his troll. The guy was clever enough to use a public computer, and that made it a lot harder to finger him. Of course, had he been a real terrorist, Thorn could have called upon the FBI to trot field agents out to the mall to find the guy, but for a troll? No way. Not a good idea to start one's tenure as head of a law enforcement agency by indulging in a personal vendetta. . . .

Then again, there was nothing wrong with asking questions as a private citizen. He could drop Mr. McMa.n.u.s an e-mail, ask him if he had a regular customer who maybe talked about fencing. Certainly Rapier spent a lot of time on-line, he must be in and out of the cybercafe often enough so maybe somebody would have noticed him?

As Thorn recalled, the University of Chicago had a pretty good fencing team, at least it had been back when Thorn had been competing in college. He'd gone to a tournament there once, got to the semifinals in epee before he lost to Parker King, which had been no shame, since King had gone on to win the NCAA finals and, eventually, a Bronze in the Olympics.

Maybe somebody there knew Rapier?

He shook his head. Say, do you know a troll who bugs people on UseNet, calls himself "Rapier?" Say, do you know a troll who bugs people on UseNet, calls himself "Rapier?"

For all he knew, anybody he asked could be the guy, and wouldn't that be an unpleasant experience? Having Rapier field his call and know he had gotten to him?

Of course, it might scare him off, getting a call from Thorn, but then again, maybe not, and he didn't want to give the troll the satisfaction of knowing he had rattled Thorn's cage.

Time to give it up, Tom. You have other things to occupy your time. It's just a troll, a pathetic man with no life. Let him stew in his own juices.

Before he shut down, he tapped in the URL for the cybercafe's webpage.

The splash page came up, with a directory, and Thorn clicked on the biography for the cafe's operator.

Dennis James McMa.n.u.s was a slight, fair-skinned red-head, balding, about Thorn's age, a serious, almost scowling expression on his face. He leaned against a dark wall, arms crossed, practically glaring at the camera.

An unhappy man, Thorn reflected. Looked familiar, somehow, though Thorn couldn't place him. Oh, well. Thorn reflected. Looked familiar, somehow, though Thorn couldn't place him. Oh, well.

He was about to log off, had, in fact, hit the quit b.u.t.ton on his browser, when he noticed a word in the bio, just a quick flash as the page blinked off: Epee.

h.e.l.lo?

Thorn quickly logged back on and read the bio.

Apparently, Mr. McMa.n.u.s had been a collegiate fencing champion in Ohio.

Well, well, well. How about that . . . ?

Gotcha!

Walter Reed Army Medical Center Washington, D.C.

John Howard was talking to Julio when he looked up and saw Alex and Toni Michaels heading toward them.

"Alex, Toni. I thought you were in Colorado."

"We almost were," Michaels said. "We caught a flight back as soon as we heard. How is he?"

"Julio talked to Saji a few minutes ago-she's in the ICU with him."

Fernandez nodded. "No change. He's unconscious. The bullet apparently broke apart when it hit the windshield, and about a third of it glanced off his forehead, just above the right eye, dug a b.l.o.o.d.y groove, but did not penetrate the skull. It hit him hard enough to rattle his brain, and he is in shock. Everything else seems to be working okay, but he hasn't come around and n.o.body is quite sure why."

Michaels nodded. "What about the guy who shot him?"

Howard shook his head. "No sign of him."

"Why did he do it?" Toni asked.

Again, Howard shook his head. "We don't know. We've got some witnesses who said a car cut him off, a guy hopped out and headed for Jay. He had a gun. Jay tried to back his car away and the guy opened up on him. One shot-ballistics says it looks like a Thirty-eight Special or Three fifty-seven Magnum round, from the pieces they dug out of the car."

"Road rage?" Toni said.

"Looks like," Howard said.

"Cops have any idea who they are looking for?"

"A tall-short-fat-thin-blond-brunette-white-black guy," Fernandez said. "Joe Average, wearing gla.s.ses, moustache, had a band-aid on his chin."

Michaels said, "Anybody thinking that maybe it wasn't some angry commuter? Maybe somebody targeting Jay in particular?"

Julio and Howard glanced at each other. "The thought had crossed our minds. We've got somebody going over Jay's e-mail and phone log, checking on all the projects he was working on, like that. Thing is, Jay isn't the kind of guy whose enemies pack guns-most people who'd be after him would use software at ten paces."

"Anything we can do to help?" Michaels asked.

Howard shrugged. "The new Commander was here-the doctors told us all to go home, and he did. We're running down everything we can think of now. We were just fixin' to head out ourselves."

"Can we see him?" Toni asked.

"Yeah. Check with the nurse's station, he can have two or three people in at a time. I'm sure Saji will be glad to see you."

"Who's watching your son?" Fernandez said.

"Guru," Toni said. "He'll be fine."

Howard smiled a little. The old lady they called "Guru" was the woman who had taught Toni the martial art silat silat, at which she was a deadly expert. The woman had to be pushing ninety, and Howard wouldn't want to mess with her if he had a ball bat and a knife. That little old lady could kill you with either hand and never work up a sweat.

"We'll go check on him," Michaels said.

"You need a place to stay?" Howard said.

"Hadn't thought that far ahead."