He sighed. Yeah. Apparently so.

But that didn't matter. He was going home.

25.

Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia Even though he knew it was theoretically possible, Thorn hadn't really believed he'd be that lucky. Now and again, it happened, just often enough to keep him from discounting it.

The Super-Cray had come up with a match on Jay's shooter and whoever killed the dead Russian.

Alone in his office, Thorn had his holoproj float the two images side-by-side. The picture on the left was from a bank ATM cam near the spy goods store-the man hadn't been using the machine, but had been walking past it in the background, behind a woman withdrawing money from her account. Forty dollars, according to the ATM's records. It was not the sharpest picture in the world, and only caught him from about the knees up, but it showed a dark-haired man of perhaps thirty-five glancing in the camera's direction. A scale running down the size of the image showed his height in centimeters, based on the known height of a NO PARKING sign on a post behind him. He was about six feet tall.

The woman, a young and attractive brunette who was visible only from the chest up and blocking most of the frame, wore a skimpy red halter top that had trouble keeping her rather voluptuous b.r.e.a.s.t.s in check, and if the rear view was as interesting as the front one, Thorn guessed that this was the reason the pa.s.sing man was looking over his right shoulder her way. He was checking her out.

That would mean he was heteros.e.xual.

Or maybe he was gay, she had on designer pants, and he was admiring those.

Or maybe she had a puppy standing next to her and he was a dog breeder . . . ?

Leave that for now.

The second image was taken by a traffic cam covering an intersection in southern Connecticut, the town of Bridgeport, four miles away from where the Russian spy's body had been found. A car was halfway through the intersection, making a clear right-hand turn on a red light, right next to a NO TURN ON RED sign. The traffic cam had snapped an image, showing the driver and the front of the car with its license plate, all neat for the local authorities to run the plate and mail the driver a ticket. The picture was date and time stamped.

The driver was an elderly woman, white-haired, and barely able to see over the top of the full-sized Cadillac's steering wheel.

But: Behind that car, stopped behind the crosswalk, was a new Dodge, and seated at the wheel of that car was a dark-haired man whose head was surrounded by a pulsing red circle.

"Enlarge two hundred percent. Unsharp mask, selected field, on image two," Thorn said. "Apply reasonable extrapolation generator."

The computer obeyed, doubling the size of the image inside the circle, sharpening it, and augmenting the colors and shapes rendered based on a specialized enhancement program, the REG.

It looked like the same man to Thorn, but the big thing was that the Cray thought so, too. It had a much higher accuracy rating than Thorn's eyes.

"List facial feature matches, normal tolerances."

A pair of grids showing sizes blossomed, one under each image. The computer brought the two grids together into one image in the middle. All the features that were plus or minus a millimeter lit in flashing red for a beat, then locked. There were twelve matches of the eighteen factors scanned.

Same size nose, same size right ear, same distance between pupils, same ratio of forehead to ear height to chin angle . . .

Thorn didn't need to go any further. Once you hit five major facial points, it was either the same guy or his twin brother, and Thorn didn't think that was likely.

This was the guy who had bugged Jay's car, shot him, and who had killed the Russian spy. Thorn was sure of it.

"Ha!" he said. "You are mine, mine, pal!" pal!"

Unfortunately, it wouldn't be that easy. He searched the rest of the file, but there was no obvious way to identify the man-at least none that the Super-Cray had been able to come up with. The Cadillac in the foreground blocked the bottom of the car the shooter had been in, so there was no license plate visible. No other images of that car were in the traffic cam, and if the Cray hadn't seen him elsewhere in its strain, then it wasn't like a set of human eyes would do any better.

"Print images," he said.

Thorn pa.s.sed out hard copies of the holographs to General Howard, Colonel Kent, and Lieutenant Fernandez.

"This is the guy?" Howard said.

Thorn nodded. "I believe so, yes. What's the word on Jay?"

Fernandez said, "He's checked himself out of the hospital and gone home. We have guards watching the house. Saji says he's planning to head back into VR and start looking."

Thorn frowned. "VR? I would think the doctors would want him to stay out of that for a while."

Howard nodded. "They do, but Jay's more stubborn than they are."

Thorn said, "I'll call him and pa.s.s this along when we're done. "I've run the driver's license databases from all fifty states through the mainframe. The Super-Cray is checking all military photo records, current pa.s.sports, and federally incarcerated prisoners-nothing yet. NCIC and CopRec databases are matching the image through local and state jail and prison systems, and that will take a while even with big crunchers. If he's in the system, we'll find him. Eventually."

"You want us to go out on the streets looking?" Fernandez asked.

Thorn smiled. "The regular FBI is doing that already. They've got agents flashing these pictures in the vicinity of the spy store, the area where Jay was shot, and in the dead Russian's neighborhood."

"Good. At least that'll give them something to do," Fernandez said. "What's this on his fingernails?"

Thorn frowned. "What?"

Fernandez pointed at the picture. "Looks like he is wearing nail polish on his right hand, see?"

The picture was too small to see more than a little gleam.

Thorn tapped the computer console on the conference table, called up the ATM image, and had it focus on the right hand-the left was behind him and out of sight. The computer enlarged and enhanced the hand.

A little fuzzy, but sure enough, it looked like the guy had fairly long fingernails, neatly manicured, and they did seem awfully shiny. Kind of an odd, slanted shape, angled to one side. That didn't mean anything to Thorn, though.

"What's the other hand look like?" Kent said.

"Can't see it," Howard said. "Miz Halter Top there is blocking it."

Thorn called up the other picture, in the car. The man's left hand was on the car's steering wheel, at about ten o'clock. He had the computer magnify and enhance the image. It was grainy, not as sharp as the ATM image of the right hand, but it appeared as if the nails on that hand were much shorter and duller. Odd . . .

"He's a guitarist," Kent said.

"What?" Thorn said.

"I have a nephew, in Tucson, Arizona, my sister's oldest son, who teaches music at the local U. He plays cla.s.sical guitar, and that's what his hands look like. Nails on his right hand are long, polished, and angled, and the ones on his left are clipped short-it's how you play the instrument."

The others looked at him.

"You pluck the strings with your nails, but if you have long nails on the other hand, the strings buzz when you fret them-at least that's what my nephew told me."

"So maybe he's a country-western guy, or bluegra.s.s or folk music player," Fernandez said. "Even a rock star."

Kent said, "Could be, but rock stars mostly flat-pick, and acoustic guitars have steel strings. Fingernails simply don't hold up against those, so those guys wear curved finger-picks or have fake nails. Cla.s.sical guitars have nylon strings."

"How do you know all this?" Thorn asked.

"When I was stationed outside Atlanta, one of my sergeants was a serious blues guitarist. I used to go and listen to him play at local clubs, and I picked up a few things here and there."

"And you remembered it?" Julio asked.

Kent looked at him. "Not everybody older than you is automatically senile, Lieutenant."

"No, sir," Fernandez said. "Point demonstrated and taken."

General Howard grinned.

"Does this help us?" Kent asked.

Thorn nodded. "Absolutely. If nothing else, it's another place to look. And something tells me there are not a lot of cla.s.sical guitarist hit men around."

Washington, D.C.

Jay sat in the command chair of the Deep Flight V Deep Flight V, and stared out at the inky black water over two miles below the surface of the ocean.

He tapped instructions on the keyboard and the deep-sea submersible tilted to the right-starboard-and headed toward an odd-looking pile of silt. At this depth there wasn't much moving except him. Vaguely nautical-sounding music played out over the stereo, and there were odd creaks and groans from the structure around him caused by intense pressure from the ocean.

Except that he just didn't feel feel it. He wasn't it. He wasn't there there. It wasn't real real.

He frowned and shook his head. I was sure this would work. I was sure this would work.

Even as he thought it, he knew that it wasn't true. He'd wanted it to work, but he hadn't really believed it would.

He sat in the media room of the apartment he and Saji lived in, the 270-degree panorama projection screens at one end of the room lit up with images from his VR simulation. He was looking for a Spanish treasure fleet lost in the late 1500s. But when he leaned back, he could feel the upholstery of the chair, and hear the purr of the ventilation system. He even thought he could hear Saji rattling around in the kitchen, though that could be his imagination.

He frowned again.

You're going to have to do it, Gridley.

After spending subjective months inside his head, in a world similar to VR but not as controlled, he found that he was loathe to leave reality. No, more than that. He was afraid afraid-if only a little bit-to leave reality. He knew you couldn't get trapped in VR. It just wasn't possible. But then he'd always believed that you couldn't get trapped inside your own head, either.

He'd devised a non-VR metaphor to break the code that had put him in the hospital. He'd built a simulation he could run from a flatscreen, a remotely operated vehicle sim that searched the ocean floor while he sat in his desk. He'd been hopeful that it might work, that it would let him wait a while before going back into artificial reality.

But it just didn't do the job. Not even close.

So he'd taken the next step, programmed the media room for near-full VR immersion, and created a sim that put him inside a submarine. That worked better. He was more engaged. But it still was not enough.

No, not nearly enough.

Jay's edge, his best trick, was using all of his senses in VR. Limiting himself to vision only, or even audio and visual, was like cutting off his arms or legs. It felt wrong.

He took a deep breath and saved his location before killing the sim. He stared at the VR gear hanging on the rack, feeling a slight chill.

Can't be a VR jock unless you do VR, Jay, said a voice in his head. Was he ready to give it all up? Not go back because he was said a voice in his head. Was he ready to give it all up? Not go back because he was afraid? afraid?

No.

Besides, he had to find the guy who had done this to him. Before he came back and found a way to put Jay back inside his own head permanently.

He called up several research databases and began to construct what he needed. He took his time, writing code segments that added to the reality of the VR, making it more detailed than necessary. One of the things he'd realized from his experience was that most VR wasn't as good as his unconscious-even his.

But after a while he realized he was just stalling.

"Saji," he called out. "I'm going in."

"I know." Her voice was faint from the kitchen, but he smiled at the sound. She knew. She always knew. And she'd be there to help him if somehow, someway he got into trouble. Not that he would, but . . .

He closed the file window and pulled his stims off the rack. The movement was familiar and practiced, and within seconds he was ready to jack in. He reached inside his desk drawer and got a large binder clip. He pried it open and clamped it on the loose flesh behind and above his left elbow.

Ow.

It didn't hurt too much, but the pressure was there. He jacked in and suddenly found himself on the floor of the ocean.

It was cold and dark. He looked down, pointing some of the bright LED lamps on his modified Mark 27 Navy diving helmet at the ground, and watched his feet sinking into the muck. He adjusted his buoyancy so that he was just touching the surface.

He'd forgotten to breathe. He inhaled sharply, feeling a push into his lungs from the flow amplifier in the helmet. He nearly coughed, which wouldn't have accomplished much, except to push more of the Perfluorocarbon fluid filling the helmet out of his lungs just a little faster.

The fluid he was breathing made diving at this depth a little easier, because it didn't compress the same way a gas would. Although it still hadn't been approved for general use, military and special research units all over the world had started using Perfluorocarbon fluid for deep dives once they'd solved the carbon dioxide removal and inertia problems.

Weird.

He felt like he should be choking, but he had plenty of air, didn't feel faint at all.

The silt pile he'd identified earlier was just ahead on the right. Jay activated the deep-dive Sea-Doo seascooter he'd brought with him, and it pulled him toward the pile of silt.

As he neared it, he could see that it seemed to be regularly shaped, which gave him hope; the regularity of man-made shapes was a big part of finding salvage in the sea.

He cut the forward motion of the seascooter and let it hang in the water. Green and red lights circled it, so he could find it at this depth, even if his suit lights went out.

The cold dug at the suit, trying to get in.

His left arm was still feeling clamped, and he had a moment where he knew knew he was in his own home. For that moment, everything seemed artificial before he suspended his disbelief and let himself come back to the VR scenario as his baseline reality. he was in his own home. For that moment, everything seemed artificial before he suspended his disbelief and let himself come back to the VR scenario as his baseline reality.

He shook his head. He was still fighting this, as bad as a first-timer exploring the near edge of VR.