"Huh?"

"Go on, ask me."

"Okay, what is the most important thing about-"

"Timing!" she said, cutting in.

He smiled. "Got it."

"You will, you will. Practice makes perfect. Now, again. Punch."

He stepped in, and threw another right, harder this time, and braced with his left hand.

She blocked it and demonstrated the counter. "Good," she said. "Again."

This was going well. Maybe the kris kris was lucky in love. Wouldn't that be nice? was lucky in love. Wouldn't that be nice?

Chapter Twenty-Four.

Tuesday, January 11th, 9:50 a.m. Bombay, India Jay Gridley walked into the small storefront tobacco shop to the jingle of a spring-mounted warning bell on the door frame. The bell tinkled again as the door closed behind him with a solid chunk chunk! The smoke shop was not far from Government House, on one of the danker streets facing Back Bay. The time was late 1890's, and the British Raj was still in full sway; Bombay was, of course, Indian, but the English flag draped heavily over the city, as it did the entire country.

Rule Brittania.

Inside, the shop was dark and hazy with fragrant blue smoke. The man behind the counter was also dark, a native, dressed in a white shirt and summer suit, and the smell of his blended pipe tobacco hung sweet and heavy in the still air. He took another puff from his heavy, curved briar, and added that smoke to the already abundant cloud.

A month-old copy of the London Times London Times lay upon the counter next to a large gla.s.s jar full of cheap cigars, a small wooden box of strike-anywhere matches, and a metal tray of cedar lighting sticks. lay upon the counter next to a large gla.s.s jar full of cheap cigars, a small wooden box of strike-anywhere matches, and a metal tray of cedar lighting sticks.

Jay himself wore a white linen suit and a tan planter's hat. He nodded at the shopkeeper. "You have other newspapers?" He waved at the Times Times.

"Yes, sir, we have them in the back, next to the humidor," the man said, in that singsong lilt of a native Indian who'd learned English only as an adult. He exhaled smoke with the words.

Jay touched his hat brim and moved to the shelves to the left of the counter, next to the closed gla.s.s door that led into the humidor room where the good tobacco and cigars were kept.

He glanced at the papers. There was The Strand The Strand, the New York Times New York Times, and something from Hong Kong in Chinese. Not what he was looking for-ah, there it was. The Delhi Ledger The Delhi Ledger, a small publication put out in English that sold mostly to expatriate Brits homesick for King and country. Or was it Queen and country? Sure, must be Victoria, it being the Victorian age and all. He ought to know his English history better, he supposed.

He thumbed through the cheap newsprint and smudged the ink, getting it on his fingers. Well, at least that was a nice touch.

Ah, there it was. The reference he had been trying to run down. The article was ostensibly about Danes come to visit India, but there in the fluffy travel piece was the name he wanted: The Frihedsakse Frihedsakse.

Once upon a time, Jay would have thought it was odd to find a bit of information about Denmark in an Indian infonet, but not anymore. Information was like dust; it blew around in the wind and wound up in places you'd never think it would. The logical place to start hunting for information on a Danish terrorist organization would be in Denmark, or at least in the Scandinavian countries, and certainly he had combed through those nets with the best search engines and squeekbots Net Force had, but he'd come up empty. So he'd widened his search, and this was the first real hit he'd had. Time was pa.s.sing-it had been a week without any real leads-and while it had been quiet, there was no guarantee it would stay that way. He took the paper to the front, paid for it, and went out into the Indian afternoon. It was overcast. What time of year was it? Monsoon season? He was getting slack in his old age. There was a time when such a detail would never have gotten past his scenario research, even if he'd been in a hurry. Oh, well. Things changed. While it was still important to look good, getting the job done counted for more.

Tuesday, January 11th, 10:15 a.m. Blackloun, New South Wales, Australia Jay had switched from his tropical linens into an Abercrombie & Fitch khaki outfit, shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, complete with stout walking shoes and a pinned-up Australian bush hat. His next stop was a small library in Blacktown, just north and west of Sydney. It was the middle of summer, and warm, and the library was not air-conditioned, even though he'd picked a contemporary time to run his scenario.

Not a bad transition for a couple minutes' work.

"Can I help you, sir?" the librarian asked. Jay loved Australian accents. He used them for secondary characters all the time.

"Yes, ma'am, I'm looking for this periodical." He put a slip of paper onto the woman's desk. She put on her reading gla.s.ses and looked at it.

"Oh, right. In the magazine section, go past the record kiosk, on your left, about halfway down the rack."

"Thank you, ma'am."

"You're American, right?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Nice to make your acquaintance then."

Jay smiled, tipped his hat, then headed for the magazine racks. This was perhaps a little more time-consuming than a non-VR search, but if he couldn't have fun, why bother?

Tuesday, January 11th, 10:30 a.m.. Rangoon, Burma Jay found a mention of Frihedsakse Frihedsakse in a backline infonet connected to a major shipping company. Not much, just an unconfirmed rumor, connected to the sinking of an oil tanker. Well. Great avalanches from little s...o...b..a.l.l.s sometimes grew. He gathered the information in and moved on. in a backline infonet connected to a major shipping company. Not much, just an unconfirmed rumor, connected to the sinking of an oil tanker. Well. Great avalanches from little s...o...b..a.l.l.s sometimes grew. He gathered the information in and moved on.

Tuesday, January 11th, 10:40 a.m. Johannesburg, South Africa In a police station in Boksburg, a man arrested for stealing a car had been searched. There had been nothing in the arrestee's wallet save a business card, upon the back of which was the handwritten word Frihedsakse Frihedsakse. Next to the word was an old-style internet-provider ID number. The IP probably wasn't active, but that didn't matter. If it had ever been active, there were ways to trace it.

A quick check of the dates on the information showed that it had been in the police system for five months. A pix of the card had a day and time stamp on it as verification of the item's log into the evidence locker at the central storage vault in Johannesburg.

Jay collected the card. He grinned. These terrorists didn't know who they were messing with. He was Jay Gridley, the man who had run the mad Russian programmer to ground. These balrogs didn't have a prayer.

Tuesday, January 11th, 10:50 a.m. Kobe, j.a.pan At a beef ranch in Kobe, somebody had broken in and stolen, of all things, a case of beer, which was to be fed to the cattle. Investigating policemen had no clues, save one: Scrawled on the wall next to ten cases of beer that had been left behind was the word Frihedsakse Frihedsakse in kanji. in kanji.

Jay made note of that.

So it went, a tiny bit here, an even smaller bit there. This was sometimes the way of computer sievework. You strained slowly, but very fine. If you did it right, you might come up with a bunch of pieces so small that none of them would mean anything but, puzzled together, you might have something. Jay was gathering his ducks. When he had enough of them, he would put them into a row. And when he had enough ducks in a neat row, he would get some answers. And then?

Well, we'll just see, won't we? I got your fried s.e.x right here, pal...

Tuesday, January 11th, 11:15 a.m. Miami Beach, Florida Platt strolled along one of the touristy streets near the ca.n.a.l, enjoying the seventy-degree weather. Around him, people walked, dressed in all the bright colors of the rainbow, plus a bunch of colors not found anywhere naturally. Old, young, white, black, domestic, foreign, Miami Beach was always cookin', there was always action. It might be snowin' like a sonofab.i.t.c.h up north, in Washington or New York City, and still be practically summer down here in the land of sin.

Life was sure grand when you could just pick up and go to where you could walk around in a T-shirt and shorts in the middle of the winter.

Platt ambled along, not going anywhere in particular, just strolling, soaking up a few minutes of the warm sunshine before he had to go back into his room and plug into the net.

He watched a black girl in a tank top and short shorts stride by, and smiled at her big and tight backside after she pa.s.sed. Fine-lookin' woman.

A tall man in a purple crushed-velvet jumpsuit pa.s.sed on in-line skates, laughing. He was throwing quarters every which way, and had a pa.s.sel of children chasing him, scooping up the change.

Platt pa.s.sed two window-shopping old ladies, all in lime green and hot pink, baggy Bermuda shorts and halters, both of them burned leathery and the color of dark toast, but with silicone implants that were the only things not sagging on them. The old broads must be in their seventies or eighties, and their faces were pulled so tight by plastic surgery that their fake b.o.o.bs probably bobbed up and down when they smiled.

If there were some kind of big disaster that destroyed a lot of civilization's records, then maybe a thousand years from now, when some scientist got to digging up old coffins or s.h.i.t, he might scratch his head and wonder when he opened them: Why were there so many caskets with these two little plastic sacks of Dow Jell-O in there with all the bones?

Fake b.o.o.bs didn't do it for Platt. Didn't matter how big they were if they weren't real. h.e.l.l, if he wanted to handle stuff like that, he'd just go on down to the hardware store and buy himself a couple of tubes of bathtub caulk. Go on home, squirt a couple of big blobs into bowls and let them dry, squeeze that. Sheeit...

Platt grinned again. He was just stalling, so he wouldn't have to go back to work. He sighed. Might as well get to it.

He didn't have any illusions about how good he was on the net. He was better than some, but not as sharp as the real experts. In VR, some of the Net Force players would dance circles around him in a head-to-head match. Thing was, tricky and pretty sharp beat real sharp every time. And the Net Force pukes were fooling themselves, so that helped a bunch.

Back after he'd first left home and gone on the road for a while, Platt had met an old grifter name of James Treemore Vaughn. Jimmy Tee, they called him. He was probably pushing seventy, had white hair, and looked just like your kindly old gramps. Kinda guy you'd trust with your wife, your kid, your money. Only Jimmy Tee was a con man, working the small cons by the time Platt had met him, though in his prime he had done a lot of second- and third-man parts in big stings. Earned big, spent big, didn't have a pot to p.i.s.s in. But he knew more about people than a trainload full of psychiatrists, hookers, and bartenders put together. He could rope a mark, sting him, and send him on his way thinking Jimmy Tee had done him a big favor.

They'd sat in a bar in Kansas City once, Big Bill Barlow's place, Jimmy Tee having a weakness for good blended whisky, and the old man had taught Platt a major lesson.

"Thing is, boyo, if you work it right, a mark will do most of the work for you. Yeah, you can set him up, hammer him good with the pitch, pull a fast close, and take off with the score, but if the mark knows he's been had, sooner or later he'll scream. A good con gets you the money. A great con gets you the money-and the mark doesn't know he's been had."

Platt was fascinated. "Yeah?" He waved at the bartender, who came over to fill up Jimmy Tee's gla.s.s.

"Oh, yeah. See, there's a lot of people out there who are faster, smarter, stronger, and meaner than you. You face off with them, you get the c.r.a.p kicked out you. A big guy comes at you, you don't try to block him b.a.l.l.s against b.a.l.l.s, you just redirect him a hair. Nudge him in a direction, and get out of his way. The trick is to make him think that's the way he wanted to go in the first place. You can do that, you can write your own ticket."

In the warm sunshine, Platt smiled again. Old Jimmy Tee had been dead and gone what? Five, six years? But his lesson had stuck.

The Net Force guys were looking for terrorists because that was what they were most afraid of. So, zap, Platt and Hughes gave them some terrorists. And the trick was to hide little clues here and there, hide 'em well enough so when the Net Force dogs went sniffin', they had trouble finding those little rabbits in their hidey-holes. If you were lookin' for somethin' you just knew was there and you couldn't find it, well, that made you look just that much harder.

This whole bulls.h.i.t Danish thing was Hughes's idea, but it was pretty smart. Platt had started planting stuff about the Fried Socks thing five or six months ago, so some of the clues were absolute boilerplate when it came to real time. Net Force could poke and prod at the information and no matter how they scanned it, it would come up real-well, at least real in that the thing had been sitting in somebody's memory archives since months before the manifesto showed up.

Some of the clues were yet to be put into place, but when they got there, they'd be backdated to seem as if they had been there for months or years. By the time the Net Force pukes got to those, they'd have checked the earlier stuff and found it to be more or less legit. So they would convince themselves that the later stuff was okay by the time they found it. They wouldn't bother to check, or if they did they'd do a half-a.s.sed job, since that was what they wanted to believe.

If it looks like a rabbit, smells like a rabbit, and hops like a rabbit, well, h.e.l.l, it's a rabbit, ain't it?

You give a guy a sack of coins and he dips into it and pulls out eight or ten at random and they all a.s.say out as pure 24-carat gold, he is gonna believe that all of the suckers in the bag are real. He'll figure no way anybody could tell which ones he'd pick, it's pure chance, so he's covered.

Guy like that would completely forget all the sleight of hand he'd ever seen, forget that there were magicians who could fan a deck and let him pick a card-any card-and the trickster would know what it was before the mark ever touched it.

The hand doesn't have to be quicker than the eye-if the eye doesn't know where to look.

The trick, Jimmy Tee had said, was not to embellish it too much. Just give the guy a direction and get out of his way. The smarter the guy was, the quicker he would fool himself. If you did it right.

Net Force was hot on the trail of a Danish terrorist group. Platt knew this because some very expensive and practically undetectable squeal programs had told him that the feds hunting for the terrorists had finally started to find his planted clues. Clues that were hidden enough so they had to work at finding them, and clues that were mysterious enough to keep 'em guessin'.

They didn't trust anything too easy. Most people figured if it didn't cost anything, it wasn't worth worth anything. But if they had to slog through a swamp, swatting at mosquitoes, then what they found hiding in the hollow of the third dead cypress on the left, well, h.e.l.l, that was why they'd come, right? anything. But if they had to slog through a swamp, swatting at mosquitoes, then what they found hiding in the hollow of the third dead cypress on the left, well, h.e.l.l, that was why they'd come, right?

Wrong. But that was the trick.

When the hounds caught the quarry's scent, when they knew for sure they were on the right track, then he could let them see the rabbit. When it took off running, they'd follow it. They'd never catch it, because it wasn't real. It was a phantom, a spook, a ghost.

And boy, it was gonna be fun to watch them chase that sucker.

But of course, the thing he had to do was make sure the hounds still wanted to chase the critter. So this afternoon, he was going to give 'em a new reason. A real good reason, this time...

Chapter Twenty-Five.

Wednesday, January 12th, 6:15 p.m. Washington, D.C.

Tyrone Howard pretty much wanted to die.

He lay on his bed, staring through the ceiling, unable to move for the weight of what Bella had dropped on him. He had replayed the conversation a hundred times in his head, and every time, it came out the same. There wasn't any wiggle room, no way to put a good face on it. She'd dropped him, blap, just like that.

He'd seen her at school, she'd acted just fine, and although he'd told himself he wasn't, he was not not going to say anything, in the end it had spewed from him in a hot blast, as if he'd been punched in the belly and the punch had knocked his words out with his wind. going to say anything, in the end it had spewed from him in a hot blast, as if he'd been punched in the belly and the punch had knocked his words out with his wind.

"So, meet anybody interesting interesting at the at the mall mall lately?" lately?"

Give her credit, she wasn't stupid and she didn't try to pretend she didn't know what he was talking about. Right there in the hall, outside his last-period cla.s.s, she let him have it, full spray, nozzle tight: "Maybe I did. What business is it of yours?"

Wham! Another punch to the gut. "What business is it of mine mine. Jesus, Bella, I thought we were-you and I-I mean, we were-"

"What? Married Married? Well, attenzione attenzione Ty-ree-o-nee, we are not. I like you, you're sharp, but I have other friends, you copy? I see them when and where I want. You praw that?" Ty-ree-o-nee, we are not. I like you, you're sharp, but I have other friends, you copy? I see them when and where I want. You praw that?"

He was too stunned to think about his response. Maybe if he'd thought about it, if he'd had time to consider it, what she said, he'd have said something else, but he didn't have the time. He said, "Yeah, I do have a problem with it."

She'd glared at him as if he'd slapped her. "Oh? Really? My game, my rules, that's how it is. You want to play, you play my way."

Then he really put his b.u.t.t into it. He said, "No. I don't think so."

That really really burned her. He thought she was going to spit on him for a second. Then she said, "Well, then, tell you what, slip, you just lose my com number, okay? I don't have time to be holding your hand and showing you what's what, little boy." burned her. He thought she was going to spit on him for a second. Then she said, "Well, then, tell you what, slip, you just lose my com number, okay? I don't have time to be holding your hand and showing you what's what, little boy."

And then she turned and left. His world went gray. He couldn't hear the students around him, couldn't see anything, couldn't feel anything-except a twist in his stomach. His gut was knotted as if he'd just jumped off the top of a very tall building and was in free fall. With the ground coming up fast...

On his bed, he replayed it again, searching for a small crack, a word that could have a double meaning that he had somehow missed, a magic word that, once he grasped it, would turn the whole conversation on its head and make it mean something altogether different. But he couldn't find it, that magic word. It just wasn't there.