Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 (94 page)
The pyramid before him held the ruined throne room he needed. Jay stood at the entrance, planning his attack.
At its peak, the room must have been stunning, but hundreds of years in the warm jungle climate had taken its toll. There were still beautiful stone carvings on the less exposed sections of the walls, and the huge pillars holding up the sagging roof maintained a sense of grandeur despite the clinging vines and cracks that marred them. But mold and decay permeated the ancient stones, from which an almost visceral miasma seemed to whisper the demise of all things man-made.
He grinned at himself.
Not bad, Gridley, not bad at all.
Not bad, Gridley, not bad at all.
Whatever force had caused the end of the ancient kingdom had motivated the fleeing king to install traps in the room—it was a maze of death. To encourage his ancient foes to enter this trap, the king had left his jeweled scepter on the throne.
All Jay had to do was cross the floor to get it.
The problem was that the large blocks of stone that made up the floor of the room weren’t all solid. If he stepped on the wrong block, he’d fall into a pit filled with who knew what.
Well, actually, he did know what—snakes. Lots and lots of snakes.
Of course he wasn’t
really
traversing an ancient throne room. He was trying to crack the data he’d found. Unfortunately, the printed label had vastly increased the difficulty of the decoding process.
really
traversing an ancient throne room. He was trying to crack the data he’d found. Unfortunately, the printed label had vastly increased the difficulty of the decoding process.
In most code-breaking scenarios, the encoded data was run through a sifter that would find patterns, which revealed letters. But there were several factors complicating this particular code.
First, Iran had over seventy living languages—picking the right one to sift was a critical part of the process, and not the most difficult. The majority of the languages in the country used Arabic script as an alphabet, which had twenty-eight letters instead of English’s twenty-six. Western Farsi, the most commonly used language, added an extra five characters to that, taking it to thirty-three—and making the code-breaking several orders of magnitude more difficult.
On top of that, the Arabic/Farsi alphabet had been represented by three different encoding systems since it had migrated to the computer. In the late twentieth century, back in the days when computer standards were still up for grabs, there had been no less than two different character sets for Arabic—one for Unix and Macintosh systems, and another for the Windows world. Then unicode had come along—a larger character set that made it easier to standardize. And the letters could be in any of the three, depending on the hardware used to generate them.
But all of that was relatively easy compared to the way the data had been encoded.
None of the 2-D codes he’d examined so far matched the ones on the zip disk label. Treating the border as four long strips of data had proven fruitless, which meant it had to be in blocks. Before he could sift it, he had to get it into the computer.
Without orientation markers, he couldn’t tell which way the blocks ran—and to get enough data to make up an encoded sequence, he’d have to get several blocks in a row, so that he could see if it was encoded sequentially.
To make matters worse, he wasn’t even sure that the blocks were on an axis that was parallel or perpendicular to the borders of the label. Many 2-D encoding schemes had enough error correction that they could lose up to 25 percent of their visual area and still be decoded at 100 percent accuracy. This code could have been rotated off-axis to make things really tough.
He grinned, his tanned-and-grizzled face wrinkling. His old brown leather bomber jacket creaked as he leaned forward to stare at the gray stones. He had an urge to hum the theme from
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
but he refrained.
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
but he refrained.
Which way, which way . . . ?
He stared at the mortar between the stones. Did it look newer on the right or left?
Left.
Carefully, he began to put his weight on the stone to the left of the entry. Slowly he increased the pressure until nearly all of it rested on the stone he’d selected.
He enjoyed a moment’s satisfaction before the block abruptly fell out from underneath him. Jay toppled, started to fall, and lashed out with the twelve-foot bullwhip he was carrying, wrapping it around a stone outcropping on the wall nearby and yanking. The effort pulled him back to where he’d started.
I guess it’s not to the left.
The trap was clever—it wouldn’t trigger until a heavy weight rested upon it. If he’d been standing there with both feet, it would have been “So long, Gridley.”
He peered over the edge of the broken-off stones—more than one had fallen, to widen the danger area—and saw nothing but blackness. But there was a hint of sound—was it hissing? Slithering? Yes, definitely, both. He couldn’t hope that the falling block had killed all the nasty wigglers down there.
He could brute-force it—drop weights on all the stones in the room and see which ones were left, but the idea offended his sense of style.
Someone clever had put the code together, and Jay wanted to figure out the key to the puzzle. There
was
a key, of course, there had to be. Any programmer who played the game this well always left a way in.
was
a key, of course, there had to be. Any programmer who played the game this well always left a way in.
After all,
he
would.
he
would.
So while he could easily run the numbers through the machine, he wanted to beat it himself.
He took a closer look around the room. As he usually did when he created VR based on a puzzle, he’d let a freeform algorithm give substance to the puzzle pieces after supplying base parameters. This was, as he saw it, the real advantage of a VR structure—a place that could have clues, things that hadn’t been programmed consciously, to give his other senses a chance to help crack it. If he could cross the room, he’d have gotten enough blocks in a row to identify at least a part of the code.
Think, Jay, think!
He could go right, or angle off diagonally. . . .
He stopped and thought for a moment about the programmer. The man was clever—he’d hidden the code in plain sight.
But he’d hidden it on a disk about a Muslim mosque. What kind of man would have such a disk in his possession to use as camouflage?
A devout one.
Jay stepped to the east, the direction of Mecca, the way Muslims face during their prayers every day. He kept his whip ready to sling out and grab onto something if necessary.
The stone was safe. No trap, no danger.
Aha!
There was still room to continue in the direction he’d started, so he took another step, glancing down at the floor as he did so.
The stone gave way, and he just managed to lurch backward to safety.
Damn!
Now he could go forward, angle left, or angle right.
The direction of Mecca.
A thought came unbidden into his mind as he was looking at the scepter.
Maybe the scepter is Mecca.
A burst of excitement came with that idea. If he was right, there was only one way to traverse the puzzle—by looking toward the scepter the entire time.
On any of the blocks.
On any of the blocks.
A thrill ran through him.
Now
that
would be a cool paradigm shift. It would probably map in RW to having a central point on the label as a focal point to focus the direction of each data block. He’d been staring at the scepter when he took his first step, so that matched as well.
that
would be a cool paradigm shift. It would probably map in RW to having a central point on the label as a focal point to focus the direction of each data block. He’d been staring at the scepter when he took his first step, so that matched as well.
It felt right. It fit with the way the label instead of the disk had been used to hold data. It was his sense of intuition that made him more than just a good programmer, after all—he didn’t just code from pure logic—he could
feel
solutions sometimes, take jumps that leapfrogged him to the same place he would eventually get by working it out.
feel
solutions sometimes, take jumps that leapfrogged him to the same place he would eventually get by working it out.
But there was only one way to find out.
I’ve got you now, sucker,
he thought, thinking of the programmer.
he thought, thinking of the programmer.
I won’t need this anymore.
Jay threw the bullwhip to his right and heard it hit—eventually. Faint hissing sounds came up from the pit below the throne room.
Jay threw the bullwhip to his right and heard it hit—eventually. Faint hissing sounds came up from the pit below the throne room.
Jay fixed his gaze on the scepter, grinned, and ran all the way across the throne room.
No stones fell, and no other traps were triggered.
“Hah!”
As he laid his hand on the scepter and picked it up, a rumbling came from the back wall of the throne room, and he looked up, startled.
The wall had opened up onto another room, this one crisscrossed by a wicked-looking maze of spikes.
Across that room lay something else glinting gold.
“Oh, no,” he said. “I’ve only cracked
part
of it.”
part
of it.”
Well. Half a loaf, and all that. This was what it was all about, matching wits in a virtual world.
And winning.
He grinned. “Bring it on,” he said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
3
Washington, D.C.
Eduard Natadze sat in the rental car outside the 7-Eleven, just inside the line from Virginia, waiting. He was dressed in a pair of thin wool slacks and a dark gray Harris Tweed sport coat—decent clothes, but not expensive and nothing to draw attention. He wore a pale blue cotton-blend Arrow shirt and a ten-dollar blue silk tie. His shoes were black leather Nunn Bush, with rubber soles, dressy enough so they didn’t look like running shoes, but functional if he needed to move in a hurry. His watch was a basic Seiko, nothing special. His hair was cut to medium length, he was in decent physical shape, but not bulky, and just an inch or two over average height. Nothing about him screamed for a second look. He was, to a casual gaze, just another thirty-something businessman with a serviceable leather briefcase, on his way to or from work; nobody to notice at all.
Which, of course, was exactly as he wanted it.
His only real extravagance was in the satchel-type case, which was closed with a rip-strip of velcro and accessible in a hurry: A Korth Combat Magnum revolver, a German gun, and worth more than his clothes, watch, shoes, and briefcase put together, by a wide margin. It was the most expensive production handgun made—though “production” was perhaps something of a misnomer. There was a lot of hand-polishing and fitting on the weapon, which cost four times as much as a decent L-frame revolver from Smith & Wesson.
More than five thousand dollars for a double-action six-shot might seem excessive to some, but the one thing he never stinted on was his equipment. When your life was on the line, you did not want to lose it because you went cheap on your gear. Any revolver or pistol that would group three inches or less at twenty meters was sufficient for most combat situations. The Korth could, if you were adept enough, keep a grouping less than half that, using Federal Premium 130-grain Personal Defense loads, his personal choice.
When you could cover five shots with a quarter coin at that range, you had a precision instrument. When the instrument was what stood between you and the Reaper, you wanted the best you could afford. And when you worked on special projects for a billionaire who cared only for results and not the manner in which they were achieved, you could afford the best.
Natadze had two of the Korths. If he had to shoot somebody with one—and he had not had to do so yet—that gun would have to be destroyed, to avoid any possible ballistic connection to him. It was unlikely that investigators would think of the Korth as a possible weapon. They would examine any spent rounds they might find in a body, but the rifling was standard and not the European hexagonal often used in German guns. If he did have to shoot it, there would be no expended shells to worry about, since revolvers did not eject those. And if the authorities did by some chance suspect a Korth, they would hardly expect the shooter to destroy such an expensive machine. It would break his heart to do so, but in the end, it was a tool, and tools could be replaced. Dead was dead forever.
Not that he would need the gun for this mission. His preferred weapon at close range was a roll of quarters in his left hand—his left hand, never his right. He had to be too careful about the fingernails on his right hand, and so, over the years, had learned to punch left-handed. He also liked to wrap his hard fist in a leather glove. A roll of coins gripped to add heft and mass to his fist was a formidable weapon, especially against someone not expecting it. And burning a pair of twenty-dollar gloves was much cheaper and easier than getting rid of a revolver or pistol. But if he needed it, he had the gun, and he could get to it in a matter of a second if things did not look as he thought they should look.
He should not need his fists for this, either, though. Only his wits.
He smiled at the thought of what they would think back home if they knew that he was willing to smash and grind to bits a five-thousand-dollar handgun. A family in rural Sakartvelo—formerly Soviet Georgia—could live on half that for a year. Then again, the authorities in his homeland did not have the resources that the United States had at its beck. There, if you weren’t noticed in the act of shooting somebody by a dozen witnesses, you might stay free forever. Of course, you also might be unjustly accused of some other crime, tried, convicted, and executed for it. That happened all the time. If they needed a criminal and could not find the right man, anyone nearby would serve. There was a kind of balance, if not one that was fair.
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