“I have no secrets from Mr. Ventura.”
Wu nodded. “Very well. Anybody with good intel connections, such as Luther has, could have gotten those two names. How do we know you aren’t running a scam?”
“What would it take to convince you?”
“Well, you could give us the technology, allow us to test it, and then let us pay you.”
Morrison laughed, and after a moment Wu joined him. “Just a thought,” Wu said.
“Try a different thought.”
Wu rubbed at his chin and pretended to do that. Ventura picked up his pistol and lightly pushed the muzzle against the back of his seat, pointed at Wu. If the man made any sudden moves, the Chinese were going to need themselves another purchasing agent — and at the least, the rental company was going to have to put in new seat covers.
“All right, then. Try this: Let’s take it for a little test spin, shall we? Kick a few tires, rev the engine, drive around the block. This time, we pick the destination. If it works there as it did in Daru and Longhua, then we would be very interested in your vehicle.”
“At my price?”
“It seems reasonable — assuming nobody else will be driving the same model anytime soon?”
“They won’t be.”
“How, ah, big is this car? How many, ah, passengers are we talking about?”
“There is a point of diminishing returns. With more power, I could do more, but the limit right now is a circle about ten miles across.”
Wu nodded. “I think we’ve strained the car metaphor as far as we can. I need to get back to my superiors with your offer. We will come up with coordinates for a test. We’ll get these to you, you run it, and if it works, then we’ll discuss terms. Is this satisfactory?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Shall we head back?”
Ventura nodded, and tapped Walker on the shoulder. Walked looked, and Ventura pointed his finger at the car’s roof, waved it in a tight circle, then pointed behind them. Walker nodded, and pulled into a dusty field next to the gravel road to turn around.
As they headed back toward the HQ compound, Wu said, “Fascinating place here, Luther. You a believer?”
“No. Parallel traveler. You make do with what you have.”
“I hear that. We have similar places in our country, you know. Now and then the government uncovers a nest of malcontents and has to step on it. If you don’t, pretty soon you have fools who are willing to walk barehanded in front of tanks. Better to crush them before they get too brave. The difference is that you know these people are here, and yet you allow them anyway.”
“The price of freedom,” Ventura said.
“I’ve always thought that freedom was a highly overrated commodity,” Wu said. “More trouble than it is worth. Order is much better. Besides, it doesn’t really matter to people like us — you and me — does it?”
Ventura shrugged. “Everybody has to be someplace. One is as good as another.”
“I suppose.” Within the tiny shrug of indifference, there was a flash of something on Wu’s face, something cold and ugly, just a fast hint, and Ventura had to fight the urge to pull the trigger and cook the little man right here and right now.
No, he didn’t look like much, but Ventura had a feeling deep in his gut that Chilly Wu here would be a formidable opponent in any kind of a fight. With any luck, he wouldn’t have to find out. If he did, it was going to end in blood, he was sure. He hoped it wouldn’t be his own.
18
Jay had to smile at the imagery the boss enjoyed. He had a thing for the swamps — a couple of times Jay had gone with Michaels’s default scenarios and they had been boats on bayous, like that. They weren’t bad, better than a lot of off-the-shelf stuff, but not as textured as Jay normally liked to create. He’d added in some pretty neat stuff for this setting, at least he thought so, even if Michaels might not notice. Of course, the boss was management, and VR programming wasn’t his real strength.
As he motored along the narrow river in the little outboard-rigged flat-bottomed skiff, or whatever they called them down in Cajun country, Jay decided to stay with this sequence. He had a lot of work to do — places to go, things to look for — and it was easier to use this than to create a new ersatz, so he cruised past the Spanish moss and the alligator and right on up to the… Dewdrop Inn.
That name was worth another smile.
Carrying a small satchel, Jay approached the front door. There was a raggy, bearded yehaw kinda guy in nothing but overalls leaning against the door, and Jay walked right up to him, smiling. Yehaw, so the joke went, was the kinda guy whose father might also be his brother or his uncle.
“Ain’t open,” the man said.
“I know. I just wanted to let you know that somebody is around back trying to break in.”
It took a second or three for it to register — probably because Yehaw had some kind of dinosaur-like sub-brain down in his nether regions that had to relay the thought back and forth a few times before he got it.
Yehaw frowned, pushed off the wall, and lumbered away, heading for the back door.
Jay waited until he was out of sight, then slipped the lock on the front door with a thin piece of steel, stepped inside, and relocked the door behind him.
The door guard — in reality a fire wall program for the HAARP computer system to stop outside access — was strong, but not very bright. The guard would amble around back, not see anybody trying to break in, then return to his post in the front. He’d remember that Jay had approached, if anybody asked, but since Jay wouldn’t be visible, the guard wouldn’t worry about him. He’d never think to look inside; that would be beyond his capabilities.
That was the problem with software. Hardware, too. People didn’t upgrade for all kinds of different reasons, and it always cost them something. Shoot, the military arm of Net Force still had — and still used—some subgigabyte-RAM tactical computers when there were systems with ten or fifteen times that much power you could buy off a department store shelf! Might as well be steam-powered. The honchos-military would mumble, and say that was all they needed to run their tried-and-true programs; they were dependable, and shockproof, why bother going for more power with some untested unit or software that might crap out when they really couldn’t afford that? Shortsighted of them, Jay thought, but then he wasn’t interested in being anywhere except on the cutting edge. A lot of people still thought slow and steady won the race, when fast and steady was much better.
Well, that was not his problem at the moment.
Jay found the lockbox under the bar that the boss’s report had mentioned. He removed a pair of latex gloves from his satchel, slipped them on, and bent to examine the box. He saw the scratches showing that the padlock had been tampered with. Humming to himself, Jay removed a small aerosol container from the satchel, aimed it at the lock, then sprayed it with a fine mist of dry powder. He blew the excess dust off, then used a second aerosol can on the lock, this one a kind of liquid glue.
Yeah, okay, so he brought maybe a little more attention to detail to his constructs than was necessary. A man had to have some standards.
Several fingerprints appeared as the chemical reaction from the two sprays took place. Jay pulled a clear strip of transfer tape from a roll in his handy satchel, carefully pressed it against the lock, peeled it off, and stuck it onto a white plastic card.
Just for fun, he took his pick gun and a torsion tool and opened the padlock. Took all of about six seconds, a piece of cake.