The lockbox had stacks of papers, money, some coins — all virtual representations of various kinds of electronic files. Jay picked up a couple of papers and scanned them, but he wasn’t as interested in what they had to say as he was in who had broken in before him. He closed the box, relocked the padlock, and headed for the back door.
He would take the prints back to the office and check them. Of course, what he would really be doing was back-tracking e-codes and running down servers and all, looking to see who had left traces of their visit. If the thief had been stupid enough to do it barehanded, Jay would have him. Probably he hadn’t been that stupid, but you never knew. Generally speaking, if crooks were smart enough so they wouldn’t get caught, they were smart enough to make more money honestly than they could by thievery. Not always. Some were smart, but lazy. Some liked the adrenaline rush of doing something illegal. Jay remembered one case where the head of a large computer software corporation got his thrills hacking into private computer systems and copying crap, like employee addresses or financial records, stuff he could have legally gotten elsewhere. He didn’t even use the material, just stashed it in a booty file. The thief never did any damage, and never took anything of value — it was the electronic equivalent of petty shoplifting, and if he’d wanted, he could have bought most of the companies he plundered. When Jay had run him down, the corporate prez had laughed, paid the fine, and was probably back at it the next day. A thrill junkie.
Jay ran into guys like that all the time, hackers who thought they were faster or smarter or better, and who wanted to test themselves. He could understand that — if he hadn’t gotten into Net Force, he’d probably be doing it himself. But now it was his job to nail ’em.
Jay had gone up against the best, and while he hadn’t always beaten them easily or fast, in the end, he had beaten them. Well. At least the ones he knew about. There might be crooks out there who were so good they could commit the perfect crime, that being one that nobody ever realized had happened. But truth be told, Jay didn’t believe there were many, if any, who were that good. And he didn’t think whoever had broken into HAARP’s computer was one of the best, or they wouldn’t have left scratches on the lock. This would be a walk in the park.
Now he had to go and find out about Dr. Morrison. If anything, that ought to be even easier.
Tyrone and Nadine had spent the morning watching contestants in the various events, concentrating on checking out the MTA seniors. Nobody was coming close to Gorski’s unbelievable record, but there were some pretty good hang times.
They decided to practice after lunch, and went to the field set up for that, a little farther up the hill.
Tyrone looked at the sunny meadow with others practicing, then at Nadine. She wasn’t a looka’me like Bella, but in this light, here in this green field, she was a lot more attractive in ways that Bella was not. She was a person, somebody who liked being with him, somebody who he liked being with for reasons that went past a pretty face.
“What are you grinning at, fool? Your chances of beating me tomorrow?”
Tyrone shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.
“Well, come on, let me give you another lesson in how to throw.”
“Your ass.”
“Yeah, you are my ass, aren’t you?”
They both grinned. At that moment, Tyrone didn’t see how life could get much better than this. Well. Maybe after he won the championship it could.
“Have you ever fired a handgun, Dr. Morrison?”
They were on one of several shooting ranges at the militia compound. Though it was late, nearly nine, it was still light enough to see the targets, squared-off human torso silhouettes made of cardboard, mounted on wooden stands. There were a dozen of these at various distances from where they stood behind a chalk line drawn on the dirt, next to a beat-up table made of weathered two-by-fours and plywood.
Morrison shook his head. “No. Rifles and shotguns when I was a boy, not pistols. My parents didn’t believe in them.”
Ventura said, “The principle is the same. You use a sighting device to line the weapon up on the target, press the trigger, the gun goes bang. The main differences are that a shorter barrel is harder to aim well, and most handguns have considerably less punch than a rifle or a shotgun. You trade stopping power for portability and being able to conceal the weapon.”
Ventura pointed to the tabletop, where several pistols lay. “What we are going to do is let you try several of these, to see which one you can shoot the best. There isn’t time for you to gain real expertise, and this is for a last-ditch, enemy-in-your-face situation. If you have to resort to it, then my people and I will likely be dead, and frankly, your chances of surviving will be slim and none. But they probably won’t expect you to be armed at all, so you might surprise them.”
Morrison nodded again, feeling a cold rush in his lower belly. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. The idea of being kidnapped or killed had been more intellectual than real. Looking at a table full of guns made it all too real.
“Ideally, you would carry the biggest handgun you could — the larger and faster the bullet, the more rounds, the better. That’s a Glock.40 semiauto, the black plastic one. Next to it, that’s a Taurus.357 revolver. These two have the most oomph. If you hit somebody solidly in the torso with one round of either, they’ll go down and be out of the fight better than nine times out of ten.”
Ventura shook his head. “I have to apologize, Doctor. This isn’t how you’d learn to shoot if I had time to teach you properly, but we don’t have time. We’ll start with those.”
Morrison put on the headphones Ventura handed him.
“The hearing protectors are electronic,” Ventura said. “You’ll be able to hear fine until the gun goes off, but they’ll cut out the noise. These two pistols are particularly loud devices. If you shoot one inside a car without protection, you can blow out an eardrum.
“Hold it like so, both hands. Stand like this, arms out, in an isoceles triangle. Grip is important, hold it tight. The sight picture should look like this.” Ventura drew a picture on the table with a felt-tipped pen. “Line the post up inside the notch, put the target right on top. If you need to shoot, you probably won’t have time for a clean sight picture, your attacker will be right in your face, so what you’ll do instead is point it like you would your finger, and index the whole gun. Here.”
He handed Morrison the black plastic pistol. “If you can see the back of the gun against the man’s chest, that’s good enough for close range.”
“How close?”
“Inside twenty feet. In your case, probably more like six or eight feet.”
“Okay.”
“Glock operates like this. Magazine in here, pull back the slide like this to chamber a round, pull the trigger. No external safety. Point, press. Don’t jerk it. Try it, that target right in front of us. Shoot it twice. It will kick some.”
The cardboard human torso and head was maybe a dozen feet away.
Morrison took a deep breath, pointed the Glock at the target, and pulled the trigger. The damned gun almost jumped out of his hands, and the second shot went off before he was ready, so it was probably a little high…
He lowered the weapon and looked.
There were no holes in the target.
How could he have missed? It was right in front of him!
“First round was off to the right, second was way high and right. Try the Taurus.”
Five minutes later, Morrison felt a sense of profound embarrassment. He had fired ten shots from five guns. Only two of the bullets had hit the cardboard, both of them almost off the target to the right, barely on the edge. Two.