Jay took off his pith helmet and wiped the sweat off his forehead with one arm. Hot out here in the Punjab and, shade notwithstanding, the little elephant house didn't have AC. He could have designed that in, of course, but what was the point? Anybody could cobble together a bastard scenario full of anachronisms; artists had to maintain a certain kind of purity. Well, at least every now and then they did, just to show they still could.
How could this break-in have been done? It couldn't — at least not using any physics he knew.
It reminded him of the old story during the early days of aeronautics. Some engineers had done studies on bumblebees. Based on the surface area of the bee's wings, the weight and shape of the insect, and the amount of muscle and force it had available, they had determined, after much slide rule and pencil-on-paper activity, that it was flatly impossible for such a creature to fly.
Bzzzzt! Oops, there went another one.
It must have been terribly frustrating to look at a paper filled with precise mathematical calculations about flow and lift and drag, to know that bees couldn't fly, and then have to watch them flitting from flower to flower, oblivious to man's certainty that they simply couldn't do that.
The obvious deduction was that the researchers had missed something. They went back to their bamboo slide rules and pencil stubs, did more observations, filled dozens of legal pads, and eventually they figured out how the synergism of bee flight worked.
If you already have the answer, you damn sure ought to be able to at least figure out the question. Bees had been flying about their business for millions of years, despite what anybody thought otherwise, and that had to be factored in.
So here was a file that couldn't be brute-forced, and it had been broken open like an eggshell in the hands of a giant. What was it Sherlock Holmes had said? "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
This break-in couldn't be done by any method Jay Gridley knew about and, modesty aside, he was as good as anybody when it came to computer rascalry. But since it had been done, then there must be a new tiger out there in the tall grass. All he had to do was figure out what it looked like, find it, and capture it. Without getting eaten.
He grinned again. That brought up another bit of hunting wisdom. The recipe for rabbit stew?
First, you catch a rabbit.
Mikhayl Ruzhyo squinted into the desert sun. Although he was relatively fair-skinned, he had tanned since he'd moved here, and now he was the color of good holster leather, lines etched into his face, veins prominent on his bare arms. The days were not as hot here in Nevada as they would be in a couple of months, and the nights were still chilly, but it was warm enough out. He stood in front of the small Airstream trailer he had purchased and towed to the five-acre plot of sand and scrub weed he had also bought, feeling the hot wind play over him. He was more or less alone. Only one of the other five-acre "estates" within a mile had a structure on it, and that was a green plastic dome lined with what appeared to be aluminum foil, full of packets of freeze-dried food, like campers and hikers used. Ruzhyo had picked the simple padlock keeping the place shut and checked it out within a few hours of locating this property. Every couple of months, an old man who drove a large GMC pickup truck would arrive at the dome, unload more of the freeze-dried packets from the vehicle and store them in the building, then lock up and drive away. Ruzhyo wondered why the old man brought the stuff out. Was he storing it against some future catastrophe? Worried about a war? Or plague? Or was it part of some commercial venture?
It was hard to determine the motivations of Americans at times. Back home in Chetsnya, even in Russia, he had never seen old men hoarding this kind of food. Of course, maybe that was because nobody thought such things were worth hoarding. Or they couldn't get it if they did think that.
Ruzhyo shrugged mentally. No matter. The dome was the only building close, and the next structure past that was a cabin near the small river that was a dry bed most of the year, almost three miles away. The cabin belonged to a Methodist church, and it had been used by hardy campers but three times since Ruzhyo had lived here, never for more than two nights at a time. None of the campers had hiked close enough to speak to him.
He was grateful for the solitude. Since retiring from wetwork, he'd had few occasions to even talk to people, much less have to kill them. He had money banked he could retrieve as needed, using a computer card. Once a week or so, he drove almost two hours into town and bought his supplies in one of several large supermarkets where he was totally anonymous; he did not chat with the clerks when he checked out. He would fill the car's tank with gasoline and drive home. He would pass Death Valley on the west, and turn off the highway onto a dirt road that led to his trailer. The nearest town — if it could be called such — was Scotty's Junction. A military gunnery range dominated the land to the east.
Ruzhyo had paid cash for his car, a Dodge SUV, used but not too old, and had done the same for the trailer, both of which he had purchased through classified ads in a Las Vegas newspaper. The land he had acquired using one of the safe names he held and, to avoid arousing undue interest, had given a substantial down payment to the seller and paid monthly notes from the same account since, automatically deducted on the first of each month. His profile could hardly be much lower.
The trailer had a generator and batteries, even air-conditioning, but he used the cooler rarely. He relished the heat.
He could not say he was happy — he had not been happy since the cancer had claimed Anna, and he did not ever expect to be so again — but he could say he was content. His life was simple, his needs few. The biggest project on his agenda was building a natural stone wall along the perimeter of his property. It might take ten years, but that hardly mattered.
Or he had been content, until today. As he scanned the rock terrain, the dust and heat-hazed hills in the distance, he knew something was wrong.
There were no signs he could see to tell him what the problem was. No helicopters overflew him, no dust clouds betrayed vehicles trying a stealthy approach. He lifted the powerful binoculars and did a slow scan of the surrounding countryside. His five acres was on a rise, slightly higher than most of the area, and he had a good view. He could see the old man's dome from the front of the trailer. He looked at it now. Nothing.
He walked a few yards up the gentle incline behind the trailer, until he could see the roof of the Methodists' cabin and the dry riverbed. No activity there.
He lowered the binoculars. Nothing to be seen, no cause for concern, but in his gut he felt that something was wrong. He headed for the trailer. He had weapons in a flat box hidden under the floor in the bedroom. Perhaps it was time to take them out and keep them handy.
No. Not yet, he decided. There was nothing at which to shoot. Perhaps the feeling was wrong; perhaps his gut was merely troubled by a badly digested meal or a parasite.
He gave himself a tight smile. He had not survived as long as he had by entertaining such rationalizations. At his best, he had been like a roach seeing a sudden light in the night. Run first, worry later. It had kept him alive when many others in his profession had died. He had learned to trust it over the years. No, something was wrong. Whatever it was would manifest itself sooner or later. Then he would deal with it.