He caught her hand. “No. I can’t.”
“It’s already evident that you can, Jay. And that you definitely want to.” She leaned in, to kiss him. . . .
He got the wheels working on the chair, and it rolled back suddenly, leaving her a couple feet away as he slammed into the wall, hard.
He leaped to his feet. “I’m sorry, Rachel. I just can’t do this!”
He practically ran for the door.
And part of him kept saying, “Idiot! Go back! She wants you! And you damn sure want her!”
Yeah, and that was the problem!
33
The Bizarre Bazaar
Jay had bagged the sci-fi convention scenario to try something different. He was still rattled by his visit with Rachel, really rattled. He felt as if he had developed a sudden case of some tropical fever; he was alternately hot and cold and on the edge of throwing up. He didn’t want to think about it, and work was the best way to avoid that, but even so, it kept coming up in his thoughts.
How close it had been. Way too close. He was ashamed of himself for letting it get that far. For even considering it.
So here he was, in fantasy Arabia, looking at a hookah when the alarms went off. The hookah was big, maybe three feet tall, and VR text hanging in the air in front of it advertised it as suitable for flavored tobacco or “other substances.” The hose of the hookah had been customized to look like snakeskin, and the mouthpiece had been molded appropriately to match.
“Other substances.” Yeah, right.
The alarms sounded like air-raid sirens. All around him vendors grabbed their cash boxes and headed for the exits. The VR commerce center had been modeled like a cross between something from the Arabian Nights and a 1940s Hollywood movie about Damascus in Glorious Living Technicolor—baskets, tables covered with colorful cloth, and brightly decorated awnings inside a huge, cavernous, walled marketplace. A bizarre bazaar, indeed . . .
It was mostly a gray market—products which were illegal in some countries, but not here, as well as questionable transfers of supposedly legal items.
Like, say, firearms.
If he could figure out for sure who bought the BMF, they’d be one step closer to nailing the terrorists attacking the bases.
Unfortunately, while the information was here, the site containing the information was international—which meant he had no jurisdiction to demand anything. How what he wanted had come to be here, Jay didn’t know, but he was sure that it was.
The problem was the way the records were kept. There were hundreds of vendors, each of whom had their own unique files. And most of those were only internal—to follow the money outside the market, their transactions had to be cross-checked with the site’s commerce engine. He could easily hack the individual sellers, but getting to the money transfers was somewhat more difficult. The guy who had bought the gun had used a swiped ID, but he had come, for some odd reason, through here to do it. Jay was betting his real name was here somewhere.
The data he wanted was kept behind a major firewall—one designed to Net Force specifications. Which meant that even being Jay Gridley wasn’t enough to get into it.
If only I could get the good guys to protect their stuff like that.
So he had followed what one of his professors had called the “Prophet Tactic”—if you couldn’t go to the mountain, maybe you could get the mountain to come to you. . . .
He’d run two quick tests, triggering the site’s security. During each test he’d seen the site’s crisis measures in action.
Rather than wiping every dangerous piece of data, the site database was split and fired off into different directions. After a set time the pieces would be reassembled and business would begin as usual at YAVA—Yet Another VR Address.
Jay had twice watched the burnoose-wearing VR metaphor for the cash records haul ass down a dark alley toward the back of the market and out through an arched doorway.
So all he had to do was trigger the alarms again, grab the records from the avatar—who looked like a middle-aged accountant in faux-Arabic robes—and he’d be in good shape.
There he goes. . . .
Exactly as predicted, the cash records guy hustled out the firewall entrance—which looked like a concrete bunker pasted with advertisements in Farsi or something—and toward the rear of the marketplace.
And here I go. . . .
This was where it could get iffy. Up until now, he’d been a bystander, no one who would catch the attention of site security.
If site security ID’d him quickly enough, they could start unraveling his net disguise and track him back to U.S. law enforcement.
Which would be embarrassing.
Not that the United States wasn’t used to being embarrassed—but Net Force’s top VR jock certainly wasn’t.
And I don’t want to start now.
Jay ran past the hookah vendor’s long table toward an intersection the records carrier would cross before turning into the alley. By not following the carrier directly, he hoped he was less likely to catch unwanted attention.
But—no. Someone had programmed the marketplace’s security with a predictive network filter. They weren’t common, and ate up a lot of processing power, but apparently the site’s owners were willing to spend it to protect their records. He’d been identified as a threat. Dozens of black-robed security avatars, each carrying long, shiny scimitars, came running toward him. They sounded like extras from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. . . .
Damn!
The carrier was still a good twenty yards or so ahead and the blade-wavers were coming up fast.
Bullet time . . .
Jay triggered a subroutine he’d prepared as a “just-in-case” and instantly everything slowed—including himself.
He was in the air, running, front foot on the way earth-ward again. All around him everything had slowed to a barely perceptible crawl. . . .
Although he couldn’t move any faster, he was able to sit back from his avatar and examine the scene like a three-dimensional model—himself running, the carrier ahead, the security guys closing in.
He only had a few seconds—the slowdown routine would be blocked by the VR site, since speed was to their advantage—so he had to think fast.
Come on, Gridley!
He could see he wasn’t gonna make it. The security team would have him trapped before he intercepted the carrier.
Should he abort?
Normally, he wouldn’t even consider it. But being caught raiding an international site in U.S. colors would be ugly. Real egg-on-the-face stuff. Crap!
Unless there’s another way—
There were too many guards, and too many bystanders between himself and the carrier. The spacing of the tables in the marketplace funneled things too tightly. He couldn’t get to the carrier fast enough going around the tables—
But nobody said he couldn’t go over them.
He jumped up onto a table holding a variety of decorative daggers and kicked a display out of the way. Blades flew left and right and he saw one of the security guards duck.
The seller yelled what was surely a nasty curse.
Jay jumped to the next table, this one full of cartoon collectibles, and knocked over boxes filled with mugs and figurines as he kept moving. He glanced down and saw a red-garbed dog with a black U on its chest go flying.
Do not fear, I am here. . . .