The guards couldn’t recover fast enough. The network predictor was confused just a hair, and that was enough.
By running the tables, he gained enough time to be just in front of his quarry at the mouth of the alley. He leaped, knocked the guy down, grabbed the papers and started shuffling in a big hurry. C’mon, c’mon—!
All he needed was—there it was, the name!
Carruth. He recognized it from the prison scenario.
Gotcha!
As the guards closed in to behead him, he laughed and gave them the finger. “End scenario!” he yelled.
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Jay knocked on Thorn’s door, and didn’t wait to be invited in.
Thorn was on the com, but he said, “Let me call you back.”
Jay said, “Boss, I got one of the terrorists ID’d. And it’s the guy who iced the Metro cops, too.”
“Carruth,” Thorn said.
Jay looked as if he’d been punched in the gut. “How did you know? You got spyware in my system?” There was a scary thought. What else might he know? About Rachel?
“No. The Army got an anonymous tip about another base going to be hit. The caller identified Carruth and gave Army Intelligence particulars—where and when. Said the guy coming in would be wired with explosives and was not going to let himself be captured.”
“Damn. All that work and somebody just . . . gave him up?”
“The confirmation is important, Jay. The guy just hit the base, right on schedule.”
“He dead?”
Thorn shook his head. “No. He got away.”
Jay frowned. “What? How’d he do that if they knew he was coming?”
“I don’t know. According to what I just heard”—he nodded at the com—“he was on the base and heading toward his target—supposed to kidnap some colonel—when all of a sudden he spun his car around and boogied. They weren’t expecting that. They hadn’t sealed things up tight yet. He got off the base and they couldn’t catch him.”
“Crap. What morons!” Yeah, he was still upset about the Rachel thing, no question.
“We have a location,” Thorn said. “In the District. The tipster called back and gave the Army an address. The FBI and local police are rolling on it. Abe Kent and a team are going along as ‘advisers.’ We’ll collect him if he went home.”
Jay nodded.
“You can ride along with General Kent in the mobile command center if you want. He’s leaving in about two minutes.”
“Thanks, but I’ll pass. Not my area of expertise, and this guy has a gun that will drop a charging Kodiak bear. I don’t want somebody explaining to my wife how I was hit by a stray bullet that will require a closed coffin at the funeral.”
Especially before he had a chance to see her and come clean about Rachel. He had to do that.
“Smart,” Thorn said.
“Some days I think so. Other days, maybe not. Lemme know how it goes.”
Jay stood.
“What are you working on now?”
Jay shrugged. “A loose end. Probably not anything, but a thought came up I want to run down.”
“Break a leg.”
“Not mine, I hope.”
There was no need to build a complicated scenario for this, and Jay didn’t really feel up for it. What he felt was sick, and what he hoped was that he was wrong. He wasn’t looking to entertain himself; he just needed the facts.
Carruth, however many people he might have killed, wasn’t the brains of this operation. That became obvious the more Jay looked at it. The guy didn’t have a net presence to speak of, and nothing in his background indicated any great computer skills. He was an ex-Navy SEAL. He could stomp you to mush, or shoot you, or blow you up, and he could do it falling out of a plane, on the ground, or underwater, too, but there was just no way he had built the alien-bug game, and no way he could have hacked into Army computers and gotten squat. That a dead guy made the game and might have been running the show made sense, but it was awfully convenient—maybe too convenient—and now Jay wasn’t so sure about that, either.
Carruth was a pawn, maybe even a knight, but not the king for whom Jay had been searching.
Or, as it had finally dawned on him, maybe he wasn’t looking for the king at all.
Maybe he should have been trying to find the queen. . . .
Jay used a stock VR library, went to the front desk, got the location, and went to find the biography of Captain Rachel Lewis, United States Army.
He took to the book to a table and opened it.
The facts and figures were there—DOB, family, schools, like that, but what Jay wanted was going to be beyond the public facts; fortunately, he had access to things most people couldn’t get to, and the index in the Book of Rachel was very thick.
Some of it came from odd angles, but there was a lot of information there if you knew how to look, and certainly Jay knew that.
It bothered him that he was doing it. No, that wasn’t strictly true—what bothered him was that he believed he had a reason to do it. It was an ugly suspicion, and maybe he had it for the wrong reasons.
Was it just guilt? At how he had felt as she was rubbing his crotch? Or shame at how hard it had been to jump up and run out of her office?
Because that had been tempting. Lord, it had. He could have just . . . let go, pretended it was VR, that it wasn’t really happening, and he had a feeling it would have been absolutely dynamite sex, too. Blond, beautiful, brainy, everything to like . . .
But the image of Saji holding their child had bloomed in his mind, and he couldn’t see past that to the woman wetting her lips for him and reaching for his zipper. . . .
Sure, a lot of men had affairs after they were married. None of them seemed to think it was that big a deal, a little on the side, but Jay realized that he wasn’t like most people. He had been a computer geek for a long time—he’d had a couple of girlfriends—but nobody had ever loved him like Saji. She had been there for him while he was lying in a coma, she had given him a son, and what he felt for her was beyond his ability to put into words.
Yes, Rachel Lewis was smart, she was sexy, and she wanted him, no question, but if he had gone down that road, how would he have felt about himself afterward? Were a few minutes of sexual pleasure, no matter how hot, worth his self-esteem? Worth risking his marriage?
The answer was simple: No.
Once he had realized that, once he had made that decision, even in the panic in which it had taken place, things had . . . shifted. There was an old saying he had seen somewhere, from the I-Ching or the Tao or something: “The Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.”
When it had been a fanciful possibility that he might have fallen into bed with Rachel, he hadn’t looked at her as critically as he might have done otherwise. He didn’t like that, but he had to accept it. She’d had a free pass.
On some level, he had been enjoying the flirting, the idea of it, the risk. But when push came to shove, he couldn’t do it. It would have been wrong.
And now? Now his vision wasn’t being blocked by the image of Rachel lying naked on a bed. And he had started wondering.
Now, all those little things he had accumulated that he had ignored? They suddenly seemed bigger than they had before.
Who had given him the information on the URL that he’d wasted so much time chasing, only to find it a red herring?
Who had been with him when his scenario crashed as he was about to catch the Alien Cowboy?
Who had access to all the Army’s sensitive information, and the ability to use it without being suspected?