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.

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.

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.

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.

“Don’t feel bad,” Ventura said. “Trained cops miss at this range. Ever see the video of the state cops who stopped a couple of guys in a truck for an expired license? Guys were guilty of other crimes, so they came out with guns. The truck passenger and one cop faced each other from twelve feet, each fired five or six times, nobody hit anything. If somebody is pointing a gun at you, it’s a lot worse than shooting at a target that won’t shoot back. Adrenaline makes your hand muscles twitch funny.”

Morrison shook his head.

“Try this one. Smith and Wesson Model 317, an Air-light.”

He handed the gun to Morrison.

“It’s not very heavy.”

“Aluminum, mostly. Just under ten ounces. Holds eight rounds of .22 caliber.”

Morrison took another deep breath, indexed the little gun, pulled the trigger, one, two! The revolver jumped a little, but not much, and when he looked at the target, there were two small holes in the center, no more than an inch or two apart. Hey!

“Again. This time, keep pulling the trigger until the gun stops shooting.”

Morrison obeyed.

This time, he was able to see the holes as they appeared in the cardboard. They weren’t very big, but all of them were clustered in the center, except for one, and it was only a few inches above the others. The clicking of the hammer on empty came as a surprise.

“Very good. This is your weapon,” Ventura said. “It’s light, simple to operate, almost no recoil. It doesn’t have any real stopping power, but a solid hit from a small-caliber round is a lot better than a miss from a hand cannon.”

Morrison looked at the gun.

“Here is how to reload it, though I don’t expect you’ll get that far if you need it. If it’s one guy, point and shoot until he falls down or goes away. If it’s more than one, give them two rounds each, then repeat. We’ll practice that, double-taps.”

But they didn’t get to double-tap practice. The sound of Morrison’s cell phone ringing was clearly audible through the electronic sound suppressors.

That would be the Chinese calling.

Morrison removed the earphones and thumbed the receive button on the phone.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hey, Pat! What say we take that car of yours for a test drive? I know just the place.”

As Morrison listened to Wu, Ventura reloaded the Air-light, then handed it to him. With a cell phone in one hand and a gun in the other, it suddenly seemed to Morrison that the summer evening’s warmth had just turned to winter.