Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,19
The Dewdrop Inn.
Oh, boy.
In reality, he was sitting in his office more than fifty years away from this place, wearing ear and eye bands, hands in skeletal sensory gloves, seeing and feeling the computer’s imagery, and he was aware of that on some level, though he had learned to tune the “real” reality out, as had most people who spent any time in VR.
Normally, he would have had Jay or one of the other serious players investigating this. But the truth was, he needed the diversion; otherwise, he’d have to pack up and go home, and while work wasn’t always a cure for what ailed you, sometimes it was better than nothing.
He ambled toward the juke joint. A swarthy, bearded man wearing overalls, no shirt, and no shoes leaned against the wall next to the entrance. The man spat a stream of chewing tobacco juice at a little chameleon perched on a stump nearby, missed. The man smiled, showing gaps in his mostly rotten teeth.
In VR, fire walls came in all kinds of configurations.
Well, yeehaw, Michaels thought. Welcome to the shallow end of the gene pool, boy.
“Ain’t open,” Overalls said.
Michaels nodded. “Uh huh. Guess I’ll have to come back later.”
“Reckon so.”
Michaels smiled and walked away. He retreated to the small dock, got into his boat, cast off, and cranked the motor. Around the next bend in the bayou, maybe three hundred yards farther upstream, he put back into shore, tied the bateau to a low-hanging willow tree branch, and hiked back toward the Dewdrop Inn. He circled around behind it, being careful not to let Overalls see him.
The back door was of unpainted wooden planks, crude, but solid. He fished around his pocket and pulled out a skeleton key. In reality, the key was a password provided by Dr. Morrison, but one couldn’t expect to have a coded keypad lock in this kind of scenario; it wouldn’t be appropriate.
The spring lock clicked open. Michaels quickly stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
The inside of the place was pretty much a match for the outside, a 1950s backwoods bar. There were scarred wooden tables, beat-up cane-bottomed bent back chairs, and a row of stools in front of a bar that had seen decades of spilled beers and misplaced cigarettes. Two big rectangular coolers marked with beer logos were behind the bar, and a single shelf under a long, cracked mirror held bottles of bourbon, gin, sloe gin, scotch, and vodka.
It took only a minute or so for Michaels to find the built-in lockbox under the bar, a steel plate with a huge Master Lock padlock on a finger-thick brass hasp.
Michaels had a key to the padlock, but since he didn’t know what was normally in the lockbox, it wouldn’t much matter what he’d find in it if he bothered to look. If something was missing, he wouldn’t be able to tell by looking.
It was dim behind the bar, light shining through two grimy windows on the sides of the building, hardly enough to see by. He pulled a small flashlight from his back pocket and shined it at the lock.
Sure enough, there were fresh scratches on the lock and on the hasp. Somebody had been at it, trying to pry or pick it open. No way to tell if they had managed it, but it confirmed Morrison’s story, at least in part.
Michaels stood, brushed off his hands, and started for the back door. Morrison could have done it, of course. Somebody yelled “Fire!” a big part of the time he was the guy with the match. Then again, why bring it up? Nobody would have noticed without Morrison’s report, at least nobody in Net Force. And Morrison had access to the lockbox—which was, of course, nothing more than a protected set of files inside the HAARP computer system. He could open it whenever he wanted, there was no need for him to break into it.
Well. At least it gave Michaels something to go on. He’d have to call Morrisoh back, get some more specific information. It didn’t seem particularly vital, whatever was in the box, no reason to break a leg hurrying to get to it. There were people he could pass it off to, or he could wait until Jay got back from his vacation; he was only going to be gone for a week.
It had been a nice little exercise, maybe helped keep his VR muscles from atrophying completely, but nothing earthshaking.