Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,83

to a mercenary chat room on VR was a lot more interesting than running facial points of comparison against the image files of the NCIC, NAPC, or the FBI, looking for a match—which he had already done, and come up with zed-edward-roger-oliver.

“Jeez,” somebody said from the doorway. “Jay?”

The voice sounded familiar. Jay released the bartender and turned.

Tyrone Howard stood there, looking around the inside of the biker’s hangout.

“Tyrone? What are you doing here?”

There were a few people to whom Jay had given his forwarding code, so that if they needed to contact him electronically, they could in essence meet him on the net wherever he was. It wouldn’t work in a high-classification security area, but any hacker worth three bytes could follow the line into anything as simple as this kind of public access site if Jay allowed him past the fire wall. Tyrone Howard had been very helpful during the mad Russian thing a few months back, and Jay had added him to the list of people who could contact him in a hurry.

Might have been a mistake, considering the overlay.

Apparently Tyrone had decided to let Jay’s scenario be the default, and it wasn’t one you particularly wanted to have a thirteen-year-old boy see you in. He might get the wrong idea.

“Yeah, I seen him,” the bartender said.

Jay turned back to the giant biker, breaking character: “Really?”

“Yeah. He’s been in once or twice.”

“Where can I find him?”

“I dunno. But the guy over by the pool table, the one in the Army shirt, drinking boilermakers, he’s had some dealings with him.”

Jay nodded.

Tyrone walked into the place toward Jay.

“Gimme a second here, Ty, I’ll be right with you.”

“No hurry, Jay. I’ll just ... enjoy the ambience. Jeez, this is as bad as Jimmy-Joe’s strip joint.”

Great. All he needed was Tyrone telling his father about this scenario.

Worry about that later, Jay. Let’s go see the man who likes boilermakers.

But the man who enjoyed dropping a shot glass of whiskey into his beer stein, depth-charge style, wasn’t really there—he was a proxy.

While it was true that none of the people in the ersatz biker bar were really “there,” some were less so than others. A proxy was a shell, little more than a link to another location, something to mark a place, and not somebody you could interface with directly. A ghost of a shadow.

Jay was able to get a location, but a quick pulse in that direction did a reverb with nothing more than an RW street address, somewhere in the District. Apparently Mr. Boilermaker here didn’t like to reveal too much on the net, and if Jay wanted to speak with him, he was going to have to drop out of VR and go RW.

Huh. Who did that anymore?

He wasn’t a field op, he was a netjet, so he could pass this along to one of the staff investigators to have them look up Boilermaker here and have a face-to-face chat with him.

Jay shook his head. That might take days, given the way the field ops took their sweet time about such requests. Even if the boss put a rush on it, Jay didn’t altogether trust the shoe skidders—some of them weren’t particularly sharp, and it would be his luck to get a dull one who’d mess up the interview.

Soji had been after him to get out more. No reason why he couldn’t drop by and do the interview himself, was there? It wasn’t as if he was afraid of going outside.

He looked around for Tyrone, but the boy had vanished.

“Tyrone?”

A biker with the physique of a competition bodybuilder whose monthly steroid bill was higher than his house note smiled at him. “Hey, Jay.”

“Nice suit,” Jay said, waving at the mound of muscle.

“I thought it was a good idea. It’s a modified pro wrestler, all I had to do was change the clothes and add a couple of tattoos. I didn’t want to stand out.”

“Come on, let’s leave this pit. I’ve got a private room.” He rattled off the password and headed for the door.

As he reached the exit, the exotic dancer’s music changed, and the first notes of Destroyers’ version of “Bad to the Bone” rumbled its bass beat from the speakers. Jay grinned. For a second, he’d forgotten he’d programmed that in. Yep, that’s me. Jay Gridley, better not step into my path, ’cause I’m b-b-b-b-bad!

30

Wednesday, June 15th

Woodland Hills, California

Ventura wiped a thin film of sweat from his forehead as he stood outside the theater, smiling into the parking