Changing of the Guard Read Free Page B

consultant in private industry. So can I, for that matter.”
    Thorn smiled again. Was that a dig? Was he saying that it was easy for Thorn to take this job because he was already a wealthy man?
    Michaels said, “We did our job, did a little good now and then, and now it’s our time to move on. Nothing sinister—although the politics of the job are a bitch. Some of the hearings up on the Hill you’ll have to attend, you’ll need an iron bladder.”
    Thorn chuckled politely.
    “My advice is for you to do what you do best and leave the heavy lifting in the field to the regular feebs or the military arm. Stay in front of the computer, work Congress to keep the wheels oiled, and you’ll do fine.”
    Thorn nodded. “Thank you, Alex. I appreciate the advice.” Not that he needed it. He had his fencing, but you didn’t get to carry an épée or saber around in polite society these days, and facing off with thugs was not his forte. His mind was his most valuable tool, not his fists. Muscle was easy to hire.
    “Well, I’m about ready,” Alex said. “You’ll want your own people, of course, but you have a pretty good team here already. I would stay and help you in the transition, but I have only a couple of weeks before I have to be at my new job, and we need to get moved and settled. Jay Gridley can answer any questions you might have.”
    “I know Gridley’s work,” he said. “Thank you, Alex.”
    “You’re welcome. I hope the job is what you want, Commander.”
    Me, too, Thorn thought.
     
    Jay Gridley sat in his office and stared at the zip disk. Another day, another top-secret code to unravel. Ho, hum.
    Change was in the air: Alex and Toni were leaving; John Howard, too, and new faces were coming in. Soon just about the only familiar face around here would be Jay’s own. Which was odd—he had never thought of himself as the survivor type.
    He supposed he could be worried about that. New bosses sometimes cleaned out the cupboards when they came on board, re-shuffling the deck and dealing in their people. But Jay wasn’t too concerned about that. He was Jay Gridley after all—there weren’t any people who could replace him—well, at least not on this side of the law. Besides, if he had to, he could always do what Alex and Colonel Howard were doing: get another job somewhere else. He could find another one, and for a lot more money, at the drop of a hat. It would be their loss. . . .
    Either way, though, he was going to miss the old crew. They were his friends. Oh, they’d probably stay in contact, but it wouldn’t be the same. It might be better. It might be worse. But it was for sure that it wouldn’t be the same.
    He glanced at the zip disk. It wasn’t often he got to play with old-style media these days, what with flash memory and cardware being so cheap, and data disks so wonderfully dense.
    Shoot, the thing held less than a half gig. Hardly worth going into VR for. It would barely touch his desktop’s CPU for sifting, much less require the mainframe.
    But that was the way it was in third-world countries—most of the toys they got to play with were outdated cast-offs. Which did make his job easier when he was trying to pry information from its hiding place.
    A cheap, rough-looking, dot-matrix-printed label covered the hard plastic protecting the disk. It was really ugly , too—blocky black-and-white dots portrayed a cartoonlike lion’s head, with an even uglier-looking border surrounding it. Arabic numerals and script proclaimed “Mosque-by-the-sea Tourist Photos disk 11.” At least that was what the neat hand-written print in English underneath the script said.
    A Turkish spy in Iran had died just after delivering the disk. Jay didn’t think that the Turkish ambassador himself would be asking Net Force to dig around in it if all it held was tourist photos.
    Jay slid the disk into the drive he had dug up from a storage closet and jacked into VR. . . .
     
    He stood next to a cold and muddy