Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 Read Free Page B

sporadic popular support, she changed her cabinet as often as she changed her underwear, and the lumpy stew of monarchists, moderates, progressives, and radical unionists in late 19th-century Spain was about to come once again to a roiling boil. Her military politicians, the generals Ramón María Narváez and Leopoldo O’Donnell, were both dead by now. Led by Serrano y Domínguez, the Duque de La Torre, who had run things before Isabella’s ascension, and Juan Prim y Prats, the prime minister, Isabella was about to be booted out of the country in the Revolution of 1868. She would flee to Paris, where she would stay until her son, Alfonso XII, eventually ascended the Spanish throne some six years later, but even then her influence upon him was to be minimal. She would, however, outlive the leaders of the revolt against her by long margins. Prim would be assassinated a mere two years after the revolution, and while Serrano lived until 1885, Isabella lasted until 1904.
    Living long enough to spit on your enemy’s grave was a certain kind of revenge.
    Jay sipped his not-too-bad wine and grinned. Well, what was the point of creating a VR scenario if you couldn’t make it sing and dance and do tricks like you wanted it to do? Being a history buff could be a lot of fun, if you let it.
    In the Real World, Jay sat in his office at Net Force HQ, part of the almost four-hundred-acre FBI compound at Quantico, plugged into full wirelessware haptics, including top-of-the-line optics, otics, reekers, droolers, and the brand-new version of spray-on WeatherMesh, which could be set and controlled by your computer to plus-or-minus one degree Fahrenheit, and none of the Madrid afternoon was the least bit real. But it looked, sounded, tasted, smelled, and felt real—close enough for government work, anyway.
    Sure, you could still input everything into a computer with a keyboard or voxax, or read words scrolling up a holoprojic screen if you wanted to, but with VR software as good as it was, why would anybody do that if they didn’t have to? When you could get the same information you needed and be entertained at the same time, why wouldn’t you, unless you were short on imagination?
    A short, balding man wearing a clean but out-of-date summer suit strolled toward Jay, mopping his florid face with a handkerchief he pulled from one jacket sleeve.
    “Señor Gridley?” His name came out as “Greed-lee.”
    “Sí.”
    “Por favor, Señor, I have a message for you.”
    Jay nodded. He indicated the chair across from him. “Have some wine, Señor . . . ?”
    “Montoya. Jaime Montoya. Muchas gracias.”
    The little man sat. A waiter appeared with a glass, plunked it down, and sauntered away. Montoya poured himself a glass of the wine, took a long sip, then sighed.
    “Ah, good. Hot today.”
    “Mucho,” Jay said.
    The man removed a folded parchment from his jacket. The yellowish document was sealed with a dollop of orange wax, imprinted with the signet of a local marquis. Jay expressed his thanks as he took the parchment, thumbed the seal open, and unfolded the document.
    Sure, he could have downloaded this file to his system and scanned it. And sure, if he needed hard copy, that would be courtesy of the office printer, on so-so grade ink-jet paper and not parchment, but what the hell—if you couldn’t have fun, why bother?
    It was what he had come to find, but a quick read told him it wouldn’t do him much good. The hackers who had attacked the net servers were too good to leave an obvious trail he could follow. The marquis could not point him in the right direction, lo siento.
    Oh, well, how big a surprise was that? The shock would have been if somebody good enough to rascal their way into major computer nodes had left obvious clues to back-track.
    “Personal call override” came a warm and sultry voice. “Saji on line one.”
    Jay cancelled the VR scenario with a finger-weave in the sensor grid and told his phone to put the call