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.Or maybe it was the Russians themselves.They could have a mole somewhere they absolutely did not want to lose.Just because the Russians were currently friends didn’t mean they wouldn’t still want intelligence information if they could get it.Friendly countries all spied on each other.The Russians would know about the file’s existence, they would know the Turks had intercepted it, and maybe they were trying to make sure Jay didn’t get to some valuable bit of information?The Russians trying to protect a valuable spy, or the spy trying to protect his own hide, either of those would be enough reason to want Net Force to back off.But, okay, assume one of these scenarios was true, then whoever it was would have to have pretty good resources.They’d know that Net Force had the file, if they had some way of getting into the Turk’s agencies, but how would they know that Jay was the man working on it? And be able to target him, get a bug on his car, and be ready to take him out the way they had? That indicated somebody with expertise, and experts cost money.Thorn stretched.He needed a break.He decided to check his e-mail, see what had come in while he’d been working, and then get back to the problem of Jay.It had been a pretty good day so far, considering how early it was, but when he found his personal e-mail box jammed once again with messages from the troll, he decided it was time to put a stop to it.He didn’t need this irritating crap when he had more important things to do.He emptied the mailbox and got on-line.He wanted to check something before he went any further with this, and it didn’t take long to track down the stats he wanted.The amount of information on the web was incredible, things nobody would have ever dreamed of in the early days of the net.He had wondered why the man who called himself Rapier felt such anger at him, and for the life of him, Thorn hadn’t been able to come up with a reason.Yes, Thorn had made a lot of money in the computer software field, and that alone engendered a certain amount of resentment, but Rapier—whose name was Dennis James McManus, he had discovered—seemed personally irritated, and Thorn didn’t know him from a hole in the wall.What Thorn had on the holoproj in front of him were the results of fencing matches from his days in college, specifically the matches at the University of Chicago all those years ago.It didn’t take long to find the match, one he had forgotten until this very moment.He didn’t have a great memory for names, and recalling the faces of the people he’d competed against was worse.But he remembered tourneys, and individual matches, the good ones, and when he saw that he had fought McManus in the quarterfinal match, before he had lost to the great Parker King in the semifinals, he recalled the bout.The guy had been pretty good.They had fenced to “la belle”—a tie score one point away from victory.McManus’s style was odd—he had a great lunge, fast and strong, but his tip control was so-so, and his riposte slow.And he liked throwing flicks, too, which were legal, but irritating.Even so, he might have won the match had he not been penalized.McManus liked to infight—and was good at it, if a bit sloppy.Early in the match he had stepped in too close and bumped Thorn with his hip, getting his touch disallowed and earning himself a warning for corps-a-corps.At la belle, when Thorn threw a feint, McManus bound his blade and stepped in close, his bell guard high, tip landing solidly on Thorn’s side, but again he came in too fast and too far.He had run into Thorn again, harder this time, and the director again disallowed the touch.McManus had ripped off his mask to argue with the director, without asking or receiving permission.A stupid error, and inexcusable at that level of competition.When the director called him on it, he popped off and actually shook his blade at the official.McManus had been disqualified on the spot.That had cost him and his team, the match had been awarded to Thorn.Maybe McManus could have won on points, maybe not, but the rules were the rules.Could that be it? That much bile and anger, after all these years? Because he lost a match he felt he should have won?Thorn could find nothing else to explain it, but it seemed so.petty.How would it be to live your life like that? Hanging on to something that small for so long?He considered how he was going to handle it, and decided that a simple and direct response was best.He flipped on the voxax circuit and said into the microphone:“You lost the match.Knock it off [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]