Night Moves Read Online Free

rocks inside cans, and chanted loudly to Spock and drive from the chest-high grasses the tiger who might be hidden therein. Jay smiled at the image, knowing it was not politically correct, but he wasn't worried. He wasn't likely to run into anybody he knew while playing this scenario, and besides, he was half Thai, wasn't he? Once upon a time, one of his great-great-grandfathers or uncles would probably have been barefoot down there in the grass, in what had been Siam, making noise, praying to assorted gods that the tiger would go the other way. All things considered, it was better to be in the shaded little hut up on the back of a ten-foot-tall elephant, with a Nitro Express double rifle racked right next to you, than it was to be on the ground beating a plate with a stick. And there was that extra, a small boy perched on the elephant's rump waving a fan on the end of a big pole to provide a warm but welcome breeze for him and the rajah. First class all the way. The only way to travel. What Jay was actually hunting was information, but keyboarding or voxaxing queries for coded binary hex packets wasn't nearly as much fun as stalking a man-eating Bengal tiger. Of course, they hadn't seen the big tiger yet, and the beaters had been thumping and rattling for a long time, relativistically speaking. The rajah was apologetic. "So sorry, sahib," he alliterated, but it wasn't his fault. You couldn't flush it out if it wasn't there. Oh, yeah, there were lesser beasts running from the hunters. Jay had seen deer, pigs, all manner of slithering snakes, including a couple of eight-foot cobras, and even a young tiger, but not the big cat he'd Tioped to find.
The tiger had come and gone--maybe burning bright, but certainly leaving no easy trail--had gutted its prey and disappeared. The VR prey in this case was a goat inside a stainless steel and titanium cage with bars as big as a bodybuilder's legs. A tyrannosaur couldn't chop through those barriers, even if his big ole teeth were made from diamonds, no way, no how. The goat--actually an encrypted file giving the time, location, and other particulars of a train shipment in Pakistan early today--should have been monster-proof. But something, had ripped the bars open as if they were overcooked noodles, gotten inside, and Mr. Goat was history.
Jay hadn't believed it at first. He thought surely somebody had managed to get a copy of the one-time key, which was how these encryptions worked, but after he'd gotten a look at the cage--the mathematical encryption-he could see it had been brute-forced open, no key involved. This was not some kid's DES, used to hide a porno file from his parents, but a decent military-grade encryption, and while not unbreakable in the long run, whoever had cracked it had done so in less than a day.
And that, of course, was just not possible. No computer on earth could do that. A dozen Supercrays working in parallel might manage it in, oh, say, ten thousand years, but in the few hours since the message was sent and it was broken, it couldn't be done. Period. End of story. Here, let me tell you another one ... Jay took off his pith helmet and wiped the sweat off his forehead with one arm. Hot out here in the Punjab and, shade notwithstanding, the little elephant house didn't have

AC. He could have designed that in, of course, but what was the point? Anybody could cobble together
a bastard scenario full of anachronisms; artists had to maintain a certain kind of purity. Well, at least every now and then they did, just to show they still could. How could this break-in have been done? It couldn't-at least not using any physics he knew. It reminded him of the old story during the early days of aeronautics. Some engineers had done studies on bumblebees. Based on the surface area of the bee's wings, the weight and shape of the insect, and the amount of muscle and force it had available, they had determined, after much slide rule and pencil-on-paper activity, that it was