Cybernation

21

Jasmine Chance liked to be in charge, a big part of the reason she had taken this job. Here she was, with a corporate budget as big as the treasury in some small countries, on a gambling ship she had named herself, and after a fashion, for herself. She could, literally, decide matters of life and death. If that wasn’t control, what was? But at the moment, with Jackson practically wetting himself, she felt a definite loss of mastery here.

They sat on the bed in her room. She’d thought sex was going to be the main thing on his mind, but she quickly realized she was wrong.

“He’s going to beat the crap out of me,” Jackson said. “I know it.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“You didn’t see him, how he looked at me. I’m telling you, this is not somebody to mess around with. He might as well have sent me an invitation: You are cordially invited to a major ass-kicking — yours.”

“Jackson…”

“I’m not joking around here, Jasmine. This guy isn’t civilized. Yeah, he wears a suit and smiles and can make small talk, but that’s no thicker than a coat of paint. Underneath, he’s a savage. He’s a killer! He wouldn’t think twice about sending me to the hospital, or the morgue.”

“He’s just trying to rattle you, hon, that’s all. He knows how much we need you. He’s playing with your head.”

“And he plans to be playing soccer with my balls. I’m telling you, I know.”

“You need to relax.” She put her hand on his shoulder. The muscles there and in his neck were bunched like wet, knotted ropes.

“Easy for you to say. Listen, I want off the ship. Let me go to the train.”

The train was one of the other two locations for CyberNation’s mobile computer centers. Currently, it was on a siding in Germany, somewhere near the French border.

“Keller—”

“I can take my team there. It won’t be any different. The hardware is the same, the software we built in the last day can be encoded and uploaded in a few hours. By the time it finishes downloading, we can be halfway there.”

“What will you tell your team?”

“No need to tell them anything except they should pack their bags. They do what I say.”

“That’s not the plan,” she said.

“Neither is getting my head stomped in by a jealous assassin!”

She thought about it. It was the fight-or-flight syndrome. Maybe in his place, she could understand it. Still, it wouldn’t really solve anything. What was to stop Roberto from hopping on a plane and dropping round to see Jackson on the train? When he had time to settle down and think about it, he’d see that. There was no safety in distance, not if somebody like Roberto really wanted to do you harm. But no point in saying that now. He was rattled enough already.

Of course, out of sight might be out of mind. She was sure she could divert Roberto’s attention. She could buy him a new toy, something to do with his fighting art. Sooner or later he would feel the call from her to find a place where they could get naked. Roberto was, after all, very primal in his urges. Maybe it would be for the best if Jackson wasn’t around.

“All right,” she said. “Gather your team and make the arrangements. Roberto won’t be back before tomorrow at the earliest. You can be gone before he returns.”

His sense of relief was obvious.

“As long as we are here, why don’t you lie down and let me massage your back? You’re as tight as a violin string.”

He started to protest. “That’s what got me in trouble in the first place.”

“Relax,” she said. “ ’Berto is in Washington. You’ll be gone when he gets back, and we aren’t doing anything we haven’t already done a dozen times. What difference could it make now? Why not relax and enjoy it?”

She didn’t give him time to think about it. She slid her hand down his chest and into his lap. After that, he had other things on his mind.

Michaels was in the Net Force gym, dressed only in a pair of shorts and workout shoes, practicing his djurus. The short dances encompassed all the moves that serak teachers had developed for fighting, armed and unarmed. Somewhere in the djurus were all the tools you’d ever need, he’d been taught.

So far, he had learned more than he thought he’d use if he got into fights every day. But better to have too much ammo than too little.

The creator of the esoteric fighting style had been a cripple called Sera, so named either because he was wise as an owl, or had a hoarse voice, depending on which definition of the Indonesian word sera, you liked. According to the various oral histories and subsequent letters and books, Sera had been born with a clubfoot and missing part of one arm. Such handicaps would not seem to lend themselves to the development of expert fighting abilities. Nonetheless, that had apparently been the case. Evidently the man had been an extremely nasty fighter, and not a man to be sneered at, however gimpy he might have been.

The origins of the art and its first practitioner were somewhat mysterious. Michaels had poked around, trying to research it, because he was curious, and had run into half a dozen dead ends.

He shifted from djuru seven, coming up from the full squat and upward thrust to an attacker’s face that ended it, to eight, moving on the triangle, or tiga. Later, he would practice the footwork on the sliwa, or square pattern.

He had worked up a good sweat; it rolled down his chest and back. He’d always thought it interesting he could get so much work out of stepping around a triangle or square that was less than two feet long on each side.

Djuru eight was essentially a blending of three previous djurus—four, six, and three — and since it was the last one he had learned, once he finished it he repeated it and started going backwards toward the first one. That was how you did the exercises, up and back on one side, then up and back on the other, so that each djuru got at least four reps, two on the right, two on the left.

Pak, or Bapak—those meant sir, or most honorable older sir, more or less — Sera’s date of birth was unknown. He’d been listed as having been born as early as 1795 A.D.; however, this seemed unlikely, given the known lineage of students, and Sera was probably born a quarter century later, in the 1820s or maybe even the 1830s. Current practitioners could not even agree on the man’s real name. The ones Michaels came up with were Eyang Hisak and H. Muhroji.

Toni didn’t know any more about Sera than Michaels did; she’d always accepted what her teacher told her and let it go. Not that it really mattered, but it was a shame they couldn’t give the man his proper due.

The birthplace and tribe of Sera were also open to question. Some claimed he was of the mysterious Javanese people known as the Badui. Since not much was known about the Badui — the White, or Inner Badui remaining cloistered even in modern times and admitting few visitors to their primitive villages — this was difficult to determine. If Sera was of the Outer, or Blue Badui, that would seem more likely, but if he was, he certainly did not stay there, according to the stories.

Others said Sera was born in Tjirebon, on the north coast of Java, east of what was then Batavia, now Jakarta. There was no consensus on this point.

Family history from Guru DeBeers and from what he could find on the web indicated that Sera trained in Silat Banteng, which came from the area of Serang, in north-west Java. From his exposure to Tjimande, which it is said he studied, and with his training in Banteng, Sera developed his own system, tailored to his physical handicaps.

Although the exact dates weren’t known, it was probably sometime before the turn of the 20th century that Sera met the man who was to become his senior student, a hardass of a fighter named Djoet, who was supposedly born around 1860, and died in the late 1930s. Djoet subsequently helped Sera formalize the system, adjusting it for people with sound limbs. Djoet was reportedly trained in Silat Kilat, Kun Tao, and probably Tjimande.

Michaels made it back to the first djuru. He stopped, grabbed a towel, and wiped the perspiration from his face and head. The problem with the short haircut he liked was that it didn’t soak up as much moisture. He had thought about wearing a headband, but decided that looked a little too yuppie-ish for him.

He glanced at the clock over the gym’s door. The day was winding down, and he had managed to lose a fair amount of the tension he had soaked up testifying before the senate committee. Not all of it, but some. Another twenty or thirty minutes of practicing his forms would help more, he decided. Picturing some of the more obnoxious senators on the receiving end of his punches and elbows probably was bad karma, but that helped, too. Imagining the “Urk!” a fat politician would blurt as Michaels buried his fist in the man’s belly was certainly politically incorrect, but also very satisfying…

“So is this a great toy, or what?” Julio said.

Howard looked at the device. “It looks like a miniature version of Robby the Robot somebody stepped on.”

And indeed, it did. A scaled-down version of the movie robot, the device was squatty, maybe eighteen-inches tall, and had a clear bullet-resistant Lexan half-dome atop the cone-shaped body, complete with a pair of articulated arms and tanklike treads. It was very wide at the base and narrowing toward the top.

“We call her ‘Claire,’ ” Julio said. “Your basic self-contained radio-controlled mobile reconnaissance and surveillance unit, the main feature of which is optical and auditory gear, including state-of-the-art CLAIR equipment — that standing for Circular-Looking-A-class InfraRed sensors. Aside from the regular cams, she can see heat sigs in the dark, has a fuzzy-logic come-back circuit so she won’t bump into things and can find her way home if the RC fails, and little waldo arms for picking up things to examine under her microscope, should the need arrive.”

Howard shook his head. “Uh-huh. What did this beast set us back?”

“Ah, sir, there’s the beauty of it. Nothing. Not a dime.”

“How did you manage that? Tell me we aren’t running a stolen robot here, Lieutenant. Something you won in a poker game with your RA buddies?”

“You wound me, sir, to suggest such a thing.”

“And butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, either. Give.”

“Claire here is a test model, from CamCanada, up in Toronto. They specialize in making devices to inspect the inside of big pipelines, checking weld integrity, hunting for cracks, like that, but they are looking to get into the police and military market. This is one of three prototypes they sent off for tests. The Mounties have one, one went to some sultan somewhere in the Middle East, and we have the third. We test it out under field conditions, write up a report, and for our trouble, we get one of the first models when they go into full production, absolutely free of charge. Well. Except for the maintenance contract, of course. But that’s nothing.”

“Interesting.”

Julio picked up a remote and pushed a button. The little robot whirred.

“It does all the usual forward, back, left, and right stuff, and the POV cam shows an image right here on the handheld. Digital images and sound, and instant capture of info on its own wireless modem and DVD burner, which are around here somewhere. Those can be plugged into just about any computer for study and analysis.”

He held the remote so Howard could see it. “Everything is shockproofed out the wazoo, structural components are machined from titanium or aircraft aluminum, and you can supposedly set off a stick of dynamite ten feet away without hurting it. Got a gyroscope for balance, low center of gravity, and she’s very stable.”

He brought the robot close enough to them so he could kick it. His combat boot drove it back a few feet, but it whirred and stayed upright. He touched a control. “This shuts off the gyroscope. Watch.”

He moved to the little device, which was slightly shorter than knee-high, and managed, with some effort, to shove it over onto its side with his foot.

The robot whined, and a rubber-tipped metal rod extruded from the robot’s side and shoved it back upright.

“Automatic righting system,” he said. “She can pick herself right up and keep on going. A byproduct of BattleBot technology, I’m told.”

He picked up another remote and pushed a button. The windowless warehouse got very dark.

Howard saw the remote control’s screen light up, and the false-color IR images of himself and Julio, looking like two washed-out ghosts, appeared on the screen.

“Lieutenant, I believe you just turned me into a Caucasian.”

Julio chuckled. The false-color computer-augmented image tinted Howard’s skin slightly darker, but no more than a redhead’s tan might be.

“Only with the lights off, sir.”

He switched the lights back on. “But wait, here’s the really fun thing,” he said. He touched another button, and the robot hissed like a giant lizard, leaped two feet into the air, flew about four feet forward, and came down. It clunked when it landed, but not hard enough to knock anything loose.

Howard raised an eyebrow.

“Compressed gas jets. The tank isn’t that big, so it’s only good for eight or ten hops before it runs out, but if Claire here comes to a ditch that would take too long to go around, she can make like a bunny and leap right over it.”

Howard smiled. “Might make recon of a building full of armed terrorists easier, at that. What are they going to run when they go into production? Any idea?”

“Ballpark only. They’re saying a hundred thousand, Canadian.”

“Lord, Lieutenant. For that much, we can buy an armor-plated car.”

“Yes, but it can’t do this.”

The little robot hissed and jumped again.

“And it’s free.”

“What’s the service contract run?”

“Practically nothing. Three years, maybe thirty thou, U.S.”

“For thirty thousand American or so, I can find a lot of enlisted men who would spit and jump up, even if they can’t see in the dark.”

Julio shook his head. “Have I ever mentioned that the general is somewhat old-fashioned?”

“Never know when my buggy whip is going to come in handy, Lieutenant. It does the job it was designed to do and never needs batteries.”

“Come on, John, give it a try. You know you want to.” He passed the controls to Howard.

Well, yes, he did. It was just like playing with Tyrone’s new toy on Christmas morning when the boy was nine. As his mother was fond of saying, If you couldn’t have fun, what was the point?

Howard pushed the button, and grinned as the robot jumped again.

22

Santos waited until the senator came out of the supermarket on his way home before he made his move. One of the most powerful men in this country, one of only a hundred altogether, and he not only didn’t have a bodyguard, he drove a small car and did his own grocery shopping. Amazing. In Rio, a man in this senator’s position would be guarded, chauffeured everywhere in an armored limo, and would not have the slightest idea what a carton of milk or a loaf of bread cost, unless somebody happened to tell him. What was the point of having power if you did not exercise it?

Santos had already driven the route the man would take to get to his townhouse. He had a woman there — not his wife, who was back home in West Virginia with their two teenaged children until the school year was done. Santos had seen the mistress himself when he had driven by earlier. The information about the wife and children was public knowledge, available to anybody who cared to look for it. Another amazing thing. Back home, men of wealth and influence knew that knowledge was power, and they kept it to themselves. Why would you give a potential enemy anything he might use against you? Foolish.

The senator from West Virginia swung his car out onto the street and headed home, driving in the right lane. Santos followed him, two cars back on the four-lane road. Three blocks later, Santos swung into the left-hand lane and passed the senator. He sped up slightly, just a few miles an hour over the limit, not enough to trigger photo radar or the interest of a traffic cop. He gained a block on the senator’s car, pulling into his home street forty-five seconds ahead of the honorable Wayne DeWitt. He gunned the car’s engine, sped a hundred feet down the street, and hung a skidding one-eighty turn. He stopped the car, his steel-toed workboot resting on the brake, but still in gear. He lifted a motorcycle crash helmet from the seat next to him and slipped it on, pulled the straps tight. The helmet had a face-shield of heavy clear plastic. He flipped the visor down into place. He already wore the heavy leather and rubber grappling gloves used by NHB ring fighters for matches, with the wrist wraps cinched tight. You could use your hands, but there was a lot of padding on the outside. He put a boil-and-bite mouthpiece into his mouth and slipped it over his upper teeth. Guaranteed for the first seventy-five hundred dollars of dental work if you hurt your teeth while wearing it, nine dollars at K-mart. A great deal. He wore a boxer’s cup in a jock-strap over his leather pants, and a weightlifter’s thick and wide belt covering his waist and his lower back under his leather jacket. Without special springs and belts, he was as protected as he could be in this car.

When the senator’s car rounded the corner, Santos mashed the accelerator pedal.

One thing you had to give big gas-guzzling American V-8s — they had power to spare. He left tire rubber smoking on the asphalt as he took off.

He was doing almost fifty when he switched lanes and slammed into the senator’s compact car.

It was at a slight angle — he wanted to be able to drive his car away, if possible, and there was too much chance of rupturing the radiator in a head-on, even against a smaller car.

There was a hard thump! and crash, and a sense of time slowing down, almost of drifting through space. Even though he was braced and ready, the seat belt tight, he still went forward into the air bag as it deployed. The face shield and gloves saved him from a flattened nose and brush burns on his arms as he hit the bag, which immediately collapsed. Striking an air bag in an accident was not, as some people seemed to think, like being hit in the face with a soft feather pillow. It was more like being punched by a gloved boxer, hard.

The big car’s windshield didn’t shatter, that was good, but something shiny flew up from the impact and hit on the passenger side hard enough to crack the safety glass.

He saw the senator’s car spinning, saw the man’s head hit his side window, blasting the tempered glass into squarish little bits that burst outward in a glittering fan of shrapnel. The air bag in the senator’s car had gone off, but the deliberately angled impact had caused the senator to hit the bag well to the side, so the safety device didn’t do as much good as it would have — another reason to avoid the full frontal smash.

Once past, Santos stood on the brake, and his car, already slowed by the crash, skidded to a noisy stop. He looked back in time to see the senator’s car pinwheel into a fiberglass light pole that snapped off at the base and came down on top of the auto just as the car plowed into a row of bushes, wiped them out, and smashed the right rear panel into a thick oak tree. The tree shook violently, but held.

Santos put the car into reverse and backed up. Seemed to be driving okay, nothing scraping against the wheel, that was good.

He came abreast of the senator’s car. No way they were going to repair that, the whole front end was shifted to one side, the frame bent and badly distorted. Steam came from the ruptured cooling system.

The senator’s head lolled through his shattered side window. Blood welled from his head and dripped onto the ground, and from the angle of his neck, Santos thought it might be broken. Certainly it was wrenched enough to damage muscles. The front of the car was collapsed enough so that the man’s legs were probably pinned, maybe they were broken, too.

Good enough. Maybe he would die, maybe not, but he wasn’t going to be playing golf any time soon, if he survived. And he would not be a thorn in CyberNation’s side for a while, either.

Santos put the car into forward gear, and drove away. People were coming out of their townhouses to see what had happened. He kept his head down, knowing he was disguised by the helmet and face shield.

Once he was around the corner, he pulled the helmet and gloves off and spat the mouthpiece into his hand. He unbuckled the lifting belt, pulling it from under his jacket. He used a small pocket knife to cut the elastic on the jock and cup. With one hand he stuffed all the protective gear into a big shopping bag from Trader Joe’s.

Three miles away he came to a major bus stop. There was a movie theater across the street. He parked the car in a movie lot, damaged front end toward the building, got out, and dumped the bag in the nearest trash bin. Anybody who found the bag would probably not be the kind of person who’d run straight to the police, and even if they were, what was illegal about gloves, a helmet, and a lifting belt? By the time anybody found the hit-and-run vehicle, he would be long gone.

He walked to the bus stop. Smiled at an old black lady who saw him coming. She smiled back.

A good night’s work, this. Made a man proud.

Jay Gridley sat on a bench provided for pilgrims and watched the sunset. Fuji-yama was a walk-up, lots of people climbed it every day. It was a volcanic peak, a strato-volcano shaped like a squat cone, but more than twelve thousand feet high, in Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, near Honshu. The sacred mountain was the highest in Japan. It hadn’t had a major eruption since the early 1700s, but it vented steam and smoke now and again. Gave folks a bit of a thrill, maybe, to know it could possibly wake up and blow the climbers into the next world, however unlikely that was.

Most of the pilgrims started their ascent at the Fifth Station, about seventy-five hundred feet up, from where it took six or eight hours to make it to the top. The official climbing season ran from July to the end of August. Climbers on the north side used the Yoshidaguchi trail, which ran from Fujiyoshida City to the summit. The Fuji Subaru Line toll road met the trail at the Fifth Station, halfway up the mountain.

It was crowded — Fuji-yama was always crowded, sometimes hundreds of people walking in a long serpentine line, only a few inches apart, laughing, talking, enjoying themselves. It wasn’t Mount Everest. More than a hundred thousand people a year climbed the sacred mountain. Now and again, one would die making the ascent, usually from a heart attack, but sometimes from heat exhaustion or dehydration. It was cool, maybe ten degrees above freezing at the top today, but a steady climb produced a lot of heat, and the heavy jackets tended to come off pretty quick.

The old saying in Japan was you were a fool not to climb the mountain once, and a bigger fool if you climbed it twice.

Jay watched the pilgrims slog past, many with walking sticks — canes, staves — backpacks holding small children, even a seeing-eye dog leading a blind man. Old, young, fit, flabby, tourists, seekers, dressed in every color of the rainbow and a lot of hues not found anywhere in nature.

It was not a totally safe climb, however, even for those in good shape. Falling rocks injured or killed people, if rarely. Those who wandered off the trail had sometimes fallen. And now and again, a tourist would be hit by lightning, sometimes out of the blue. Jay carried a small transistor radio Velcroed to his backpack, tuned to a time sig from somewhere. Supposedly, if the radio started blasting out a lot of static, it was a good idea to hit the ground and lie flat.

Weather was not particularly stable from the base to the top, and what started out sunny could be foggy, rainy, or snowy in a matter of a few minutes. The place made its own weather.

The Climbing Safety Guidance Center was located at the Sixth Station, First Aid Station at the Seventh. Climbing during the off-season was not encouraged. Those who felt the need were required to clear their climbing gear with the Fujiyoshida Police Station. Failure to do so as a tourist would get you kicked out of the country if caught, heavily fined if you were a local.

It was a good idea to bring proper clothing, water, food, and toilet paper.

Assuming you made it to the top, you could visit the shrine, mail a postcard at the post office, and explore the volcanic crater. You could also buy souvenirs, very expensive, and the big show was to watch the sunrise above the sea of clouds that often shrouded the earth below.

Jay had made the climb five times. In VR, that is. He wanted to try it in RW some day. Since meeting Saji, he was no longer worried that the real thing might not live up to the artificial experience.

Saji. Ah, there was something to think about when he got to the top. As he had been thinking about her most of the way up so far.

An old man, white-haired, seventy, darkly tanned, came and sat on the bench next to him. He looked as if he might be Thai. He wore gray wool slacks over waffle-soled hiking boots, a white shirt under a blue Gore-Tex wind-breaker, white cotton gloves, and dark sunglasses. He smiled at Jay.

“Nice day for a climb, isn’t it?”

Jay nodded. This wasn’t a private scenario, but a public one run by Tokyo University. Some, maybe all, of the climbers could be personas of real people. Many of the visuals were lifted right from the net-cams that watched the mountain year-round. “Yes, it is,” he said.

They sat there, not speaking for a few moments, then the old man got up. “Well, that’s enough rest for the wicked. See you around, Jay.”

Jay nodded and smiled, and it was a full two seconds before he realized that the man had called him by name.

“Hey! Hold it!”

But the old man developed a speed and broken-field running ability that would have shamed a star football quarterback on a ninety-yard touchdown run. And he laughed loud and almost maniacally as he did so.

Somebody is seriously playing with me, Jay thought.

And it seemed to Jay in that moment that it must be somebody who knew him.

But — who?

Jackson and his crew were well away from the ship when Roberto returned from his mission. Jackson had called, was already working using his flatscreen and modem from the helicopter, and obviously feeling much better.

Chance had read about the senator’s accident on the NetNewsNow headline page within an hour of the event. DeWitt would live, but doctors were not sure that he would walk again.

Too bad. But you had to factor that in — you couldn’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

DeWitt was a fly removed from the ointment.

Now, as she waited for Roberto to arrive at her office — she didn’t want to invite him to her cabin and have him refuse — she considered yet again how she was going to play this.

Roberto wasn’t the brightest bulb on the string, but neither was he stupid. He was cunning, in a sly way, but his view of the world was limited, much more personal than global. She was smarter than he was, she knew it, and manipulation was one of her strengths. She could bend him in her direction. She had the skills.

He smiled when he sauntered into the small office she kept. “Missy. It is done.”

“I heard. As ever, you are a man to be relied upon. Thank you.”

He shrugged.

“Listen,” she said. “I have sent Jackson away.”

His eyebrows went up.

“It was a mistake. You know how I am. I am weak about sex, I crave it. I am sorry. But it was wrong, I admit that. So Jackson is gone; he’ll be working on the train from now on — you never have to see him again if you don’t want. I’ll make it up to you.”

“How?”

“Anything you want.”

He smiled.

She could almost hear the wheels turning in his head. Of course Missy realized her mistake, how could she not? He was much man, while Jackson was a boy, one who diddled computers and did nothing for real. Only a fool would prefer him over Roberto, and Missy, slut that she was, was no fool. This was only right.

“I will think about it,” he said.

She held her smile in check. She had him.

“Thank you, Roberto.” Don’t lay it on too thick, she told herself, just enough so he sees you as contrite, and willing to kneel for his forgiveness. Let him think about what he is missing — what he could be missing in addition to that.

He would come around.

She watched him stroll out, walking with that cocksure swagger that men of physical prowess displayed, like big cats who could spring at any second, relaxed, but ready, a coiled spring waiting for instant release.

And he really was much better in bed than Jackson.

23

Keller felt better. He knew intellectually this wasn’t altogether realistic, his relief — Santos was as portable as he was, and if he really wanted to come and get him, he could; still, having a thousand miles of space between himself and the killer was better than not. Besides, he didn’t think Santos would do that, come after him. Jasmine should be able to protect him, and certainly she could distract the man if she put her mind to it. She was very talented when it came to distracting men, Keller knew for sure. He’d never been with anybody like her, not even close. She knew things he had never heard of, never imagined. The tricks she could do…

That was the problem. He should have never let himself get into that situation in the first place, but, ah, she was something. How could a normal man refuse? She could raise a cold sweat on a brass monkey, raise some other parts of his anatomy, too.

Still, as soon as he’d climbed onto the copter, Keller had felt as if a great weight had been lifted from him. He was able to get on-line and screw with Jay Gridley some more without looking over his shoulder. To have fun with it.

He leaned back in the first-class seat of the 747 heading for Germany and stared through the window. Dueling with a man like Gridley, that was a civilized way of doing things. You used your skill, your wit, your intelligence. Your opponent appreciated these things, respected them, even if he opposed you. There were rules, many of them unstated but understood nonetheless, and adhered to, proper ways to engage and contend. Civilized men knew these things — they knew how the game was played.

A man like Santos? He appreciated nothing but brute force. Violence. It didn’t matter to him that you were smarter, that you had talent and skill. No, all that mattered to him was the fist in the face, the foot to the crotch. He was a savage, no matter how you cleaned him up and dressed him, a jungle creature with a sharp stick. If you explained this to him, he would laugh. If you protested his lowbrow, knuckle-dragging demeanor, he would kick sand in your face. He would rather hurt people than not.

Keller shook his head. How could you reason with a man like that? You couldn’t. Jasmine wound him up like some demented killing toy and set him loose to do her dirty work. She used money, not to mention her sexual favors, like a carrot to entice a mule into her bidding. You didn’t take a stick to a beast like Santos. He would turn around and rip your arm off if you tried it. The man was an animal, with the morals of a cat. Pure evil, not a whit of guilt, a sociopath.

Still and all, Santos was necessary. CyberNation had to go forward. Whatever means were necessary were justified. Just as abolitionists of a century and a half past had broken immoral laws to help the slaves, so would those engaged in the fight to bring CyberNation to life be revered as freedom fighters decades from now. Living on the cutting edge was risky, but it had to be done — for the greater good. If a few men had to suffer so that mankind as a whole would progress… was this not how it had been since before the beginning of history?

Yes. It was.

A man like Jay Gridley, even if he couldn’t be persuaded to your side of the argument, could be outmaneuvered, could be defeated, using the tools that would eventually be society’s redemption. Deep in his heart, whether he would admit it or not, Gridley knew that the old rules, the old ways, had to move aside. Progress marched on. It always had, and if you stood in its path, you got run over, that was the way of it. The question was not if, but when. The choice was between evolution and revolution. Even Gridley would admit to that. He was for evolution, a status quoist, but he had not always been so inclined. Neither, for that matter, had the country. Had not the United States of America been born of revolution, guns against outmoded laws? Could they not see that such cycles would come again? That the fast wheel was sometimes better than the slow one?

People who were comfortable had a selective kind of blindness. They saw what they wanted to see, and ignored the things they did not wish to notice. Like a horse with blinders on, they had no vision save straight ahead.

Now and again, somebody had to come by and pull the horse’s blinders off, cut his traces, and slap him on the rump. Run free, my friend! The future awaits you out there!

The drone of the big jet engines lulled him. Here he was, on a craft bigger than the ships that had crossed the seas from Europe to open up the Americas, a flying vessel that was so big and so heavy that no one on Earth would have taken a bet that it could fly, even a hundred years ago. The jet could travel thousands of miles without re-fueling, cover a distance in a few hours that would have taken the wind-blown sailors months in their wooden ships with canvas sail. The electronics in this bird would boggle the minds of the creators of Univac. You didn’t turn back from such wonders. The future ran only one way, and the next revolution was not going to be in machines, but in knowledge. The global community would be one, together, able to reach out and touch each other faster than thought itself.

Once that happened, men like Santos would be superfluous. They could be quietly eliminated. The strongest man could be brought low by a bullet to the head. The hand that pulled the trigger need not be any stronger than that of a child. As the mammoths had fallen before the technology of the spear and fire, so, too, would men like Santos, who flexed their muscles instead of their brains, eventually join the ranks of the extinct beasts who were strong, but stupid.

The mind was more powerful. Brain won over brawn.

At least in theory. Given his recent experience with Santos, Keller realized there was going to be a transition period before the thugs and mugs went the way of the dodo. And during that period, it would be smart to stay out of the way of the brutes as they flailed about in their death throes. Yes, indeed.

In bed next to Saji, both of them reading, Jay sighed. “What?”

“This biz with this guy,” he said. “I feel like somehow I’m missing something I shouldn’t.”

She put her book down and looked at him. “Oh?”

“Yeah. There’s something, some kind of, I don’t know, familiar feel to the traps and touches. Like the Fuji thing. Why appear as an old Thai? Why come and sit next to me and then give it away like that?”

“He knows you’re part Thai,” she said. “He’s playing with your head.”

“Yeah, yeah, but something is weird about it. I feel as if I should know this guy.”

She sat quietly for a moment. Then said, “What else is bothering you?”

“Me? Nothing. Work is all.”

She said, “Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.” He looked at her. “What are you getting at?”

A short time passed before she spoke. Then she said, “Are you really ready to get married?”

He blinked. The question that had been on his mind for weeks sounded terrifying when it came from her. “How can you ask that? Of course I am!”

“Okay.”

“What — are you having second thoughts?”

She sighed. “Yes.”

“What? Really?” He sat up straighter. His gut churned with sudden cold, as if he’d swallowed a cup of liquid nitrogen. “Why?”

“You know the Four Noble Truths,” she said.

He shrugged. “Yeah. There’s suffering in the world. There’s a reason for this suffering. There’s an end to it. There’s a way to learn how to end it, using the Eightfold path.”

“Close enough. And the Eightfold path?”

“What is this, a bedtime quiz?”

She shrugged. “You asked.”

“Okay, we’re talking, ah — right understanding, right thinking, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right, uh, effort. Lemme see, ah, right mindfulness, and — don’t tell me, I got it — right concentration.”

“Yes. And the Middle Path is the way many of us seeking enlightenment choose. Staying away from the extremes.”

“Okay. So? What’s this got to do with you having second thoughts about us?”

“I fear that my desire for you is sometimes too strong,” she said. “That having a desire this powerful, that being so attached to it, will ultimately be the cause of suffering. Not being with you, but wanting to be with you too much.”

“Listen, I’ve tried to plug into this, but I’ve never really understood it. What does that mean?”

She smiled at him. “Admission of ignorance is the first step on the road to wisdom.”

“Yeah, right.”

“It’s not that we can’t be together, married, and happy. Each moment should be what it is, and there is much joy to be found in each moment. But the idea is to not be attached to that, not to want the joy so much that you can’t experience it. You can… get in your own way. You can spend all your time trying to live for the future, full of expectation, or living in the past, full of nostalgia. Either will cause suffering, because you can have neither. The past is gone, the future never arrives.”

“So are you saying you don’t want to get married?”

“No, idiot, you’re not listening. I do. Maybe too much, that’s all I’m saying. I don’t want to make you responsible for my happiness, because if I do, sooner or later, I’ll be disappointed and unhappy.”

“That’s real comforting, sweetie.”

“It’s the truth. Reaching outside yourself for happiness is the big cause for suffering. I want to stand next to you, but not depend on your shadow to protect me from the sun. Suppose I put all my life into you, into us. And it works great, you give me back all I give you and more.”

“Sounds right to me. What’s the problem?”

“You change your mind in ten years, decide you don’t want to be here.”

“I won’t—”

“Okay, better example — you get hit by a bus in six months. You don’t have the choice to stay or go, your number is up.”

“Are you saying you don’t want to miss me if I get hit by a bus?”

“No. I’m saying that I want to be happy on my own, so that what I bring to us is real and true. Marriage is a partnership. If I don’t come to the table with my half, it’s not fair to either of us.”

He shook his head. He really didn’t understand. She was worried that she might want him too much? How was that a bad thing? His fear was that he would lose something of himself by marrying her. That was different.

Wasn’t it?

He felt her hand slide across his leg. “Whoa. What have we here?”

“The moment, Jay. No past, no future, just right now.”

He grinned. Okay. He could deal with that. Oh, yeah. Definitely.

But it bothered him that she was worried about the marriage thing. Given how he had felt lately, that shouldn’t bother him at all, but it did. Was that a double standard? Probably, but — ah!

She overrode his thoughts with her actions, and in the moment, he stopped worrying and was happy.

Santos was satisfied, at least for the moment. He had made Missy do some things she ordinarily did not do — and that was saying something. She would be sore in new places tomorrow. He was not done punishing her, and Jackson would not get off just because he had run away to Germany, but he could wait. All in good time.

Did he trust her? No, certainly not. She was a slut, and she was out for herself, that had not changed, no matter what she said. Her skill would only buy her so much, but for now, it was worth enjoying. When he went home, he would find younger women who did not know the arts of love, and teach them to please him in the ways Missy did. Only they would not have her devious mind and need to be in control. Smart women, ambitious women, they were dangerous, to be avoided. Young, beautiful, and stupid, that was what he preferred. And if they got smarter with age? There were always fresh ones waiting to take their place.

As he showered, lathering himself with her hard-milled soap, he hummed a little tune. The next part of the project was about to start. There was only so much they could do with their computers and advertising, and soon it would be up to him and men like him to make things really happen.

He stepped out of the shower and dried himself with one of the huge towels Missy kept. He should go and practice his moves, now that he was relaxed. The ship’s gym had room once you moved all the equipment back out of the way. Making love, having a hot shower, those were things that made a man want to go to bed and take a nap, but discipline must be maintained. He worked out every day, no matter what, no matter where he was, he found a way to do something. The fighting edge was one that grew dull if not sharpened frequently. It would be easy to justify a day off now and then. But if you could do that, you could justify two days off. Then four. There was no end to that, and the next thing you knew, you were fat and lazy, meat for some lean and hungry player who did not fool himself into thinking he still had the moves when he had let them rust away.

He found his striped workout pants and rubber sandals, grabbed a clean towel, and headed for the door.

Lying naked on the bed, Missy saw him. “You’re not going to work out?”

“I am.”

“But you must be tired.”

“Yes. That does not matter.”

“Why don’t you come back to bed? You can work out later.”

“I could. I will. But I am also going to work out now.”

She shook her head, and he left. She could not understand. She was a woman. Women did not know the ways of men, not in the important things. Oh, yes, they knew about what a man wanted in bed, but about honor and discipline and what made a man a man? No. They knew nothing of these things. How could they? No more than a man could know about bearing children. It was just not in them.

24

In the conference room bright and early, Michaels listened to his team give their reports. Toni was here, Jay, John Howard, and Julio Fernandez.

Toni said, “Police are certain that the car that rammed Senator DeWitt’s vehicle did so deliberately. There were no skid marks before the impact, and the hit-and-run car, which has been identified from paint and chrome chips, has been located, only a few miles away. Area residents got a glimpse of the driver, but he was wearing a helmet and heavy gloves, so no one got a look at his features. He could be white, black, or even a woman.”

Michaels said, “And Jay thinks this ties to CyberNation. Jay?”

Jay nodded. “Yep. Just one more log on the circumstantial fire, boss, but it’s burning pretty good right now. I’ve been poking around and have found some interesting stuff out about their gambling ship. It never puts into port anywhere, at least it hasn’t since it was refitted and went to sea more than a year ago.”

“That’s unlikely. How does it resupply and refuel?” Howard asked.

“Fuel, mail, food, everything comes in either by helicopter or by special cargo ships that show up once a month. Since the ship is in international waters, nobody can bother it. There are no plans for the rebuilding and refitting on file, nothing since the original vessel was chartered. Libyan registry means nobody pays any attention to it as long as they pay the fees. There are webcams on-line, but only of the main casino and the outside. We don’t know what all is on the ship. I’ve culled reports from various web pages, posts by tourists, and if you put them altogether, you come up with a composite picture that is missing a lot.”

“Such as?” Michaels said.

“Such as, half the ship. Here, take a look at the graphic.” Jay touched a button on his flatscreen, and a line drawing wireframe holoproj lit the air above the projection port. “There are passenger cabins here and here, on these decks.” Part of the 3-D schematic lit up in red.

“The casino is here. This is the pool, here is a gym, over here a big dining hall, and an entertainment hall.”

More of the image came to life in different colors.

“If this area is crew quarters, and you allow for these decks to be dedicated to engines, supplies, miscellaneous storage, fuel, all that”—more colors flashed on—“then you throw in a couple more big spots for the hell of it, you still have a fair amount of the ship that looks to be empty. And none of the reports can fill in those unused decks.”

“Maybe they are building more casinos?” Fernandez ventured.

“Nope, no signs of construction, no construction stuff delivered on the supply vessels for at least the last six months — I was able to get those manifests.”

“So, what exactly are you trying to say here, Jay?” Toni said.

He shook his head. “I dunno enough about ships to be sure, but it seems to me you wouldn’t leave all that space empty.”

“That’s generally true,” Howard said.

“So, if that’s the case, what is on these decks? I’m betting it’s something connected to CyberNation and not to gambling per se.”

“Such as?” Michaels said.

Jay shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe computers. Some kind of production facility, for all those ads they run. They do those themselves, I found out, no outside agency involved.”

“Which means what, even if that’s so?” Toni said. “Nothing sinister about that. They had some extra room, they put it to good use.”

Jay shook his head. “They don’t need the room. CyberNation HQ is in Switzerland. They have a twenty-story office building in Geneva, and a big honkin’ warehouse there, too. What’s a ship half full of slot machines and card tables compared to that?”

“You have a theory, though, don’t you?” Michaels said.

“Yes, sir, boss, I do. See, if they were up to something illegal, the Swiss police could go and knock on their door and check out that building in Geneva. But what if they had something going on down in the Caribbean? Who has the power to go and check it out?”

Howard nodded. “Legally, nobody.”

“Exactly.”

“So you’re saying you think the net attacks originated on that ship?” Toni said.

“I can’t say that for sure. But if they did, how would anybody be able to find out about it? Or do anything if they could find out? Why does CyberNation have a gambling ship anyhow?”

“Maybe we better find some answers,” Michaels said.

“I’m working on it,” Jay said.

After the meeting broke up, Jay found himself alone with Julio Fernandez.

Julio said, “Sounds as if you have your work cut out for you on this thing.”

Jay smiled. “Maybe not. I might be able to crack their personnel database. If I can find out who is working for them, maybe I can locate those people by other e-trails. You know, get hits on where they used their credit cards, made long-distance phone calls, like that. If they’ve got some crack programmers working on that ship, that would point another finger in their direction.”

“You think you can blow past firewalls for a place like CyberNation?”

“Well, yeah, if I had a lot of time and a couple superCrays to play with. But there’s an easier way. Social engineering.”

Fernandez smiled. “I remember you talked about that,” he said. “But is that legal?”

“Not in the strictest sense,” Jay said.

“In what sense is it legal?”

“Well, okay, not in any sense,” Jay admitted. “But let’s say, for instance, that I know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who has access to the files, and I can trade him something for the information. That doesn’t cost us anything.”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but isn’t that exactly the kind of thing we are here to stop? Doesn’t sneaking into somebody’s computer system and stealing information constitute a crime?”

“Technically, yes.”

Fernandez gave him a wry grin. “Uh-huh.”

“But look, we’re not talking about some honest citizen whose house we’re breaking into to steal his TV. I’m pretty sure these are the guys who cost nations around the world millions and millions of dollars. People died as a result of the net going down in places. These guys wear eye patches and carry cutlasses. They’re crooks.”

“Slippery slope there, Jay. Blows right past the Fourth Amendment. Fruit of the poisoned vine and all like that.”

“Since when did you become a constitutional scholar, Lieutenant?”

“I’m sworn to uphold and protect it. You are, too, given Net Force’s charter. Once you start breaking the rules to get to the really bad guys, how long before you bend ’em to get to the plain old bad guys? And then the ones who are maybe not so bad, but that you don’t like?”

Jay sighed. “Yeah, well, you have a point. There is probably another way to get to the information without doing anything illegal. Be harder though. And what if while I’m doing that, they hit again, shut down a hospital and kill off a bunch of patients or something?”

“That would suck. But still.”

“You obey all the traffic laws, Julio, all the time?”

“Nope. And if I get caught, I don’t kick, either, I pay the fine. But running a red light in the middle of nowhere at midnight when nobody is around is not the same thing, is it?

“Suppose you get the stuff you need and we use the information to nail these guys. No harm, no foul, right? But then one of their lawyers finds out what we did? The bad guys, who are guilty, get off, and you wind up looking for work, or maybe spending quality time in a cell in some country club federale, doing the warden’s taxes for five years. It’s the Rule of Law, Jay. It’s what separates the good guys from the bad guys. We toss that out, we’re no different than they are.”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re right. It was just a thought.”

“Can’t hang you for thinking. Not yet, anyway.”

Toni took a coffee break, but she sat at her desk, fiddling with the computer. It had been a while since she had done any serious scrimshaw work — if any of what she had done while she was housebound during her pregnancy could be called serious — and she decided to check in on Bob Hergert, whose on-line class had taught her what she knew about the art of scratching lines on ivory and then filling them with black paint.

Bob’s method ran heavily to stippling, of putting a lot of tiny dots on the smooth surface, using very sharp needles, some of which he made himself, since ordinary needles were too dull for the microscrimshanding he liked to do. Bob could put a realistic portrait on a piece of ivory no bigger than a dime, so detailed that you could only see the thing properly under a big magnifying glass or even a stereomicroscope.

There were folks who didn’t consider that art, but Toni wasn’t among them.

Bob had redone his on-line shop in the past year, adding new material. Virtually everything he had produced for the last fifteen years was available for view, since he kept records of it all.

Toni strolled down the wide aisles — floor space was cheap in VR — and looked at the various pieces set out for inspection. She had a more specific reason for dropping by than just checking. John Howard’s wife, Nadine, had bought her husband a set of faux-ivory grips for his revolver for his upcoming birthday. The newer versions of that looked so much like elephant ivory it would fool almost everybody, but cost a lot less, and didn’t require that Jumbo die for your sins. Nadine had asked Toni if she might be interested in doing some artwork on them. Toni had done a gun butt once, for one of Julio Fernandez’s buddies. The friend, an ex-green hat, had a cowboy six-shooter, and Julio had asked her to do something on one panel. She had done a simple design, with a beret over a thin scroll, with the words, “De Oppresso Liber” on the scroll. “To Free the Oppressed.” The design and motto were right out of the Special Forces T-shirt catalog, so it hadn’t been that hard. She wasn’t pleased with the way it had turned out, the lettering wasn’t perfect, and the shading was not quite right, though the recipient had seemed happy enough with it. Nadine Howard had something a little more complex in mind, and if Toni was going to do it, she needed some help.

The store had been sorted according to her needs when she logged in, so it was easy to find the pistol grips. There were quite a few of them. There was a nice set given to a retiring sheriff by his friends, his badge and name on them. Some that had fancy lettering and geometric designs. Some with a portrait of a grandchild.

The ones that caught her attention were a set showing the front and back of a nude black woman, who was crouched down in an outdoor courtyard, over what looked like a tile floor, surrounded by Middle Easternlike structures. The detail work was intricate — the columns supporting the arched roof were carved, the balusters, rails, parapets of the building, all were exquisite. A domed roof showed in the distance in the back view. You could see the reflection of the woman’s foot on the tile floor. And the nude herself was gorgeous. She had short hair, almost a crew cut, a nose that looked as if it had been broken, and with five-power magnification, you could see that her eyes were light-colored.

She looked familiar.

Bob drifted over. “Hey, Toni,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Hey, Bob. I might have some gun grips to do, and I thought I’d come and get some inspiration. This is beautiful work.”

“Thanks. That’s Dirisha. Look close at the back of her hand, right there.”

Toni did. There was what looked like a small square with a tube sticking out of one side, extending out like a finger. She dialed up the magnification to get a better look.

“That’s a spetsdöd,” he said. “A dart gun. She’s a character from a science fiction novel; I did this for the writer.”

“It’s incredible work, Bob.”

“Thanks.”

“I should live long enough to get this good.”

“All it takes is practice, kiddo. If I can do it, anybody can.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Well, okay, a little talent helps. But mostly it’s hard work. Oops, gotta run, customer. See you around, Toni. Let me know if I can help you.”

“Thanks, Bob.”

She bent to marvel at the gun grips again. Bob did his work under a stereomicroscope, and Alex, bless him, had surprised her with one. Which, as it turned out, was instrumental in solving a case he’d been working on, so it had been a pretty good investment for that alone. But if Toni was going to do work like this, it would take a lot more than a good stereoscope. Whatever Bob had to say about it, it took a lot of talent and patience to produce a work of art so detailed that under twenty-power magnification, you could count every hair on the woman’s eyebrows, and not a one was out of place.

Lord.

Jasmine Chance looked at the numbers. New memberships were up, way up, but not nearly at the levels that CyberNation wanted. It had been a good campaign, the combination pushes, but it had pretty much peaked.

She leaned back in the chair and sighed. Well, she’d expected it to come to this. None of the governments they had lobbied were ready to step on board: There hadn’t been enough of a public clamor, and that was what it was going to take. Politicians did not venture far from their power bases, everybody knew that, and the way to get legislation passed was to get enough static from the voters so the elected officials knew which way to go. Politicians were, by their natures, followers, not leaders. They reflected public opinion more than they shaped it. That made for more longevity in their jobs, and getting re-elected was more important than any single piece of law they might sponsor.

So, it was time to step up things enough so that an outraged public would demand that those people who did their elected bidding got off the stick and fixed things.

Chance and her teams had to give them something to fix. Something it would take them a lot of time and money and effort to make right. And that meant taking down more than computer networks with software. It meant taking down hardware, and whether it was cutting cables or blowing up buildings, whatever it took was whatever it took.

She looked at her watch. Keller’s team would need to be told. She’d put in a call to him to let him know the schedule was being moved up again.

Roberto would be tickled. He could cut loose, pull out all the stops, and that’s what had always attracted him about this project. That and the money, of course. He liked being with her, no question, but she wasn’t foolish enough to believe she came first.

Well. Sometimes she came first…

She grinned, and reached for her com. Things were going to get active around here.

25

Joe’s Diner was a classic — or it would be, if it survived to the 1980s. Shaped like a fat hot dog bun, the front was glass from waist-height up. Inside, a counter with boomerang patterns on the Formica ran the length of the place, and was utilized by sitting upon bolted-to-the floor chrome-plated stools with red Naugahyde covering the padded tops. Joe’s served burgers, fries, and toasted cheese sandwiches for lunch. For dinner, the blue plate special was sliced roast beef and mashed potatoes, both covered with thick gravy, and your choice of a vegetable — as long as it was canned green peas or diced carrots. For breakfast, you could get ham and eggs, bacon and eggs, or sausage and eggs, and they all came with hash browns. If you were looking for health food, you’d starve to death in Joe’s, and nobody would feel sorry for you. Only some kind of commie queer ate nothing but vegetables, and good riddance if he croaked.

Since it was early, Jay was having breakfast, and the light version at that: eggs, sunnyside up, two of them. Four little sausages, Bisquick biscuits drenched in melted butter. Hash brown potatoes in a puddle of warm oil. The heart-attack special they’d have called it in the twenty-first century. Sixty years before, this was what people ate regularly and never thought twice about. And if they wanted cereal to go along with it, they had Frosted Sugar Whatevers with whole milk, and a couple heaping teaspoons of granulated sugar on top of that. And nobody here called it White Death.

Jay glanced at his watch and then at the door just as the newspaper guy from the Kansas City Star arrived. This was a jaunty-looking bearded fellow wearing a gray fedora, a rumpled white shirt and tie, with a black sport coat slung over his shoulder, Frank Sinatra-style, and carrying a manila folder. Here was Mahler, ace reporter for the Star, a metaphor for the information transfer Jay needed.

“Hey, Joe,” Mahler said. “Coffee and the Number Three. My Oriental friend here is buying.”

Joe, the swarthy, heavy-set counterman in a once-white apron that would need a gallon of bleach and three turns through a washer with new, blue Cheer just to get back to gray, nodded and turned to the kitchen pass-through. He yelled at the cook, “Four-mixed-shredded-fatback-short-dollars-and-burnt!”

Jay translated mentally: Four scrambled eggs, hash brown potatoes, bacon, a small stack of small pancakes, and white toast, well-done. Well, just “toast” was enough, since white bread was the only option in this place at this time.

Joe poured a cup of coffee into a heavy china mug and set it down on a saucer in front of Mahler. Some of the thin brew — it looked more like weak tea — slopped into the saucer. Mahler spooned four teaspoons of sugar into the cup, poured a little glass bottle of cream into it, stirred the concoction a couple of times, then sipped at it.

Starbucks would have a field day here.

Amazing they weren’t all diabetics, too.

“So, here’s your information,” Mahler said. He slid the folder across the counter toward Jay.

“Thanks.”

“No problem. Anything I can do to keep those Red bastards at bay, you just call.”

Jay smiled. The fifties were full of people worrying that the communists would be storming ashore at Palisades Park or Long Beach at any moment. Senator McCarthy had played the country’s fears like a rock drummer on crank hammers his skins, at least for a while. And even after HUAC — the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities — finally faded, the Red Scare lingered until the Soviet Union broke up, almost forty years later. For a time, anybody who considered himself a patriot would do anything for any government agency who hinted it would help stem the Red Tide threatening to engulf the world…

“Your government thanks you, Mr. Mahler.”

Jay opened the folder. Julio Fernandez had been right. He had been able to get to the information legally. It was the long way around, but it was all public information, and if you knew what you were looking for, and you knew how to look for it, it was all there to be had. He scanned the list, nodded at the names, and smiled again. The boss was gonna love this.

Mahler’s breakfast arrived, and it was positively psychedelic-looking. Bright yellow scrambled eggs, reddish-brown strips of crisp bacon, a stack of pancakes the diameter of a saucer, piled eight high, and a second plate with four pieces of toast cut in half diagonally, each buttered, with eight more pats of butter in a tiny bowl. Man. Jay had done the research. They really did eat like this. It was a wonder any of them had lived to be thirty.

Michaels was in his office trying to make sense of the new budget sheet his comptrollers had put together when Jay walked in. Nobody knocked around here. What did he have a secretary for? She never even tried to slow Jay down, far as he could tell.

“Check it out, boss.” He waved his flatscreen.

“I’m listening.”

Jay handed Michaels the flatscreen and flopped onto the couch. “They got a boatload of computer programmers on that ship. Bet your ass that’s where the attacks on the web came from.”

“And you know this how?”

“Well, I was gonna rascal the personnel files for CyberNation, but Julio talked me out of it. Being as how that would be illegal, immoral, and probably fattening and all. But he got me thinking, and I dug it out using public stuff, perfectly legal.”

“Dug what out, exactly.”

“Okay, look at the list. What I did was, I borrowed a couple hours on the BFS machine at NSA and ran a bunch of INEST records through them.”

Michaels nodded. BFS was the Cray computer nicknamed the Big Fucking Sorter, at the National Security Agency’s newly refurbished underground complex outside Fairfax. INEST was the InterNational Education Statistics Terminal mainframe, based in D.C.

“Okay.”

“And what I did was, I ran the top two percent of grads from top computer schools in the U.S. and Europe for the last ten years. I found out who they were, then crossed them with public records — drivers’ licenses, property taxes, income tax, like that.”

“I’m still listening, but I’m getting older here. We getting to a point? I’ll stipulate that you are a brilliant fellow.”

Jay laughed. “Well, okay. So what it comes down to is a whole bunch of these guys and girls who were the wonder kids of their graduating classes at CIT, MIT, Zurich U, U of Q, and all, seemed to have taken up official residence in Geneva, Switzerland. Doesn’t mean they all went to work for CyberNation, of course, but the brightest of that bunch have been spending time and money in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for the last six months. They went to Switzerland, then to Florida.”

“Which means?”

“Guess which gambling ship has half a dozen flights from its deck to Fort Lauderdale each and every day? And records I can access show these folks tend to show up in the same cycle each week. I make that their days off. They live and work on the ship, hop the copter, and fly to town for Saturday R&R.”

Michaels nodded. Circumstantial, but a really big coincidence if that’s what it was. Occam’s razor would slice that one to confetti.

“I can nail it down some more, but I think we’ve got a nest of programmers and weavers on that ship, and they are taking some trouble to keep it quiet, if not absolutely secret. And of course, the big question is: How come? And I think we all know the answer to that. They’ve gone over to the dark side.”

“Well. I guess we need to find out for sure, don’t we?”

Jay shook his head. “Harder to do. We might catch one on the deck webcam or something, but the ship’s records aren’t going out to the public. I don’t think we got enough to get a court order for a search. Not that we could get one anyway. They don’t belong to us, and I doubt Libya cares.”

Toni appeared at the doorway. “What’s up?”

Michaels nodded at Jay, and gave her a quick rundown.

“Good work, Jay,” she said. “So what now?”

“Maybe somebody ought to take a trip to the ship and look around,” Michaels said.

“All one has to do to get on board is show up at the heliport and flash a little credit to get a ride out to the floating casino,” Jay said. “Most of the patrons come from the U.S. Mainland, a few from Cuba and the other islands.”

“You going to ask the FBI to check it out?” Toni asked.

“They don’t have any jurisdiction there,” Michaels said. “And between you, me, and the hidden microphone in my lamp, I don’t trust the CIA as far as I can fly by waving my arms.”

“What are you saying here, Alex?”

“It’s the dead of winter. A little trip to the Caribbean to gamble and take in the tropical sun would be a nice break, don’t you think?”

“Me, me!” Jay said. “I’ll do it!”

“Nope,” Michaels said. He looked at Toni. “What do you think, Miz Michaels? You up for a little work out of town?”

The look on her face was priceless.

After Jay was gone, Toni said, “You’re serious.”

“Yes, ma’am. We need to send somebody there to get the lay of the place.”

“And you don’t want to do it.”

“No, my wife would kill me if I went off like that, leaving her at home with a toddler.”

“Seriously, Alex. Why me?”

“As I recall, the last time I tried to avoid sending you on an assignment because I was being overly protective, I got my ass handed to me. I learned my lesson.”

“Really.” Her voice was as dry as the Sahara.

“Well, okay, I don’t think it is going to be particularly dangerous, if you must know. You aren’t going to have to do anything risky, just walk around and get a feel for things, get the routine down. I don’t want you skulking into parts of the ship that are off-limits to the public, no trying to swipe computer codes, like that. I’ll have Jay come up with some holographs of the programmers he’s found, you can study them, so if you happen to see one while you are there, fine, but the main thing is to gather information readily available.”

“For…?”

“For when and if we might need it. I don’t know exactly where this is going to lead, but let’s take a couple of hypotheticals and run with them. Suppose Jay is right. Say that CyberNation is responsible for the attacks on the net. And they are being mounted from this ship in the Caribbean. What can we do about it without proof? They are on the high seas, and our laws don’t apply. Sure, we could send a Navy destroyer or missile cruiser down to do a search — assuming we could convince the admiral commanding, Secretary of the Navy, the Joint Chiefs, and the president to go for it, not that likely a proposition. If we’re wrong, international outcry would blow whoever was responsible — that would be me — right out of a job. Even if we were right, every Third World country on the planet would scream to high heaven about American imperialism and gun-boat diplomacy. The drawback to being a superpower.”

“ ‘O! it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.’ ”

He looked at her, puzzled.

She grinned. “I’ve been waiting years for a chance to use that. Measure for Measure,” she said. “One of my political professors at NYU was a big fan of Shakespeare; he used to throw quotes at us like peanuts to overfed monkeys — we pretty much ignored them. The only other one I can ever remember came from Titus Andronicus. Not much chance to toss that one into a conversation.”

“They made a movie of that one, didn’t they? All about rape and murder and vengeance? Real upbeat, cheerful stuff.”

“Oh, yeah. The line was Aaron’s: ‘If there be devils, would I were a devil, to live and burn in everlasting fire, so I might have your company in hell, but to torment you with my bitter tongue!’ ”

“Must have been an interesting character, your teacher.”

“Oh, yeah. He went to work for State a few years after I graduated. One of the China hands now, I think.”

“Well, I’m impressed with your knowledge of the Classics. You want to go on this trip or not? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have any trouble finding volunteers if you don’t.”

“Yeah, I heard Jay.”

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t force you. It’s up to you. But you can’t say I didn’t offer.”

She nodded, and thought about it.

“If we can get enough stuff to be sure CyberNation is the guilty party,” Alex said, “and that they are doing it from that ship, then we can maybe do something about it ourselves.”

“How do you mean?”

“John Howard’s boys and girls are bored, so he tells me.”

“The director would kill you.”

“Not if we were right. It’s within our charter, sort of — at least we won’t be sneaking into some foreign country. We have as much right to be out on the ocean as anybody, right?”

“That’s real iffy, Alex.”

“Not as bad as some we’ve done and gotten away with. Remember the trips to Grozny? And to Guinea-Bissau?”

“That’s how you justify it? Making it the least of several evils?”

“Why not? I remember situational ethics from college, too.”

She shook her head.

“Besides, it’s all vaporware right now. We don’t know for sure that Jay is right. Maybe after we gather a lot of little pieces, we can puzzle it together.”

“And you’d really be okay with me going?”

“As your husband and the father of your child, not so much. As your commander, I am more sanguine about it. You are a trained operative, you can take care of yourself, and the level of danger is very low.”

“And leave my husband with a toddler?”

“I have Guru to help. And you’ve been griping about being cooped up in the house or office, worried that you might turn into a woman who talks about baby poop at social gatherings. Go. Take a couple days, lose a few dollars of the government’s money in the slot machines, get some midwinter sun — properly skinblocked, of course.”

She smiled. “Okay. I’ll do it. Thanks, Alex.”

“We live to serve. Guess I better give John Howard a call.”

“You’re sending him, too?”

“No, but he might want to start thinking about ways to sneak onto a ship in the middle of the ocean.”

In the lowest hold behind locked and guarded doors were the EMP bombs. They wore wooden frames, made from two-by-four fir boards, and sat on big pallets, also made of wood. They smelled faintly of something spicy, and that and a seawater-and-oil odor drifted about in the damp hold. Santos knew vaguely how they worked, these devices, but they were not his thing.

He had made the mistake of asking. The explosives expert practically peed himself as he talked happily about overlapping radiation pattern lobes and capacitors, coaxial this and coaxial that, of hardened components and planes of radiation.

Santos listened with half an ear, nodded, and murmured from time to time, so that the bomb man believed, perhaps, that he had some idea of what the man was talking about.

“We’re talking fifteen, twenty megajoules in ten-hundredths of a microsecond,” the man said, his face ecstatic with pleasure at having an audience.

The man pointed at the nearest bomb, which looked to Santos like nothing so much as a torpedo in an old submarine movie. A little smaller and thinner, maybe. More pointed.

“This particular model uses PBX-9501. The armature is surrounded by a coil of heavy-gauge aluminum wire, that’s the FCG stator. The winding splits into halves, to increase induction. It’s cased in a heavy block of tightly wound Kevlar and carbon fiber, so it doesn’t blow apart before it generates the field—”

A bomb that didn’t blow things up. How odd.

Well, yes, it did explode and destroy itself, but its primary purpose was to fry sensitive components with a powerful electromagnetic pulse generated by the explosion. Very complicated. It seemed easier to him just to drop a blockbuster on the target and take it all out, but apparently magnetic radiation could go through concrete better than explosives, and besides, they didn’t want to lose the infrastructure altogether, they would need it themselves later.

Like a biological weapon that killed people, but left the buildings standing, an EMP bomb was designed to kill computers, but allow the people to remain. A bloodless weapon.

“Not as good as the Vircators,” the bomb man continued, “which are electron beam/anode devices that will vibrate at microwave frequencies. They can get forty gigs out of this design in the lab, but they are heavy and much more complicated—”

It was all just so much useless technical babble to Santos, who cared only that these giant finned silver turds would blow up when and where they were supposed to blow up, and do the job they were intended to do.

These looked big and heavy, but the bomb man had assured him they could be easily transported by common aircraft. Even though they had come via supply ship, they could, in fact, be carried on one of the big passenger helicopters, no problem. Each one only weighed as much as, say, four or five big men, and on a craft that could carry thirty or forty people, half a dozen of these devices would ride quite nicely.

The bomb man started off on some new techno-rant, but Santos waved him quiet. “Yes, I understand,” he said, lying through his smile. “I need merely be certain you understand where and when they must be delivered.”

“Oh, yes, I know.”

“Good. Attend to that. I will check back with you as we go.”

Santos strode away, his footsteps upon the steel grating echoing slightly in the warm, dank hold. You’d think it would be cooler down here, right next to the water and all, but it was not.

Timing on all this would be critical. His part was easy enough to accomplish, but a failure on the parts of others could be fatal to the mission. They had only a week, and everything must be in place and synchronized exactly by then. It was not much time when you had to deploy men, transfer bombs, and make certain you know exactly where and how to strike each target. But, it was what it was, and he was happier to be going into the field than sitting around waiting.

Moving was better than waiting, almost always. Once you got moving, to hesitate at the wrong moment, to look away from the goal, that could get you killed. Yes, you had to plan in advance, know your tactics so that you did not make a stupid mistake, but once you started rolling, hesitation was a killer. The man who blinked first lost. And that would not be him.

26

It was raining hard. There was a tropical storm offshore, maybe a hurricane, still far enough away so it wasn’t any real danger to the state yet, but close enough to bring lots of rain and choppy seas in the Gulf. Yet, there Gridley came, in an old-fashioned wooden shrimping boat, arrogant as always, secure in the knowledge that he was invincible.

Lack of confidence had never been one of Jay’s problems.

Keller, wearing a black slicker and hiding in a mangrove tangle at the edge of the estuary, with a scoped 30–30 Winchester deer rifle, watched Gridley maneuver the boat through the shallow water as he headed for the Gulf, checking for roots or half-submerged logs he might hit with the boat’s propeller. Or did they call them “screws” on boats this size?

Once again, the scenario was over the top, much more than necessary to troll for the kind of information Jay wanted. The man never let one simple vision serve when he could do nine visions complicated. And even the public scenarios he chose were major sensory sims, like that stupid climb up Mount Fuji. Please.

Keller grinned at that memory. That had shaken old Jay up some, when he’d gone over in persona and sat down right next to him. Old Jay hadn’t expected that.

When the boat got within range, Keller laid the rifle’s forestock on a gnarl of root and aimed. The rain slashed down hard, the wind blew, and the scope was wet and blurry. The trawler was bouncing up and down on the rough water, and enough of it was sloshing up through the mangrove roots to keep Keller soaked, despite the raincoat. It wasn’t an easy shot.

He managed to put the first round into the wheelhouse side window, shattering it, but missing Jay by a good foot. He worked the bolt and fired again, aiming at the hull just below the normal waterline when the boat came up on a wave. He ejected the empty shell and chambered a third round, which he fired at the life preserver hung next to the wheelhouse. Must have missed that completely, he didn’t see it hit.

The boat chugged on, no sign of Jay, who must be ducked down inside the wheelhouse, wondering what the hell was going on.

Enough. He had other business to which he needed to attend. This was fun, pulling Gridley’s chain, but Omega was coming, and they had less than a week to get ready. Not nearly enough time. He was going to have to let this go. Too bad.

In this scenario, which was Jay’s, Keller had a small boat hidden behind the mangrove island in the swamp flats just short of the Gulf where some nameless river emptied into it. Probably it had a name, come to think of it, since Gridley did stuff like that.

Keller dropped the rifle, for which he had no further use, and worked his way to his boat. Might as well check things out as he left. Gridley wouldn’t have come here if he hadn’t been looking for something in particular, and maybe Keller could spot it.

He reached the boat, and started to untie the line that kept the craft from drifting away. When he did, a monstrous figure rose from the water like the creature from the Black Lagoon.

Keller froze.

The monster said, “Surprise!” and Keller realized it was a man in scuba gear and a wetsuit. Behind the face mask, he recognized Gridley’s basic persona, which looked pretty much like the real man.

Gridley had a big knife in his hand. He smiled and moved awkwardly toward Keller, his flippers slapping the water noisily—

Keller bailed.

Keller came out of the scenario cursing. Dammit! He had underestimated Gridley again! He should have known better! He threw the wireless sensory gear down hard, and regretted that instantly. These headsets weren’t cheap. If he broke it, the replacement would come out of his budget.

He picked up the set, touched the test button. The diodes lit up green, one after another.

Thank God for small miracles. He put the set down more carefully, hanging it on its rack.

Overconfidence had been the downfall of a whole lot of programmers, and he had seen it happen enough to know nobody was immune, even him. Gridley might have opted for the status quo, turned into a fedhead, fat and happy, but he still had some moves. Keller was better than they’d been in college, but it wasn’t smart to think that the Old Thai had stayed where he’d been. He was, after all, the head of Net Force’s computer operation. He might not be as good as Keller was, but he wasn’t a total lubefoot, either.

It was too bad he didn’t have time to call Jay out for a full wrangle. To make it a one-on-one, no-holds-barred. To show Jay who was better now.

Well. There was no help for it. And no real harm done. Keller’s net persona was a mule, a Joe-average construct that didn’t look like anybody in particular, certainly not his real self. Even if Gridley had seen him, he hadn’t seen anybody he could put a face to.

And even if he had known who it was, well, so what? Knowing who and figuring out where he was, finding him and doing anything about it before Omega launched wasn’t going to happen. And afterward? Jay wouldn’t be able to do much to him then, either.

The train was moving. That very morning it had left the siding where it had been for days, and was now only a couple hundred kilometers northeast of Dijon, France. It would arrive at the border shortly, where it would turn around and head back toward Berlin. The powers that were in CyberNation did not want their three mobile centers anywhere near their headquarters in Geneva. The ship was in the Caribbean, the train went back and forth between Berlin and the French border, mostly, half-loaded with tourists who knew nothing of the high-tech gear on board the other half. The third station was on a barge ostensibly being rebuilt at a shipyard in Yokohama, Japan, though it could be hauled off at any time. If the German authorities being paid to ignore the train developed pangs of conscience, or if the Japanese harbor officials who were bribed not to worry themselves overmuch about the repairs on the barge suddenly went mad, the ship was the safety, the most secure backup. If something happened to the train or the barge, or both, the ship would be the base nobody could legally touch. But any one of them was enough by itself to get the job done. All three were similarly equipped, and what one did was quickly uploaded to the others, so that at any given moment the lead team was never more than a few hours ahead of the others. Major data transfers were done four times a day in all directions, so if the train or boat or barge was suddenly hit by a giant meteor, there wouldn’t be more than six joint hours of work lost to the remaining two centers.

It was a good system. Not Keller’s design, but good, nonetheless.

Well. As much as he’d like to square off with Gridley and kick his ass, he had to get on with it. Omega was coming, and his group wasn’t going to be caught short. Maybe after it all came down he’d go find Jay and show him up, but that would just have to wait.

Jay and Saji walked along, looking at the tiger cage. It was cold enough so the big cats were inside their heated enclosure. A lot of the less furry animals seemed to be. For a long time after he had been mauled in VR by such a creature, it had been all Jay could do to look at the tigers. Now, he made a point to stop by the zoo every so often to remind himself.

He was only paying half his attention to the walk though, and, of course, Saji noticed.

“Where are you?” she said. “Not here.”

“Oh. Sorry. I was thinking about the fishing boat scenario. I think I know who the shooter was.”

“Really? How so?”

“Well, when I ran the lists of the best computer programmers graduated in the last ten years, I came up with quite a few I knew. Me, for one. A lot of guys I went to school with at CIT, others I knew from the net and web, conferences, like that. Some of them I’ve kept in touch with, others kinda drifted away, so I tried to run down some of the guys I used to pal around with that I haven’t seen in years.”

They passed the brown bear compound. The bears weren’t around. Hibernating maybe?

“Yes,” she said. “And…?”

“A couple have died. One in a car wreck, one from cancer. Most of the rest of them went into the field and have done pretty well. A few dot-biz millionaires, some commercial software producers. Some got out of the field, went to work in other areas. One woman I knew who was an ace programmer opened a chain of daycare centers for school kids. One guy writes comic books and TV shows. A few did well enough to quit work and live in Hawaii or somewhere. A couple dropped out completely to raise organic carrots or whatever on dinky farms in Footlick, Missouri, or like that.”

“Yes. And…?”

“Two are missing. No record of them. Didn’t die, didn’t get married or change their names, just dropped off the face of the Earth. One of them was a weirdo we all expected would go ballistic one day and assassinate somebody. The other was one of my best friends, a guy named Jackson Keller. We exchanged a couple of Christmas cards after school, and then lost track of each other.”

“I see.”

“The thing is, I can’t imagine he would drop out of the biz. He was gung ho, like most of us. I figured they’d have to haul his body away from the console if he died. But there’s no sign of him anywhere from about three years after we graduated. Poof.”

The insect house was not far ahead. It was always warm in there, if kind of humid, but it was getting chilly, and Jay nodded at it. “Let’s go look at the bugs.”

Inside, small children darted from window to window, looking at giant cockroaches, horned beetles, and all kinds of scorpions from around the world. It felt like a jungle, warm and damp, though the lights were fairly dim.

“So you think maybe this weirdo is somehow part of things?”

He shook his head. “No. I think it’s the other one — my old buddy Keller.”

She looked at an albino beetle the size of a mouse as it lumbered over a floor of fine-grained sand. “What makes you think that?”

“A couple things. The weirdo — his name was Zimmer-man — never had the chops to make me look bad in VR. Keller wasn’t quite as good as I was, but he coulda gotten better. And I’ve been thinking about that climb up Fuji-yama. When the old Thai guy came and sat next to me. That’s what Keller used to call me, back in college. Jay, the Old Thai. He was a year or two younger than most of us, a child prodigy who finished high school at fifteen.”

“You think the VR construct was a hint?”

“I think so, yeah. And you know what it really feels like? It feels personal. Like this guy knows me, wants to screw me up. And his stuff is like the stuff Keller used to do — he was always big on ambushes. He used to say if you are going to duel with somebody, shoot ’em in the back before they see you coming, it’ll save you a lot of grief. Their fault if they weren’t paying attention.”

“Huh,” she said.

“ ‘Huh?’ That’s the best you can do?”

“What do you want me to say? Yes, you must be right, you brilliant stud!”

He grinned. “That would be okay, I like the sound of that.”

She grinned back at him. “I bet.” She looked back at the beetle. “So, if this is true, how do you find out for sure? And then what?”

“Well, to start, I can dig deeper in public records, see if I can find Keller anywhere. Maybe I’m imagining it, maybe he’s got a job in Silicon Valley somewhere running some company and I missed him.”

“Maybe he changed his name,” she said.

“Why would he do that?”

“For all your smarts, you sometimes miss the easy stuff, Jay. What if he got into debt? Maybe some kind of white-collar crime? Needed a fresh start. Or just went bonkers and decided to start calling himself ‘Ra, God of the Sun.’ ”

Jay watched the bug in the glass case going about its business. It had found something in the sand and was digging it up. Jay halfway expected to see the insect unearth a tiny human skull. “I don’t think so. If he had, there’d be some record of it under his old name. First things I checked were criminal records, B&D stats, and Deja, and he was active on the net until about five years ago. After that, he’s just gone. You’d think somebody who was planning on leaving would say good-bye — he was on a lot of newsgroups and professional pub pages, then he stopped posting. I had a searchbot scan all his postings: There’s no mention of being in trouble with the law, or in debt, or wanting to change his name. One minute he was there, the next, he was gone.”

“Black helicopters got him?” she said.

Jay smiled. “Uh-huh. Don’t forget, I know where those guys hang out.”

The beetle came up with something that looked like a little ball made out of Tootsie Roll, and proceeded to roll it across the stand toward a far corner of the cage.

“All right, then,” she said. “Hunt him down and find out what he’s been up to.”

Jay nodded. Yes.

27

The ceremony was outside, a bright June afternoon. A sea of graduates in blue caps and gowns sat in folding chairs in front of a raised platform. On the stage, a speaker called out names, and students walked across the stand to collect their diplomas. Most of the students looked happy as they accepted their sheepskins and shook hands with the principal. A couple of the boys mugged and did silly waves. One boy flashed the crowd, showing off jockey undershorts. A typical high school graduation, “Pomp and Circumstance” playing in the background, the proud parents smiling, crying, fanning themselves with programs, watching their progeny morph from children to semi-adults.

Later, a tall blonde girl stood with her arms around two of her girlfriends while her parents, then the parents of her friends took pictures.

As the festivities wound down, students hugging each other, slapping each other on the back, punching shoulders, a father and son walked side by side toward the parking lot. The family resemblance was strong, the boy a younger copy of his father. The father stopped walking and said, “Here, son.”

The boy took a small plastic card from his father, looked at it, then back at his dad.

“Your first year of membership in CyberNation,” his father said. He was blinking back tears.

The son looked amazed. “But — but you think this is stupid!” He waved the card a little.

“Times change, son. People change, too — they have to, or they miss what’s important in life.”

The boy looked at the card.

“Your mother would have been so proud.”

Behind them, a woman — the spirit of the boy’s mother — shimmered and appeared ghostlike into view. The father and son looked at the spirit, who smiled at them.

With the spirit of the wife and mother watching, the boy and his father embraced.

“CyberNation,” said the deep voice. “It’s today, it’s tomorrow. It’s forever.”

A small graphic appeared under the father and son, and in small print the words CYBERNATION appeared.

Michaels pointed the remote at the television in disgust and clicked the set off. “Have you seen this? A three-hanky commercial for an Internet service.”

Toni came out of the bathroom with the electric toothbrush in her mouth. “What?”

Michaels waved at the television. “The CyberNation ad.”

She held up a hand, a “wait a second” gesture, then went back into the bathroom. A moment later, she was back. “Let me go check on the baby,” she said.

“Already did. He’s sleeping like a rock.”

She moved to the bed and sat. “You were saying something about the TV?”

“Yeah, the CyberNation tear-jerker commercial.”

“Which one? The old lady abandoned in the nursing home by her children? Or the young guy talking to his wife’s tombstone?”

“The high school graduation.”

“Oh, that one.”

“These guys put Coca-Cola, the phone and insurance companies into the minor leagues. Most manipulative thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Wait until you see the thirteen-year-old girl orphan on the street and the cop who comes to help her,” she said. “Equal parts of pathos and pedophilia.”

He shook his head. “Don’t they have any shame?”

“Not if they sell the product.”

He shook his head again.

“So, have you thought any more about what we talked about? Guru?”

“You really want to do this?”

She nodded. “Yes. She’s as much my grandma as anybody. Every day from the time I was thirteen until I went off to college, I spent two hours with her. Sometimes at her house, sometimes on the steps out front, sometimes in the park. Rain or shine, whatever else was going on, she was there for me. She gave me a skill that’s the core of who I am. Whatever else happened to me, I was always sure I could take care of myself if somebody wanted to put his hands on me and I didn’t want him to. It was the basis of making my way in the world. If all else failed, I could kick somebody’s butt. I didn’t have to be afraid.”

He smiled at her.

“She’s useful here. Little Alex loves her. I love her. And I owe her. For so much. She’s eighty-five, she won’t be around much longer.”

He chuckled. “She’ll probably outlive us all.”

“Alex—”

“Okay. If you really want this, then, yeah, okay. Ask her.”

“You sure?”

“What I’m sure of is that I want you to be happy. Whatever it is. If that means having a coffee-swilling deadly old nanny living in the guest bedroom, what the hell.”

He didn’t think he’d ever seen her smile any bigger. She hugged him, and once again he marveled at how good that made him feel, to make her smile.

What was it Jay’s girl Saji had said recently? Making somebody smile lightens your karmic burden? Well, if that was the case, he intended to be karmically clear on Toni’s grins alone, if he could.

The train was stopped, some kind of mechanical problem, just outside Kassel, still three hundred or so kilometers southwest of Berlin. Some of the team had taken the opportunity to get off and stretch their legs, but Keller saw no reason to do so. He had never been a fan of outside. When you could go anywhere in time or space in VR, could control the weather, the smells, the action, why would you bother tromping around in the cold and dark next to a train track in the middle of nowhere? Where you had no control at all, save that of your own body’s ability to come or go? That’s what the Luddites didn’t understand, that virtual reality was so much better than the real world because you could make it do exactly what you wanted it to do. No wild cards, no chance that you would be caught in an unexpected snowstorm, or bitten by a mosquito chock full of malaria. In VR, life was what you wanted it to be.

This was the real reason that CyberNation would succeed, more than anything. As VR became more and more like RW, the ability to have anything you wanted, to see, hear, taste, touch, smell, and feel it exactly as you wished it to be, that was heaven. Give the people what they want. Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. That was always how it had been, and that was how it was going to continue to be.

There were some things you still had to do. Serious VR players, really serious ones, could hook up IVs and catheters so they could stay jacked in for days, not having to eat or pee. Keller had done that a few times, been in VR for forty, fifty hours, even sleeping on-line, being fed dreams by programs that knew how to input them. Usually, however, he had to interface with the real world often enough so he couldn’t do that. Just like now, he had to go pee. It was a bother, but there was no help for it without a Foley running through your dick into your bladder.

He went to the toilet, which on this old-style car was a pretty big place — five stalls, five urinals, a tile floor, mirrors, sinks, the whole enchilada. Normally, they closed the toilets when the train was in the station, because when you flushed the toilet, a hole opened in the bottom and it fell right out onto the tracks. There were laws against that now in a lot of places, but people who ran private trains didn’t pay attention to them. Who was going to follow a train across the country looking to see if it was dropping turds and piss onto the tracks out in the middle of nowhere?

He stood in front of the urinal for what seemed like a long time, emptying his bladder, zipped up, and started to wash his hands.

“Hello, Jackson” came a voice from behind him.

Keller froze, as if he had seen Medusa and turned to stone.

Smiling behind him, reflected in the mirror, was Roberto Santos.

Keller forgot how to breathe. He managed to manufacture a grin that felt like a rictus. “Roberto. Wh-what are you doing here? Something wr-wrong?”

Santos moved to the door. Locked it.

Keller’s heart turned to a block of dry ice. His mouth went dry.

“Nothing wrong, Jackson. Just balancing things out.”

“Wh-Wh-Whuh—?”

“You touched my woman. You knew she was mine, and you went with her. Missy is fine, she is hot. I know it was her idea, making the two-backed beast, I know how she is. Woman’s got tricks that would make a plaster saint hard. I know turning her down is not easy. But she was mine. She still is, until I say otherwise.”

“Listen, Santos, it was a mistake, a mistake, I’m sorry, I really am, I’m sorry, what can I do to make it up to you?”

Santos smiled. “Don’t worry so much, Jackson. I’m not gonna kill you. It won’t even show. But you got a debt; it has to be paid.”

“Santos, don’t! You don’t want to do this! Jasmine will fire you!”

“No, she won’t. Because you won’t tell her.”

“I will! I will!”

“No,” he said, “you won’t. And you know why? Because if she fires me, I will come back and kill you. But only after a long, long time of you wishing you were dead. You understand?”

Keller’s fear gripped him so hard he started to shake.

Santos moved — so fast! and hit him, just under his sternum.

He… couldn’t… get… any… air—!

Santos smiled. A man enjoying himself.

As Keller tried to get his wind back, Santos hit him again.

It hurt so bad—!

The rental car was cold when Santos started it, and it took the heater a while to warm things up. He hated the cold. Even in a jacket, with gloves and a hat, he felt the chill trying to get to him. Yes, they had winter at home, but it was the kind of winter where you could walk around in a T-shirt and shorts. In June, when it was the coldest, it dropped to maybe sixty, sixty-five most nights. Mean temperature year round was seventy-something. It got hot sometimes — now, in the summer, you could work up a sweat; it actually got cold sometimes, but rarely. Those were not the normal things. In Rio, the temperature was almost always perfect. It was God’s country, and men who lived there were fortunate above other men.

Here and now, there was ice in the ponds and lakes, and patches of snow in the shadows, with more to come. How could people live in such places?

Well. They were Germans, weren’t they? And all Germans were at least slightly mad.

The plane he was going to catch was at a private airport about thirty miles away. From there, he would fly to a big airport in Berlin, and from there, back to the U.S. He was supposedly making sure that preparations for the big attack were in order, and in a way, he was. He had already talked to people he needed to talk to, and he would see others. Missy wasn’t expecting him back for a couple of days.

Putting fear into Keller was part of the preparations as far as he was concerned.

He smiled at the memory of Keller, lying curled like a newborn on the floor in the train’s washroom, a pool of yellow vomit next to him. He hadn’t really hurt the man, nothing permanent. Never hit him in the face. He would be sore tomorrow, belly, ribs, back, thighs, and he would bruise some, but nothing that would show when he was dressed. He was a flower-picker, Jackson was, his ping-pongs the size of BBs, more girl than man. It hadn’t been particularly satisfying to beat him, like slapping a child. He had offered no resistance, but it had to be that way. There were things that a man had to do if he was going to remain a man and not turn into an old woman.

He hadn’t decided yet how he was going to punish Missy, but he was smart enough to know he needed to wait until the attack was finished. There would be a bonus for successful completion, a big bonus, enough so he could walk away if he really wanted to do that. At the very least, he had to wait until that money was converted into gold and on its way home. It would not be quite as much as he wanted, but it would do. A man like him could always find more work if he had to find it.

The heater had finally begun to unfog the windows and offer enough warmth so he didn’t have to tense against the cold. Better. Not good, but better.

Keller would say nothing to Missy. If he knew anything, Santos knew when a man would stand and fight, and Keller was not such a man. Missy was more dangerous. She could put a knife between your ribs if you pissed her off bad enough and closed your eyes at the wrong time. That was part of what he liked about her. She was soft where it counted, she could wring a man dry of his essential juices, but she was also hard in her mind. He would punish her, he had to, but it must be in such a way that she could not revenge herself upon him.

He might even have to kill her. A shame, but sometimes, that’s what you had to do. People died every day. That was how life was: You came into the world, you lived your time, you left. All that mattered in between the coming and the going was how you spent your time. And for Santos, that and O-Jôgo—The Game.

All else was no more than a shrug.

28

The lobbyist’s name was Corinna Skye. She was a drop-dead gorgeous natural blonde who looked five years younger than her thirty-five years. She was tall, slim, busty, and was a six-handicap golfer. She wore a charcoal-gray power suit, the skirt cut just short enough to show she had great legs without being titillating, a white silk blouse, and a dark red scarf. Her shoes were dark gray handmade Italian leather, one-inch heels, five hundred dollars a pair. She was smart, funny, and while many in political circles considered all lobbyists high-priced whores, she had never slept with a senator or congressman, though many of them had tried to make that happen. She had graduated first in her class at Columbia in political science, and was considered the best lobbyist on Internet issues in the country.

Chance sat across the table from Skye in the booth at Umberto’s. The salad had been perfect, and the handmade fresh pasta was outstanding — Chance had gotten the bay shrimp in heavy cream and would have to pay for it on the stairclimber later, but it had been worth it.

“With Wayne DeWitt’s unfortunate accident — a terrible tragedy — things’ll be easier on the senatorial side,” Skye said. She didn’t know that DeWitt’s injuries had been on Chance’s orders; she wasn’t in that loop.

She continued: “We’ve gone to a full-press in the House. Congressman Kinsey Walker — he’saDfrom California — will offer his bill on Monday. We have the votes to get it out of committee, though we’re still eight shy for passage in the House — but we’ll get those.”

“Assuming it passes in the House and Senate,” Chance said, “what are the chances of a presidential veto?”

“Ordinarily, I’d say it would be nailed, at the very least pocketed. But the administration has a couple of pet projects on the table, the National Parks bill and the new medicare thing, and they’d sell their wives and mothers to a Turkish dope dealer to get either of those passed. We have some votes to trade. More than enough.”

“Good.”

The waiter came by. Would the ladies care for dessert and coffee?

Just coffee, they both said.

“You do realize that this bill is not what we’d hoped for,” Skye said. “It’s about half-strength.”

Chance nodded. “Yes. But it’s a start. Once this is established, then it’s like new taxes, it won’t go away, and we can strengthen it next session. The first part of making an omelet is to collect some eggs.”

Both of them smiled, women of the world.

As they sipped their coffee, Chance reflected that in another life, she might have been friends with Skye. She preferred the company of men most of the time, men were so much easier to manipulate, but there were occasions when sitting somewhere and talking to a bright woman was more relaxing. True, there was always a certain amount of competition, even with women, but as long as there were no men around to control, girl talk could be a breath of fresh air. Testosterone did get overwhelming at times.

Take ’Berto, for instance. He was a man’s man, willing to buy a drink and slap a back in fellowship, or, at the drop of a hat, kick in his drinking buddy’s teeth. No complexity about him, no convoluted layers to his thoughts, he had simple wants and needs. For him, life was one giant game of king-of-the-hill. As one of her yoga teachers would have said, ’Berto lived in his lower chakras, the belly and the phallus, and had yet to realize his higher potentials. The yoga teacher would have earnestly believed that ’Berto had higher potentials. Chance knew better. ’Berto had three things driving him: fighting, sex, and good food, that was it—

“I’ve seen the latest TV spots,” Skye said, interrupting her internal musings.

“What did you think?”

Skye chuckled. “The people who make Kleenex must love you. Even Kodak hasn’t got anything so soppy.”

“Subscriptions are up twelve percent since we started running the new series.”

Skye wiped a bit of lipstick from her coffee cup with a napkin. “Doesn’t surprise me. I’d expect them to be effective. Subtle doesn’t work for television viewers. Lowest common denominator and all. Speaking of which, I know a woman who slept with one of those basketball players.”

Chance raised an eyebrow.

“Hung to here,” she said, slapping the inside of her left knee. “And she says they must make Viagra out of his blood.”

They both laughed.

Chance nodded. Yes, a smart woman was a great break from mule-headed men. She glanced at her watch. “Well. I need to run along. It’s been great visiting with you, Cory.”

“As always. I’ll call you with updates.”

“I appreciate it.”

Chance waved the waiter over and paid the bill, and Skye merely nodded her thanks. Another thing a man would quibble over. Skye cleared half a million a year, easy, and she wasn’t going to make noise over a little hundred-dollar lunch tab, one way or the other.

As she left the restaurant, Chance looked around. Washington was a dreary city in the winter. It was beautiful in the spring, all the flowering fruit trees, but when the gray and cold settled in, all the marble and wide streets couldn’t offset the gloom. She had a couple of other errands to run, including a visit to a key senator. While Cory Skye was scrupulous in her personal life, Chance would use any weapon she had to win a contest. If that meant screwing a middle-aged married senator stupid — which was no great chore, given the starting point of his IQ — she had no problem with that. Whatever worked.

Toni was excited. It had been some time since she had been in the field, back when she and Alex had had their troubles on that trip to England. She smiled at the memory, which was bittersweet. Such heartache they’d gone through, for what was basically a stupid mistake, on both their parts. More his than hers, but, she had to admit, she had jumped to a conclusion she shouldn’t have.

She had packed for warm weather, one bag she could fit into the overhead bin on the jet. She was only going for a couple of days, and she had had enough bad experiences with checked baggage to last a lifetime. Once, on a flight to Hawaii, her suitcase had vacationed in Japan.

Documents had provided her with a new ID — driver’s license, credit cards, even a library card, no passport needed — that showed she was Mary Johnson, a divorced secretary from Falls Church, Virginia. She was on holiday, going to play the slot machines and soak up the sunshine in the warm Caribbean. She had her flight booked, along with a single cabin on the Bon Chance. It was enough cover to check out the ship, she’d be in and out, and nobody would be the wiser.

“You still packing, girl?” Guru said. She came into the bedroom, Little Alex slung over her right hip.

“Guru, I don’t know how you expect him to practice walking if you never put him down.”

Guru smiled and bounced the baby on her hip a couple of times. He laughed.

“Don’t you worry about him learning to walk. Pretty soon, I start teaching him djurus. Time you get back, he’ll be a fighter.”

“I’m only going to be gone three days.”

“Plenty of time, eh, best boy?”

Little Alex laughed again.

“You sure this is all right?”

Guru shook her head. “Child, I raised a houseful of babies. This little one is an angel compared to a couple of my boys. We’ll be fine. And we’ll watch out for big Alex, too.”

Toni nodded. Guru had recovered from her stroke all right, but she was in her eighties. Then again, her mind was still sharp, and the years of silat practice had given her a balance most people didn’t have in their thirties. Little Alex couldn’t be safer, and anybody who thought the old lady pushing the baby stroller was a victim would learn a hard lesson otherwise. It was just so strange to be catching a jet and flying off on her own. It felt… weird, somehow. That kind of thing belonged to her life before Alex and the baby.

“Go, I think I heard the cab honking,” Guru said.

Toni took Alex and hugged him. “You be good for Guru,” she said. She kissed him, and felt a pang of something like loss when she handed him back to the old woman, and hugged her in the transfer.

Once she was in the cab, Toni found she had to force herself to breathe slower. Her belly roiled with nervousness. An adventure. She was going on an adventure.

Keller ached all over. He had taken half a dozen ibuprofen tablets, and they had taken the edge off, but every move, every breath, hurt. He had never felt like this. Once, when he was fourteen, his mother had run a stop sign and their car had been broadsided by another driver. He had wrenched his shoulder and elbow, banged his head against the glass, and had a sore spot on his hip, and he’d thought that was bad, but that was nothing compared to this. Yet, when he looked into the mirror, there was almost no sign of the beating Santos had given him — he had some bruises on his chest, his belly, his legs and back, but they didn’t look nearly as bad as they felt. They were just light brown splotches, a little purple in a couple of them. How could it hurt so bad and not look worse than it did?

Santos was a devil, a monster, a psychotic thug! He should get a gun and shoot him!

But even as he dressed, trying to avoid moving as much as he could — he had to sit down to put his trousers on — Keller knew he would not do that. Even with a gun, he was afraid of Santos. If he missed, if the man didn’t die immediately, he would come for Keller, and that would be that. The man would kill him, slowly and painfully. And pain was not something that Keller wanted any more of, ever.

Jay wound the RT/10 Viper up into fifth gear and blew past the guy in the Shelby GT at ninety-five. In a few seconds, he was doing a hundred and fifteen, eating up the highway, speed still climbing. This stretch of road was straight as an arrow and in the middle of the desert, nothing to see, and even at this clip, he wasn’t gonna get through it any time soon.

He shifted into sixth, and the little car had enough to surge when he did. Who’s your daddy, baby? Huh?

The guy in the Mustang must have stepped on it, Jay could see him in the rearview, starting to gain. Jay laughed. The Shelby was fast, maybe even faster than he was on the top end, but he had a mile and some on the guy by now, and by the time the Mustang wound it up and pegged the speedometer, Jay would be at the exit to the olive place and the race would be over.

The olive place was where he was meeting his contact in this scenario, and he was being nothing if not careful this time. He came in with an anonymous persona, a female one at that, under a phony name and addy, and anybody looking for Jay Gridley wasn’t gonna see that guy in this car. It would be almost impossible to figure out who he really was, and even if he went places where traps had been set for Jay — which he didn’t plan on doing, thank you very much — he was going to make it look like he — or she, in this case — had wandered in there by accident.

There was the exit. The Shelby GT was coming up fast, but not fast enough. Jay put on his blinker and was off the interstate and down to sixty before the Mustang roared past. He heard the man in the car yell at him, and shook his head. Why, none of it — he’d never had that kind of relationship with his mother. The very idea!

The Viper burbled and rumbled, as if anxious to get back up to speed, but Jay nosed it into the olive place’s parking lot, a big graveled area that had to run three acres, and parked.

The desert heat beat down on him in the little convertible, and he felt it much more without the wind, hot as that was.

He tossed his long blonde hair back over his shoulder, adjusted his boobs with the backs of his hands, and walked toward the building, the red miniskirt barely covering a very shapely female ass.

Inside, he slipped his shades off and into his purse. There were racks of olives in various jars, ranging from drinking-glass-sized ones to convoluted monsters five feet tall. Mostly they were big, fat green things, pits still in them, but here and there were some stuffed with pimento, and even some black ones that had been pitted.

There were also bottles and tins of olive oil, ranging from cold-pressed extra virgin or somesuch on down. How could oil be better than virgin?

An old lady with a big straw hat and a matching handbag cruised the aisle, her shopping cart half full of jars and cans. She smiled at Jay’s young woman persona, and Jay saw the white rose pinned to her yellow sundress that told him this was who he had come to meet.

“Hot day out,” Jay said.

“Yes, isn’t it? Nice and cool in here, though.”

“I wonder, have you seen any Tuscan bread?” This was the code phrase, in actuality, a key to a firewall’s back door.

“Funny you should mention that, dearie,” the old lady said. “I had picked up two loaves of that very thing, but I realize now I should put one back, one is more than enough for just me, since the mister passed on. Here, why don’t you take it? Save an old lady a trip?”

“Why, thank you, ma’am. That’s very nice of you.”

“No trouble at all, dearie.”

The old lady pushed her cart away. Something was stuck to one of the rear wheels, it bumped slightly every time it hit the floor. How annoying. Jay always got that cart when he went grocery shopping.

Jay went to pay for the loaf of bread.

Outside, he opened the packed, removed the bread, and broke it in half. Inside the bread was a mini DVD, the size of a half-dollar coin. Rainbow colors sparkled from its surface in the hot sun. Jay smiled. Easy as falling off a chair.

He hiked his blonde’s short skirt up to climb back into the low-slung Viper, and accidentally flashed a man in a Cadillac who pulled into the lot as he hopped into the car. Oops.

But he had half of what he had come for. Another stop a bit farther south, and with any luck, he would have it all. Half the trick to finding information on the web and net was knowing how to look. It was all out there, but if you couldn’t narrow your search properly, you’d never find it. After years of practice, Jay knew how to look: It had become almost instinctive, more an art than a science. Yeah, you could turn searchbots loose hither and yon and gather up tons of data, but sometimes you just knew where to go, without knowing how or why you knew. That was zen, Saji said. Knowing without knowing.

Whatever. As long as he could do it. And he could. A few more minutes and he would be ready to start kicking ass and taking names, and he would start with his old buddy Jackson Keller. Because if Keller was in some way responsible for the attacks on the net and web, and more important, if he was responsible for the attacks on Jay personally, then he was gonna be extremely sorry. You don’t step on Superman’s cape, and you don’t mess with Smokin’ Jay Gridley. No siree.

29

The baby was asleep, as was Guru, and Michaels was propped up in bed, watching the news when the com chimed. He reached for it, thinking it was Toni.

“Hey, boss.” The visual blossomed on the receiver, a tiny hologram of a face that definitely wasn’t Toni’s.

“Jay. What’s up?”

“I’ve got good news, better news, and not so good news.”

“Oh. Give me the good news first.”

“I found Jackson Keller.”

“I didn’t know he was lost. Who is Jackson Keller?”

“Long story. Short version: I believe he is the guy running the web/net attacks.”

“Good. Where can we collect him?”

“Well, see, that’s the not-so-good stuff. I’m not exactly sure where he is. I know where he was, up until a few days ago, I think, but I’m pretty sure I know who he’s working for.”

“And that would be…?”

“The better news — CyberNation.”

“You’re sure about this?”

“Yep. Want me to dazzle you with my brilliance?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Jay ignored that and said, “I scanned public tax records in the U.S. and found he had paid federal taxes last year on foreign income grosses of $250,000. I checked incorporation records, and found a Delaware company called Molotov Software Programs, Inc., the president being one Jackson Keller. Apparently the vice president is his mother, the secretary-treasurer his uncle. That’s got tax-dodge or scam written all over it.

“From what I was able to determine, all of MSP’s income for the last three years came from another corporation, Systems Upgrade, Inc., which turns out to be a shell owned by Future Tense Computer Engineering, which is, when you run it down, another shell, owned lock, stock, and barrel by — ta dah! — CyberNation.

“Corporate credit cards — Visa, MC, AmEx — have been issued for MSP, Inc., from the International Bank of Zurich, and Three-Cees and TRW both say that the credit is good, which means he pays his bills on time. Without a warrant, I can’t get into real specific details on those transactions, but I’ve checked commercial usage location lists and gotten hits in southeast Florida for the last three months. Before that, he spent some time in Japan, and before that, in Germany. Apparently CyberNation owns some rolling stock and some other ships. The train carries tourists back and forth between Berlin and France, and there is some kind of repair work being done on the boat, or barge, or whatever, in Yokohama.”

“He does some traveling,” Michaels said.

“Yeah. But the south Florida thing is the deal — he goes to the same places the other programmers on the gambling boat go. Last hit was less than ten days ago, so my guess is he’s on the boat. I dunno what his connection to the CyberNation stuff in Germany and Japan is, but I’m gonna find out.”

“You think this is the leader of the assault team?”

“I’d bet money on it, boss. He’s a programmer out of CIT, second in his class.”

“Isn’t that where you went to school?”

“Yeah.”

Michaels heard something in Jay’s voice. “What?”

“I know the guy. I used to know him, anyway.”

“Second in his class, you said? He must be pretty sharp.”

“Not as sharp as the guy who was first in the class.”

“Ah.”

“I’m gonna dig some more. When I think I got enough for a warrant, I’ll shoot it past Hang ’Em High Harvey, and then we can pin this moth to the collecting board.”

“Good work, Jay.”

“Thanks, boss. Discom.”

After he broke the connection, the com chimed again.

This time, it was Toni. She looked tired, but she was smiling.

“Hey, babe,” he said.

“Hi. I’m all settled in. I’m at the airport Hilton in Fort Lauderdale. I’ll catch a shuttle copter to the ship in the morning.”

“You’re calling from the hotel?” It had been a while since she’d been in the field, but surely she hadn’t forgotten something so basic?

“Not on the house phone, I’m using the coded cell.”

He nodded. Net Force had field phones that looked ordinary, but sent and received shifting-code encrypted messages; even if somebody managed to trap the signal, they wouldn’t be able to translate it into anything they could understand, unless they had a matching transceiver. Michaels’s house com was so equipped, just as all the virgils were. SOP.

“How’s the boy?”

“He’s fine. Conked out about eight. Guru has him in bed with her. She’s gonna spoil him.”

“How are you doing?”

“Cold and pitiful in this big old bed all alone.”

“Poor baby. I’ll be all alone in this big old hotel bed, too.”

“You better be.” That got him a smile from her.

“I just got a call from Jay.” He explained what Jay had just told him.

“Does he have a picture of this guy? Maybe I’ll spot him on the ship.”

“I’ll have him upload one to your flatscreen if he has one,” he said. “I’ll have him bury it in a picture of your aunt Molly’s seventieth birthday or something.”

“Thanks.”

There was a short pause, then she said, “Thank you for sending me to do this. I appreciate it.”

“No problem. Just don’t do anything other than what is in your mission plan.”

“By the numbers, Commander Honey, don’t worry.”

But of course, he did. Despite what he had told her about how low risk it was, the husband and lover in him didn’t like sending her anywhere. He worried about the plane’s safety, the helicopter ride, and street traffic, not to mention being on a vessel that he now knew was enemy territory. He knew Toni would resent it mightily if he tried to keep her home and completely out of harm’s way, but that’s what he felt like doing.

They talked a few more minutes, said their good-nights, and discommed. It had been a long day and he was tired, but sleep was a long time in coming. This was the first time he and Toni had slept apart since they’d gotten married, and he didn’t like it. Not even a little bit.

This was not a town where you would expect to find a major Internet locus, Santos thought. Probably why it was here. Not far from the Louisiana border, in the southwest corner of Mississippi, Woodville was a sleepy place that time seemed to have touched only lightly in passing, at least in its last few decades.

Santos drove the old pickup truck along the Lower Woodville Road carefully. The day was gray, overcast, and cold. This was just a scouting trip to be certain of the information he had been provided. He was a black man in a small Southern town, and while racial profiling was not supposed to be allowed by police departments in this country anymore, he knew they still did it in such places. On the surface, the old tensions had been smoothed over. But a few inches down? Everybody here remembered who had been property and who had been slave masters, just as they did back home. People of color had carried the water and picked the crops. Nobody forgot that. A shiny new rental car would have made him suspect; a beat-up ten-year-old truck with local plates made him less likely to be noted. He wore a baseball cap and an old pea jacket over a workshirt and overalls, windows rolled up against the cold — just another lower-class Negro not worth paying any mind to, Thank you, Officer.

He would only get two passes by the location, one going out, another one half an hour later coming back. Any more than that might raise suspicion, and he did not want that.

The road ran next to a sluggish little river that he assumed was Ford’s Creek — he’d been on Ford’s Creek Road before, the place he was looking for was farther north, where Lower Woodville Road branched and another section of creek road picked up again, so that would make sense. He would make a pass, drive for fifteen minutes, then turn around and go back. From there, he’d keep right on going, local highway 24 east to Highway 61, then south on that all the way to New Orleans and a flight back to Florida. By mid-morning, he would be back on the ship.

But that was later. Now, he had to pay attention to what he had come for.

A few minutes later, he saw the driveway leading off to the west. There weren’t any signs, but a hundred feet off the road was an eight-foot-high chain-link gate and a wooden kiosk behind it. He couldn’t see the guard in the little building, but surely there must be one.

That would be the place. What else could they have worth guarding out here?

To be certain, he would have one of CyberNation’s lease-time spysats do a pass overhead and confirm it. Or maybe they could just pull one of the CIA’s public domain views — they had covered most of the world, and had pictures of anything not considered secret that could be had just by downloading them from the Internet. Whatever. That was not his job. He only needed to get the lay of the place, a feel for the location, for when he came back.

Some of the targets would be blown up electronically. Some would be taken out with more conventional explosives. And some would be captured and utilized for CyberNation’s own ends, at least for a short while. This location needed to be functional for a critical few hours after the shit hit the fan, and he was going to see that it happened that way. After that, who cared?

At first, he hadn’t really understood how this was supposed to be good for business. Missy had explained it simply. When a citizen’s water or power shuts off, he doesn’t care why. The reason why is not important, the only question that matters to him is, When will it be back on?

If somebody’s Internet service dies and they need or want it badly enough and there is somebody standing right there with a shiny wire that will reconnect things just like that, a lot of customers will switch, no questions asked, except maybe how much, and how soon? And the answers will be, less than you were paying before, and immediately. These were the answers they wanted to hear.

With the surge of added customers clamoring to join up, CyberNation’s political base would instantly grow stronger. Authorities would of course worry and wonder who was responsible, and they would certainly suspect CyberNation, who would benefit from such chaos. But they would have no proof, and the man in his little house in Nowhere, Indiana? That wasn’t his problem — all he wanted to do was collect his e-mail or download his pornographic pictures.

It was simple human nature. In the right place, at the right time, a bottle of water would be worth a fortune. Timing was critical.

Santos could see it when she explained it that way. People here must be very stupid, but then again, people everywhere were mostly stupid. That was how it was.

That was not his problem, either.

When the pain got to be too much — and it was actually worse the second day, more hurtful than it had been on the first! — Keller got off the train when it stopped and went to a doc-in-the-box, in Zehlendorf, not far from the Universitat, to get some medicine for it.

The doc-in-the-box was part of a chain that stretched across Europe, centered in the U.K. They didn’t ask questions, and if you didn’t want to show them an insurance card, they didn’t care as long as your cash or credit was good.

The doctor, a gray-haired and gray-bearded old man name Konig, who looked to be in his late sixties and who resembled an old picture of Sigmund Freud, examined him, prodded and poked a little, and said, in fairly good English, “So, you fell down a flight of stairs, is that right?”

“Yah.”

The old man smiled.

“What?”

“I’ve been a doctor forty-six years, my friend. In a land where narrow and steep old stairs are common. If you fell down a riser, it was after somebody beat you.”

Keller, still bare-chested, blinked at the man, more surprised than annoyed at being called a liar. “You can tell that by looking? How?”

“Look here.” He made a fist and touched it lightly to a brownish-yellow splotch on Keller’s chest. “See? Stairs are flat and smooth. Even if you hit the edge of a step, it leaves a line — not a shape that matches perfectly a human fist like this does. Somebody punched and kicked you. Over a woman, was it?”

Keller started to deny it, then shrugged. Who cared if this old man knew? He would never see him again. “Yes.”

“Beautiful?”

“Yes.”

“Not your wife. Her husband?”

“Boyfriend. A big, stupid brute.”

“Ach. That is the problem with the beautiful ones, mein Freund. I see nothing broken, so this brute must have held back a little. Here is a prescription — you can fill it at the Apotheke out front when you leave, if you wish. It is a generic version of Vicodin 5/500—acetaminophen and hydrocodone bitartrate. Take one or two every four hours if you need them for pain. Do not drink alcohol or take sleeping pills with these. Be careful if you drive, it can make you drowsy or slow your reactions. You should be feeling much better in a few days.”

“Thank you.”

The doctor waved him off. “The cost of love is dear sometimes, yah?”

Keller stared at him. Love? Lust, maybe. Never love. Not with a woman like Jasmine Chance…

He gave the prescription to a woman in the built-in drugstore on the way out, but when he went to pay for it and the office visit, he didn’t have enough cash in deutsche marks. He shrugged and handed her his Visa card. While she was scanning the card, he unscrewed the cap and dry-swallowed two of the pills.

By the time the cab got back to the train, he was feeling pretty good. Hardly hurt at all, unless he really thought about it, and why should he? The train would be turning around to head back toward the French border in a few hours. Best he get back to work, now that he could sit without it hurting so bad.

30

Toni leaned back in the seat and watched the dust boil up under them as the big transport helicopter lifted from the pad. You’d think there wouldn’t be any dust, what with the choppers taking off and landing all day, not to mention the frequent rain here, but there it was.

The craft, a Sikorsky S-92, held eighteen passengers, and was full. Most of them actually were, she assumed, what she was supposed to be: tourists going to the gambling ship, which, as the flight attendant had announced, was ninety miles offshore where it was a pleasant seventy-eight degrees and sunny right now. A far cry this time of year from Ice Butt, Minnesota, where you could spit and have it freeze before it hit the ground. As long as there were winters like that, tropical resorts would have customers.

According to the posting in the hotel, they scheduled these flights on the half hour, starting at six A.M., with the last one returning from the ship to the Mainland at midnight, thirty-seven flights a day, split up among three aircraft. Which meant at capacity, they could move over six hundred and fifty people a day to and from the ship from this one heliport, and there were at least three other ports in operation just on the Florida coast, not counting those in Cuba or the other islands. At forty bucks a head for the trip, that was a hundred grand a day to pay for aviation fuel. Which also meant that if the things ran at full operation, and each of the passengers lost on average, say, only a hundred dollars each at the casinos, the gross would be over a quarter of a million dollars a day from the Mainland alone. Almost eight million a month. Assuming the Cubans had anything to lose, and anybody coming from elsewhere also did, that could work out to more than a hundred million a year, easy. Of course, they might not run to capacity day in and day out, and there would be operating costs, and even a few winners, too, but if even a quarter of that was profit, it would be a tidy sum. Better, Guru used to say, than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick…

The copter spiraled up and outward to its cruising altitude, only a few thousand feet, Toni would guess, and leaned into the rising sun. Fifteen or twenty minutes out, they passed a matching copter going the other way, a mile to port.

She looked over the passengers without staring at any one in particular. About what she’d expect. There were several couples, sporting fresh sunburns and wearing shorts and colorful Hawaiian shirts, likely going to see if they might be able to win back some of their children’s college tuition.

There were a few women who appeared to be traveling alone, most of them also middle-aged, although there were a couple of younger ones in their mid-twenties who looked as if they might be former beauty queens. Hunting for rich husbands, maybe? Or perhaps high-priced hookers going to offer their services to winners looking for a way to spend their free money?

A couple of men looked like she’d always pictured high rollers — dressing in western chic, with ostrich-skin cowboy boots and string ties, wearing Stetson hats.

There were some young guys, college-age, Toni guessed, laughing and talking among themselves, off on an adventure. Several of them had already cast appreciative glances at the ex-beauty queens.

There was a very fit-looking shaved-bald black man of thirty or so in a yellow silk T-shirt and khaki trousers, with dark sunglasses, who leaned back in his seat and appeared to be sleeping. He wore a gold Oyster Rolex on his left wrist, a gold nugget pinkie ring, and a matching bracelet of heavy gold links on his right wrist. From the way he sat and the look of his musculature under the thin silk, Toni’s first impression was that he was a cop, or some kind of security officer, a bouncer, maybe. He might be asleep, but he looked as if he could go from zero to sixty in a heartbeat.

Behind him sat a couple who looked to be in their early seventies. Retirees from some colder climate moved to Florida, she figured.

Not that exciting a group, and nobody who looked like what she thought an international computer terrorist ought to look like.

Well, what did you expect? Geeky-looking guys with pocket protectors and horn-rimmed glasses, their fingers glued to Palm Pilots or flatscreens?

She grinned at herself. Figuring out who might be a heavyweight Bulgarian weight lifter was something you maybe could do by looking, but computer wizards came in all sizes and shapes. It was a fallacy to think they all looked like classic movie nerds. She of all people ought to know that — here she was pretending to be a tourist when she was, in fact, a spy.

Well. She’d be at the ship in a few minutes, she’d get checked in, find her cabin, then take her camera and wander around, snapping perfectly innocent pictures of whatever was open to public view. She had the picture Jay had sent late last night, she’d strained it from the covering JPEG of her mythical aunt. It was a college yearbook image of this guy Keller, and Jay had added ten years to it with a plastic surgery art program. The hair might have changed length or color, contacts could change eye color, too, but the shape of the ears and head would be the same. Even crooks having their faces remodeled seldom did their ears.

She had memorized the picture, then wiped it from the flatscreen’s drive, overwriting the file so it couldn’t be recovered. Like Alex said, she was just supposed to gather small bits of information they could use, but it would be embarrassing at the least if her flatscreen got lost and wound up being scanned by some curious tech-head who found something he shouldn’t find.

So far, so good.

As the commuter helicopter approached the gambling ship, she saw that the actual landing site was a huge flat-topped barge anchored a few hundred yards away, with several long passenger boats shuttling people back and forth from it to the floating casino. She counted six helipads on the barge. There were three craft similar to the one she was in on the deck of the barge, with another one taking off, and a fifth one circling for a landing. That made sense — all those copters taking off and landing on the ship itself would be a windy, noisy commotion better left elsewhere. Smart.

Santos watched the dark-haired woman walk away from the shuttle boat toward the cabin check-in queue, and nodded to himself. She moved well, inside her balance, something most people did not do. Something in her stance, her carriage, it indicated some kind of physical training. A dancer, maybe, or a gymnast, she had the hip swing and that muscular roll to her walk. She wore a T-shirt and shorts, running shoes, no socks, and pulled a carry-on bag behind her, a big purse slung on a shoulder strap. Very sleek in the butt and legs. She was alone, wore no rings, a tourist from the States. Were he not so busy with all the things he needed to do right now, she would be a pleasure he would like to try. Missy would love that, wouldn’t she? To see him with another woman? She was so sure of herself in that way, she would not believe a man could prefer somebody else to her, it was a major part of her power. And she had reason to believe in it, she was most adept in those ways.

Hmm. Maybe he was not as busy as he thought. When you could kill two birds with one stone, was that not a rock worth throwing? And how long did it take to slip out of your clothes and into a good-looking woman anyway? He could skip a workout in the gym, trade that for one in the bedroom, yes?

He grinned at the thought. Missy would steam like turtle soup…

“Hello, ’Berto.”

Speak of the devil.

Without further planning, Santos allowed his gaze to linger on the woman from the helicopter as she walked toward the registration area. Missy could not help but notice he was looking at something other than her. He held his stare long enough for her to be sure of it, and for her to turn to see what held his attention. He caught the flash of anger as it lit her face. She turned back to look at him. It was there only for a moment before she hid it, the irritation, but it was there. Ah, good. Already he felt a warm satisfaction.

“Your trip was successful?”

“My trips are always successful.”

“Made some new friends, did you?”

He shrugged, slow and lazy, gave her a small lopsided grin, but said nothing. Not yet, but if she wished to think so, why shouldn’t she? It would serve his interests.

Her smile didn’t change to look at, but it grew chilly; he could almost feel it. “We have a lot of things to discuss. Why don’t you meet me in my office in an hour.” With that, she turned and walked away, and he could see the anger in her steps.

Ah, better and better!

Now, of course, he more or less had to follow up on the attractive brunette with the dancer’s stroll. He would talk to the clerk at the room check-in and ask about her. Find out who she was, which cabin she was in. It was a big ship, but not so large as all that. He could find a way to run into the woman on deck or in the casino, maybe even the gym, since it was obvious she worked out. He had access to the ship’s security cams, and could find out where she was easily enough. A chance meeting, a little conversation, perhaps a drink, and they would go on from there.

A man had to do what he had to do, but, he had to admit, some jobs were more fun than others…

Jay was in tracking mode, a skill Saji had taught him when he’d been recovering from his stroke. He walked carefully along the dirt road, cutting sign, looking for the smallest indication that his quarry had come this way.

The road was easy. It was dusty, and upon it, the passages of somebody in a vehicle or on foot were simple to spot, no problem. Somebody looking to hide his trail could brush the tracks away with little effort, but because the dust was so fine, it showed every tiny detail, and erasing something itself left a sign that was more interesting than the tracks. A man trying to avoid pursuit could change his mode of transportation, from a car to a bike to a pogo stick; he could change his shoes, and with a little bit of misdirection, lose a pursuer who was following combat boots when they turned into running shoes. But wiping away all tracks? That might seem smart on first thought, but really wasn’t if you knew anything about how to follow a trail.

Sometimes, as Sherlock Holmes was wont to say, it was the absence of the dog barking in the night that was important.

The lack of impressions on a dirt road were more telling than any bootprint.

Carpet-walkers would sometimes glue carpet to the bottoms of their shoes, so as not to leave impressions, but that worked on sand or rocky soil, not on a red-dirt road with baby-powder-fine dust; instead, it would leave distinct patches of relatively smooth tracks. And somebody dragging a branch or burlap sack behind them would likewise wipe out the tracks, but leave drag lines that would last through a dry and moderately windy day, even though rain would eventually patter them down.

No, a smart runner would get off the road entirely, head for the rocks or streams where any tracks either wouldn’t show, or would be swirled away in a few minutes or even seconds. And he would double-back, angle off in false starts, and head in the wrong direction long enough to gull a so-so tracker before he circled around for his true destination.

But if somebody was taking only the barest precautions, and they didn’t really think they were going to be noticed or tailed, they weren’t likely to be as cautious. You didn’t go into full alert and stealth mode every time you went out to collect the mail from your box, or the paper from your front lawn — what was the point?

Keller wore carpet shoes, and for most people, most of the time, his basic moves would have done the job. Nobody driving along the road would notice any tracks. Anybody walking but not looking wouldn’t notice the smooth patches. Even somebody looking for tracks of a particular kind of shoe would probably miss ’em. But Smokin’ Jay Gridley wasn’t just anybody, was he?

It was a nice day for a walk. Greenery everywhere, flowers in bloom, the smell of pollen and dust in the summery, early evening air…

Ahead, on the right, was a weathered wooden building. It had a caduceus painted on the side, the winged staff with two snakes twined around it, indicating a doctor’s office, the paint weather-worn and faded from black to a light gray. Yes, this must be the place.

Jay walked to the front door. The office was closed for the day, and the door was locked, but the latch was an old-style spring lock, and it took all of ten seconds for Jay to open it with a skeleton key he pulled from his pocket.

It was dark and quiet inside. Jay looked around, didn’t see any alarms. He flipped a light switch up. There was a four-drawer steel file cabinet full of patient files next to a big wooden desk. The drawers were locked, but he opened them with a couple of bent paper clips. So easy when you knew how.

He found the file quickly enough, too. Keller hadn’t even bothered to use a phony name, and had paid for the office visit and medication with his corporate credit card — which is how Jay had tracked him here so quickly.

He read the report. “Fell down stairs” was what had been written on the new patient form. The physical examination showed multiple contusions and abrasions, no broken bones or torn ligaments. In one corner, in tiny, neat lettering was a note: “Altercation c jealous boyfriend over woman,” it said. The letter “c” had a line over it, and the words were underlined twice. Apparently the good doctor, one Willem Konig, M.D., had gotten a different cause for the injuries than had his receptionist.

So. Whaddya know. Keller had gotten his butt kicked for fooling around with somebody else’s girlfriend. That was interesting. Keller had never been a ladies’ man in school, but you never could tell. Jay himself hadn’t been that much of a lover back then, either. Things changed.

He put the report back into the drawer, closed and re-locked it, looked out the window to make sure nobody was around, then exited the building, locking it behind him. Technically, he was bending the law here. While he had a legal warrant to do an electronic search, that permission only extended to the U.S. borders. While Net Force did have reciprocity agreements with dozens of countries, including Germany, and the U.S. federal warrant would eventually have gotten a counterpart here, he didn’t have time to wait. He wasn’t planning to use this information in court, so it didn’t have to have all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed, as long as it helped him find his quarry.

Outside, behind the doctor’s office, was a small hill. Jay climbed to the top and looked around. Krumme Lake was to the west, a short distance away, on the edge of the Berlin Forest. The Grunewald area was right over there. There were roads, a train track, and what was still West Berlin, deep in the eastern heart of a divided Germany, that wouldn’t be reunited for decades. The Cold War was still cranking up in this era.

So, Keller was in Germany, or at least he had been yesterday, and a routine request from State to the German government for any use of Keller’s U.S. passport had come back negative, so if he was gone, he must have done it illegally. Given his current status, Jay couldn’t say Keller wouldn’t do that, but since he didn’t know anybody was looking for him, there wouldn’t be any compelling reason for him to sneak out of the country.

Why Germany? Who was the jealous boyfriend who must live here who clobbered Keller? Where had he gone?

That was the problem with searching for information. Sometimes you came up with more questions than answers…

“Hold on a second,” Jay said aloud. Wasn’t there something else about Germany he had come across recently? Something about a barge…? No, that was Japan. It was a train. CyberNation ran a tourist train or somesuch here. And there were the iron horse’s tracks, right there. Maybe it was a sign.

And maybe not. But it gave him something he could check. Train schedules were public information. Find all those that had passed on this track down there for the last couple of days, run them down, find out where they went. Find out if the one owned by CyberNation was around. If it was, that would certainly be a big coincidence, wouldn’t it? And a great place to go and look…

31

Toni played the tourist, mindful of what she had come to the ship to do. She carried a cheap electronic camera, and she took pictures of her room, the exterior decks, the swimming pool, and the helicopter barge. She bought a gambling credit card for two hundred dollars and played the slot machines. She lost eighty dollars over a period of four hours, then hit a three-cherry payout for a hundred dollars. She had lunch in one of the cafeterias, a club sandwich and iced tea, with a slice of very good banana cream pie for dessert, and that cost her half what it would in most D.C. restaurants.

In the early afternoon, she slathered herself with coconut-scented sunblock and lay in one of the deck chairs near the swimming pool. It was hot, but a nice breeze off the water kept things bearable.

A steward came by and asked her if she wanted a drink. She ordered a margarita, and when it came, it looked like a big green snow cone.

She went to her cabin, showered, put on shorts and a T-shirt, then took her camera to the ship’s stern, where passengers tossed bits of food to a flock of hovering sea-gulls. She took pictures of the birds, and more views of the ship from that angle.

The periodic drone of passenger helicopters landing and taking off from the barge was noticeable, but not overly loud.

She could get used to this. Too bad Alex wasn’t here to enjoy it with her.

Late in the afternoon, she went back to her cabin and changed into workout clothes, bike shorts and a halter-top, running shoes, white cotton socks. She didn’t want to practice silat while she was here, even in her room, but she could at least ride the stationary bike and maybe do a few sets on the weight machines. She draped a towel around her shoulders, tucked her room keycard into her left sock top, and headed for the gym.

There were a dozen people in the gym, which was down a level from her cabin. The place had eight or ten weight station machines, pneumatic rather than stacks of iron, six bikes, three stairclimbers, two treadmills, and in one corner, a heavy punching bag hung on a thick nylon strap, the bag itself center-wrapped with layers of duct tape. Toni wished she could work the bag, but she didn’t want to draw any attention to herself. Even in this day and age, a little woman beating the stuffing out of a punching bag drew raised eyebrows and male interest. Men who might not ever speak to you while you were on a bike or stairclimber would feel the need to say something if you were kicking a heavy bag. It was somehow a challenge to their masculinity.

Toni got a free bottle of spring water from a dispenser, found an empty spot in front of the mirrors, did a little stretching and a few warm-ups, then moved to one of the cardiobikes. The one she picked had one of those fan blade front wheels, so the harder you pedaled, the more air you had to move. This was good, because it helped keep you cooler. The electronics allowed a choice of difficulty. She started off slow, and built up resistance after a few minutes.

She was halfway through what she figured would be a forty-minute ride when the black man she’d seen on the copter ride came in. He wore an old pair of baggy shorts, no shirt, rubber sandals, a white cotton headband, and had a towel around his neck.

The shorts had the Bon Chance logo on them. He must work here, she realized. If he was a tourist, the shorts would be new, not old and worn as they were, right?

Toni sipped at her water. The man was well-built, all muscle, no fat on him. Not like a power lifter, but more like a boxer a few days from a championship match.

He moved to the hanging bag, kicked off his sandals, tossed the towel next to them, and went through a series of stretches.

He was very limber for somebody with that much muscle, she noticed. She was curious to see if he was going to work the bag, or that was just a place where he loosened up.

It didn’t take long to satisfy her wonder.

The man stood in front of the bag, and started slapping it. Open-handed, first with the palms, then with the backs of his hands, he developed a rhythm — palm right, backhand right, palm left, backhand left, over and over, until the sound of the strikes sounded like somebody working a speed bag, wapata, wapata, wapata, wapata.

After a couple of minutes, with a sheen of sweat beaded on his head and body, he switched to elbows, and the rhythm was slower, but similar. Right horizontal elbow inward, then back, followed by the left, bap-bap!

Toni kept pumping, watching the man in the mirrors rather than looking right at him.

He switched from elbows to punches, using hammer fists in the same pattern. Then he went to his knees, and then to a series of instep-then-heel kicks. Right, left, right, left.

He was working really hard. Most people didn’t realize how difficult it was to strike a heavy bag like that — it took a lot more energy than riding a bike or walking on a treadmill, a lot more. And not wearing bag gloves was hard on the hands, too.

The timer on Toni’s bike cheeped. She looked down at it. The black man had been working the bag for twenty minutes, and while he was sweating profusely, he didn’t look particularly tired.

The guy was in incredible shape. And though she couldn’t tell from the strikes what his art was, he was obviously deep into some fighting discipline. He moved in balance the whole time, and his hits, while fast, were also powerful. Interesting.

She warmed down on the bike for another minute, gradually slowing her pedaling. She stepped off the bike, wiped her face with the towel, finished off her water, then started for the exit.

The black man stepped back, threw a hard sidekick at the bag, and lifted it a foot into the air, to drop back on its nylon strap hard enough to shake the mirrors. He reached for his towel, wiped his face and head, slipped his feet into his sandals, and walked away.

He was a few feet behind Toni when she stepped into the hall.

“You a dancer?” he said. He had an accent, sounded like Spanish or Portuguese, maybe.

Toni looked at the man. Was he hitting on her? In her guise of divorced secretary, she would probably be receptive to such things. He was a strong, good-looking man. Then again, she was supposedly from the South and might have a racial prejudice, so perhaps she ought to seem a little timid. If he worked here, maybe she could find out some things from him.

“No,” she said. “Not really.”

“You have the legs,” he said. He nodded at her.

Toni gave him what she thought would pass for an embarrassed smile. “Well, I try to keep in shape. Are you a boxer?”

He shrugged. “Kind of.”

He moved up next to her as they walked. “Your first visit to the ship?”

“Yes. You’ve been here before?”

“Oh, yeah. I work here.”

“Really? What do you do?”

“I’m with Security,” he said.

No surprise, but Toni raised her eyebrows. “How exciting.”

He shrugged again. “Pretty dull, mostly. You maybe want to get a drink later?”

Toni pretended to be more nervous than she felt. “Uh, well, maybe.”

He grinned, showing perfect white teeth. “I don’t bite, Missy. My name is Roberto Santos.” He put out his hand.

“I’m Mary Johnson.” She took his hand. It was damp, but warm, and she could feel the power in his grip, even though he throttled it way back. “From Falls Church, Virginia.”

“It is my pleasure to meet you,” he said. He released her hand. “That drink?”

“Oh. Okay. I want to shower and change. Can I meet you somewhere?”

He smiled again. “How about the Lady Luck, that’s the little bar next to the dining room outside the main casino. In an hour?”

“That would be fine,” she said.

After he had gone on his way, Toni felt her heartbeat start to slow. It had been a long time since she had been in the field working a contact. That he was such a primal, physical man added something to her nervousness. This man was dangerous. No question of that.

When Jay sneaked onto the train, he kept it simple. This close to Keller, he wanted to be sure he wasn’t distracted by historical details or esoteric odors in a complex scenario — Keller was, he had shown, too good to shrug off. So the train was just a train, the era was the present and real-time, and Jay’s plan was to get in and out without raising a ruckus. He hadn’t come to slap Keller’s face with a glove and challenge him to a duel, only to find out whether he was here or not.

The duel would come later. On Jay’s terms.

Not that even this much was easy. He made his way through the baggage car with his utmost stealth, stopping frequently to look and to listen. Cracking any of CyberNation’s secure services would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. These were people who prided themselves on their ability to program and weave, and any chinks in their armor would be microscopically small. But the train ran on public tracks, and it had a connection to the railway system’s computers, which were a lot easier to rascal. Jay wasn’t hurting anything, he wasn’t going to even peek at the rail system’s files, he was just riding their coded sig into the CyberNation train. They had to allow it access, and while it wouldn’t get him past their foot-thick firewalls, the information he wanted wasn’t behind them anyhow.

Jay got through the baggage car. Just ahead was the conductor’s office. Jay knocked, and when nobody answered he slipped the lock with a credit card and stepped inside. If the conductor had been in his office, Jay would have offered some excuse, gone away, and created a diversion that would have drawn the man out.

A file cabinet stood near the conductor’s desk, but it was partially open, not even locked. Jeez, Louise! Not that the lock would have stopped him, but still, they didn’t have to make it so easy. It was amazing to him how often people who should know better left their doors unlocked.

A few minutes shuffling through papers came up with what he wanted: a passenger list. He looked at several other manifests, on the off-chance somebody might someday notice he had poked around in here. No point in being obvious about what he was looking for.

Jay recognized several of the names on the passenger list from his own list of high-end computer program grads. And there, plain as day, was the name he had come to find.

Jackson Keller.

So, this was where he was, and this was where his primary team was, too.

Jay put the list back into the drawer, went to the door, peeked out. Nobody around.

He hurried back toward the baggage car. He had what he wanted. Time to leave.

“We’ve got a hacker incursion,” Taggart said.

Keller stared at her. “Incursion? Not a failed attempt? Impossible!”

“Not in our systems. In the train’s op comp. We got a bounce-back from Deutsche Bahn Access, said he wasn’t who he said he was. I checked it: The hit came in off the sat pipeline from EuroAlliance One, not from any registered Deutsche Bahn connections.”

“Let me see.” He moved to the work station where Samantha Taggart, the security monitor for this shift, sat.

“Nothing to see,” she said. “He’s come and gone.”

“What did he do?”

“Nothing to speak of. He accessed several housekeeping files. Didn’t take anything, didn’t leave a worm or virus behind. Probably some kid trying out a new cracker program.”

“Which files? Never mind—” Keller tapped in a key sequence. The file list appeared in a real-time crawl on the holoproj. Mail manifest, cargo bills of lading. Passenger list. Station stops. Who would bother? There was nothing there to see.

“You back-walked him?”

“Far as I could. It was an anonymous sig from somewhere in the NoAtlantic Net; it frayed eight hundred ways from Sunday past that.”

“That would be pretty sharp for a kid hacker.”

“I used to do it when I was a kid. You used to do it. It’s not that hard.”

Keller chewed his lip. Nothing was taken. Nothing there to take, really. Who could possibly care where the train stopped, what it carried for cargo or mail, or who was on it—

He blinked. He opened the passenger file. There they were, his team, himself, the train crew. He felt a sudden cold rush in his lower belly.

Gridley!

He shook his head. “Can’t be. He doesn’t even know who we are.”

“Excuse me?”

He looked at Taggart. “Nothing. Never mind. You’re right, it was probably some kid screwing around. No harm, no foul.”

But as he walked away, Keller’s fluttering bowels didn’t settle down. If it wasn’t some kid trying to break into a system just for the hell of it, then who could it be? And the only answer was: somebody who wanted to know who was on the train. Maybe Gridley had figured it out. Maybe that old Thai persona Keller had used had been too good a clue. And if it was Gridley, and he knew Keller was on the train with his team, then they were in deep trouble. If the Americans thought this train had anything to do with the net and web disruptions, they would be all over the Germans to pull it to a stop and have a look-see. Somebody high up in the German government would surely owe a favor to somebody high up in the U.S. government, and even if not, there could easily be a quid pro quo offer in a big hurry: Scratch our back, Hans, and we’ll scratch yours, yah?

And if Gridley knew about this platform, maybe he knew about the barge in Yokohama, too. It wouldn’t be safe there, either.

He had to get off the train. Fast.

32

Michaels looked at Jay, then at John Howard, the other man in his office. “It’s iffy,” he said.

Jay nodded. “Yep. I don’t have ironclad proof. But I’m positive of it. Keller is the guy leading the charge. He’s got the chops, and CyberNation is the organization that stands to gain more than anybody. Last week, he and his team were on the boat, and now they are on a big ole electric train in Deutschland. If we can grab them, I bet we can squeeze a confession out of one of ’em. And sure stop anything they are planning.”

“There’s due process for you,” Michaels said.

“Hey, the Germans got stung when the net went wonky, people all over the world lost money. If they don’t have Miranda warnings, that’s not our concern, is it?”

“I think you’ve been watching too many World War Two movies, Jay. They aren’t all Nazis over there anymore. People have rights in Germany now.”

Jay shrugged.

“What I want to know more about is this connection among the three locations,” Howard said. “The train, the barge in Japan, the ship.”

Jay said, “Triple redundancy. I think each of these has got identical computer systems set up. They share the information. If something happens to one, they still have two backups. That’s how I’d do it. We got at least a backup off-site ourselves now, the new substation in D.C.”

“So it wouldn’t do us any good to take out the train by itself.”

“Well, General, it would tell us for sure if these guys are the villains if we got a look at their hardware and software. Don’t we have any spies who can do a walk-through in RT?”

“We’ve already got a spy on the boat,” Michaels reminded him.

“Yeah, but she’s not supposed to poke around in the private decks, just gather info that’s public. Besides, we know that Keller is on the train now anyhow. I’m telling you, this is the real deal.”

Michaels shook his head. “Even if I believed you — and it happens I do — we don’t have enough to start arresting people, even via another government. And if we could shut down the train and the barge at the — where was it? the shipworks? — that would still leave the gambling ship down there in the Caribbean. If they are about to do something else nasty, wouldn’t that be likely to precipitate it?”

Jay shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe. But they might not be ready to go for it yet. Our defenses have gotten better. It’ll be harder next time. Plus if we get Keller and his big guns, that’s gonna monkey wrench it. The second team won’t be as good.”

“If that’s all they do,” Howard said.

Michaels looked at him.

“Remember that cut transcontinental fiber-optic cable? Where they found the two dead militiamen? Have we considered that they might be linked?”

Michaels shook his head. “Why would you say that?”

“Well, sir, if it were me, I’d want a multipronged attack on something as big as the Internet. Sticking it with a knife in the hind leg will make it bleed, but that won’t kill it, or even seriously slow it down. But if you shot it in the head, maybe set off a charge of dynamite under it at the same time?”

“The general has a point, boss. There is more than one way to shut off a node. Doesn’t have to be with software, could be with hardware. My programmers can’t fix that.”

“Great. I need to hear this.”

He leaned back in his chair and thought about it for a second. “All right. I’m going to present this to the director and get her thoughts about it. Meanwhile, General, you might want to fine-tune your ship-boarding scenarios. I’m expecting an update from Toni soon, so you can add that into your data files.”

“Yes, sir.” He grinned.

“You really like the idea of storming a ship at sea and taking it over, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir. I know I shouldn’t, it’s dangerous, but it’s what I’m trained to do. Every now and then, you like to see if your tools still work.”

“Go sharpen them, John. I’m going over to see the director. Jay, you get back on-line and get me something, anything, I can use to convince the director we aren’t grabbing at straws here.”

“On my way, boss.”

The bar was relatively quiet, but the muted sound of bells going off in the casino filtered through the walls. People were smoking as well as drinking, there being no laws against it here. Even though there were apparently vacuum ashtrays on the tables and bar that sucked a lot of the smoke away, it still smelled like cigarettes, with a cigar or pipe thrown in to add their heavier scents. Cigarettes were nasty, but Toni had to confess that she kind of liked the smell of cigars and pipe tobacco.

Toni, dressed now in jeans, running shoes, and a dark blouse, arrived ten minutes early and looked around. She noted the exits, then found a small table next to the wall in the corner. She sat with her back against the wall. A row of curtained portholes ran along the wall at head level, but she arranged her chair so she wasn’t sitting in front of one.

A young and pretty waitress in a short black skirt and white shirt was at the table fifteen seconds later.

Toni ordered, and it was only another minute or two before the waitress returned with a tall glass of tomato juice with a celery stick in it. Quick service.

Roberto Santos arrived exactly on the hour. He wore a dark suit, Armani if she was any judge, a black silk scoop-necked T-shirt, and alligator loafers. The shoes alone probably cost more than all the clothes she had packed. He also wore that gold watch, ring, and bracelet she had seen before. A walking Fort Knox.

He walked straight toward her table, as if he had known where she would be.

“Miss Johnson. Good to see you again.”

“Mr. Santos.”

“Roberto, please. Mr. Santos is my father.”

They exchanged smiles.

The waitress was there before Santos settled fully in his chair, and she had a drink on her tray. It was mostly white, with streaks of brown in it. He smiled at the young woman and took the drink. “Thank you, Betty.”

The waitress dimpled and almost curtsied, then moved away. Toni had the impression that if Santos said “Jump,” Betty would be in the air in a heartbeat, and naked before she came back down.

Santos sipped at the drink. “Ah,” he said. He looked at her and answered what he thought was her unasked question: “Coconut milk and Cuban rum,” he said. “Very fattening. I have to work extra hard after I have one of these.” He raised his glass to her and she held up her tomato juice. It looked like a Bloody Mary. Let him think so.

“To new friends,” he said.

“Why not?” she said.

They clinked glasses.

She nursed her juice while he finished his rum and coconut milk and started a second one. He was very smooth, this Santos, not glib, but totally focused on her, appearing entranced by her every word or look, as if she were the most fascinating woman in the world. Which, in her fake identity, she certainly was not. It didn’t take a genius to realize he was hoping to get laid.

Well, he was going to be disappointed, unless he could talk Betty the waitress into it, which didn’t seem like much of a chore.

When she asked questions about his work, he managed to slip them, like a good boxer does punches, giving her almost no information. He walked around, he said. He watched for trouble. From time to time, he ran errands. Nothing special. Just a job.

Toni smiled and nodded and pretended to be impressed anyhow. He wasn’t telling the truth. If something was going on upon this ship, Santos here was a part of it, she was sure of that. But — short of blowing in his ear and going off to his cabin with him — how was she going to find out what he knew?

“You have not had supper yet,” he said. “We should go and eat.”

Toni realized that extracting herself from this would be more difficult if they had dinner, and she was about to offer an excuse — a sudden unexpected visit from Mr. Red ought to do it — when Santos glanced away from her at somebody who had just entered the bar. He looked back quickly, and he wore a small smile when he did.

Toni looked at the entrance.

There was a strikingly beautiful woman standing there. She looked Asian, maybe Amerasian, Toni couldn’t pin her nationality down exactly. She was tall, had black hair past her shoulders, so black it looked like shimmering ink. She wore a red blouse, tucked into a matching skirt that stopped four inches above her knees, hose, and heels. The clothes were snug enough to reveal a svelte hourglass figure, but not so tight as to look trashy. Toni was aware that the conversational background noise suddenly dropped in volume, and a quick glance around showed virtually everybody in the place was looking at the new arrival.

Except Santos. And given his obvious attraction to women, that seemed odd.

“Who is that?” she asked.

He looked at her. “Pardon?”

“In the red, over there.”

He looked, pretending not to have seen the woman before. “Ah. That is Jasmine Chance.” His accent thickened a bit, so that his next sentence came out, “She work on de boat, too.” Not Hispanic, Toni decided. Brazilian, maybe.

The woman, meanwhile, was on the move, and it looked to Toni as if she was heading right toward their table, smiling like the Cheshire cat as she walked, heels clicking in the suddenly quiet bar. Here was a femme fatale.

Sure enough, she approached their table and stopped, still smiling. “Roberto.”

“Hello, Missy,” he said. He grinned back.

While it was all pleasant and smiley on the surface, Toni immediately felt that charged atmosphere that couples who’d been arguing sometimes had — just before they put on their public faces.

Bad blood here.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend, Roberto?” Another smile, and if ever an expression was fake, this one was. It had crocodile all over it.

Santos held up a lazy hand. “This is Mary Johnson, she is an executive assistant from Falls Church, Virginia. Mary, this is Jasmine Chance. Head of Security. My boss.”

“A secretary,” Chance said, looking at Santos. Contempt practically dripped from her voice.

Toni felt a strong urge to stand up and slap the woman for that patronizing tone, but that wouldn’t be in character, not at all.

“There was something you wanted?” he said.

Chance never moved her penetrating gaze from him. “An important security matter came up. Perhaps your friend could excuse us for a moment?”

Toni would have loved to stay and listen to this conversation, but it provided the easy exit she needed. She said, “Oh, of course. I was just about to leave anyway. I’m feeling a bit under the weather.”

“I’m so sorry,” Chance said, the words absolutely devoid of any sympathy at all.

“No need to leave,” Santos said. “I’m sure this won’t take long.” He wasn’t looking at Toni, either, but at Chance.

If looks could kill, anybody walking between these two would have been turned into crispy critters as if bathed by flamethrowers.

Toni stood. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Chance. Thank you for the drink, Roberto. Maybe I’ll see you again.”

She hurried away, just in time. She had to call Alex, and the window for the call was pretty narrow.

Back in her cabin, she went into the small bathroom and started the shower. That her room might be bugged was unlikely, but it paid to be careful. Once the water was running and making noise, she used her disguised scrambler phone to call Alex, vox only, no visual. There was a long-distance microwave repeater on the ship — they couldn’t expect people to be without their phones even out here — but Toni’s call went through a military comsat she knew would be footprinting the area for the next ten minutes.

“Hey, babe.”

“Hey,” she said.

“How’s it going?”

“Fine. I haven’t seen Jay’s guy.”

“That’s okay, we think he’s in Germany. Anything else?”

“I’ve managed to meet a couple of people who look interesting. You might have Jay run their names and see what he can come up with.”

“Shoot.”

She gave him Santos and Chance, described them. “Santos says he’s with ship security, and that Chance is his boss. They have some kind of thing going between them, if that’s any help.”

“I’ll pass it on to Jay. How are you doing?”

“I’m okay. I miss you and Little Alex.”

“We miss you, too. He’s fine, Guru is fine, I’m fine. Nothing to worry about here. Listen, I need you to plug whatever you’ve got, pix, thoughts, diagrams, into a file and upload it to one of the secure mailboxes. Mark it for John’s attention.”

“I won’t be able to do it until the next comsat pass,” she said. “Unless you want to risk using the ship’s transmitter.”

“No, it’ll wait a couple hours.”

“What’s up?”

He explained Jay’s theory about CyberNation’s train and barge. He finished by saying, “I spoke to the director. Ordinarily, the government would be hesitant to move with so little hard evidence, but the powers-that-be uplevels are really nervous about this whole situation. There are going to be some strings pulled, some favors called in. The German train and the Japanese barge are going to get unexpected visitors. If what Jay thinks is right, that’ll take two of the three computer loci out of action.”

“Leaving the ship,” she said.

“General Howard is working on that,” he said.

“You’re serious?”

“As a triple bypass. If this nest of electronic snakes is about to strike, we need to stop them before they do. Both Jay and John think they might escalate things from pure software attacks to physical attacks on servers and phone companies. That would really screw things up royally.”

“Yes. So, I’m the fifth column agent?”

“No. You leave as scheduled. Finish up, catch the flight back to the Mainland, come home tomorrow.”

“Alex—”

“Not open for discussion,” he said. “If Net Force’s military arm has to flex its muscle, that’s who does the job, not the Assistant Deputy Commander.”

She knew he was right. She was a mother, she had a toddler at home. She didn’t have any business being on a military raid. Still, she felt the excitement at the idea.

“All right,” she said.

The signal started to cut in and out, so they finished their conversation and discommed. Toni shut off the shower and went to collect her flatscreen. She would make notes, draw maps, and add in the pictures she had taken, and fold them into a compressed and encoded packet to send to John Howard via the scrambled cell phone the next time the comsat overflew her. One more day on the ship, and she would head home. It felt good to have gotten back into the field. And while she would have liked to stay on board if Net Force mounted an assault, she had other responsibilities now. It was the right thing to do. Although she hated thinking like a grownup. It made her feel… old…

33

Keller’s jet was more than halfway to Miami when he got the frantic call from the train’s SysOp.

German authorities had stopped them for a “health inspection,” looking for, they said, a carrier of Lassa Valley Fever. Trash protocols had been instigated as soon as the police had arrived, the SysOp said. The onboard computers would be blank before anybody could download anything, all files burned and unrecoverable. There wouldn’t be any sign of anything particularly illegal. Certainly it would seem suspicious, to have that kind of state-of-the-art computer setup on a train, and more suspicious that the machines were all empty, but there would be nothing the German authorities could charge anybody with that would stick. They could haul everybody in, but no evidence, no case, and all the players knew all they had to do was sit tight and CyberNation’s lawyers would eventually spring them. Keller and his crew were safe, and they were what made the programs work.

It was scary, but not altogether unexpected when the scrambled call came in from the Japanese SysOp a few minutes later. The barge’s computers were history, too.

That left the ship, and if Gridley and his guys knew about the train and the barge, they had to know about the Bon Chance.

Fortunately, the ship was in international waters. If the U.S. could get a Coast Guard cutter or Navy ship to go there — not politically likely, according to Jasmine — the gambling boat’s crew would see it coming fifteen miles away. Plenty of time to wipe those computers, too, though that would be a last resort. With Germany and Japan gone, all their work was on the ship. They would have to be damned certain it was endangered before they trashed it. Thousands and thousands of man-hours erased would hurt way too much.

He had better call Jasmine and let her know where he was and what was going on. Better she hear it from him first.

In her office alone, Chance was absolutely pissed off. First there had been Roberto’s little routine with that slut of a secretary — she could have strangled him when he looked at her all innocently and said they were just having a friendly drink. Now there were the goddamned hits on the train and barge, with a terrified Keller on his way back here practically peeing in his pants. She wasn’t worried that the U.S. Navy was going to come calling as much as she was frustrated over the losses. How had they figured it out? Keller had told her it was impossible.

She was going to have to speak harshly with him about this.

And the schedule was going to have to be moved up, just in case. They only had one arrow left in their quiver now, and it had to be strung and loosed before their target had a chance to move out of the line of fire. She paged Roberto, a priority-one call. If he was interrupted trying to get into the secretary’s pants, too bad. She sent half a dozen other pages, also P-1 calls. She didn’t like the way this felt. Not at all. She did not want it to come unraveled now, not when they were so close to winning. Better to move and win a partial victory than to stand still and lose it all. The clock was ticking, and if time ran out before they launched, it would be all over.

Howard looked at Julio. “So, what do you think?”

Fernandez shook his head. “It’s just simple enough it might work. Gridley can get the computer stuff done?”

“He says so.”

“So if we get approval, we’d go when?”

“Tomorrow. After dark.”

Julio shook his head. “Technology. Amazing stuff.”

“Put together three squads, mixed male and female. I want thirty troopers, two pilots and copilots, the usual bells and whistles, given the limitations. Air transport, briefings, maps, assignments, I need everything ready to roll by 0600 tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir. I’m on the way. Guess we’ll see if the new top kick is as good as he thinks he is.”

“He can’t possibly think he’s as good as you thought you were when you were a sergeant.”

“Well, sir, that’s because he couldn’t possibly be that good.”

Howard smiled.

After Julio had left, he looked at the computer images floating in the air above his conference table. The best plans were the simple ones, he knew, but maybe this one was too simple.

Only one way to find out.

Santos didn’t like being hurried. Once he set his mind to a plan, he liked to have it flow naturally. Sometimes, you had to adjust to the unexpected, but this new bug up Missy’s butt was too much, too quick. He’d tried to tell her, but she wasn’t having any of it. Still pissed at him for the secretary.

Too bad, that. This speeded-up schedule was going to put a crimp in his seduction. The secretary was as good as on her back when Missy came in, all Ice Bitch, and started trying to pull his chain. She was gonna pay. It was just one more coin it was gonna cost her.

Meanwhile, he had to get his teams ready to move. Missy wanted it fast. Tomorrow, if possible, the day after at the latest. Too soon — but what could you do? He didn’t want to miss the action.

Toni wandered around, taking more pictures, but feeling a sense of impending something. As the day wound down, nothing new happened she needed to think about. No sign of Santos, so maybe his boss had put the fear of God into him.

She briefly considered trying to get onto the private decks. Even went so far as to seem to get lost and wind up at one of the entrances to one such deck. But the electronic card reader would need a key, and as she started back the way she’d come, the door opened and revealed a couple of men standing on the other side, wearing photographer’s sleeveless vests over their shirts, which in this kind of climate meant they were using the vests to cover pistols tucked into their belts — they certainly weren’t cold.

One more small piece of circumstantial evidence, the armed guards. Of course, maybe they were there to guard a vault room, where the gambling winnings were kept?

Not likely. Most of what Toni had seen was cashless, all done on credit exchanges. You didn’t need guards for that.

No, she would pack up and catch a late-afternoon helicopter out, head home. Earlier, she had heard somebody say it was supposed to rain tonight or tomorrow, a little tropical depression, not a hurricane or anything, but some wind and weather. She would just as soon be gone if that was going to happen — she didn’t like to fly in the rain. She’d known some people who had been on a jet that tried to take off in a typhoon once. The jet had crashed and burned, and the folks she knew had been lucky to survive. Bad weather and flying didn’t go together in Toni’s book.

Jay looked around, and felt a little uncomfortable. The club was noisy, the music playing very loud, lights flashing, and people dancing. Most of the people dancing were men, there were only a handful of women, and some of them looked pretty mannish, too.

He turned back to his virtual beer. According to what he had learned, Le Boy was the biggest gay night club in the city. You kinda had to expect to see a lot of men, now, didn’t you?

A tall, well-built bodybuilder in a pair of skin-tight leather pants and a tank top arrived at the bar to Jay’s left and flashed him a big, toothy smile. “Com lisença,” he said, “voce é ativo? O passivo?”

Jay tapped the tiny translator hidden in his right ear, and the Portuguese the man had spoken was translated into English: “Excuse me, are you a top or a bottom?”

Even in VR, Jay flushed. “I’m waiting for a friend,” he subvocalized. The translator turned the reply into Portuguese.

The buffed bodybuilder — they called them “barbies” here, Jay recalled from his research — kept smiling. “I could be your friend,” the translator said in Jay’s ear.

“Maybe,” Jay said. “Do you know a man named Roberto Santos?”

His would-be friend’s face went dark. “Bicha!” he said.

Jay didn’t need the translator for that one.

“He is a friend of yours?” the barbie said, his voice dangerous.

“No. An enemy.”

The man nodded. “He is a bastard among bastards, a son of a whore, a fucker of his sister and grandmother!” He reached into his mouth and tugged. A partial dental plate came out — his top four front teeth were false. The barbie waved the plate at Jay. “He did this to me!” He put the plate back in.

Jay made sympathetic noises. “Tell me about him.”

The barbie needed no more prompting. “He cruises the gay scene, though he is not gay. He sometimes goes into the — the dark rooms, and lets some poor boy give him oral sex. Then he beats him. He has hurt other of my friends. He always picks big men, strong men. He is a fighter, his fists are like iron. He enjoys hitting. He laughs while he does it.”

“Why haven’t the police arrested him? Has no one complained?”

The barbie nodded. “Oh, yes, many have complained. The police only laugh and shake their heads when they hear his name. He is protected. So protected that once he beat a man so bad the man died, and still the police did nothing. Santos is a devil.”

Interesting. Jay had what he came here for. Time to move on.

Professor Wang, a forty-five-ish woman with a pageboy haircut and a gray business suit so severe it made her look like a business nun, said, “Oh, yes, I remember her.”

They were in a business library, the air conditioning blasting away. Jay nodded. “Anything you’d feel comfortable in saying about her?”

Wang smiled. “The words comfortable and Jasmine Chance don’t belong in the same sentence. There’s a story the students and staff used to pass around. Once, Jasmine was visiting the zoo, and there was a terrible earthquake. Some of the animals got loose. A pair of man-eating tigers escaped from their cage. Free and hungry, the tigers charged a group of school children. At the last second, Jasmine Chance stepped in between the hungry tigers and their prey. The tigers took one look at her, turned tail, and ran back to their cages in terror.”

Jay chuckled politely.

“That’s not the good part,” Wang said. “The good part is, she charged the parents HK$400 each for saving their children.”

“That sounds… harsh.”

“Harsh? Let me tell you something I know is true. Jasmine wanted to be first in her class. But she was not doing well in one subject — and for her, not doing well was being second in her grades, only a high A instead of the highest one. So she seduced the teacher, a middle-aged man with a wife, four children, and three grandchildren. She got her first place. When the professor said he would leave his wife for her, she laughed at him. In great shame over what he had done and her refusal to accept him, he committed suicide. When somebody told Jasmine what had happened, she shrugged. ‘Too bad,’ she said. That woman is as moral as a shark. You don’t ever want to get between her and what she wants.”

Jay nodded. Even more interesting.

“So there you have it, boss. CyberNation has themselves a gay basher who apparently got away with at least one murder, and a woman who will do anything to accomplish her goals. I don’t have a lot of other history on them, but Santos has been essentially a high-class knee-breaker for a couple of organizations, and Chance has risen up a couple of corporate ladders so fast she seemed to have wings. Add them into the mix, it just keeps getting thicker and thicker. Pretty soon, we have the whole cake.”

“We’re missing a couple of ingredients yet,” Michaels said. “Your friend Keller wasn’t on the train; neither were the others you listed who were supposed to be there.”

Jay cursed.

“Yes, indeed. The German government is checking airports and other trains, but it appears he has flown the coop.”

Jay cursed again.

“I believe you said that.”

Jay shook his head. “Yeah. So, what now?”

“I am expecting a call from the director sometime in the next five minutes. If her clout is enough, we will be sending visitors to the Bon Chance in the very near future.”

“I bet she named it after herself,” Jay said.

“Excuse me?”

“The boat.” He blew out a sigh. “Where is Toni?”

He looked at his watch. “She should be catching a helicopter from the ship about now. In fact, if you can access the passenger lists, I’d appreciate knowing which flight she is on.”

“No problem. Mary Johnson.”

Before Michaels could say anything else, the com chimed. His secretary said, “The director is on line one.”

Michaels reached for the receiver, and shooed Jay out with a wave as he picked it up. Jay stood, but moved very slowly toward the door.

“Hello?”

“Commander. We have a ‘go.’ You better be right about this.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

Jay raised an eyebrow from the doorway. Michaels nodded at him and raised one hand in a thumb’s-up gesture.

“Yes!” Jay said in a stage whisper. He made a fist and pumped it.

Michaels wished he felt so positive.

34

Toni waited in line for the shuttle boat. The sky had gone gray, and while it wasn’t raining yet, the wind had picked up and the southeasterly breeze felt damp. There was a full load of departing passengers waiting. Apparently more than a few people were worried about the weather, and didn’t want to be on a ship ninety miles away from land if it got nasty.

The boat from the helicopter barge arrived and tied up at the base of the ramp, and after a few seconds, new arrivals climbed the stairs or wheelchair ramp onto the ship.

She hoped they had all come to gamble, because they surely weren’t going to get much sun—

Hold on—

Coming up the ramp was a face she recognized. It took a second for her to realize why.

Keller. From the picture she’d seen. This was Jay’s guy!

What was he doing here? He was supposed to be in Germany, wasn’t he? This must mean something.

As soon as he’d passed, Toni left the shuttle boat line, as if she had suddenly remembered that she had forgotten something. The gap she left filled instantly. She glanced at her watch. The comsat wasn’t due for another forty-five minutes. Could she risk calling Alex on the ship’s phones? She could keep it innocuous—Hey, you know that picture you gave me? Well, I thought I had lost it, but I found it after all, right here on the ship.

Anybody who didn’t know who she was could hardly tell what she was talking about from that, could they?

Not likely. But if the ship’s phones were tapped, and that would be easy enough to do since they were owned and maintained by CyberNation, they might wonder why a secretary from Falls Church was calling somebody at Net Force headquarters. Or maybe they might be even able to recognize Alex’s name on the home phone or his virgil. And even if her scrambler kept them from hearing anything other than noise, maybe they would wonder what a secretary was doing with a scrambled phone.

Any of those would be bad.

No, she would wait until the next footprint so she could call on the secure line. There were still a dozen more copters leaving this evening, and she needed to get a better look at this guy, maybe even see where he went or who he might talk to—

As if some bored deity had been listening, Toni suddenly saw Jasmine Chance, now dressed in a black jump-suit and sandals, step into view ahead. Toni turned away and put a hand up to block her face from view.

Keller went straight to her, and while she couldn’t overhear his conversation, he was obviously pretty excited from the way he waved his hands around.

Well, well. What did this mean?

Alex would surely want to know about this. Yes, she could call him from the Mainland, or even from the shuttle copter, but there was no hurry, was there? Maybe she could find out something more before she had to leave.

The old 727’s rebuilt engines were reassuring in their smooth, dependable drone. They were only a few minutes out now, and Julio was going over the checklist a final time as they began their descent into Fort Lauderdale.

“Our boy Mr. Gridley here came through.” Julio smiled at Jay, who sat across the aisle. “First squad and half of second squad will be on Bird A; third squad and the other half of second on Bird B.”

Howard nodded. Next to him sat Commander Michaels. Michaels hadn’t planned to come along at all, even to sit onshore, but he hadn’t heard from Toni, who was supposed to have left the ship by now. According to Jay, Mary Johnson had not gotten on any of the shuttle copters for the Mainland yet. Maybe the weather had more people leaving than normal, delaying the flights, but Michaels was worried enough to go along. Howard didn’t blame him. He knew how he’d feel if it was his wife there.

“Weather radar shows an ugly set of heavy showers moving from the southeast toward the target, the main body of which will have arrived by 2100—we’re gonna get wet.”

“I’ll be sure to bring my umbrella,” Howard said.

“Wind’ll just turn it inside out, sir. Steady breeze will be almost thirty knots, gusting to forty.”

“Go on.”

“Troops all have Class III spider silk vests for armor — that’s the best we can do, given the scenario — so nobody is real bulletproof. Augmented-LOSIR coms will be set on opchan Gamma, and we carry sidearms and subguns, plus the usual assortment of puke gas, flashbangs, and all like that, packed away in our luggage. Everybody knows what he or she is supposed to do.”

Howard nodded.

The seat belt light and audible warning went on.

Julio said, “So, to condense things a little, we get there, take over before anybody knows what is going on, and capture the computers before they can trash ’em. Then our computer wizard here waltzes in and collects the evidence, the bad guys all go to prison, and everybody lives happily ever after.”

It won’t be that easy, Howard knew. It never is.

The jet started to descend; he could feel the pressure in his ears change.

“No word from Toni yet?” he said.

Michaels looked worried. “No. She should have called by now.”

Toni had a problem. Her room was no longer available, she had checked out, and she didn’t want to be wandering around the ship towing her suitcase. That made it kind of hard to skulk, when the wheels of your little carry-on were clacking over every imperfection in the floor. So when Keller went to a cabin, she ducked into a public toilet nearby, put her suitcase on the commode in an empty stall, locked the door, and climbed out over the top of the stall’s door. It would have been smarter to have found a concierge and checked the bag, but she didn’t want to get too far away from Keller, in case he came out.

He did come out, not ten minutes later, and she stayed far enough back so he didn’t seem to notice her. This was working out all right.

He went straight to one of the guarded entrances to the private decks, and she couldn’t follow him in there.

Okay. He was here, Alex needed that information, and that might be all she was gonna get. It was what it was.

When she went back to get her suitcase, it was gone. And her scrambled cell phone and flatscreen were in the suitcase.

This was not good. Not good at all.

Probably housekeeping had the bag. Somebody had reported the stall locked, a janitor had come by, found the bag. Nothing sinister about it. She had her wallet and ID, she could just go and find housekeeping and pick it up.

Maybe. Or maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.

She sat in the stall and thought about the situation. If Alex and the Net Force teams were going to move on the ship, she didn’t want to do anything that might possibly cause them problems. So making the phone call without her coded phone was out.

If they did show up here, chances were good they’d catch Keller — she could tell them he was here when she saw them. It wasn’t as if she was the only civilian on the ship, now was it? There were probably a couple thousand tourists here — she wouldn’t be in any more danger than any of them. Less, because she knew there might be a reason to keep her head down, and because she had some skill at staying out of harm’s way.

If the suitcase was in the lost-and-found waiting to be claimed, no problem. But if they had opened it, seen who it belonged to, and wondered why it had been sitting in an empty, locked toilet stall, that might make them curious. It would surely make her curious if she were running security on a ship. Once they saw it wasn’t a bomb, they might start to ask themselves other questions: Why on Earth would anybody leave their luggage there? What possible reason could there be?

The flatscreen was clean, no damaging files on it; she’d run the burn program. The cell phone was iffy. It looked fine, just another commercial model, tens of thousands of them around. There weren’t any numbers programmed into it, and they’d have to be real inquisitive to take it apart and discover there was hardware and software built in that scrambled calls, coming or going.

But — just for the sake of argument — suppose they did that? Mary Johnson goes toddling in to collect her missing bag, and security — in the form of Jasmine Chance, who obviously bore Ms. Mary no love whatsoever for moving in on her Roberto real estate — decides to have a long chat with her? International waters, no constitutional rights, that would be, well… bad.

That word seemed to be cropping up a whole lot in the last few minutes.

Okay, she decided, that was what she would do. She would go to ground, find a hidey-hole, and stay there, see if Alex showed up. If so, good. If not, she’d worry about that when she got there.

Where to hide?

She had an idea. Probably the last place they’d look if they decided they needed to find her.

Chance called Santos into her office. He came in, a slow stroll, as if he had all the time in the world. He was like a big tomcat, coming and going as he pleased, not going to hurry for anything.

She wanted to slap him.

“Okay,” she said, “whatever problems you and I are having, they have to go on hold now. We need to get this done, and we can sort the rest of it out later.”

He shrugged. “Problems? What problems?”

Now she really wanted to slap him. Instead, she smiled. Fine. He’d pay for all this later. He truly would.

Santos looked at his watch. He had an hour and a half before he needed to leave. Plenty of time, since he was all packed, and since he could take the private launch to the copter platform without waiting for the regular boat. Maybe he should go and find that secretary? Fifteen minutes would be more than enough time to relax them both, no? Time enough for a shower afterward.

Why not?

He headed for the Security Cam Center. If she was still on board, she would have passed in front of a glass eye recently. The computer system that ran the surveillance gear couldn’t search for a particular person, but it could, within limits, hunt for kinds of people. Women, brunettes, a certain size, smaller or larger. All you had to do was tell it what you wanted. Well. Generally. The computer probably wouldn’t appreciate what he really wanted, and it couldn’t see that as long as she had her clothes on anyway.

He smiled.

Michaels stood in line behind Lieutenant Fernandez, who was behind Jay. General Howard was already on board the Sikorsky. They all wore touristy civilian clothes, and carried assorted sizes and shapes of luggage. The bags were a little heavier than what most tourists would be bringing, but there weren’t any metal detectors to pass through before boarding the choppers, so that didn’t matter.

Everybody in the passenger line was from Net Force. At a different hotel helipad ten minutes away, another group of Net Force troopers stood in a similar line. Jay had booked them all into two flights, making sure nobody else would be on those particular craft but them. Well, except for the copter crews, and they weren’t going to be a problem, the general had assured him. They didn’t know the passengers were anything other than folks going to gamble. If something unforeseen happened, John had his own pilots who could take over.

It was simple enough. They would fly out to the helicopter barge, take the boat from there to the ship, and infiltrate the ship. It was not a direct assault, it was an undercover operation. By the time security on the ship realized it, it ought to be a done deal. Much less likely there’d be any shooting this way, and less chance of civilians getting wounded by accident. A pretty clever idea, actually.

Though Michaels had planned to stay in Quantico and wait until it was over, Toni’s failure to report wouldn’t let him do that. Right up until the last minute, he was hoping she’d call, but she didn’t. And he wasn’t going to let his people and all their hardware go without him, not as long as Toni was on that ship.

It wasn’t politically or tactically smart, but hey, hell with it, he was the boss. At least for now.

The line moved along easily, with a military precision. Michaels had to grin at that. The copter’s crew wouldn’t have any idea their passengers were all part of the same group. Jay’s work had made them appear to be from all over the country, singles, couples, a trio of college friends, no reason to think they were anything other than tourists.

As he climbed the short flight of steps into the craft, Michaels heard two troopers, a man and a woman, talking to each other.

“So, this your first trip to Florida?”

“No, actually, my family used to vacation here when I was a girl. Of course, that was up north, a little town called Destin, near Fort Walton Beach.”

“Wow. I had an uncle who was stationed at the Naval Air Station at Pensacola. Small world.”

Other troopers talked, establishing their cover. Michaels felt a nervous twinge in his belly, a quick flutter. He found a seat, tucked his bag between his feet, and buckled himself in. John had lent him his body armor vest. It was folded into the bag, along with a plastic handgun and a com headset. Since he had no active role in the mission, Michaels was supposed to find a secure spot and stay out of the way until the ship was secured, but if trouble popped up, he’d be able to communicate and he’d have a weapon and some protection.

He hoped Toni was all right. Yes, she could take care of herself better than most people, but even so, she wasn’t a superwoman. Something could have gone wrong. Probably it was nothing — weather, crowded flights, her phone on the blink, that was all. But he couldn’t help worrying. He loved her. And if she was all right, he didn’t care how much she hated it, he was never going to send her into the field like this again.

35

Keller had checked the operations center and everything was fine. Well, as fine as it would get. Chance’s hurry-up was going to cause big problems. His team was good, the best, but they couldn’t walk on water. They were at eighty-five, eighty-eight percent readiness, and if Omega launch was tomorrow, they wouldn’t be able to improve on that. He had them all running full blast, and as soon as he had a chance to take a shower, get into some fresh clothes, and grab a quick bite, he would be right back there with them. He hated this. He wanted ten-for-ten for his part, but eight or nine was going to have to do it.

Maybe Santos the sociopath and his team of mouth-breathers could take up the slack. Not Keller’s fault if they couldn’t. He had been given a timeline, he had kept to it. If they wanted to hurry him along, fine, but in that case, they couldn’t bitch about his work.

The door to his cabin stuck. He had to wipe the keycard three times to get it to open. Just one more little glitch in his life he didn’t need. He flipped on the lights, went into the bedroom, and sat on the bed. Took off his shoes, his shirt, and undershirt. He was reaching for his belt buckle when a woman said, “I think that’s enough for now.”

He jerked around so hard he nearly fell down.

A short little brunette stood there in T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes.

“Who are you? What are you doing in my room?”

“Nobody you know, Mr. Keller. What happened to you? You get caught in a riot?”

She nodded at his bruises, which had developed several different shades of brown and purple.

“I’m going to call security,” he said.

She shook her head. “No, I’m afraid you can’t do that.”

He blinked at her. She was, what? Five two, maybe a hundred and twenty, twenty-five pounds? He took a step toward the cabin’s phone on the bedside table.

Somehow, she got between him and the phone and shoved him. He was off-balanced by the little push. He fell on the bed.

Screw this! He might get mauled by a man like Santos, but he was not going to be pushed around by some little woman! He jumped up, intending to slap her silly. He swung his hand at her face, hard—

She ducked the slap, and hit him with a brick in the ribs! Before he could recover, she did something to his feet, tripped him, and he fell back on the bed again.

He lost it. All the suppressed rage he’d felt at being used and abused by Chance, at being assaulted by that trained ape Santos, at being attacked by a woman in his own room, it all exploded. He screamed and leaped at her. He was going to choke the life from her—!

He came out of grayness, puzzled. He saw a woman sitting next to him, watching him. Who was this? Where was he? His thoughts were sluggish, as though wrapped in sheets of lead. He hurt, more than he had before. He needed a pain pill, that’s what he needed. Had he been in an accident?

“Sorry,” the woman said.

Part of it came back to him. He was in his cabin, on the ship. He’d come here, to… to do something, and this woman had been here. She had attacked him. Hit him with a club. Where was the club?

“Wh-who are you? What do you want?” God, he hurt.

“It’s not important who I am,” she said. “But we need to talk. I need you to tell me all about what you’ve been up to.”

A surge of depression broke over him. This sucked! He had been beaten by Santos, threatened with death. And now, he had been beaten by a woman! A tiny little woman! It was embarrassing. He was ashamed. He felt himself starting to cry. What had he done to deserve any of this? It wasn’t right!

“It’s all right,” she said, patting him on the shoulder. “I won’t hurt you anymore.”

That really made things worse.

The Sikorsky’s intercom bonged: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. As you’ve noticed, we’re getting a little weather here, and apparently the conditions are worse at our destination. While we could probably make it just fine, I’d rather not take the risk, so I’m afraid we’re going to have to abort our flight and go back to Fort Lauderdale. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

With those words, the big helicopter started a slow turn to port.

Howard sighed. Of course. It had been too easy. He looked across the aisle at Julio and nodded.

Julio unbuckled his seat belt, stood, then stepped into the aisle and headed forward.

One of the two flight attendants moved to intercept him. “Sir, please take your seat. The captain has the seat belt sign lit.”

“I’m gonna puke,” Julio said. He moved closer toward the flight control cabin, which wasn’t far.

“I’ll get you an airsickness bag, but you need to sit down—”

Julio said, “Sergeant Reaves?”

Reaves, a brawny man with a high-and-tight buzz cut, came up and grabbed the flight attendant, one arm pinning her arms to her body, the other hand covering her mouth. The woman tried to yell, but only a little sound got past the sergeant’s powerful grip.

The second flight attendant, at the back, saw this and reached for an intercom mike, but a trooper caught her and sat her back in her seat.

Julio reached under his tails-out Hawaiian shirt and pulled his pistol, the old warhorse of a Beretta he carried, and hurried forward to have a little chat with the pilot and copilot.

A few seconds later, the helicopter turned back toward the southeast.

Howard looked at Michaels and gave the commander a little shrug. “Stuff happens,” he said. “No problem.”

Howard turned and motioned to his pilot to go forward. The man did. A minute later, Julio marched the copilot back and sat him in the vacated seat. His pistol was tucked back into its holster. He went back to his seat and buckled himself in.

“Everything okay, Lieutenant?”

“All systems green, sir. The captain has decided that cooperation is in his best interest, since our pilot is in the second chair with a gun and he’s let the captain know he knows how to fly this thing. He wasn’t ordered to turn back, it was his decision. ETA is thirty minutes. Might as well sit back and enjoy the ride.”

A downdraft dropped the copter at that moment, a free fall that made them nearly weightless for a second or so. The fall stopped, and the craft shook as if it had bumped into something in the air. Howard looked at Julio.

“Think of it as a new and exciting ride at Disney World,” Julio said. “The Upchucker.”

Santos looked at his watch and frowned. Forty-five minutes, and no sign of Mary Johnson. He had called and found that she had checked out, but the rain and wind were worse now, and they had shut down the commercial flights back to the Mainland, and according to their records, Ms. Johnson had not left yet. So she was here somewhere, and if she wasn’t in her room, or in the casinos, restaurants, or bars, where was she?

Maybe she had found a lover? Was lying in bed letting the roll of the sea rock her and some lucky man into easy sex?

Well. It didn’t really matter. Pretty soon, he would have to leave. Too bad.

His com rang. He pulled it from his belt and opened it. “Yes?”

Missy said, “Have you seen Jackson? He’s supposed to be in Computer Operations and he’s not.”

“Haven’t seen him,” Santos said. And wasn’t likely to, if Jackson saw him first. “You try his room?”

“He’s not answering his phone, his pager, or knocks on the door.”

“Maybe he’s in a bathroom throwing up? Boat’s moving some, and that Jackson, he’s got kind of a weak stomach. So I heard.”

“I doubt that.”

“Or maybe he’s getting himself a little pussy. I hear he likes that.”

“Grow up, Roberto!” There was a short pause. “You’d better get going. The storm is getting worse, and you have to be on the Mainland.”

“Don’t worry about me, I’m not gonna disappear like Jackson.”

He flipped the phone shut, tapped it against his other palm, then stuck it back on his belt. That was odd, that Keller wasn’t around. He lived for his computers. Maybe before he took off, he should check Keller’s cabin, make sure he hadn’t had a heart attack or something.

Toni listened, astounded by the scope of the planned attack on the Internet. Keller, once he got started, was babbling like a man stoked on amphetamines, talking so fast he kept running out of air and had to suck more in big gasps.

Hacks. EMP devices. Men with guns and cable cutters. This was major. She was going to have to call Alex with this, it was too big to risk letting it get started. People were poised to do all this in a few hours, and authorities around the U.S., around the world, had to know.

Keller knew some of it, but not all. They needed to get the locations for attacks on the hardware, so they could stop them. Undoubtedly those were in the computers. Could Keller access those plans from here?

Yes, he could. He had his flatscreen. He could download those files. Would she like him to do it?

Toni smiled. This would justify her staying here! “Do it,” she said.

It didn’t take that long. When he was done, he burned the download into a mini-DVD and ejected it from the machine. “Here it is,” he said.

Toni took it. She would call Alex, right now. If he wasn’t on the way, this would be important enough to scramble a military copter and get help here. Toni said, “You did good, Jackson. Now just sit there for a minute while I make a call.”

As she reached for the phone, somebody knocked on the cabin’s door. No, not knocked, pounded on it, as if they were trying to punch a hole in it.

“Jackson! You in there, boy? Open up!”

Santos!

“No! No! Go away!” Keller yelled, before Toni could stop him.

Uh-oh. They were in trouble now—

Chance felt like a caged beast. She paced back and forth in her office. Where was Keller? Where was Santos? Why hadn’t he left yet? Neither man was absolutely necessary at this point — the plan would go with or without them — but the lack of either would cripple things more than a little. Dammit! What was happening here?

It was dark, the wind rocked the copter like a leaf blown by the winds of fate, and the rain was coming down pretty steady. Not a great night to be flying way the hell out over the ocean.

“There it is,” Howard said.

Michaels looked through the window. A smear of bright light shined through the darkness. The helicopter barge. Past that, at least half a mile or so, he’d guess, was the gambling ship, also lit up like a Christmas tree.

Fernandez lurched back from the front of the copter, holding onto the seats as he came down the aisle, just barely able to stay on his feet. He got to them, sat, buckled up. “Landing is gonna be tricky,” he said. “Our pilot wants to let the captain do it, it’s his bird, he knows her better. The barge is rocking some, and their flight control doesn’t really want to let us try it, but we have insisted — too dangerous to fly back, the captain said. They said we’re gonna have to ride the storm out tied to the deck, ’cause they ain’t running the transport boats, it’s pretty choppy out there.”

“It’s a little far to be swimming in this weather, isn’t it?” Michaels said.

Howard grinned. “Oh, I’m sure we can convince them to let us use the shuttle boat, if we ask real politely.”

The copter dropped lower, spiraling in toward the landing barge. The deck didn’t look very big from here. Kind of like a postage stamp.

Michaels leaned back from the rain-streaked window. The helicopter bounced and jerked to the left, then back to the right, and caught another wind shear that dropped them like a stone so suddenly that his stomach tried to climb up into his mouth. Behind him, he heard somebody vomiting. Into a puke bag, he hoped.

“Hang on, folks,” the captain said. “We’re going in.”

36

Toni had, she figured, about two seconds before Santos came through the door, either by using a keycard or by kicking it down. He knew Keller was in here, no question.

But Keller was a quivering lump on the bed, curled now into a fetal position, hands over his face.

She had to get this information to Alex. And she didn’t want to go one-on-one with Santos, not in a space as cramped as this cabin. Maybe she could take him. Maybe not. He was big, strong, fit, and trained, and she couldn’t risk losing the data she had gotten from Keller. What to do?

The moment of panic flared, but then her brain started working. She realized that Santos didn’t know who she was, or what she was doing in Keller’s cabin. She could play that, but she’d have to do it fast.

She grabbed her shirt, pulled it off, then peeled off her sports bra. She held them in one hand, loosely covered her breasts, and hurried to the door.

Santos was having trouble getting the keycard override to work. He kept dragging it through the slot, but the little light stayed red. He was about to kick the door when it opened.

A half-naked woman stood there.

The secretary!? She was here with Keller!?

What god had he pissed off that this man, this picaflor, was sleeping with two of his women? That was it. He was gonna kill the guy.

“Roberto? What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to Keller. He’s supposed to be working. But I guess I can see why not. No wonder I couldn’t find you.”

“He’s putting his clothes on,” she said. “In there.”

“Yeah, well, you wait right here. I got something for you.” He cupped his groin, hefted it. “Bigger and harder than anything Keller has.”

She smiled at him. Moved her hand with the shirt in it out of the way and took a deep breath.

Ah. Nice mambas.

Oh, yeah, this would have to be quick, but he could do that. Get Keller out of here, pronto, and get back to her. Leave Missy with a little something to think about — he’d make sure Keller told her about it.

He was already halfway ready as he moved past her through the short hall toward the bedroom.

Toni ran. She sprinted as if she were trying out for the Olympic hundred-meter dash team. She passed a couple in the hall, saw the man grin at her. Well, a half-naked woman running down the hall was probably not something they saw every day. She didn’t have time to stop and dress. By the time Santos realized something was wrong, she wanted to be far away. She had to find another hiding place, fast.

The rain slashed down like a first-class hotel shower with good water pressure, and the blue-and-white-striped canvas roof on the shuttle boat didn’t do much to keep the people under it dry.

Michaels was soaked by the time he got on the craft, as were the other “tourists.” The rain came in almost horizontally when the wind gusted. The spider silk vest he wore under his shirt didn’t help anything.

Next to him, Howard yelled, “I’ve left the pilots watching the crews of the two birds and two other troopers guarding the barge crew. They just developed serious radio and com trouble.”

The way the boat was bobbing up and down, pitching and yawing, the helicopter crews were the least of Michaels’s worries. There was enough light here to see the whitecaps and foam blown from the waves. He tasted salt then yelled, “Nice night for a boat ride!”

Whichever trooper was operating the engine cranked it up, and the shuttle, built to hold sixty people and only half full, moved away from its moorings against the barge. The motion got worse. Anybody who was prone to sea-sickness was going to be giving up everything they’d eaten for a month. Fortunately, that wasn’t one of Michaels’s afflictions.

The boat rocked and shook, pitched dangerously, but with its back finally turned to the wind, straightened out a little. It was still a long way to the ship.

As the boat slogged through the four-foot seas, Michaels’s virgil buzzed against his hip. He’d left it on vibratory mode. Good, since he’d never have heard it in this wind and rain. He grabbed the unit. The caller number ID didn’t mean anything, and the little screen was blank, no visual. He held it to his ear so he could hear better.

“Hello?”

“Alex, it’s me.”

Toni!

“Babe, what—?”

“Where are you?” she cut in.

“On a boat heading for the ship,” he said. “We’ll be there in five minutes.”

“Thank God. Listen, I’m on a public phone. Jay was right, about everything. The balloon goes up tomorrow. I’ve got all the details. I’ll call again later, but right now, I’ve got to go. I love you.”

She discommed.

A malignant worm roiled in his gut.

“What?” Howard said.

“Toni. She’s in some kind of trouble. Enough to risk calling on an open line. She says she’s got the evidence we need.”

“My God,” Howard said.

“Hurry this thing up,” Michaels said.

Howard made a hand signal. The boat’s engine roared louder, but it didn’t seem to move any faster.

Santos couldn’t figure it out for a second when he saw Keller lying on the bed. What, had she screwed him stupid? He was just lying there, no shirt, in his pants, curled up in a ball. Was he afraid Santos was going to beat him again?

“Keller. Keller!”

The man whimpered. “Don’t! I didn’t mean to!”

Santos strode to the bed, reached down, and grabbed Keller by the hair, jerking him up. “What are you whining about?”

“I didn’t mean to!” he said. “She beat me. She made me tell her!”

Santos turned to look behind him. “Tell her what?”

“About Omega!”

Santos let go of Keller’s hair and slapped him with his free hand, but only once, then ran back to where he had left the woman.

She was gone, of course.

He looked out into the hall. No sign of her.

Santos pulled his com from his belt and thumbed the emergency button. “This is Santos,” he said, when security answered. “There’s a woman on board, short, black hair, maybe twenty-eight, thirty, calls herself ‘Mary Johnson. ’ Dressed in jeans, running shoes, a black T-shirt. Find her. Find her now!”

The officer at the boat moorage was amazed. He looked at the boat with its drenched tourists. “You must be crazy to come across in weather like this! Somebody’s head is gonna roll!” He looked at the boat’s pilot. “And who the hell are you? Where is Marty? This is his shift.”

The pilot grinned and shoved his Walther pistol into the officer’s belly. “Marty got sick. If you behave yourself, you won’t catch what he’s got.”

The officer froze; his face went white under his rain hat.

“Let’s move it, people!” Fernandez said.

Michaels was first up the ladder.

Toni had solved the problem of where to hide by running past doors until she found one that was open. She slipped into a passenger cabin, saw a maid cleaning the room, and stepped into the bathroom before the woman got a good look at her.

In Spanish, Toni said, “Hey, you can leave that,” she called out. “Come back later please, okay?”

The maid said, “Esta bien, Senñora,” and left.

Once the maid was gone, Toni checked out the cabin. No computer, so she couldn’t try to upload the disc into a Net Force receptacle, or even some friend’s mailbox. Damn!

She couldn’t stay here long, she knew. Santos would have put out an alarm by now. If somebody asked the maid if she’d seen a norte americana, maybe Toni’s speaking Spanish would throw them off. Maybe not. But the ship was rigged with surveillance cams all over, and she didn’t want to let one of those see her. Alex had said he’d be here in a few minutes. If they were about to start some kind of operation, all she had to do was stay hidden until it was done.

That was all.

Michaels looked at his watch. In ten minutes, everybody on the assault team was supposed to be in position. In fourteen minutes, everybody would put on their specially augmented LOSIR headsets, and sixty seconds later, they would pull guns, fire off explosive charges that would blow open secured doors, and, in theory, take over the ship before anybody could wipe the computers. He had already slipped his headset from the bag John Howard had given him, and had it tucked away in his shirt pocket, ready to go.

But — where was Toni?

Michaels went belowdecks, and wandered the halls, looking. There were some security types with headcoms of their own moving around purposefully, and he was sure they were looking for Toni. Or maybe they were looking for tourists carrying bags. He slipped the bag with the gun in it behind a potted plant as two of the men approached him.

Unfortunately, one of them spotted the bag. “This yours?”

Michaels looked at them. “What? Never saw it before.”

One of the guards picked up the bag.

Alex didn’t want them opening it. Quickly, he said. “Hey, you looking for a little brunette?”

The man about to open the bag stopped so suddenly he almost fell. “You’ve seen her?”

“Yeah, she came out up on the deck. Back by the swimming pool.”

“Thank you, sir.” The man took off, talking into his com.

That would help, Michaels thought. As long as Toni wasn’t hiding out at the swimming pool. But this was bad. He looked at his watch. Twelve minutes.

Santos didn’t know what was going on, but he knew the little secretary was not what she pretended to be. He should have known. Those legs didn’t belong to somebody who sat on her butt all day. This woman had moves. He was getting stupid to trust what he saw.

He had to find her. She was a spy, and if Keller had rolled over and given up the operation, it could mean big trouble. And as much as he hated to do it, he had to tell Missy.

When he found her in her office and did, she was not pleased.

“What?! Are you sure?”

“I left Keller lying on his bed curled up like a baby, sobbing,” he said. “He gave it up.”

“We’ve got to find her before she can get any of this off the ship!”

“My men are all looking. Somebody saw her by the swimming pool.”

Missy shook her head. “Why would she go there? She can’t get off the ship there. She can’t hide there. Shut off all the outgoing communication.”

“Already done.”

“The swimming pool, no, that doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe she isn’t alone,” he said. “Maybe she’s meeting somebody.”

“Find her, Roberto!”

Howard looked at his watch, then at Jay Gridley. “Stay behind me,” he said.

“Don’t worry about that.”

Howard adjusted the spider silk vest under his still-wet Hawaiian shirt. It was too tight. But that’s what he got for letting Michaels have his and using one of the spares. He loosened the side tabs a little. Better.

On the minute, Howard and Jay both pulled their augmented-LOSIR com headsets from their packs, designed especially to work indoors and around corners, and slipped them on. “Don’t forget your nose plugs,” he said.

Jay nodded, touched his nostrils. Already in.

“This is Howard. We are still on.”

Howard stepped to the card reader, put a strip of plastic explosive onto it, and waved Jay back. He looked at his watch, counted down the seconds.

“—four… three… two… one… now!”

The card reader flashed like a strobe and exploded.

After a beat, the door slid open and two armed guards jumped out, waving pistols.

Howard sprayed them with emetic foam, a burst that looked as if a can of shaving cream had exploded. Thick white billows of the stuff enveloped the pair. They both screamed, and both started retching. Great night for reverse peristalsis, he thought.

It would have been safer to have shot them, but they didn’t want to kill anybody if they didn’t have to.

Even as the guards fell, he was moving. “Go, go!”

Jay was right behind him.

37

Michaels heard Howard over the headset, then felt the small explosions through his shoes, and knew the teams had begun their assault on the computer decks. It would take only a few seconds, and with luck, they’d be able to shut down the computers before they destroyed their information.

He looked up and saw a ship security man with a drawn pistol running in his direction, and he flattened himself against the wall, playing the frightened tourist. The man didn’t seem interested in him, but kept running.

As he passed, Michaels stuck his foot out. The guy tripped, sailed a good eight or ten feet, and came down on his face, screaming as he fell.

Michaels ran up behind the downed man and as he tried to stand, he kicked him in the head. The guy collapsed.

Score one for the good guys.

Santos was about to open the door of the room where the Cuban maid had seen a woman come in when his com buzzed stridently, the emergency pulse, long and loud rings.

“What?”

“Sir, we have some kind of trouble belowdecks! There’s a — aaahhh!”

“What?! What?!”

Santos heard the sound of somebody vomiting noisily.

He snapped the com shut. The woman? Or her friends? Whatever, it was serious. He headed toward the stairs. He’d better see what was going on.

He rounded a corner in the corridor, and saw two men in Hawaiian shirts heading away from him. They were dressed as tourists, but they wore com headsets and carried submachine guns. He could see what looked like body armor under their wet shirts.

Not his people.

He pulled back out of sight. Grabbed his com, triggered the emergency caller.

This time, there was no answer. A minute ago, it was working fine.

Either his people were too busy to answer, which was not likely, or the ship’s communication system had been shut down. Neither was good for him.

He knew what had happened. The spy had arranged to get her people on board. Maybe they had been here for hours, days. The place was done. If he hung around, he was going to be done, too.

It was time to leave this party.

If he could get to the launch, he could escape. The cigarette boat had a couple hundred miles of range, easy. In the storm, nobody would see him, and even if they had a ship with radar, they’d never catch him in it. It would beat him half to death in this kind of weather, but the cigarette could outrun anything afloat in these waters. Florida had a long and unprotected east coast. He would find a secluded spot. Once he was ashore, he would be safe.

Yes. He needed to go. Now.

But as he cut up and through the gym, he came across another tourist with a headset. Fortunately, this one wasn’t holding a gun.

“You’re Santos,” the man said.

“That’s right. And who are you?”

“I’m a federal agent. You’re under arrest. Sit down and put your hands on top of your head.”

Santos laughed.

Chance realized when the com system shut down that something grave had happened. She saw a stranger run past, men with guns, and she knew instantly that the ship was under assault.

Her people weren’t prepared for that, not a full-out military attack. They could dump the computer drives, but the security had not been designed to hold out against SEAL or Special Forces teams once they actually got onto the ship — that had never been in the cards.

Now, it would come down to lawyers and money. CyberNation would take care of her. She had seen to that. But her insurance to that end might be a liability if it fell into the wrong hands. Best she attend to that, right now—

38

Michaels stared at the man. The ship’s gym was a fair-sized room with wall-to-wall mirrors and a thick carpet, exercise machines around the perimeter and mostly open in the center. Santos circled around a treadmill and leaped into a dive at the floor, hit on his hands, and did a front handspring directly toward him.

Michaels had never seen anything like this—!

Despite his training to go in when attacked, however, Michaels sectored off to his right, and the heel missed his nose by an inch. A good move, it turned out: If he’d gone in, he would have eaten it.

What the hell was this? Some kind of demented gymnastics?

The black man landed on his feet, then twirled around into a crouch facing Michaels. He danced from side to side, raising and lowering himself from almost upright into a full squat and back as if he were some kind of a crazed jack-in-the-box.

Reflections of Santos matched him in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

This was surreal, like something out of a Bruce Lee movie.

Santos had beaten a man to death, according to Jay, so let’s not forget, he is dangerous.

Michaels kept himself angled at forty-five degrees, left foot forward, one hand covering high-line the other low-line, not moving.

“What kind of crooked stance is that?” Santos asked, grinning. “Not karate, not jujitsu. Not, for sure, Capoeira.”

Capoeira? That rang a bell. It was the South American fighting style the African slaves either created or brought with them from the Old Continent to the New World. Acrobatic stuff, but that was pretty much all he knew about it. He had heard Toni talk about it. That would fit. Santos was from Brazil.

“Welcome to O-Jôgo, homem branco!” The man leaped up and did a back flip, landed easily, one foot hitting before the other, one-two! He laughed.

Michaels felt another moment of panic. Get a grip here!

Santos shuffled to Michaels’s right, almost as if dancing to some unheard tune.

Michaels didn’t move. Let him dance. He wasn’t doing any damage out there.

Santos jinked in, just at the edge of kicking range, then jumped back, trying to draw the attack.

Michaels held his ground.

The black man smiled. “You know something, don’t you, Mr. White Man Federal Agent? But what is it, White? How well does it work?”

“Come and find out.”

“Oh, yes, I will.”

Santos shuffled the other way, stepped in, and feinted a high kick. He was too far away to connect, and outside Michaels’s range. Michaels stayed where he was.

“You waiting for me to make a mistake?”

“Whenever you’re ready.”

Santos laughed. Then he twirled and whirled and dropped, spun into a kind of crabbed cartwheel, and somehow ate up the space between them. His kick was low, and while Michaels dropped his stance, turned, and managed to get a sweeping block down, the kick was too powerful to do more than slightly deflect it. It glanced off his thigh instead of hitting it square on, but it still hurt even in passing.

Michaels should have blocked it, but it wasn’t major. The goal here was not so much to win as it was to not-lose. The winner was the guy who got to go home, under his own steam, and well enough to be able to hug his family.

Santos shifted back and forth from foot to foot, waving his arms in a pattern that was probably supposed to be hypnotic. “Not bad for an old man,” he said. “What you call this, Branco?”

Branco. Must mean “white.” “Does it matter?”

“Just curious. Always lookin’ to educate myself more.”

“I’ll tell you all about it after we’re done. Maybe you can find a teacher in prison.”

Santos laughed, a deep belly rumble. “That’s funny. You expectin’ to be around after we’re done, me in jail? No way. Tell me now.”

“I don’t think so,” Michaels said. He pivoted to follow Santos as he circled, switching his hands from high to low, still in the open-gate stance.

“Good economy,” Santos said, nodding. “No wasted motions. Maybe I let you live so you can tell me about this. Chinese, maybe? Burmese? Why don’t I know it?”

“You need to get out more. Lots of things you don’t know. We have the ship.”

“Maybe. But you don’t have Santos.”

Michaels took a deep breath. He let half of it out. “Relax, Alex,” he said quietly to himself.

The days he’d practiced the mental exercise Toni had showed him paid off. He dropped lower, with just enough tension to stay upright. His breathing deepened, and he felt much looser. Considering his current situation, this was more than passing extraordinary.

Santos raised an eyebrow. “What did you just do there, Mr. Federal Agent?”

Michaels smiled. “Bring your pretty little dance closer and see.” It was, Toni had always taught him, good silat to bait an opponent. Maybe it would make him angry enough to lose control, do something stupid. Probably not this guy, who looked as if he’d been carved out of stone and was just as impervious to trash-talk as he would be a hammer, but it didn’t hurt to try.

“I will, don’t you worry. But we have time, yes? No reason to rush. We might make the game last a while.”

Santos feinted a kick and punch, then spun and dropped, put his hands down on the floor, and shot out a mule kick with his left foot, low, aimed for Michaels’s knee—

Michaels sectored to the inside, blocked the kick, and threw a snap kick of his own at Santos’s groin—

Santos twirled away, and Michaels’s heel hit him on the thigh. The glancing blow didn’t seem to hurt him, but at least it connected.

Santos whirled back around and did some kind of acrobatic twist, ending in a back fist at Michaels’s head—

Michaels stepped in, his right fist covering his face, and did a block hit—

Santos leaned away, slipping the punch, but not quite enough — Michaels got one knuckle solidly into the other man’s forehead.

Santos backed off, shook his head. “Good one,” he said.

He came back immediately, dropped into a one-legged squat, and swept with his other leg extended—

Michaels didn’t expect the sweep from that angle — it caught his left ankle. He started to lose his balance, pushed off with his right foot, and managed to hop over the still-sweeping leg and come down without falling. He stepped forward and into a closed gate, right foot ready to kick or beset if Santos stepped in.

Santos did another twisting aerial move away. He came down lightly ten feet from Michaels. “I like this stuff you do. It’s tight, no wasted moves. Come on, tell me what it is so I can learn it. It will make my game better. Tell me, in case you aren’t able to afterward.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Michaels said. But he was worried about it. He wished he had a knife. Might as well wish for a gun. A hand grenade or a tank would be useful, too.

Santos laughed. “You worried, Branco?”

“Nah, I just don’t want to be late for dinner. You’re the one who should be worried. See, I know what your dance is — it’s Capoeira. You don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

“Let’s see!”

Santos flew at him—

The wound was minor, the handgun bullet had punched a hole through Howard’s side exactly where the vest tab left a tiny gap between the front and side panels. The slug had caught mostly skin and fat, maybe three inches above his belt. Another inch to the inside, and the body armor would have stopped it. An inch farther out and it would have missed entirely. Bad luck. A freak shot. What you got for not using your own gear.

It hadn’t done any crucial damage, though, and while his shirt was ruined and the nick oozed some, he wasn’t going to bleed out from it. He would worry about it later.

The man who’d shot him had taken Howard’s return fire square in the middle of his chest. He hadn’t been wearing a vest, and the Medusa’s two.357 semijacketed hollowpoints had punched holes right through his sternum, no more than a couple inches apart.

Julio would like that. A nice group. And so much for not killing anybody. Well. The guy should have thought about that before he shot Howard.

“General?” Gridley said, “You okay?”

“I’ve hurt myself worse shaving. I’ll put a Band-Aid on it when I get a minute.”

The voice on the LOSIR was Julio’s: “We have the ship secured, General.”

Howard laughed. He had never felt more alive. Risk was a part of life, he knew that now. And this was what he did, who he was. He was a man of war. A soldier. Death came to all, eventually, but he couldn’t stop living in the meanwhile. “Good work, Lieutenant. Where are you?”

“With the computers. Deck D, amidships.”

“We’ll see you in a few minutes. Discom.”

Gridley shook his head. “I’m gonna stop going out with you. Last time, I nearly got killed by some psycho drug fiend in California. This field work gets old fast.”

“You get a fix on the commander?”

Gridley looked at his virgil. “Yeah, his virgil is about a hundred and fifty feet that way.” He pointed. “But I can’t get an altitude on him — he could be on the top deck or down below.”

“Let’s go find him. Our squads will mop up the rest of these bozos. Stay behind me.”

“You don’t have to tell me that twice. Saji would never forgive me if I messed up the wedding by getting myself killed.”

Howard did a tactical reload, using a Bianchi speed strip to replace the two fired shells in the revolver. He snapped the cylinder shut, and headed past the row of slot machines and toward the blackjack tables. There was a corridor past those that led through a kitchen to a cafeteria. Michaels would have to be past that, according to Gridley’s GPS sig. He brought up the briefing map in his mind’s eye: past that, on this level, was a stairway leading up and down. Up was the main deck. Down was a gymnasium. There was an access to the locked-off computer deck that way, too.

Worry about it when you get there, John. Because if you aren’t more careful, you might not get there…

“Just ahead,” Jay said.

Howard nodded. He looked at Jay. “I’ll go through first. Try not to shoot me in the back.”

Jay laughed.

Santos came in, fists and knees driving, but Michaels knew how to deal with that — he launched himself to meet the attack—

Santos disappeared. He dropped into a weird, crablike pose, feet extended out in front, hands in back, face up but almost lying on the ground. Stupid position, his crotch was wide open. Michaels stepped in to kick Santos’s balls for a field goal—

It was a trap!

Santos snapped one foot up and caught Michaels in the thigh, just missing his groin. The force was enough to spin Michaels around, and he nearly lost his balance. He stumbled, managed to get his feet back under him—

Santos came up, twirled in, and it was all Michaels could do to cover as a quick series of punches bounced off his arms, shoulders, and one against the side of his head that cracked him into a blinding flash of red—

The man had fists like rocks—!

Michaels felt for Santos, not using his eyes but his body. He threw his knee and right elbow, caught a hip with the knee, the side of the man’s neck with the elbow. Not pretty, but enough to back him off—

Santos shook his head, whirled around, stepped out of range. He nodded. “I thought I had you then, good recovery. Now we havin’ fun.”

Michaels knew this was psychological warfare. He’d connected with two solid shots, and Santos didn’t seem overly bothered by either. The neck hit had to hurt, but he was not going to let Michaels know that.

“Your head okay, Branco?”

Michaels was still rattled from the head punch, but he couldn’t let that show, either. “Why wouldn’t it be? Did you hit me? Is that the best you got?”

Santos managed a smile as he circled, spiraling slightly inward. “Best I got? I’m not even warmed up yet. Let me show you. I am younger, stronger, faster, and more skilled. You have enough of your game to see this, no?”

Damned straight about that. He was better than Michaels, and he knew it. He wasn’t going full out, he was playing, as if this was a friendly sparring match. Michaels felt it. He was in trouble here.

Well. Wasn’t that what silat was supposed to train you for? To stay with somebody who was stronger, faster, and as well-trained?

Yeah. But this guy was some kind of world-class fighter. He probably trained for hours every day. He had the edge. He knew it, and Michaels knew it, too. Silat would let you keep up with most people, but it didn’t make you invincible, certainly not at his level of ability.

But there was one thing he had going for him, and maybe he could stall the guy long enough for that to happen.

Michaels circled to his left, staying low. He said, “You want to hear a story?”

Santos flashed a smile. “Is it a funny story?”

“I think so.”

“Go ahead. I need a good laugh. Been a bad day.”

They circled, each to his left.

“Once upon a time, there was a gathering of animals in the woods. They talked about the rain, the sunshine, the state of the world. At one point, the talk turned to which creature was the most deadly in the forest, and Tiger proclaimed that he was the most dangerous animal.

“ ‘Really,’ Dog said. ‘Why is that?’

“Tiger laughed. ‘Just look at me! Compared to you, I am bigger, stronger, and faster! My teeth are longer, my claws are sharper! I could break your neck with a single swipe of one paw! Is this not true?’

“ ‘It is true,’ Dog admitted.

“ ‘Then you agree that I am the deadliest animal in the forest.’

“ ‘Maybe not,’ Dog said.

“This angered Tiger greatly, and he roared his displeasure.”

Santos grinned, gave a little foot feint, but did not follow up. Michaels shifted his hands, but did not take the bait.

“Just making sure that you’re awake, White.”

“I’m awake.”

“Go on with your story. Tigre is angry.”

“Yes. And he looks at Dog and says, ‘So, you say I am not the deadliest animal? Who is, then? You?’

“ ‘Not me,’ Dog said.

“ ‘Tell me! Tell me now, or I will kill you!’ And he reared up and prepared to leap on Dog. But before he could attack, there came an explosion, and Tiger suddenly fell over dead.

“There behind the animals stood Man, smoke curling from the muzzle of a rifle.

“And Dog smiled his dog-smile and said, ‘I am not the deadliest animal in the forest. But I have a friend…’ ”

Santos smiled. “That’s not such a funny story, Branco.”

“Oh, I don’t know” came a voice from behind him. “I thought it was pretty good.”

Santos stepped back and half-spun.

A black man, another tourist-not-a-tourist, stood there, aiming a handgun at him. He held the gun in both hands, and it was pointed right at Santos’s heart. A second man stood behind him. He had a gun, too.

Too far away to get to them before they could shoot. Hmm.

“Commander,” the newly arrived black man said.

“General. I am extremely glad to see you.”

Santos glared at branco. “You cheated.”

He smiled. “Yes. Cheating is good silat,” he said. “That’s the art I practice, by the way. Pukulan Pentjak Silat Serak. From Indonesia.”

“Ah.” Santos knew of the Indonesian forms. He had never faced anyone who played them before, but he had seen pictures, films. “Where is your skirt?”

“It’s a sarong, not a skirt—!”

Santos leaped, turned the jump into a dive and roll, and as he came up, made that into another dive—

The gun went off, but a hair slow. The bullet burned across his back, the lightest of touches. A graze, that was all, nothing, no damage—

There was a large sealed window looking into the hallway just ahead of him. He was a step and a dive away from it…

The gun boomed again, loud in the enclosed space, and the bullet hit the glass in front of him, punched through, and spiderwebbed the glass with fractures. Good!

He launched himself at the cracked plate headfirst, hands and forearms up to cover his face. Hit!

He flew through the window in a spray of glass shards, tucked, rolled, hit the carpeted floor, came up, too much momentum, slammed into the corridor’s far wall. That shook many of the glass fragments on him loose. He grunted as he flattened against the wall, pushed off and L-stepped away, shoving hard with his left foot, moving to his right, as the third bullet punched through the wall where he had been a quarter-second ago. But now he was moving down the hall, ducking low, and gaining speed with each step. In two heartbeats, he was out of the line-of-fire, the angle on the window no good to the shooter anymore. He pumped for all he was worth, feet digging into the rug, leaning into it, almost a fall. He reached a juncture, cut to his right, skidded across that corridor and into the wall, hit on his left shoulder, bounced off, and kept sprinting.

He laughed, loudly. He had a small wound on his back, and there was blood coming from little cuts on his arms, the back of one hand, but he was gone. They would never catch him from behind. He would find a way off this ship. CyberNation might be mortally wounded, but that did not matter. He would get away. He would go home. He would count his gold and have the last laugh.

But first, there was one small piece of business he needed to finish. Then he could leave.

Chance had the pistol and the disk with the blackmail insurance on it. Nothing else was important enough to worry about, not now. She didn’t know how many of the invaders were on the ship, or if her people had had time to wipe the computers, but she would have time enough to destroy the disk, and that was all that she could do now. If they caught her, CyberNation’s lawyers would get her out of jail, and once that happened, she would disappear. She had half a dozen false identities ready for use, money stashed under those names. This was a big loss, but she would survive. She could start over, under another name. Work her way back up. It might even be fun, that kind of challenge.

She couldn’t risk hiding the disk. They might take this ship down to the waterline for all she knew, and if they found it, CyberNation would suffer a major, maybe even a killing blow. The files were damning — names, dates, places, a criminal prosecutor’s dream. She had done it to protect herself in case CyberNation decided she was no longer worth having around, but now she needed their help, and anything that hurt them might hurt her.

It wasn’t enough just to break the disk. Supposedly there were recovery devices now that could get information from fragmented DVDs. It could be glued back together, and while some of it would be lost, much could be salvaged. She couldn’t afford the risk.

No, she had to make sure there was nothing left to recover.

There was a cigarette lighter on her desk, a fancy thing of carved jade and semiprecious stones, a gift from a former lover. She would burn the disk. The pistol would make sure nobody would get to her before the disk was destroyed, if need be. A few shots fired into the floor or ceiling would make anybody heading her way cautious. She’d only need a minute or two. After that, she would surrender. Sooner or later, she would make bail.

She hurried down the corridor toward her office.

39

Toni came out of the room; she looked carefully up and down the corridors. There were people milling about, a score of tourists who were puzzled and upset, but none of them were Santos or any of his guards that she could tell.

“What’s going on?” somebody said.

“Pirates!” a fat man answered. “We’ve been taken over by hijackers!”

Toni smiled.

“What’s funny, lady?” a bald man with a bad complexion said. “You think being hijacked by pirates is funny?”

“It’s not pirates,” she said. “It’s just my husband, come to rescue me.”

The man stared at her as if she had turned into a giant snake. She smiled again and started toward the stairs.

Boy, this was gonna be a great story to tell Little Alex someday. Maybe when he was forty or fifty…

40

“I never saw anybody move like that!” Jay said.

“Did you hit him?” the boss asked.

John Howard shook his head. “Not so you’d notice. I didn’t think a man could be that fast, rolling and all. He a gymnast?”

“Capoeira,” the boss said. “South American fighting art.”

“We’ll get him,” Howard said. “We have the ship. The more important thing is, our people control the computer room, and they’ve pulled the plug. Jay here can have a field day.” He pulled a pistol from his belt and threw it to Michaels. “But just in case we run into your friend along the way, here. If you see him, shoot him.”

Michaels nodded. “Oh, yeah.”

As they were heading toward the stairs, Toni appeared.

Michaels nearly knocked her down he grabbed her so hard. They hugged, spun in a circle. Jay could feel the relief coming off both of them like heat off a fireplace. And he had to admit, he felt a lot better himself. He had been worried a little.

Toni held up a mini-DVD. “The plans for the attack on the net,” she said. “They ramped things up. You need to get these locations to the appropriate authorities,” she said.

Howard took the disc. “Yes, ma’am. Although they won’t be doing anything from here. We control this vessel.”

“You collected Santos and Jasmine Chance?”

“Not yet. But we will.”

“He’s a dangerous man,” she said.

“Tell me about it,” the boss said.

Santos saw that the door to Missy’s office was closed, and when he got to it, he found it locked. She wasn’t in her room, and he didn’t think she would be trying to hide on the ship, she was too smart not to know they’d find her. No, she’d be here, and likely working on some scheme to save her beautiful ass. That was the thing about Missy, she always had a backup plan.

He touched the door, nodded once, and stepped back. He hit it with his shoulder and slammed it open, recovered his balance, and moved through the atrium to the inner office.

“Roberto! What are you doing?”

She had a cigarette lighter in one hand, a small pistol in the other. Something was burning in the ashtray on her desk.

“Come to pay my respects, Missy. Leaving you a little gift before I retire.”

“What are you talking about? We don’t have time for this!”

“Your left leg, I think,” he said. “Just above the knee. I think that would balance us. I wasn’t so rough on Jackson, but it wasn’t really his fault, was it? When your woman screws another man, if it isn’t rape, then she is the one who is responsible. All she has to do is say ‘No.’ You will have plenty of time to think on it when you are propped up in the cast waiting to heal.”

She raised the gun. “You’ve lost your mind. I’m not going to just stand here and let you break my leg!”

He grinned. “Easier on you if you do. You think that little gun is enough? You sinned, you know it. It’s only justice.”

“You talk about justice?! You were humping every waitress and change girl on the ship! You think I didn’t know? Get out!”

“Men are men,” he said. “It’s not the same. You can’t understand that.” He took a step forward.

She dropped the cigarette lighter and grabbed the pistol with her other hand. Aimed right at his chest.

“If you shoot, I will break your neck instead. A leg is not so bad.”

He took another step.

She shot him. The noise didn’t seem all that loud, and the impact of the bullet, high and to his right, didn’t hurt. It was like being hit with a finger-poke, nothing, really. He leaped—

Chance pulled the trigger, again and again, until the pistol clicked empty. She saw the holes appear in Santos’s body, his chest, belly, one in his outstretched hand, but he kept coming!

She tried to leap out of the way, but he snagged her with one big arm, caught her around the waist—

She hammered at his head with the butt of the pistol, saw the skin tear on his scalp, watched the bright red blood gush, but he wouldn’t let go…

He dragged her down, knocked the chair behind her away, slammed her back against the floor

“Roberto! Don’t—!”

She kept hammering at his head. Saw him grinning through the blood streaming down his face. He slid his hand up her body, caught her by the throat. He squeezed, his big fingers biting into the vessels of her neck. Her sight went gray.

“Please! Don’t!”

“Good-bye, Missy,” he said. He leaned down and kissed her. His blood dripped into her face. She tried to blink it away. Then it all faded. His smile was the last thing she saw.

Santos held his grip on her neck for a long time after her eyes rolled back in their sockets, until they settled back and the pupils dilated and stayed that way. When he finally let go, he was sure she was gone.

Too bad for her.

He tried to push himself up and away from her, but found that his strength had gone, too. He had never felt so weak. He inched forward a hair, but that was it. He could no longer support himself on his wounded hand. He collapsed across her body, his face next to hers. Who would get all his gold? he wondered.

That was his last thought.

In the bowels of the ship, the CyberNation programmers and security people had panicked. They hadn’t done as good a job as they had on the train and barge. The men spraying puke foam and blasting flashbangs had moved too fast. There would be evidence here.

“Jay?”

“Already on it,” Jay said. He moved to an undamaged console and sat. Toni stood behind him, watching. “I’ve got a freezer here. Let me get it slotted. That should kill their autowipe…”

From behind them, Julio Fernandez said, “General?” He came in, leading a couple of troopers.

“Been taking a nap, Lieutenant?”

“Something I think you and the commander want to take a look at. Hey, Toni, nice to see you’re okay.”

“Nice to be okay, Julio.”

Howard nodded. “Keep an eye on things here,” he told his troops. “Lead on, Lieutenant.”

Michaels and Toni followed Howard and Fernandez up a short flight of stairs and down a corridor. In an office on the floor were two dead people: Jasmine Chance and Roberto Santos.

Michaels shook his head. “Lord. What happened?”

Julio said, “From the marks on her neck and the little hemorrhages in her eyes, I’d say she was strangled. He’s got six bullet holes in him and cuts all over his head from where somebody hit him with that little.380 PPK over there. There’s blood all over her hand and a pattern in it that matches the butt of the pistol. Way I see it is, he came at her, she blasted him, he lived long enough to choke her out. Ai-uchi, the Japanese call it — mutual slaying.”

“My God,” Howard said. “Mean people.”

“Not anymore,” Michaels said.