Hidden Agendas

PROLOGUE

A cold and damp winter wind played around the windows of the building, a breeze not strong enough to rattle the still-pristine thermopane glass, but potent enough to tweak an occasional whistle from an art-deco protrusion, whistles that now and then came low enough to sound almost like moans.

Alone inside, the night watchman—watchwoman in this case — pored over the laptop on the guard station's desk, adding a few personal notes to the text of Professor Jenkins's long and incredibly boring lecture on the strata of rock formations in southern New Zealand. The lecture was from his auditorium-sized class Introduction to Geology, her final science requirement, and she'd put it off as long as she could, but graduation was fast approaching and there was no way around it. She would have taken Astronomy, supposedly a walk, but the classes had been filled before she'd ever logged on to registration. Too bad. Stars were much more interesting than rocks.

Kathryn Brant sighed, leaned back in the creaky chair, and rubbed at her eyes. Geology. Bleh.

She leaned toward the desk again and got another nail-wrenched-from-wet-wood noise. Lord. Brand-new, and already the chair squeaked as if it had been left out in the Louisiana rain for a couple years. But that was what happened when you bought everything from the lowest bidder — a bid that had probably been the low one because the company had bribed somebody in the Contracts office. Bribery was a normal way of doing business around here. Kat had taken two semesters of political science at LSU, where she was, thankfully, a senior. Studying politics was almost a necessity in Louisiana, where people still spoke fondly of Huey Long, the governor-turned-senator who'd been assassinated in the main part of the capitol building, just up the hall there, more than seventy-five years past.

Huey had been one in a long list of rogues who had run the state, and with the public's blessing. After all, the big oil companies had paid for everything for decades, there hadn't been any income tax — no property tax to speak of — and if you were going to elect somebody, why not elect somebody colorful, especially if it didn't cost you anything? Her political science professor had once told the class that when he'd been a teenager, he and his friends would catch a bus to the capitol and sit in the gallery, watching the House in action. More interesting than going to a movie, he'd said. People came from all over the country to study Louisiana politics, and rightly so.

She grinned as the wind howled at the glass doors that opened out onto the capitol grounds. Huey was out there, in spirit and in bronze, just around the bend, the spotlight from the top of the tall and pointed building — once the tallest in the entire South, and still pretty much the tallest in the state — again shining down upon the populist martyr's huge statue. Every now and then, the state tightened its purse strings and decided to turn the spotlight off to save a few dollars, but they always turned it back on again. Tourists still came to see old Huey out there, pigeons and all.

Working your way through school as a guard at the state capital wasn't the best job in the world, but it left plenty of time to study, that was the main thing—

Her com buzzed. She grinned again and pulled the tiny unit from her belt. She knew who it was. Nobody else would be calling at this hour.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey, Kat," her husband said.

"How come you're still awake?" Kat asked. "You'll never make Lard Ass's class."

"Piss on him. I miss you. All alone here in this big, old bed. Naked under the covers. Full of lust for my new wife."

Kat laughed. "You all talk, goat-boy. If I came home right now, you'd whine about how you had to get some sleep."

"No, ma'am. You come home and I'll show you. I have a big surprise for you."

"Not so big as all that, honey chile. I'd say it was just an… average surprise."

"How would you know? Come on home and see. I've been lifting weights."

She laughed. "I am tempted—" she began.

She never finished the sentence. The compression shock wave blasted her so hard that if the investigators hadn't known who she was, they would never have been able to identify her, not even using dental records. When the various agencies finished combing the rubble — city and state police, fire department, ATF, FBI — they found in the bloody mush that had been Kat Brant only eight of her teeth still intact, none of which had ever been touched by a dentist's laser.

The only blessing was that she did not suffer. She never knew what hit her.

Chapter One

Alexander Michaels, Commander of the FBI's elite Net Force unit, fell on the floor, smack onto his butt. He hit harder than he expected; it knocked the wind out of him. Fortunately, the cheek that took most of the impact was the left one, and not the right where, two months ago, a bullet had exited after he'd been shot in the thigh. The wound was pretty much healed; it only twinged now and then.

The woman who had just slammed him to the floor was his chief deputy, Assistant Commander Antonella "Toni" Fiorella — all five feet five inches, one hundred and maybe ten pounds of her.

Before he could even try to recover his breath, Toni dropped to one knee next to him and threw a short right elbow at his face, slapping it with her left hand for emphasis — and to move her left hand into position for a follow-up wipe, did she deem it necessary.

It wasn't going to be necessary. Michaels had no plans to punch her. He could barely breathe. Smiling took everything he had.

Toni offered Michaels a hand, and he took it. She stood and helped him do the same.

"You okay?"

He managed to suck in enough air to say, "Yeah, fine." Holding the smile was one of the hardest things he'd done in a while, but he held it.

"Good. You see what I did?"

"I think so."

Generally, they practiced such takedowns on the nice, padded mat thoughtfully provided here by the FBI in the smaller of the two gyms in Net Force HQ. Now and again, however, they stepped off the mats onto the floor. Toni, who had been practicing this esoteric martial art since she was twelve, had explained why such training was necessary.

"If you practice on the mats all the time, you get used to that cushion. If you fall on the street or a sidewalk, it won't be quite so easy. And since a lot of fights end up on the ground, you need to know how it feels."

Yeah. Right.

He could understand it, though he wasn't sure he was going to ever learn the stuff so well he could hit the concrete and bounce like a rubber ball. But after a month of training five days a week, at least Michaels could finally get the name of the system right: Pukulan Pentjak Silat. Or silat, for short. It was, Toni had told him, a slimmed-down and simplified version of a more complex art that had come out of the Indonesian jungles less than a century ago. She had learned it from an old Dutch-Indonesian woman who'd lived across the street from the Fiorellas in the Bronx, after she had witnessed the old woman use the art against four gangbangers who had tried to run the granny off her door stoop. A big mistake, that.

Michaels had been impressed with what he'd seen Toni do. If this was the simple and easier stuff, he could wait on the really nasty moves.

"Okay, you try," she said.

"You gonna punch left or right?" he asked.

"Doesn't matter," she said. "If you control the center like you're supposed to, it'll work either way."

"In theory," he said.

She smiled at him. "In theory."

He nodded, then tried to relax and assume a neutral stance. That was supposed to be part of it too, Toni had said. It ought to work from whichever position you happened to be in if an attacker jumped you; otherwise — what was the point? You wouldn't have time to bow and get into your ready stance if the street thug decided to eat your lunch. It wasn't real likely a guy in an alley coming at you with a knife was going to allow you to run home to take off your shoes and put on your gi while he stood there waiting, maybe cleaning his nails with his blade. If a move wasn't practical, the Indonesian fighters didn't much like to pass it along. This wasn't a do, a spiritual "way." It was the distilled essence of anything-goes street-fighting. It was not an art of flashy, fancy moves, but an art of war. In silat, you didn't merely defeat an enemy, you destroyed him, and you used whatever you had at hand to do it: fists, feet, elbows, knives, clubs, guns—

Toni leaped at him.

You were supposed to block first, then step, and this defense was supposed to be a move to the outside of the attacker. Instead, Michaels, rattled, blocked and stepped to the inside of Toni's leading foot. In theory, as she'd said, it didn't matter, since anything that worked was the point.

His right thigh slid between Toni's legs and pressed against her pubis. His concentration on protecting himself just kind of… evaporated. He'd blocked the punch, but now he just stood there. He didn't follow up. He was very much aware of the warmth of her crotch astraddle his thigh, even through two sets of sweatpants.

Damn!

"Alex?"

"Sorry, I drew a blank."

Quickly, Michaels stepped back. He'd nearly been killed by that assassin a couple of months ago; if it hadn't been for Toni, the killer would have gotten him, and it had seemed a good idea to learn more about how to protect himself, but right now this intimate martial contact with Toni might be bringing up more problems than it solved. It certainly was bringing up one problem in particular he could do without—

"Hey, Boss?"

Michaels shook off the erotic thoughts. Jay Gridley stood near the gym's entrance, looking at the two of them. The younger man was grinning.

"Jay. What's up?"

"You said you wanted to hear about that Louisiana thing as soon as it came in. I just downloaded the packet from the field team in Baton Rouge, got vid and reports. It's flagged in your incoming files."

Michaels nodded. "Thanks, Jay." He looked at Toni. "I need to check that out."

"We can pick up where we left off Monday," she said. "Unless you're working tomorrow?"

"I wish. I was hoping to work on the car, but I've got to bone up on financial stuff. I'm supposed to appear before Senator White's committee on Tuesday."

"You get all the fun," Toni said.

"Don't I just?"

They bowed to each other, the intricate silat beginning and ending salute, and Michaels headed for the dressing room.

Sheldon Gaynel Worsham was sixteen years old, a student at New Istrouma High School. He looked about twelve, was thin, and had black, oily hair sucked down all over, save for a wavy lock that dangled greasily over his left eye. He wore blue parachute pants and a black T-shirt with a putrid-green pulse-paint logo. The logo was a stylized badge with the word "GeeterBeeter" in jagged letters across it. Whatever that meant. The kid slouched in a cheap chair next to a heavy castplast table that was scratched and battered by years of abuse. Somebody had carved a heart with initials inside it on one corner, something of a surprise, since this was obviously a room where knives or other sharp objects were generally forbidden.

The man seated across the table from Worsham was heavy-set, florid-faced, in a cheap, dark business suit, and he might as well have had "cop" flashing in neon over his head.

"So tell me about this bomb," the cop said.

Worsham nodded. "Yeah, okay, okay. So we're not talking Semtex or C4 or crap like that, we're talking RQX-71, a top-secret chemical used in conventional missile warheads. It's an analog of some old stuff called PBX-9501. You want to know about anisotropic elastics or isotropic polymerics? Expansion rates or like that?"

"Why don't we just skip over that for now," the cop said. "Where did you get it, this explosive?"

The kid grinned. "I made it in the chem lab. Swiped a key card from the janitor's desk and duped it, got the alarm codes, snuck in at night. Only took a week. Got a little tricky at one point, I thought I was gonna blow myself up, but it worked out okay."

"You made it. And took down a brand-new, three-story, steel-framed addition to the capital with it."

The kid grinned wider. "Yeah. Something, huh?" Worsham sat up straighter in the plastic chair.

"And that blast killed a woman guard working her way through college."

"Yeah, well, I'm sorry about that part, but it's not really my fault. The coozers shouldn't have fired my dad, you pross?"

"Your father worked on the construction of the building."

"Until the stupid coozers fired him, yeah. I wanted to make a point, you pross?"

The cop nodded. "I guess you did that." He shifted in his chair. The thin plastic squeaked in protest. "And how did you happen to come up with the top-secret formula for this — RAQ?"

"RQX-71." Now the kid favored the cop with his biggest grin yet. "That was the easy part. I scarfed it off the net."

Michaels leaned back in the conference room chair and glanced at Toni and Jay Gridley. Gridley touched a control and the holoproj of the interrogation faded.

"Full of remorse about killing that young woman, isn't he?" Michaels said.

"Kids don't relate to death," Jay said. "Too much entcom, too many vids, too much VR slaughter-rooming."

Toni said, "And the formula?"

"Just like the little bastard said," Jay said. "Right in the middle of a public net room. We pulled it as soon as we found it, but it was posted anonymously. We're trying to backwalk it, but it looks like it came from a recaster somewhere."

"Who would do such a thing? Why?" Toni said.

"And how did they get the formula to do it?" Michaels added.

Jay shrugged. He tapped at the portable and the image of the destroyed building shimmered and came up on the holoproj. It basically looked like a pile of concrete and metal rubble, beams sticking out, shards of glass glittering under the searchlights, and smoke still coming from sections of it.

"Jesus," Toni said.

"Yeah," Michaels said. "Only this one is in our lap and not His. We've got to find whoever is responsible for putting this formula onto the net where our sociopathic teener could find it."

"According to the counter, there were more than nine hundred hits on that file before we cleaned it off," Jay said. "We better hope nobody else who downloaded that formula has a grudge against somebody."

Michaels shook his head. Nine hundred hits. Nine hundred chances for someone to try to concoct this stuff. Nine hundred chances for someone to succeed, and take out a building like that Worsham kid or — and this was maybe even worse — blow themselves and a whole school full of kids up in the process. What kind of scum would do something like this? The Worsham boy was obviously bent, missing a few key neurons in his brain, but whoever posted the formula for the explosive was really sick. They needed to find him fast.

And Christmas was also fast approaching. The holidays would slow things around here to a crawl, and he had to go back to Idaho to see his daughter, Susie. And his ex-wife, Megan, too. A prospect that brought forth mixed emotions in Michaels, to be sure. At eight, Susie was the brightest spot in his life, but it was a long way from Washington, D.C., to Boise, and he didn't see her nearly as much as he wanted to. And Megan? Well, that was another whole can of worms that didn't bear opening just at this moment. The divorce had been final for more than a year, and if she called and asked him to come home right now… Up until recently, there hadn't been any question, he'd go. But the torch he'd been carrying had dimmed a little when he'd found out Megan was dating somebody. Being with another man. Enjoying it. "Alex?"

He looked at Toni. "Sorry, I slipped into the void. What?"

"Joanna Winthrop is coming in at two-thirty." Gridley snorted. "Lightweight Lite? What's she want?"

"Lieutenant Winthrop is going to be assisting us on this matter," Michaels said. "Colonel Howard has graciously allowed us to borrow her from the field. In fact, she will be working with you."

"What? I don't need her, Boss," Jay said. "I can run this dweebo to ground without some airhead sim-bimbo—"

"Jay." Michaels's tone was sharp. "Sorry, Boss. But she's only gonna get in the way."

"As I recall, her grade-point average was higher than yours straight across the board," Toni said. "Sure, where she went to school."

"MIT, wasn't it?"

"Yes, ma'am, but their standards have gone way down. CTT is acme now."

Alex just shook his head and said, "Jay, whatever your differences with Lieutenant Winthrop, you'll just have to find a way to get past them. We need all the help we can get on this mess." He waved at the holoproj.

Gridley nodded, but his jaw muscles flexed as he gritted his teeth.

Great, Michaels thought, one more brick on the load I don't need. A computer prima donna jealous of his territory. Just great.

His temporary secretary came into the conference room. "Commander, I have Director Carver on the phone."

Michaels stood. "I'll take it in my office." He waved at Jay and Toni. "Get busy, folks."

Chapter Two

Thomas Hughes strode into the senatorial offices as if he owned them, the building they were in, and the city around them. He waved at the receptionist. "Bertha. Is he alone?"

"Yes, sir, Mr. Hughes."

Hughes nodded. He'd known Bertha for more than a dozen years. She'd been with Bob since his first term, but she still called him "Mr. Hughes," and he had not encouraged otherwise. He walked to the inner office door, rapped once, and pushed it open in the same motion.

Jason Robert White, fifty-six, the senior United States senator from the great state of Ohio, sat at his desk. He was playing a computer game. He looked up and started to frown at the interruption before he realized who had dared barge in.

"Hey, Tom." White did a fingerwave over the sensor on his handpad and the small-scale holoproj images froze. It looked like two guys in hand-to-hand combat, one of whom was green and scaly. Jesus.

"Bob. How'd the lunch with Hicks go?" Hughes moved to the pale gray leather couch, sat, and looked at the man for whom he worked.

White appeared ten years younger than his actual age, with a deep chemical tan under his perfectly styled, artfully graying hair. He wore a dark-blue tailored Saigon suit, a pastel-pink silk shirt, and a striped regimental tie for a regiment that had never existed. Hughes couldn't see his feet, but the shoes were doubtless Italian or Australian, and handmade. Altogether, the outfit the senator wore offhandedly was worth what Hughes made in salary each month, easy. He was the image of a successful senator, handsome, fit, and comfortable in his custom clothes, no doubt about it. He could play a Viennese waltz on the piano, speak passable French and German, keep up with a so-so tennis pro, and break a hundred on a bad day at the country club golf course. A man who could walk the corridors of international power with ease.

Hughes, on the other hand, knew he looked every day of his fifty-two years. He was twenty pounds too heavy, wore a decent, but not expensive, Harris Tweed sport coat and gray wool slacks from Nordstrom, both off the rack, and his shoes were Nike dress casuals. Total cost of his outfit was maybe a twentieth that of White's.

White leaned back in his chair and waggled his left hand in a so-so gesture. "Well, Tom, you know Hicks. He never gives a nickel but what he wants a dime. If we want to get his support, the honorable senator from Florida wants to see the Naval Air Station remain a fixture in Pensacola from now until the end of time."

Hughes nodded. He had expected no less. "Fine. Give him what he wants. What do we care? He's a critical vote. We get him, we'll get Boudreaux and Mullins. We get them, we're out of committee and it's a lock on the floor."

White smiled at his chief of staff. "Probably won't hurt us with Admiral Pierce either."

"Exactly." Hughes glanced at his watch, a gold Rolex that White had given him on the eve of their election to the Senate.

Hughes had been the campaign manager, and such a watch was way beyond anything he'd ever been able to afford. For White, whose family owned half of Ohio and part of Indiana, a Rolex was a trinket, a drop from a bucket brimming with money. It was the most expensive piece of jewelry that Hughes ever wore, and though he could afford better now, he couldn't afford it legally.

"Aren't you supposed to be on the links with Raleigh at two-fifteen?" he reminded White.

"The old man canceled. Too cold for him. Personally, I think he just doesn't want me to kick his ass again. Last time out, I beat him by nine strokes. We're doing drinks at the Benson instead, two-thirty."

"Good. Remember, let him bring up the Stoddard thing. Play it cool, let him court you. He doesn't need to know you want it more than he does."

"I will be an iceberg," White said. He waved at the computer projection frozen over his workstation. "You ever play DinoWarz?"

"I can't say as I have, no."

"Very stimulating mano-a-mano combat scenario. There's a full VR version that puts you right in the middle of the action. Some junior high school kid built it and put it on the net. Fun. You should try it sometime."

Hughes smiled and tried not to show the contempt he felt. White was rich, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of wealthy men. It wasn't just a silver spoon he'd been born with, but a platinum one encrusted with diamonds. If he'd wanted to, White could have blown a million dollars a year for his entire life and never depleted his share of the family fortune. He wasn't a total fool, but he was a dilettante, a dabbler; the office was for him an adult version of DinoWarz, and Hughes believed it meant about as much. White thought being a United States senator was… fun.

"One other thing," Hughes said. "That bombing in Louisiana."

"Oh, yeah. Terrible thing."

"Worse than terrible. The kid who did it got the formula for the explosive off the net. A supposedly top-secret military formula."

"No shit?" White leaned forward, and his face came close to the translucent holoproj of the two combatants. He waggled his fingers and the image vanished.

"I think this plays right into your hearings on Net Force. They are supposed to stop such things."

"That's true."

"You might want to mention it when the budget hits the table. I'll have Sally work up the report on the bombing. That young woman guard who was killed was in college, a newlywed, about to graduate."

"A shame," White said. "Tell Sally to highlight that part."

"Of course."

The intercom chimed. Bertha. "Sir, your limo is here for your two-thirty."

Hughes stood. "I'll be in my office," he said. "And I'll meet you for the staff meeting at four."

"Thanks, Tom."

After the senator was gone, Hughes went down the hall to his own office. He nodded at Cheryl, his secretary.

"Anything pressing?"

"Louis Ellis called from Dayton. He's going to be in D.C. next Thursday and he wants the senator's ear for a few minutes."

"Have Bertha pencil him in for half an hour in the morning." Ellis, one of White's father's drinking buddies, had contributed half a million to White's last reelection campaign, more or less legally via various PACs. He'd also given them that much cash under the table, a nice chunk of which had found its way into Hughes's own safety deposit box, where it joined a thick sheaf of crisp hundreds already there.

Hughes had been very careful about living beyond his means. His public face was exactly what was expected for a senator's chief of staff making a paltry ninety grand a year. But under various guises, Hughes had a fat line of electronic credit. Still, it never hurt to have some hard currency in case of emergencies.

If his plans went as expected, he'd be able to use the bills in his box to light his Cuban cigars, if he felt like it.

"Anything else?"

"Your massage therapist called. She will be at your house at seven."

Hughes nodded. Brit would give him a good massage, that was true enough. But that was only half of the service she provided.

He went into his office and closed the door behind him.

Hughes's office was a spartan affair whose only artwork was a Picasso on the wall behind his desk. He didn't particularly care for Picasso, but a picture worth that much on an office wall certainly impressed people who did care about the old Spanish dauber. Depending on his mood, he would give different stories when asked about the painting. Sometimes, he told them he'd bought it at a garage sale for fifty bucks just to watch their jaws drop. Other times, he said a woman had given it to him in gratitude for his lovemaking abilities. Once in a great while, he told the truth — that the painting was a gift from his boss — but that was never as much fun.

He sat behind the desk in a wooden teacher's chair. In fact, the chair had once belonged to his high school civics teacher, Charles Joseph, who had told Hughes he would never amount to anything. He kept the chair to remind him that where he was going in the not-too-distant future was going to be beyond old Joseph's — or anybody else's — wildest dreams. Senator White and his family would look like paupers compared to Hughes. Everything was going as planned.

He grinned. That was the trick, wasn't it? But he was well on the way. He was, Hughes reminded himself, the smartest man he knew. He could pull it off.

No doubt in his mind.

The com chirped.

"The Vice President is on three," Cheryl said. "I'll take it," Hughes said. "But let's let him wait a few seconds. We don't need an uppity Vice President, do we?" Cheryl chuckled, and Hughes felt pretty good himself. So far, so good.

In his office, Alex Michaels looked at the clock blinking in the corner of his default holoproj, a bucolic scene of a modern-day cattle drive blocking automobile traffic on a back road in Colorado. Michaels had worked one summer on a dude ranch while he was in college. He hated cows as a result, and the picture was another one of Jay Gridley's little jokes. The young man loved to do such things. Thought he was funny.

Michaels grinned. Jay was pretty funny, though Michaels preferred that somebody else be the butt of the young man's jokes.

But the clock said that it was ten minutes past the time Lieutenant Joanna Winthrop was supposed to be here for her meeting, and that didn't go with what he'd read about her in her history jacket. He touched the intercom's manual control. His secretary was a temp, filling in for Nadine, who was on vacation. Maybe she had made a mistake.

"Liza, isn't Lieutenant Winthrop on for two-thirty?"

"Yes, sir, Commander," the young woman said. She sounded rattled. "She's uh, here, sir, but, uh, she's occupied."

Occupied? Michaels went out to see what was going on.

On the floor next to his secretary's desk, with a rat's nest of red, white, and blue wires in her lap, sat Joanna Winthrop. She had a pocket tool of some kind, probably a Leatherman, and was using it to twist two of the colored wires together.

He had not forgotten how attractive she was, but it still came as something of a shock to him to see her.

Winthrop was one of the most beautiful women Michaels had ever seen. She was tall, lean, had long, natural honey-blond hair pinned up, and green eyes that put expensive emeralds to shame. She wore a blue jumpsuit and black boots that would have made most women seem dumpy. On her, the drab clothes looked positively sexy.

She glanced at Michaels. "Hello, Commander," she said. She shoved the tangle of wires under the desk, stood, closed her folding pliers, and said, "Try it now."

Liza tapped at her command module's keyboard. "Hey! It works. Thank you!"

"No problem," Winthrop said. She flashed a radiant smile, perfect save for one slightly crooked tooth that gave it just enough character so it didn't look fake. She turned the grin in his direction, and Michaels could feel the warmth of it from fifteen feet away. A stunning woman, beautiful and smart, a lethal combination. She was single, in her mid-twenties, and much too young for him at his ancient age of forty; still, she was pleasant to look at, no question.

"Sorry I'm late, sir," Winthrop said. "Liza's keyboard input had a short, and you know how Computer Services works; they'd be two hours getting a tech up here unless it was an emergency. And in an emergency—"

"— it would take three hours," Michaels finished. He smiled at her. It was a standing joke in Net Force. "Well, come on in."

He gestured at the door, and waited for her to precede him into the office. He was merely being polite, he told himself. It wasn't just to get a look at her backside. Although, he had to admit, that was worth seeing. It reminded him of an old Flip Wilson joke, about the preacher's wife being tempted by a new dress she was trying on. The Devil said, "Buy it, honey, buy it!" And the preacher's wife said, "Get thee behind me, Satan!" And the Devil did, then he said, "Mm. Looks good on you from here too…"

Michaels shook off the semi-erotic thoughts. Winthrop was a subordinate, more than a dozen years younger than he, and he didn't need any entanglements just at the moment. But it had been a long time since his divorce had become final, and things had not been too good at home for a lot of months before he'd moved out. He hadn't been in bed with a woman since.

There was only so much space in a man's life that work and hobbies would fill. You could only read yourself to sleep so many nights of the week.

He glanced up and saw Toni standing in the doorway of her office, leaning against the jamb, watching him. Michaels felt guilty, even though he hadn't done anything. He gave her a half smile, then went into his office. If he was going to leap off a cliff into an office romance, Toni would be his first choice, but that was a bad road to even contemplate. Toni was a coworker and a friend, and he certainly didn't want to damage either of those relationships for the sake of romance. Friends were harder to come by than lovers.

Well. At least that was what he'd heard. It had been so long since he'd had a lover, he had forgotten how to play that game. And it wasn't exactly like riding a bicycle.

He looked at Joanna Winthrop, who stood in front of the chair across from his desk, waiting for him. A drop-dead-gorgeous woman. Despite himself, he could easily imagine what her hair would look like unbound and spread over a pillow, what her face would look like staring up at his in passion…

He gave himself a twitch of a grin. Fortunately, his shower came equipped with plenty of cold water. And he was probably going to be using his share of it tonight.

"Thanks for fixing the keyboard," he said.

"My pleasure."

He moved behind his desk, sat, and gestured for Winthrop to do the same. She did so. Back to business now.

"We have a little problem, Lieutenant. Colonel Howard thought you might be willing to help us out."

"Yes, sir, whatever the colonel wants. He thinks well of you, sir."

Michaels looked at her. Really? A few months back, hearing that would have been a surprise. Although after the kidnapping of the mad Russian, maybe Howard did feel a bit better about having a civilian commander. Michaels had risked his job ordering that, and Howard had done outstanding work on it. Maybe a little mutual respect had come out of the mission.

"And he thinks well of you, Lieutenant. Yours was the first name he suggested when I asked him for assistance."

"Sir, if it's all the same to you, please call me Jo, or Winthrop. This rank business isn't necessary unless we're in the field."

"Fine, Jo. Might as well call me Alex, while we're at it. We're pretty informal around here."

"Yes, sir. Uh, I mean, right, Alex. So, what's up?"

He smiled at her and waved his hand over his computer controls.

Chapter Three

Colonel John Howard wore his old Gortex windbreaker, covering the S&W Model 66.357 short-barreled revolver nestled in the Galco paddle holster just behind the point of his right hip. When he had occasion to carry while out of uniform, he preferred this kind of holster. It used a plastic paddle that slipped between the waistband and shirt, so he could put it on and remove it without having to take off his belt and thread it through the loops. It was convenient, and just about as concealable as a regular belt slide or pancake holster—

Ten yards away, a mugger with a knife leaped out of the darkness and ran at him. The assassin was no more than two seconds away.

Howard shifted his hips slightly to the left, opening a gap between his jacket and body, and swept his right hand back and under the Gortex. He grabbed the wooden grips of the revolver, automatically unsnapping the thumb-break safety snap on the holster when he closed his hand. He pulled the Smith, thrust it toward the mugger as if punching him one-handed, and pulled the trigger. At this range, trying to line up the sights was too slow. Instead, you could use the whole gun silhouette to index the target.

Six feet in front of Howard the mugger stopped cold as the 91-grain Cor-Bon BeeSafe frangible bullet slammed into his center of mass at just under 1600 feet per second.

The second shot was a quarter second behind the first.

The mugger froze, and glowing red lights pulsed on his chest where the rounds impacted. Most people didn't realize just how fast a running man with a knife could move. Another half a second and the ersatz thug would have been all over him.

Howard glanced at the computer next to the shooting box. There was a small holoprojection of the mugger over the computer and stats under it. Elapsed time: 1.34 seconds from start to shot. Organ hit: heart. Estimated one-shot-stop percentage: 94. The revolver didn't hold as many rounds as an H&K Tactical pistol, but it was a kind of talisman for Howard, and he was more comfortable with it.

As he reholstered the gun, he noticed his right shoulder felt sore. Well, no, not so much sore as… tired somehow. After one draw? Seemed like he'd been tired a lot lately—

"Not bad for an old man," Sergeant Julio Fernandez said. He was in the next shooting box at the indoor range, making a lot of smoke and noise with his beat-up old Army-issue Beretta 9mm.

"Reset," Howard said. He grinned.

The mugger vanished. Had it been a real attacker instead of a holoprojic target, the frangible bullets would have each dumped 550 foot-pounds of energy into the man and, because the rounds were designed to fragment on impact, would have shredded the attacker's heart into mush, and they wouldn't have over-penetrated and gone on down the street to maybe kill some little old lady out walking her dog. This was a very important consideration in an urban scenario. Of course, frangible wasn't good for shooting through solid walls or car doors, but the next two rounds in the cylinder were standard jacketed hollowpoints that would do that just fine. If the mugger had been in a car, Howard could have cycled past the first two rounds, or, in a hurry, just pulled the trigger twice to get to the jacketed stuff.

"Morning, gentlemen," he heard somebody say behind him. The wolf-ear headphones he wore amplified normal sounds, but cut out anything loud enough to damage his hearing. He turned.

It was his boss, Alexander Michaels.

"Commander. What brings you to the range on a Saturday morning?"

Michaels patted the taser clipped to his belt on his right hip. "Requalification. Thought I'd come down when it wasn't too busy."

Howard gave him a small smile and shook his head.

"Not a fan of the kick taser, Colonel?" Michaels asked.

"No, sir, not really. If a situation is dangerous enough to require a weapon, then it ought to be a real weapon."

"I am given to understand that the taser has a ninety-percent one-shot-stop rate, whether it penetrates clothes or not. It will defeat standard Kevlar vests, and there aren't any bodies to clean up afterward."

Howard could almost hear Fernandez grin. "Sergeant, you have a comment?"

"Well, unless the guy you shoot has anything real flammable about his person, sir. Then he might just burst into flame. At which point your non-lethal weapon turns your guy into the Human Torch. It has happened a few times."

"The sergeant is correct. However, the biggest drawback, sir, is that you only get one shot," Howard added.

"Everybody is required to carry a spare reload or two. I'm told an expert can do that in about two seconds — snap off, snap on, be ready to fire again."

"In which time somebody just average with a handgun would have shot your taser expert four or five times. Or his buddy would have — if there is more than one of him. Sir."

Michaels grinned. "Well, you know how it is with us desk jockeys, Sarge. The weapon is more a formality than anything. We don't get out into the field that much."

"That's not what I hear, sir," Fernandez said.

Howard held his grin. Whatever Michaels said, he had faced an assassin who had snuck into HQ and he'd shot her dead using her own gun. That had earned him a bit of respect in a lot of opinions, including Howard's own.

"Besides, I have dedicated and trained men like you to do all my light fighting," Michaels said.

"Good thing," Fernandez said, but quietly enough so Michaels probably didn't catch it.

"I'll let you get back to your practice," Michaels said. "Have a good day, gentlemen." He walked to the end of the long row of shooting boxes and began to set up for his session.

Sarge shook his head, then looked at Howard. "Tasers, nightgowns, sticky foam, photon cannons, beanbag shooters, what are the feebs gonna come up with next? Sugar-and-spice spray? Flower-petal launchers? Seems like a lotta effort for not much gain."

"We live in politically correct times, Sergeant. Subgunning a mob is bad PR, even if all of the people in the mob are terrorists with pockets full of hand grenades. It looks bad on the evening news."

"Bleeding-heart liberals are gonna take all the fun out of being a soldier someday, sir."

"I expect they will, Sergeant."

"You know the definition of a conservative, sir?"

"I am afraid to ask."

"A liberal who's been mugged."

Howard grinned. "Light up your target, Sergeant, and let's see if you can shoot as well as you talk."

"Little side bet, Colonel?"

"I hate to take your money, but if you've got so much you can afford to lose it, you're on."

The two men laughed.

At the end of the row of shooting boxes, Michaels heard the colonel and sergeant laughing. Probably at him and his taser. Well, not everybody was a soldier. His father had been a career Army man and that had been enough to sour Michaels on it. He knew he could kill somebody, if it was self-defense, or to protect somebody he loved. He had done so when the assassin had slipped into Net Force HQ and used Toni to ambush him in the gym's locker room. He'd shot the woman known as the Selkie after she had shot him and tried to stab Toni. It was necessary, but it was not an experience he wanted to repeat.

He set his computer for a practice run on the taser qualification scenario, checked to make sure the spare compressed gas cartridge holder was on the left side of his belt, and then pulled the taser and inspected the weapon to make certain the cartridge in it was still active. It was. He reclipped it to his belt, took a deep breath, and blew it out. "Activate," he commanded the target computer. "Two to thirty seconds, random start."

The new-model taser was wireless. He wasn't sure he quite understood exactly how it worked, but supposedly the twin needles were essentially small but highly efficient capacitors. Powered by a simple nine-volt battery, each needle was slightly thicker than a pencil lead. The pair carried high-voltage, low-amperage charges, somewhere around a hundred thousand volts, and when they both struck a target, a circuit was completed. The compressed gas propellant — nitrogen or carbon dioxide, depending on the model — would spit the needles up to fifty feet with enough force to penetrate clothing. At normal combat range, about seven or eight yards, the weapon delivered a knockdown jolt virtually every time. There was a tiny, built-in laser. When you squeezed the handle, the little red dot from the laser showed you where the needles would bracket when they hit. If you missed, the backup feature was a pair of electrodes in the handle that would allow the taser to function as a stun gun — if the attacker got within range. What the device looked like was a long and skinny electric razor, or maybe one of the old Star Trek: Deep Space Nine phasers.

Operation was easy enough. You pointed the taser at a target, squeezed the handle, lined the laser's dot up, and thumbed the firing stud. If everything went right, half a second later your attacker was jittering on the floor in electrically induced convulsions, and any interest he might have had in harming you was the last thing on his mind. Recovery after a couple of minutes was virtually total, but you could do a lot in a couple of minutes to an assassin sprawled helplessly on his back.

Of course, such a device could be used by the bad guys too. To counter that, all tasers were required to carry taggants in their propellant, thousands of tiny bits of colored or clear plastic that would identify the registered buyer. There was no way to sweep all these tags up after a taser was fired—

A mugger appeared and ran at Michaels. The mugger had a crowbar in one hand. He raised the bar of steel as he ran—

Michaels pulled the taser from his belt, pointed it, and squeezed the handle. The little red dot danced up and down on the mugger's leg, but that didn't matter. Anywhere on the body was good. He thumbed the firing stud—

A splash of yellow light flared on the mugger's leg, but he kept coming.

Shit—!

Michaels grabbed the taser's cartridge with his left hand, pressed the two buttons that ejected it, fumbled for the spare cartridge, but it was too late. By the time he got the thing reloaded, the mugger was on him. A loud buzzer blared. The mugger froze.

Damn. He should have tried for the stun-gun backup.

The computer image to Michaels's left strobed the letters FTS-G in bright red. Failure to Stop — Gotcha. The tiny image of the mugger on the proj showed the reason why. The needles were designed to spread apart, to make the circuit's arc big enough to work. At the distance he'd fired, the leg hadn't been a good target. The left needle hit the mugger's thigh square on, but the right missile had been ten inches to the right — a clean miss. He must have jerked his hand when he touched the firing stud. It didn't take much to screw up the shot.

Had this been a real mugger, Michaels would have been looking at a crushed skull — unless Toni's silat instruction would have let him dance the crowbar and poke the guy with the stun-gun electrodes. And he wasn't good enough at that to trust it yet.

He shook his head in disgust. He picked up a spare cartridge from the supply on the table and put it into his belt holder. He reclipped the taser to his belt. "Reset," he told the computer. "Two to thirty seconds random start." He pointedly did not look at Howard and Fernandez. He knew they'd be smiling.

Toni sat on the lounger her oldest brother, Junior, had given her for Christmas three years ago. He owned a furniture store in a nicer section of Queens — which wasn't saying much — and had gotten stuck with several chairs he couldn't sell and couldn't ship back, since the manufacturing company had gone out of business between the time he ordered the shipment and when it arrived. It was a comfortable chair, but kind of a putrid, mottled green color that apparently hadn't overwhelmed any of his customers. Somebody might as well get some use from it, he'd told her.

She smiled into the phone, a vox-only connection with her mother. Mama had never cottoned to the idea of picture phones. What if the phone rang before she put her face on? If her hair was messed up? If she was in the shower?

"Mama, if you're so worried about how much these calls are costing me, why don't you get an ISDN or a DL and let Aldo hook Papa's computer to it? For ten dollars a month, we could talk over the net as much as we want."

"I don't wanna be foolin' with no computer business," Mama said. "It's too complicated."

"It's not any more complicated than using the telephone. All you have to do it turn it on and tell it my number if you want to call. If I call you, you just have to touch a button when it beeps, and you get audio and video."

"It's too complicated."

Toni grinned again. Mama would never change. There was a bare-bones computer in the ground-floor brownstone apartments where Toni had grown up, a birthday gift from Toni and the boys a couple of years ago. Most American homes these days had some kind of house computer, but Mama didn't want anything to do with it. While she didn't cross herself when she walked past it, Toni had long believed that Mama looked at the thing as if it were the spawn of Satan, just waiting to ensnare her in its tendrils and drag her off to electronic Hades. Sophia Banks Fiorella was sixty-five, and had six children, five of them boys, all of them college-educated. Aldo, at thirty-one, the youngest child save for Toni, was a high-level programmer for the State of New York's judicial system, and if he couldn't convince Mama to use the computer after all the Sunday dinners trying, Toni was wasting her time.

"So, whenna you comin' home?"

"Thursday night late," Toni said. "They're giving us the 24th off, but I have to work on the 23rd."

"You need Papa to pick you up at the airport?"

"Papa is not supposed to be drivin', Mama, he can't see that good. I thought Larry was gonna talk to him about that." Toni noticed that her Bronx accent had thickened considerably as she talked to Mama. It always did. "That" sounded an awful like like "dat," and the " — ing" endings to words lost the "g" completely.

"You know your father. He don't hear what he don't wanna hear."

"We're gonna get one of those steering-wheel lockbars for the car if he doesn't stop it."

"Tony Junior already tried that. It took Papa about two minutes to figure out how to take it off. He's not stupid."

"I didn't say he was stupid. But he is half blind and if he keeps driving, he is gonna kill somebody."

"Okay, so Larry or Jimmy will pick you up."

"I'm not flying. Mama, I'm taking the train and I'll catch a cab from Penn Station."

"Late at night my daughter should be inna cab? That's dangerous, a young girl by herself."

Toni laughed. She was pushing thirty and adept at self-defense, more so than any man she knew. She carried a laser with which she was qualified Expert, and had been a federal agent for years, but Mama didn't want her riding in a taxi from the train station.

"Don't worry about me. I've got my key, I'll go to the guest unit."

"Mike is coming from Baltimore with his wife and children, they'll be in the big bedroom and the kid's room."

"I'll stay in the little bedroom. Don't worry, Mama, I'll see you Christmas Eve morning, okay?"

"Okay. Look, you need to go, this call is probably costing you a fortune. I'll see you Friday. What time do you want to get up? You want to sleep late?"

Toni grinned again. It didn't matter what time she said. Mama would be at her door at six-thirty sharp, and breakfast would be ready. "About six-thirty," Toni said.

"Okay. I'll get up early. I love you, baby. You be careful."

"I will be, Mama. I love you too."

Toni put the phone down and shook her head. One of the joys of her big Catholic family was the annual holiday gathering. What with her brothers, their wives, and the nieces and nephews, there would be twenty-some people at Mama's, not even counting the uncles, aunts, and odd cousin or two who might show up for dinner. It wasn't so crowded since Papa had bought the units on either side of the old one and knocked out walls to make one large apartment, but even so, it would be bustling.

Toni was very much looking forward to it. Too bad she couldn't bring Alex with her. Mama would be so thrilled that Toni had a potential husband — and any man she looked at more than twice was, as far as Mama was concerned, a potential husband — that she wouldn't be able to sit down, she'd be so busy doing things for him.

Maybe someday.

Chapter Four

Jay Gridley rode the net.

On a horse.

Until recently, he had favored a Dodge Viper in virtual reality, playing scenarios that involved superhighways and high speed. Hell of a car, the Viper, a rocket with wheels, and he liked putting the pedal to the metal and feeling the wind in his hair. But he'd gotten into a Western frame of mind a couple of weeks ago, and after doing a fair amount of research had built himself a cowboy scenario. You could use just about anything you wanted for virtual reality — VR — net travel, and it didn't have to be historically accurate; you could have cowboys and spacemen in the same scenario. But when you were a programmer at Jay's level, you had certain standards. At the very least, it had to be consistent, and above all, it had to look good.

In this scenario, Jay wore button-fly Levi's, real cowhide pointed-toe cowboy boots, and a plaid wool shirt, along with a red bandanna, a cream-colored Stetson hat measured in gallons, and a Colt.45 Peacemaker six-gun strapped around his waist in a period leather holster. No drugstore cowpoke clothes for him, no pearl-button shirts with fringe, or chaps or anything like that. He sat upon a hand-tooled saddle, and his horse was a pinto stallion named Buck. Well, formerly a stallion — the VR horse had been gelded, to keep him from tearing off after passing female horses. Jay had thought about a white horse or even a palomino, but figured those were maybe a bit over the top. Most of the off-the-shelf software would never have gotten into this kind of detail, but they weren't held to his standards.

Buck picked his way along a narrow switchbacked trail that wound through the foothills of a VR mountain range in the Old West. Jay kept a lookout for rattlesnakes — sidewinders, they called them out here — Indians, or desperados who might want to stick him up. There was a net nexus coming up, represented by a little town called Black Rock ahead a couple of miles, but the sun was almost straight up and it was oven-hot and bone-dry here, and he needed to stop for a drink. The rocky trail was mostly bare, with only a few lizards and some scraggly bushes that might grow to be tumbleweeds someday — if they were lucky, and if they didn't spontaneously burst into flame first…

He grinned. Damn, but he was good. A very tight little scenario, if he did say so himself.

He reined up next to a dried and dusty stream bed, dismounted, and took a swig from his water bottle, a canvas bag with a wooden plug. The canvas bag held about a gallon, and was woven loosely enough so it allowed a little liquid to seep through it, the idea being that the evaporation would cool the water, but it was still pretty warm. He took his hat off, poured a pint or so into it, and offered it to Buck. The horse noisily lapped the water from the hat.

"Not far now, boy, a few more minutes."

From around the bend came the sound of an approaching wagon. Jay dumped the water from his hat and put the Stetson back on. He loosened the Colt in its holster. You never knew what kind of scum was around. Best to be ready to shoot first and ask questions later.

It wasn't a wagon, but a one-horse buggy, drawn by a big gray mare. The horse's shoes clop-clopped on the hardpan, and the iron-bound wooden wheels clattered over small rocks. The driver was a woman, in a ground-length cotton dress that had once been dyed indigo, but sun-and-wash-faded now to a pale blue. Since she was seated, the dress was hiked up enough to reveal the tops of her high-button shoes. She also wore a blue bonnet, not quite so faded as the dress, tied under her chin. On the seat next to her was a thin stack of books.

Why, it must be the schoolmarm.

Jay relaxed, and reached up and tipped his hat as the woman approached.

"Howdy, ma'am," he said, in his best cowboy-speak.

As the buggy drew closer, he could see she was a good-lookin' woman — no, not just good-lookin', she was downright gorgeous, a few stray blond hairs escaping the bonnet, beautiful green eyes—

Aw, hell. It warn't no schoolmarm, it was—

Lieutenant Joanna Bimbo Winthrop.

Damn!

She pulled the buggy to a stop ten feet short of Jay and smiled. "Well, well. Jay Gridley. Fancy meeting you here." She climbed down from the buggy and stood facing him from a few feet away. Her face went blank for a second.

Jay knew what she was doing. She was in her own net program and she was re-phasing to allow his to set the joint scenario.

Her face came back to life and she looked around, seeing now what Jay was seeing.

"Well, yee-haw, little doggies," she said. She smiled.

"What are you doing here, Winthrop?"

"Perhaps this silver bullet will tell you." She held out her hand, and upon it was a shiny handgun cartridge. "Go ahead, bullet, tell him."

The cartridge was silent.

"Very funny." Jay wasn't in any mood to be insulted by the likes of Bimbo Winthrop. "And what freeware are you running?"

"Not freeware, horsie-boy. Something with a little subtlety." She waved at the high desert around them. "And a little complexity."

Oh, really?

In the Real World, Jay was sitting in his office chair at HQ, wearing full VR gear, connected to his workstation and the net. In RW, he finger-jived out of his Old West program to let Winthrop's vehicle become the default. In half a second, the VR blinked and reformed into Winthrop's—

He found himself on the boarding platform at a train station. Winthrop stood across from him, and a passenger train was stopped behind her. Her hair was in a bun, tucked under a wide-brimmed hat, and she wore a long, dark cloth coat over an ankle-length gray wool dress. From her clothes and the style of the train, he guessed it was late nineteenth or maybe early twentieth century. A sign on the station to his left said "Klamath Falls." It was winter, the air crisp and cold, and fresh snow was six inches deep on the ground, with higher drifts piled up outside the roofed platform. Passengers boarded the train, the women in long dresses and coats and hats, the men mostly in suits, hats, and overcoats. There were a few working-class souls mixed in among the more affluent passengers, wearing caps and jackets and workboots. A big pale guy who looked like a bodybuilder in a tan duster stopped to help an old lady lift her bag onto the train. A little girl ran by, trailed by a dog. It looked like a setter or a retriever of some kind. The smell of coal smoke hung heavy in the air, mixed with the dregs of cooling steam… and just a hint of unwashed body odor.

People hadn't bathed every day back when. That was a nice touch.

And looking around, he saw she had done a pretty clean job on the scenario. No gray areas, no sketchy backgrounds, plenty of detail, even to the wood grain in the fir posts supporting the platform roof.

He looked at himself and saw he wore a three-piece gray wool suit and black-leather dress shoes. A gold pocket-watch chain draped across the vest. He saw a slip of colored paper in one of the vest's pockets and removed it. A train ticket. He could read every word on it, down to the fine print. A very nice touch, that.

Well, okay, he had to admit it, this was a first-class piece of work.

He didn't have to admit that to her, however.

"All abooard!" the conductor yelled.

"Well?" she said.

"It's a little busy," he said. "I prefer mine." He overrode her program, and half a second later was back standing in the desert next to Buck, looking at her and the buggy.

"What do you want?" he asked her.

"I was looking for you. We're going to be working together, whether either one of us wants to or not. I know you don't like me, and you're not on my top-one-hundred list either. But I'm a professional, I can get around that."

"Meaning I can't?"

"No, Gridley, meaning exactly what I said. This isn't about who is the better programmer, it is about getting the assignment done. Commander Michaels wants me on the project, I'm on it. We don't have to hold hands and walk through the spring meadows, but we also don't have to get in each other's way, can we agree to that?"

Jay looked at his horse. He could see why cowboys spent so much time on the trail. Women, especially pretty women, tended to complicate things. He knew he was a better programmer. He hadn't gotten any doors opened because of his looks, and he was damned sure Winthrop had. But he sighed and nodded. "All right. We can stay out of each other's way."

"If I come up with something before you do, I'll pass it along."

"Fat chance of that," Jay said. It was under his breath, however.

"Excuse me?"

"Nothing. I'll do the same for you."

She said something he didn't catch.

"Pardon?"

"Nothing," she said. "I'll leave you to your scenario."

She climbed back into her buggy and snapped the reins over the big mare's back. "Giddyap," she said. She waved as she drove away from town.

Jay watched her go. The horse whinnied.

"Yeah, pal, my sentiments exactly," Jay said. "Come on, we got bidness in town, Buck old boy."

Jay put his left foot into the stirrup and mounted up.

They moseyed toward town.

Hughes had his virgil — his Virtual Global Interface Link — in the limo, but he didn't want to use it to call Plait. Supposedly, the telephone signal was binary-encoded and nobody could understand him if he used the phone in the virgil, but he didn't trust it. It was a great toy, about the size of an electric shaver, and in addition to the phone it had in it a GPS, clock, radio, TV, modem, credit chip, camera, scanner, and even a fax. Of course, if he hadn't been White's chief of staff, he wouldn't have access to such a device. He couldn't have afforded it, and likely couldn't have gotten on the list to get one even if he had saved up the money.

There was a pay phone just ahead, a landline, and as random as any. He directed his driver to pull over.

It was cold out, a damp wind blowing, and the sky had that dark, heavy, nacreous gleam of snow clouds about to let go. Hughes stepped into the graffiti-covered clear-plastic paneled booth and pulled the door shut. He set the phone for vox-only, no vid, slipped the one-time throwaway scrambler over the mouthpiece, tapped in the number, let it ring once, then hung up. Platt had the gear to trace the number on his end, and also a matching scrambler. Nobody was going to decode their conversation.

Thirty seconds later, the phone rang. Unless it was a very large coincidence, that would be Platt.

"Yes," Hughes said.

"Hey," Platt said. He managed to shoehorn a whole lot of southern Georgia into that one drawn-out word.

"Okay, what's the situation?"

"Well, we got us a little problem there. Seems the Lord High Ooga-Booga wants to see you face-to-face ‘fore he seals the deal."

"Not possible. I sent you to be my representative."

"What I told El Presidente Sambo, but he ain't listenin', it's some kind of native thing. You know how these darkies are, it's always somethin'."

Hughes ground his teeth together. Platt was a cracker, a racist, and probably a member in good standing of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan and the Sons of the Confederate Veterans. Sending him to Guinea-Bissau, a little dirt-poor tropical country on the North Atlantic coast of west Africa shoehorned in between Guinea and Senegal, was an invitation to disaster. Platt was so white he gleamed, and ninety-nine percent of the population in Guinea-Bissau was black; worse, they spoke Portuguese or Criola, or French, plus a slew of African languages with names like Pajadinka, Gola, Bigola, and the like. As far as he knew, Platt didn't have any foreign languages. He had trouble enough making himself clear in English past that Georgia cane syrup of his, but somehow he always managed. Being six and a half feet tall with a build like Hercules probably helped — people tended to be polite to Platt even if they didn't like him. And while he was crude, he wasn't stupid. He liked to play the good old boy and let people think that was all there was to him, but he knew his way around computers, from laptops to extended mainframes, he could shoot any weapon capable of firing, and fix a computer or a gun if either of them broke.

"Anyway, what El Presidente said was, you don't come and set down for a little chat, it's nooo deal."

Damn! Hughes fumbled for his electronic calendar, punched up the month of January, and looked at it. It would be tricky. He'd have to come up with some kind of hurry-up junket not too far away, then sneak into the country. He had a couple of passports and visas he could use. It was a bitch, and it wasn't going to be cheap, but it was doable. He said, "All right. Tell President Domingos I will be there on… January 13th. That's a Thursday."

"Thursday, the 13th. I got it."

"And you come to Washington. I have other business for you."

"Washington." That came out as "Warsh-ing-ton."

"Shoot, there's almost as many jigs there as there are here. You know what else? There ain't but four thousand telephones in this whole country. They still use drums, I reckon. You know, the natives are restless? And uppity too. I get one more buck staring at me, I'mon put the hurt on him."

"Don't kill anybody."

Platt laughed. "Me? Shoot, I ain' gone kill nobody. I'mon just knock a few ub'm off the sidewalks." He laughed again, a gravely, raucous noise. "Only thing is, they ain't got no sidewalks most places here. I guess I can wait to do that in Washington."

"Just come back. What about the leaks?"

"I got the next one on a timer. Set to go off bright and early Monday morning, matter of fact."

"Good. Good-bye."

Hughes uncapped the phone's mouthpiece and dropped the scrambler into his pocket. Jesus. Platt was a lunatic, probably psychotic and sociopathic, and a sharp and dangerous tool. Necessary, but just as apt to cut the hand that held it as anything. Hughes would have to be careful, and pretty soon he would have to figure out a way to make Platt… go away. For good.

Hughes opened the phone booth's door. A blast of cold wind hit him, raising chills on his neck. He could smell the snow coming. Better get back to the city before it turned the roads into parking lots.

He nodded at the driver as he got back into the limo. "Let's go home."

Chapter Five

The invisible green-eyed demon had its claws sunk deep in Tyrone Howard's back, and it hurt like he wouldn't have believed only a couple of months ago. He felt sick to his stomach, he wanted to throw up, scream, or punch somebody — maybe do all three at once — and none of these were viable options. The students at Eisenhower Middle School were used to seeing some weird things in the dingy green halls, but a thirteen-year-old boy running amok in a jealous rage was not one of them.

The reason for Tyrone's pain stood thirty feet away, smiling up at the quarterback of the football team, one large and muscular Jefferson Benson. Belladonna Wright was a year older than Tyrone and, without a doubt, the most gorgeous young woman in D.C. On the East Coast. Maybe in the whole world. And since he had done her a favor by helping her pass her computer class, they had spent a little time together. She had more or less ditched her old boyfriend, Herbie "Bonebreaker" LeMott, who was in high school and the captain of the wrestling team. Since then, she and Tyrone had gone to the mall, had done VR, and had sat in her bedroom and kissed until he thought he was going to explode. He was absolutely, totally, triple-back-somersault-in-a-full-layout in love with Bella. And there she stood, in her microskirt and halter top and squeegee slope-plats, talking to another man. Smiling at him. At a man who could tie Tyrone into a square knot and shotput him fifty feet without breaking a sweat. All Tyrone had going for him was his brain, and while the mind might be mightier than muscle in the long run, in a face-to-face matchup, the guy with the muscle would pound you into a breaded cutlet if all you could wave at him was your brain.

"Uh-oh. Looks like trrrrouble in paradise," came the voice from behind him.

Tyrone wasn't looking directly at Bella. He was using his peripheral vision as he stood fiddling with the door to his locker. He didn't have to look at the speaker — it was James Joseph Hatfield, a hillbilly from West Virginia who had such bad eyes he couldn't even wear contacts, and thus went around peering through thick plastic lenses that made him look like a giant white hoot owl.

"Shut up, Jimmy-Joe."

"Hey, nopraw, rider, she's just talkin' to him, not fishin' for his trouser eel—"

Tyrone turned to glare atomic bombs at his best friend.

"All right, all right, be cool, fool," Jimmy-Joe said. "But think about it, bro. If she wanted a big dumb jock, she'd still be with Bonebreaker, right? I mean, he makes Benson look like a shrimp."

And Benson made Tyrone look like a microbe. "Yeah. Maybe."

"Go slowmo, Joe, you worry too much." Jimmy-Joe slapped Tyrone on the back.

As Tyrone watched peripherally, pretending not to, the large and muscular Jefferson Benson turned and headed down the hall, moving in that oiled-ball-bearing rolling walk of his. People moved aside to let him pass.

Bella looked up, saw Tyrone and Jimmy-Joe. She smiled and waved. "Hey, Ty!"

Tyrone's sick feeling lifted when he saw her smile at him. He felt like Atlas must have felt when Hercules took the world from him. All of sudden, life was wonderful. He could sing, he could dance, he could float like a cloud.

Bella came toward him. People stopped to watch her. Queen of the Hall, she swayed like a palm tree in a tropical breeze as she walked. His heart pounded like native drums in Tyrone's head. Man—!

She stopped in front of him. "I'm going to the mall after school, if it doesn't snow again," she said. "You going?"

"Oh, yeah," Tyrone said. "I planned to."

"Exemplary, Ty. See you at the Shop."

Bella flashed her perfect smile again, patted him on the shoulder once, then left. Tyrone watched her go, a man in a trance, unable to look away. His shoulder was hot where she'd touched him.

"Calls you Ty. Puts her hand on you. Slip, you are about as DFF as it gets," Jimmy-Joe said. "Data flowin' fine."

Tyrone grinned. Yes, yes, that was true. Life didn't get much better, did it? How could it? The most beautiful woman in the world had just arranged to meet him instead of the football thud. It was absolutely amazing, was what it was. Amazing. Wonderful—

"So, how's the upgrade goin'?"

Tyrone watched Bella round the corner and vanish from view. He savored the memory of her from behind.

"Hel-lo? Mission Control to Deep Space Vessel Tyrone, do you copy?" He made the sound of a staticky radio. "Come in, DSV Ty…"

Tyrone shook off the trance. Jimmy-Joe was asking about the revision to the netgame he'd built and posted, DinoWarz. "Oh, that. I haven't had much time to work on it."

"Haven't had time? You are feekin' me, right?"

"No feek," Tyrone said. He had been spending every spare minute he could scrounge with Bella. And when he wasn't with her, he was thinking about her. Dreaming about her.

Lusting after her…

"Rider, you are stalled out!"

"It's just a game," Tyrone said.

Jimmy-Joe stared at him as if Tyrone had just morphed into a giant roach and started doing a demented jitterbug.

"Just a game? Just a game? You got a testosterone short in your cerebrum, chum."

The bell for class rang, and Jimmy-Joe walked off, shaking his head. "I will see you later, slip."

Tyrone stared at his friend. He didn't understand. Games were fine, but how could a game compare to holding hands with Belladonna Wright? To kissing those warm and magical lips. To putting his hands on those warm and—

Don't follow that thread, Tyrone. Not here and now.

A video game? Even a VR full-flex, compare with Bella? It couldn't. No way.

He hurried toward his own first-period class. And he was going to the mall after school, dupe that to the eighth power.

Julio Fernandez looked at the holoprojection floating in the air behind the instructor. The image was a series of mathematical equations interspersed with pictures of what appeared to be an old-fashioned paper theater ticket, a crumbly cookie, and a heavy metal safe with a big mechanical tumbler lock dial. Remedial computer imagery for dumbots.

The instructor said, "All right, who can tell me what the phrase ‘security through obscurity' means?"

Fernandez stared down at the screen built into the top of his desk. Pick somebody else, he thought. There were fifteen people in the computer programming class, so the odds weren't that bad that the dipwit teacher would call on one of his classmates, except that the dipwit seemed, for some reason, to have it in for Fernandez. The teacher's name was Horowitz. He was maybe twenty-four, short, dumpy, wore frazzled suits, had acne, and his face always looked as if he had a painful rash on his private parts. Horowitz also looked as if he would rather be scratching that rash naked in public than suffering through this class, and Fernandez knew how that felt. If there was any other way, he wouldn't be here either. At least the man was a civilian and not — thank God — an officer.

That the classroom smelled like old sweat long gone sour didn't help.

Of course, he could have downloaded all the lectures and texts for this class and studied them at home on his own. Nobody was holding a gun to his head and making him attend. Most of the other students were new feebs — FBI Academy students — and this class was mandatory for them, though more a matter of form than anything. They were all college grads, most of ‘em law school grads too, and this dinky little access course was a snoozer they could pass in their sleep.

Not so for Sergeant Julio Fernandez, whose computer literacy was right up there with his knowledge of quantum mechanics, or the mating habits of great blue whales, which was to say, very lame on his best day. He'd tried absorbing the stuff on his own, and it slid out of his mind as if his brain were made of solid Teflon. He'd hoped that listening to the teacher and having other students ask questions and offer answers would somehow help, but so far, after three sessions, it hadn't done much to advance his knowledge of the subject, which he hated, but which he needed to know. When it came to using his hands or his weapons, Fernandez didn't give away anything to anybody. He could set up camp in a jungle or a desert and live off the land, but when it came to anything past button-punching a computer, he was dense, and that wasn't good for a Net Force man—

"Let me see… Sergeant Fernandez? Security through obscurity?"

Great. Just freakin' great. "Sir, I believe it means that a certain kind of computer system's security is sort of like a… fortress. You know it is there, you can find it easy enough, but the doors into the place are armored or booby-trapped or rigged with so many locks you can't open ‘em, even though you can walk right up to them."

"What a charming simile. You know what a simile is, Sergeant?"

Some of the feebs chuckled.

Fernandez felt himself flush under his swarthy skin. He was old enough to be this kid's father and the little bastard was jerking him around. "I know what a simile is."

"Well, as it happens, by what is no doubt a major miracle, you are essentially correct. Today's lecture will cover principles of how to accomplish various forms of security, from firewalls to encrypted passwords, from private-access tickets and their expiration dates and times, to security cookies, both fresh and… stale."

A few of the feebs laughed at the stale-cookie thing.

The teacher waved his hand and the holoproj vanished, and was replaced by another. This one showed a small boy sitting in front of a workstation. The kid looked to be about five years old. Probably who this class was aimed at, little kids.

Fernandez gritted his teeth. Even when he gave the right answer, this dipwit twisted it so he looked stupid. Horowitz must get his jollies like that, making students look bad. He certainly wasn't going to get much action otherwise, as lemon-faced and pimply as he was.

Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe Fernandez should be spending his time on the range instead of having his tail twisted by young Master Horowitz. Maybe he should just bail out and paraglide away, and spend his time doing something he knew how to do: ground-pounding, dirt-soldiering, pick ‘em up and set ‘em down and count cadence while you are at it.

For just a second, he enjoyed that thought.

No. He was gonna learn this crap if it killed him. So when the young shavetail lieutenants started rattling off their compu-babble on a mission, he could nod and at least vaguely know what the hell they were talking about.

One lieutenant in particular came to mind…

"So, who can tell us what happens when an electronic ticket expires on an encrypted access site? Sergeant Fernandez? Since you are on a metaphorical roll, would you like to give us another of your charming little homespun similes?"

Fernandez regarded the man. He was mightily tempted just to get up and walk out. His second choice was to get up and teach Horowitz how to breathe again after he punched him one good shot solidly in that soft gut. Now there was a real pleasant thought—

"Come, come, Sergeant, speed is of the essence! In computer programming, in life, in everything. He who hesitates is lost and last!"

"I believe you are mistaken in that, sir."

Horowitz regarded him as a frog might view an uppity fly. "Oh, really? Please elucidate. Show us the error of our ways."

Fernandez said, "Sir. When I was going through my basic training, we had an old master sergeant who was teaching us the use of small arms. He told a story about when he'd been a recruit, about a rivalry between two drill sergeants from different companies.

"Seems there was a military shooting match both guys had entered, a course of fire using the then-issue M16's."

Fernandez looked at Horowitz. "That's a fully automatic rifle, the M16. You know what a rifle is, sir?"

Horowitz frowned. Good thing Fernandez wasn't depending on getting some kind of grade in this class — he'd never pass.

But the feebs had had some firearm training at this point, so he had their attention.

"So the first sergeant, name was Butler, he came up to the line. The timer beeped and he locked and loaded. Or at least he tried to. Nothing happened, the magazine wouldn't feed the round. So he dropped the magazine and inserted a fresh one, only cost him a few seconds. Same thing happened. Since the course of fire was limited to two magazines, he was SOL. He raised his hand, and got a DNF — that's a Did Not Finish.

"So the second sergeant was up, his name was Mahoney. He locked and loaded, fired the course. Did a respectable time, nothing to write home about, but enough to keep him in the top five, if he was lucky. Clean shooting, moderately fast and accurate.

"Meanwhile, Butler figured out what his problem was. He had inadvertently overloaded his magazines by one round each. This compressed the springs too much and they wouldn't feed the rounds. So Butler asks for a reshoot due to equipment failure. It was a slow day, and the RO — that's range officer — let him go again after everybody else was finished.

"And this time, Butler came out hot. He smoked everybody. Shot the fastest time, didn't miss anything, knocked ‘em down left, right, and center like he was a machine. Butler was thirty seconds faster than Mahoney through the course. Guys who had been laughing at him before suddenly looked at him with a new respect. No doubt about it, the man could shoot.

"So Butler grins at Mahoney, gives him a mock salute, and swaggers off.

"Mahoney is packing away his weapon and gear and one of the other shooters who knows about the rivalry comes over. ‘Too bad,' the guy says, ‘I know you really wanted to beat him.'

"And Mahoney smiles and says, ‘He won the contest, but if we'd been on opposite sides on a battlefield from each other, Butler would be history and I'd still be here. You don't get a second chance in a firefight hot zone if you're up against a guy who is any good at all. And there ain't no second-place winner in a gunfight neither.' "

Fernandez looked at the porky young instructor. "A slow shot that hits the target is better than a fast shot that misses. Sir."

The class laughed, and it was Horowitz's turn to flush. "See me after class, Fernandez."

"My pleasure."

When the other students were gone, Fernandez stood six feet away from where Horowitz sat at his desk. The instructor said, "Sergeant, your attitude needs some adjustment. I realize this is a non-credit class for you, so you aren't required to get a pass/fail, but if you were, I am certain you would be repeating this course next term."

Fernandez stepped up to the desk, put his hands on it, and leaned toward the younger man. He was well within Horowitz's discomfort zone, invading the man's space. Horowitz leaned back as far as the chair would allow, and fear stained his face.

"Listen up, sonny. You got the social skills and wit of a water buffalo. You're so busy trying to score points and show everybody how clever you are that whatever teaching abilities you have — if any — can't get out of where you have your head shoved. I know this is like talking to three-year-olds for you, but you're supposed to be a teacher. That's your job, and you're dogging it."

"You wait just a minute!"

"Shut up," Fernandez said. He kept his voice flat and quiet.

Horowitz did just that.

"I'm an easygoing guy most of the time. That's why you aren't on your knees observing the remains of your most recent meal spattered all over your shoes and the floor. I'm done here, junior. I won't be back. Lucky for both of us."

So much for his resolve to learn this shit. Oh, well. There were other ways. There had to be. He leaned back from the desk, smiled, and turned to walk away.

Behind him, Horowitz's voice was shrill, shading right up the scale and into soprano: "What is your superior's name? I am going to report you for threatening me!"

Fernandez turned, still smiling. "My CO's name is Colonel John Howard. Give him my regards when you call. And I didn't threaten you, sonny. If I had done that, you'd be needing a fresh pair of pants. Adios."

As he left the classroom, Fernandez shook his head. His inner voice said, Dense move, Julio, m'boy. Scaring a little pissant teacher isn't going to help you learn anything.

Yeah, yeah. But it sure felt good, didn't it?

He was almost sure he heard his inner voice chuckle.

Chapter Six

Platt strolled along the sidewalk next to the Mall in a T-shirt and jeans, without a jacket, pretending to ignore the hard chill and dirty, slushy snow the plows had piled up along the curb. It wasn't really all that cold, right around freezing, but he sure as hell felt it. Least the wind wasn't blowin', and he had his steel-toed Kevlar boots on, so his feet weren't cold. Thing was, at six-four and 225, he didn't have any body fat to speak of — he couldn't pinch any on his ridged six-pack belly — so no insulation. He worked out five times a week in a weight room when he was where he could get to one, had a decent gym of his own at home if he didn't feel like goin' out, and used big elastic bands or a portable apparatus when he was on the road. The portable thing, which was basically just some screw-together pipes made out of titanium and spun carbon fiber, assembled into a frame that would let you do chins and dips. Cost a damned fortune, but it was worth it. It didn't weigh hardly anything, and when it was disassembled it would fit right into a regular suitcase. Between the bands and body weight, you could keep the tone on your upper body for a couple of weeks without the iron, if you needed to. Didn't do much for the lower body, but that was what one-legged squats and stairs were for.

He didn't like Washington, not the town, not the folks who lived and worked there, not the big old marble buildings, wasn't nothin' about it he liked. But if you walked around in the cold without a coat, people would stare at you just like they would anywhere else — except maybe Los Angeles.

Platt grinned. He remembered the first time he'd been in L.A., twelve or so years back when he'd been a green kid just off the farm outside Marietta. He was walking down Hollywood Boulevard, a hick tourist gaping at the gold stars in the sidewalk, when he passed an old lady standing in front of the Chinese Theater. She was stark naked, smiling and waving at everybody. That didn't seem right to him, that somebody's poor ole granny was bare-assed on the street like that, so Platt whipped out his phone and called the po-lice. Told them about this nekkid woman. And the bored cop on the phone said, "Yeah. Uh-huh. Which naked woman are you calling about?"

Which naked woman. Like there was more than one, which it turned out, when he asked the cop, there was.

Jesus. According to the po-lice, somebody got naked on the street four or five times a week in Hollywood. Damn. Them folks had smogged-up brains out in La-La-land.

He looked at his watch. Just after ten. He grinned again. About now, that spring-loaded time-release file would be hitting the web hard, and it was gonna be like a ton of fresh feces whapping into a big ole industrial-grade fan. If that bomb down in Louisiana didn't get their attention, this one would sure as hell wake ‘em up. Gonna pop a few strands when it landed, for damn sure.

Ahead of him, coming in his direction, were two black men. African-Americans, was that still what they called themselves? Sheeit, these brothahs in their wool suits and camel-hair overcoats had probably never been within five thousand miles of Af-ri-ka, probably born in Mississippi or Georgia, and come to the big city for white poontang and cheap dope. Way Platt figured it, you were born in this country, you were an American, period, and you didn't hear white people talkin' about how they were German Americans or French Americans or English Americans. That was all bullshit, just one more way the spooks got uppity. Call themselves anything they want, they were still darkies, they couldn't hide that.

The two in suits stared at him, but they weren't right. They were too small, too civilized. Probably lawyers or political staff guys who hadn't been in a fistfight since they were pickaninnies.

Platt grinned, and he could almost hear the jigs thinkin': Look at that crazy fool white man, running around in a T-shirt in the cold!

Yeah, but he a big crazy fool white man. Why don't we just cross on over the street here?

A block or so later, he spotted the one he wanted. He was a big buck, wearing jeans and motorcycle boots, a leather jacket, and Gargoyle shades, thought he was so cool. Almost as big as Platt. And alone. Platt didn't mind a couple, but he wasn't stupid. A gang was not a good idea unless you were armed, ‘cause they sure as hell would be, even though guns were all kinds of illegal in this city. All Platt had on him was a little aluminum-handled Kershaw liner-lock, blade just about three inches, and while he could snap it open as fast as a switchblade and could slice and dice somebody into bloody mush with it, a knife wasn't the smartest choice against three or four gangbangers strapped with shooters. He didn't like to carry a gun in the city unless he had a particular need for one, and he didn't want to use the knife if it was one-on-one — unless the jig pulled one.

Or unless it turned out the boy was a karate or judo guy who knew his stuff. Most of that crap was worthless, it didn't work on the street, but now and then you'd run into one of them smart enough to keep it simple, with the skill and timing to make it work. Had to give them that, some of them could dance real good. That would get you your ass kicked pretty good. If that happened, he could sneak the knife out and hide it, wait for an opening, though a guy who knew enough of that gook fighting shit to thump you barehanded usually knew how to deal with a blade too. Plait had a few nasty memories about bad guesses he'd made. But this guy in the leather jacket didn't look like no Bruce Lee, and besides, Platt just wanted to stomp somebody a little, not kill him.

"What you starin' at, boy?"

The big black man stopped. "Who you callin' boy, cracker?"

"I don't see nobody else around, do you? Boy?"

Leather boy took his shades off and carefully slipped them into his pocket. He smiled.

Plait matched the smile. Oh, this was going to be fun…

Alex Michaels sat at his desk, looking over the latest computer dump into his electronic in-box. Came in every half hour, the new business, faster if it was flagged, and there was always some fresh crisis that Net Force had to take care of or the country would go to hell in a handbasket. He on-screened the latest batch and scrolled through them: Somebody had stolen a couple million dollars worth of Intel's SuperPent wetlight chips from a plant in Aloha, Oregon. There was a name for you, Aloha. Town's founder must have spent a pleasant time in Hawaii. The chips were small enough so that they could all fit neatly into a shirt pocket without causing the pocket to sag, and good luck on finding those before they made their way to Seoul to be restamped and installed.

Next item…

Stanley the Scammer had opened a new VR store, once again selling porno. There was no product, past the handful of public-domain teaser j-pegs and QuickTime VRs he used to sucker his customers in to buy. He took their electronic money, promised to send them a bunch of nasty stuff, then shut the VR shop down and shifted to a new location. They had busted Stanley a couple of times, always in New York City. Stanley would rent a cheap flophouse room with a plug and phone, hook his computer up, run his scam, and usually skip before the local cops got there. While he wasn't moving across state lines himself, his victims were from all over, so it was Net Force's problem. And it was compounded by the fact that most people who got ripped off buying pornography didn't particularly want the proper authorities to know that was what they were doing, so most of the customers ate the loss and kept quiet about it. Explaining to the wife that you lost a hundred dollars trying to get a copy of the "Darla Does Detroit" VR was something most men wanted to avoid. The wife might get curious about all that time hubby was spending in his workshop with the door closed.

Stanley's was a classic scam, and the reason most confidence men who were any good could continue to pull off their games was that they appealed to the illegal or immoral in people, made them partners in the sting. A guy worried that he was doing something wrong was hesitant to run to the police to complain when he got cheated.

Of course, there was always somebody who cared more about their money than their reputation, and so some sucker always reported Stanley.

The main problem was that there were dozens, scores, hundreds of small-time thieves like Stanley, and anytime they ripped off somebody computronically across a state line, Net Force heard about it.

Michaels shook his head and scrolled the proj:

Here was a report of a money transfer gone bad at a small bank in South Dakota. Some enterprising cyberstealer had siphoned a couple hundred thousand into his account during a series of fast e-shifts. The Feds' safeguards had caught it, albeit a bit late, and the money was quickly recovered, but they still had to catch the thief, who had run in a hurry, and figure out how he had managed to slip the federal wards even as long as he had. It had been an inside job — the thief worked as an auditor for the bank. It almost always was an inside job, given how good the Federal Reserve kept track of money these days.

What else did they have here?

"Sir," Liza broke in, over the com. "I've got Don Segal from the CIA on the hot line. He says it's an emergency!"

Michaels smiled at his secretary's excitement. Most emergencies didn't turn out to be all that exciting. "I'll take it," he said.

"Hello, Don." Segal was the AD for foreign intel-gathering, a nice guy whose wife had just given birth to their third child, a boy.

"Alex. We've got a big problem."

"I've got to appear before White's committee tomorrow morning," Michaels said. "Bad as that?"

"I'm serious here, Alex. Somebody just posted to the net a list of all our sub-rosa ops in the Euro-Asian theaters."

"Jesus!"

"Yeah. Every American spy in Europe, Russia. China, Japan, Korea—all of them have just been outed. State is crapping big octagonal bricks. A lot of the ops are in supposedly friendly countries, our allies. That's going to cost us some favors and a lot of mea culpas, but we've also got agents in places where they'll get shot first and questioned later. We've put out a total recall, but some of them aren't going to get out before they get picked up."

"Damn," Michaels said.

"Yeah. Damn. And think about it — if he got Europe and Asia, who's to say he didn't get the Middle East, Africa, or South America?"

Michaels couldn't even speak. "Damn" wouldn't begin to cover it.

"We got to find this guy, Alex."

"Yeah."

Chapter Seven

Joanna Winthrop washed her hands, reached for the paper-towel dispenser, and looked at her reflection in the large mirror over the sink in the women's restroom.

She shook her head at her doppelgänger. All of her life people had told her how beautiful she was, men — both young and old — and more than a few women, but she still didn't see it. She had learned how to pretend to ignore the stares, but people still stopped her on the street, strangers, to tell her how attractive she was. It was flattering. It was interesting.

It got in her way.

And it was a mystery to Winthrop. She had a sister, Diane, who truly was beautiful, and next to whom she had always felt dowdy. Her mother at fifty was a knockout, and her smile wrinkles and gray hair only served to accent her perfect bone structure and muscle tone. True, Joanna wasn't ugly, but of the Winthrop women, she was a distant third insofar as looks were concerned. In her opinion.

Of course, that wasn't what most other people seemed to think. It had been a mixed blessing all of her life. Sure, it had been fun to be invited to all the parties when she'd been a kid, to always be at the top of everybody's lists, to be popular and sought-after. She had accepted it as the norm, never questioned it — until she looked up one day and realized that most people considered her nothing more than a… decoration. All she had to do was stand there, smile, and be pretty, be an ornament, and that was enough for them. It wasn't enough for her, it wasn't anything she had done — nothing she had earned, she'd been born that way. Who could take credit for that?

Boys were tongue-tied in her presence, but they lined up for the chance to be rumble-mouthed, and eventually she realized that to most of them, she wasn't a real person, but a trophy — to be pursued, captured, then displayed. Looky here, guys, look what's hanging onto my arm. Don't you wish she was yours?

She was smart, she did well in school, stacked up well against objective academic standards, but nobody seemed to care about that. Being pretty was more important than being smart to everybody. Everybody except Joanna Winthrop.

Being pretty got old. Too many people couldn't see past it — or didn't want to see past it.

She tossed the damp paper towel into the trash can and glanced back at the mirror again. The first boy she'd slept with, at seventeen, had been the president of the science club, not any of the dozens of jocks who had chased her. He was intelligent, soft-spoken, and handsome, in a consumptive dying-poet kind of way. A sensitive, caring, bright young man who respected her for her mind. That was what she had thought.

He'd bragged about sleeping with her to his friends the next day. So much for his sensitivity, his caring, his respect for her mind. It had broken her heart.

Most of the girls she knew were jealous of her looks, especially the pretty ones, and they were resentful and catty. Her only real friend in school had been Maudie Van Buren, who had been plain, fifty pounds overweight, and addicted to black sweatsuits and running shoes. Maudie didn't care about looks — hers, Joanna's, anybody's — and she didn't understand why Joanna was so upset about being popular. She'd love to be on anybody's list for anything, she always said.

They'd gone off to different universities, Winthrop to MIT, Van Buren to UCLA. But they kept in touch. And each year, they got together for a week at Maudie's uncle's mountain cabin outside Boulder, Colorado. During the break between their junior and senior terms, they had managed one of their best ever conversations. Maudie had gone on a diet, started working out, and in six months had dropped her excess weight, tightened up, and emerged from her sweatsuit-fat-chrysalis stage as a slender — and beautiful — butterfly.

Over bottles of silty, home-brewed beer that Maudie's uncle had stocked the fridge with before he left, the two young women had talked.

"I think I finally get it," Maudie said. "About the pretty thing."

Winthrop sipped at the cloudy brew. "Uh-huh."

"I mean, when I was a big tub, anybody who bothered to spend time with me did it because of my personality, such that it was, and it wasn't as if I had to carry a stick to clear myself a path through my admirers when I went out. Now, I get calls from guys who thought I was invisible when I was a whole helluva lot bigger than I am now. It's like I suddenly got rich and everybody wants to be my friend." She took a big slug of the beer. "I mean, the depth of a guy who is only interested in you because of your looks is about that of a postage stamp, isn't it? Kind of hard to feel a lot of trust for somebody like that. ‘Oh, baby, I love you for your mind!' sounds a little hollow when he's fumbling to unsnap your bra strap."

Joanna grinned around another swig of beer. "Tell me about it, sister."

Maudie looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time.

"You've had to deal with this your whole life. How did you finally get past it?"

"Who got past it? I bump into every day I go out. You learn to live with it."

"I may start eating again," Maudie said. "Who needs the stress? Maybe it's better to be fat and sure of my friends than skinny and suspicious."

"No, I think the best thing is to find somebody who can get past your face and boobs, who doesn't care too much about either. It's okay if they think you look good, that's fine, as long as they realize that isn't all there is to you."

"You got somebody like that?"

"I got you, babe."

"I mean somebody male."

"Well, no. Not yet. But I'm ever hopeful. He must be out there somewhere."

"Better be careful. I might find him first."

Both women laughed, and drank more of the malty home brew—

Winthrop's virgil cheeped, and she pulled it from where it was clipped onto her belt. Incoming call. The caller ID showed it was Commander Michaels. It must be important if he was calling her from just down the hall.

"Yes, sir?"

"We have a situation here, Joanna. If you could come to my office, I'd appreciate it."

"Be right there," she said.

She discommed, stuck the virgil back on her belt, gave herself a final glance in the mirror, and started for the door.

Michaels looked at the three leaders of his computer team, as good a group of people as he'd ever worked with. They all looked back at him with anticipation as he finished laying out the scenario.

"All right, folks, there it is. CIA is justifiably upset and they'd like us to do something about it. Forty years of work is going down the tubes, and more might follow that any second. Let's have some risk assessment and scenario building here. Jay, what do we have so far?"

"I wish I could say it was good news, Boss, but so far, zip city. I don't think we're dealing with some kid hacker. What little I've found is a little rougher than the Russian we just dealt with. The guy snuck in and out, but he didn't track a lot of mud — I haven't found his footprints yet."

"Toni? How is he getting this stuff?"

"Three possibilities," she said. "One, he's cracking his way into secret files and stealing it; two, somebody who knows it is feeding him — or three, he knows it himself."

"So he could be almost anybody," Joanna said. "Somebody outside the walls, or inside them."

"How do we find him?" Michaels asked.

They all looked morose, and Michaels knew why. If the guy hadn't left an obvious trail, and if he didn't come back and blunder into a hole and break his leg or something, finding him would be iffy at best.

"All right, skip that. How do we stop him?"

Again, Michaels already knew the answer, but he wanted to get his team cranked up to full alert.

Jay said, "We've already put out the word to all federal agencies to harden systems, change passwords, reschedule downtimes from periodic to random, all like that."

"Which will help if he is by himself outside and looking in," Toni said, "but not if he's a cleared employee."

"Or being fed by somebody who is," Joanna added.

"We set some rattle cans up on real obvious targets," Jay said. "Squeals, squeakers, telltales, like that, but if he was dumb enough to blunder into those, he probably wouldn't have gotten in in the first place."

Michaels nodded. It wasn't their fault, but they had to catch this guy before more people started dying. He had to be hard here. "Folks, this guy, whoever he is, has caused at least one death we know of, and maybe more, and is likely to cause more. He's compromised our national security, pissed off our friends and enemies alike, and way down at the bottom of the list, he's also making Net Force look bad. There are people who will use this against us, and that's a problem, but that's the least of our worries. I want to see some contingency plans, some operational scenarios that will nail this bastard and get him off the net. Use whatever Cray time you need, spend what you need to spend, call in favors, whatever. This is critical, priority one. We have other business, sure, but this sits on top of the pile, understood?"

They nodded, murmuring assent at him.

"All right. Go."

After they had left, Michaels stood staring into infinity. It never rained but it poured. And it was his job to stop the rain.

Toni stretched her legs, dropping into the left sempok position by sliding her right foot behind and past her left, sinking until her buttocks touched the floor, then bouncing up and across to the opposite side. A good silat player could defend or attack from a seated pose, could leap to her feet, kick, sweep, punch, or move quickly to one side. It didn't always look pretty but it worked, and that was the point. In silat, the object was to get the job done, not strike attractive poses for anybody watching.

She looked up and saw Alex walk into the gym carrying his bag. She raised her eyebrows in surprise. She hadn't expected him to come in for class today, not given all the crap going on with the spy thing.

"I didn't think I'd see you here," she said.

"Me neither," he said. "But there's not much else I can do about things at lunch. Everybody I'd want to talk to will be out and I hate to interrupt somebody trying to grab a quick bite. Besides, exercise tends to clear out the cobwebs. I'll get dressed, see you in a minute."

He headed into the locker room, and Toni went back to limbering up. Poor Alex. He took all this so personally, as if everything that happened was all his fault. She fielded as much of it as she could, tried to take care of him, but she couldn't shortstop all of the crap that landed on his desk.

Of course, given her choice, she would be able to make his life a lot more relaxed away from work. He needed somebody to take care of him, to rub his back, to fix him a drink before dinner, to—

— screw his brains out?

Toni smiled. Well, yes. That too. That wasn't likely to happen. He was still faithful to his ex-wife, at least as far as Toni knew. It was both an admirable and a frustrating trait in him. Although she had certainly seen how he looked at Joanna Winthrop, with her drop-dead good looks and bedroom eyes, and that had made Toni's belly knot in cold fear. How could you compete with a woman who had a face that would launch a thousand ships, a body to match, and who was as bright as a thousand-watt bulb to boot? Hardly fair, her being beautiful and smart.

Toni blew out a sigh. She could hardly blame him if he wanted to chase the beautiful lieutenant, could she? Alex didn't feel for Toni the way Toni felt for him. She loved him, and even so, even so, she had stumbled. Of course, that one-night stand with Rusty had been a big mistake. She'd repaired it as best she could immediately after it had happened, and he was dead now, so nobody knew about it and nobody ever would. Except her. She knew. She was in love with her boss, but she had slept with another man. How could she get around that? It felt awful.

Toni threw an elbow at an imaginary opponent. Too bad she couldn't control her love life as easily as she could a physical attack. Life would be much easier. Get into a fight with a would-be partner and throw him, then he'd be yours forever.

Too bad it wasn't that easy.

Alone, Hughes drove to one of his safe houses for the meeting with Platt.

There was always business that couldn't be handled longdistance, just as in Guinea-Bissau, and one needed places to conduct such business away from curious eyes.

This hideaway was a basic third-floor single-bedroom apartment deep in the bowels of one of the new monster apartment complexes just over the District line, in Maryland. The complex was part of the extended bedroom community that had come to surround the nation's capital, accreting slowly over the years at first, then suddenly metastasizing like some architectural cancer, expanding in huge pressed-wood, ticky-tacky lumps and clots in all directions. Such places were the modern equivalent of tar-paper shacks — although probably not as sturdy.

Here was one of these cheap constructions, the River View Province. Three stories high, a thousand units strong, less than six months old, it was a perfect place to hold clandestine meetings. Nobody knew their neighbors, and it was so large nobody noticed who came and went. It was between Colmar Manor and Bladensburg, just off SR 450, and if you were on the third floor in the unit Platt had rented, and if you stood in the kitchen sink and leaned out the window, you could indeed see the north fork of the Anacostia River — for what that was worth.

Hughes drove a rental car, a small, plain gray Dodge something or the other that looked just like a million other cars on the road. He might as well have been wearing a cloak of invisibility for all he was likely to be noticed. He wasn't likely to run into anybody he knew out here, and he wasn't going to be recognized by anybody except a political junkie, none of whom would see him and Platt together in any event.

He wended his way through the vast parking lot, got lost when he took a wrong turn at one of the stupidly named and numbered lanes — Catbird 17—then finally arrived at the assigned parking slot for his apartment. He pulled the car into the space and shut the motor off. He looked around. Cold, clear, nobody around except some big guy walking a pair of brown and black German Shepherds on long wind-up leashes. The dogs snuffled the air, looking back and forth, keenly alert and searching for wolves to bark at. How could you live with two dogs that big in one of these little places? The poor guy must spend half his day walking those monsters; otherwise they'd eat all his furniture and wear holes in the carpet. Hughes liked dogs, and though he didn't have time for one now, maybe he'd get a whole pack when he got set up. He'd have the room, and the time to fool with them.

He took the elevator to the third level, headed down the hall to the unit, opened the door with a plastic keycard, and stepped quickly inside.

Platt was already there. He stood in the kitchenette, and he had what looked like a plastic bag full of ice cubes pressed against the right side of his head. The big man had scratches and a brush burn on one cheek, and the knuckles on both hands were torn and crusted with flecks of dried blood.

"What the hell happened to you?"

Platt grinned, and moved the bag of ice away from his head. "I had me a little ar-gu-ment with one of our underprivileged black brothers. He clipped me a good one on the side of the head. You want to ice something like that down pretty quick, otherwise you wind up with a cauliflower ear. I'm too pretty to let myself get to lookin' like some punch-drunk ole boxer."

Hughes stared. "You were supposed to keep a low profile. You weren't supposed to draw attention to yourself."

"Didn't get no notice to speak of. Boy lost a couple teeth, maybe got a broke rib or two, he'll be just fine in a week or three. Probably didn't even go to the hospital. Shoot, any wog dentist could put them teeth back in. I left before the po-lice showed up, if they ever did. It was just a little ole dance, nothin' much. He moved pretty good, we had us a fun time."

A man who got into fights for fun. Platt was surely crazy.

"You got somethin' for me?" Platt said.

Hughes removed a thick manila envelope from his briefcase and tossed it at Platt, who caught it one-handed.

"There's twenty thousand in there, all in used hundreds."

"That ought to keep pork chops on the table for a couple weeks," Platt said.

"Just be sure and get that list from the NSA satellite clerk."

"Yeah, I'm looking forward to those codes. I'mon be able to get HBO for free."

Hughes shook his head.

"You see ‘em runnin' around like chickens with their heads cut off over at Langley? Bet we get ourselves a new CIA Director real damn quick." Platt laughed.

"The spy list did create quite a stir," Hughes allowed. "But we've got to keep the pressure up."

"No problem. Japanese Stock Exchange codes go out in the mornin', and the flight information for the Hijos del Sol cartel's cocaine shipments gets fed to their main rivals, Hermanos Morte, tomorrow afternoon. It'll be knee-deep in blood and snowing the Devil's Dandruff all over Colombia before it gets good and dark. DEA is gonna be having kittens down there trying to figure out what's what."

"What about the banks?"

"I got some stuff coming out on Wednesday. Nothin' big, just a couple of thousand East Coast ATMs going wonky, givin' out beaucoup cash to anybody who uses a smartcard. Be real interesting to see how much of it gets turned back in."

"All right. Anything else I need to know?"

"Nope. I got me an appointment with a masseuse this afternoon. She's gonna relieve my tensions allll over."

Hughes shook his head again. Platt didn't know it, but he'd been under surveillance for six weeks, by a very discreet — and very expensive — investigative firm hired to keep tabs on him. Since Hughes trusted the big man about as far as he could throw him one-handed, he thought it wise to make sure Platt wasn't playing any games he shouldn't be playing. No doubt Hughes would hear from his hired operatives about the street fight later. As he would hear about the "masseuse" who came to minister to Platt's needs.

The woman would be black, of course. They always were.

Platt had availed himself of outcall massage services fourteen times in the last six weeks; had sampled the wares of half-a-dozen prostitutes in Guinea-Bissau during his stay there, along with a streetwalker working the airport during his long stopover in Cairo. All had been black women, more than twenty of them. He did not mistreat any of the trulls, as far as Hughes's investigators could determine, nor was he interested in anything other than heterosexual-style relations, no whips or chains or funny clothes.

Platt's racism was apparently not wide enough to encompass females of African heritage. A wonderful dichotomy, Platt. He would beat up a black man in the morning, then fornicate with a black woman in the afternoon. Hypocrisy was such a wonderful thing. The world wouldn't be able to run without it.

"All right," Hughes said, "I'll call when I have something else for you."

"I hear you," Platt said. "See you later, alligator."

Chapter Eight

The Senate meeting room was too warm by at least five degrees, which certainly didn't help Alex Michaels feel any less sweaty. He sat on the hot seat at the table reserved for victims of the inquisition — more euphemistically known as "witnesses called to give testimony" — facing the panel of senators, whose dais was raised high enough so there was no doubt who was in charge. That had to be, in a society that equated height with superiority. Next to Michaels sat Glenn Black, one of the FBI's top legal eagles. The two of them, backed by a gallery of other witnesses and interested watchers, faced the eight senators of Robert White's Governmental Finance Oversight Subcommittee.

Net Force's budget was the only item on today's docket, and after a pretense at politeness, the charge, led by White, was in full attack.

It was going to be a long day.

Michaels hated this part of his job, sitting in front of committees whose members might — and usually did — range from idiotic to brilliant, but who almost never knew what was really going on about much of anything. No matter how smart, the senators were at the mercy of their staff people who supplied them with information. While some of those on various staffs were pretty sharp, they were usually limited in what they could find out. A lot of agencies were reluctant to be totally forthcoming when called for information that might whittle away at their budget for the next fiscal year. What the senators got from their people was generally on a par with reporting on the six o'clock news. Like a rock skipping across the surface of a pond, only the information that was in easy view was even touched upon, and that only briefly. The depths below were hidden and, for all practical purposes, inaccessible.

Being ignorant of the truth never stopped men like Senator White, however. And while he wasn't the dimmest bulb on the string, his wattage was hardly what you would call blinding on his best day.

"Commander Michaels, what exactly are you trying to tell this committee? That Net Force doesn't care if some nut makes public information about how to build bombs that kill young newlywed girls?"

"No, sir, Senator White, I did not say that." Michaels was beginning to get pissed off, and his reply was a little more clipped and sharp than it ought to be. Black leaned over, put his hand over Michaels's microphone, and whispered, "Take it easy, Alex, it's only eight-thirty. We're going to be here all day. He's just playing to C-SPAN's cameras and the audience at home."

Michaels nodded, and under his breath said, "He's a fool."

"So when did that become a liability for holding public office?"

Michaels grinned. Glenn was right. It was going to be a long session; no point in losing his temper. Michaels usually kept a low profile at these things, and that was considered a good idea. Let them rant. When it came to the actual vote, the sound and fury before didn't count for much. He knew that. Still…

White went on: "It sounds to me as though you're saying that Net Force has more important fish to fry, Commander. And I have to tell you, sir, from where I sit, your oil doesn't seem hot enough by half."

He must have a new speech writer, Michaels thought. Somebody trying to downplay his rich man image and give him a little folksy touch. Good luck, writer boy.

Michaels knew that his boss, Walt Carver, the Director of the FBI, was in the audience behind him. So far, Carver had been able to keep White at bay, using his network and ties from when he'd been in the Senate, but White was getting more aggressive all the time. At the very least, Michaels had to put on a decent performance while on the hot seat, and not embarrass himself or the Bureau.

"I'm sure I don't know as much about oil as the honorable senator from the state of Ohio does."

Michaels hadn't really planned to say that, it just kind of slipped out. There were a few chuckles. It was a small dig at White's wealth, some of which had come from petroleum shipping, a business run by his grandfather.

White frowned. Michaels held his smile in check. Maybe it wasn't smart to pull the lion's tail, especially when the lion had you in the cage with it, but it sure felt good.

"There seem to be some serious problems in your organization," White said. He shuffled through some hardcopy. "We are talking about issues of national security, about which I will not speak in public, but these are grave matters that Net Force is failing to address properly." He looked at Michaels. "What is the point in funding an agency that doesn't do its job, Commander Michaels?"

"I'm sure, Senator, that you know much more about agencies that don't do their job than I."

More laughter, but Michaels caught a warning look from Glenn, and it was easy enough to interpret: Easy, boy. Not smart to get into a fight with the man who controls the microphone. Especially not smart to make him look bad on TV. Michaels sighed. He had to watch his mouth. And even if he did, it was going to be a very long day.

A day's ride from Black Rock was the Western town of Dry Gulch. Jay Gridley hadn't been disposed to spend that much time in the scenario, so he'd logged in on the edge of town. Black Rock had been a bust, no sign of the bad guys, so Gridley had moseyed on.

It was close to high noon, and the sun hammered the bleached road so dry that clouds of reddish-gray dust hung in the windless air after every step his faithful steed Buck took. Just before he reached the outbuildings behind the blacksmith's shop and livery, Gridley took the U.S. marshal badge from his Levi's pocket and pinned it on his shirt. The silver gleamed brightly in the hard, actinic light. He didn't want anybody catching that mirror-shine on the trail, but in town he wanted the official muscle the badge offered.

Like Black Rock, Dry Gulch looked like a place from a Western cowboy vid, circa the mid-1870's. The main street — and the only street — was fairly wide, situated between rows of false-front shops. Here, among others, were the dust-spackled Tullis Good Eats Cantina, Dry Gulch General Store, Mabel's Dress Shop and Tailors, Honigstock & Honigstock Attorneys-at-Law, King Mortuary and Undertakers, the Dry Gulch Bank, the La Belle Saloon, and the sheriff's office and city jail.

Jay nodded and tipped his hat at an elderly woman in a long dress crossing the street. "Howdy, ma'am."

The old lady gave him a suspicious glare and hurried on, stepping onto the boardwalk next to the storefronts. The walk was a foot higher than the street, and that made sense. It probably flooded here during the infrequent rain, and you'd want to be above all that sudden mud.

A couple of boys chased barrel hoops down the dirty road, driving the flat metal rings with short sticks, laughing. A quail offered his song in the distance, not the usual "bob-white" whistle, but the more urgent "baby! baby! baby!" mating call.

Jay reined Buck up in front of the sheriff's office. A gray-whiskered old man sat on a wooden chair, whittling on a big stick with a jackknife. He looked like a miner, with a leather vest over a grubby red-and-black checkered shirt, tan once-upon-a-time canvas pants, and black boots.

The saddle gave out a leathery creak as Jay put all his weight into the left stirrup and dismounted. He wrapped Buck's reins around the horizontal hitching post.

The old man spat a foul-looking brown stream at a lizard scurrying along the boardwalk looking no doubt for shade. Missed him by two feet.

"Missed ‘im, damn," the old man said. He had a voice that sounded as if it had been soaked in a barrel of whiskey, then pickled in heavy brine, and then left out in the desert for thirty or forty years.

Jay nodded at the old man and started for the door. His boots clumped on the boardwalk.

"You lookin for the shurf, he ain't around," the old man said.

Jay stopped. "Where would I find him?"

"Boot Hill!" The old man cackled until the laugh turned into a wheeze, then a cough. He spat more tobacco juice, but the lizard was already well out of range. "Damn, missed ‘im."

"There a deputy around?"

"Yep — planted right next to the shurf!" This brought on another round of cackling, wheezing, and coughing.

Must have been sitting here praying for a stranger so he could say that.

When he managed to get his breath back, the old man said, "The Thompson Brothers came to stick up the bank three days back. I ‘spect you bein' a marshal, you know who they are. They kilt two tellers, the shurf, and the deppity. Shurf got one of ‘em, and Old Lady Tullis blowed ‘nother one off n his horse as they were ridin' out, cut him down with that old 12-gauge coachgun she keeps behind the counter o' her cantina. Course that left three of ‘em still ridin' hellbent for leather, but they didn't get no money and they ain't likely to come back to this town real soon, nosiree Bob!"

"What's your name, old-timer?"

"Folks ‘round here call me Gabby."

I can't imagine why. "Well, Gabby, I'm trackin' down some shysters from back East. Bad hombres."

"Ain't been no tinhorns stop off here lately," Gabby said. "Maybe some passin' through on the stage. Wells Fargo office's down't'other end o' town." He pointed with the stick he'd been carving on. "Past the whorehouse there."

"I'm obliged, Gabby."

Jay walked back to Buck, mounted, and walked the horse toward the Wells Fargo office. He nodded again at Gabby. Of course, the old man could be a firewall. Might be the sheriff was snoozin' in his office, his feet propped up on his desk or in a cell bunk. Or maybe he was havin' a drink at the cantina or the La Belle, and Gabby had been posted there to stop any strangers lookin' to talk to the local law. Jay would check out the stagecoach office, check with the telegrapher — he saw the telegraph poles so he knew the town was wired — and if he didn't get anything there, he would circle back and bypass Gabby to be sure he was tellin' the truth.

Jay smiled. Who would have ever thought of a firewall as a tobacco-chewing, lyin' old fart who looked like a forty-niner?

Jay was almost to the Wells Fargo depot when a big, swarthy, black-haired man with a drooping handlebar mustache and a pair of holstered guns stepped out into the street in front of him. "Hold up there, pard."

There was a definite air of menace about the man, who wore a black suit over his boiled white shirt and tie, and a derby hat instead of a cowboy hat.

Jay looked at the man. The guns he wore weren't Colt.45 Peacemakers like Jay's; they looked like Smith & Wesson Schofield.44's, top-loaders with seven-inch barrels. Powerful and accurate, damn fine weapons, but slow from the holster. When it came to fast draws, size mattered. Shorter was better…

Jay dismounted and led his horse to another hitching post, this one next to the whorehouse. Four horses were already there. There were three large windows on the second story of the big house, and three or four pretty women in colorful petticoats and underwear leaned out of the open windows to look down at the two men in the street. Jay tipped his hat to the women. "Afternoon, ladies," he called out.

The women tittered. One of them waved. "Come on up, Marshal!"

Jay grinned, then turned back to face the man in the derby hat. He moved away from his horse so Buck wouldn't be directly behind him. "What can I do for you, amigo?" Jay said.

"Fact is, I don't like lawmen. I think mebbe you need to turn around and head back where you came from." The big man cleared his coat back from his holstered revolvers. "It would be good for your health."

"You got a name?" Jay said.

"Name is Bartholomew Dupree. Folks call me Black Bart," the man said.

Well, of course they do.

Jay dropped his hand next to the butt of his Colt. "Sorry, Bart, I got business at the stage depot. Why don't you just stand aside and let me pass?"

"Can't do that, Marshal." He waggled his fingers, loosening them.

Definitely a firewall, and a tough one. So Jay was on the right track; his quarry had passed this way. And he wasn't about to give up because there was a roadblock. Lonesome Jay Gridley hadn't gotten to where he was by accident. He was the best.

"Make your play then," Jay said.

Bart went for his guns. He was fast — but Jay was faster. The.45 spoke a hair before the twin.44's, a throaty roar, belches of thick white smoke erupting around tongues of orange fire. Speckles of unburned propellant stung Jay's hand. He recocked the big single-action revolver, but it wasn't necessary. Bart dropped to one knee, guns falling from his suddenly nerveless fingers, then toppled to one side. Dust splashed from the street, joining the stink of black powder smoke.

Jay uncocked, then holstered his gun and walked over to where Bart lay on his side in the dirt. Got him right between the eyes, Jay noted with satisfaction.

Teach you to mess with Lonesome Jay. Pard.

He thought he heard music coming from the saloon behind him, a kind of echoing wah-wah-wah sound that was more synthesizer than upright piano. He grinned. Too many Eastwood movies when he'd been a kid.

A dark-haired man in a gray banker's suit and steel-rimmed spectacles came out of the arcade next to the house of ill repute and walked to where Jay stood looking down at the corpse. "Perhaps you might have need of my services, friend?" He tendered a business card. "Peter Honigstock, Attorney-at-Law," it said.

Jay turned so his marshal's badge was visible to the lawyer. "Nope. Just the undertaker."

"Ah," Honigstock said.

He turned back, nodded at the soiled doves in the whorehouse, then headed for the stage depot. And after that, he was gonna mosey on back to the sheriff's office and have a few words with old Gabby. The lyin' bastard.

Chapter Nine

In his study at home, John Howard leaned back in his chair, looked away from the terrain maps of the Pacific Northwest and glanced at his watch. He realized he was going to have to leave for the airport to pick up Nadine's mother in about five minutes. The idea of fighting rush hour traffic made him feel even more tired than he already felt, which was plenty tired enough.

He didn't know what the problem was, or why he was so worn out lately. He couldn't get a pump working the weights, was winded so bad after a couple miles into his usual run he had to slow down almost to a walk. And he wasn't sleeping real well either — dropping off early, tossing and turning all night, then waking up tired and groggy. What it felt like was overtraining, but he hadn't been working that hard, no more than maintenance stuff. And there wasn't anything pressing at work: some training exercises in the high desert in Washington state coming up, and some winter work in the snow, in the hills of West Virginia, in mid-January. Other than that, nothing.

Could he be getting old?

No, he was only forty-two. He knew guys ten years older who could run him into the ground; it couldn't be something that simple.

No? Some folks age faster than others, don't they, Johnny boy? Remember your twentieth high school reunion? Some of the guys you graduated with had so much gray hair and so many wrinkles they looked old enough to be your father. You'd pass them on the street, you'd never know who they were. Maybe your clock is running fast…

Howard shook his head. He didn't need to be going down that road, thank you very much. He didn't even have any gray hair yet, and he looked better than he had at twenty, with more muscle. Maybe he just needed some vitamins.

He pushed away from the chair and stood. It wasn't going to do anybody any good sitting here thinking about being old, not when his mother-in-law would turn into a black volcano spewing hot bile if he was late fetching her. That woman had a mean streak on her, and a mouth to go with it. He'd best get moving.

Nadine was in the kitchen, working on supper, and Howard started in that direction, to tell her he was fixin' to take off. Might as well stir up Tyrone while he was at it.

The boy was in his room. But instead of being glued to the computer chair as he usually was, he was lying on the bed, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling.

"You okay, son?"

"I'm fine."

"About time to go pick up Nanna."

Tyrone turned his head slightly. "I think I'll stay here."

"Excuse me?"

"I mean, I'll see Nanna when she gets here."

Howard stared at his son as if he had. suddenly sprouted horns and a tail. Not go to pick up his grandmother? What happened to the boy who used to chant, "Nanna! Nanna! Nanna!" over and over, bouncing all over the car the entire way to the airport? Who'd practically knocked the old bat down, hugging her and dancing around like he was demented?

"She'll wonder where you are."

"She's gonna be here for a week."

It was that girl, of course. Girls turned boys into adolescent beasts struggling to crawl out of a mud pit of raging hormones. And Tyrone was officially a teenager now, becoming quiet, sullen, withdrawn, and about as communicative as a fence post.

"You can have your calls forwarded—" Howard began.

Abruptly, Tyrone sat up, then stood. "I'm going to the mall," he said.

Howard felt a stab of anger. "Wait just a second, mister. You don't tell me what you're doing; you ask."

Tyrone came to attention, executed a crisp, snappy salute, and said, "Yes, sir, Colonel Howard, sir!"

Rage enveloped Howard. He had to restrain himself from reaching out and slapping the boy. He was tired, he didn't feel great, and he was about to spend an hour and a half going to and from the airport to pick up a woman who had never liked him and who had never been shy about telling him he wasn't good enough for her daughter. What he sure as hell didn't need was lip from a kid who thought his old man was a fossil who'd ridden to school on the back of a grass-eating dinosaur.

For a few seconds, Howard didn't say anything. The rage abated just a hair as he remembered he'd once been young and stupid himself, sure that his parents couldn't begin to recall through their aged fog how it had been to be young. But even so, if he'd pulled his father's chain the way Tyrone had just pulled his…?

Howard had a temper. Once, when he'd been about six or seven, his little brother Richie had snuck up behind him while they were playing cowboys and Indians and clonked him on the head with the butt of his toy revolver, to knock him out like they did on television. It hadn't knocked him out, but it had sure pissed him off. He'd bellowed like an angry buffalo, turned around, and chased Richie across the street toward their house, fully intending to brain the little bastard when he caught him.

Their father, who'd been in the front yard trimming the azalea bushes, had heard Richie screaming and moved between him and Howard.

"What's going on here?" his father had said.

And Howard, eyes and mind blurred with killing rage, had yelled something supremely stupid: "Get out of my way!" and then swung his own toy gun at his father's legs to move him aside.

The next thing he remembered, he was lying on the ground, looking up into the warm summer afternoon, wondering how he had gotten there. The old man had cuffed him upside the head and straightened him out instantly.

Howard, who had never raised a hand to Tyrone, now knew how his father must have felt. He offered a silent apology to the old man. Sorry, Pop.

And Tyrone, who up until lately had been a model son, looked down at the floor and said, "Sorry, Pop," echoing Howard's thoughts.

Adolescent angst. Think back, John. Remember how it was that nobody understood how you felt, nobody could possibly know how you felt.

"All right, forget it. I'll get Nanna, you go ahead to the mall. She'll understand."

He saw the boy take it in, think about it. Loyalty to his grandmother warred with his infatuation for his girlfriend.

This time, loyalty won.

"No, I'll go with you to the airport. If I don't, Nanna will blame you." He grinned.

Howard returned the grin. There Tyrone was. Back, for at least a moment.

Nadine, with the instincts of a wife and mother sensing trouble, drifted into the doorway. "Hey, you two. Everything okay back here?"

Howard turned to look at his wife, still the most beautiful woman he'd ever known, more so after fifteen years of marriage. "Everything is just fine," he said.

At least for now, it was. But Tyrone was only thirteen. They had six more years of this to look forward to.

Lord, Lord.

Naked, Platt lay on his stomach on the bed in the little hotel on C Street, not far from the Library of Congress. A woman, who was also naked, straddled the small of his back, leaning into her hands, pushing and digging into the muscles of his neck and shoulders, the traps and delts. Her thighs and crotch felt warm against his skin.

She actually gave a pretty good massage, which was unusual for outcall girls. Most of ‘em just gave a few half-assed wipes with their fingertips, maybe a little scratchy-scratch with their nails, but this girl was putting something into it. He'd give her a good tip for that. She was tall, a little thin, no tits, but a great ass. And her hands were a lot stronger than you'd guess by lookin' at her.

"Damn, honey, you hard as a rock," she said, pressing hard with her thumbs into the trigger points just under the scapulas. It hurt, but it was a good kind of hurt.

"You ain't seen the half of it, baby," he said. "Wait till I roll over."

She laughed. "Yeah, I noticed you pretty big, for a white boy." She wasn't talking about his muscles. "What line of work you in, Mr. Platt?"

"I'm an expediter," he said. "For a big import/export business. I travel a lot. Get to travel all over the world, make things happen."

"That a fact? I always wanted to go overseas. Never been out of the country. I always wanted to go to Japan."

Her hands felt damn good on his neck as she kneaded the tight muscles there. "Uh-huh," he said. "You don't want to go back to Africa? See your homeland?"

"Sheeit, what I want to do that for? There's plenty of black folks in this country."

He laughed. He liked her. "Maybe next time I get to Japan, I'll bring you back a souvenir."

"I'd like that. A nice red silk kimono."

Platt rolled over. She lifted a little, then settled back down over his legs when he got turned. He grinned at her. "One red silk kee-moan-oh, no problem."

"My, would you look at that?" she said. She flashed even, white teeth, bright against her chocolate skin. "What do we have here?" She reached down. He slid his hands around under her butt and lifted her slightly. Hel-looo, baby!

In his office, Hughes finished a synopsis of what he wanted White to say at his meeting with the vice president tomorrow before White went back to Ohio for the holidays.

There was a knock at the door. Speak of the devil.

"Bob?"

"I thought I'd find you still here," White said. He sauntered into the office and put a small package onto the desk. "Christmas present. You didn't think I'd forget, did you?"

Hughes smiled. "Now how could I think, that, Bob? I wrote the reminder in your day log myself."

Both men laughed.

Hughes reached into the drawer, pulled out a Christmas-wrapped box, and handed it to White. It was hard to buy stuff for a millionaire who bought himself whatever he fancied, but Hughes always worked to find something unusual. And he knew White loved being surprised.

"Can I open it?" Just like a kid.

"Sure."

Eagerly, the senator ripped off the green and red foil and pulled the lid from the box. He removed what looked like a small leather candy dish mounted on a wooden stand from the box. Inside the leathery cup was a game infoball, an iridescent, silvery orb the size of a marble, made to be slipped into a SonySega PlayStation, a device that White had owned since the first ones had come out. He looked at Hughes and raised one eyebrow.

"That's the beta-test full-VR version of DinoWarz II," Hughes said. "Won't be generally available for a few more months."

"Really? Wow, thanks, Tom! How'd you get it?"

"I have a few contacts in the right places."

White rolled the ball in his fingers, and Hughes could see he was itching to run home and play the game. The senator looked at the container. "This a candy dish? Looks unusual."

"It's a plastic-coated bull scrotum," Hughes said.

"What? You're kidding."

"Nope. I can think of a few people you might want to offer peppermints to from it."

White laughed and shook his head. "Well, I'll be taking the family jet home in the morning. You need a ride anywhere?"

"Nope. I'm hanging around here, finally be able to get some work done with you out of the way."

They laughed again.

"Guess I better open my present now," Hughes said.

He did so. Inside was a carved ivory figurine, seven or eight inches long, a woman stretched out, lying on her side, propped on one elbow. Hughes knew what it was. It was a Chinese medical doll. Once upon a time in China, women of breeding never let any man but their husbands see them unclad, sometimes not even their husbands. When they needed to see a doctor, they took the doll with them. When the doctor asked where the pain was, they showed him on the figurine, and he made his diagnosis based on that and symptoms, without ever seeing or touching his patient's body. Knowing White, Hughes figured this statuette was probably worth a fortune. The work was exquisite.

Hughes made appropriate noises. "It's beautiful, Bob. Thank you."

"Well, it isn't a bull scrotum, but it's the best I could do. It belonged to some emperor's wife or concubine, I forget which. Bertha's got the documentation on it. She'll give it to you after we get back from the holidays."

"I appreciate it, I truly do. Working with you has been so beneficial to me, I can't begin to tell you how much."

That was surely the truth.

"I couldn't have ever gotten the job without you, Tom. Merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas," Hughes said. And with any luck at all, the New Year will be my best ever — though it might be your worst, when the shit hits the fan…

Chapter Ten

Alex Michaels wanted to keep the staff meeting short so they could get back to their desks. With Christmas only a few days away, not much work was getting done as everybody geared up to go off for the holidays. The office didn't shut down, of course, there was always a skeleton staff, but anybody not stuck with that duty who wanted to take off early could do so. He looked around the conference room, at his primary players: Toni, Jay, Howard, and Joanna Winthrop. They were all senior enough, except for Joanna, and she was working out of Howard's command, so they didn't have to stick around here for Christmas.

"Okay, that pretty much covers the basics. You all know this poster business is critical, so take your flatscreens and if you get any bright ideas, log them in for the rest of us."

He already knew their plans, and no matter where they were, they'd keep grinding away at this thing. Toni was going home to the Bronx for a week's visit with her family. She'd be back next Wednesday. Jay's parents were visiting relatives in Thailand, so he was hanging around the city and would probably would spend much of the time here at HQ. Howard had relatives visiting. He'd be in town. Joanna was going to meet an old friend at a mountain cabin in Colorado. She'd be back Monday. And Michaels was going to Boise to see Susie. And Megan too.

There was a case of mixed emotions.

"Anybody got anything new?"

Jay said, "Well, I came across some interesting statistics in the new Murray Morbidity and Mortality Report. According to the MMMR, life expectancy for men in Washington, D.C., is the lowest of any metropolitan area in the country. In fact, it's lower than any rural area too, except for a couple of counties in South Dakota. Sixty-three years. Whereas if you live in Cache County, Utah, you can expect to live fifteen years longer, a ripe old seventy-eight. And you can add eight or ten years to both those numbers if you're a woman."

"I bet it feels a lot longer in Washington," Howard said.

"I don't know," Toni said. "Have you ever been in Utah?"

"Yeah," Jay said. "I think maybe they all get too bored to die."

Michaels smiled. "Fascinating. Anything that might relate to what we do in this agency, Jay?"

"Nope. I got through the poster's firewalls, but the trail petered out, a dead-end in a box canyon. I haven't been able to draw a bead on him since."

"Yee-haw," Joanna said quietly.

"Excuse me?" Alex asked.

"Private joke," she said. "Sorry."

"All right. That's it. If one of you catches the poster before we take off for the holiday, I'd bet big that Santa Claus will put something nice in your stocking, a Presidential Commendation at the least."

"Oh, boy," Jay said. "A new floor for my parakeet's cage."

"I didn't know you had a parakeet," Toni said.

"I don't, but for that, I'd get one."

"Somebody has to represent the agency at the L.A.W. convention in Kona on the Big Island in February," Michaels said.

"Me! Me!" Jay said. "Send me!"

"Catch us a crook and you can work on your tan."

Joanna chuckled.

"What's funny?" Jay asked.

"Nothing. I'm just imagining myself on that black sand beach I've heard about."

"Don't pack your bikini just yet," Jay said.

"No? Well, I wouldn't start buying Coppertone in bulk either, if I were you."

"I think that's got it," Michaels said. "Back to work."

As the meeting broke up, Sergeant Julio Fernandez arrived. He nodded at Michaels, and moved to talk to Colonel Howard, where the senior officer stood talking to Lieutenant Winthrop.

"Colonel. Lieutenant."

"Sarge," Howard said.

Michaels caught a quick glimmer of something on Fernandez's face when he looked at the young woman. Well. He could understand how the sergeant might appreciate Winthrop.

Back at their offices, Toni approached Alex. "Got a minute?"

"Sure."

In his office, she produced a small package, wrapped and decorated with a red bow. "Merry Christmas," she said.

"Thank you. Can I open it now?"

"Nope. Got to wait until Susie opens her gifts. You'll want this then."

"Ah, intrigue. All right, I'll wait. Here, I got you a little something." He opened his desk drawer and removed a flat box, this one wrapped in the hardcopy Sunday cartoon section of the Arlington newspaper.

She smiled at the wrapping, hefted it. "Book?"

"Go ahead and open it."

She did, carefully peeling the tape from the edges and unfolding the colorful newsprint.

"You going to save the paper, Toni?"

"Sorry. Old habit." She got to the book. "Oh, wow."

It was a 1972 first edition of Donn F. Draeger's The Weapons and Fighting Arts of Indonesia.

"Where did you find this? It's a classic." She flipped through the pages, again with care, looking at the black-and-white illustrations. "I've never seen an original, only the on-demand-print and CD versions."

He shrugged. "Picked it up somewhere. I thought you might like it."

Yes, he had "picked it up somewhere," all right. He'd had a bookseeker service hunting for six weeks for the thing, and it had cost him a week's salary when they'd found it. Oh, well. He didn't spend a lot of money. Outside of his living costs and Susie's child support, his only hobby was the restoration of old cars. His current project was a Plymouth Prowler. That wasn't cheap, but when he finally finished and sold the car, he'd get all he'd spent back, and then some. The book had made a dent in his bank account, but Toni deserved it. He couldn't do his job without her. And the look on her face when she saw the thing was worth a lot too. He smiled.

Toni was about to close the book when she got to the title page. "Hey, it's autographed!"

"Oh, really? Huh. How about that?" That autograph had jacked the price of the book up a few hundred dollars.

Impulsively, she hugged him.

God, she felt good, pressed against him that way. She could stay there all day…

Toni pulled away and gave him a big grin. "Thanks. My gift is nothing compared to this. You shouldn't have."

He shrugged. "Hey, a big meteor could fall on me while I'm taking the trash out tomorrow and what good would money be? I really appreciate all you do around here, Toni."

There was a silence that started to get awkward. He said, "So, you're going home to see your folks?"

"Yes. There'll be a big gathering, all my brothers and sisters-in-law, and nieces and nephews, the uncles and aunts. Regular army of relatives." She paused. "I hope your visit with Susie goes okay."

"Yeah."

"Well, I'd better get back to work. Thanks again for the book, Alex."

"You're welcome."

Joanna Winthrop took advantage of the take-off-work-early offer from Commander Michaels to book a deadhead seat on an early military jet leaving from Quantico and stopping off in Denver on its way to Alaska. When she mentioned it to Colonel Howard, Sarge Fernandez had offered to take her to the flight.

"I can catch a cab," she'd said.

"No problem, Loot, I'm heading out that way anyhow, got some errands to run. I'll swing by and pick you up."

It did make it easier for her. "Sure."

So now she rode in the front seat of Fernandez's personal car, a slate-gray seventeen-year-old Volvo sedan. She smiled. "Funny, I'd have figured you for a little racier ride than this."

"It gets me there. Slow and steady. And it doesn't spend much time in the shop."

"Well, I appreciate the lift."

"No problem."

They rode in silence for a few minutes, but she was aware of him giving her small peripheral glances. Well. He was a man, and she knew that look.

He said, "You mind if I ask you something personal, Lieutenant?"

Oh, Jesus, here it comes, she thought. He's going to hit on me.

She'd had plenty of practice shutting male attention down when she wanted to. Although Fernandez had a certain Latin charm about him, it wouldn't be a good idea, a relationship. Even though the ranks were more quasi- than real-military in Net Force, and there wasn't a specific prohibition against fraternization as in the Regular Army, there was a difference in their respective statuses. So she could let him down gently. "Fire away."

"Has working with computers always been easy for you?"

Hmm. That wasn't what she expected. "Excuse me?"

"I've watched you. You're good at it, that goes without saying, but you make it look easy. I was just wondering if it was. Easy, I mean."

She thought about it for a second. She didn't want to sound egotistical, but the truth? "Yeah. I guess it does come without a lot of effort for me. Always has. I had a kind of affinity for it."

He shook his head. "I can strip a heavy machine gun and put it back together in the dark in a pouring rain, but when it comes to bits and bytes, I'm a techno-dweeb."

She laughed. Men so seldom admitted to their shortcomings, it was refreshing to hear.

"I mean, I've tried to learn, but I have this block, the information just bounces off, it doesn't sink in. I tried a class recently, but I had a… personality conflict with the instructor. I think he just recognized that I was as dumb as dirt and would never get it."

" ‘A thing can be told simply if the teller understands it properly.' "

"Excuse me?"

"George Turner, a writer I admired in college. You know how a computer works, basic theory?"

"Yeah. Well, actually… no."

"Okay. Let's say you're on guard duty, you're watching a door. You open it when somebody with the right password comes by, you close it if they don't have the password. You follow that?"

"Sure."

"Now you know how computers work. A door is open or it's closed. A switch is on or it is off. The answer is yes or no when somebody gets to the place you're standing guard. It happens fast, all the switching, but that's the base, and everything else links to that."

"No shit? Sorry, I mean—"

"No shit," she said.

"Damn. How come nobody ever put it that way before?"

"Because you've run into crummy teachers before. A good teacher uses terms a student can relate to, and she takes the time to learn what those terms are. When I was in college, I took a psych course. There was a story they told, about biased IQ tests for children. You know, you show a picture of a cup, and you show a saucer, a table, and a car, then you ask, what does the cup go with?"

"Yeah?"

"So in middle- and upper-class America, the kids with working brains all pick the saucer, because cups and saucers go together, right?"

"Right."

"But in the poor parts of town, cups might go with tables, because they don't have saucers. And among kids from homeless families, cup might go with car, because that's where the family lives."

"Economic bias," Fernandez said.

She nodded. He wasn't a dummy, no matter what he said. "Exactly. Same thing holds true for racial or religious or other kinds of cultural factors. So then everybody thinks these kids are stupid, and so they get a different level of teaching, when the real problem is on the other end, in the minds of the ed-ucators. Because they didn't take into account the students' knowledge as well as their own."

"I get it."

"There's nothing wrong with your mind. All you need is a teacher who can put things in terms you already know how to relate to. You're a soldier, find a soldier who knows computers, you can learn from him."

"Or her," Fernandez said.

"Or her." She looked at him. "Are you asking me to teach you?"

"I would be ever so grateful if you would," he said. Kept a straight face while saying it too.

She smiled. "This isn't some ploy to get next to me because you think I'm beautiful, is it, Fernandez?"

"No, ma'am. You have knowledge I don't have, and I'd like very much to learn it. This is part of my job and I'm not good at it. That bothers me. I don't need to be Einstein, but I do want to understand as much of it as I need to understand. I mean, yeah, you are beautiful, but what's more important here is that you're smart."

She blinked and looked at Fernandez in a new light. My God, if he was telling the truth, he admired her for her mind!

"We might be able to work something out. Come see me when the holidays are over."

"Yes, ma'am."

"And bag that. Call me Joanna."

"I'll answer to just about anything, but my friends call me Sarge or Julio."

"Julio it is."

She grinned again. Ooh, wait until Maudie hears about this!

Chapter Eleven

"Would you care for something to drink, sir?"

Alex Michaels looked up from the in-flight magazine, from an article on the construction of the world's tallest building, the new twin towers in Sri Lanka. The new structure would be, when finished, seventy feet taller than the second tallest building — which was also in Sri Lanka.

"Coke?" he said.

"Yes, sir." The flight attendant handed him a plastic cup of ice and one of the new biodegradable plastic cans of Coke. The can would keep for ten years, as long as it wasn't opened, but once fresh air hit the inside, the plastic would start to degrade. In nine months, it would be a powdery, non-toxic residue that would completely dissolve under the first rain that hit it. Throw the can on the ground, and in a year it would be gone.

The flight attendant moved to the next row of seats. Michaels poured the soft drink into his cup, then sat and watched it fizz and foam. He was in business class, the equipment was one of the big Boeing 777's, and he sat next to the wing door on the starboard side. He liked to get that seat when he could, next to the exit door. It always seemed that there was a little more room in the exit row, although that might have been his imagination. The main thing was, if there was trouble on the plane, he wanted to be in a position to do something.

He'd started asking for the exit row after a flight to Los Angeles when he'd seen an elderly man who might have weighed a hundred pounds sitting next to an emergency door. Yeah, the guy might get a burst of adrenaline under stress, so he could pop that door right open if the wheels collapsed on landing or some such, but Michaels didn't want to risk his life and the lives of the other passengers on that. Maybe the old guy would get a burst blood vessel instead. Then again, maybe the old guy was like Toni's silat teacher, and there were hidden strengths there. Michaels knew he shouldn't be so judgmental. But still, better a fairly strong forty-year-old GS employee in front of that door than a seventy-year-old lightweight. Better odds for all concerned.

Of course, he'd rather fly first class too. A couple of times, he had gotten agency upgrades on official business, and it was more comfortable, but he could never justify the expense when it came to personal flights. The way he figured it, the back of the plane got there at the same time as the front did, all things going as planned, and to cough up several hundred dollars extra for cloth napkins and complimentary champagne seemed excessive.

There was enough time for an in-flight movie before they got to Denver, where Michaels had to switch planes for Boise. The airlines had gotten a lot better about not losing luggage, but he wasn't taking any chances. He had his single soft-side roller tucked into the overhead compartment, along with Susie's main Christmas gift, a band/vox synthesizer. Apparently she had discovered a kind of music called technometo-funk, which was all the rage among the kids. Michaels tastes ran to jazz fusion, classic rock, 40's big band, or even long-haired classical. He hadn't followed new-wave pop stuff for years. He knew he was getting old when he read the news, saw the Billboard Top Ten list, and realized he didn't recognize the names of any of the songs, or the artists who performed them. Who could take seriously a song called "Mama Moustache Mama Sister," by somebody who called himself "HeeBee-JeeBeeDeeBeeDoo?" Or "Bunk Bunk!" by "DogDurt"?

With the synthesizer, Susie could supposedly program herself into any group, then hear and see herself performing on stage with them. It seemed like an advanced toy for somebody her age, but it was what she wanted. It had been a bitch to find one too. Apparently every other kid in the country had to have one of the things. Fortunately, Toni had found one, so he could be a hero to his daughter.

Toni did that a lot, made him look good.

He looked at the screen built into the back of the seat in front of him, a screen that could be angled for viewing so that even if the person sitting in that row decided to lean back all the way, you could still see it. No. He didn't feel like watching a movie, playing video VR, or monitoring the progress of his flight via a little animation of a jet flying along over a map. It was nice just to sit with a magazine in his lap and gaze out at the cold ground below. Fortunately, the weather was clear, and the Ohio landscape below, much of it covered with snow, sparkled white in the setting sun.

It was going to be midnight, East Coast time, when he landed in Boise, assuming he made his connection and the flight went as scheduled. Ten p.m. in that part of Idaho. He had a rental car reserved at the airport, and a room booked at the Holiday Inn, not far from the house where his daughter and ex-wife lived. Where they had once all lived together. There was a spare bedroom in the big old clunky two-story house, two if you counted the sewing room, but Megan hadn't offered and he hadn't asked. The armistice between Alex and his ex was uneasy. She was a sniper, quick to shoot and too accurate for his comfort. Better to have a safe house where he could hole up and gather his forces for the battle. There was a lot to be said for a nice quiet Holiday Inn, with room service and a double lock on the door.

He wondered how many other people thought about holidays in such a fashion? As an ugly guerrilla war to be waged quick and dirty and retreated from as soon as possible? Why did unhappy families gather, if it made them so miserable? A lot of people he knew would just as soon cancel the big holidays and keep their families at a safe distance…

In his case, however, the answer was easy: Susie. Whatever else, she needed to know she had a mother and father who both loved her and wanted her to be happy, even if they couldn't be happy with each other.

Certainly this wasn't something he had ever foreseen for himself when he'd been courting Megan, when they'd been young, in love, with the world by the tail, so full of themselves they could never envision failing at anything, much less their marriage. Ah, the arrogance of youth, when you knew everything, and didn't care who knew you knew everything, since you were willing to tell them all about it at great length if they blinked at you.

Boy, that had been a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

Maybe he could get some sleep. Just lean over against that cool plastic window with one of the little puffy pillows, and turn it all off.

There was an idea that had much appeal.

The car was small, black, and looked like an old Fiat. The driver heard the siren behind him and pulled over, next to a row of small shops that appeared to be closed. There was a shoe store with a Nike swoosh on the glass, and an electronics store with small television sets in the window. The words on the storefronts looked to be German or Austrian, maybe Croat.

The Fiat's door opened and a smallish man in a long, dark coat stepped out of the car. He had his hands up next to his shoulders, to show he was unarmed. The sun was bright, but the street seemed deserted save for him.

A pair of policemen approached the Fiat, pistols drawn. The uniforms they wore had that Middle European look, odd-shaped billed caps with checkering on the front, leather jackets over dark blue shirts and ties, and dark blue trousers with a yellow seam-stripe on the outside of the legs. One of the cops moved to stand in front of the small man in the long coat; the other cop checked out the car.

The first cop gestured with the gun and said something. The small man turned around and put his hands on top of the Fiat, and the cop patted him down. No weapons.

The second cop talked into a small com, but kept his pistol pointed in the Fiat driver's direction. Second cop listened to the com for a moment. He nodded at the first cop, and said something.

The small man leaning against the car shoved away from it, swung his elbow up, hitting the cop behind him in the face, and knocking him down. The small man ran. The second cop darted around the front of the Fiat, raised his pistol, and fired — four, five, six times. The gun belched orange fire and white smoke, and the empty shells showered the car. The brass hulls glinted in the bright sunshine like gold coins as they bounced and dropped to the sidewalk.

The small running man fell, face-down on the street. He moved his arms and legs, as if spastically trying to swim on the concrete.

The cop who had been elbowed in the nose recovered. He moved to where the small man lay on the street. He pointed his pistol at the back of the downed man's head. He fired. The little man spasmed one more time, then went limp.

Thomas Hughes blew out a big sigh, then froze the recording's image. The two cops stood over the dead man — and there was no doubt he was dead, a bullet to the back of the head from three feet away sure as hell did that.

Man. They just executed that poor sucker. And all of it caught on the surveillance cam mounted on the dashboard of the police car.

Hughes leaned back in his chair and looked at the frozen holoprojection. He felt a flash of regret, but he buried it. The man was a spy, he had known there were risks. He'd had to know what might happen to him if he got caught.

Of course, he probably hadn't thought his name would be stolen from a top-secret list nobody was supposed to have access to and posted to the net so anybody who bothered to look would know who he was.

Hughes had gotten the recording from one of his spies — actually one working for Platt. And it was brutal to watch, a man getting murdered like that. It turned your stomach, made you queasy.

But there it was. You couldn't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. It was necessary. What were a few spies, easily replaced, compared to the long-range goals Hughes had in mind? Not much, not really. The end in this case surely justified the means. People died every day. A handful more wouldn't make a difference in the grand scheme of things.

The new Quayle addition to the Senate office building where White had his offices was nearly empty. Not a lot of people were working at this hour on the day before Christmas Eve. Hughes assumed that the other Senate office buildings — the Russell, the Dirkson, the Hart — were also, mostly deserted, save for security and cleaning personnel, with maybe a few young staff members trying to make points while everybody else was off for the holidays. Not much official work got done from early December on into the new year, but a lot of groundwork did get laid.

White had once had offices in the Hart Building, back when they'd still had that ugly modern-art sculpture of cut-out metal, Mountains and Clouds or some such, in the atrium. The staff on the upper floors had spent a lot of time sailing paper airplanes down to land on top of the sculpture. They'd had contests to see who could get the most to hit and stay.

He sighed again. The stakes were high, and the cards had to be played correctly or the game would be lost. It was a pity about this agent, and about the others who would be imprisoned or maybe killed, but there was no way around it. There was a lot of inertia to overcome to get something as big as he had in mind to move — a lot. This spy was the first, but he wouldn't be the last who had to die for Hughes's plan to go forward. It was too bad, but that was how it was. In this world, you could be a hunter or the hunted, and sheep were prey for wolves, plain and simple. It was the first law of the jungle — the strong survive at the expense of the weak.

And Thomas Hughes was a survivor.

He saved the recording into a file for White to look at later, then started to wave the computer off. He'd done enough here for the day. Time to go home, order in some takeout, and have a glass of wine and a nice hot bath. Maybe he'd lift a glass to the poor operatives who had to suffer for his scheme. Why not? It wouldn't cost him anything.

His com cheeped. It was the secret number, rerouted though something like sixteen satellite bounces so it couldn't be traced to him.

He checked the scrambler to be sure it was on, even though it was automatic on this number, and clicked on the vox-altering circuit, picking Old Lady for the latter. Whoever was on the other end would hear what sounded like a ninety-year-old woman talking.

"Hello?" he said.

There was silence for a moment.

"Who's there?" Hughes said.

"I have some information concerning certain… shipments."

Hughes knew who it was. A mid-level manager at the National Security Agency, a man with top secret clearance, but a man who had a secret gambling problem and was deep in the hole to his bookies. His voice was altered too. Hughes had been waiting for the man to come up with something for him. The gambler didn't know who he was speaking to. "Go on."

"It concerns some volatile… minerals."

"I'm still listening."

"I need fifty thousand."

Hughes could almost hear the man sweating. "How much of the… volatile substance are we talking about?"

"Nineteen pounds. In four packages. On the same day."

Hughes considered that in amazement for a moment. Nineteen pounds of weapons-grade plutonium was being moved at the same time? Certainly not by the same agency inside the U.S., even broken into that many sub-critical-mass chunks. The NRC and NSA would have kittens if somebody did something that stupid. But he had to check.

"This is domestic movement?"

"Of course not. Two are, two are foreign. Six pounds, seven pounds, four, and two."

"When?"

"In two days. You want the particulars or not?"

"Fifty thousand, you said."

"Yes. In cash. Nothing bigger than a hundred."

"All right. I'll have somebody meet you at the place, tonight, nine p.m. Bring the information."

Hughes broke the connection. He hadn't planned to escalate things quite this much, this fast, but when something like this fell into your lap, you grabbed it and ran with it.

He tapped his com. Platt answered right away.

"Yeah?"

"Swing by here."

Platt said, "When?"

"Now."

He would give Platt the money and send him to fetch the information. Anybody with access to some explosives, a good metal shop, and some electronics from Radio Shack could build an atomic bomb, but without the right fissionable material it was nothing more than a mildly dangerous science project. There were a lot of groups out there who would pay millions to get their hands on nineteen pounds of weapons-grade plutonium. You didn't need that much to build yourself a nice and dirty little nuclear bomb. It would make a helluva bang when you set it off.

Now he could really give Net Force something to think about.

Chapter Twelve

Toni climbed the familiar brownstone steps, steps that she had swept clean daily when she had been studying with Guru DeBeers. Somebody else must be doing the job now, for there was no snow or ice or dirt on them. The chicken-wire glass doors were closed and locked, but Toni still carried her well-worn key. She opened the door and stepped into the building. The hall was marginally warmer than it was outside.

Guru's apartment was the third one on the left. As she reached up to knock, the old woman's gravel-and-smoke voice came from within:

"Not locked, come in."

Toni grinned. Before she even knocked, Guru knew she was there. She was sure the woman was psychic.

Inside, the place looked as she remembered it from last year, and from her childhood. The old green couch with the needlepoint doily here, the overstuffed red plush chair with its needlepoint there, the short coffee table with one leg propped on an old Stephen King novel, all were in their usual places.

Guru was in the kitchen, crushing coffee beans in the little hand-powered grinder she had brought with her sixty years ago from Jakarta. She cranked the handle slowly and the smell of the beans, shipped to her by a distant relative who still lived in the highlands of Central Java, was sharp, rich, and earthy.

The two women faced each other. Toni pressed her hands together in front of her face and moved them down in front of her heart in a namaste bow, and Guru returned the greeting. Then they hugged.

At eighty-something years old, Guru was still brick-shaped and solidly built, but frailer and slower than she had been. As always, her clean and carefully set white hair smelled slightly of ginger, from the shampoo she used.

"Welcome home, Tunangannya," Guru said.

Toni smiled. Best Girl, what Guru had called her almost since they'd met.

"Coffee in a minute." Guru dumped the freshly ground coffee into a brown-paper cone and set it into the stainless-steel basket over the carafe, then poured hot water from a cast-iron kettle that had been heating on the tiny four-burner stove. The smell was delightful, almost overwhelming.

Guru waited until most of the water filtered through, then added a bit more. She repeated this until the kettle was empty. She took two plain white china mugs from the doorless wooden cabinet over the stove, then poured fresh coffee into them. There was no offer of cream or sugar. You could drink it any way you wanted at Guru's — as long as it was black. Adulterating coffee was, according to her way of thinking, very nearly a sin of some kind. Guru's religious beliefs were an amalgam of Hindu, Moslem, and Christian, and difficult to follow at best.

Wordlessly, the two women moved into the living room. Guru took the chair, Toni sat on the couch. Still without speaking, they took sips of the hot coffee.

Guru made the best coffee Toni had ever tasted. In fact, it spoiled her for drinking the stuff anywhere else. If Starbucks could get its hands on Guru, they would triple their business.

"So. How is life in Washington? Has your young man yet seen the light?"

"Not yet, Grandmother."

Guru sipped her coffee and nodded. "He will. All men are slow, some slower than others."

"I wish I could be sure of that."

"Not in this life, child. But if he fails to notice you properly, he does not deserve you."

They drank more coffee. When they were almost done, Guru said, "I think it is time to tell you a story. About my people."

Toni nodded but didn't speak. Guru had taught her a lot using this method, telling her Javanese tales and legends.

"My father's father's father came from Holland on a sailing ship in 1835. He came to work as an overseer on a plantation that raised indigo and coffee and sugarcane. Back then, the country was not called Indonesia. The pale men called the islands as a whole the Dutch East Indies, or sometimes, the Spice Islands. To my people, our island was Java."

Guru held up her empty cup. Toni stood, took both cups, went to the kitchen, and refilled them. Guru kept talking.

"My great-grandfather went to work on the farm, just outside of Jakarta, which had not nearly so many people then as it does now. He was married, with his wife and two children left behind in the country of his birth, but as was often the custom with white men in a foreign country in those days, he took himself a native wife. My great-grandmother."

Toni brought Guru's coffee back to her, reseated herself on the couch, and sipped at her own brew.

"In due course, my grandfather was born, first among six brothers and two sisters. When my grandfather had eleven summers, my great-grandfather sailed back to Holland, to rejoin his wife and children there, now a wealthy man. He left his Javanese family well-provided for, not always the custom with white men. He never saw or contacted them again.

"My great-grandmother's family took her and her children in, and life went on."

Toni nodded, to keep the flow going. Guru had told many tales, but never one about her family that was so personal.

"My grandfather's mother's brother, Ba Pa — The Wise — took it upon himself to teach my grandfather, whose Dutch name was Willem, how to be a man. My grandfather grew up strong, adept, and eventually became a soldier, part of the native army." She sipped at her coffee. Then she said, "Go into my bedroom and look at the nightstand. There is a thing upon a small silk pillow there. Bring it to me."

Toni nearly choked on her coffee. In all the years she had trained and known Guru, she had never been past the closed door into her bedroom. She had conjured all kinds of fantasies as to what it must look like in there. Maybe shrunken heads dangling from the ceiling, or walls covered with Indonesian art.

It was nothing so weird. It could have been any bedroom, belonging to any old woman. There was a bed, a carved, dark wooden chest at the foot of the bed, teak or mahogany, and a tall and dark wardrobe, also of wood, with a mirror that had lost part of its silvery backing. On one wall was a painting of a nude girl standing in a pool under a waterfall. The room smelled of incense, patchouli or maybe musk.

But on the nightstand was a red pillow, and upon the pillow was a kris inside a wooden and brass sheath.

Toni knew what it was. She had done some reading about Indonesia, curious about the country that fostered the martial art she studied, and while she had never trained with a kris, she had played with plenty of knives.

She picked the weapon up. She couldn't tell from the sheath what the shape of the blade was, but the typical Javanese kris was a foot to a foot and a half long — this one looked to be maybe fifteen or sixteen inches — and had a wavy, undulating double-edged blade, made of layers of forged, hand-hammered steel. Thus, like the swords of Damascus or the samurai katana, the final knife had a grain, a pattern in the welded metal itself.

She hurried back into the living room, wanting to hear the rest of Guru's story.

Guru traded the weapon for her empty coffee cup, which Toni quickly refilled.

"My great-uncle Ba Pa had no sons, only daughters, and when it came time for my grandfather to become a man and receive his kris, this is the one he inherited. It had been in the family from my great-uncle's father's father's father's time."

With that, the old woman drew the knife from the wooden sheath and held it up.

It was an undulate blade, a ribbon of steel with six or seven curves on either side, narrowing from a wide base under a slightly curved and short pistol-like handle to a sharp point. The metal was black, it had a dull, matte look, and on one side there was a little loop of steel protruding under the inside of the guard, almost like a tiny tree branch. On the other side of the blade were tiny, jagged teeth-like points.

"In the days when spirits were still powerful in Java, this kris had much hantu—much magic." She waved the weapon. "It has thirteen luk dapor, thirteen curves, and the pamor is called udan-mas; it means ‘golden rain.' Here, you see?"

Guru pointed at the pattern in the metal, which looked like little drops of rain had spattered upon dry ground.

"This kris was supposed to bring good fortune and money for its owner.

"Some believe a good kris could kill slowly an enemy simply by stabbing his shadow — or even his footprints. If an enemy approached, a good kris would rattle in its sheath, to warn its owner of danger. The sight of the naked blade would turn a hungry tiger in its tracks. According to my great-uncle's grandfather, this kris once flew from its sheath like the garwk and cut the wrist of a thief trying to enter his house during the dark of the moon."

Guru smiled. "Of course, some of these old stories might have become embellished with the telling."

She returned the weapon to its sheath and held it in both hands on her lap, her coffee now growing cold on the doily upon the small table next to her chair.

"My grandfather gave this to my father when he became a man, and my father gave it to my only brother when he became a man." She stared into space, remembering. "My brother died in the war against the Japanese before he could begin a family. Many of our young men died in that war. My father had no sons, no nephews after that war. So the kris came to be mine."

They sat quietly for a moment.

"I bore my husband three sons and a daughter. Two of my sons live, and I have six grandsons and a great-grandson, and two granddaughters. My sons are old men, my grandsons are teachers and lawyers and businessmen, my granddaughters are a teacher and a doctor. They are a fine family, successful, scattered all over the country, and they are all good Americans. There is no wrong in this.

"But of all my family, none have studied the arts. Well, no, I do have a grandson in Arizona who plays tae kwon do, and one of my sons does tai chi to keep his joints limber, but none of them have studied silat. You are my student, the holder of my lineage, and so now, this kris now belongs to you."

The old woman held the dagger out on the palms of her hands to Toni.

Toni knew this was no small thing for Guru, and she had no thought for refusing. She knelt in front of the old woman and took the weapon in both of her hands. "Thank you, Guru. I am honored."

The old woman smiled, tobacco stains on her teeth. "Well you should say so, child, and a credit to my teaching that you should know to say so. I could not have wished for a better student. You should keep this on the red silk pillow near the head of your bed when you sleep," she said, waving at the kris. "It may make an American lover nervous, though." She giggled.

Toni looked down at the smooth wood of the sheath. Why was Guru giving this to her now? She had a sudden chill.

"Guru, you aren't… I mean, your health isn't…?"

The old woman laughed. "No, I'm not ready to leave just yet. But you have more need of the hantu than I do. I have had a full life, and you are still unmarried. A woman your age needs to think of such things. It is a magic blade, after all, kah?"

Toni smiled. "More coffee, Guru?"

"Just half a cup. And tell me more of this young man who has yet to recognize your spirit. Maybe together we can find a way to wake him."

Chapter Thirteen

Julio Fernandez went to early mass at St. Gerard's, in Alexandria. He sat in the back of the small church, listening to Father Alvarez drone on in a dull monotone broken only occasionally by a louder "Lord," which tended to rouse the sleepy congregation.

Fernandez was used to being up this early, of course, but usually he'd be moving, doing laps or running the obstacle course or otherwise keeping his blood circulating. Sitting on the hard wooden pew in a too-warm and stuffy building listening to the old priest who could preach this sermon in his sleep — and might well be doing just that — was not a good way to stay alert.

Still, if he hadn't come to mass, he might have thought about lying to his mother, and he did not want to actually do that. He was on duty and couldn't fly back for Christmas with the relatives. Well, that wasn't strictly true. He could have gotten leave because he had seniority, but there were other men with families locally who needed the time more than he did, so he had volunteered — but he didn't have to tell Mama that. He would call her later today, she would be expecting that. There would be aunts and uncles and at least half of Fernandez's six brothers and two sisters would be there in La Puente at Mama's with their broods, probably bitching about the El Nino rains forecast to pound southern California. It wasn't as if Mama was going to be rattling around in her house alone; still, she wanted to hear from her children who couldn't get there, and the first question she would ask him after how was he doing would be had he gone to mass this morning? Mama suspected that her third son was more lapsed than good Catholic, and she was right in that suspicion, but at least he could tell her he had in fact been to early mass. He could tell her how Father Alvarez, who had once been a parish priest where Mama went to church some forty years ago, looked. Old, Mama, he would say, the man must be at least five or six hundred years old. I kept expecting somebody from the Cairo museum to come in and grab him, to take him back to King Tut's pyramid where he belongs.

Mama would laugh at this, tell him how awful he was, but it would make her happy that he went to mass, at least on Christmas, and it wasn't too much for a son to do for his mother, was it? One time a year?

So he'd get a few points for this — assuming he didn't doze off on the pew, sleep all day, and completely miss calling home…

Alexander Michaels rang the doorbell of the house that had once been his. It was a big, wooden, two-story home built in the early 1900's, at the top of a slight rise, with a high front porch at the top of ten broad steps. When the house had been built, it had been just outside what was then the city limits. Boise had engulfed the neighborhood long ago, but the houses along the street were still much as they had been a hundred years past. Outside of a new paint job that matched the old pale blue, and a couple of repaired steps and slats in the porch floor, the house looked the same as he remembered it. The same glider he'd installed when they'd bought the place hung on rusty chains at the south end of the porch, looking out over a somewhat cold rhododendron bush that would blossom a hard pink come the first warm weather. He'd spent some wonderful hours in that squeaky old wooden swing, looking out over that rhoddy bush, listening to the wind play in the big Doug fir trees that shaded the lot.

He heard his daughter's footsteps and her yelling as she raced for the door. "Daddy's here! Daddy's here!"

Susie flung open the door and jumped. With her present under one arm he had to make the catch one-handed, but she helped by wrapping her arms and legs around him and hugging him tight. She wore a pair of red-flannel pajamas and butter-yellow fuzzy slippers. "Daddy!"

"Hey, squirt. How are you?"

"Great! Great! Come in, we've all been waiting on you to open presents!"

Michaels stepped into the house, and what Susie had said registered.

We've all been waiting for you? Did she mean herself, Megan, and the dog Scout?

Susie slithered down and took off running down the hall for the living room. And sure enough, little Scout, the poodle who thought he was a wolf, came sliding around the corner from the kitchen, scrabbling on the hardwood floor, trying vainly for traction, to greet Michaels. The dog barked once, saw who it was, and wagged his tail so hard Michaels thought he might fall down. Michaels squatted and put the presents down as Scout ran and jumped into his arms.

Two for two, he thought.

As he stood, the little dog licking his face, Megan stepped into the hall from the living room.

Tall and leggy, with long brown hair worn in a ponytail, she was still one of the most beautiful women he had ever known. She wore a black T-shirt and blue jeans, her feet bare. She also looked nervous. "Hello, Alex."

"Hello, Megan."

"Come on in. Susie is about to pop."

He put the dog down, picked up the presents he had brought, and followed his ex-wife into the living room. Oh, well. Two out of three…

They had put up a large tree, an eight-footer, easy to do in a place with such high ceilings. The tree glistened with lights and fake snow and ornaments and tinsel. There was a fire in the wood stove, burning brightly behind the thick glass. Susie was on her knees under the tree, amidst a pile of wrapped gifts, grinning.

And standing by the old plush blue couch was a stranger, a big man with a full beard. He wore jeans and a blue work-shirt and cowboy boots. He looked to be about thirty, a good ten years younger than Alex, and at least five years younger than Megan.

Megan walked over to the bearded man. She slipped her hand under his arm, smiled at him, then turned back to look at Michaels and said, "Byron, this is Alex Michaels, Susie's father. Alex, this is my friend Byron Baumgardner. He's a teacher at Susie's school."

The big man grinned, showing nice, white teeth, and ambled over to take Michaels's hand. "Glad to meet you, Alex. I've heard a lot about you."

Michaels felt his belly twist into a frozen knot. So. This was Byron. He forced a smile as he stuck his hand out. "Byron."

The two men shook hands. Michaels shot a glance at Megan. She had looked nervous, and now he knew why. Here was a nice surprise on Christmas. Meet the new boyfriend. Your replacement.

"Can I open my presents now, can I?"

"Sure, honey," Megan said.

Michaels smiled at Susie as Byron moved over to stand next to Megan. The bearded man put his arm around Megan.

Michaels felt sick. He wished the ground would open up and swallow him. He wanted to be anywhere on the planet instead of here. Anywhere, for any reason.

On his back on the bench, Platt squared himself under the weight, put his hands on the bar in a false grip, and took a couple of deep breaths. Counting the bar, 440 pounds lay heavy in the bench-press cradle. He nodded at the spotters on both sides. "Ready," he said.

The two gym rats, both hard-core steroid boys bigger than he was, moved in a hair and put their hands under the end of the bar, not touching it, but ready, just in case.

Platt gathered himself to lift the weight off the rack. Took another deep breath, and shoved, let part of the air out as he cleared the stand and began to lower the Olympic bar toward his chest.

The first rep went up pretty easy.

"One," the gym rats said in unison. Like he couldn't fuckin' count.

Second rep was a little harder, but he got it to lockout.

"Two!"

The third rep was hard. He had to blow it up, arching his back, to get it locked.

"Three!"

He knew his limits. "I'm done, take it," Platt said.

The two bodybuilders caught the ends and helped him re-rack the barbell. Platt blew out a big exhalation and sat up.

The guy on the left, who had a shaved head and a purple sweatband above his eyes, said, "Lemme try a few."

Platt nodded and switched places with Baldy. As he squared up on the bench press, Platt glanced around the inside of the place.

They had a pretty decent setup here at the new Gold's Gym. Lotta free weights, a bunch of piston machines, some bikes, rowers, elliptical walkers, and stair climbers. They even had one of the new peg machines in one corner. Mirrors on all the walls. It was Christmas, but there were twenty people in here working the iron. Gym rats, most of them, serious bodybuilders or weightlifters, most of them on the juice. You didn't miss a workout because it was a holiday. You'd never get anything done that way.

You could always tell somebody who was stackin' serious ‘roids. They had that crepe-skinned, veiny look, the whites of their eyes got yellowy, they were usually balding, and a lot of ‘em had acne on their back and shoulders. In the locker room with their clothes off coming out of the shower, some of ‘em had bitch-tits and little bitty balls and peckers too. But they were strong, as Baldy on the bench here showed Platt. He did ten reps with four-forty and racked the bar by himself, then sat up, grinning. "Okay, I'm warmed up. Lou?"

The other gym rat traded places with Baldy, then Baldy and Platt spotted him while he did his benches. He only made eight reps, and Baldy called him a pussy.

"Want to do another set?" Baldy asked Platt.

"No, thanks. I got to go do chins and dips. I can come back and spot if you need it."

"Cool. Later, dude."

Platt headed for the chinning rack. Strong, both of the bodybuilders, stronger than he was. Then again, he didn't take anything but vitamins and a few aminos and supplements, and he didn't have to worry about his liver rotting or getting brain cancer or shit like that. Or ‘roid rage. Blowing up and killin' somebody who cut him off in traffic. Fightin' for fun was one thing, losin' control was something else. And these guys were so strong they tore muscles and ripped tendons right off the bone sometimes. He'd seen a guy benching six-fifty once rip a pec. The muscle rolled up his chest like a window shade, and the guy was looking at major surgery and a lot of down time. Stupid. Wasn't any point to all this stuff if you weren't healthy enough to enjoy it.

His sweats were already soaked, but Platt figured he could do a couple sets of chins and dips, no weight, alternating, to finish off his pump. Half an hour in the sauna and hot tub, a shower, and he was done.

He wondered if that bento place over on Wisconsin was open today, A couple plates full of grilled chicken skewers and rice with hot and sweet sauce would sure taste good about now. He'd go check it out.

The big fire roaring away pushed the cabin's chill into the room's corners. The place smelled of cedar and woodsmoke and pine. Wonderful. "Merry Christmas," Joanna Winthrop said. She raised her champagne glass and tapped it against the glass Maudie held. "Same to you," Maudie said. They drank. "Mmm. This is great," Winthrop said. "It ought to be. It cost eighty bucks a bottle."

"Jesus, you spent that kind of money on champagne!"

"Not me. It was a gift from an admirer. I think he wanted to lick it off my naked body."

"Why didn't you let him?"

"Because we went to a movie and he made a disparaging remark about one of the actresses who was a few pounds overweight."

"Ah. Fat jokes, the squash of death."

"Unless you're fat — then it's okay." Maudie sipped at the champagne again. "I'll send him a nice thank-you e-mail for this."

"I'm sure he'll appreciate it."

They giggled.

"So, tell me more about this Sergeant What's-his-name. Anything serious in the offing?"

"Too early to tell. So far, all we've talked about is computers, about which he knows zip. But he seems like a sweet man. And he admires me for my mind."

"Uh-huh."

"Well, either he does, or he's very, very clever about taking the long way around to get my pants off."

"Hah. Men will cross a desert in July on their hands and knees over broken glass if they think they'll get laid when they get to the other side."

"True. But I have a good feeling about this one. How many men have you met who will admit they don't know something about everything?"

"So far? Let me see… oh, if you total them all up, about, roughly, approximately… none."

"So I'm one up on you."

"Oh, girl. You got a picture? How about a com number?"

"Oh, no, you don't. You should be able to find one in California."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? I'm thinking about putting an ad in the personal sections of the local alternative weekly paper. ‘Fat, ugly woman, smart, looking for man who can appreciate me for my mind.' It would be interesting to see who answers."

"I'm sure that would work." She lifted her glass. "Cheers."

"Uh-huh."

They drank. They laughed some more. There were worse ways to spend Christmas.

Chapter Fourteen

Jay Gridley was getting a little tired of the Western scenario and he considered switching it. He hated to do that in a VR session, though, jump genres. After this time, he'd use a different program.

At the moment, he was in the small Western town of Ambush Flats, walking up toward the telegraph office. A Christmas wreath hung in the window.

"Mornin' Marshal," the telegraph clerk said. The man wore a card dealer's green eyeshade, a boiled shirt, and a thin, dark tie. "Happy Christmas. Shame you got to be travelin' on such a day."

"And you workin'," Jay said. "Any messages for Marshal Gridley come through here?"

"Nossir, I don't believe they have." The man made a show of checking the stack of yellow paper next to his key. "Nope, don't see none."

"Uh-huh. And any messages a marshal ought to know about pass through your ears or fingers?"

"Nossir. I'm a law-abidin' citizen, Marshal. I don't truck with such things."

It wasn't that Jay didn't believe him — but he'd learned the hard way that truth was a valuable and sometimes rare commodity on the net. And Jay needed to know if that was what he was dealing with here.

There were several ways he could do this. He could pull his gun and order the telegrapher to lie down on his belly. He could point out the window, and when the man looked, clonk him on the back of the head and knock him cold. Or he could use subterfuge, which was his preferred method. "Well, I appreciate it, friend. Thanks. Adios."

Jay left the telegraph office and moseyed around to the back of the building. There was a wooden barrel of trash next to the door. He pulled a strike-anywhere lucifer from his shirt pocket, scratched it on the barrel's metal hoop, and tossed the flaring match into the trash. Paper caught, flamed, and in a few seconds, there was a hot little fire blazing away in the barrel. Jay looked around and spotted some weeds growing from under the building. He pulled a handful of the greenery and tossed it into the flame. Thick white smoke poured out as the green plants began to burn.

Jay walked around to the front of the building, found a shady spot under an overhang, and leaned against a porch post. He didn't have long to wait.

"Fire!" somebody yelled. A bell started to ring. Folks came a'runnin' too.

The telegrapher sprinted through the front door of the office, away from the sudden smoke pouring in from the back, and looped around the building to see what was what.

Jay sauntered back into the building and began to go through the stack of telegrams. Nothing to see.

There was a locked wooden drawer next to the telegrams out in plain sight, and he used his Barlow jackknife to slip the simple lock so he could get at the hidden documents in the drawer.

He grinned. Breaking into an encrypted e-mail sorter using a brute-force generator didn't sound nearly as colorful as rifling the telegrapher's desk in his marshal persona. It wasn't as much fun either.

There was a lot of junk in the drawer. Some shady money exchanges, illicit love letters, porno, the usual stuff people tried to hide. Technically speaking, what he was doing wasn't altogether legal, but he wasn't going to use it in court, he was just looking for information. If he hurried, he would be gone before the telegrapher got back, and nobody would ever know he'd been snooping in private affairs.

Looked like a waste of time again — hello? What was this?

Jay read the message, growing more alarmed as he went. Somebody had sent particulars on the routes for four shipments of plutonium — that didn't translate into this scenario as dynamite either — to a group calling itself the Sons of Patrick Henry! Jay had heard of them. They were a militia group that danced on the edge of treason and had a membership that made Alüla the Hun look like a flaming red Communist.

And the stuff was moving today. Holy shit!

Clutching the message tightly, Jay ran.

With the racket blaring from Susie's new musical toy, having a conversation was difficult. Not that Michaels felt much like talking anyhow. Megan was making it perfectly clear by the way she kept touching, leaning, or rubbing against Byron exactly what she wanted her ex-husband to know. At first, the jealousy had been so powerful it had made him feel heartsick and nauseous. Now he was beginning to gel pissed off. Megan had a cruel streak he had always known about. He'd loved her in spite of it, but it wasn't pretty to be on the receiving end of it. She could have asked her bearded boy toy to stay home and let Michaels have this time with his daughter, but she wanted to show Susie's father exactly where he stood with her mother — which was outside her house, peering in through a locked window.

He was supposed to stay for lunch, and if he hadn't thought it would upset Susie, he would have already bailed and gone back to his hotel.

At a point when Megan had gone to check on the turkey she was cooking, and Byron had gone to get some more wood for the fire, Michaels remembered the little present Toni had given him. It was in his coat pocket. He walked to where he'd hung his coat, fished the little gift out, and opened it.

When he saw what it was, he laughed.

"What's funny, Dadster?" Susie yelled over the blasting noise she thought was music.

He tucked the present into his shirt pocket. "Nothing, sweetie, I just remembered something."

Toni had gotten him a pair of electronic earplugs. According to the instructions, they would allow the wearer to hear normal sounds, but would damp any high-decibel noises that might damage a wearer's hearing. Funny woman, his assistant.

His virgil cheeped.

He frowned. He had forwarded all incoming calls to his vox mail. The only messages he should be getting were Priority One coms, and if that was what this was, it was bad news. He checked the caller ID. Jay Gridley.

"What's up, Jay?"

"Chief, we got a major problem here. Somebody just tried to hijack four shipments of plutonium. We headed off three attempts, but at one in France there were a lot of dead bodies after the smoke cleared, and at one in Arizona we were too late, they got away with it. Colonel Howard is on the way with a strike team, we got National Guard and state police and local cops crawling all over the place down there, and about half a bomb's worth of plutonium on the loose."

"That's awful, but why is this our problem? Shouldn't it be CIA for the foreign and regular FBI for the domestic?"

"Well, it's ours because the message giving the yahoo militia who did it the times and places came out of a Net Force workstation, Chief. Right here in HQ."

"Oh, shit!"

"Yes, sir. You might want to think about going to Arizona or coming back here or something."

Michaels looked up and saw Megan frowning at him from the hall.

"I'll call you back."

"What?" Megan said.

"Something has come up," he said. "I'm going to have to miss lunch. Sorry."

"Big surprise," she said. Her voice was bitter. "Got to go save the goddamned world all by yourself again, don't you?"

"Listen, Megan—"

"They can't get along without you for one day? It's Christmas!"

With bad timing, Byron chose that moment to step into the room with an armload of split oak and alder for the fire. "What's going on?"

"Alex isn't staying for lunch." She said it loudly.

Susie came out of her music trance. "What? You're leaving? You just got here!"

"Daddy's work is more important than staying to visit, honey," Megan said. "You know that. He's a very important man."

Michaels glared at Megan. Then he looked at his daughter. "I'm sorry, baby, but it's an emergency."

"It's okay. I understand."

But she didn't understand, he could see that. And Megan wasn't going to make it any easier. "I'll get back as soon as I can to visit you again," Michaels said.

"About the time Hell freezes over," Megan said.

Michaels gritted his teeth. "In the hall," he said to Megan.

"Excuse me?"

"I'd like a word with you in the hall, please."

Megan stared daggers at him. Michaels went to hug his daughter and kiss her good-bye. "You learn how to work this thing, and when I come back you can show me all the songs you know."

"Exemplary, Dadster. I love you."

"I love you too, little bit. You take care of your mother."

In the hall, Megan stood with her arms crossed, so tight she was almost humming with tension. Byron was right behind her.

"You come all the way out here, drop off a present, and leave. That's just great, Alex. You're a terrific father." Her sarcasm was so acid you could etch glass with it.

And it hurt, just as she knew it would. She knew how to find the cracks in his armor. She always had. And the needle she used to stab him was loaded with poison, just as it had been during the last year of their marriage, and during the divorce. When she got pissed off, she stopped playing fair. He said, his voice tight, "I'm doing the best I can."

"Your best is crappy. If you loved your daughter, you'd do better."

"So you told me a couple of thousand times already. Must be nice to be perfect in every way. How do you stand being around us mere mortals?"

"Hey, take it easy there," Byron said. "No point in getting nasty."

Michaels looked at the big bearded man as if he had just turned into a giant upright toad. "Excuse me? She can tell me I'm a lousy father and that I don't love my daughter, but I can't fight back? Why don't you go get some more firewood, Byron? This is a private conversation."

Megan flared at that. "Anything you can say to me, you can say in front of Byron."

"Really?" Michaels's temper was smoldering now. He was about to flame on, and if he did, he would say something he would regret. He tried to hold onto as much calm as he could. "Listen, you don't want me here, you and Byron have been doing everything short of tearing each other's clothes off, and I suspect some of that was for my benefit. Fine, you made your point."

"It doesn't matter how I feel about you, Alex. It's how your daughter feels."

"I'm not going to let you beat me over the head with that anymore! I love my daughter and she knows it. If you really loved her, you wouldn't be turning her against me at every opportunity. You can really be a bitch when you want, you know?"

That got her attention. It was the first time he'd ever said something that direct about her, and her eyes went wide in surprise.

It got Byron's attention too.

"That's it, pal," he said. "You're outta here!" He reached out and grabbed Michaels's arm with both hands.

Boy, was that the wrong thing to do.

Michaels reacted without thinking. He swung his elbow at Byron's head, keeping it in tight, as if he were holding a marble in the crook of his arm, just like Toni had taught him. Bone met bone with a solid thwack! and Byron fell as if his legs had suddenly vanished.

Son of a bitch. It worked!

Megan dropped to her knees and grabbed at the fallen man. "Byron! Byron! Are you okay?"

Susie's music boomed from the other room where she played, thankfully oblivious to all this.

Byron blinked, tried to sit up. "What happened? Did I slip on something? Why am I on the floor—?"

He'd live, he was just stunned.

Megan looked up from the fallen man at Michaels. She said, "We're getting married! And Byron wants to adopt Susie!" Her voice practically dripped venom.

Michaels felt his soul freeze, then begin to shrivel. There it was, in black and white, no mistaking it. He had loved this woman beyond measure, and she was doing everything she could to hurt him. How could he have been so blind?

When he could find a breath, he spoke, and his voice was cold. "Congratulations. I'll send you a toaster. But he will adopt Susie over my dead body. I'll spend every penny I have and every penny I can borrow on private detectives and lawyers. And if Byron here spends a night under this roof before you get married, you'll find yourself in a custody battle like you wouldn't believe! You want to play rough? Fine."

With that, he turned and stalked out.

In the cold air, snow clouds gathered and threatened. Perfect. Just perfect!

Well. You wanted an excuse to leave, didn't you? Better be more careful what you wish for next time, Alex. You might get that one too.

Damn! He couldn't believe what he had just done. How he had lost control.

Damn!

Compared to what he'd just felt, terrorists stealing nuclear material didn't seem so bad.

Chapter Fifteen

Michaels rode in the second helicopter of his trip, heading for the hijacking site on Interstate 10, about forty miles west of Phoenix. A small military jet had been waiting for him when the first copter dropped him at the airport in Boise. It had been a straight flight, and fast.

The Arizona sky was clear and sunny, and he could see what the pilot had told him was the Bighorn Mountains ahead of the copter.

John Howard had flown out in one of Net Force's chartered 747's with his strike team, and was setting up a command post at a truck stop just outside Tonopah, Arizona.

The chopper pilot brought his craft in for a landing not far from a pair of helicopters already on the ground. Big Hueys, they looked like. In addition to the copters, the ground was a beehive of activity — cars, trucks, troops, flashing lights.

Practically speaking, it would have made more sense for Michaels to have gone back to HQ; once you got to be the commander of a group like Net Force, you were supposed to be a desk jockey — they paid you for your managing abilities, not to go play in the field. But the idea of sitting in his office parked in front of the computer station and com gear waiting to hear what was going on did not appeal to Alex. He needed to be out doing something after that whole scene in Boise.

Dust and sand kicked up as the copter settled. He saw John Howard in his field uniform, holding on to his cap as the wind blasted him.

Michaels exited the craft and walked to where Howard stood.

"Commander."

"Colonel. How is it going?"

"This way, sir."

Howard led him toward what looked like a Texaco truck stop. Along with a dozen big commercial rigs, clearly local, there were a few smaller Net Force trucks and cars, brought by the cargo version of the 747 that the strike force used. There were a couple of large igloo tents erected behind the main truck stop building, and big power lines snaking into the tents from six rumbling gasoline-powered electrical generators parked near the larger of the tents.

A chilly wind blew across the dry land, but inside the mobile tactical unit — a fiberglass-framed tent the size of a small house — the air was warm. A dozen techs worked on various electronics, mostly computers and com-gear. Several other soldiers in the strike team checked weapons or assembled field equipment. Julio Fernandez looked up, saw Michaels, and saluted.

Howard stopped in front of a big flatscreen on a stand. He picked up a remote and clicked it. A turning-globe map appeared on the screen.

"Here's what happened, as best we can tell," Howard said. "Somebody sent the routing information for four shipments of plutonium scheduled to move today to a paramilitary group that calls itself the Sons of Patrick Henry. Here are the sites."

Red dots pulsed on the map. France, Germany, Florida, and Arizona.

"We got word of the leak from Gridley at HQ at about the time the attacks began. All four went off simultaneously. We got word to the convoys ASAP. The Florida and German convoys took alternate routes and encountered no problems.

"The French attack had already begun, as had the one here. We alerted French authorities, and they got there in time to stop the assault. Eight of the attackers were killed, four wounded seriously, several seemed to have escaped. The driver of the French truck and four of the guards were killed, three more were wounded. Some civilians got caught in the cross fire, all locals.

"We called the Army transport group here too late. By the time the National Guard and state boys and girls showed up, it was all over. The Army lost two drivers, eight more men, and two women. Looks as if the wounded soldiers were executed after they were downed, assault rifle or pistol rounds to their heads. The terrorists took their dead or wounded with them, but there was enough blood without bodies on the road and surrounding territory to know the Army's shooters connected with at least a few of them.

"They left behind a couple of antitank mines to slow pursuit. The state patrol lost two cruisers and three officers. And five civilian cars also got blasted. Six civilians are dead and three more in the hospital probably won't make it. Everything the state and local police can put on the ground or in the air is out looking for the terrorists."

"Jesus."

"Yes, sir. The shipment was en-route from Fort Davy Crockett, Texas, to Long Beach, California, where it was to be taken via ocean vessel to a location that the Army does not wish to reveal to us. Seven pounds of WG plutonium."

"Where do we stand?"

"We know who did it. We know where they are."

"Have you told the local authorities?"

"No, sir. We've sent them off in other directions. It gives them something to do. And if they should get too close, they'll be warned off." He fiddled with the remote. The screen image shifted to an overhead view of a group of small buildings surrounded by a fence. The image zeroed in, growing larger in distinct frames, until details as fine as cars and even a couple of people could be seen.

"This is the nearest bolt-hole the Sons maintain. It's just north of the Gila Bend Indian Reservation, not that far from here. These people apparently own property all over the country, and they've got branches all over the world. We've got the place footprinted with one Kl Albatross spysat, and we've requested that the military shift another one into the same orbit. Which they are doing."

"How good is the sat coverage?"

"Not perfect. Any bird high enough to be in geosynch orbit has to be at least 22,300 miles—36,000 kilometers — and IR or optical resolution to six feet at that height is iffy, especially in a hot desert, so spysats that can see guys running around on the ground have to be a lot lower, which means they are whipping past any given point at speed, so they can't sit and watch one spot. We'll see ‘em, but it'll be a fast look. Computers'll fill that in."

"This is where you think they took the plutonium?"

A yellow box blinked on and outlined one of the structures. "There's a tracker built into the outer shell of the radioactive transport box. NRC and NSA don't allow anybody to ship this stuff via FedEx. This is where they took it, sir. GPS puts it in the southwest corner of this building, right there. Since it's Army gear, there's no fudge-factor on the satellite bounce, so we can pinpoint the GPS unit to within plus or minus five feet. It's in there. I doubt they took it out of the box to play with."

"Where is the Army?"

"They're massing their teams thirty miles south of the bolt-hole, on the old Luke Air Force target range. So far, they are holding off, but Military Intelligence is having a fire hose of a pissing match with the FBI over who gets to shoot whom, so everybody is waiting for the spray to settle back in D.C. before anybody moves."

Michaels waved that off. Nothing they could do out here about weenie-waving uplevels. Somebody would figure out what to do soon enough. Then they'd see who got to step up to the plate.

"What are our options, the tactical considerations, if we get the nod?"

Howard flashed a tiny grin, teeth bright against his chocolate skin.

"Fast and dirty. We can give the Air Force a call, and they can drop a big smart rock that'll squash the Sons flat before they ever know it's coming. Army's got a few of those they'd be happy to use too. End of immediate problem. Of course, that could spread plutonium dust all over the surrounding countryside, which might upset the locals. The evening news would have a field day when they found out, and they likely would notice if the local goals started giving glow-in-the-dark milk.

"Unless they have another chunk of this stuff already, they aren't going to build a fission bomb. Even if they do have enough for a critical mass, it isn't like they can just pop open the container and drop it into their bomb like a flashlight battery. It'll take some fine-tuning, and whatever happens, they aren't going to have that much time."

"You don't see any possibility of negotiation here?"

"No, sir. We're talking everything from treason, to multiple murder, to a dozen other local, state, and federal felonies. They give up. they are all history, and they know it. Their manifesto is ‘Give me liberty or give me death.' They aren't going to give up, and we can't dick around long enough to let them think about things they might do with that heavy metal they borrowed."

"I see."

"It is possible they could have rigged the container with conventional explosives so if anybody comes after them, it would give us the same scenario as the Air Force attack. Our staff psychologist doesn't think this is likely. They are paranoid enough, but this is a big prize, and they won't be in a hurry to lose it. So he says.

"Our first pass with the locals indicate that the attack wasn't set up very well. They didn't notice anybody poking around until yesterday. This engagement does not appear to have been the result of a long-term, well-laid plan. This is consistent with Gridley's finding that the transmission of the intelligence was less than day and a half ago. They mounted this operation in a hurry, on the fly, and they were lucky to get away with one out of four tries."

"And you don't think they've booby-trapped the container."

"No, sir, I don't. This feels like a come-as-you-are party and they had to hit the ground running. They haven't had time to think about it much.

"I see an infantry-style assault in the dark as our best bet. Since these guys are gun nuts, they've probably got spookeyes and motion detectors, but we can get close enough to knock those out and be on top of them before they have time to figure out what's happening. PEE for the spookeyes, jammers for the motion sensors."

"PEE?"

"They're new, sir. Photosensitive Epilepsy Emitters. Brainwave flashers. They cause seizures or nausea in a lot of people who see them. And at night, they are bright enough to blind a guy using starlight spookeyes anyhow. So the guards watching the dark are either having fits, puking, or bumping into the furniture.

"Jammers shut down the transmitters on wireless sensors. Unless they've got hardwired sensors, they won't know where we're coming from until it's too late. And even hardwired, knowing we're coming and being able to do anything about it is not the same thing. My troops'll be in SIPEsuits. The Sons' surplus AK-47's, M16's, and handgun fire won't get through the armor."

"What if they have heavier weapons? Rockets, AP, like that?"

"We've got half-a-dozen jump troops who can use parasails well enough to hit a spot the size of a dinner plate from six thousand feet at night, using their spookeyes. I can put them inside to sap the fence before we hit it from outside. I've got green hats, black hats, SEALs, the best of the best on this team. These camo clowns won't know what hit ‘em no matter what they're shooting."

Michaels nodded. "So if uplevels gives us the job, you'll be ready to go when?"

"We're ready right now. Optimal time would be 0230 hours. Most of the terrorists will be asleep. I've run a dozen computer scenarios, and our numbers average about eighty-seven-percent success. Realistic range is from seventy-five to ninety-four percent."

"You want this one, Colonel?"

Again the smile, larger this time. "Yes, sir. You bet."

"I'll call the director and see what the situation is."

Howard watched as Michaels moved off to a quieter part of the tent to use his virgil to call the FBI's director. The colonel looked around at his men and women, confident they could do the job. They were all volunteers, nobody had to be here, and he would lead them into Hell to pull the Devil's tail, secure in the knowledge they would follow without batting an eyelash.

Did he want this operation? Sheeit, he couldn't imagine anything he could want more just at the moment. He could be home, sitting on the couch, digesting Christmas ham and listening to his mother-in-law give him a hard time. Storming a nest of terrorists who'd swiped a chunk of radioactive bomb material was easy duty compared to that…

"Sir, we got the second bird coming on-line, about to step on the location," Fernandez said.

"Copy, Sergeant. Let's see it. Put it on the holoproj so we get a three-dee view."

"As the colonel orders," Fernandez said. "Hey, Jeter! Three-dee!"

Howard moved toward a folding aluminum display table where the holographic projector had been focused. After a few seconds, the image appeared. It started out as a black-and-white. Then the computer furnished false colors so that it looked almost like a model.

"Give it to me from a hundred feet up and three hundred feet out," Howard said to the tech.

"Sir," Jeter said.

The image shifted viewpoints. The computer filled in the details based on images in its memory, but it was probably a pretty accurate representation of the place. A two-story ranch house sat in the middle of the compound, which was surrounded by a chain-link fence, probably ten feet high. There was also what looked like a wooden barn, plus a pole shed that was just a roof and half-a-dozen upright supports, and a smaller storage building behind the house. Four trucks, two cars, and a single-engine high-wing airplane were parked in front of the main house. There were two guards on the gate, and either the spysat's optics or the computer had decided they were both short-haired men in baseball caps, with rifles or carbines slung over their shoulders and holstered side arms. A third guard with a large dog patrolled the fence in the back. A fourth figure, a woman in a dress, stood in front of what appeared to be chickens, tossing feed to the birds. Optics weren't so good that they could see chicken feed from however many thousands of miles up in space, but they were good enough to guess that the woman had long black hair and fair skin. Amazing.

"We have any idea how many are in there, Julio?"

Fernandez drifted over and shook his head. "No, sir. Most we've seen at a time's half a dozen — four men and two women. No children, thank God. They could have fifteen or twenty in there, given the number of vehicles. IR doesn't work real well through a roof. My guess is, they don't know we know where they are." He glanced at his watch.

"Got an appointment, Sergeant?"

"I was supposed to call my mother after I got out of mass. I didn't get around to it."

"Use one of the landlines and call her, Julio. I don't want your mama mad at me because I made you work on Christmas."

Fernandez grinned. "Sir. Thank you."

Howard watched his best soldier — and probably his best friend in the world — amble toward the phone bank.

Michaels came back, clipping the virgil onto his belt, next to his taser.

Howard raised his eyebrows.

"It's ours, Colonel."

Howard grinned, real big.

Michaels shook his head and sighed. "I already had occasion today to remember the old saying ‘Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.' Colonel. You just got what you wanted. Merry Christmas. I hope it doesn't blow up in our faces."

Chapter Sixteen

Hughes had just walked into the safe house apartment and noticed that Platt wasn't there yet when his virgil buzzed. He looked at the ID. Senator White. He felt a stab of worry, even though he knew there was no way White could know where he was and what he was doing there.

"Hello, Bob. Merry Christmas."

"Tom. What's all this I've been hearing about some kind of nuclear material getting stolen?"

"Nothing that concerns us directly. Well, except that the word I hear is that this was another one of those deliberate leaks into the aethernet."

"Jesus Lord."

"Oh, worse than that. My sources tell me the leak came from Net Force Headquarters, right smack dab in the middle of the FBI compound itself."

"I'll have Michaels's head on a platter if that's true! And Walt Carver's ass for desert!"

Now there was an image.

"It'll keep until after the holidays, Bob. The terrorists fell down, only one of the attacks was even partially successful, and I am given to understand that that one is about to be rectified by our military and other federal agencies. No great harm was done. Enjoy the season. We can nail all this down when you get back to town, before the session gets rolling. I'm keeping tabs on things from this end. Don't worry."

"All right, if you say so."

Platt swaggered in, circled his hand to his forehead, lips, and heart, and added a couple of circles, then held it out to Hughes in a bastardized salaam. Hughes waved him off.

"Give my love to June and the girls and the grandkids," Hughes said to White.

"I will. Merry Christmas, Tom."

After he switched off the virgil, Platt laughed. "So, our little game ruffled your boss's feathers, hey?"

"Don't worry about him. I've got it covered."

Platt walked to the refrigerator, opened it, and took out a plastic bottle of apple juice. He opened the bottle and drank half the juice in three big swallows. "Seems like such a waste, though. Telling the Sons of Whoever about all the shipments, then telling the feds on ‘em."

"Right. I was really going to give those fruitcakes the material to build a working atomic bomb. If they put the thing together, assuming they could, what do you think would be the target city?"

"Couldn't happen to a nicer town," Platt said. "Full of stuck-up assholes who think they're better than the rest of the country." He burped. Took another swig of juice. Said, "Ahh, that's good stuff."

Hughes shook his head. Platt was definitely a loose cannon. Sooner or later, he was going to shoot the wrong way or blow himself and everything around him into bloody pieces. "You need a sense of history," Hughes said. "Washington is our nation's capital. I don't want to destroy it."

"It's just about money, huh?"

"No, it's also about power. But that doesn't mean I have to be a homicidal maniac to get what I want."

"What about the guys guarding the u-rain-e-yum? You don't feel like they're dead because of you? Was your fruitcakes that hosed ‘em."

"I didn't pull any triggers. I didn't tell anybody else to either. If I give you a bread knife and you cut somebody's throat instead of using it to slice bread, that's your fault, not mine."

"Unless you knew I wasn't gonna use it for bread when you sold it to me. And this wasn't exactly no bread knife, was it? More like a headsman's hatchet."

"I didn't ask the Sons, they didn't tell."

"Oh, yeah. The information we fed ‘em was for study purposes only."

"No, it was to get things rolling in the direction I wanted them to roll in."

Hughes didn't really think he could explain it to Platt, but for a moment he felt the need to try. "Do you know anything about how the Japanese traditionally made their samurai swords?"

"I have a sheath knife with a Damascus blade," Platt said. "It's kind of like how they make them in Damascus. The Japs fold and sandwich the steel over and over and hammer it out, then temper the edge harder than the blade."

"Right. But do you know how a master swordsmith would get started? How he would actually light the fire for his forge?"

"I dunno, a Zippo?"

Hughes ignored the wisecrack. "The smith would hammer on a piece of iron bar until it began to glow red. Then he'd put the iron into a bed of cypress shavings soaked in sulfur."

"No shit? That must have taken a while, to get the iron that hot just by whacking it with a hammer."

"Exactly. Making the finest swords the world has ever seen is not like ordering a Whopper and fries at the local BK. It takes skill, precision, patience. Which is what we need too. Our goal here is not to blow things up. Let's not forget that."

"I hear you."

"Good. I think it's time the subversive group responsible for all these problems on the net steps up to claim credit. Let's show them the manifesto."

Platt grinned. "Hot damn. I've been waitin' to do this."

"Don't embellish it, Platt. Just like I wrote it."

"Nopraw, hoss. It's bad enough without me fiddlin' with it. The wogs and sand nigrahs are gonna love this!"

A loose cannon with a short fuse. If Hughes didn't deactivate him soon, Platt was going to screw the whole thing up. A couple more weeks, a month, they'd be over the hump, and Platt was going to have a fatal accident. Maybe just… disappear.

Toni sat on the left side of the commuter jet, staring into the dark over the ocean in the distance. She couldn't see the water, but she could see where the lights on the land ended, as if sliced off by a knife.

She smiled to herself when she had that thought. There had been some problem when she wanted to take the kris onto the plane. They didn't have any trouble with her taser — most of the airlines would allow federal law-enforcement officers to carry tasers or even guns on their planes — but long and wavy-bladed daggers were apparently something else altogether.

No way was Toni going to check the kris. Whatever its monetary value, it was irreplaceable, and according to Murphy's Law, if one item got lost in the baggage roulette on this flight, it would be the kris.

Airline officials weren't going to allow her to carry the knife, despite the illogic of that versus a taser or a gun. Toni didn't tell them that she could kill somebody with her hands almost as easily as she could do so with a knife. That probably wouldn't have been helpful. In the end, after she threatened to call the FBI and have the plane held on the ground for security reasons, the officials relented. She could take the knife, if she let the flight crew have charge of it until they landed. That was good enough. The kris would be in the plane with her, and it was doubtful they could lose it with the doors closed.

The copilot said he'd watch the cardboard box very carefully.

Jay Gridley's call had come as a surprise, but it wasn't such a great loss that she had to leave the annual gathering a little early. She'd gotten a chance to see her family and Guru DeBeers, they'd all exchanged presents, and had eaten a huge Italian Christmas dinner. Mama and Poppa had gone to evening mass with as many of the relatives as they could bully into going with them. The fun part of of the gathering was mostly done, and the inevitable too-close-together friction would be warming up about now. She loved her family, but after a couple of days cooped up in the apartments with them, things could get a little contentious. She'd left them trying to convince her father he shouldn't be getting behind the wheel of his car anymore, and she knew that was a war the family was going to lose.

It surprised her too that Alex had cut short his visit home to fly from Boise to Arizona. He wasn't a field operative, and she worried about him. John Howard wouldn't let Alex do anything dangerous — she hoped — but it still gave her butterflies thinking about Alex being on-site for a hot op. He should be back at HQ, and the strike team should be doing its job without him.

When she'd called him, he'd told her she didn't need to go into HQ herself, but she'd cut that short. If this was important enough for him to be there, it was important enough for her to get back to work too.

She leaned back in the seat and stared through the window. The jet was half-empty. Not a lot of people traveling on Christmas Day.

Sitting in the propane-heated spa inset into the redwood deck behind the cabin, Joanna and Maudie watched the snow fall into the hot water and melt. The deck had three eight-foot-high walls of cedar slats and wicker screen surrounding it, to keep occupants hidden from the neighbors' view, with the cabin as the fourth wall, but there was no roof. The spa itself was big enough to seat six people in comfort, maybe eight if they were on real good personal terms. Upon the steaming water and the two women in it, fresh snow fell, fat, heavy flakes, adding to that already piled up eight or ten inches deep on the deck, pristine save where it had been footprinted by the naked women going to and from the tub.

Winthrop took another sip from the second bottle of champagne they'd bought, splurging their own money for the good vintage after they'd polished off Maudie's admirer's gift.

Maudie raised her glass and watched a few snowflakes hit the wine. She said, "Problem with this is that you get spoiled real quick. After the expensive stuff, the cheap champagne tastes like something you'd clean your oven with."

Winthrop waved her own glass. "Hear, hear." She reached across the big oval-shaped fiberglass tub with her foot and snagged the floating thermometer. She dragged it to her, lifted it, and looked at it.

"Hundred and six," she said. "And the air temperature is what? Twenty, twenty-five?"

"Sounds about right."

Winthrop shook her head, and the melting snow fell from her hair into the water with a tiny slush! sound.

"I wonder what the poor folks are doing," Maudie said. "You know, it might not get any better than this. Friends, Moet & Chandon, hot water, and snow."

"Amen, sister. Well, except for maybe a couple of hunky young studs."

"Wouldn't do much good in this," Maudie said. She dragged her free hand through the water. "You never heard of the Boiled Noodle Effect?"

They both laughed.

From inside the cabin, a com chirped, a one-two… three rhythm.

"That's mine," Winthrop said. "Damn."

"Don't answer it. Anybody asks when you get back to work, tell them we were in a digital dead zone. Mountains and all."

She considered it for a moment. "Nah. I better. Could be my family."

Maudie shrugged, waved at the French doors. "Go and sin no more."

Winthrop stepped out of the water, and felt an almost immediate chill despite the red glow of her skin as she padded through the snow to where a pair of thick beach towels hung on a rack next to the doors, under the roof's overhang enough so they didn't get rained or snowed on.

"Damn, girl, if I was into women, you'd be my first choice," Maudie said. "You got a great butt. Speaking strictly as somebody who knows how much work it takes to get one to look like that, of course."

Winthrop grinned. "Beauty is only skin deep," she said as she wrapped the towel around her. It was cool, but not too cold.

"Yeah, but a great butt is a joy forever!"

Inside the cabin the fire crackled in the big stone fireplace.

Winthrop walked over a patch of cold wood floor, onto the Oriental rug, and picked up her com.

The caller ID showed the name "Lonesome Jay Gridley." She grinned in spite of herself. "Hello?"

"Lieutenant. I take it you haven't been watching the network news lately?"

"Nope. I've been enjoying champagne and a hot tub lately."

"I thought not, or you'd have called. A few things you need to know."

She listened as he filled her in on the situation with the terrorists attacks on nuclear transports. When he was done, she said, "Christ. I'll catch the next plane I can get back to HQ."

"That isn't necessary, I believe we can get along without you for a couple more days. Enjoy your hot tub."

"What aren't you telling me, Gridley? I hear something else hiding there. What is it?"

"Not much. That leak I mentioned that seemed to come from inside Net Force?"

"Yes?

"It came from your station."

"What?"

"Yes, ma'am, no doubt about it. You weren't here when it went out, of course, and we all know you had nothing to do with it, but I'm sure glad it didn't come from my station. Bye-bye. Talk to you later."

He discommed.

Winthrop stared at her com as if it were a rat come to life in her hand.

Oh, man! This sucked!

Chapter Seventeen

Howard looked around. His strike team troops were loaded in three transport vehicles, and they were parked in a dusty stretch of desert with a slightly overcast sky. Without their headlights, it would be very dark out here. The troop vehicles were highly modified Toyota Land Cruisers — mostly just the engines, frames, and wheels left from the originals — and they all wore flat-black carbon-fiber stealth shells. Close-range radar was cheap, a rig swiped from any big powerboat or sailboat would be sufficient for a ranch house, and since they had the cruisers, they might as well use them.

The trick was not so much to be completely invisible, but rather to be hard to see and identify — until you were right on top of whoever was looking at you. Even the new stealth gear wasn't a hundred percent efficient on a land vehicle, but it would give a radar operator an odd blip that might be mistaken for ground clutter or maybe even a herd of deer or something. Probably the stealth shells wouldn't even be necessary; so far, there hadn't been any radar signature emitted from the ranch, so maybe the terrorists hadn't had time to get a unit, or if they had, to set it up. But you tried to cover all the bases as best you could, just in case.

Each of the vehicles held six troopers, suited, locked, and loaded. The assault suits were modified from Regular Army SIPEs, slimmed down a bit since field operations were usually in and out, and the LOL — live-off-the-land — systems weren't necessary. The tactical suits should be enough to turn away what the average terrorist had to shoot at them. The shirt-vests and pants were cloned-spidersilk hardweave, with overlapping body pockets lined with ceramic plates. Boots and helmets were Kevlar, with titanium inserts in the helmets.

The slimback CPUs were armored and shockproofed, and the tactical CPUs did everything from encrypting long-range radio and short-range LOSIR units, to downloading and uploading sat-links and giving motion-sensitive heads-up displays. Except for the LOSIR headsets — line-of-sight-infrared tactical coms — the strike team would keep radio silence until after they had secured the objective. And since LOSIR signals were encrypted, even if the terrorists had a full-range scanner, they wouldn't get anything but gibberish. Besides, by the time the strike team was close enough for the terrorists to scan and hear LOSIR, it would be too late even if they could understand the voxtrans.

Weapons of choice were H&K 9mm subguns, and H&K tactical pistols. They had considered using the 5.65mm OICW, with the 20mm grenade launcher. The bullpup-stocked weapon had an outstanding bracketing/tracking target laser, and it could drop an explosive round into a trench where you couldn't even see an enemy, but Howard didn't completely trust it. Too many bells and whistles with the cameras and computers, and besides, they didn't want anything blowing up on this operation, not even a little bit. Bad enough that the SIPEsuit radios went out every time a thunderstorm passed within a parsec, or that the tactical comps sometimes got confused and had to be reset on the fly.

Howard himself carried a much more unofficial weapon, a 1928 Thompson.45-caliber submachine gun that had belonged to his grandfather. The vintage gun wore a loaded fifty-round drum and had the gangster front grip and sight-through-the-top bolt-slot. He almost never carried the beast, since it weighed about fifteen pounds and was a bear to haul around, but somehow it had felt like the right thing to do on this operation. Normally, he'd be using a.30-caliber assault rifle, or a 7.62, but like the S&W revolver strapped to his right hip, the tommygun was a good-luck piece — an old, but still functional, good-luck piece.

His antique revolver and Chicago typewriter notwithstanding, whoever these camo clowns were, they didn't have the state-of-the-art combat gear that Net Force had.

Howard would be going in his Humvee, which also wore a radar-slipping shell. He glanced over at his ride and saw Fernandez grinning back at him from the driver's seat, camo paint darkening his face below the SIPEsuit's helmet.

In war, sooner or later, this was what it came down to: troops going in against troops. The Air Force could drop tons of bombs or smart missiles, the Navy could shell or hard-rain rocket a target from fifty miles offshore, but in the end, it was the infantry that had to go in, to take and hold the ground.

Next to Howard, Commander Michaels said, "I would say I'd like to go with you, Colonel, but that wouldn't be true. I'm a lousy soldier. I'd trip over something and get in somebody's way."

Howard grinned. "Yes, sir, and that is why you pay us the big bucks. I expect that Assistant Commander Fiorella would have my family jewels if I allowed you to go along anyhow."

Michaels smiled.

Howard looked at his watch. "The transport plane will be entering the drop zone in thirty-three minutes. It's running whisper-props, but even so, out here, sound carries. It won't slow down and even if the terrorists do hear it, they'll be listening for a change in the engine sound, which they won't hear. If we work it right, our assault teams should be flashing puke-and-dizzy lights hot and hard to distract the guards as our four sappers float into the compound on their parawings. I've got a man standing by who will simultaneously cut the power line to the ranch. They've got backup power next to the storage shed, a little gas or diesel generator, but it won't kick on automatically, somebody will have to go out there and start it. Time that happens, he'll have company waiting for him.

"We've had a series of spysats providing continual footprints of the area, so we pretty much know where every terrorist is. We'll have continual coverage through the expected duration of the attack, and a little longer too, just in case things don't go quite as planned. There are three guards posted, two at the front, one at the rear, and if it goes as planned, they will be taken out by the time the two vehicles reach the fence. The main gate is to the front, but there are two smaller gates to the rear, at the north and south corners. Alpha Team will hit the main building with flashbangs, while Beta Team covers the rear of the house, the barn, and the storage shed. Delta Team will patrol outside what's left of the fence in case anybody slips past us. With any luck at all, we'll have them rounded up before they can get their pants on.

"Of course, it's said that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, so we'll just have to go and see."

Michaels nodded.

Howard glanced at his watch again. "All right, people, this is it. Let's roll!"

"Good luck, Colonel. Give ‘em hell."

"Thank you, sir. We will."

Howard hurried to the Humvee. They had gotten an exact distance from the compound to this location from the foot-printing satellite. They'd be running on spookeyes without lights, but the terrain was mostly flat with a little scrub, and they had a route mapped, so they should be able to calculate their speed and distance and nail it to the second.

"Drive, Sergeant. And switch off the brake lights. I don't want the yahoos to see us flashing red because you stopped for a lizard in our path."

"Already done, sir. I've been down this road before."

Fernandez slid his helmet visor down and clicked his spook-eyes on, then cranked the engine and moved out. Howard picked his computerized helmet up from the floor by his feet and slipped it on, put the visor down, and lit his own night-vision scope. He buckled his three-point seat belt into place, snapping the black steel latch shut with a hard clack!

The landscape seemed to light up in that eerie, washed-out green that the starlight amplifiers traded for the seemingly opaque darkness. Then the suit's computer kicked in, adding false colors to give a more realistic image, and it was almost like driving in a somewhat dim and hazy afternoon.

"You don't think this pointy-nose plastic stuff is really going to hide us from radar, do you?" Fernandez said. "Seems like a shame to ruin a perfectly good truck by hanging all this crap on it."

Howard said, "I don't think the boys in the ranch had time to set up a full-scale HQ. They only had a day and some to plan the attack. I'd be surprised if they had a mobile field unit roll into this location with radar or doppler."

"Would you look at that," Fernandez said. "Bugs Bunny!"

A jackrabbit angled across their path, then cut sharply back and stopped as the Humvee rolled past. It sat there watching as the cruisers also zipped past, turning its head to track them. Howard looked over his shoulder at the small creature.

I wonder what a rabbit thinks when he sees four black vehicles with pointy-nose plastic crap hanging all over them rumble past his burrow at two in the morning.

"There's something you don't see every day," Fernandez said.

"Excuse me?"

"Probably what the rabbit was thinking."

Howard smiled. They'd been serving together for a long time. Must be a little telepathic spillage.

He was pumped, but even so, there was this… weary feeling, as if he could stretch out and take a long nap, could sleep for a week, and still not wake up feeling refreshed. What was this all about, this lethargy? It was worrisome. Well. He'd have to deal with it later. He had business to take care of just now. Serious business.

Alex Michaels walked back to the AWD car they'd given him, a little Subaru Outback. The strike team was out of sight in the darkness, heading for a rendezvous with the bad guys ten miles away. He should have stayed at the tent HQ back at the Texaco truck stop in Tonopah, but even if he wasn't a frontline soldier, he had wanted to come at least this far. By the time he got back to the tent, Howard's attack would be in full swing, maybe even over. All things going well.

He started the car, then headed back to the dirt road a mile or so away that would take him to the highway a couple miles past that.

This was a risky business, the assault. If it went sour, it would probably be bad enough so he'd be looking for a new job.

He laughed to himself. It seemed like every time he turned around, his job was at risk. But that went with the territory. Steve Day, the first Commander of Net Force, had never mentioned that part to him. Maybe if he hadn't been killed by that Russian computer genius's assassins, he would have eventually gotten around to telling Michaels about it…

It was really dark out here, the only source of illumination his headlights, and he bounced along for what seemed like a lot longer than a mile, the little car rocking pretty hard over some of the dips and holes in the ground. He reached the dirt road.

Finally.

For just a moment, he wasn't sure about which way to turn.

Then he remembered he had followed Howard's Humvee off the road into the desert by making a right; therefore, he should turn left to head back in the direction of the highway. He hadn't been tracking on the odometer, but it seemed like that had been a couple-three miles.

Alex paused, then made up his mind. There was no danger, he knew, not to himself nor to Colonel Howard's strike team. The terrorist camp was several miles away — at least four or five — so he could head this way for a couple of miles. If he didn't hit the highway by then, he'd turn around or check his virgil… something he was reluctant to do. That would be admitting defeat. He had always hated to ask for directions, a legacy from his father, and even looking at a map was considered unmanly in his family. The Michaels didn't get lost, according to the old man.

He turned left and picked up a little speed now that he was on a road of sorts.

A large bug splashed against the windshield in front of his face, leaving a blob of greenish goo. The body fluids of that one joined those of several other low-flying moths, mosquitoes, beetles, and whatevers. Apparently the insects didn't hibernate for the winter here. He wasn't driving that fast, and you'd think they could see him coming for a long way off, but they kept splattering against the front of the car. He turned the wipers on, smeared the bug goo around, added the washer fluid to the mix, and managed to clear a patch of glass he could see through.

The road dipped into a gully, then came up, and he rolled over several half-buried rocks in the dirt, jolting him hard enough so his head nearly hit the ceiling.

He didn't remember that part of the drive coming in. None of it looked familiar. Dark as it was, he couldn't see anything but what was in the cone of his headlights, but surely he should have reached the highway by now.

Had he somehow taken a wrong turn?

He looked at his odometer. The highway couldn't have been more than three or four miles from the dirt road. He must have come that far, he'd been driving for at least twenty or thirty minutes. It was 2:20 a.m. Howard would be hitting the terrorists in five minutes.

Maybe it was time to check the GPS.

Well, not yet. Give it another mile. If he didn't see the highway by then, he'd turn around and backtrack.

Michaels shook his head. Brother. Wouldn't that be a story for the folks at HQ? You heard about how Commander Michaels got lost in the desert?

I don't think so, Alex, m'boy.

There was a hillock ahead that curved to the left. As he rounded the curve, the dirt was loose, and the car fishtailed and slipped traction, so he slowed to a crawl. To his left, there was a little stand of scrub trees, stunted pines or some such, none of which looked to be more than ten or twelve feet tall. That was practically a forest out here.

A man stepped out of the scrub growth. He wore chocolate-chip desert camouflage pants and a jacket, and held a short assault weapon in his hands, pointed at Michaels's car. He waved the weapon, his meaning clear: Pull over.

An AK-47?

For a moment, just a moment, Michaels thought it must be one of Howard's troops, but then he knew the man was all wrong. Wrong clothes, wrong gun, wrong place.

Fear spasmed in Michaels' belly as he realized who this must be:

It was one of the terrorists—!

Oh, shit! What had he done? Better still — what was he going to do now?

Chapter Eighteen

Howard looked at his watch. A gift from his wife on his thirty-fifth birthday, it was a Bulova Field Grade Marine Star, with a black face and a dial light, an analog quartz whose battery was recharged by the smallest body motion. It wasn't the most expensive watch made, not by a long shot, but she had saved for a year to buy it. It kept dead-on time, and right now the sweep second hand was moving toward 0225 hours. Thirty seconds left…

It was time.

"Ready to rock, Sergeant?"

"Just call me Elvis."

The four vehicles were rolling, slowed somewhat to time their arrival. The compound was just ahead, a smear of hard yellow flaring in the spookeyes' optical field from the security light mounted high on the wall of the barn. Which illumination should be going out just… about… now…

The compound went dark.

"Better make sure your filters are up, Colonel, the light show is about to begin."

"I've been down this road before, Sergeant." Both men smiled.

Time slowed for Alex Michaels as the gunman walked toward his car. It seemed as if he had days, weeks, months to decide what to do. The problem seemed to be that he couldn't move. Well, he could, but the speed of his movement bogged down to match the gunman's walk. Just to lift his hand from the steering wheel seemed to take forever.

In what couldn't have been more than a couple of seconds, Alex sorted through all the possibilities he could think of. He could try to talk his way out of it. He could stomp the gas pedal and haul ass, ducking low so that when the guy opened up on him he might not get hit. He could pull his taser and hope to get the needles into the man in camo gear before he was hosed with jacketed death. He could shit or go blind.

So many possibilities. How to choose?

The gunman got to within a foot or two of the door, and motioned with the assault rifle's muzzle for Michaels to roll his window down.

Choose, Alex. Choose!

The PEE lights strobed like an electrical storm gone insane. The polarizing niters in the suit's helmet visor blocked the effect — plus they were behind the lights, and thus got only a partial hit anyhow.

"Gate dead ahead!" Fernandez yelled. "Looks like our sappers have taken it down along with the guards. Might as well have rolled out a red carpet for us."

"Don't count those chickens just yet."

The Humvee rolled through the gate, and one of the sappers waved at it as it went past.

"Alpha has landed," came a voice over Howard's LOSIR. "We're in the door."

"Beta's got the back door," came another voice.

"Delta's on patrol," came a third.

Fernandez slewed the Humvee to a stop by the shed where the chickens were kept, not far from the barn. Howard bailed out, the Thompson held ready, and Fernandez was next to him in two seconds.

"You didn't lock the keys in the car, did you?"

"Negative."

"Good, I hate it when you do that."

Truth of it was, Howard himself should have stayed outside the fence in command mode and directed traffic from there. He didn't really have a function here, except as backup for Alpha, which they ought not to need—

"We're in, got static, stand by—"

Howard heard gunfire, both over his helmet phones and in real time. It came from inside the main house.

"Two terries down, two down! Alpha intact!" Alpha's team leader called. "Target just down the hall, stand by." There came the sound of more gunfire from inside.

"So far, so good—" Howard began.

He felt the impacts of the bullets before he heard the shots, and the incoming rounds bit hard enough to jolt him. Thump, thump, thump, three of them, all on the left side, but the armor held—

Damn! Howard turned, saw a man and a woman in the doorway to the barn, illuminated by the bright yellow-orange of their muzzle flashes as they fired bursts from fully automatic rifles at him and Fernandez. Now and then, a tracer left a glowing red trail in the darkness. Bad idea — tracers worked both ways—

Another bullet hit Howard on the torso. It felt like being whacked with a hammer.

Shit—!

Michaels took a deep breath, then pressed the button to lower the window with his left hand while he carefully pulled the taser from his belt with his right hand. The terrorist stepped right up to the car.

"Excuse me, officer," Michaels said. "What's the problem?"

Michaels already had his left hand on the door's latch. He took another deep breath, then stared off in the distance and saw a series of dim light flashes. That would be the attack on the compound.

"What the hell is that?" Michaels said, still looking into the distance.

The gunman must have caught a glint of light peripherally. He glanced away from Michaels to get a better look—

Michaels yanked the latch up, threw his weight against the door, and slammed it into the surprised gunman. It wasn't enough to knock him down, but it did rock him off balance.

"God damn—!" the man began. He flailed with the weapon and his empty hand, trying to catch his footing, but slid a little in the loose dirt on the road. He recovered a hair, enough so he could swing the assault rifle around—

Michaels pulled the door shut. A little too hard — the door's latch handle came off in in his hand — but he didn't have time to worry about that. He thrust his taser through the open window, pressed the laser aiming stud, saw the red dot on the center of the man's chest, and fired the weapon. It seemed to take eons—

The man jerked, juttered toward the car as the capacitor needles fed him however many thousand volts they held. The assault rifle nosed skyward and went off five or six times in one long noise—blaaaat! — flashing red-orange and making less noise than it seemed it should. The gunman spun to his left and corkscrewed, hit the dirt, and continued to spasm, the gun still gripped tightly in one hand but no longer firing—

Michaels couldn't open the door, since the handle had broken off in his hand, but he grabbed the window frame and hauled himself headfirst out of the car, did a sloppy dive and forward roll, and came up next to the downed man. He bent and jerked the AK-47 away from the gunman, then took two steps back and pointed the weapon at the man.

If this sucker tried anything, he was going to blast his sorry ass to kingdom come!

The tasered gunman didn't seem too interested in doing much of anything just at the moment.

Michaels exhaled out his held breath. Damn—

Howard looked at the man and woman who had opened up on him and Fernandez. Oddly enough, what he found himself thinking was: Tracers. Huh. Probably one every fifth or tenth round. What had they been doing out in the barn? Why hadn't somebody picked up their heat sigs?

Next to him, Julio turned and leveled his H&K subgun at the shooters.

Howard swung his own heavy weapon around—

"Shit!" Julio said. He dropped to one knee, his return fire chewing up the ground five meters in front of him. "I'm hit," he said. His voice was calm, as if he was talking about what he was going to have for breakfast.

One of the shooters must have armor-piercing rounds—

But they weren't using concealment or cover, just standing there hosing, so Howard V-stepped hard to his left, brought the Thompson up to a quick-kill point, and triggered a five-round burst at the man. Braap! Orange tongues lanced from the tommygun, and the Cutts compensator on the end of the barrel took part of the flaming orange and spewed it upward, forming a fiery letter "L" in the darkness that helped keep the recoil down and the barrel from climbing too much.

Without waiting to see the effect on the man, he shifted his index to the woman. Braap!

The shooters collapsed, and the man beat the woman to the ground by maybe a half second.

Howard spun three-sixty, looking for more attackers. Clear. His heads-up showed him a strike-team suit signature as one of the sappers moved in toward the two downed terrorists. The sapper waved an "I-got-‘em" at the colonel, who turned away.

"Julio?"

"I'm okay, John," he said. "Took it just above the knee, to the inside. I don't think it hit the bone. Of course, I could be wrong."

"We have the objective," Alpha's team leader said over the LOSIR. "Eight terries down, Alpha Team secure, no casualties."

Howard blew out a big breath. Thank God. He said, "Copy, Alpha, good work. Doc, Julio took one in the leg. We're at the southwest corner of the chicken coop, get over here PDQ."

He couldn't see them, but the term LOSIR was not strictly accurate — there was always a little bleed, enough to keep coms working when somebody ducked behind a tree or wandered off center.

Doc, the medic, rode with Delta. "On the way, sir. Let me drop my passengers. Forty-five seconds. Go! Out, out!"

Thirty seconds later, Delta Team's vehicle, empty except for the driver, Doc, plowed right through a section of fence, slapped it flat, and skidded to a stop ten feet away. Doc bailed and ran to where Julio sat, both hands pressed against the hole in his armor.

Doc flicked his helmet spotlight on and used a suitcutter to open a big flap in the leg of the wounded sergeant's armor. He sliced away the pants leg to reveal the hole in the flesh. He bent the leg up and looked at the exit wound.

"Looks like twenty-caliber high-velocity hardball," Doc said. "Through-and-through, missed the bone, no expansion. Neat little hole about the size of a drinking straw, bullet hot enough to cauterize the wound. We'll have to clean out fibers. Otherwise, I don't see any problem."

Doc grinned, leaned away from the leg, and looked at Fernandez. "Jesus, some people will do anything to get a few days off."

Fernandez said, "You do what you have to do to get a break."

Howard nodded, relieved. "Let's hear it, people," he said into the LOSIR.

The reports came in.

"A walk in the park, sir," Alpha's team leader said. "We make it six terries KIA, in the house, two wounded but still alive, two undamaged and in restraints. Objective is patent, no leaks, b.g. radiation levels normal. Send Doc on in when he gets a minute."

"Nobody came out this way," Delta's team leader said.

"Three terry guards down, one KIA, two slightly damaged," the head of the sapper team said. "They didn't lay a glove on our guys."

"Hell, we've been watching paint dry back here," Beta's team leader said. "We coulda stayed home and seen it on TV for all we had to do. We won't even have to clean our weapons." He sounded disgusted.

The sapper who had gone to check out the shooters in the barn came out carrying a big bunched sheet of heavy material, black on one side and silvered on the other. "Found this in the barn, Colonel," he said.

Howard looked at the sensor shroud and nodded. That was why nobody picked up a heat sig on the terrorists who'd been hiding in the barn. They'd been shielded. He'd thought about radar, but not about heat-sink camo. A mistake on his part, but fortunately not a fatal one.

Howard blew out a sigh. They had the stolen nuclear material and Julio was going to be okay. It could have been a lot worse.

Time to call Michaels.

"Commander?"

"Colonel. Everything okay?"

"Yes, sir. Objective achieved, terrorists neutralized, we have one minor injury on our side. Sergeant Fernandez picked up a little scratch."

Sitting on the ground with his leg bandaged and an amp of dorph injected to kill his pain, Fernandez said, "Bet you wouldn't call it that if it was your leg."

Howard grinned.

"Outstanding, Colonel! Congratulations. Please pass it on to your team."

"Thank you, sir, I will. We'll see you at field HQ soon as we get things cleaned up here."

"I'm on my way there now," Michaels said.

Howard frowned. "Sir? You aren't there yet?"

"I, uh, took a little ride in the country," Michaels said. "I picked up a… hitchhiker you might find it interesting to talk to when you get back."

"Sir?"

"Never mind, Colonel, I'll explain it when I see you. You got us out of a nasty spot and I appreciate it. I'll make sure the whole country appreciates it."

"Sir. Discom."

After he signed off, Howard considered his relationship with Commander Alexander Michaels. The man wasn't bad, for a civilian. Not bad at all.

"Can we hurry this up and go home, sir?" Fernandez said. "I have an early tango lesson I don't want to miss."

Howard laughed.

Chapter Nineteen

Tyrone Howard thought he might just go nova, might just shatter into a million billion pieces.

He sat on Bella's bed, his arms around her, and they kissed. Everything he knew about kissing she had taught him in the last couple of months, and he thought he was starting to get the hang of it. Her back felt hot under his hands, even through her shirt, and there wasn't a strap across her smooth skin…

She broke the kiss and let out a big sigh. "You have to leave now, Tyrone. I'm supposed to go to my aunt's house and we have to lift in like ten minutes. I have to change clothes."

"Uh-huh," he said. He leaned in and kissed her again. That went on for another minute or two. She leaned back.

"Really, Tyrone. I have to go."

"Uh-huh." He kissed her some more. It wasn't as if she was trying real hard to get away, given as how she had her hands on the back of his head pulling him closer.

Finally, she pulled away again and said, "I'll see you at the mall tomorrow, you duplicate?"

"Uh-huh. I doop that." He reached for her, but this time she put one hand on his chest and held him off. "Come on, Ty."

"Okay." He blew out a breath. "Okay. But it's hard to leave."

"I bet it is," she said, smiling. "Here, let me make it easier for you." She took his hand in both hers, kissed it on the palm, then pressed it against her left breast.

His mouth fell open, his brain went into vapor lock, he forgot how to breathe. His bug eyes must make him look like a giant frog.

It was the most exciting moment of his life.

She moved his hand away from her warmth and gave it back to him. She grinned real big and stood. "Shoo. Go." She waved at him with both hands in a sweeping motion.

He stood, knowing what a zombie must feel like. He would jump off the top of a tall building if she wanted.

Explode. He was going to just… blow up and splatter all over the room. It would make a big, gooey mess. How could he not? He couldn't stand it!

Julio Fernandez was in what passed for the infirmary at HQ. It wasn't much, just a few beds in a small ward, and he was the only patient. He lay on the bed flipping through the commercial entcom channels on the TV, looking for something that would keep his attention. He didn't need to be here. Doc had swabbed out the little hole in his leg and patched it with synskin, then given him a tetanus shot and told him to avoid heavy squats or marathon running for a few days. But Net Force policy was that certain injuries required compulsory treatment, which in the case of gunshot wounds meant at least a twenty-four-hour medical observation period. It had to do with liability and insurance and crap like that. He wasn't going to sue anybody. He knew that, the colonel knew it, but a lot of people sued a lot of other people these days — there were more lawyers in D.C. than there were roaches — so they'd stuck him in bed, started an IV with antibiotics, and given him the television remote. They'd also given him one of those short, open-up-the-back hospital gowns.

He looked at the time sig on the TV screen. He'd come back from the raid and been examined at noon. So he was stuck here until noon tomorrow. Boredom and cafeteria food loomed and threatened. Jesus.

A nurse came in, and with her was the colonel. He grinned real big.

"Very funny, sir. Wait until the next time you get shot."

"Not my policy, Sergeant Fernandez. I don't make the rules, I just do what they tell me."

The colonel sat on the foot of the bed and glanced up at the tube. "Anything good on?"

"Best things are reruns of I Love Lucy and trash sports. I just saw the middleweight North American sumo winner — he goes maybe one-eighty, two-hundred — beat the heavyweight — a fat guy pushing seven hundred pounds. Big guy came roaring in, the little guy stepped aside and tripped him. Fatso fell out of the ring, shook the camera he hit so hard."

"David and Goliath," Howard said. "There is a precedent."

"David cheated, he used a sling."

"Goliath had a sword."

"Yeah, and only a fool brings a knife to a gunfight."

"How's the leg?"

"Fine. I could take you on the obstacle course right now."

"Uh-huh. I'd almost rather be doing that than going home."

"Your mother-in-law still there?"

"Until next Sunday."

"Serves you right. Sir."

"I stopped by the office on the way over here. Seems there was a complaint about you from one of the civilian instructors in the feeb unit. Did you know that you were ‘vicious, brutal, perhaps even psychotic'? A man unfit for Net Force service, and a man who was very likely a threat to public safety?"

"Yes, sir, I believe that pretty much sums me up."

"What did you do to this Horowitz, Sarge?"

"I leaned on his desk and told him he should think less about posturing and more about doing his job."

"Lord, Sergeant, how do you expect to get away with such behavior? What kind of savage are you?"

"An unrepentant one, sir."

"Well, I will send word to Mr. Horowitz that I have taken his counsel and disciplined you appropriately." Howard reached over and took the TV remote, pointed it over his shoulder at the wall-mounted set, and clicked the power off. "No television for the next hour, Sergeant."

"I thought the idea was punishment, sir."

Both men grinned.

By the time she got back to HQ, Joanna Winthrop knew the party was over. The terrorists had been taken down, the stolen plutonium recovered, and the only thing she had to do now was figure out who had gotten into her workstation and used it to give the Sons of Whoever the information about the shipments.

But somebody had told her that Julio Fernandez had been shot and was in the infirmary and so, instead, she bought a small vase of flowers and went to see him.

He was the only patient in the infirmary. Since a lot of the Net Force staff had opted for the long holiday, including, apparently, the medical staff, the place had an echoey feel to it.

"Sergeant Fernandez."

"Lieutenant Winthrop."

"I heard you got shot."

"A scratch. I'm stuck here overnight, SOP, but I could go out dancing if they'd let me."

She put the vase on the table next to the bed. "You're just lying here, doing nothing? No books, no entcom?"

"The colonel was here, you just missed him. He turned the set off. I'm being punished."

She raised her eyebrows. "For being shot?"

He chuckled. "No, even Howard's not that hard-assed."

He told her about his computer class.

It was a funny story. When he was done, she laughed. "Tough CO, isn't he?"

"Yeah. I really wanted to see how the middleweight wrestler was going to do against the light heavyweight."

They both laughed.

"So, how are you doing?" Julio asked. "I heard about the workstation business."

"Oh, don't worry about that. I'll figure it out."

"Any suspects?"

"At the top of my list? Jay Gridley. He doesn't like me. He thinks I slept my way into this job."

"Seriously?"

"That he thinks I used my feminine wiles? Or that he planted the leak in my station? Yes to the former, no to the latter. We aren't buddies, but I respect his abilities. Though if you tell him I said so, I'll deny it."

"Deny what?"

"He might keep stuff from me, but I don't think he's nasty — or stupid — enough to try to implicate me in a federal crime. After this assignment, I'm back with our unit, so I'm no threat to his position. And he has to know I'm going to figure out who did it. Just a matter of time."

There was a moment of quiet when neither of them spoke.

"So how was it?" she asked. "The sortie?"

"By the numbers," he said. "The bad guys weren't in our league. They were outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and outgunned. Only mistake we made was mine. I'd been awake, I wouldn't be spending the night here with my leg propped up and a draft on my butt. One of the yabbos hiding in a sensor nest had a few rounds of AP in her weapon. Fortunately, she was either rattled or a lousy shot. She cooked off most of a thirty-round stick and only nicked me one time. Guy with her was a better shooter, but he was using hardball and tracer, his ammo couldn't pierce the suits."

"Too bad I missed it," she said.

"You've been on a few field ops."

"Nothing lately. The colonel thinks I'm more useful in front of a computer. Last time I was in the field, I was in the HQ tent thirty miles away from the action."

"He's right," Fernandez said. "Grunts like me are a dime a dozen, but a computer genius is harder to replace."

She smiled. "I need to get back to work. Anything I can do for you?"

She saw him hesitate a second, and wondered if there would be an off-color remark. If he was looking for an opening, this was a good one.

He shook his head. "No, ma'am, but thank you for asking. I'll catch up on my sleep. See you when I get out." He flashed her a nice smile.

She resisted a sudden urge to lean over and kiss him. She was really beginning to like this guy.

"Later, Julio. We'll talk about computers when we get all this straightened out."

"I'd like that. Thanks for stopping by." Another hesitation, then: "Jo."

Jay Gridley had given up on the cowboy scenario because it felt too slow. True, speed in a scenario didn't translate to RT — real time — but if you were poking along on a horse when you felt like racing on a big Harley motorcycle, it made a subjective difference.

So now Jay turned to one of his favorite action heroes, borrowing from one of the early classic James Bond movies, Thunderball.

Over the landscape he flew, zipping through the air with the famous Bell Rocket Belt on his back.

Of course, in RW, the Bell device was not a belt at all, but a large and very heavy backpack. And it didn't have much of an operational range in RW either. Jay had done some research when designing his scenario. The original rocket belt was essentially nothing more than a pair of fuel tanks, some handlebars, a throttle, and a couple of rocket nozzles. How it worked was, hydrogen peroxide sprayed into a fine mesh, producing a very hot and hard steam that spewed from the rocket nozzles with a few hundred pounds of thrust. It was loud, dangerous, and you only had twenty-some seconds of lift, maybe thirty with the right fuel mixture and tuned nozzles, and that was it. You could lean in the direction you wanted to go, and later some maneuvering jets were added, but if you were a hundred feet up in the air when the gas ran out, you were going to fall and smash into the ground real hard.

A later version, the Tyler Belt, was a bit more efficient and gave a little more flight time, but the hops were still short and quick. A small jet-engine model that was theoretically capable of giving the wearer half an hour in the air had eventually been designed, but the U.S. military had claimed exclusive use of the new engine for its Cruise missiles.

So the personal backpack craft of science fiction just kind of fizzled out. The existing rocket belts wound up in museums or television commercials or movies, but that was it.

Jay's version of the rocket belt had a secret — but theoretically possible — fuel and a miniature jet engine that gave him an hour in the air and an automatic safety reserve to allow him to land when the fuel ran low. He could have given it infinite power in VR, of course, but that took some of the fun out of it. Realistic limits were better for the scenarios he created. Any fool could do fantasy; it took some skill to keep it believable.

Anyway, while it wasn't as fast as a jet or even his pedal-to-the-metal Viper, it was a real rush to fly along with the wind blowing in your face and ruffling your hair, to be able to leap tall buildings wearing the technological equivalent of seven league boots.

The way Jay figured it, if you couldn't have fun, why bother?

Right at the moment, Jay was zooming over the new sixteen-lane South China Causeway, from just outside Xianggang, Hong Kong, heading north to Jiulong, on the mainland, looking for Wong Electronics trucks. These were easy to spot from the air, given that they had bright orange roofs, each of which was numbered. In RW, without a VR scenario enabled, the "trucks" were actually packets of binary information gathered and collated at nodes and squirted across the net. RW was just too boring.

Wong Electronics made some minor pieces of hardware, but they specialized in transmission software, readers and mailers, and certain kinds of security programs. Whoever had snuck into Winthrop's computer had erected a couple of firewalls and dug two deadfalls on his or her way out to cover his or her ass, and from the size and shape, even without the snipped-off ID codes, Jay knew the walls ‘n' falls were top-of-the-line Wongware.

If he could locate, then sneak a ride on a Wong truck and get into their database, maybe he could find out who had bought the firewalls and deadfalls. It would be a brute-force cruncher of a project, but he had access to the power. Maybe the breaker had gotten sloppy and left a trail he could follow.

Ah. There was one of the orange-roof trucks now, a couple hundred feet below and half a mile ahead. He'd just drop on down and stow away. Breaking a lock on one of the trucks' doors would be easier than taking his shoes off for a player of Jay's ability.

He throttled back on the belt's thrust and started to lose altitude. He would very much like to find out who had used Winthrop's computer before she did. It would be a loss of face she would hate, he'd be shiny as a new wetlight chip, and he would love it: Oh, that? I ran the guy down, didn't I mention it? Piece of cake, I'm surprised you didn't do it yourself by now. No, no need to thank me, Lieutenant, I was just doing my job…

Jay reached the rear of the truck, shucked off the jet pack, and got out his lock picks. It took him forty-five seconds to get the door open. He closed it quietly behind him.

That's Gridley. Jay Gridley…

From a thousand feet above Jay Gridley, Platt watched, holding slow and level the little helicopter he'd found himself flying in when he'd dialed into Gridley's scenario. Kind of neat, the rocket thing the guy wore, and the backgrounds were all sharp and laid in thick too. The little half-breed gook had some skill.

Of course, Platt had a little skill himself. Plus he had access to all kinds of secret crap that a U.S. senator could put his hands on. Anything that White could touch, Hughes could touch, and whatever Hughes had, Platt could play with. There were real advantages to knowing top-secret codes. Platt could rascal stuff from the folks who built Net Force's computers, folks who had done the original hardware and programming, and who knew where all the back doors were hidden.

You hired a guy to build you a castle, he was gonna know where the secret compartments were, ‘cause he put them there.

Platt watched the Net Force operative settle toward the orange roof of the Wong Electronics truck on the freeway below. The man dropped his jet pack, opened the truck's door, and climbed inside.

This was gonna be as much fun as goin' upside somebody's head. This little gook with his jet pack didn't have a clue who he was dealin' with. Not a fuckin' clue. He was gonna get his ass kicked, and Platt was gonna love doin' it too.

He let the helicopter sink a little.

When he was over the truck and maybe sixty feet up, he opened the copter's window and leaned out, a twenty-five-pound barbell weight in one hand. He extended the weight, lined up, and let it drop.

The steel plate fell, hitting the cab. The driver swerved into the car in the lane next to him. He slammed on his brakes and skidded to a halt. Nobody got hurt, but it ought to rattle little Jay pretty good.

Platt hit the copter's throttled, rose, and veered away. By the time Jay-Jay got his shit together, Platt would be long gone.

We havin' fun now, ain't we?

Chapter Twenty

It was Jay Gridley who was the bearer of the bad news.

Alexander Michaels was feeling pretty good that there hadn't been any more top-secret leaks into the net for the entire workweek. He was about to go home and enjoy a quiet beer or two on New Year's Eve. He planned to be asleep by the time midnight rolled around, and with it the year 2011 and whatever joys and griefs it would bring. But as he was getting ready to leave his office to beat the traffic, Jay came in with a couple of sheets of hardcopy in his hand.

"I think you ought to take a look at this, Boss."

"It can't wait until Monday?"

"I don't think so."

"Why don't I like the tone of that?"

Jay tendered the hardcopy. Michaels looked at it. He started to read it aloud:

"Overlord Beasts of America:

"Know you Beasts that your days are numbered. Know you Oppressors of the Disenfranchised People, that the Number of the Beast is 666, and that the Number fast approaches. We, the Representatives of the People, we, The Frihedsakse, will bring Low You Despoilers of Earth, You Masters of Tyranny."

Michaels looked up from the hardcopy at Jay. "Fried socks? Freed sex?"

"Close enough. Our universal translator says it's Danish. Means ‘axis of liberty.' "

"Danish? I never heard of any Danish terrorists! Denmark is a peaceful, civilized country where you can let your old grandma go for walks alone at night without worrying she'll get mugged."

"Sure. She won't get mugged, but she might slip and freeze and maybe turn into a granny-sicle," Jay said.

Michaels shook his head and continued reading:

"For Your Wicked Ways are Manifest and Myriad, and we Shall Reveal your Sickness to All. All Shall Know You for your Evil, and the Weapons of your Sinful Ways Shall be used Against You, for the Power of Knowledge is the Light that All Demons Fear and the Power of Knowledge is given to the People."

"Brother," Michaels said. He looked at Jay again. "So why didn't you add this one to the pile of other whackaloos claiming responsibility for the leaks?"

"Read on, McDuff."

"You cannot Hide from the Light of Justice, nor can You Run from the People's Retribution, nor will Fortresses save You, for you are Hated by the People."

"A kind of loose interpretation of Machiavelli, that part," Jay said.

"Against You the People will throw All that is needed to Defeat you. The End is Near. Prepare for your Doom."

It was signed "The Frihedsakse."

Michaels looked at Jay yet again.

"Next page," Jay prompted.

On the next page was a list of numbers.

"As nearly as we can tell, those are the original posting times and dates for all the major leaks we've been running down. There are a couple there we missed. We went back and strained a lot of stuff posted then, using the Super Cray Colander. We found a posting of the master list for last month's new American Express customer names and numbers. The other posting we found reveals the codes for all the computer-controlled railroad safety lights and switches on the main commuter line between Washington and Baltimore. A bright hacker could use those to pile half-a-dozen trains up into big heaps of smoking scrap before somebody figured out what was going on. We called American Express and Amtrak."

"Jesus."

"Unlikely anybody would know those specifics unless they posted them in the first place, Boss."

Michaels looked at the number. The last one in the sequence read:

/31/10-1159.

"That's tonight? December 31st, one second before midnight?"

"Yes, sir. If these are the guys, they are going to leak something just as the New Year arrives. Be my guess it won't be a recipe for mulled wine."

"Shit."

"I hear that, Boss."

"Any way to trace this?"

"Sure. We already did. Posted on a public BBS from a pay phone in Grand Central Terminal, New York City, at 3:15 p.m. today. Rush hour, New Year's Eve. No sig, no ID, no residual DNA from the modem jack on the phone, no fingerprints. A six-phone bank next to a coffee shop. Phones are in a dead zone, no security cams watching ‘em. Records show thirty-seven calls were made at those six phones between 5 p.m. and 5:20 p.m. Good luck trying to find whoever sent it."

"Better tell your shift they won't be partying tonight."

"Already done," Jay said. "We're scanning all the major nets we can, we've turned all of our search engines on, have squealbots roaming, and we've informed all of the big commercial services to grab anything coming in from 11:55 p.m. to 12:05 a.m. I expect we're going to get real sick of reading ‘Happy New Year!' but if he posts anything on a major board or node, we should get it pretty quick."

Michaels said, "Good work, Jay. I guess I'll be in my office."

"Happy New Year, Boss." "Yeah. Right."