Hidden Agendas

Chapter Twenty-One

Platt sat in the kitchen of his house, the house that had belonged to his mother before she died, his laptop computer on the wooden table next to the fridge. He took another big ole slug of the Southern Comfort and Coke over ice, and giggled. Four minutes it had taken the Net Force pukes to snag his posting. He'd have thought they coulda done it in less, given they knew exactly when it was coming and all, but okay, cut ‘em a little slack, they did have a lot of territory to cover. He'd stuck a squealer on the note and dropped it into a public chat room on the World OnLine commercial service, the WOL room marked "Gay Texans."

Steers ‘n' Queers, he called that room, after an old joke his uncle had once told him about Texas. He liked to check in there once in a while and do a little VR vampire stuff on the fags, leading them on and all before he blasted them. He had a great little piggyback virus, a Trojan horse he could embed in an e-mail. That was a hot piece of software, infecting e-mail, since you supposedly couldn't do that. The queers'd open the mail, read a few lines of the hot sex stuff he put in, then bap! the virus would infect their computer. Unless they had the latest immune system software installed, it would eat their drive in about two days.

Served ‘em right for being fags.

He took another snort of the blended liquor and Coke, and laughed again. He was remembering little Jay Gridley hopping out of that VR truck, trying to figure out why the sucker had slewed to a stop in the middle of the freeway. Time he got it, it was too late. Haw!

Platt was on the wireless modem, had beamed a signal to a rebroadcaster, and then into a little throwaway stupecomp he'd set up in a rented room in San Diego, California. The stupecomp was set up for e-mail only, and rigged so it logged onto WOL and then sent the message and squeal at exactly 11:59: 59 Eastern Standard Time. When the squeal went off, it sent the signal back to the stupecomp, which routed it back through the rebroadcaster and to his laptop, to let him know. Then the stupecomp wiped its hard drive and RAM disk clean, then fried the modem's memory real good — a complete wipe that nobody was going to undo — and shut itself off. Probably they'd have a team of feds kicking in the room's door in an hour or two, but that was okay. It'd give ‘em something to do, but finding the computer in San Diego wasn't gonna do them no good, no good at all. They couldn't get anything off it that was gonna point them at him, three thousand miles away in Georgia laughing his ass off.

He lifted his glass, rattled the ice cubes, and held it up in a toast. "Yo, Net Force. Happy Fucking New Year!"

He drained the rest of the dark brown and slightly fizzy liquid in two big swallows, put the glass down on the table, then shut the laptop off. The info in the squirt wasn't much, a list of all the patients treated for STDs — sexually transmitted diseases — reported to the Atlanta CDC MedNet for the last six months. By law, certain things had to be reported to the states, and eventually some of these things wound up at the Centers for Disease Control. There were a few eyebrow-raisin' names on the list, politicians, actors and actresses, some high-profile big-money types, and even some visiting big shots, including a couple of sand nigrah princes. No real tactical value, the list, but it would be embarrassing as all hell trying to explain to your wife just how come you was treated for the clap. Mainly it was something to rattle Net Force's cage, to show that the little manifesto Hughes had cooked up was legit. A throwaway, that was all.

Outside, the sounds of firecrackers and gunshots still echoed through the cold Georgia night.

"Oh, yeah, yeah — we havin' fun now, ain't we, boys?"

Hughes sat in bed, reading a recent biography of the Norwegian Vidkun Quisling. Quisling, a career army office whose name later came to be synonymous with "traitor," had in the late 1930's, formed a national socialist party in his country, the Nasjonal Samling. The party hadn't done much, had never had any real power, but then the Germans had started a war and, in due course, had invaded Norway. Quisling tried to form his own government, which the Germans knocked down pretty quick, but since he was a home-grown national socialist who had once met with Hitler, the Nazis saw him as one of their own. Quisling became a collaborator who was ultimately deemed responsible for sending hundreds of Jews to the death camps, along with trying to convert the schools and churches into pro-German organizations.

One of the first things the Norwegians had done after their liberation was to round up and arrest scores of known collaborators. These were quickly tried, then quickly executed.

Quisling had been at the top of their list.

The biographer was convinced that Quisling's policies had cost Germany the war. Had he not tried so hard to "Nazify" the country, the writer was convinced there would not have developed much of a Norwegian resistance movement. The Norwegians were from good Viking stock, not the least bit cowardly, as evidenced by the famous tale of their king and the Jewish symbol — when told that Jews must wear the Star of David sign in public to show who they were, supposedly King Haakon VII took up the symbol himself and urged all his people to do the same. Thai could be apocryphal, of course, but truth should never stand in the way of a good story. The Norwegians were also smart enough to figure out which way the winds of war were blowing. If things hadn't been bad at home, they would have hunkered down and allowed the storm to blow itself out. But Quisling's policies pissed them off.

The resistance movement was never more than a small thorn in the Nazis' side, but it did cause a fair amount of industrial sabotage. Foremost among the attacks was a major strike against the heavy-water production facilities in Rjukan. The writer postulated that if the Germans had been able to speed up their atomic experiments, they would have likely developed a working atomic bomb before the United Slates did, and that such a weapon would have turned the tide of war in their favor. A few of those in the noses of V2 rockets launched from ships off the U.S. mainland at American cities would have done the trick.

If you accepted the theory, that was a reasonable assumption. A mile-wide smoking crater in the middle of New York or Washington, D.C., would have given the Americans something to think about, all right.

Too bad for them, the Germans ran out of time. It was left for America to build fission bombs that finished off the Japanese; atomics hadn't even been needed to beat the Germans.

Hughes thought this Quisling-cost-the-war theory was something of a stretch, but the writer nonetheless echoed a valid point from all the vaults of history: For want of a nail, a war could be lost. One man, in the right place, at the right time, could alter the course of the entire world. There was a popular sci-fi plot device that frequently used this idea. What would happen if a time traveler went back and throttled Hitler as a boy? Or some Christian zealot time-traveled and rescued Jesus from the cross? Or a fumble-footed paleontologist went back and accidentally killed the first protohuman ancestor from whom mankind would evolve?

A butterfly flapping its wings in Kansas today contributes to the tornado in Florida tomorrow. All things are interconnected, so the theory went.

Hughes grinned. He dog-eared the corner of the page and closed the biography. He turned off the light, settled down into his orthopedic biofoam pillow, and stared into the darkness.

Quisling had probably not been aware that he was a contributor to history. Certainly he hadn't wanted to be remembered as a traitor. But men who were less than adept did not control their own destinies, much less how they personally would be viewed years later. History, after all, was written by the victors.

History…

Hughes had always been fond of the story about the French physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. Elected to the French National Assembly a few years before the Revolution, and being a man of medicine and of a kindly nature, Le Docteur Guillotin's major political ambition seemed to be a wish to make criminal executions less painful. He had witnessed a few botched beheadings, wherein a headsman had gotten sweaty-palmed, or had arrived drunk, and had had to hack several times at a screaming victim's neck before managing to lop off the offending head. Such a thing was barbaric for civilized people like the French. The Scots, the English, mon Dieu! even the ignoble Poles possessed bladed mechanical devices they used for executions — although these were mostly for nobles, to be spared the embarrassment of an inept headsman. So the doctor helped pass a law requiring that legal execution be performed by a machine that would not miss, to be more humane to the condemned, rich and poor alike.

Le Docteur hardly wanted to be remembered by history as the man primarily responsible for the head-cleaving device at first called La Louisette. He certainly had not wanted to see the killing machine, which he had no hand in inventing, tagged la guillotine, the name that eventually stuck.

What a wonderful legacy for one's relatives. A family name with which to inspire gasps and revulsion, how lovely that must have been. And how ironic, given Le Docteur's good intentions.

But men like Quisling and Guillotin had been small of vision, and not gifted with Hughes's intelligence. In a few days, he would be going to Guinea-Bissau, to sit with the head of that small country's government, to strike a deal that would someday be viewed by history as one of the most daring and clever schemes of all time. If history was written by the victors, then surely he would write his own.

He did not for a moment doubt it.

In her kitchen, waiting for the coffee maker to finish brewing, Toni held the sheathed kris in both hands. Traditionally, silat players would not want a "used" kris. If you didn't know who had owned it or what he had used it for, you might be inheriting some bad hantu; you might find yourself connected to dead people by an evil blade, soaked in blood and karma. But since this was Guru's family blade, it was certainly reputable.

Maybe it did have enough magic to help her with Alex. She had been sleeping with it in its wooden sheath on her night-stand, blade carefully pointed away from her head. She was willing to take any help she could get…

Even if she was peeved with him just now. It hadn't taken long for the story to get back to her about his little adventure in the desert during that raid on the terrorists. Naturally, he hadn't told her, but it hadn't taken long for him to figure out she knew either. He was supposed to be the Commander of Net Force, not a foot soldier! How dare he risk himself like that?

Toni grinned as the coffee maker chose that instant to gurgle and belch the last of the coffee into the pot, a kind of brewed raspberry noise, almost as if making fun of her.

She put the kris onto the counter, laying it softly on a clean dish towel, and grabbed her cup from the cabinet. Oh, well. Life was never boring.

Joanna Winthrop stood in the warm spring sunshine, waiting for the train to arrive. She wore a long, yellow patterned dress, a bonnet, and held a small tube-shaped brown leather travel satchel. The year was 1916. She was at the Oro Station, in northern California, and the surrounding fir and alder had sprouted new greenery to herald Persephone's return from the Underworld.

Joanna had been impressed with that legend as a girl, how the Lord of the Underworld had kidnapped the beautiful Persephone, and how her mother, Demeter, Goddess of the Corn, had been so wracked with grief that she turned her back on mankind, causing a cruel winter in which no crops could grow.

Joanna had always felt a certain sympathy with women who had gotten into dire straits because of their beauty.

According to the mythology, after a year of this cold misery, Zeus finally intervened, sending Hermes to ask the Lord of the Underworld to allow Persephone her freedom. The Lord of the Underworld was not happy about this request, for he did, in his own brutish way, love the woman he had kidnapped to be his wife. But one risked the wrath of Zeus with great care, if one dared risk it at all, so by Zeus's request, Persephone was released. Demeter was so overjoyed that the flowers blossomed and the grasses grew, and spring came. Alas, her daughter had eaten seeds of the pomegranate during her stay in the Underworld — there's always a catch in these things — so Persephone was required to return to the Underground for a portion of each year. And each time, Demeter's grief at losing her daughter caused winter to fall upon the Earth…

It was a wonderful and imaginative story to explain the seasons. Although you'd think Demeter would have wanted to cut the apron strings after a few thousand years. God-time must be different.

Too bad she didn't have Zeus to help her find the hacker who had used her computer station. She could use the help. The guy had left a trail, but it was faint, and rigged with booby traps all along the way. She was beginning to get really pissed off. When she found this guy and turned him over to the feebs, she was hoping to get at least one clean kick at his testicles before they hauled him away. Having your supposedly secure computer station used for sabotage was, at the very least, embarrassing.

It was one thing to be thought beautiful when it got in your way. It was another thing entirely to be thought inept at what you did for a living.

The incoming train's whistle blew twice, steam-powered hoots that echoed into the station. There were only a few passengers waiting in her scenario, none of them paying any attention to her. She liked this time; it allowed her to wear clothes that could utterly conceal her shape and most of her features. People had been polite to each other in 1916, and the pace of life, just before America entered the Great War for Civilization, had been more stately than brisk.

The locomotive arrived, pulling a passenger train of some sixteen cars, blasting clouds of steam, its great wheels squealing and squeaking to a halt at the platform.

Well. It didn't matter how many traps this bodoh left in his wake, she was going to track him down…

Chapter Twenty-Two

Alex Michaels leaned back in his chair and wished he was somewhere else. Just about anyplace would do, instead of sitting here listening to one of Senator White's staffers drone on at him over the phone.

"You understand our problem, don't you, Commander?" Oh, yeah, he understood, all right. He made a sympathetic noise he didn't mean: "Um."

Congress was still out for the holidays, but the staff people got a lot of work done when the bosses weren't around. Probably more than when they were here, getting in the way. The truth of it was, Washington was run by staff. Without them, most congressmen and senators would not have a clue as to what was really going on. How some of the most influential people in the country ever got elected amazed Michaels. Some of these bozos probably had to be led to the bathroom and shown how to work a zipper.

"So I can pencil you in for the committee meeting?" Michaels thought about it for a second. What if he said no?

That would be fun. They'd have to subpoena him. Would Net Force security keep out a federal marshal looking to serve papers if he asked them to? Probably, but Michaels would have to leave the building sooner or later. And the good senator would make mounds of political hay out his refusal to take the hot seat voluntarily. Did the Commander of Net Force have something to hide? An honest man doesn't fear a few questions, does he?

"I'd be happy to talk to the senator's committee."

"Thank you, sir. Eight a.m. on Monday the 10th. I'll e-mail you to confirm."

"This isn't going to be another of those week-long deals, is it, Ron?"

"No, sir. The senator is going on a junket — uh, a fact-finding mission — to Ethiopia on the 12th, so we'll wrap by Tuesday."

So, at worst, he'd be on the hot seat for a day or two, assuming nobody else was slotted. And it was unlikely that he'd be the only sacrificial lamb — White's committees always had plenty of victims they wanted to skewer. What an idiot.

After he hung up, Michaels leaned forward in his chair, feeling tired. He'd like nothing better than to take the day off, go for a nice long ride on his bike, to enjoy the cold, crisp morning while working up a little sweat. Or, as long as he was wishing, why not a week in Tahiti? Lie on the beach, soak up whatever rays the sunblock would let past, drink coconut and tropical fruit and rum. Listen to the waves break. Boy, did that sound good.

He grinned at himself. There was a pile of work on his desk that he couldn't get done if he worked twenty-four-hour days for a month. The deeper that pile got, the more he felt like dragging his heels. Did everybody feel that way? Or was it a contrary streak in him, just like wanting to spend money the most when you were dead broke?

Well. You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, right?

Right.

John Howard sat on Doc Kyle's couch in the base clinic, watching the older man flip through the hardcopy print out.

Kyle shook his head. "I don't know what to tell you, John. X-rays, EEG, EKG, sonograms, MRI, MEG, everything is normal. You have the blood pressure of a man half your age, your reflexes are great, there's nothing growing in any dark corners that shouldn't be there. Your don't have AIDS, hepatitis, prostate cancer, or herpes. Your cholesterol is low, your liver enzymes are good, hormones are normal — all your bloodwork is all dead-center normal, except for what might be a little bit of a white cell shift to the left, a few segs, that might be indication of a virus. Might also be lab error, it's that close. You're as healthy a specimen as I've seen all month."

"So why am I so tired all the time?"

Kyle, a full bird colonel, was sixty, and a career military man. Howard had been his patient for years. Kyle grinned. "Well, now, none of us is getting any younger. A man your age needs to realize he's not going to be able to run basic with the recruits forever."

"A man my age? Jesus, I'm not a man my age!"

Kyle laughed. "Come on, once you hit forty you have to expect to slow down a little. Sure, you can hold the Reaper at bay with diet and exercise, cheat him pretty good, but the time when you could wine, women, and song it up all night long, then grab a full pack and hump it all the next day are behind you. What you did for a light workout as a shavetail is overtraining for a colonel old enough to be that boy's father."

"You're saying I should slow down."

"Not ‘should.' You will slow down, that's the nature of the beast. You're in better shape than most twenty-year-olds I see in here, no question. But the fact is, a twenty-year-old in peak condition is going have better legs, faster recovery, and more energy than a forty-year-old in peak condition. I'm not saying you should park your butt in the rocking chair, smack your gums, and wait for senility, but you need to recognize the reality. If you hit the gym four times a week, better cut that to two. If you jog ten miles a day, drop it to five. Warm up more, stretch before and after you sweat hard, give yourself more recovery time. You don't have the reserves you once had, simple as that. You can maintain a vintage aircraft pretty good, but sooner or later the metal fatigues, no matter how many times you rebuild the engine and the hydraulics."

Howard stared at him. It wasn't as if the doc was giving him a death sentence—

Well, yes, it was. That was exactly what he was doing. He was reminding him that the grave was still out there — and it was closer than it used to be.

Just what I needed to hear. Howard blew out a sigh. "All right. Thanks, Doc."

"Don't take it so hard, kid. You might have a couple more good years left. You want me to write you a prescription for some prunes and Geritol?"

Outside, the January sky was clear and cold. Howard walked toward his office, thinking about what Kyle had said. So, okay, he'd ease up a little on his workouts, see if that helped. If Doc was right, then he'd feel better.

Of course, he'd also feel worse, knowing that there wasn't something simple that could be fixed. Nobody had come up with a cure for getting older yet. And this was the first time he'd realized that it was going to happen to him too. Somehow, he'd always felt as if he'd live to be ninety, and except for a few wrinkles he'd look and feel the same then as he had at twenty or thirty.

Maybe there was something to be said for dying in battle while your brain was still sharp and your eyes unclouded by time. At least it was quick. Maybe it was better to be burned-out ashes than cold, ancient dust.

Tyrone's life was over.

He stood inside CardioSports, between the wrist-heart-monitor display and a display case of stopwatches, staring through the front window into the mall. From where he stood, with the rack of ski jackets behind him, he'd be hard to see from the tables at the food court, just across the mall's main walkway, but he could easily see Bella where she sat at one of the tables.

Where she sat, with somebody.

Where Belladonna Wright sat with Jefferson Benson, facing him across the little round white table, holding his hands with her hands, smiling at him.

Smiling at him.

Oh, God!

He felt sick, as if he was gonna throw up, as if somebody had punched him in the solar plexus hard enough so he couldn't breathe. And he felt a cold and hot blend of sad, aching misery entwined with mindless, killing rage. He wanted to scream, to run to where Bella sat, to smash Jefferson Benson's face in with his fists, to kick him enough times to break every bone in his body. He wanted to do that, and then spit on him.

But what Tyrone did not want to do was look Belladonna Wright straight in her lying face. Not at that moment.

He was on afternoon shift at school, like she was, and so he'd asked her if she was going to the mall. They could meet, grab lunch, head for classes?

No, she'd said. Not today. She had to run some errands, she'd said, so she wasn't going to the mall. She'd see him later at school.

Fine. That was nopraw.

And yet, there she was. Sitting there with Benson, holding his fucking hands, smiling at him.

Tyrone stood there, pretending to examine the heart monitors, unable to look away. It was like when you saw somebody do something really stupid on a vid, something so stupid it embarrassed you just to be watching it, and you wanted to look away, but you couldn't, you watched it anyhow. He didn't want to be here. He didn't want to know that Bella had lied to him. He didn't want to see her holding hands with Benson. But he couldn't move, couldn't turn his head away. He had to watch. Even though it felt as if there was something alive in his stomach, something with teeth and claws trying to dig its way out of him.

He never would have known if he hadn't come to the sport store looking for a birthday present for his father. It had never occurred to him that Bella would be at the mall. She'd said she wasn't going, and it had never crossed his mind to believe otherwise. Truly had never occurred to him.

She'd lied to him.

As he watched, Bella stood, and so did Benson. They moved around the table, closer to each other. Benson bent over.

Tyrone wanted to scream, to pound himself on the sides of the head.

The worst thing he could imagine happened. Benson kissed her.

No, there was something even worse than that — she kissed Benson back. Tyrone saw their mouths working and knew it was a tongue kiss. Benson put one hand behind her, put it right on her butt. Pulled her closer.

Bella let his hand stay there.

It lasted forever. A million years.

Finally, they finished. Benson turned and went one way, Bella the other.

Tyrone stood frozen, a worn-out statue of old bronze, unable to even blink. It was like the time on the parachute ride in Florida, that big free-fall drop. His belly fluttered, came all the way up to his throat. He was paralyzed on the outside, even though his guts roiled like a nest of beheaded snakes.

What should he do? Should he go out and confront her? Tell her he was just passing by? See what she said? Would she lie to him again?

Did he want to know that?

Oh, man, oh, man! He wanted to die. Right here, right now. Just go up in a blast of fire and smoke and be dead and gone and not have to know this, not have to think about it, not have to deal with it.

Bella had betrayed him. That was it, that was it, there was no way around it. She could have explained being in the mall, maybe even explained meeting Benson by accident and having lunch, but no way could she explain the last part. The kiss. The hand on her ass.

Right now, he hated Jefferson Benson so much that he would have killed him if he could have figured out a way to do it and get away with it. Maybe even if he couldn't get away with it. But Benson wasn't the real problem. Tyrone knew that. Bella was the problem. What really hurt was that Bella had let him kiss her. That Bella had wanted him to kiss her. That she had enjoyed it.

She wanted somebody else. Instead of Tyrone.

That was the thing that made Tyrone sickest.

What was he going to do?

How could he live with this?

At that moment, he couldn't see any way. No way at all.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Julio Fernandez stood in the cold at the start of the obstacle course, next to the chinning station. The morning trainees had come and gone, and the afternoon group didn't come on until after lunch. Some civilian feebs ran the course at noon now and then, along with senior troops trying to stay in shape, but right at the moment he was the only one at the chin racks.

He spent five minutes warming up, rolling his shoulders and stretching his neck. If he didn't do that he would probably strain his traps, and walking around with a sore neck for the next week didn't appeal to him, especially given his already gimpy status.

There were four sets of three bars there — hardwood dowels, each two and a half feet long, an inch and a half in diameter, mounted in six-by-six pressure-treated lumber posts. Each of the crosspieces was set at a different height. The lowest was about six and a half feet off the sawdust, the middle one was a foot higher, the highest a foot above the middle one. Usually he could easily jump up and catch the highest of the bars, but his leg bothered him a little more than he'd let on. Until the muscle got a little less sore, he wasn't going to be dunking any basketballs. Or springing up to catch the top chin bar. But he could grab the middle one easily enough. He did so, palms forward, using a full grip about eight inches wider than his shoulders. It didn't really matter how tall the bar was because when he did chins he pulled his legs up into an L-sit to work his belly muscles anyway. Kind of like a gymnast, although he wouldn't get many points for form. He didn't point his toes enough.

He curled his hips up, pointed his legs — he could even feel that in his wounded leg — then chinned himself, going up at a medium speed, coming back down at the same speed, to a full hang. Anything else didn't work the lats enough.

One.

He repeated the move, then did it again, getting into the rhythm.

… two… three… four…

Doing it in an L-sit made it harder, but that was the point. He wasn't trying to see how many he could do, cheating to a half-hang and then pumping it back up. The idea was to make the muscles work.

… five… six… seven… eight…

Some guys used a false grip, with their thumbs hooked over the bar for more lift, instead of under and around the fingers. And some guys used wrist straps, on the theory that their forearm muscles and hands would get tired before they wore their lats out, and chinning was primarily a lat exercise… nine… ten… eleven…

Fernandez figured that there wasn't much point to his back being so strong that his hands couldn't keep up. It wouldn't do you much good to have lats like Superman if you didn't have the grip strength to use them… twelve…

He let himself down, lowered his legs, released the bar. He was warmed up pretty good now. He shook his hands and arms out, flexed and extended his fingers, rolled his shoulders a couple of times, then turned his hands around so the palms faced him, and caught the bar in an underhand pull-up grip, this time spaced about shoulder-width. That was the only difference between chins and pull-ups, whether your palms faced away or toward you.

One… two… three… four…

The biceps started to burn first, but the forearms were right there too.

… five… six… seven… eight…

It was getting tough now. He blew out a hard breath, sucked in a deep lungful of air, gutted it out.

… nine…

Come on, Julio, you can make it!

… ten…

He dropped, hung on to the bar for a second, then let go.

"I didn't think you were going to make that last one," a woman said from behind him.

He turned. Joanna Winthrop.

He grinned. "Me neither. Course, if I'd known you were watching, I'd have managed a couple more. I wouldn't want you to think I was a wimp."

She wore running shoes and sweats, dark blue pants, and a matching hooded shirt with the Net Force logo on the front. "I doubt I would think that. Twelve chins and ten pull-ups? On a good day, I might do six of either. Not both."

"Well, I don't want you to feel bad, so how about I just skip the one-handed sets?"

She laughed. "Thank you. I appreciate it."

"So, what brings you out here?"

"Too much time at the desk. Every so often, I have to get away and clear my head."

"I hear that."

"How's the leg?"

"You want the macho answer? Or the truth?"

"Oh, both, please."

"Well, the macho answer is, ‘Ah, no problem. Little old bullet wound like that can't slow a real man down. Hell, I hurt myself worse putting on my socks. I was just about to go run the course. After which I'm probably gonna jog around the compound a couple times, then go find a pickup rugby game somewhere.' "

"I see. And the truth?"

"That sucker is sore, stiff, and if I tried to run the course, I'd get maybe halfway to the first hurdle, cursing like a sailor, before I collapsed and fell down hollering in pain."

She laughed again. He liked that, making her laugh. She relaxed when she did it; she lost some of that tightness in her face that made her look just a little too cool to approach.

She said, "You're going to give macho men a bad name, Julio, admitting something like that."

"I'm trusting you to keep it a secret," he said, his face held as grave as he could manage. "If they found out, I'd be labeled a sissy, and drummed right out of the Manly Men Society."

"My lips are sealed."

They smiled at each other. "So, you gonna do the course?"

"That was the idea."

"How about I hobble along and watch?"

"I can live with that."

She started a series of leg stretches, and he moved over to lean against the chin supports. He watched.

Alex was running a little late, and Toni was already dressed and warmed up, practicing sempok and depok postures, dropping to sit, then springing back to her feet, when he made it to the gym.

"Sorry," he called, headed for the dressing room. "I got hung up on a call."

"It's all right."

He was back out in a minute, dressed in a black T-shirt, black cotton drawstring pants, and a white headband. He also wore wrestling shoes. They didn't like you to work out on the mats with shoes that might leave marks.

She bowed him in and set him to practicing his djuru. He only knew the first one, but it was obvious he had been practicing away from class. Another month or two and he'd be ready to start the second djuru. Pretty quick. She'd been four months before Guru had given her Djuru Two.

After about fifteen minutes, she called a stop. He'd worked up a pretty good sweat, his shirt was damp and the headband was soaked. She walked to where her jacket was folded next to the wall, bent, and pulled the kris in its sheath from under the cloth.

She walked back to Alex and showed him the weapon. "Look at this."

He raised his eyebrows. "Is this Indonesian?"

"Yes. It's called a kris. K-r-i-s. Sometimes spelled with an E after the K, sometimes with a double S. My Guru presented it to me when I went home for Christmas. It belonged to her great-grandfather. It's been in her family for more than two hundred years." She handed it to him.

He pulled it from the wooden sheath and looked at the blade. "Wow. How'd they get that color and texture?"

"The shape is called dapor. This one is a kris luk, the wavy-blade pattern. The waves are always an odd number. There are also straight kris. The blade is made by welding and hammering various kinds of iron or steel together, then forging them into one piece. It's etched, they use lemon or lime juice and arsenic on the blade to darken and bring out the patterns in the steel. The surface pattern is called pamor. There is a lot of meaning attached to what kind of dapor and pamor a blade has, and who crafted it and how."

"Security didn't say anything when you brought this in?"

"I told them it was a paperweight. Feel the edge."

"Not very sharp," he said, testing it with his thumb.

"That's because it is primarily a thrusting weapon. One doesn't use a kris for household chores, only against an enemy or a wild animal. It's pretty much a ceremonial weapon, although it can certainly be used to kill in the hands of somebody who knows what he or she is doing. It was the traditional execution weapon for a long time."

He hefted the weapon. "Interesting. Is it valuable?"

"Moneywise, probably worth several thousand dollars. But the real value is in the thing itself.

"The kris are considered little temples by many Indonesians. The makers are called Empu, and depending on how one produces the kris and the wishes of the client, certain… magics are included in the forging. Many of the traditional kris are designed to be lucky, in war, or love, or business."

"Which is this one?"

She shrugged. "I'm not sure yet. The magic apparently changes a little with each new owner." Lucky in love, she hoped.

"You aren't going to stick me with it, are you?"

She smiled. "And piss off Security? No, I thought we'd start with the wooden knife for practice. But I wanted you to see it."

He put the dagger back into its sheath and handed it to her. "Thank you for showing it to me."

She took the kris, went back to her jacket, and rewrapped the weapon.

Back in front of Alex, she said, "Okay, let's work a little on applications from the djuru. Throw a punch, right here." She touched the tip of her nose.

He stepped in and shot a weak straight right at her nose. She double-blocked it without any effort. "That's not a punch! And let me see the other hand bracing the right. It's not that much slower, and remember, this hand" — she raised her right fist—"never goes into battle without this one." She put her left hand on her right forearm. "Just like the djuru."

"Can I ask a question?"

"Sure."

"Why?"

"Because silat is based on structural principles and not raw power. You have to have base, angle, and leverage, but you must use proper technique to get them. See, you are bigger and stronger than I am, and if you punch really hard, I might not be able to deflect it using pure muscle. But if I brace my block thus, and my hips are corked properly, I have a mechanical advantage. Remember, this stuff was created with the idea that if you needed it, your attacker was going to be bigger, stronger, faster, probably armed, and there might be four of five of him. They might also be as skilled as you. You might be able to muscle a guy your size or smaller, but you can't outmuscle three or four who are bigger and stronger."

"And faster," he said. His voice was dry. "And as skilled."

She laughed. "Yes. But speed and power and even skill are not nearly as important as timing. Ask me what the most important thing is about comedy."

"Huh?"

"Go on, ask me."

"Okay, what is the most important thing about—"

"Timing!" she said, cutting in.

He smiled. "Got it."

"You will, you will. Practice makes perfect. Now, again. Punch."

He stepped in, and threw another right, harder this time, and braced with his left hand.

She blocked it and demonstrated the counter. "Good," she said. "Again."

This was going well. Maybe the kris was lucky in love. Wouldn't that be nice?

Chapter Twenty-Four

Jay Gridley walked into the small storefront tobacco shop to the jingle of a spring-mounted warning bell on the door frame. The bell tinkled again as the door closed behind him with a solid chunk! The smoke shop was not far from Government House, on one of the danker streets facing Back Bay. The time was late 1890's, and the British Raj was still in full sway; Bombay was, of course, Indian, but the English flag draped heavily over the city, as it did the entire country.

Rule Brittania.

Inside, the shop was dark and hazy with fragrant blue smoke. The man behind the counter was also dark, a native, dressed in a white shirt and summer suit, and the smell of his blended pipe tobacco hung sweet and heavy in the still air. He took another puff from his heavy, curved briar, and added that smoke to the already abundant cloud.

A month-old copy of the London Times lay upon the counter next to a large glass jar full of cheap cigars, a small wooden box of strike-anywhere matches, and a metal tray of cedar lighting sticks.

Jay himself wore a white linen suit and a tan planter's hat. He nodded at the shopkeeper. "You have other newspapers?" He waved at the Times.

"Yes, sir, we have them in the back, next to the humidor," the man said, in that singsong lilt of a native Indian who'd learned English only as an adult. He exhaled smoke with the words.

Jay touched his hat brim and moved to the shelves to the left of the counter, next to the closed glass door that led into the humidor room where the good tobacco and cigars were kept.

He glanced at the papers. There was The Strand, the New York Times, and something from Hong Kong in Chinese. Not what he was looking for — ah, there it was. The Delhi Ledger, a small publication put out in English that sold mostly to expatriate Brits homesick for King and country. Or was it Queen and country? Sure, must be Victoria, it being the Victorian age and all. He ought to know his English history better, he supposed.

He thumbed through the cheap newsprint and smudged the ink, getting it on his fingers. Well, at least that was a nice touch.

Ah, there it was. The reference he had been trying to run down. The article was ostensibly about Danes come to visit India, but there in the fluffy travel piece was the name he wanted: The Frihedsakse.

Once upon a time, Jay would have thought it was odd to find a bit of information about Denmark in an Indian infonet, but not anymore. Information was like dust; it blew around in the wind and wound up in places you'd never think it would. The logical place to start hunting for information on a Danish terrorist organization would be in Denmark, or at least in the Scandinavian countries, and certainly he had combed through those nets with the best search engines and squeekbots Net Force had, but he'd come up empty. So he'd widened his search, and this was the first real hit he'd had. Time was passing — it had been a week without any real leads — and while it had been quiet, there was no guarantee it would stay that way. He took the paper to the front, paid for it, and went out into the Indian afternoon. It was overcast. What time of year was it? Monsoon season? He was getting slack in his old age. There was a time when such a detail would never have gotten past his scenario research, even if he'd been in a hurry. Oh, well. Things changed. While it was still important to look good, getting the job done counted for more.

Jay had switched from his tropical linens into an Abercrombie & Fitch khaki outfit, shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, complete with stout walking shoes and a pinned-up Australian bush hat. His next stop was a small library in Blacktown, just north and west of Sydney. It was the middle of summer, and warm, and the library was not air-conditioned, even though he'd picked a contemporary time to run his scenario.

Not a bad transition for a couple minutes' work.

"Can I help you, sir?" the librarian asked. Jay loved Australian accents. He used them for secondary characters all the time.

"Yes, ma'am, I'm looking for this periodical." He put a slip of paper onto the woman's desk. She put on her reading glasses and looked at it.

"Oh, right. In the magazine section, go past the record kiosk, on your left, about halfway down the rack."

"Thank you, ma'am."

"You're American, right?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Nice to make your acquaintance then."

Jay smiled, tipped his hat, then headed for the magazine racks. This was perhaps a little more time-consuming than a non-VR search, but if he couldn't have fun, why bother?

Jay found a mention of Frihedsakse in a backline infonet connected to a major shipping company. Not much, just an unconfirmed rumor, connected to the sinking of an oil tanker. Well. Great avalanches from little snowballs sometimes grew. He gathered the information in and moved on.

In a police station in Boksburg, a man arrested for stealing a car had been searched. There had been nothing in the arrestee's wallet save a business card, upon the back of which was the handwritten word Frihedsakse. Next to the word was an old-style internet-provider ID number. The IP probably wasn't active, but that didn't matter. If it had ever been active, there were ways to trace it.

A quick check of the dates on the information showed that it had been in the police system for five months. A pix of the card had a day and time stamp on it as verification of the item's log into the evidence locker at the central storage vault in Johannesburg.

Jay collected the card. He grinned. These terrorists didn't know who they were messing with. He was Jay Gridley, the man who had run the mad Russian programmer to ground. These balrogs didn't have a prayer.

At a beef ranch in Kobe, somebody had broken in and stolen, of all things, a case of beer, which was to be fed to the cattle. Investigating policemen had no clues, save one: Scrawled on the wall next to ten cases of beer that had been left behind was the word Frihedsakse in kanji.

Jay made note of that.

So it went, a tiny bit here, an even smaller bit there. This was sometimes the way of computer sievework. You strained slowly, but very fine. If you did it right, you might come up with a bunch of pieces so small that none of them would mean anything but, puzzled together, you might have something. Jay was gathering his ducks. When he had enough of them, he would put them into a row. And when he had enough ducks in a neat row, he would get some answers. And then?

Well, we'll just see, won't we? I got your fried sex right here, pal…

Platt strolled along one of the touristy streets near the canal, enjoying the seventy-degree weather. Around him, people walked, dressed in all the bright colors of the rainbow, plus a bunch of colors not found anywhere naturally. Old, young, white, black, domestic, foreign, Miami Beach was always cookin', there was always action. It might be snowin' like a sonofabitch up north, in Washington or New York City, and still be practically summer down here in the land of sin.

Life was sure grand when you could just pick up and go to where you could walk around in a T-shirt and shorts in the middle of the winter.

Platt ambled along, not going anywhere in particular, just strolling, soaking up a few minutes of the warm sunshine before he had to go back into his room and plug into the net.

He watched a black girl in a tank top and short shorts stride by, and smiled at her big and tight backside after she passed. Fine-lookin' woman.

A tall man in a purple crushed-velvet jumpsuit passed on in-line skates, laughing. He was throwing quarters every which way, and had a passel of children chasing him, scooping up the change.

Platt passed two window-shopping old ladies, all in lime green and hot pink, baggy Bermuda shorts and halters, both of them burned leathery and the color of dark toast, but with silicone implants that were the only things not sagging on them. The old broads must be in their seventies or eighties, and their faces were pulled so tight by plastic surgery that their fake boobs probably bobbed up and down when they smiled.

If there were some kind of big disaster that destroyed a lot of civilization's records, then maybe a thousand years from now, when some scientist got to digging up old coffins or shit, he might scratch his head and wonder when he opened them: Why were there so many caskets with these two little plastic sacks of Dow Jell-O in there with all the bones?

Fake boobs didn't do it for Platt. Didn't matter how big they were if they weren't real. Hell, if he wanted to handle stuff like that, he'd just go on down to the hardware store and buy himself a couple of tubes of bathtub caulk. Go on home, squirt a couple of big blobs into bowls and let them dry, squeeze that. Sheeit…

Platt grinned again. He was just stalling, so he wouldn't have to go back to work. He sighed. Might as well get to it.

He didn't have any illusions about how good he was on the net. He was better than some, but not as sharp as the real experts. In VR, some of the Net Force players would dance circles around him in a head-to-head match. Thing was, tricky and pretty sharp beat real sharp every time. And the Net Force pukes were fooling themselves, so that helped a bunch.

Back after he'd first left home and gone on the road for a while, Platt had met an old grifter name of James Treemore Vaughn. Jimmy Tee, they called him. He was probably pushing seventy, had white hair, and looked just like your kindly old gramps. Kinda guy you'd trust with your wife, your kid, your money. Only Jimmy Tee was a con man, working the small cons by the time Platt had met him, though in his prime he had done a lot of second- and third-man parts in big stings. Earned big, spent big, didn't have a pot to piss in. But he knew more about people than a trainload full of psychiatrists, hookers, and bartenders put together. He could rope a mark, sting him, and send him on his way thinking Jimmy Tee had done him a big favor.

They'd sat in a bar in Kansas City once, Big Bill Barlow's place, Jimmy Tee having a weakness for good blended whisky, and the old man had taught Platt a major lesson.

"Thing is, boyo, if you work it right, a mark will do most of the work for you. Yeah, you can set him up, hammer him good with the pitch, pull a fast close, and take off with the score, but if the mark knows he's been had, sooner or later he'll scream. A good con gets you the money. A great con gets you the money — and the mark doesn't know he's been had."

Platt was fascinated. "Yeah?" He waved at the bartender, who came over to fill up Jimmy Tee's glass.

"Oh, yeah. See, there's a lot of people out there who are faster, smarter, stronger, and meaner than you. You face off with them, you get the crap kicked out you. A big guy comes at you, you don't try to block him balls against balls, you just redirect him a hair. Nudge him in a direction, and get out of his way. The trick is to make him think that's the way he wanted to go in the first place. You can do that, you can write your own ticket."

In the warm sunshine, Platt smiled again. Old Jimmy Tee had been dead and gone what? Five, six years? But his lesson had stuck.

The Net Force guys were looking for terrorists because that was what they were most afraid of. So, zap, Platt and Hughes gave them some terrorists. And the trick was to hide little clues here and there, hide ‘em well enough so when the Net Force dogs went sniffin', they had trouble finding those little rabbits in their hidey-holes. If you were lookin' for somethin' you just knew was there and you couldn't find it, well, that made you look just that much harder.

This whole bullshit Danish thing was Hughes's idea, but it was pretty smart. Platt had started planting stuff about the Fried Socks thing five or six months ago, so some of the clues were absolute boilerplate when it came to real time. Net Force could poke and prod at the information and no matter how they scanned it, it would come up real — well, at least real in that the thing had been sitting in somebody's memory archives since months before the manifesto showed up.

Some of the clues were yet to be put into place, but when they got there, they'd be backdated to seem as if they had been there for months or years. By the time the Net Force pukes got to those, they'd have checked the earlier stuff and found it to be more or less legit. So they would convince themselves that the later stuff was okay by the time they found it. They wouldn't bother to check, or if they did they'd do a half-assed job, since that was what they wanted to believe.

If it looks like a rabbit, smells like a rabbit, and hops like a rabbit, well, hell, it's a rabbit, ain't it?

You give a guy a sack of coins and he dips into it and pulls out eight or ten at random and they all assay out as pure 24-carat gold, he is gonna believe that all of the suckers in the bag are real. He'll figure no way anybody could tell which ones he'd pick, it's pure chance, so he's covered.

Guy like that would completely forget all the sleight of hand he'd ever seen, forget that there were magicians who could fan a deck and let him pick a card — any card — and the trickster would know what it was before the mark ever touched it.

The hand doesn't have to be quicker than the eye — if the eye doesn't know where to look.

The trick, Jimmy Tee had said, was not to embellish it too much. Just give the guy a direction and get out of his way. The smarter the guy was, the quicker he would fool himself. If you did it right.

Net Force was hot on the trail of a Danish terrorist group. Platt knew this because some very expensive and practically undetectable squeal programs had told him that the feds hunting for the terrorists had finally started to find his planted clues. Clues that were hidden enough so they had to work at finding them, and clues that were mysterious enough to keep ‘em guessin'.

They didn't trust anything too easy. Most people figured if it didn't cost anything, it wasn't worth anything. But if they had to slog through a swamp, swatting at mosquitoes, then what they found hiding in the hollow of the third dead cypress on the left, well, hell, that was why they'd come, right?

Wrong. But that was the trick.

When the hounds caught the quarry's scent, when they knew for sure they were on the right track, then he could let them see the rabbit. When it took off running, they'd follow it. They'd never catch it, because it wasn't real. It was a phantom, a spook, a ghost.

And boy, it was gonna be fun to watch them chase that sucker.

But of course, the thing he had to do was make sure the hounds still wanted to chase the critter. So this afternoon, he was going to give ‘em a new reason. A real good reason, this time…

Chapter Twenty-Five

Tyrone Howard pretty much wanted to die.

He lay on his bed, staring through the ceiling, unable to move for the weight of what Bella had dropped on him. He had replayed the conversation a hundred times in his head, and every time, it came out the same. There wasn't any wiggle room, no way to put a good face on it. She'd dropped him, blap, just like that.

He'd seen her at school, she'd acted just fine, and although he'd told himself he wasn't, he was not going to say anything, in the end it had spewed from him in a hot blast, as if he'd been punched in the belly and the punch had knocked his words out with his wind.

"So, meet anybody interesting at the mall lately?"

Give her credit, she wasn't stupid and she didn't try to pretend she didn't know what he was talking about. Right there in the hall, outside his last-period class, she let him have it, full spray, nozzle tight:

"Maybe I did. What business is it of yours?"

Wham! Another punch to the gut. "What business is it of mine. Jesus, Bella, I thought we were — you and I–I mean, we were—"

"What? Married? Well, attenzione Ty-ree-o-nee, we are not. I like you, you're sharp, but I have other friends, you copy? I see them when and where I want. You praw that?"

He was too stunned to think about his response. Maybe if he'd thought about it, if he'd had time to consider it, what she said, he'd have said something else, but he didn't have the time. He said, "Yeah, I do have a problem with it."

She'd glared at him as if he'd slapped her. "Oh? Really? My game, my rules, that's how it is. You want to play, you play my way."

Then he really put his butt into it. He said, "No. I don't think so."

That really burned her. He thought she was going to spit on him for a second. Then she said, "Well, then, tell you what, slip, you just lose my com number, okay? I don't have time to be holding your hand and showing you what's what, little boy."

And then she turned and left. His world went gray. He couldn't hear the students around him, couldn't see anything, couldn't feel anything — except a twist in his stomach. His gut was knotted as if he'd just jumped off the top of a very tall building and was in free fall. With the ground coming up fast…

On his bed, he replayed it again, searching for a small crack, a word that could have a double meaning that he had somehow missed, a magic word that, once he grasped it, would turn the whole conversation on its head and make it mean something altogether different. But he couldn't find it, that magic word. It just wasn't there.

"Son? You okay?"

Tyrone looked at the doorway. His father stood there.

"Your mother is worried about you. Is there something going on we can help with?"

His knee-jerk response was to wave his father off. No, nothing, I'm fine, just tired, nopraw. But he was too sick at heart to even lie about it.

"Bella and I broke up," he said.

His father came into the room. He leaned against the wall next to Tyrone's computer. "Not your idea, I take it?"

"No. Not my idea."

"You want to talk about it?"

"No. Not really." But then, as they had with Bella, the words somehow just came tumbling out. He told his father all about it, about seeing her in the mall, about her kissing that jockjerk, about seeing her in the hall. It just flowed from him like some kind of sour, bitter fluid.

John Howard listened to his son, felt his anguish and pain, and ached for him. If he could stand between his child and the world and stop anything from ever hurting him, he would do it, but he knew it didn't work that way. Some lessons you had to learn on your own. Some pain had to be endured. If you were to be tempered so that your edge would stay sharp, you had to go through the fire, be annealed, quenched, and heated again. But it hurt to watch your child suffer. More than anything else he could imagine.

Finally, the boy ran down. His grief was intense, all-consuming, it filled his world. He couldn't see any way around it.

There was nothing Howard could say that was going to heal this wound. A broken heart accepted no medicine except time. That the first case of puppy love squashed would some day be nothing more than a small scar in the grand cosmic scheme of things was not what Tyrone wanted to hear. You will survive this and get over it was the truth, but it would not provide much comfort right at this moment. Still, it was all he had to offer.

Howard sighed. "When I was sixteen, I was in love," he said. "A girl in my school, Lizbeth Toland, same class. We were tight, went everywhere together. I gave her my junior class ring. We called it ‘hangin' out' back then. We talked about going to college together, getting married, having children. It was pretty serious."

Tyrone stared at him.

"It's kind of hard for you to imagine me with anybody except Mom, isn't it?"

Tyrone nodded. "Yeah." Then he must have realized that might not sound too good, because he said, "Well, no, I mean, well, I–I never really thought about it."

"That's okay. For the longest time, I believed my parents must have found me on a doorstep or under a cabbage leaf — the idea of them having sex together was beyond my comprehension."

Tyrone shook his head, and Howard could almost read his thoughts: Gramma and Grampa? Having sex? There was a puker pix.

"Summer after my junior year, I went to ROTC camp. Lizbeth and I wrote each other every day — snailmail mostly. And we talked on the phone when I could get to one. She said she missed me, couldn't wait for me to get back, and I felt the same way.

"Then I got a call from my best friend. Rusty Stephens. He'd been at a bar one night sneaking in to drink beer with a couple of buddies. They'd seen Lizbeth there, with somebody he didn't know, partying pretty good."

"That's terrible," Tyrone said.

Howard nodded, knowing his son knew just how he had felt when he'd heard it.

"Yeah, I thought so. I called her, asked her about it. She had a perfectly reasonable explanation. She'd been in the bar, sure enough, but the guy she was with was her cousin, come to visit with his folks, and her mother had told her to take him out. So it was family, it didn't mean anything, they didn't do anything, it was her cousin."

Howard shook his head. "I believed her. How could I not? We loved each other, we trusted each other. And I wanted to hear there was a reason other than what I was most afraid of, so I was happy."

"So what happened?"

"The summer went on. Rusty called again. He'd seen Lizbeth out again, dancing, drinking. Different guy, different place. He took it upon himself to follow them when they left. They drove up to Lover's Point, parked in the guy's car, fogged up the windows in the middle of July."

"Oh, man," Tyrone said.

"Right sentiment, but I used harsher language when I heard. I was pretty torn up about it. I called Lizbeth and asked her about it. She denied it. Said whoever told me they'd seen her was a liar.

"So here's the situation. Either my girl was stepping out on me, or my best friend was a liar."

Tyrone shook his head. "What did you do?"

"I checked it out. I called a couple of the guys Rusty said had seen Lizbeth. They confirmed his story, at least part of it."

"That's terminal," Tyrone said.

"Yeah. But it gets worse."

His son raised his eyebrows in question. "How could it get worse?"

"I called Rusty. Told him to go see Lizbeth and to get my ring back. If she was going to lie to me, we were through."

"Did he do it?"

"In a manner of speaking. He went to see her, told her what I'd said. She refused to give him the ring, but they talked for a long time. She said some… unkind things about me."

Tyrone blinked at him.

"Called me a ‘stupid shithead,' Rusty said."

"Jesus."

"So, I thanked Rusty for his efforts and said I'd take care of it. I bought a train ticket and waited for a long weekend in August when we didn't have much going on at camp. Went home. I got there on a Friday night late, caught a cab to Lizbeth's house. When I got there, I saw Rusty's beat-up old Chevrolet parked out front. He must have come by to try and talk to her again, I figured. Maybe even to get my ring back. Good old Rusty.

"I got out of the cab, walked over toward Lizbeth's front door, then I heard a noise coming from the Chevy — and I stopped and looked into the car. I saw Rusty and Lizbeth wrapped around each other in the front seat, both of them half undressed."

"Fuck," Tyrone said.

Howard considered saying something about his son's language, but this wasn't the time. In the grand cosmic scheme of things, a bad word didn't mean much. "It didn't get that far," Howard said. "I thought I was going to die, right there, on the spot. I didn't know whether to pull good old Rusty out and beat the crap out of him, or to turn and take off before they noticed me."

"What happened?"

"I stood there for what felt like a couple of million years, watching them kiss and fondle each other. It didn't seem real, like it was a bad dream. Then all of a sudden I got cold, really cold, as if I had turned to ice. August and it was probably still eighty-five degrees outside, hot, muggy, and I was cold. I reached out and tapped on the driver's-side window. They both jumped a couple of feet. When they turned and looked right at me, I smiled and waved good-bye. Then I left. The cab was gone, and I started to walk home.

"Rusty caught up with me a half a block or so away, on foot.

"He said, ‘John! I can explain!'

"And I looked at him and said, ‘No, you can't.' I was as cool as a barrel full of liquid oxygen. On the one hand, I wanted to smash his face in, but on the other, I was somehow… removed from it all. Like it was some kind of dream or vision, that I wasn't really even there. I said, ‘You aren't my friend anymore Rusty. I don't want to talk to you, ever again.' "

"Jesus, Dad."

"Yep. Lost my girl and my best friend at the same time. I didn't know then this kind of thing happens all the time, so often it's a cliché, and I don't guess it would have mattered if I had known. They were both lying scum and they deserved each other. I could have punched Rusty's teeth in, but I figured, like my momma used to say, karma will get them. People who do crap like this will get theirs someday. I didn't want to have anything else to do with them, even to the point of not bloodying my knuckles on Rusty's lying face.

"So I understand how you feel about all this, Tyrone, and all I can say is, you'll get over it eventually. It's terrible now, but someday, it won't seem so bad."

"Yeah? You still remember what happened to you pretty good."

"I didn't say you'd forget it. And it'll never go away completely, but it won't hurt as much as time goes by. Eventually there'll be a little scar that only aches a little if you poke hard enough at it. I know this doesn't help much, but that's the truth."

There was silence. Howard waited, to see if they were done, if he should leave or if the boy wanted to talk more. Finally, Tyrone said, "So, what happened to them? Rusty and Lizbeth. Did karma get them? They get run over by a bus or like that?"

Howard grinned. "Not exactly. They got married right after graduation. Went to college. He's now a medical doctor, she's an English professor, they have three kids, and according to my relatives back home who keep me up to date about such things, they have a wonderful marriage."

"So much for cosmic revenge."

"Thing with karma is, it might take a couple of lifetimes to catch up with you," Howard said.

"Oh, good."

"What's done is done, Ty. You can't take back what you saw and heard, and if you could arrange to drop a piano on Bella and her new friend, it really wouldn't make you feel any better. Revenge hardly ever brings peace with it. Besides, if Lizbeth and I hadn't split, I'd never have met and married your mother. I figure I came out way ahead on the deal. No comparison." He smiled.

He got a small smile back from his son.

"You gonna eat supper?"

"I don't think so. I'm really not hungry."

"Okay. I'll cover it with Mom."

"Thanks, Dad. And, uh, Dad? Thanks for telling me the story."

"You're welcome, son."

Chapter Twenty-Six

The garage sure felt empty.

Michaels stood in the doorway to his garage, looking at the larger of his two big metal tool caddies. His most recent project car, the Plymouth Prowler, was gone, sold within a couple of days after he'd gotten it running right. He'd cleaned it up, and had taken it out only a few times, top up — it had been too cold and wet to drive the little convertible the way it was meant to be enjoyed — before his phone had rung with a potential buyer. That was how most of these things were done among the people he knew who restored old cars. Somebody told a friend, who told somebody else that this guy had a project car that was close to being finished, and if you were interested, you didn't want to wait for an ad on the net, because by then it would be too late.

Michaels smiled and walked back into the house. Might as well see what he had for supper.

In the kitchen, he dug around in the freezer and came up with a choice of Gardenburgers or teriyaki chicken sandwiches. He shrugged. The Gardenburger was going to get freezer-burned if he didn't eat it pretty soon, but hell with it, he wanted the chicken. He tore the plastic bag to vent, and stuck the sandwich into the microwave to thaw.

So, that was how it had gone. The phone had rung one evening, and a man with a lot of money who knew somebody who knew somebody asked about the Prowler.

Michaels figured out what the car had cost him, what the parts had added to that, and how much labor it had taken him to rebuild the engine and the transmission and linkage and bodywork. He added thirty percent to that, and named a figure.

The potential buyer agreed with the number so fast that Alex realized he could have asked for more. Then again, he didn't restore old cars to make a living — although it was nice to know that if he ever decided to chuck Net Force he probably could survive that way. All you needed was a garage and some tools, and he already had those…

The microwave began its repetitive cheep, and as he reached for it, the phone also called him.

"Hello?"

"Uh, yeah, hello? I'm looking for Alex Michaels. The guy who does car stuff?"

Well, think of the Devil. "You found him."

"Oh, hey. My name is Greg Scates, I got your name from Todd Jackson."

Todd Jackson was the man who had bought the Prowler. "How are you, Mr. Scates? What can I do for you?"

"Well, uh, I've got an old car Todd thinks you might be interested in."

"What kind of car?"

"It's a Mazda MX-5, a 1995."

Michaels's eyebrows went up. MX-5 was better known in the U.S. as the Miata. A little drop-top two-seater, a lot smaller than the Prowler. He wasn't a big fan of Japanese hardware — he liked the big Detroit iron — but a Miata? He'd always thought those were on a par with the little MG Midgets. Fun.

And in ‘95 they still had the flip-out headlights too. Barn doors, they called them.

"So, tell me a little about the car."

"1 have to be honest with you. Mr. Michaels, I don't know a lot about it. It belonged to my father, who passed away in November. He bought the car new after I'd left home. He drove it for a few months, but he didn't really have the reflexes for it — my mother was afraid he was gonna kill himself in it — so after a while, he put it in storage."

Interesting. "What kind of shape is it in?"

"I can't really say. Dad pulled the tires off it and put the car up on jacks in his garage — my folks live down in Fredericksburg — he drained all the fluids out of it, coaled everything with Armor-All and some kind of grease, then put a cover over it. The tires are in plastic bags in the garage. As far as I know, it's been sitting like that for about sixteen years."

Michaels felt a surge of interest. You heard about these things, low-or-no-mileage cars stored in somebody's barn for future sale. He'd never happened across one himself, but it was a common fantasy among car people — a rare model in near-mint condition, inherited by some relative who didn't have a clue what it was worth and who'd sell it for pocket change.

He moved to the kitchen computer terminal, next to the pantry, and called up the Classic Book. Even though the car was only sixteen and technically not a classic, it would be in there. Given the average half-life of cars since the eighties, sixteen was fairly old.

Mazda, Mazda, ah, there it was…

"So, what do you figure the car is worth, Mr. Scates?"

"Greg, please. I don't know. But Todd says if you're interested, you'll offer me a fair price."

Michaels looked at the computer readout. Hmm. Classic Book said the little two-seater convertible wasn't cheap if it was a ‘95 in good condition. And one that had been on jacks, assuming it was in better shape for being stored, would be worth even more. Still, he could swing it, given what he'd made on the Prowler. He'd have to see it first, of course.

"I'm interested, Greg. I'd like to take a look at it. But I'm not going to be able to get to Fredericksburg until Saturday. Can you sit on it that long?"

"No problem. It's been in the garage for years, it can wait a couple of more days."

Michaels nodded at the unseen speaker. "Good."

He got directions and a time, then hung up.

Well, well. Interesting how things worked out. With any luck at all, he'd have a new project car pretty soon. Sure would help that empty garage. And having a goal outside of work was always good.

Time for the teriyaki…

Hughes rode in a bullet-proof Cadillac limo from his hotel toward the new Presidential Palace, and the ride was not particularly impressive. Even though the former President, Joao Bernardo Vieira, and his African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, had dragged the locals kicking and screaming into the modern era, it was still a third-world country. Actually more like a fourth- or fifth-world country. Half-dressed natives worked and shopped in outdoor market stalls that dotted the streets among office buildings. There were open sewers just off the main roads, and a lot more dirt roads than paved ones. Finding a working public telephone was a rarity.

Agriculture and fishing were the main economic activities — ninety percent of the million and a half souls here worked on farms or boats, or processed the crops or fish that came from the land and sea. The primary exports were cashews, peanuts, and palm kernels, and they imported four times more goods than they shipped out — which wasn't saying much. The main local non-agricultural products were soft drinks and beer. National debt was high, exploration of minerals was minimal, and Guinea-Bissau was quite simply among the poorest countries on the planet. Most people here ate rice, and not much of it, and considered themselves lucky to have that. If they lived to be fifty, they were well ahead of the game. Less than forty percent of the population was literate, most of those men. Education was not wasted on women here — maybe one in four could read more than her own name.

There were no railroads, only a couple thousand miles of badly paved roads, one airport big enough for international flights to land at, and it was cheaper to use local pesos for toilet paper than it was to buy toilet paper. You didn't offer a left hand to greet people here…

Given a choice, almost nobody civilized would choose to live in Guinea-Bissau. Unless they were at the top of the food chain. The very top.

At least it was the dry season. During the monsoons, you didn't walk, you waded.

Hughes leaned back in the car seat and stared at the multicolored swatches of pitiful humanity walking or standing along the street, staring at the passing limo. He was on his way to meet President Fernandes Domingos, a not-particularly-bright man who had somehow lucked into the job. Fortunately, Domingos was bright enough to know a good deal when he heard it. The Presidente had been out of the country, had spent much time in Johannesburg and London and Paris, and had developed a taste for things nearly impossible to enjoy in his own country without a lot more money than he could currently steal. These things included fine wines, finer women, and expensive evenings at the casinos in Monaco.

If things went as planned, Hughes would make Domingos richer than he had ever dreamed of being, and able to indulge his tastes in more pleasant circumstances than the dirty streets of Guinea. Domingos in turn would make it possible for Hughes to — for all practical purposes — eventually own the entire country.

Even a third-world pit such as this one currently was had an inestimable value — or it would, in the right hands. Political asylum alone was worth a fortune, not to mention what was hiding under the ground. Yes, Guinea-Bissau definitely had potential, in the right hands.

In his hands.

"The Compound is just ahead, sir," the driver said. He was large, white, and had a clipped, posh-English accent. On the seat next to him lay a submachine gun, and Hughes knew that under his chauffeur's coat the driver also carried a large-caliber pistol, and from what else he knew, the man had the ability to use both weapons expertly. He was an ex-British military operative of some kind, hired to make sure the President's special guests got where they were supposed to get in one piece. There wasn't much chance of being assassinated by locals, but the neighboring countries, such as Senegal and Guinea, were always wrangling with Guinea-Bissau or each other, sending ratty armies across ill-defined borders to loot and rape, and there was some small possibility of terrorism from saboteurs.

Since he was not officially supposed to be here, it would hardly do to have too high a profile — like a shoot-out with some half-baked crazed spy. Fortunately, the U.S. ambassador in this backwater owed Hughes several large favors, and if the man wasn't exactly in Hughes's pocket, he was circumspect in the extreme. You didn't get to be a full ambassador without learning which way the wind blew, then setting your sails accordingly.

Hughes turned his attention to the palace compound. The main building was big, ostentatious, three stories tall, and made of some slightly pink native stone, with glazed blue tiles on the roof. The architectural style looked to be a bad blend of Mediterranean and Spanish-style villas. The compound was maybe ten acres and a dozen buildings, and surrounded by a fifteen-foot-high matching stone wall topped with what looked like broken glass.

Hughes shook his head. This kind of spending fit a pattern he'd seen all over the world. The less wealth a country had, the larger the extravagances the top dogs lavished upon themselves. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. What a surprise.

The limo arrived in front of a big electrically operated metal gate in the pink stone wall. A pair of guards with assault rifles outside the gate drifted over and bent to look inside the limo. The Brit nodded at them, and it was obvious they knew him, but he offered his ID anyway. The guards checked the ID, then waved at a third armed guard inside the gate at a small kiosk. The gate swung outward to admit the limo.

The driveway was circuitous, and wound around several sharp-angled turns bounded by ponds or dirt mounds covered with grass. Platt had explained that to Hughes. If you managed to get a car full of explosives through the gate, you weren't going to be able to build up enough speed to ram the palace hard enough to put your vehicle inside before you set it off.

The President was largely beloved — but apparently not universally so.

Eventually, the limo arrived at the entrance to the main building.

Standing in front of a set of tall, carved wooden doors was President Fernandes Domingos, along with a pair of bodyguards and a large-busted but otherwise willowy blond woman in a white blouse, a short black skirt, and three-inch heels. Very attractive, the woman. Domingos's mistress, perhaps?

Hughes alighted from the limo as the driver held the door. He smiled at Domingos, who flashed a set of perfect teeth in return.

"Ah, Thomas! How good to see you again!" Domingos spoke good English with an accent from South Africa, the country to which he had been sent for his university education. A university at which, apparently, Domingos had majored in sex, gambling, and drinking.

The two men shook hands. The President was short and heavyset, with a webwork of spidery veins across his nose and cheeks, visible despite his dark complexion. The broken vessels were probably due to incipient alcoholism. At fifty, he had a dissipated look, an aging rake who needed a magic picture in the attic, but unfortunately didn't have one. His namesake ancestors had been Portuguese, and somewhere along the way they had obviously taken a dip or two into the native pools, for he was darker than most Europeans, and what was left of his thinning, dyed-black hair was very curly. But Domingos's features were otherwise not Negroid, despite Plan's racist slurs.

"Mr. President. I am honored."

Domingos waved that away. "No, no, none of that, we are friends! Please, come into my humble home. And I would like you to meet Miss Monique Louis, who has just recently returned from Paris. I am sure you two will get along famously!"

Hughes eyed the blonde, who smiled lazily at him, a hint of come-hither in her expression. "Bonjour," she said. "So nice to make your acquaintance."

Ah…

Unless he was terribly mistaken, the good President had apparently provided him with a… companion. Well. She was attractive enough. And Domingos certainly had enough practice in such matters to have selected an expert trull. Why not? Negotiations could sometimes be arduous, and Hughes might as well relax after they were done — but only afterward.

The tall doors were carved in bas-relief, images of native people, proud faces and young bodies, most of them nude, a kind of gallery of tribal Africa. Platt must have loved that when he'd seen it. Hughes could almost see the cracker shaking his head in disgust. Except for the naked black women, of course.

The doors swung silently open, each operated by a black man dressed entirely in white — shoes, pants, shirt, coat. Monique moved over, took Hughes's arm in hers, and smiled at him, and they followed the President into the palace. The bodyguards swung into position behind them.

This, Hughes decided, should be interesting.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

At Mac's, one of the last old-style hard-core gyms in Manhattan, Platt grunted through a set of heavy squats. Wasn't no ferns or New Age music playing here, no chrome and red leatherette magnomachines or yuppie VR slantwalkers, just racks and racks of iron — dumbbells, barbells — and benches and racks and a concrete floor with a few rubber pads on it. Mirrors on the walls and good lighting, the place had those, but that was it. You didn't come here to get a nice glow, you came here to sweat — and to know pain.

He was in the safety rack, so the weight wasn't gonna fall and crush his ass, but that didn't help his thighs. They burned as though he was standing hip-deep in molten lava. Four hundred pounds on the bar across his shoulders, and after the first set, each rep was a war. He hated squats, hated ‘em, and after a couple of heavy sets, he could barely move. He'd puked more than a few times after squats, in such pain he couldn't even stand up without help, but that was how it went. You wanted to be strong, you had to move big weight, that was the name of that tune. Those little pansies who did leg extensions with fifty pounds and thought they were working out made Platt want to laugh. You didn't see those guys here. Mac would laugh their asses right out of the building.

Excuse me, sir, but where are the cardiowalkers?

Why, just go out the front door and a couple of miles that way, hoss. Look for a spa full of sissies, you'll fit right in.

Down Platt went, legs cooking in their own juices. Below horizontal, butt almost on his heels.

Up he came, vibrating, shaking, quivering, fire flowing through his veins and arteries, burning his muscles, hot right to the bone.

Man!

Three more, and he was able — barely, finally! — to rack the weight. He grabbed a towel, wiped the sweat off his face and neck, and moved to the water fountain. Around him, the clang of steel echoed as men grunted and strained against the big plates. There were a couple of women here, bodybuilders on the juice, so they looked like men. That kind of woman didn't appeal to him at all. He liked to see a woman in shape, but not a male shape caused by mojo steroids that did everything but grow a dick on her.

Well. Enough of this. Time to shower and head for the place in Queens where he had his throwaway computer set up. The feds were about to get another surprise, courtesy of the Fried Sex gang. A big surprise this time.

Platt laughed aloud. He didn't see how life could get much better than this.

Jay Gridley leaned into the fierce wind coming off the East Siberian Sea, a wind so strong and cold that it would blast an unprotected man to death in a matter of seconds. Enough wind so that the rocks along the shore were bare of snow, despite more than ten feet of it having fallen in the last two months. The snow had been blown away like so much dry talcum powder. The locals here liked to joke about how cold it got. There were people in Alaska or Canada who bragged about throwing a pot of boiling water into the air and watching it freeze on the way down. In Siberia, they liked to say, the water would freeze while still in the pot. Sometimes while the pot was still on the fire, da!

It was an unlikely place to be hunting for clues to a Danish terrorist organization, maybe more so than any other, but there was a blowhole in the ice up ahead where seals came up to breathe, and one of those "seals" was the packet of information he wanted to find. Jay was armored against the cold — electrically heated underwear, including socks, hat, and gloves — with four layers of material over that — polyprop, silk, wool, and fur — a face mask, and heavy boots. Even so, he felt the cold prying at the mask he wore, digging at the smallest seams in his clothing. This was as close a VR scenario as he could build to what the locals actually faced, and he wondered how they could stand it. The houses here were all heavily insulated, with triple doors and windows, dead spaces in the insulated walls, and even so, you could store your food in an unheated back room and it would keep all winter long.

Brrr.

A Klaxon began screaming at him, loud and insistent. What the hell was that? Where was the sound coming from? He turned, put his back to the wind, and saw a tower in the distance.

Jay did the mental shift and realized that the Klaxon was his real-time override, back at his workstation. Oops. Something bad — the override's threshold was dialed up high enough so only something really nasty would set it off. A fire in the building, a major system failure, the pizza delivery truck had a flat…

Better check this out quick. Jay logged himself out of VR.

Toni was in the middle of a stack of electronic correspondence when her workstation crashed. One second she was dealing with a memo from Supply telling her that Net Force had exceeded its normal monthly quota of phone and virgil batteries, the next second the screen went blank.

Crap. Just what she needed, a computer failure—

The screen relit then, only out for a second or two, but the memo from Supply was gone, and in its place was a picture of a man's hand. All of the fingers were curled down and held in place by the thumb — except for the middle finger, which stood straight up. The image rotated slowly on its axis, and there was no mistaking the ancient obscene gesture.

She heard her secretary laugh. "What?" Toni yelled.

"My computer is giving me the finger," her secretary yelled back.

Toni had a sudden sinking feeling that this image was not confined to just two stations.

It didn't take long for her to learn she was right.

Good Lord. Somebody had hacked into the Net Force computer system and given the organization the bird.

This was bad.

Toni met Jay Gridley as they both headed for the conference room. Joanna Winthrop beat them there by half a second. Alex was already there. He didn't even wait for them to sit down before he started in.

"All right, what the hell happened?"

"Frihedsakse," Jay and Joanna said simultaneously. They glared at each other, then both tried to talk at once.

"I found the—"

"They came in by—"

"One at a time," Toni cut in, before Alex could say it. "Jay?"

"They got in through a subsystem in FBI Personnel. It's a dedicated Direct Line used for submitting resumes and job applications. In theory, it's not supposed to be cross-linked with secure systems without gate passwords for every upload or download, but in practice a lot of times, somebody opens the link to supervisors looking for new employees, and they leave it open so they don't have to spend five minutes every time they need to relink to send a file. Somebody got in on that line and into our mainframe."

Toni could see that Joanna was eager to talk. "Lieutenant?"

"Our circulating antivirals caught the program almost immediately. There was no damage to hardware or software. The rotating hand image was already on file, and it looks as if the hack was designed to get in, open that visual, and post it to our system as an EWS — Emergency Warning System — override. As far as I–I mean, as far as Jay and I can tell — nobody lost any data, and the virus didn't do anything else."

"We're running full diagnostics," Jay added, "but I can guarantee they won't find any more infection. This is nothing, a simple encapsulated program, the kind of thing a kid hacker would do just to show he could. They gave us the finger. Big deal. No harm, no foul."

Alex shook his head. "You're wrong, Jay. This is a major hit."

Jay frowned, but Toni saw from her face that Joanna understood.

Toni said, "Net Force is supposed to be the guardian for the nation's computer systems. If this group can get into our supposedly secure setup, how does that make us look? What kind of confidence is this going to inspire in our clients, when it comes to protecting their systems?"

"But it doesn't matter that they got in," Jay said. "They couldn't do anything! Our automatics nailed the program within a couple of seconds. It opened a picture we already had in our files. All the picture did was just sit there and shine. It couldn't have done anything else no matter what. We were back on-line before most people even noticed it. It was a glitch, no damage, zip city."

"We're not talking programs here," Alex said. "We're talking politics. It doesn't matter that the terrorists didn't do any damage, what matters is that they got in. Even if you and I know better, people who don't understand computers are going to be afraid. Sure, they'll say, the Net Force bleebs say no big deal, but so, if it's no big deal, how come they didn't keep them out in the first place?"

Jay shook his head. "But — but—"

"Toni, see what you can do for damage control," Alex said to her. To Jay and Joanna, he said, "Try and backwalk this, see if you can get us any leads. I have a feeling this is going to get real ugly on us if we don't short-circuit it pretty quick. Go."

After Jay and Joanna were gone, Toni sat alone with Alex.

"You okay?" she asked.

"Yes, of course, I'm fine. It's just all this." He waved one hand to encompass Net Force and all its problems

But he wasn't fine, she could see that. He had been tighter than a violin's E-string since he'd come back after Christmas. At first she'd thought it was because of his little adventure in the desert that he didn't want to talk to her about. But that wasn't the kind of thing to bother him, at least not as much as he seemed to be bothered. He'd come out a winner, captured a bad guy, no loss of face there. If anything, he came off kind of heroic. Men admired that kind of thing in other men.

She hadn't asked about his visit with his daughter and ex-wife, he hadn't volunteered, and Toni suspected that maybe the visit hadn't gone well. Even divorced, that woman seemed to run Alex's life long-distance, and Toni hated her for it. And the woman had to be stupid; otherwise how could she have ever let Alex get away from her?

But it wasn't Toni's place to ask, not given their strictly professional relationship. All she could do was offer opportunities for him to talk. If he didn't want to do that, she couldn't make him.

"Okay," she said. "You know where to find me. I'll see if I can bury this where nobody will stumble across it."

She stood, started to leave.

"Toni?"

"Mm?"

"I'm going to look at a new car tomorrow — assuming the sky doesn't fall before then. Well, it's an old car, one I'm considering buying, assuming this whole place hasn't totally gone to hell by then. Car's a little Miata, it's in a garage in Fredericksburg, that's on 1-95 a few miles south of here."

"Uh-huh?"

"Well, given how much you know about cars and all, I was, uh, wondering, that is, I mean… would you like to go along and help me check it out?"

Toni was stunned. Where had that come from?! Out of nowhere, that's where! Her brain stalled, as if somebody had slapped it silly. For a moment, she couldn't think, couldn't talk, couldn't even breathe. Then her little warning voice kicked in, and what it said was:

Oh, baby! He's asking you out! Slow, go slow, don't scare him off!

She managed a breath. "Yeah, I'd like that. A Miata, huh? One of my brothers had one of those once."

"Yeah," he said quickly, "I remember you told me that, so, uh, your advice would really be helpful. You know."

She wanted to grin, but she held her face to polite interest. He was like a fourteen-year-old kid asking a girl out on his first date — she could see it in his expression, hear it in his voice. He was nervous. Afraid she would turn him down.

As if that was remotely possible.

It made him all the more adorable, that he was rattled.

"I, uh, want to get an early start," he said, "so why don't I pick you up about seven?"

"Seven would be good."

"Uh, where do you, uh, live? I've never been to your place."

She gave him her address and directions, still full of wonder about this.

Don't go jumping to conclusions, girl. He just asked you to go look at an old car, not for a weekend in Paris.

Shut up, she told her inner voice.

"Probably you should wear some some old clothes," he said. "It might get a little greasy poking around in an old garage. I'm going to take some tools and stuff. I might be able to get the thing running. If you don't mind hanging around while I try."

"No problem," she said.

For a long moment — a couple of millennia anyhow — she stood there staring at him, feeling so bubbly she wanted to jump up and down and scream. Finally she pulled herself away. "Okay," she said. "I'll go work on the hack."

Once she was out of the conference room, her back to Alex, she could not stop the grin. Yes! Yes!

When he'd been thirteen, Alex Michaels had ridden the Tyler Texas Tornado — at the time, the world's largest roller coaster. He'd never forgotten that weightless, pit-of-the-stomach rush as the car fell over the first drop and gravity let go of him. If it hadn't been for the safety bar, he would have floated right out of the ride.

He felt like that now, as if he had just gone over the first drop of the 111. His stomach was fluttery, his heart was thumping along at least twice its normal speed, his mouth was dry, and he was breathing fast.

Jesus H. Christ. What did you just do? Did you just ask Toni Fiorella, your assistant, out on a date?

No, no, not a date! Just to go check out the car. She knows about cars — remember when she came to the house and saw the Prowler? She knew all about motors and hydraulics and like that! She had a house full of brothers who were into cars!

Uh-huh. Sure. Who do you think you're fooling here, pal? I was there, I remember you looking at her butt while you were on the phone talking to your daughter. And I remember silat class, too, buddy. When you and she are all entwined in one of those grappling moves. How she feels pressed against you, just before she throws your stupid butt on the ground.

He knew. He knew this was not a smart thing to be doing. Toni worked for him, and yeah, he'd gotten vibes from her that she didn't exactly find him hideous or anything, but this was dangerous territory. Toni was bright, adept, good-looking, and, oh, yes, it would be a lot of fun to get closer than they did in silat. There was nothing wrong with his imagination — he just hadn't let it play much since he and Megan had split up. But that last visit to the old house, that whole scene with Megan and her new boyfriend, that had pretty much put the final nail in the coffin, hadn't it? The marriage was dead, they weren't going to get back together, and when he'd calmed down later and thought about it, he realized he didn't want to get back together with a woman who could do to him what she had done. Megan had a nasty streak, and while it didn't come out that often, it was very mean-spirited when it did. He didn't want to be with somebody who could go postal on him at any time. That was no way to live, sleeping with one eye open.

He'd been behaving like a monk for a long time. He'd put all of himself into his work or his car, he'd run or biked thousands of miles to wear himself out, and it wasn't like it was a sin to take pleasure in the company of an attractive woman.

It didn't have to go any farther than that. He didn't have to risk losing Toni as a friend and coworker by pushing it into romance. He could keep his hands to himself, his pants zipped, and keep it platonic.

Right. Was that why you asked her to take a little drive down to Fredericksburg? To be Mr. Platonic?

Shut up, he told himself. Nothing has happened, nothing is going to happen. We're friends, that's all.

His inner voice laughed at him all the way back to his office.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

When Toni Fiorella walked past her, Joanna Winthrop looked at the woman and was sure her suspicions were dead on target:

Miss Toni had the hots for their boss.

It wasn't that hard to see, given how Fiorella blossomed like a hothouse orchid time-lapse vid every time she was around Alex Michaels. He didn't seem to notice, no surprise. Men were usually stupid that way — among all the other ways. Still, he was a nice enough guy, and the truth was Winthrop had entertained a couple of fantasies in that direction herself. Well, at least before she'd started finding reasons to drop by and see Julio Fernandez. Michaels was okay, but Julio? Julio was a jewel.

In fact, she could probably break some time away from work tomorrow to get together with him and do a little computer stuff. He still wanted to learn, and she was getting more and more comfortable hanging around with him. The guy didn't seem to have any ego, at least as far as women were concerned, and he just kept surprising her with what he said and how he said it.

She grinned to herself. Yeah, let Toni pine after the boss. They were probably better suited for each other. Winthrop was finding that lately she had developed a real hankering for… Hispanic food.

It was still dark outside the one-man funnel tent, dark and cold too, but at least the snow had started falling again.

John Howard wasn't exactly toasty in his mummy sleeping bag, but he was warm enough, and the face shield had kept his nose from freezing off. He didn't want to peel himself out of the bag and get up, but he had to go pee and there was no getting around that. It wouldn't be light for a while yet, but he didn't have to go looking for a place — he was all by himself. Like his grandfather used to say, he was so far out, the sun came up between here and town…

He'd planned to do a winter survival weekend in Washington state after the scheduled joint Net Force/military exercises in the Pacific Northwest, but there was some kind of problem with the biochemical depot at Umatilla. Apparently one of the destabilized nerve-gas rockets had sprung a leak. It wasn't much of a leak, on the order of a microscopic spray, and it was contained and not dangerous, but the Army had been running around trying to put a media lid on it, and of course, had failed utterly to do so. As a result, the civilians nearest the depot were terrified that a cloud of poison was about to roll into town and kill every man, woman, child, and dog, and folks were being sent to visit relatives way out of town, so Net Force and the Army had canceled their exercise. The Army figured that it wouldn't look good to have a bunch of guys in combat gear running around and going hut-hut-hut! all crisp and active. That would sure as hell scare folks, none of whom would believe for a second that this was just a drill and pure coincidence. Even so, Howard hadn't wanted to skip his own personal survival trip, so he'd decided to drop down into Oregon instead. The differences in the terrain between eastern Oregon and eastern Washington on either side of the Columbia weren't all that major.

Howard slid out of the sleeping bag, already dressed in long underwear, pants, socks, and a heavy wool shirt. He removed the spare socks he'd stuffed into his boots to keep the scorpions and spiders out — even though it was winter, this was a good habit to get into. He pulled the boots on after he looked for hitchhikers anyway — damn, they were chilly! — grabbed a jacket and hat, and scooted out of the tent.

The early morning sky was perfectly clear, with stars glittering in hard, sharp, fiery points. You could see the Milky Way out here, and all kinds of constellations that you'd never spot in the city. And the colors of the stars, reds, blues, yellows. Truly a beautiful sky.

He stood, ambled a few yards off along the path he'd packed down before he'd turned in the night before, and wrote his name in a snowbank piled up against what looked like a frozen and pretty-sad-about-it creosote bush.

Back inside, he lit his hurricane candle, and set up his single-burner propane stove. The mouth of the funnel tent was just tall enough to sit upright in. The tent was made of double-walled rip-stop Gortex, which kept the snow out, but still allowed most of the moisture inside to escape, so you didn't wake up with your own condensed water vapor raining on you. In the old days, he'd have gathered firewood and started a small outdoor fire to boil water for coffee and rehydration of his food, but the current land-use philosophy was for "no impact" campsites. No cutting down trees or clearing brush, no trenching your tent for runoff, no open fires, and only a minimal latrine — and even that had to be covered and tamped before you broke camp.

He grinned as he started a snowmelt pot of water heating. He'd been on a couple of outings where the "no impact" rule had been so strictly adhered to they'd had to bag and seal their own solid waste and pack it out. That had been worth a few laughs: Here, Sarge, I saved you some Tootsie Rolls for dessert. Yeah? Well, that's funny, ‘cause I got some chocolate pudding right here for you too, Corporal…

It was amazing what soldiers would joke about.

It was about twelve degrees outside right now, and the ground was hard as a rock and frozen to boot, so digging wasn't going any deeper than the snow, but he had biodegradable toilet paper pads that would disappear the first time they got wet, and by spring any signs of scat would be long gone. It wasn't likely anybody was going to be out here playing in the snow before springtime…

He had a little hike ahead of him today, just ten miles. But on snowshoes and with a backpack it would work him some. He had a GPS if he got lost, though he'd try to locate his next campsite the old-fashioned way, with a compass and landmarks. It wasn't as easy as the GPS, of course, where all you had to do was punch a couple of buttons and it would tell you exactly where you were and how to get to where you wanted to go. But batteries could go dead, satellites could fall, and a compass was reliable if you knew how to allow for magnetic north and all. If you lost your compass, there were the stars, including the sun. And if it was cloudy, there was dead reckoning, though that was a little more iffy.

Truth was, he hadn't been lost in a long time. He had a good sense of direction.

At six a.m., he pulled his virgil and keyed his morning check-in code. He could also find his way out using the virgil, and could go to vox to call for help if he needed it. If something happened and he couldn't call out, Net Force or other rescuers could also find him via the little device, which had a homer with a dedicated battery in it. It wasn't as if he were Lewis and Clark, a million miles away from civilization. Still, it was cold and he was all by himself out here in the middle of the high desert, with fresh snow piled a foot and a half deep. If anything happened to him, help wouldn't get to him right away.

There was a real risk to being here. Which was, of course, the point. The way a man found out what he was made of was when he tested himself against real danger. VR only went so far, no matter how real it felt. You always knew you weren't gonna die in VR. But in real life, sometimes things went to hell, and you had to survive on your wits and your skills. This little three-day trip was not that big a deal. He'd lived off the land on his own for a couple of weeks, in terrain ranging from desert to jungle. There was a great sense of accomplishment in knowing that if you survived a plane crash in the middle of nowhere, you could probably survive long enough for help to arrive. Assuming anybody wanted to find you…

How did you come to climb that big old mountain, fella?

Well, sir, it was in my way…

The water started to boil, and Howard dug in his pack for the freeze-dried coffee crystals.

Somewhere, he'd heard about an order of Zen monks or some-such, who lived high up the slopes of an Oriental mountain. They had a little café there, and when climbers would stop in, they would sell them coffee. There were two prices: a two-dollar cup of coffee — and a two-hundred-dollar cup of coffee. When asked the difference, the monks would smile and say, "A hundred and ninety-eight dollars." The brew, the water, the cups, all were exactly the same, but there were always those who were willing to spring for the more expensive cup. They swore it tasted better.

He could understand that. What he was about to drink wasn't in the same class as freshly roasted and freshly ground premium beans strained through a gold filter and served in fine china by a well-practiced and attentive waiter, but the first cup of coffee on a survival camp out was always better than the best restaurant stuff. Always.

Hughes rolled over in the king-sized orthopedic bed and watched as Monique waded through the ankle-deep white carpet toward the bathroom. It was a nice view, her naked backside, and he enjoyed it until she slipped into the bathroom and closed the door quietly behind her. He grinned. She was no more a natural blonde than her boobs were real, but neither of these things detracted from her expertise as a lover. After three sessions with her — last night, a quickie at noon, and tonight — he was completely spent, tired, and more relaxed than he had been in years. This was one of the perks of wealth, a well-practiced mistress, and he toyed with the idea of hiring Monique full-time. He could afford her now, and soon would be able to afford thousands like her.

But — perhaps not. It might be better to avoid any more entanglements until his major goal was achieved. Even an entanglement as much fun as Monique.

He glanced at his watch. Just after eleven o'clock. What would that make it in D.C.? Was it four hours ahead here? Five?

It didn't matter. Platt was back there, merrily adding gasoline to various fires, setting up the project's end-stage. Hughes hadn't called the cracker while he'd been here, but that wasn't necessary at this stage of the game.

Negotiations had gone well with Domingos, even better than he'd expected. The main reason the man hadn't closed the deal with Platt had been a simple matter of money — Domingos wanted more. Hughes had anticipated all along that the President would up the ante, and had been surprised when he hadn't done so earlier, so this was not an unforeseen bump in the road. It had merely come later than expected. For the sake of appearances, Hughes had dickered, pretended to be insulted, and had offered a stiff resistance to any change in the basic agreement. After sufficient time for Domingos to convince himself that he was the equal of a platoon of Arabic horse traders, Hughes had allowed himself to be worn down and persuaded. Another thirty mil was thrown into the pot, bringing the payout to the President to an even hundred million dollars U.S. Or, if he preferred, he could have it in French francs, Japanese yen, or British pounds. Or dinars, rupiahs, rubles, or Guinea-Bissau's own pesos.

Dollars would be fine, the President had allowed.

Hughes grinned again as the bathroom door swung open and Monique walked through the thick carpet toward him. The view was even better from the front, he decided, what with her dyed-blond pubic thatch shaved into that little heart shape. Even the breast implants had been hung by an expert medico, for they looked — and felt — quite real.

Spent as he thought he was, he felt a bit of a stirring in his groin.

"Ah, you are awake, I see."

"Not all of me."

"Oh, but I am certain I can remedy that, oui?"

He chuckled. If anybody could raise his hopes, certainly Monique could.

"Let's see, shall we?" he said.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

"You want to stop for some coffee or something?" Alex asked. He waved at a service station off to their right.

"No, I'm fine," Toni said. "I had my two cups already."

The day was chilly, but clear, and traffic was light. The inside of the van was a hair too warm.

He smiled at her, a little awkwardly, she thought.

"Yeah, me too," he said.

Toni had the impression that he wished he hadn't done this — invited her to go along with him to look at the Miata. They were in the company car designated for his use, a politically correct electric/hydrogen-powered minivan. And as everybody who'd ever driven one knew, as gutless a piece of machinery as you could find. It had all the get-up-and-go of a turtle with a broken leg. Top speed was sixty-five — and that was downhill, with a tailwind and a god who took pity on you, and it took a long time to get to that fast. Range of the van was about two hundred miles — if you added both propulsion systems together. Then you had to pull over, plug in, or get a new bottle of hydrogen. Alex was allowed a certain number of personal miles every month, though he seldom used them. Easy to understand why. The joke around the agency was that if you had a roller skate, you could sit on that, push with your hands, and get where you wanted to go faster than the minivan — and your butt would hurt less when you arrived.

Alex had a fair-sized tool chest in the back of the van, along with a car battery, several cans of oil, and more cans of brake and transmission fluid.

"You talk to Jay this morning?" she said.

"I checked his vox around six, heard his update."

Toni had also checked the coded message, but to keep the conversation going she pretended she hadn't. "Anything new?"

"No. Nothing good or bad. We haven't run the terrorists down, though we've got all kinds of little clues. No new rascals on any systems — at least none we've found. I'm waiting for it, though. These guys are going to drop a big brick on us, I can feel it coming."

He looked at her. "I also feel a little guilty about taking the day off."

"Nothing you could do at the office."

"I know, but even so—"

A big double-cab pickup truck whipped by in the speed lane. It had to be going eighty-five or ninety. The wind of the truck's passage rocked the minivan.

"Where are the cops when you need one?" Toni said.

That got a little smile from him.

She said, "I've buried the system break-in as best I can, but we probably need to talk about what happens if it becomes known outside the house. Just in case."

He glanced at her, then back at the freeway. "Oh, I'd bet my next paycheck against a stale doughnut that Senator White'll know about it by Monday — if he doesn't know already."

"You thought about what you'll say if he calls you on it?"

"Sure. The truth. It's easier to remember." He smiled again. "I'll throw all of Jay's rationalizations at him, but that won't matter. He would like to get rid of us and pretend we never existed. Any excuse will do."

"We could sacrifice a goat," she said, half-joking. "Somebody high enough up to take the fall."

Now he looked harder at her. "You have somebody in mind?"

All right, if they were going to go down that road. She took a deep breath and started to speak. "Well, yeah, I was thinking maybe I—"

"No," he cut in. "Don't touch that control. I don't want to hear it. Nobody is falling on her sword here, certainly not you!"

The vehemence of his response surprised her. She was at a loss.

"There are always going to be idiots like White," he said. "We'll always have one wolf or another chasing our sled and howling for blood. We'll deal with them, but we won't throw any of our people off, understood?"

"Okay."

He smiled a little, to take the sting out of it. "Besides, if something happened to you, I wouldn't be able to find the door to get into HQ."

Okay, that was a compliment. You can follow that one up. Go—

She heard a siren, looked into the outside rearview mirror, and saw a police car coming up fast. The siren dopplered louder as the car drew closer. The driver sure had his foot in the fuel injector; he was flying.

Alex drifted from the slow lane over onto the wide shoulder and slowed.

The flashing light strobed Alex's face as a Virginia state trooper's unit blew past them.

"He's going after that truck," Alex said. "How about that. There is some justice in the world."

She nodded. She was in a car with Alex going somewhere other than Net Force business. Maybe there was justice.

Or maybe Guru's kris had some magic left in its black and convoluted steel. She grinned.

"Something funny?"

"No, just a pleasant thought," she said.

Joanna wasn't scheduled to work this morning, but she was on her way into HQ anyway. She still hadn't run down the SOB who had used her station to post that fruitcake militia thing, though she had figured out it was done by remote and not in person — big surprise there. This latest incursion with the finger image pissed her off even more, even though it hadn't come through her in particular. It was a slap in the face, a direct challenge to Net Force that she took personally. She was going into the net for some serious webwalking to find these creeps.

Or, at least that was her intention. As she was heading in, she saw Julio Fernandez in his sweats, limping back from the direction of the obstacle course.

Well. She hadn't been able to connect with him for the last couple of days, they'd played message tag, and now there he was, in the flesh. It wouldn't hurt to say hello. Maybe she could kill two birds with one stone.

He saw her, smiled, and nodded. "Lieutenant."

"Sergeant. You on duty?"

"No, ma'am. I just finished hobbling through my morning constitutional and was gonna hit the showers before I headed home."

"I'm going to be doing some work on the web," she said. She waved at the HQ building. "You want to come along, sit in? I can show you some of the more interesting aspects of VR."

"I'd like that. I still ought to hit the showers first. I'm a little ripe."

She sniffed. "You don't stink too bad. I think I can stand being in the same room with you. Come on."

"Yes, ma'am."

They both grinned.

Truth was, she didn't mind a man who smelled like a man instead of a fruity aftershave or deodorant. Nothing wrong with a little clean sweat. It was probably all the pheromones that appealed to her…

The thing was, Tyrone realized, you could only lie in bed staring at the ceiling for so long before it got boring. Real boring.

He had gone over what he'd said, what she'd said, every detail of what had happened between him and Bella a thousand times. Nothing was going to change. It was like a big rock — no matter how many times you poked at it with your finger, it was still going to stay a rock.

He sighed, rolled out of bed, and headed for the bathroom. He did the control finger-jive in front of the vidwall's sensor, and the default channel, the newscom, flicked on. Dad had programmed the house com unit to default to the news channel, the idea being that it wouldn't hurt any of them to watch the news now and then. Tyrone had been meaning to reprogram the thing — lock-chips were a joke if you knew anything — but he hadn't gotten around to changing it yet.

The multimedia local news blared and flared. They were doing the traffic. First, real-time traffic, streets and highways, then virtual traffic, which parts of the net were clear, which parts were clogged, which subservers were down or wounded.

He made it into the bathroom, listening to the news with half his attention while he peed.

Dad was gone, off on his survival thing. Mom had a breakfast with her women friends — the Goddesses, they called each other — and wouldn't be back before eleven, at least. So he had the house to himself. Lying in bed wasn't going to solve anything, so he might as well do something.

The temptation was to log into the net and catch up on his computer work. He'd been slack to the point of droop on that during the last few months, all wrapped up in Bella, Bella, Bella. Now that he thought about it, that was pretty much all he'd done. When he wasn't with her, he had been dreaming about her, thinking about her, or talking about her.

In a flash of clarity, Tyrone realized how boring he must have been to be around lately. It was Bella this or Bella that, or Bella the other, and his friends — such as they were — must have elected him King of the Dull and Stupids on the first ballot. Particularly he owed Jimmy-Joe a big sorry-sorry. He remembered saying to him, "It's just a game," about the computer stuff, and the look of horror on his friend's face when he'd said that.

Man, was that a data no-flow, slip. Stupid squared to the tenth power.

But — okay, okay. That was then, this was now.

Somehow, though, the idea of sitting down and going VR just didn't lube his tube. He needed to do something, but it wasn't the computer.

So, what? What else was there?

He grinned at himself. Pretty sorry when the only two things in your life were computers and a lying girlfriend, and you didn't even have her anymore.

He could go to the mall. No, overwrite that option, Bella lived at the damned mall. He could go for a walk, ‘cept his neighborhood was about as interesting as a bag of kitty litter. He could surf the entcom channels for a vid…

No, no, he needed to do something, not just sit back and suck up data, whether it was VR, vids, or whatever. But what to do on a chilly, sunny day?

"And now for local events," the vox from the newscom droned. "Students from the Kennedy High School marching band are having a car wash to raise money for new uniforms. This will be at the Lincoln Mall Vidplex from noon to four, Saturday."

Oh, yeah, a car wash, that was exciting, helloooo slipper!

The drone continued. "The Foggy Bottom Children's Library welcomes writer Wendy Heroumin for a reading of her latest book, The Purple Penguin."

Hey, hey, a children's book! Whoa, tachycardia city!

"And the Sixth Annual Boomerang Tournament begins in Lonesdale Park at eight a.m. Saturday and runs through Sunday at five p.m."

Tyrone was finishing his hands when he heard this last announcement. A boomerang tourney? What was a boomerang tourney? Those aborigine things? The sticks?

Well, hey, slip, you got zip on your drive — why don't you go and find out?

He grinned. All right. Yeah. He could do that. The new park was only a dozen blocks away, so he wouldn't even have to take pubtrans. He could just Nike on over there and check it out. One thing for sure, he wasn't going to run into Bella there. Or likely anybody else he knew either.

Why not? He'd never even seen a boomerang, except in VR, and that only as background scenario. Why not?

A short guy built like a brick was in the middle of the soccer field. He reared back with a dayglow orange boomerang in his right hand, concave side forward, one end up, and threw the thing so hard his hand went forward and touched the ground.

The boomerang did this kind of eccentric egg-rolling end-over-end flight, swooped about fifty meters straight ahead, then started to curve to the left. It kept going up, twisted so it was flat-side-down, twirled and twirled and circled back around the guy, maybe ten meters high, went behind him, headed out in front of him again, a full circle, then did a little jog up and spun toward him. The spinning orange delta-shape came right at the guy, who held his hands about a dozen centimeters apart in front of himself, palms facing each other. When the stick was just about to hit him in the chest, he slapped his hands together and trapped it.

The guy never moved his feet, he didn't have to, it came right back to him.

This was so flowing fine!

I got to have one of these!

Tyrone had been watching for about an hour. This was fantastic, there were ems and fems out there doing things he couldn't believe. They were making the things swoop and twirl, making them dive and circle, keeping two or three in the air at one time, running and catching them, laughing, tumbling, it was great.

His favorite demo had been — according to the woman narrating on the portable PA system — the war boomerang. Unlike the sport models, this one was not designed to return. The man who threw the thing was tall and thin. He wound up, putting everything he had into the throw, judging by what Tyrone could tell, and the stick, which was almost straight, and about twice as big as the sport models, flew like an arrow, straight ahead, maybe a meter and a half above the ground, it flew, and flew, and flew, just… kept going, on and on.

Man!

When it finally dropped, Tyrone couldn't believe how far it had flown. Two hundred and twenty meters, easy. It was like it had a jet motor in it.

There was a break in the action. Tyrone headed for the little tables they'd set up for sales. There were maybe twenty different models on the tables, various angles, sizes, colors. He couldn't begin to figure out what they all meant.

"New at this, mate?" the man behind the table said. He had an accent so thick you could lean against it. Australian.

"Yeah," Tyrone said. "But I want to learn."

"Right. How much you lookin' to spend then?"

Tyrone pulled his credit card out of his pocket and called up his balance. He'd floated a lot of shine on Bella, but he had about fifty in his account.

He told the seller the amount. What else did he have to shine it on?

"Hey, for that, you can get just about anything on the table. Though you might want to start with a sturdy model until you get the hang of it." The Aussie picked up a light-brown boomerang with one of the blade tips painted white. He handed it to Tyrone.

"You hold it by the white tip, if you're right-handed, yeah, like that, just like making a fist, thumb on the outside, there you go. When you throw, it's straight ahead, you put a little wrist into it. You need to allow for wind direction and all, but we toss in a little how-to chiplet, tells you everything you need to know to get started."

Tyrone examined the boomerang. It was wood, plywood, and while it was flat on the bottom except for a scalloped outer edge under the paint, the top edges were angled. The leading inside edge was blunt, and the leading outside edge had been sharpened so that it sloped from the full thickness to a thinner margin. The part you held onto was cut to mirror the leading edge — thick on the outside, thin on the inside. Tyrone guessed that the thing was almost half a meter long, maybe a centimeter thick in the center. Probably about a forty-five- or fifty-degree angle. He turned it over. Laser-cut into the center of the flat side was a tiny image of a black man holding a boomerang in one hand, ready to throw, and the words "Gunda-warra Boomerangs — Kangaroo — Crafted in Wedderburn, Victoria, Australia."

"Until you learn to throw it right, it's gonna hit the ground pretty hard a few times. The plywood models tend to hold up longer than the solid wood ones. And they're cheaper than NoChip. This one'll run about twenty dollars U.S."

Tyrone hefted the stick. He realized he hadn't thought about Bella but once since he'd gotten here, and then only briefly.

"Comes with a membership in the International Boomerang Association. We've got a great web site."

Tyrone grinned. "I'll take it."

Chapter Thirty

Howard found a sunny spot to break for lunch. The relatively level patch of snowy ground was partially sheltered from the weather by some Douglas fir trees and stunted shrubs on the east side, though the growth had collected its share of solid precipitation. A couple of the smaller trees were so heavy with snow, they leaned over precariously, branches drooping.

It was warming up under the clear skies, though it was still not what you'd call warm, probably a degree or two above freezing. Big clots of partially melted snow fell from the trees to splatter on the shallow snow below, landing with wet plops.

Howard chose his cook spot away from overhanging branches. He tamped the snow down with his snowshoes into a ragged circle next to a big flat-topped rock. He used his virgil to beep in, showing he was still alive, then shrugged out of his pack, pulled the snowshoes off, and set his stove up on the rock. He dumped a couple of handfuls of snow into his cook pot, then began melting the snow to reconstitute some freeze-dried chicken and vegetables, kind of like a pot pie without the crust.

He walked around the site as he waited for the water to heat up, stomping a more solid path in the relatively shallow snow. He looked for signs of small animals, and checked for any tokens that humans had passed this way recently. He found nothing to indicate man or animal had visited here, and certainly there were no other tracks in or out but his own.

On his own, far away from home. He liked the feeling, being master of all he could see.

He rolled his shoulders, stretched his neck, and did a couple of squats and toe touches to loosen his legs. It had been two hours since his last break, and two hours of snowshoeing took a lot out of you. No matter how old you were…

The metal cup of water began to bubble. He circled back toward his stove, passing beneath the trees. He glanced up and saw a blob of melting snow slip from a high branch and fall, coming right at him.

"Oh, no, you don't!" he said, laughing and dodging to the side. The big chunk missed him by a good two feet, but he stumbled and put one hand out to catch himself on the tree. That was a mistake, because his weight was enough to shake the tree a hair, and that brought a big cascade of ready-to-fall snow. He laughed again, spun around the tree and away, pleased with himself at avoiding most of the icy bath.

He didn't stay pleased.

The tree that lost its snow load popped upright like a bent spring released. It hit the tree next to it, hard.

The second tree snapped in half ten feet off the ground. Like a man breaking a pencil—pop!

The snow was not that deep, but it was too deep to run in.

He barely had time to get his arms up over his head before the tree fell on him.

From under the Miata's hood, Alex said, "Okay, try it again."

Behind the wheel, Toni said, "Okay," and turned the key in the steering wheel ignition. The motor coughed, deeper than it had before.

"Give it a little gas, pump the pedal!"

She did. After a second, the engine caught and began a throaty rumble.

"Yes!" she and Alex said at the same time.

They were alone in the garage. Greg Scates, the car's former owner, had come and gone. Alex had taken a quick look at the Miata, then as soon as he'd seen the odometer, had said to her, "Jesus, it's only got nine hundred miles on it!"

He'd made the man an offer right then. Greg had been surprised at how much the offer was. Way more than he'd expected.

Alex had transferred the agreed-upon sum from his credit card to Greg's account and waved bye-bye as the man left.

Now Alex closed the hood, wiped his hands on a red rag, and grinned at Toni.

They'd been working on the car for several hours. They had found the tires, which were in remarkable shape inside plastic bags, and pumped them full of air using a little compressor that ran off the van's electrical system. They'd put the wheels back on the car. They had added gasoline, oil, water, transmission and brake fluid, and other lubricants, replaced the battery, and tinkered with the fuel injector. Alex had done something with the plugs and wiring, cleaned preservative off various components, fiddled with this seal and that one, and now, finally, the tiny car purred.

He had, Alex had told her, every intention of driving the thing home, even though the license tag was years out of date. "Be worth the ticket if we get caught," he said.

He cleaned the grease from his hands, walked around to the open driver's door, and looked down at her. "It'll need a new top," he said. "And a set of new belts, plug wires, some other minor stuff. Paint is in pretty good shape, but I'm not that fond of arrest-me red. Maybe a nice teal," he said.

She grinned back up at him. She'd gotten a little dirt under her fingernails too, helping him put the wheels back on the car and passing him tools. He had been like a little boy, all excited, pointing out stuff to her. "Look at this. Look at that!" He'd gotten completely lost in the work, and in the doing of it had also lost years of responsibility. It pleased her to see him this way. So relaxed. Having so much fun.

"So, let's take her out for a little spin," he said.

She started to get out of the car.

"No, go ahead, you drive. You can use a manual shift, can't you?"

"Sure."

He finished wiping his hands, circled around the back to the passenger side, and got into the car. The garage door was already open, and the bright afternoon beckoned. Toni put the transmission into reverse and carefully backed out onto the driveway to the street, turned the wheel, and started to shift into first.

"Wait a second," he said. He twisted in the seat, caught the rear window zipper, and pulled it across behind her. He pressed the thin plastic rear window down behind the stabilizer bar, reached across in front of her, and undid the roof latch on her side, then the one on his side. With one hand he accordioned the top, folding the heavy black material down and behind them.

"Voilà!" he said. "Convertible! It's not too cold for you, is it?"

"Nope," she said.

"All right then. Let's see how she rides."

Toni eased the clutch out — it was a bit stiff and it squeaked — and the Miata scooted forward. The short-throw stick made shifting up the gears fast and easy, and pretty soon they were rolling along a four-lane highway at sixty. It was a responsive beast, the steering tight, and cornering was a delight. She took a thirty-mile-per-hour curve at fifty, no problem.

"It's quieter than I thought it would be," she said. "And not as windy."

He said, "Push it up to about seventy and watch."

Traffic was light, so Toni goosed it a little.

At seventy, the wind seemed to slacken, as did the noise. She said as much to Alex.

"Yep, it's quieter at seventy than at fifty-five. That was part of the aerodynamic design. Isn't this great?" He grinned at the road in front of them.

A few miles up the highway, Toni pulled into a supermarket parking lot.

"Something wrong?" he asked.

"Nope. Your turn. You've been itching to take the wheel since we hit the street."

He grinned again. Boy, she liked seeing that. He jumped out of the car and hurried around to the driver's side as she moved over into the passenger seat.

Behind the wheel, he checked his outside mirror first, then the inside one. Then he looked across at the outside mirror on the passenger side. "That one's a little off," he said.

She reached out to adjust the mirror.

"Hey, I can get it," he said. "One of the joys of a car this small. Watch." He leaned over, reached across her chest, and grabbed the mirror. "See? Can't do that in the snail van."

Stretched out across her, one hand out of the car on the mirror, he glanced up at her face from a few inches away.

She could smell him, his sweat, his aftershave, and there he was, the back of his arm almost touching her breast, his mouth close enough to kiss.

Without thinking anymore, she did just that. Leaned a hair forward, put her lips on his, and kissed him.

Are you out of your mind, Toni?

The sudden jolt of panic shot through her like an electrical charge. Oh, no! What had she done?

She pulled back to break the kiss.

Alex brought his hand away from the mirror, put it behind her head, and held her there. He worked his lips, opened his mouth, and found her tongue with his.

There must be a God, Toni thought.

No two ways about it, Howard was trapped.

He had been lucky, in that the waist-thick fir had enough branches on it to break the main trunk's descent enough so it hadn't smashed him to a pulp. But the tree's bole had come to rest on the back of his left calf, and had pinned him to the ground face-down. He managed to clear away a few small branches on his back and thighs so he was able to struggle to a sitting position, his butt against the trunk. His left leg was pinned, his right leg free, but stuck more or less straight out in front of him.

Not the most comfortable position he'd ever been in. There was no pain in the caught leg. Was that good? Or bad?

He could still wiggle his left foot, feel his toes inside the insulated boot, so that was comforting. Might not even be broken, the tibia or fibula, but that didn't matter.

What mattered was that his virgil was safely locked to a nice D-ring on his pack, over there by his cook stove. It was only about ten feet away, but given the present circumstances it might as well be ten million miles. He wasn't going anywhere.

He had tried to lift the trunk, then to shove it off using his free leg, but that was not going to happen. He had about fifty feet of tree on him, and even positioned a lot better than he was, probably couldn't have moved it with his muscle power alone. Where it rested on his calf, the tree was about as thick as a telephone pole.

This was not a good situation.

He was in the middle of nowhere, staked to the snowy ground like a bug to a display board, his electronics out of reach. He was dressed for the weather, but come sundown it was going to get very cold, and sleeping face-down in the snow with the air temperature below zero was not generally a good idea.

Of course, if he went more than twenty-four hours without beeping in they'd call, and if he didn't answer they'd come and find the virgil and him with it, but by then he might already be a Howard-sicle. And they wouldn't come looking before noon tomorrow.

No, all in all he would have to say this was definitely not good.

He took a deep breath, blew it out, and watched the breath-fog hang in the air. It wasn't that warm. In fact, it seemed twenty degrees colder than it had when he'd got here a few minutes ago.

"Okay, John," he said. "Let's take stock here. What have you got in the way of good news?"

He had a lighter in his jacket shell. There were a lot of dead needles among the green, and a whole lot of branches, albeit somewhat cold and damp, but he was pretty sure he could make a fire. So he wouldn't freeze if he did it right. He might even be able to burn through the trunk. Break the weight enough to be able to shift the tree off his leg.

Or start a small forest fire in which he got cooked real good.

Hmm. Put that one on the backup list.

What else?

Well, he had his sheath knife. He reached back on his right hip, found the handle — there was a comfort — and pulled the knife from its scabbard.

The knife was a Cold Steel Tanto, so called for the angled, Japanese-sword-style point, and was eleven inches long, five of that the cutting edge. It was a full-tang, the blade was three-eighths-of-an-inch thick across the backstrap, and it wore an artificial rubber handle, crosshatched for a good grip, and was butted and guarded with brass fittings. A fine weapon, able to kill a man with one thrust from somebody who knew what he was doing, but it had not been designed for chopping away a tree bigger around than his thigh. Still, it was what he had, and he knew if he could twist himself around long enough, he could eventually cut through the wood. It might take a long time, but it wasn't as if he was going anywhere…

He felt better, knowing he had at least two options.

Well, okay, three — he could always cut his leg off from the knee down, right?

He smiled to himself.

"Okay, any other possibilities here, John? Maybe cut your jacket into strips, make a lariat, and try to lasso your pack? It's only about ten feet, you could probably manage it, and then you'd have your virgil back."

Yeah, and wouldn't that look great. Old Man Howard lets a tree fall on his stupid sorry ass, and has to call for help. Too bad he froze to death without a jacket before somebody could break a copter loose to go and get him…

Maybe not. Put that one right before setting the tree on fire.

He looked down at his pinned leg. Hold on a second. There was yet another option, the LAIC Maneuver.

LAIC–Look At It Crooked.

If you couldn't solve a problem going in through the front door, what about the back door? When you had an enemy too strong to attack head-on, flanking him would sometimes work.

Howard looked at his leg and grinned. The limb had pretty much squished the snow out of its way under the weight of the tree. He'd bet it was close to or on the ground below, but even frozen dirt wasn't as hard as wood, was it? Especially with that nice warm leg lying on it, thawing it out and all.

All he had to do was dig a hole under his shin, come in from the side, hollow enough out so the leg would drop. When the calf got below ground level, the tree would be resting on the edges of the hole, and all he'd have to do would be to pull the leg out, right?

Look at it crooked.

It made sense. It made a lot more sense than trying to play Paul Bunyan with a knife, or cooking himself into Howard the damned fool crispy critter, didn't it?

He laughed. "Dig, baby, dig. You do this right, nobody will ever have to know it happened."

He shifted his position a bit, and cleared away the snow down to the dirt next to his trapped leg. No blood. That was good.

The topsoil was mostly sand, and the rocky clay under it was frozen, but it took less than an hour to excavate himself. In the end, his bigger worry was that the pot he'd set to heating to make his lunch would burn up, the water having boiled away, but he managed to get to it and throw it into the snow to cool before that happened.

The ankle wasn't even sprained, the snow under the leg having cushioned things enough so his pants weren't even torn. His foot was sore, but not so much he couldn't walk on it, and Howard felt immensely pleased with himself as he ate his delayed lunch.

Okay, so he was older. He could could learn to fight smarter, not harder. Growing old might be hell, but hey, it still beat the only other option, didn't it?

Ah, John, you are quite the philosopher, aren't you?

That's me.

There was nothing like a victory to give you a sense of control. It might be an illusion, but it sure felt good in the moment. Yes, sir, it did.

Chapter Thirty-One

Somebody honked their car horn and laughed as they drove past, but Alex didn't care. The passion he'd thought frozen when he split from Megan was not dead, not even wounded. God, Toni felt so good. Her lips were warm, soft, her hands on his back pulled him closer, her breasts against his chest—

His virgil cheeped, and the incoming tone was the classical music sting he'd programmed from Les Preludes that indicated a Priority One call.

Damn!

He broke the kiss and leaned back. Fumbled with his virgil.

"Wow," Toni said. She was flushed and breathing heavy.

"Yeah. Hold that thought, okay?"

He tapped the speaker button on the virgil. "Michaels."

"Commander, Jay Gridley. Sorry to bother you, Boss, but, well, the shit has just hit the fan."

"What?"

"The Fried Sex guys just crashed the U.S. Internet Bank System. I hope you got some money in your pocket, ‘cause you ain't gonna be cashing your federal check today."

"Fuck!"

"Yes, sir, Boss, that is the key and operative word around here. The bank guys are foaming at the mouth, and the ripple effect is jamming through the net like a cattle stampede. Everybody and his kid sister have thrown up firewalls and lockouts, and the whole NorAm Net is one big crappy mess."

"Damage control?"

"We're throwing water on it, but we're talking mega forest fire, Boss. It's hot and ugly and getting hotter and uglier every minute. We're gonna have to take some major systems offline and shut down a bunch of the FedWeb."

"Do what you can, get everybody we have on it. We'll be—I'm on my way," Michaels said. "Discom."

Michaels looked at Toni. "I'm sorry," he said.

She shook her head. "I hope you're talking about the call."

"Yeah, I am. But — this—" He waved one hand back and forth between them. "This is probably… not very smart."

"I know."

"I'm your boss. This sort of thing brings up all kinds of problems."

"What sort of thing?"

He stared at her. "Jesus, Toni, you know what I'm talking about. Office romance. Supervisors sleeping with people they supervise."

She grinned, as big as he'd ever seen her grin. "Oh, boy," she said.

"What?"

"You want to sleep with me?"

"Yes, of course. But given the circumstances—"

"I'll quit," she said.

"Excuse me?"

"If you sleep with me, I'll resign."

"Toni—"

"No, I'm serious. If it would be a problem for you as my supervisor, then we can fix that. I love working for you, Alex, but I can always find another job. Right now, a personal relationship with you is more important than a business relationship."

He blinked at her, stunned by her words. "You would quit your job to have sex with me?"

"In a New York second."

"Why? I'm not that wonderful."

"You underestimate yourself. I'm serious about this."

He shook his head. "Jesus. Look, we have to get back to HQ and take care of this disaster, okay? Can we talk about this later?"

"Whenever you want. You want to go back and get the van?"

"No, leave it. I'll get somebody to pick up it."

He started the Miata's engine.

Holy shit. It never rained but it poured.

Winthrop was on the net in Joined-VR, showing Julio some of the ins and out of the webweave. She had allowed him to conjure a program, and what he had come up with was a beach on Maui, near Hana. They were in personal persona, dressed in skimpy swimsuits, walking barefoot on a black sand beach. They listened to the breakers curl, to the seagulls cawing. A gentle breeze played over them, the sea where it lapped into the volcanic sand was warm, and the sun caressed their bare skin.

"So, what do you think?" Julio asked

"Not bad, for a beat-up old trooper. Why did you choose this in particular?"

"I went here once, for real. I have some good memories of it. Besides, I wanted to see what you looked like in a bathing suit."

"I bet you say that to all the girls."

"Sure I do. But my intentions are honorable — I could have made it a nude beach, you know."

She laughed.

As they rounded a big rock and the shoreline curved inward, Winthrop noticed something odd. The water seemed to be… receding, ebbing away and growing shallower as she watched. It moved out so quickly that fish were left flopping on the bottom. A big eel wiggled frantically, trying to catch the subsiding sea.

"That's a nice effect," she said. "What's it for?"

He shook his head. "I don't have a clue. I'm not doing it."

The water continued to ebb, and Winthrop looked farther out to sea.

"Uh-oh," she said.

"What?"

"I just realized what's happening. See there?"

Julio squinted into the sunshine. "Looks like a big wave."

"Yeah, it's a big wave, all right, and it's going to get a lot bigger as it gets closer. It's a tsunami."

"A tidal wave?"

"That's a misnomer. It doesn't have anything to do with tides. They're usually caused by earthquakes or volcanic activity. Sometimes by a big meteor hitting the ocean — or somebody playing with big nukes can make one."

"So why all of a sudden is there a tsunami in my scenario?"

"Got me, but it looks like trouble in paradise. Something big is happening on the net. I hate to cut the lesson short, but we need to jack out of this scenario see what RW scans show."

"Yes, ma'am. You're the expert."

"Standby—"

Fernandez came back to himself in the computer room, sitting next to Joanna. She was waving her hands at her computer station, calling up a rapid blur of images and words and numbers from the holoproj in front of her. And she was cursing like a sailor while she did it.

"God dammit! How the hell can this be happening?"

She waved her hands again, then tapped furiously at the keyboard on the desk.

Fernandez kept quiet, knowing this was not the time to fill her ears with foolish questions.

Whatever was going on, though, it didn't look good.

"No, no, no, you bastard! Don't route there, you'll crash the — dammit, dammit! Stop!"

Jay Gridley came running into the room, and excited as he was, he must already know what was going on.

"Winthrop, you see what the hell is happening?"

"I got it. Jesus Christ!"

Gridley slid into a chair in front of another workstation. "Man, oh, man! The kickouts at FedOne just blew."

"We need to scramble some programmers, Jay—"

"Already did it. Boss is on the way in, so is everybody else who can warm a seat."

"You call Fiorella?"

He spared her a glance from the flashing holoproj in front of him. "Didn't need to. I bounced her virgil's location. It's within a couple of feet of the boss's. She's with him." He waggled his eyebrows. "Isn't that interesting?"

"Old news," Joanna said. "You need to pay more attention to RW around you, Gridley."

"Screw you, Winthrop."

"In your dreams, monkey fingers."

"In my nightmares, you mean."

Fernandez felt like a fifth wheel. He didn't know what was going on, and he wasn't gonna ask, but whatever it was, it was bad.

"The blast doors on FedTwo just slammed shut," Joanna said.

"See ‘em," Gridley said. "Maybe we can reroute the — ah, piss! FedThree just rolled over too. We got a major infection here!"

"A virus?" Fernandez said.

"Not a virus, a goddamned plague," Gridley said. "Somebody got past the best antivirals we have and threw a replicant bomb. The bugs are reproducing and going through the federal financial systems like water through a fire hose. The only way we're gonna stop it is to shut down everything it's contaminated and flush it one system at a time."

"Crap," Joanna said. "Crap, crap, crap!" She leaned back, watching the screen flash stuff that was meaningless to Fernandez.

"Well, I'll say one thing," Fernandez said, "you sure know how to show a boy a good time."

"Hold up, hold up," Joanna said. "I got something."

"You can stop it?" Julio said.

"No, I can't. But I think I can find where it came from. Jeez, I can't believe the guy is that dumb. Jay?"

"I see it, I see it! I've got a lock! How'd you do that, Winthrop?"

"I found a ghost on my station from when he broke in here. There wasn't anywhere to go with it, it petered out, but just in case, I set up a scan-and-match."

"What does that mean?" Fernandez asked, despite his resolution not to ask stupid questions.

"It means that even if our perp bounces his signal, we can backwalk it — if we hurry, and if the sig is a match."

"Good work, Winthrop!" Gridley said. "You ready to run him down?"

"I'd like to kick his ass personally, but much as I hate to say it, you're better at this part than I am, Gridley. Go get him."

Gridley smiled. "You know, you're not so bad after all — for a white girl. I'm gone."

When Toni and Alex arrived, there was a lot of commotion in the computer center. Jay, Joanna, and half the regular programmers were there, stations lit and working. Julio Fernandez stood next to the doorway watching.

"Julio," Toni said. "How is it going?"

"I'm not the guy to ask. I'm catching about one word in twenty. It's nasty, this thing. Gridley calls it a replicant bomb."

"Oh, shit," Toni and Alex said together.

"But Jo and Gridley apparently got a lock on the bomb thrower. Gridley is running him down somehow. I didn't understand most of that part."

"Thanks, Sergeant," Toni said.

"No problem, Commander."

Alex moved to where Joanna sat, and as Toni started to head for her office to assess damage reports, Fernandez's smile stopped her. "Something funny I'm missing?" she asked. "I could use a good laugh."

"No, ma'am, nothing funny."

"Why the grin?"

"Oh, I was just, you know, musing."

"About what?"

"You and the commander."

Toni felt herself color. "Me and the commander?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Oh, God, does it show? We haven't even done anything yet!

"What about us, Sergeant?"

"Nothing, ma'am. Just lucky how you both get here so quick."

"You're a poor liar, Julio."

"Yes, ma'am. Probably I need more practice."

"I need to go," she said.

She hurried down the hall. He knew. How? How could he know? That little slip of the tongue, when Alex said "we," instead of "I"? That couldn't be; he hadn't even been talking to Fernandez, he'd been talking to Jay.

Well. Worry about that later. Right now, they had a crisis to weather.

One thing at a time, girl, one thing at a time…

Chapter Thirty-Two

Platt was feeling damn good about his latest caper on the net. It was amazing what you could do when you had a bunch of secret codes and passwords, courtesy of somebody who had access to a U.S. senator. Like screw up a major segment of the entire United States electronic banking system, blap! just like that. Those poor feebs were running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off, going bugfuck crazy trying to keep the money systems from crashing. Wasn't gonna stop it, though, not without shutting down a bunch of it, and that was the point. Because part of what was going down was a big ole safe that kept the net cowboys from robbing the bank. Once that was out of the way, things were gonna get real interestin'…

He was in the bathroom when he heard the alarm go off. At first, he thought it was the smoke detector, but after a second, he realized it was coming from his computer, on the kitchen table.

"What the hell—?!"

He jumped up and ran into the kitchen.

Sure enough, the little speaker on the portable was wailing away.

For a second, Platt just stood there, staring at the beeping computer. It wasn't supposed to happen, but unless there was some kind of software malfunction, somebody had somehow accessed his primary input signal. The only way they could have possibly done that was to have caught it at the satellite before the bounce, and only way that was possible was to have been waiting for the signal, and to know what to look for when it got there.

Couldn't be. He hadn't left any clues that big.

He moved, fast. Tapped in the confirmation code. Maybe it was just a software error, a glitch that tripped the audible—

Aw, shit! It wasn't an error!

They had traced his signal. And if they knew where he was, they'd pretty damn quick figure out who he was, and they'd be on their way to have a little talk with him.

Platt shut the computer off. He had to get out of here, now!

How the hell could this have happened? What did the damned Net Force boys know that he didn't? Some kind of new technology? Crap!

Worry about it later, hoss. Right now, you get your ass in gear and lay tread, or you're gonna be speculating about it in a federal cell somewhere!

Hughes smiled at Domingos across the table and raised his wine glass in salute. They were alone in the formal dining hall, Hughes and the President, working their way through the third course of a seven-course meal. The room would comfortably seat a hundred, and there was a hollow feel to it with just the pair of them at the end of a large oval table, one of half-a-dozen other tables just like theirs.

Fish was up next, some local catch, and so they'd switched to white wine, an Australian Pinot Gris, vintage 2003, that was as good as any Hughes had ever tasted. Domingos was proud of his cellar and his cook, and rightfully so.

Hughes made complimentary noises.

"You are too kind," the President said, but he was obviously pleased.

They sipped their wine, watching the waiters clear away their plates and reset for the next course.

"So, everything goes well, does it not?" the President said.

Hughes glanced at his watch. "Even as we speak, Excellency, my agents are finalizing matters. In a few days, we can make the transfers. I anticipate no problems, none at all."

"Excellent!" Domingos raised his glass. "To the future!"

"I will certainly drink to that."

Hughes smiled as he sipped the wine. Right about now, his agent Platt would be feeling an unexpected heat. He was useful, Platt was, but not the only operative that Hughes employed. And while Hughes was certain that the trick he'd played on the Southerner wouldn't result in his capture by the authorities — Platt was too canny to be caught that easily — certainly the cracker would sit up and take notice. He surely didn't want Platt in custody where he might spill everything he knew about this deal. But he did want the redneck off balance, a little edgy, and looking to his employer for some reassurance.

If a man thinks you're reaching a hand out to help him climb from a pit, he might not notice the knife in your other hand.

Platt was expendable — more than expendable, he had to go — and his usefulness was nearly at an end… but not quite yet.

The fish arrived, a single platter with what looked like a twenty-pound sea bass, cooked whole, upon the serving tray. The smell was wonderful.

"It's the French roasted hazelnut butter that does that," Domingos said. "You can understand why I'll be taking Bertil with me to Paris when I go, yes?"

Hughes smiled. Taking a chef to Paris might be gilding the lily, but if that was what he wanted, Domingos would certainly be able to afford it…

After he'd bought the boomerang, Tyrone had spent a couple of hours at the park playing with it. It was a little trickier than it looked, but it had taken him only a few minutes to get the thing working well enough so he didn't have to run and chase it. Well, not too far anyhow. A couple of times, it had come back close enough so he had been able to catch it without taking more than a step or two.

He'd never been real big on physical stuff, but he could definitely get into this.

By the time his arm was tired and he was ready to go home, he had figured out a lot of stuff about how you stood relative to the wind, and how to figure out which way the wind was blowing. He'd watched other throwers pick up bits of dry grass or dirt and then drop them, watching to see which way they drifted. He also had a fair idea of how much wrist action a basic throw needed. This was really fun stuff.

His phone cheeped. Tyrone pulled it from his belt clip. "Hello?"

"Hey, son. How are you doing?"

"Dad? I thought you were out in the middle of snowland or somewhere."

"I am. Only guy around for fifty miles."

"You okay? You don't usually call during these things."

"Yeah, I'm fine."

There was a pause, and Tyrone sensed his father wanted to say something else, so he stayed quiet.

"Actually, I had a little excitement today. You have to promise not to tell your mother, okay?"

Uh-oh. What did that mean? "Sure, Dad. What's flowin'?"

"A tree fell on me."

"A tree? Are you all right?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Thing snapped under the weight of a lot of snow. I was lucky, but it got me to thinking, maybe I should give you call. How are you doing?"

"Geez, Dad, a tree falls on you and you're worried about me?"

"It's what fathers do, Ty."

"Well, I'm flowing fine. I just got a boomerang."

"Really? War or sport?"

Tyrone felt his eyebrows rise. "You know about boomerangs?"

"A little. They're hunting devices or weapons, depending on the kind. I wouldn't want to be clonked on the head with one, even one of the birding models."

"Birding?"

"The sport models, that's what they were used for. If you hit something with it, it doesn't come back, but an expert can knock a bird out of the air forty or fifty yards away at a right angle to where he's standing. We played with them some in military camp when I was a kid. Been years since I've seen mine. I think it's in the attic at Grampa's."

Amazing. His father seemed to know something about everything. And he had a boomerang. Amazing.

"Well, I got one, a sport model. There's this tournament not far from our house, I checked it out, and I got one."

"Great. You can brush me up on how to use it when I get home. I'm out of practice."

"Yeah, that would be DFF."

"It's been good talking to you, son. I'm going to give your mother a call and say hi. And Ty? Let's keep the falling-tree thing between us."

"Right. Take care, Dad. Thanks for calling."

When he discommed, Tyrone smiled. His father had called him before he had called Mom. He'd shared a secret with him, something in confidence. And his father had played with a boomerang as a kid.

Man. Would wonders never cease?

Michaels was in his office, worrying about twelve different things, when one of those things came in.

"Alex?"

"Toni. What's up?"

"FBI and the Georgia state boys ran down the address outside Marietta. An old house, belongs to a family named Platt. Father hasn't been around for thirty years, mother died, left the place to her son."

She put a thin sheaf of hardcopy on his desk, including a photo. "That's him, the son."

Michaels looked at the image. The kid in the picture was big and muscular, in a white T-shirt and jeans, but he also looked about sixteen. "Kind of young, isn't he?"

"Only image we could find. It's about fifteen or sixteen years old. This guy Platt would be in his early thirties now. We can age the image, and we're straining him through the Cray Colander now. Neighbors say he lives at the house, but he's gone a lot."

"Seems to be something of a stretch, doesn't it?" he said.

"From Danish terrorists to a Georgia cracker?"

"Okay if I sit?"

"Jesus, you don't have to ask. Sit, sit!"

She did, and gave him a small smile.

He felt an erotic heat start to smolder low in his belly. Or thereabouts.

"I've been thinking about that," she said. "It seems kind of odd that nobody ever heard of this Frihedsakse before all this started."

"What do you mean? Jay has dug up all kinds of references to the group predating the manifesto they sent, going back years."

"Well, not exactly. I had Jay recheck. What we can absolutely confirm are bits here and there as old as six months. Before that, the etiology of the information is, as Jay puts it, ‘somewhat ambiguous.' "

Michaels leaned back in his chair and considered that for a few seconds. "Why would that be, I wonder."

"There's the jackpot question."

"What do you think?"

She shook her head. "I don't know for sure. But just for the sake of argument, let's say these Danish terrorists didn't exist until six months ago. Why would they bother to plant information that said they were a lot older? What would be the point? I mean, so they're only six months old, what difference would that make to anybody? Are they looking for prestige? Some kind of validation? They want to be the Elks or the Masons of terrorists?"

Michaels nodded. "Good point. Why would they bother?"

"Maybe they didn't," she said. "Maybe it was somebody else."

Came the dawn into his head, a few bright streaks painting the dark sky of his mind. "Oh, man. Yeah, I can see that. Maybe there isn't any such group as Frihedsakse. Maybe it's somebody who wants us looking for a terrorist group that doesn't exist. They leave just enough clues for us to think we're finding something, to stay interested, when in fact we're spinning our wheels and not getting anywhere. Maybe it's not terrorists at all."

"It's just a theory," she said.

He shook his head, suddenly angry at himself. "But we should have checked this out before. We didn't look for another target because we had this big fat turkey plopped right down in front of us. It was too easy."

Toni said, "The thing is, if it's not terrorists, who is it? And what do they want? Somehow, I have a lot of trouble believing some lowbrow high-school-dropout jock from a little town in Georgia has the wherewithal to pull all this off."

Michaels said, "Let's put Frihedsakse on the back burner. Check on what systems were hit, and who might benefit from them being damaged or down."

She stood. "I'll go talk to Jay and Joanna."

"Good."

She started to leave. He couldn't let her get to the door without saying something else. "Toni?"

She turned. "Yes?"

"About that… thing in the Miata…"

"Do you want to forget it ever happened, Alex? Because I can't forget it, but I can pretend nothing happened, if that's what you want—"

"No," he said. "I don't want to forget it. If we survive this, I think we should lie down — I mean, we should sit down — and discuss it."

Jeezus, man! That was lame, Michaels. Lame, lamer, lamest. I cannot believe you said that. You are a moron!

Toni's smile, however, told him she had not only caught the Freudian slip, but wasn't in the least offended by it.

Bad idea, Michaels, a really bad idea. You don't crap in your nest. You never sleep with the enlisted women, his father had told him. It's always a mistake.

But looking at Toni, it didn't seem like such a mistake. She was bright, beautiful, and physically adept enough so she could kick his ass if she felt like it. For some reason, those things taken together had a powerful appeal. And she had kissed him first, hadn't she?

Yeah, right, she seduced you, and if you don't sleep with her, she'll stomp your butt? Uh-huh. Who are we trying to fool here, pal? Nobody is buying that one.

Michaels watched Toni disappear from view. He shook himself and blew out a big sigh. Worry about that later. Right now, he had bigger problems on his plate.

His com beeped. "Yeah?"

"Your ex-wife is on three," his secretary said.

Michaels laughed. Of course she was.

"Take a message," he said.

Chapter Thirty-Three

"There they are," Winthrop said.

"Rats," Jay said. "You had to pick rats?"

"You'd rather cute little puppies or kittens? Something about you I ought to know, Gridley?"

Jay shook his head and raised the twelve-gauge pump shotgun to his shoulder. The gun was a Mossberg with an extended magazine tube that held ten rounds. There was a flashlight and a laser mounted on the barrel. An elastic band on the gun's stock held another ten shells.

Next to him in the poorly lit alley, Winthrop raised her own weapon, a South African Streetsweeper, also a twelve-gauge, but with a big circular drum underneath that held a whole box of shells. She also had a flashlight and a laser sight mounted on the weapon.

The brown rats, the size of cocker spaniels and with mouths full of long, yellow teeth, milled around in the dead-end alley for a few seconds before they realized they couldn't get out that way. The big rodents looked around for a means of escape, and the only path out was blocked by Winthrop and Gridley.

No real problem in guessing which way they would go.

"Here they come!" Jay shouted.

The rats, at least twenty of them, came toward them like a furry tide.

Winthrop fired first, getting off two shots before Jay pulled the trigger on his weapon.

Big rats turned into bloody red clumps of twisting fur as the #4 buckshot tore into them. Five, eight, twelve of the charging animals fell. The rest kept coming.

"To your left!" Winthrop shouted. She swung her gun over and cooked off a couple more rounds. She blasted one of the rats, hitting it so hard she rolled it like a soccer ball.

Jay tracked the two rats trying to flank him on the left, fired, hit one, pumped the gun, fired, missed—

Winthrop caught the one he'd missed, then fired twice more—whump! whump! — and rolled two more.

Jay lined up on the last one he saw moving, put the little red dot from the laser square on the thing's head, shot it—

He blew out a sigh. Blasting plague-carrying rats was certainly more exciting than chasing down viral code strings in RW voxax or fingertap mode. In reality, the rats were circular sub routines with escape and evasion codings, eating up storage space in the Federal Reserve's KC Division. The city had been evacuated — the computer had been taken off-line — so that exterminators could come in and clear out the infestation. Mostly that didn't go over too well, but that was how it had to be.

And this wasn't that bad. A couple of the banking systems had been hit so hard they'd had to be shut down completely. Nobody had liked that.

Winthrop reloaded her shotgun from a pouch full of ammo she carried around her waist. And Jay had to admit, his earlier disapproval of the lieutenant notwithstanding, she looked pretty exciting standing there, shoving rounds into that big honking shotgun, smelling of gunpowder and all. There was something sexy about an attractive woman with an automatic weapon in her hands.

Probably a month's work for a shrink trying to sort out that symbolism, Jay figured. It was a good thing he wasn't into shrinks. He'd be broke all the time.

Winthrop touched her headset. "We've cleared the alley behind the bank," she said. "We're moving into the one next to the Thai restaurant on the south side."

Jay grinned. "You throw that in in my honor?"

"You look like you ought to know your way around a Thai restaurant."

"Of course. You like peanut sauce? Maybe I'll make us some nice rat satay."

"You probably would. Come on."

"As you command, mistress," Jay said. "You should have worn leather, you know. To go with the gun."

As they walked across the street toward the Thai place, she said, "Oh, by the way, nice job on running down that Platt guy—"

"Shucks, ma'am, ‘twarn't nothin'."

"Wrong persona, Gridley."

"Ah, I stand corrected. This is present-day, so how about, ‘Nopraw, fem.' "

"Better."

"I'd never have found him if you hadn't snagged his spook. Kinda hard to believe he slipped up like that."

"Even the smartest guys get stupid sometimes," she said. "I'll take lucky over good if it gets me there."

"Amen. I hope the feebs can catch the sucker."

"Rat city, just ahead."

"Lock and load, ma'am. You want right side or left this time?"

"Left. That gun of yours throws the empties in my face on the right."

"It's always something, ain't it? But it's FS, Winthrop, FS."

She smiled.

FS stood for "Frankenstein Scenario," shorthand for the concept "If you create it, then you take care of it." Any problems in your scenario were your responsibility.

"Fine, you can build the next one," she said.

"I will. You like snakes?' "

"I used to collect them when I was a little girl," she said. "Catch them with a long forked stick, put them into denim bags, and sell them to pet stores. Great things, snakes."

Shoot, Jay thought. Too bad. Well. There must be some icky thing she didn't like. Given how much of the federal banking system was infected, they were going to be mopping things up for a while. Surely he could figure out what made her squirm before they were done…

Platt knew that Hughes wouldn't like being woken up early, and it must be six or seven in spookland over there, but he wanted to be sure to catch him when he wasn't busy. Platt wasn't supposed to be calling Hughes at all unless it was an emergency, and given as how he had gotten away clean, maybe it wasn't an emergency anymore, at least not technically, but to hell with it, he was gonna call anyhow.

He hated losing the house Momma had left him, but that was done. He wasn't going home again.

He used one of the one-time scramblers and a pay phone in the lobby of the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Motel on the outskirts of College Park, just off 1-285. Hughes had his virgil rigged up to rascal his call with the military-grade scrambler built into it, so nobody would trace nothin'. He needed to get this done and move out — Atlanta was a big town, but way too close to Marietta. He wanted to be a thousand miles away from both come sunrise, and he'd have to hurry to pull that off. He had a chartered plane waiting at the airport, and once he was in the air, he'd feel a lot better.

"What?" Hughes said.

Yep, he'd woke him up, all right.

"Howdy, Boss. We got a little situation here you need to know about."

"Hold on a second."

Hughes put him on hold, and Platt grinned. Six in the morning, Hughes would be in bed, and if he was puttin' Platt on hold, then he wasn't in the bed alone. Somebody was being sent to the John, Platt would bet.

"All right. What?"

"Sorry if I interrupted anything," Platt said, not the least bit sorry.

"Don't worry about that. What's the problem?"

"The feds ain't as stupid as they look. They backwalked a signal to my momma's house."

"What? How could that happen?"

"Damn if I know. Maybe they got some new techno-toy I haven't heard about. Don't matter as much how as they did it. I had to hightail it out pretty quick."

"But you got away without any real trouble?"

"Well, yes and no. They didn't see me, I was long gone time they showed up, I expect, but that place was under my own name. I'm gonna have to do a little ID switching."

"Is that a problem?"

"Not so you would notice. I got a half-dozen new me's lined up if I need ‘em."

"How about the other thing?"

"Oh, the other thing. That went smooth as oil on a baby's butt. Our bank boy from the place in — where was it? Minnesota? I-oway? whatever — should be able to do the deed like he's supposed to. I expect to hear from him by about noon tomorrow. Well, today now."

"Good, good. You need anything?"

"I'm gonna have to hit one of the caches," Platt said. "I'm a little short on cash."

"Fine, whatever you need. Listen, if there are any problems with your IDs, let me know, I'll work something out so you can get out of the country."

Platt grinned. "Why, thank you, Boss, I surely do appreciate that. Nice to know there's somebody you can count on in today's dog-eat-dog world. I'll call you back soon as bank boy does his thing."

"Right. Later then."

Platt pushed the disconnect button down, pulled the scrambler from the mouthpiece, and dropped it into his pocket. He'd toss it into a lake somewhere later. Hmm. Hughes hadn't seemed as upset as he'd expected by the feds sniffing Platt out. He was a cool one, all right. Maybe too cool. Truth was, Platt trusted him about as far as he could pitch the man one-handed, and while he was strong, that wasn't all that far.

Once bank boy had done his thing, Hughes was going to be eyeball-deep in money, at least for a little while, and maybe he wouldn't need an attack dog as much as he had before. Or maybe he thought he might get rid of the old one and buy himself a new dog.

You had to pay attention at times like this, Platt had learned. People always looked out for their own interests, first, last, and in between. Pretty soon now, Hughes and Platt would have interests going their separate ways. Things could get dangerous when that happened. And Momma Platt didn't raise no fools.

Platt headed for his room. He had a couple of things he wanted to pick up there before he headed for the airport.

Commander Michaels called them into the conference room for a quick meeting. Winthrop looked around. Aside from herself, there was Michaels, Fiorella, Gridley, and in the hall just outside, Julio, who had hung around even though there wasn't anything he could do on-line. He smiled at her as she moved into the conference room, and she felt her spirits lift a little. She was tired — they were all tired — they'd been in VR for what seemed like months, repairing damaged systems. Sure, they'd had help from federal programmers, but this had been a major infection, and it was mud-slogging work, a lot of slow, hard steps. It took a lot out of you, but it was getting done. Most of the damage could be fixed over the next day or two. The biggest problem would come from the systems being down and the money that cost in lost time and transactions all over.

And that whole thing with the Frihedsakse was there too. Or wasn't there, if you looked at it hard enough. They'd been baited. Gridley was royally pissed off about that, since he'd been the one on point, but it could have happened to her just as easily. There was just enough sizzle there so you thought you could smell the steak, even though you couldn't quite see it. It was a good con, and it would have been a long time before they caught it if Fiorella hadn't pointed out the possibilities. She might not be the best programmer, but she had a sharp overview, something a lot of the techno-types didn't have.

"— Federal banking systems are still at risk, but all security programs are being updated and changed, so the old passwords won't get the guy back in again," Michaels said.

"He got those," Gridley said. "What's to say he won't get the new ones?"

That mirrored Winthrop's own thought pretty well.

"The bank programmers are using the new tag system. If somebody breaks in, we'll know where the leak got sprung."

Gridley nodded. "Yeah, that'll work for a while, but in the long run, some sharp cowboy will figure out a way around that."

"In the long run, Jay, we're all dead," Michaels said.

That brought some tired smiles forth.

"All right, what's the situation on this guy Platt? Joanna?"

She looked down at her flatscreen and called up the report. "The Cray Colander has sifted everything it could on him.

"Platt dropped out of high school in his junior year. Got into some local trouble as a juvenile — car theft, assault, underage drinking, shoplifting, petty stuff. No time in reform schools or jails.

"Our boy disappeared for the next four years. He was arrested in Phoenix, Arizona, when he was twenty, some kind of con game went bad, he punched out the victim. He got released on bail, then skipped.

"Next time we see him is when he was busted for assault and battery in New Orleans, age twenty-four. He apparently attacked a man on the street for no good reason, beat him senseless. Nobody noticed the old warrant for the thing in Phoenix. He posted bail, and never showed for the trial.

"In 2006, Platt was arrested on a drunk and disorderly charge in Trenton, New Jersey. He walked into a bar and started a fight. Four men wound up in the hospital. Through some glitch in the miracle of modern communications, the bail jumpings in Phoenix and in New Orleans did not appear on his record, and he posted bond a third time—"

"Let me speculate," Michaels said. "He left town."

"Good guess," Winthrop said.

"The last thing we have on him is an arrest in Miami Beach three years ago. Another assault charge. He attacked two men at a hot dog stand, again for no apparent reason. When the police arrived, he was taken into custody, but as they were transferring him from the car to the jail, he escaped. Both the arresting officers were injured, requiring hospitalization."

Winthrop looked up from the flatscreen. "That's it. All we have on Mr. Platt. He has no credit records, no property except for the house outside Marietta, no driver's license, no work history. He's never paid Social Security, filed a tax return, or applied for a passport. At least not under the name Platt. Another of the free-rangers who don't leave electronic tracks or paper trails."

"A thug," Fiorella said. "Hardly seems like the mastermind behind computer break-ins."

"Is there anything that ties his crimes together?" Michaels asked.

Winthrop nodded. "Victim profiles. Two things jump out. All ten of the people he assaulted, including the two cops in Miami, were African-Americans. Their average weight was over two hundred and ten pounds. The guy he thumped in New Orleans was a linebacker for the Saints — he went almost three hundred pounds."

"Wheew," Gridley said. "The guy is a racist. He beats up on black men."

"Big black men," Fiorella said. "No indication of martial-arts training?"

"None," Winthrop said.

"Well, isn't this lovely?" Gridley said. "We got an arm-breaker turned computer wizard, who somehow managed to snare all kinds of secret passwords and entry routines, then used them to break into the most sophisticated systems in the country. And he's smart enough to put a big fat red herring in our way so he's got us running around looking for Danish terrorists. I'm with Toni. This doesn't scan."

Michaels nodded, and rubbed at his eyes. "All right. So Platt has help. If we find him, we'll ask him to tell us who that is. What are we doing to find him?"

Gridley said, "We're electronically crunching all car rentals, airports, and bus and train stations in a hundred-mile radius of the house, looking for single males who did business there in the last twenty-four hours. FBI has the picture and description and is checking hotels, motels, and rooming houses in the area."

"Which includes all of Atlanta," Fiorella said. "Good luck."

"He's probably not so stupid as to keep using the Platt name, but maybe his face will ring a bell somewhere," Gridley said.

"Of course, he could be in Polar Bear, Canada, by now," Winthrop said.

"Okay, everybody take a break," Michaels said. "Go home, get some sleep, get back here early as you can tomorrow. And Jay — that doesn't mean sacking out on the couch in your office for two hours. If you aren't rested, you become part of the problem and not the solution."

"Copy, Boss."

"Thanks, people. You've all done good work."

Michaels got to his feet. The meeting was over.

In the hall, Julio leaned against a wall, favoring his bad leg. "Going back into the trenches?" he asked Joanna.

"Nope. Boss says go home and get some sleep."

"Sounds like a good idea."

"Yeah, it does, but I'm too wound up to relax. I'll probably be up until dawn." She looked at him, gave him the faintest of grins. "You know anything I can do to relax, Julio?"

He grinned back at her. "Yes, ma'am, I believe I can offer some exercises you might try. They always put me to sleep pretty quick."

"All right. Come on then. You can show me at my place."

He straightened up, stood at attention, then gave her a snappy, crisp salute. "Yes, ma'am. Anything the lieutenant says."

"Anything? Big talk for a beat-up old sergeant." "I have hidden talents."

"We'll see about that." They headed down the hall.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Platt's clean phone beeped, the little European police siren hee-haw, hee-haw tone he'd set up that meant the bank guy was calling.

"Yeah?"

"It's done," the bank guy said. Peterson was his name. Jamal Peterson. And it wasn't Iowa or Minnesota, he was from South Dakota. Platt knew that, but he liked to pretend he was dumber than he actually was around Hughes. Never know but how that might give him an advantage someday.

Old Jamal had scammed a couple hundred thou at the place he'd worked at up in the Dakota territory, which was why he was working for Platt and Hughes. The feds had got that money back, but it was peanuts. That wasn't the point. The point was, when it came to pulling a money rascal, Peterson was the man.

"Any trouble?"

"No. I had two hours after you let me in. I laid mines, pulled up drawbridges, and bollixed trackers during all the commotion. I got it from more than five hundred large government and corporate accounts, no chunk big enough to raise eyebrows from any one of them. By the time they notice and get panicky, the transfers will have run through the filters. Even if they get past Grand Cayman and both Swiss accounts — which they won't — they'll never get by Denpasar Trust in Bali until somebody comes up with a real big bribe. By then, the e-trans'll be long gone, if our principal collects as he is supposed to."

"How much did you get?" Platt asked.

There was a second's pause. "One hundred and eighty million, just as we agreed."

Platt shook his head and grinned unseen at Old Jamal. The son of a bitch was lying, sure as he was born. The deal was, Hughes needed a hundred and forty, and Peterson was to get twenty, which left twenty for Platt. But he'd bet his twenty against a bent nickel that the bank boy had bled himself a little extra. Or maybe a lot extra. Which was stupid. How much did a man need?

Thing was, Peterson wasn't a real criminal. He didn't have the right mind-set. He didn't know the real problems that came from stealing large money.

Because when you tapped a big score, it wasn't the police dogs you had to worry about — it was the wolves.

"All right," Platt said. "Go where I told you to go. I'll be in touch tomorrow."

Platt broke the connection. Poor bank boy. He was hooked and cooked, any way you looked at it.

As Platt made a call to make certain Peterson had been at least partially straight with him, he thought about bank boy's unhappy future.

Back when he'd been running with Jimmy Tee, the old man had told him a story about a robbery in his home town. Seems a guard who'd been working at a bank for twenty years — everybody loved and trusted the guy — grabbed the manager one morning early when he came in, tied him up, and walked off with four million and change in unmarked twenties and fifties. Got away clean. Or so it seemed.

Thing was, the guy didn't know how to keep a low profile. The cops found him three months later, dead as an old white dog turd. Somebody had snuck into his new house in Cancun and slit his throat.

There was no sign of the stolen money.

A pro, Jimmy Tee said, would have set up an identity months, or even years ahead of time. Given himself a background, met his neighbors, had a good reason to show up there one day to stay permanently. Like he'd taken early retirement from some kind of job nobody local was ever likely to wonder about. To make sure nobody else would accidentally show up one Sunday at the local bar to ask embarrassing questions like, "Hey, you remember old Mayor Brooks? Or that time when the City Council guy got caught with that hooker? You know who I'm talking about, don't you? What was his name?"

You didn't need some thread like that to unravel, so you had to think about stuff like that in advance.

And there had to be a way to launder all that cash too. You couldn't just whip out a few hundred thousand in fifties to buy a house, and even getting a car for cash was hinky. You sure couldn't stick it into a bank, not all in one chunk. Hell, anything over ten grand got reported to the IRS. They didn't care where you got your money, as long as you paid taxes on it.

There were a lot of ways to do it, clean your money, but most of them involved things that honest people never thought about.

You needed the cover, see? The cops, if they caught you, they were just gonna toss your butt in jail, but as soon as you hit the road with four million in your pocket, the bounty hunters would be right behind you. The wolves. And the bounty they'd collect if they caught you was everything you had, up to and probably including your life. If they got you, they'd put a gun in your ear and you'd give it up. And if they didn't feel like killing you, but just walked away, there wasn't a damn thing you could do about it. Who you gonna complain to about being ripped off? The cops? Excuse me, officer, but this bad man stole the money I took from the bank. Uh-huh. Right.

No, what you did with a big score was, you took your money and you set up some kind of small business, or you lived the middle-class life of a retiree, drove a car a couple of years old, lived in a nice middle-class house. You didn't send Christmas cards to your ex-wife. You didn't go to your mother's funeral. You didn't call your nephew to congratulate him on getting into college. You cut your ties with your past clean and you never looked back.

If you wanted to take a flier on the tables or the ponies, or roll around in a waterbed with a lady of the evening, you did these things quietly. You didn't go off to Las Vegas or the Gulf Coast or Atlantic City and start betting stacks of hundreds on the dice or wheels. You didn't rent the suite at the Trump or the Hard Rock Hotel and parade showgirls in and out, buying Moet & Chandon by the case either, because the cops weren't stupid and neither were the wolves. If you stuck your head up too high, somebody was gonna spot it, and come running to lop it off.

Old Jamal didn't have the brains to know this. Oh, yeah, he could slip into an on-line bank and back out again with a couple hundred million dollars in his pocket slick as a greasy snake on a marble floor, but old Jamal didn't have any street smarts.

So, even if Platt didn't give the guy up to the cops — which he fully intended to do — somebody would catch up to old Jamal pretty quick. And the dimbulb didn't have anybody to give up to save his sorry ass when the cops dragged him in. The man he knew as Platt was somebody else now. He didn't even know who he and Platt were working for, only that it was supposed to be some rich corporate fat cat.

So the bank would get a few million of its swiped money back pretty quick once they collected Peterson. Hughes would do whatever he was gonna do over in Booga-land with his one-forty. And Platt?

That was simple. Platt was gonna buy a hard-core gym in Kona, on the big island of Hawaii, a place he'd had his eye on for a couple of years. The gym was ten thousand square feet, had all kinds of gear — free weights, machines, the whole nine yards. It got world-class bodybuilders coming through now and then, there were fitness models who dropped by during photo shoots, and enough tourists so it was practically a license to steal. The place was well-managed, so Platt wouldn't have to do anything. He would rent a little house or a condo, work out when he wanted, maybe do a little personal training, and take things easy. The climate was perfect, you didn't need to own a heater or an air conditioner, and he'd be hanging out with the kind of people he liked: fit, healthy, strong folks. The place was his for a million-two, and that would leave plenty of running-around and fuck-you money. A man didn't need more than that. Business didn't do too well, you had plenty you could drop into it a few hundred or thousand at a time to even things out. Take a long time to burn up eighteen million and change that way…

Sure, Hughes had big plans, he was gonna be master of the world, but what was the point? You could only sleep in one bed at a time, only drive one car at a time, only eat so much a day. Playing power games didn't appeal to Platt at all. He could raise a little hell now and then, kick some ass, but that was personal, in-your-face stuff. Deciding somebody's future from halfway around the world? Forget it.

A few more weeks and he'd be out there in the warm sunshine, smiling at the tanned tourists and being a respectable businessman. It couldn't get much better than that.

So old Jamal wasn't lying, the transfer had been made. Time to get the heat down on the boy. He had already recorded the message giving Jamal up. All he had to do was dial a number and hang up, and the remote would give the feds a ring and deliver a big-time bank robber on a platter.

Adios, Jamal.

And now, one more call:

"Yes?"

"It's a done deal, hoss."

He could almost hear Hughes grin from ten thousand miles away. "Good. Everything else okay?"

"No problems at all. Keep the light on, I'm gonna see you real soon."

Breaking the connection, Platt fired up his portable computer and sent one brief signal winging its way into the aethernet. He'd learned Jimmy Tee's lesson well and had prepared for success. But he'd also prepared for failure. He didn't trust Net Force, he didn't trust the jig president of that backwater country, and he especially didn't trust good ol' Mr. Hughes. So he'd set up a fail-safe or two as insurance—‘cause you never knew when a little insurance just might come in handy.

Naked, Fernandez rolled over in bed and marveled at his good fortune.

Naked next to him, Joanna blinked sleepily. "What time is it?"

"Around seven. Ask me if I care."

He lifted the covers and looked at her.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Looking at you. I know it bothers you to hear it, but you are beautiful."

"It doesn't always bother me. It depends on who says it and when." She smiled at him. "You're a little too scarred up to be called beautiful, but I'm not complaining."

He reached out, touched her face. "You know, nobody even comes in a close second to last night."

"I bet you say that to all the girls."

"No. Just you, Jo."

She sat up, the covers falling away to reveal her breasts. She reached out and hugged him. "Thank you. You can say that all you want too. And I can't remember ever having a better time with my clothes off either."

"I told you I had hidden talents."

"You want to shower?"

"No, ma'am, what I want to do is lie here in this bed with you until they come and haul us away to the nursing home. But I stink pretty good, so probably a shower is a good idea."

"Go start it. Holler when you want me to come in."

"I'll holler now then."

"No, first you warm it up. What's the point in having a lover if he won't heat the shower up for you?"

"I hadn't thought of it that way," he said. He slid out from under the covers and started for the bathroom.

"Julio?"

He stopped. "Yeah?"

"Turn around for me, would you?"

He grinned and did a three-sixty, hands held out. "Like so?"

"Yes. Okay, you'll do. Start the shower, please."

"Yes, ma'am. On the double."

Chapter Thirty-Five

Jay Gridley was still tired, having managed only an hour or so of sleep, but he felt good, the tiredness notwithstanding. Contrary to what the boss had said, he had camped out on his office couch, then gotten up and hit the nets early. Platt was the key to this whole thing, and while he had vanished, not leaving any real trail under that name, he might not be as smart as he thought he was. Few people ever were as smart as they thought they were, and Platt had made one giant mistake, no matter what — he had dared face off with Net Force.

There are some basic mistakes you want to avoid. You don't piss into the wind, you don't eat at a place called "Mom's," and you don't pull your program on Lonesome Jay Gridley. Bad idea.

The inside of the telegraph office smelled of must and pipe tobacco. A cast-iron potbellied coal stove and steel chimney in the center of the room glowed with warmth that kept the hardest of the chill off, but the place was still cool. Behind a counter sat a small man puffing on a corncob pipe. The man wore a long wool coat and gold wire-rimmed spectacles.

"Good mornin', suh. Can I hep you?"

Jay smiled and tipped his hat at the telegraph operator. "Mornin', suh."

Gridley wore the dress uniform of a Confederate captain, a soft gray wool unlike the butternut colors most of the enlisted men wore. A lot of officers had their own designs cut and sewed by their personal tailors, there being little real uniformity in officers' uniforms in the Confederacy. This early in the war, in 1862, the South was not only still in it, they had won major battles against the North. First Manassas — the Battle of Bull Run — had been a rout. The South had kicked some major Yankee ass. Things had already started downhill for the Rebs after Perryville, but right now most folks here felt pretty good about their chances of winning the War Between the States.

Jay said, "Well, suh, I am Captain Jay Gridley, detached from General Lee's staff, and you could do a great service for your state and the Confederacy. We are seeking a Yankee spy, a Southerner who goes by the name of Platt. We do believe he might have been sending coded messages by wire to his Northern masters from this area."

"Well, I do declare!" the telegrapher said. "Can it be?"

"Yes, suh. Of course, we don't think he'd be so foolish as to do these treasonous acts under his own name, but perhaps he was. Could you check your records for us, suh?"

"I would be more than happy to, suh."

Polite folks, the Southerners.

After a minute of thumbing through a stack of yellow paper, the telegrapher shook his head. "Captain, I'm afraid I cannot find any messages sent or received under the name of Platt."

"This is not unexpected, suh. However, let me describe the traitor for you, and show you a drawing we have of him. He might have used another name."

Jay laid out the general description of Platt, then proffered a pen-and-ink sketch he withdrew from inside his coat.

The telegrapher frowned at the drawing. "I am sorry to report that I do not recognize this man, from word or this representation. However, if you will wait a moment…?"

The telegrapher got up and walked to the back window, a barred affair with the glass portion closed against the chill. He raised the window and yelled out, "Buford! Put down that broom and git yourself in here!"

A moment later a tall and gangly boy of thirteen or so, dressed in gray wool trousers held up by leather suspenders, a homespun gray shirt, and scuffed brown boots, appeared. "Yessuh?"

"This is Captain Gridley, from General Lee's staff. He has something to ask you." To Jay, the telegrapher said, "Buford sometimes watches the office when I take supper. He's got a fair hand with the key for such a young age, although he'll be enlisting as soon as he turns fourteen."

Jay wanted to shake his head. They did that, went off to war as young teenagers.

A lot of them never came back. Stupid thing, war. Stupid.

Jay repeated the description and showed the boy the drawing.

"Why, yessuh, Captain, suh. I do recall him. A large fellow, although he did not go under the name Platt, suh. I recollect that he called himself Rogers." He glanced at the telegrapher, then back at Jay. "I believe he was in just yesterday, suh."

Jay caught a glimpse of something in the boy's face, though he wasn't sure what it meant. He said, "And did this Mr. Rogers send or receive a message?"

The boy hesitated. "I–I think so, suh. I'm not exactly sure. Last evening was passing busy, suh."

The telegrapher, meanwhile, thumbed through the stack of telegrams for yesterday. "I don't see one to or from Rogers here, boy. You did keep a copy, didn't you?"

The boy licked his lips, which seemed to have gone very dry all of a sudden. "I–I don't remember, suh. I must have done, if he sent or got a wire."

"I cannot find one here."

Jay stared at the boy. "Buford, you love your country, don't you?"

"Suh, yes, suh!"

"Then y'all better come clean. Something was unusual about this telegraphic event, wasn't it?"

The boy looked as if he was about to cry. His face clouded over, and tears welled.

"S-S-Suh. Mr. Rogers, he sent a message and — and he give me a nickel for the copy. He took it with him. Am I goin' to jail?"

"What? How could you do that, Buford? That's strictly against regularity!"

Jay held up one hand, asking for the telegrapher to keep silent. "I'm not worried about the nickel or what you did, son. You can square that if you can answer one question for me. Do you remember who Mr. Rogers sent the wiregram to? The name? Or the station?"

"Y-Yes, suh, I remember the station."

Jay grinned. Hah! Now I Gotcha, Platt!

Jay thundered into Michaels's office, waving a hardcopy print out and yelling "Boss! I got him, I got him!"

"Slow down, Jay. You got who?"

"Platt. Who he's working for! You're not gonna believe this!" He shoved the paper at Michaels, who took it.

"See, the thing is, the guy was smart enough not to use his own name, but not smart enough to change his appearance. I did a scan of all new phone service in Georgia — temporary lines, mobile units, new installations — crossed them with Platt's ID. I figured once he gave up the Platt name and ran, he'd want new com gear under a new name. I threw out female names and corporation names, then checked all the logs at phone stores and service companies in the state. It took a while, but I got it narrowed down to a few, and when I started running those, I came up with a security cam shot of him buying a new mobile!"

Michaels listened with half his attention. There were several numbers on the list Jay had handed him. Circled in red was a number and written in red next to it was a name:

Thomas Hughes.

It sounded familiar, but Michaels couldn't place it. He knew the name. Where did he know it from?

"So then I got the new number and ran a trace on the calls—"

"Jay," Michaels broke in. "Cut to the finish line. Who is this Hughes you have circled?"

Jay smiled and straightened himself up to his full height. "He's chief of staff for a United States senator."

Michaels made the connection. Of course. "White? This guy is Robert White's COS?"

"Yes, sir. And isn't it funny that our thug computer guy is calling Hughes? What could the two of them possibly have in common, do you suppose?"

"Jesus," Michaels said.

Toni met Alex and Jay in the conference room. She was on her fourth cup of coffee, but she wasn't fully awake yet. She hadn't slept that well, and the worry that had kept her awake wasn't about the job. She had relived that long passionate kiss in the Miata at least a hundred times. He wanted her, there was no question about that. The question was, was he going to let himself go with his feelings? Or was he going to suck it up and go stoic on her?

"Toni, what have we got?"

"Having a word with Hughes right now is going to be difficult. He's gone on a trip out of town with the senator."

"To Africa?" Michaels asked. "Ethiopia?"

She looked at him. "How do you know that?"

"From his staff guy when he called to schedule me for a committee meeting."

She shook her head. "Yes, well, we've had somebody there check, and while the senator is making the rounds and giving speeches, Hughes isn't with him. We know he got that far, he talked to the press on the flight over and shortly after landing, but nobody has seen him since."

Jay said, "Well, we have his private number here, don't we? Doesn't matter exactly where on the Dark Continent he is. If he's got a virgil, he can't be out of signal range."

Alex said, "The thing is, Jay, we don't really want to talk to him on the virgil. This is the kind of thing you need to do personally."

"You think he might run if he knows we're on to him?"

"Right now, given what we suspect, we're talking about an end to his career and fifteen years in a federal penitentiary — if Platt is working at his direction. He might decide that retreat is the better part of valor. And if he is somewhere in Africa, extradition might be iffy.

"And we have to consider the idea that maybe White is implicated."

"Wishful thinking," Toni said.

"Probably, but you never know. We might get lucky." Alex smiled.

"What I don't understand is what he would have to gain from this," Toni said. "Yeah, he gives his boss a platform to stand on, makes Net Force his whipping boy, but that seems a small payoff for such a big crime."

"I think I have the answer for that," Joanna said from the doorway.

They all turned to look at her.

She waved her flatscreen. "I just got back from the federal money hounds. While we all were running around stamping out little fires on the bank incursion yesterday, somebody snuck in and siphoned off almost two hundred million dollars."

"Now there's a coincidence," Jay said.

"Damn!" Alex said. "Of course! It was misdirection! We thought somebody wanted to take the system down! It wasn't about terrorism at all, it was about money!"

"That lets White out," Alex said. "He's probably got more money than that in his personal checking account."

Joanna continued. "The hounds have traced part of the funds through a Caribbean bank and two Swiss numbered accounts, but they are stonewalled at some Indonesian trust company."

"Part of the funds?" Alex asked

"A hundred and sixty million," Joanna said. "Forty went somewhere else."

Toni said, "That would be a pretty good reason to break into a few computers to raise hell."

"It gets better," Joanna said. She looked at her flatscreen. "Seems an anonymous tip to the FBI has just resulted in the arrest of one Jamal S. Peterson, a former bank employee wanted for a similar kind of sting in South Dakota last month. They recovered the money from that, a couple hundred thousand, but Peterson was not apprehended at the time. The tip claimed that Peterson was responsible for this theft too."

"And he's been picked up?"

"About fifteen minutes ago. I just got off the phone with the special agent in Charge. Peterson had a forged passport, a one-way ticket to Rio, and a new account in Switzerland with forty million dollars in it, transferred in last night."

"So that's all the money," Jay said.

"Not exactly. The hundred and sixty very large went into a bank in Bali, but there's a good chance the money has already left the building. The institution in question has a history of such transactions."

"So Hughes, if he's responsible, has probably already gotten his hands on more money than you and I and everybody in our department will make for the rest of our lives," Alex said.

"That would be a fairly safe bet," Joanna said.

Alex sighed. "Damn."

"I hate to add more rain on the parade," Toni said, "but with that kind of money, there are probably a dozen poor African nations who'd be happy to grant Hughes political asylum. Maybe not the Ethiopians, but some of the third-world presidents would jump at the chance to sell out. For a tenth of that much."

Alex said, "And that might be his plan. He might already be sitting in his new villa in Sierra Leone, sipping some banana-and-rum drink and laughing his head off at us."

"And it gets worse, Boss. We've been backwalking the various penetrations as best we can, and casting about for any side trails, and we think we've uncovered a problem."

Michaels looked at him. "Why am I not surprised? What is it?"

"The way it looks to us, Platt has set it up so that he has to log in to various systems at certain times. If he doesn't, and if he doesn't send the right messages, we think he has several more surprises set to be unleashed on us."

"Dead-man switches," Alex said.

Jay nodded. "That's how it looks. We're tracking them as best we can. Given enough time, we'll get them all, but if anything happens to Platt before we do…"

Alex glanced over at Joanna, then back at Jay. "Stay on it," he said, "and let me know as soon as you've got them all."

"Right, Boss."

"First thing the rest of us have to do is find out where Hughes is. Then we'll worry about how much immunity he thinks he's got."

Alex looked thoughtful. "Toni, see if you can get hold of Colonel Howard at home, would you?"

Joanna said, "He's not at home. He's doing a survival course in Oregon."

Everybody turned and looked at Joanna. She said, "Uh, that's what I heard."

Jay grinned at Joanna, and Toni wondered why.

"Ah," Jay said. "You get that from a certain NCO we all know and love?"

Joanna blushed, her pale complexion flushed a deep pink.

"Of course, some of us apparently know him and love him more than others," Jay said. Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.

"Go, people, find me a bank thief," Alex said, saving Joanna more embarrassment. "Oh, and good work on what we've done so far. You four are the best, don't let anybody ever tell you different."

"Yeah, but — who gets the trip to Hawaii?" Jay said.

"Go, Jay. We aren't done yet. And while you're looking, get me everything you can on Hughes. Let's find out what we're dealing with here."

Chapter Thirty-Six

John Howard was nearly a mile into the morning's trek when his virgil cheeped at him.

Uh-oh. Nobody was supposed to call unless it was an emergency. He unclipped the device from his belt — he'd learned that lesson, thank you very much — and looked at the ID flashing on the screen.

Assistant Commander of Net Force Toni Fiorella.

He pressed the connect button. "Howard," he said.

"Colonel, I'm afraid you're going to have to cut your survival trip short. We've got a situation here, and Alex — Commander Michaels — wants you back at HQ to put your teams on standby alert."

"Copy that."

"Find a flat spot, sir, and a copter will be there to pick up as soon as possible."

"Affirmative, AC. What's up, can you say?"

"We may be doing an extraction, Colonel, though it's a little early to tell. If we can locate the quarry, it's likely you won't need to pack your cold-weather clothes."

"Copy. I'm looking for a landing site now."

"Drop by when you get back, Colonel, and we'll fill you in. Discom."

"Discom." After the link was sundered, Howard began looking for a place for the copter to land. They'd home in on his virgil, and if a bird lifted from the nearest local military base, his ride should be there within the hour. Giving up his survival trip for a real assignment was not in the least bit distressing to him. War games and camping trips were only the maps, not the territory.

The web covered the world, even a backwater like this one, and it was but the work of a few minutes with a portable flatscreen to uplink via shielded modem pipe to a passing telecom sat. Another minute, a coded password, and 160 million electronic dollars flew from Bali to Bissau, into the government-owned Banco Primero de Bissau, where it was now as safe from the U.S. authorities' grasp as was the surface of Saturn.

In his room, seated cross-legged on his bed, Hughes took a deep breath and let it slowly escape. He smiled. It hadn't even been that difficult to do, to steal more money than most people could ever hope to see in their lifetimes. To most people, 160 million dollars was a fantasy — the only chance they'd ever have at such a sum was winning the lottery. For him, the money was but an intermediate step. A tool, nothing more. He was home free. He had the money, and they didn't have any idea who had taken it. He could go back to the States with White, wrap up a few loose ends, make a few calls, and he was on his way. Even if all of this somehow blew up in his face, he still would have forty million, after he paid El Presidente. Not a bad little nest egg. That was including, of course, the twenty million Platt was supposed to get — but wouldn't need where he was going.

So easy. Amazing.

The room's phone rang.

"Yes?"

It was the President's secretary. "Good afternoon, Mr. Hughes. President Domingos sends his regards and wonders if it might be convenient for you to join him for a drink in the Blue Room in perhaps half an hour?"

"That would be fine," Hughes said. "Half an hour."

Hughes smiled again. His Excellency wasn't wasting any time.

Time for a shower and fresh clothes before he went.

"Guinea-Bissau?" Alex said. "I hope you don't think any less of me for not knowing, but where the hell is that?"

"West Africa," Toni said, "between Senegal and Guinea."

"Oh, that helps."

They were in his office, alone, and she had just presented him with the intelligence on Thomas Hughes's whereabouts.

Toni said, "On the North Atlantic coast. Trust me, it's there."

"Okay, so how do we know Hughes is there?"

"I have a contact at the CIA who checked it out for me. They actually have an operative in the country, and she filed a report."

"Why would the CIA have an op there? I don't even see any of the Company's maps in here. How important a place can it be if they didn't bother to map it?"

Toni shrugged. "Who knows why the spooks do anything?"

He glanced at the material. "Doesn't look like a real hot vacation spot either. Why is he there?"

"The spooks aren't being real forthcoming. My source says there is some kind of deal cooking between the country's President and Hughes, but that's all they know. Or more likely, all they are willing to say."

Alex leaned back in his chair and fiddled with a light pen.

There came a knock at the door. Joanna stood there.

"Good news, I hope?" Alex said.

"Well, good that we found out the bad news," she said.

"Swell. Go ahead."

"The federal hounds paid the entry fee — that's a bribe to you and me — to bank officials in Bali and got into the account where the money was."

Alex blew out a sigh. "Was. I take it that word is key here?"

"Correct. The account was emptied less than an hour ago. Went to something called the Banco Primero de Bissau. That's in—"

"Guinea-Bissau," Alex finished.

"I'm impressed, sir. I'd never heard of the place before."

"Commanders see all and know all, Jo," he said. He gave her a rueful smile. "So, our white-collar thief and his stolen millions are in a country with whom we probably don't have an extradition treaty, no crooks from here ever having figured out how to flee there before now, right? Or if we do have a treaty, whatever deal Hughes and the local head honcho are cooking up will no doubt stall any such proceedings we might attempt? Anybody want to jump in here and reassure me how wrong I am?"

Both Joanna and Toni shook their heads.

Alex stood, put the light pen down, and paced back and forth behind his desk. After a few seconds he said, "All right. Is there any point in me calling State and telling them we want this guy back here?"

Toni shook her head again. "If Hughes thinks he is going to be arrested as soon as he steps off a plane, probably not. State can't make him come home if he's got the country's President in his pocket."

Toni continued. "Of course, he is the COS for a United States senator. He can likely throw some heavy artillery at us. Political types will owe him favors. Maybe he comes back and White steps up to bat for him."

"Maybe," Alex said. "But national-class politicos don't get to the top of the heap without knowing which bugs to step on and which ones to step around. This isn't a political gaffe, it's grand theft. Not an ant, but a stink beetle. Hughes will play hell trying to blame this on the opposition party trying to make him look bad. I'd bet White will drop Hughes like he's a lit bomb."

"All of which means what, Commander?" Joanna asked.

"I think it means if we want him, we are going to have to go and get him," Alex said.

"Hold up a second," Toni said. "He doesn't know we know he's the thief. White is due to return to the country next week. Wouldn't Hughes just come back with the senator? I mean, maybe not, but he's got a seat on White's charter. Why wouldn't he return? As far as he is concerned, he's gotten away with it. That would make things a lot easier. We wait until he lands right at Dulles and collect him, no fuss."

Alex looked at her and smiled. "You're right. Of course. He doesn't know we are looking at him. And now that the theft is a done deal, I would suspect there won't be any more attacks on the net by his pet thug. No emergency. We can wait a few days. That would keep me from having to explain to the Director why I invaded a third-world country and kidnapped somebody. Brilliant, Toni."

Toni smiled. Any time she could get that kind of response from him, she was happy.

"Of course, it might be a good idea if the CIA gave us a little help keeping an eye on this character, just in case he decides to go elsewhere."

"They'd be happy to," Toni said. "They lost people when that spy list hit the web. They want this guy. I'd guess if we don't get him pretty soon, he might have a fatal accident."

"That would be bad," Alex said. "We need him alive at least until Jay and Joanna have tracked down and defused his little time bombs."

"I know," she said. "I mentioned that we want him alive."

Platt had booked a commercial flight from O'Hare to Heathrow, where he'd switch airlines for the hop to North Africa, before transferring to a local crop-duster flight to Oogaboogah. Starting out on a nice big Mil, then going to a DC-9, and finally a DeHavilland prop plane. Since he was flying tourist class all the way, the seats weren't gonna be that comfortable, but pretty soon he wouldn't have to be fooling with this crap anymore, and he could fly first class if he felt like it.

The plane didn't leave until the afternoon, though, and he had more than six hours to kill. He thought about checking into a room and getting a few hours sleep, but he could sleep on planes, if he could get them to give him two or three pillows, and he didn't want to take any chance he'd miss his flight, so he decided to wait at the airport. He could dick around, pick up copies of this month's Flex, Muscular Development, and MuscleMag, eat a good lunch, all like that. He only had the one carry-on bag, and he could rent a locker for that. What the hell.

Since he was so early, he wasn't in any hurry to check in. He got some breakfast, hit the magazine racks, went to the John, then found a place to sit and read near where his gate was.

He spotted the two feds when they came in. They were looking for somebody, and he didn't think that much about it, other than the usual wolf-aware-of-the-hunter kind of thing. But then he saw them see him, saw them recognize him, then pretend it wasn't him they were interested in.

Oh, shit!

The two feds walked off, moving quick, ignoring him, but it was too late. He was sure. They had come here looking for him, specifically for him. They were early, checking the place out for spots to set up, and they hadn't expected him to be here yet.

How had they tracked him? If they came to this international gate, then they must know he was booked on a flight with this carrier. If they knew that, they knew what name he was traveling under, his main passport, and all. And there was only one way they could possibly know that, because he had told only one person.

Hughes. And Hughes had given him up.

Just like Platt had given up Peterson.

Shit. He had underestimated Hughes. He should have been more alert. The bastard.

He put the magazine down. He had to get the hell out of here. The two feds would be calling for backup, and the airport was going to be a stoppered bottle in a few minutes, if it wasn't already.

Maybe the feds didn't know he'd spotted them. That might buy him a couple of minutes. But he couldn't chance trying to leave by the front door. There could already be local cops heading that way.

He stood and walked toward the exit that led to the gates. It was the fastest way out of the building.

There was a keypad lock by the door, but nobody was looking right at him, so he figured he could put his shoulder against the door and pop it, but when he looked, damned if the door didn't open inward. Wasn't gonna shove that one open. Crap!

He looked around. A couple of women were opening up a computer station at one of the nearby gates. He headed that way.

"Ma'am? I'm sorry to bother you, but I just saw somebody go into that door over there." He pointed.

The airline clerks looked at him. One was tall and bottle-blond, the other was short and kind of plump, with red hair probably out of a bottle too. "Sir?"

"That door that says no entrance, right over there? Well, it was partway open, and some kid, I dunno, about eight or nine? she just went in and closed the door behind her."

"I'll check it, Marcie," the redhead said.

"It's right over here," Platt said, smiling.

Once she'd punched in the number and opened the door, Platt considered his options. Grab her and haul her ass inside, close the door, clonk her on the head, and haul ass? Or just remember the number, wait until she got done looking for the kid who didn't exist, then sneak in himself?

If he'd had more time, he'd have gone with the second choice. Less fuss. But even as they stood there, FBI and local cops could be tossing a net over the building. Seconds might count.

He stepped in behind the woman, wrapped his arm around her throat, and squeezed her carotids shut. She struggled and tried to scream, but that came out like a gargle. Thirty seconds later she was out cold, the blood shut off from her brain. If he held on and squeezed a little tighter, she'd croak, but he wasn't that desperate yet. It wouldn't do any good besides; they already knew who he was. No point in adding murder to whatever they had. Once she was out, he tore off her blouse, ripped it into strips, tied her hands and feet, stuffed a piece in her mouth and used her scarf to hold it in place, then picked her up and put her over his shoulder. He went down the ramp, laid her on the floor at the end, around the turn where nobody could see her, then opened the emergency exit and went down the ladder to the concrete. She was coming to as he left. She'd be okay.

Noisy as hell out here.

They were unloading a jet two gates over, and Platt hurried in that direction. A guy on one of those motorized conveyer trucks passed him. Platt waved him down.

"What's up?" the guy said, yelling because he was wearing headphones.

Platt smiled. Grabbed the guy, then gave him one in the gut and one upside the head, knocking the guy senseless. Platt grabbed his earphones and hopped on the conveyer truck. He put it in gear and took off.

Probably there'd be roadblocks leading to the airport pretty quick.

Think, Platt, think!

All right. He had an emergency passport and about twenty thousand dollars of Hughes's money — a thousand in cash, and the rest in a cash-card account — plus he had a hundred grand of his own fuck-you money stashed in another cash-card account under a name nobody knew.

What he needed was a ride, and he needed it from somewhere close.

Ahead was a section of the airport where the express package and cargo service planes were parked.

He grinned as the idea hit him.

"Good morning, sir," the manager of the freight office said. "How can I help you?" He was a kid of maybe twenty-four, twenty-five, wearing a white shirt and a blue tie.

Platt smiled. "Well, sir, I have me a little problem. My name is Herbert George Wells, I've got this big ole shipment of farm machinery sitting on a loading dock in London, England, and no way to git it home." He put a lot more grits in his accent than usual. Stupider he sounded, the better.

"That's what we're here for, sir."

"Thing is, the original airline I hired? Well, they crapped out on me, blew an engine or something, and in order to get my tax break, I needed to have spent the money for the plane by December 31st of last year."

The manager raised an eyebrow.

"See, it saves me about ten thousand dollars if I can show I paid the money about three weeks ago, you understand what I'm sayin' here?"

"I think so."

"I'd like to hire one of your planes to fly over there and pick up my machinery — nothin' illegal here, sir, I got proper papers on everything — but if I don't use my first charter, I'm gonna lose ten thousand dollars. On the other hand, I really need those parts, it's costin' me bidness every day they're sittin' in England and not in Mobile — that's where I need to get it, you see, Mobile, Alabama."

"It does appear to be a problem, sir."

"Well, yes. And since there's nothing illegal about my stuff over there, let's just say, just, you know, for instance, if you had taken this order from me, oh, say, around Christmastime, how much of a problem would that be?"

The manager looked around. Then he looked at Platt. What he thought he saw was a big, musclebound mechanic with his butt in a crack. "Well, sir, if I had taken the order and somehow forgotten to enter it into the computer, that would be my mistake. I could, ah, correct that when I filled out the paperwork, pre-date it so it matched the actual date I took the order."

Platt smiled, one man of the world to another. "Well, sir, if you was to do that, I would be mighty grateful, mighty grateful. And Mr. Franklin and a baseball team of his twin brothers would also be mighty pleased." Platt reached into his shirt pocket, looked around, then removed ten hundred-dollar bills, folded in the middle. He put the bills on the desk and slid them toward the kid.

The kid covered the bills with his hand, opened his desk drawer, raked the money off the desk, then shut the drawer. He smiled at Platt. "All right then, Mr. Wells, what kind of equipment did you have in mind?"

Platt grinned. He had his ride, and any feds looking for him wouldn't find it — since it had been booked two weeks earlier and under another name.

Once he got to England, getting a flight to Africa would be easy.

Then he and Mr. Thomas Hughes would have some words. Yes, sir, they surely would…

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Michaels ate takeout Chinese food at his desk, using throw-away chopsticks to fish the stuff directly from the containers, not even bothering with the paper plate that came in the lunch bag. He'd ordered hot and spicy chicken with noodles, and sweet and sour tofu, but it all seemed kind of bland, and he ate for fuel, not taste. He had other things on his mind.

Toni came into his office. He looked up. Her face, while not grim, was certainly serious. "More good news?" he asked.

"Maybe we can't wait on White's chartered jet to deliver Mr. Thomas Hughes to us after all."

Michaels put the food box down. "Never rains but it pours. What?"

"It seems that about an hour ago, FBI field agents who went to Chicago's O'Hare airport to set up a surveillance on the gate where Platt was supposed to catch a plane to England goofed up."

"Goofed up. There's a nice phrase. What does ‘goofed up' mean? And how did they know where he would be?"

"Once we knew who we were looking for, we found a couple of hidden accounts that Hughes had set up, small stuff, less than twenty or thirty thousand in each. Hughes tried to hide his connection to them, but not very hard. Platt used money from one of the accounts to book his ticket — and under a phony name."

"How do you know it was Platt?"

"Who else would be tapping into a slush account to buy a plane ticket overseas right now? We tipped off the field guys. The agents got there several hours ahead of the scheduled departure time, but Platt was already there. He spotted them."

"And he got away, didn't he?"

"The field agents aren't willing to concede that yet. But he did escape from the terminal building by assaulting a ticket agent and a freight handler. Stole a freight truck and disappeared. The FBI is looking, but it's a big airport."

"Yeah, that might be called a goof-up. Best-and-worst-case scenarios?"

Toni leaned against the wall. "Best case, they find him hiding behind a shipment of lawn furniture five minutes from now and take him into custody, whereupon he spills his guts and gives the federal prosecutors enough useful data to overload and sink an aircraft carrier. Hughes comes home, we grab him, he gets fifty years, and dies in jail when he's a hundred."

Michaels smiled at her. "I like that one."

"Worst-case scenario, Platt gets away, calls — or manages to get to — Africa, where he informs Hughes the game is over and we're on to him. Hughes hunkers down behind his money and lives happily ever after in the guest room at the Presidential Palace, then dies at a hundred from eating too much caviar."

"I don't much like that story. Why is it I think it is more likely?"

"They could still catch him."

Michaels shook his head. "Somehow, my faith in the FBI's field ops is not as strong as it once was." He paused, staring at the congealing noodles and tofu. "Where is Colonel Howard?"

"In the air, on an Air Force jet. He should be here within the next couple of hours. What are we going to do?"

"Right now, if Platt wants to pick up a phone and call Hughes, can we stop him?"

"Jay says we can. If the virgil number Platt called before is the only one Hughes is using, we can jam it so it won't accept incoming calls. But there are other phones in Bissau, some of which probably even work. We can't block them all."

"Did you lay out what's going on for the colonel?"

"Not yet."

"Call him, tell him. Tell him to lay out his incursion scenarios. Find out what our chances are of going in and grabbing Hughes."

"Are we ready to take that road yet, Alex?"

"This guy terrorized the country, caused people to die, nearly gave a big chunk of a nuclear bomb to a bunch of nuts, and stole a shitload of money. I want to see him behind bars. If we do it right, we're in and out before anybody figures out what's going on, and Mr. Thomas Hughes belongs to us. I'm ready."

"I'll call the colonel."

The intercom buzzed. "Yes?"

"Sir, your wife's lawyer is on the phone."

Great. "Get his number. Then have my lawyer call him."

Toni looked at him.

"It's a long story. I'll tell you about it when we get caught up."

Hughes stood on the terraced balcony outside his room, looking over the pink buildings of the compound at the surrounding grounds. It wasn't so bad here, when you had this kind of accommodation. You could build yourself a decent house in this country for twenty thousand dollars, a mansion for less than a hundred thousand. And he had forty million. He'd manage.

He leaned against the balcony railing, watching a shirtless native gardener with a hoe dig weeds from a flower bed. You could hire a guy like that for twenty bucks a month.

Yes. He'd do all right here.

The deal with Domingos had gone as smoothly as it could have gone. A hundred million dollars had gone into El Presidente's private Swiss account, and the mineral rights for the country of Guinea-Bissau now belonged almost entirely to Thomas Hughes. All the mineral rights were his, for the next ninety-nine years. The oil, bauxite, and phosphates alone were potentially worth billions — at least that was what Hughes's geologists and petroleum engineers had told him. Not to mention any gold, silver, copper, or whatever else might lay under the completely unexploited ground here. The problem was, the country had never had enough money in the till to do any serious digging, and not enough trust from the big international corporations for them to take the risks. You didn't want to spend a couple hundred million dollars to set up an operation in a place like this if you were worried about the locals putting your managers to the spear and taking over.

But with Hughes owning the rights, it would be different. He was an educated American, somebody that the big oil and mine companies could deal with. He had plenty of experience in high-level negotiations, courtesy of his work for White. He'd tell his potential partners he had resigned to come here and make his fortune. Hell, even if they knew he'd ripped off the banks, it wouldn't matter. If a man thought you were going to make him billions on a business deal, he'd likely be willing to overlook a few shady things in your past. There were folks wanted for crimes in the States who had gone on to lucrative careers in other countries. Who was that movie director who had run off to France or somewhere and stayed there because the locals admired his work and refused to extradite him?

Money was money. And in the billion-dollar range, ethics got real rubbery.

Hughes had scanned fully legal electronic copies of the freshly signed hardcopy agreements already stored where there was no chance of them getting lost.

He also had half-a-dozen major corporations falling all over themselves ready to drop planeloads of money on him for exploration leases.

Of course, Domingos would get a piece of that too, to go along with the "advance" he'd just collected. But when you were talking about billions, there was enough to go around. Besides, Domingos would probably have a heart attack or a stroke in the not-too-distant future, given his excesses. And if not naturally, something could be… arranged.

If ever a man had been in the driver's seat and in control of the bus, it was Thomas Hughes. Things were almost perfect.

When Platt showed up, he'd be getting a little surprise too. Domingos would be happy to furnish a well-trained shooter who would just as soon blast Platt as look at him. And even if Domingos hadn't been eager to help, as poor as most of the people in this country were, you could hire a small army of locals who'd be willing to put a knife into somebody — and for less than the cost of dinner for two in a good Washington restaurant.

Platt was going to become past tense within hours of his arrival. He was expecting to come and collect twenty million dollars, then vanish.

He was half right anyway.

Hughes straightened, and turned to head back into his room. Monique would be arriving soon for a little afternoon delight.

It was good to be the king, but being the man behind the king was almost as good — and certainly it was a lot safer.

Platt had the 767 to himself, save for the flight crew. Wasn't any stewardess to offer him drinks or membership in the Mile High Club, but he could stretch out in a nice hammock somebody had rigged in the empty cargo bay, and that was a plus. He was on his way to Merrie Olde England, and practically home free. Even if the feds happened across the kid in the freight office and questioned him, the kid had a thousand bucks he'd lose if he gave Platt up, plus some explaining as to why he had forged a date on a rental agreement.

Platt had hit a cash machine just outside the office, so he had money left, plenty enough to catch a flight to Senegal, rent a car, and buy himself a few toys. He didn't want to be landing at the Bissau airport — no, not hardly. That would get back to the Presidente pretty quick, and from the Presidente's lips into Hughes's ear, and that wouldn't do at all. Hughes expected him to be in the federal pokey by now; Platt wanted his appearance to be a real surprise.

Course, it might be tricky sneaking into the guarded compound, but even jigs couldn't see in the dark. Platt had learned how to move in the woods when he'd been a kid, and some African forest couldn't be much worse than the swamps back home. Once he was over the wall, the rest of it would be a walk.

It would be real tempting to break Hughes into itty-bitty pieces once he got to him, but all he really wanted was his twenty million. Well, okay, maybe a little extra for his aggravation and all, that would be fair. If Hughes didn't want to pay him, why, then he'd have to convince him, but that was the last resort. Push came to shove, he could kill the bastard and walk, but that wouldn't be good, he'd be broke and the law looking for him. Any way you looked at it, laying low in

Hawaii running his own gym was a lot better than being on the run.

Yep, that was how he planned it. Get some gear, sneak across the border, have a little chat with Mr. Hughes, finish this whole biz in the green. Course, he might have to find himself a can of shoe polish to blend in with the locals.

That was funny. Him, disguising himself as a darky.

He smiled. The more he thought about that, the better it got. Wouldn't that let the air out of Hughes's tires, he looked up and saw a giant spook who looked just like Platt coming in through the window?

Platt laughed aloud. Oh, yeah, it would.

Still flying home on the Air Force transport, Howard opened a shielded com with Julio Fernandez at Net Force HQ.

"I can't go off and leave you alone even for a couple of days, can I, Sergeant?"

"No, sir, Colonel. Cat's away, the mice'll have a field day."

"Let's hear it on all this African stuff, Julio. Is this serious?"

"Far as I can tell, yes, sir. About time too. It's been pretty dull around here lately."

"Talk to me."

The sergeant rattled off a bunch of background about the country, the language, the people, the geography. A minute into it, Howard said, "Look, just upload all that into my mailbox and I'll scan it later. Let's get down to the nitty-gritty. What are we going to run into if we drop in unannounced on the Republic of Guinea-Bissau?"

"Sir. The country is defended by something called the People's Revolutionary Armed Force, called the FARP locally. They have a small Army, about nine boats worth of Navy, and an Air Force consisting of a few prop planes and surplus helicopters — if you don't count the President's unarmed Learjet. They've got a paramilitary militia, and while they supposedly have maybe a couple hundred thousand able-bodied men who could be drafted, the standing army is a twentieth of that, poorly armed and uneducated. Probably half of them could figure out how to tie their shoes — if they had shoes."

"I see. What else?"

"They got zip railroads, under three thousand kilometers of paved road in the entire country, and thirty-five airports, two of which have enough runway to allow anything bigger than a crop duster to land. We'd have to put our transport down in Senegal, to the north, and go in either via copter, or overland — or maybe with an airdrop and parachutes.

"There are fewer than four thousand telephones in the country, maybe three for every thousand persons, and half those don't work."

"The phones don't work, Sergeant? Or the people."

"Both, sir. Average income is a couple hundred dollar per year."

"I see."

"They've got three FM radio stations, four AM stations — they like rock and country and western, and a lot of trash talk. There are two TV stations, one of which doesn't sign on until dark. That's because there are maybe as many TVs as there are telephones. And probably half that many personal computers total, of which maybe a third have web access."

"Sounds like a place to do my next survival trip."

"If we cruise in over ‘em anymore than a hundred feet up, we'll be safe, ‘cause none of the locals can throw their spears that high. Me and a company of our second-teamers could parachute in after dark one night and be running the country by morning, without breaking a sweat."

"Lack of confidence has never been one of your failings, Julio."

"No, sir."

"You sound awfully happy for a man stuck on a dull base recovering from a shot-up leg. I recognize that tone. Who is she?"

"I'm sure I don't have any idea what the colonel is talking about."

"You'll go to Hell for lying like that, Sergeant."

"Yes, sir, and I'll have your landing site secured when you arrive."

Howard laughed. "All right. I'm going to scan in the stuff you're sending and run scenarios on my S&T system. I should be landing in" — he glanced at his watch—"about half an hour. Meet me there."

"Yes, sir."

"Pack your tropical-weights, Sergeant, and kiss your girlfriend good-bye."

"Not a problem, sir." He laughed.

"Something funny I missed?"

"Oh, no, sir. I just remembered an old joke."

"In thirty minutes, Julio."

"Sir."

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Michaels said, "All right, I think that's it. Questions?"

He looked around the conference room at the others: Howard, Fernandez, Winthrop, Gridley, and Toni.

Toni said, "Have we cleared this with the Director?"

"Currently the Director is in a don't-ask-don't-tell frame of mind," Michaels said. "If we deliver Hughes, he won't much care what we had to do to get him. And certain members of the Senate who might ordinarily scream to high heaven will be, I expect, very quiet about this particular detention." He grinned. "We also have some off-the-record help from the CIA. About as much as we want. Anything else?"

Nobody spoke.

"Good. You all have your assignments. Better go and get started."

The others left. Toni stayed behind.

"This is not a good idea, Alex."

"You heard the colonel, it should work."

"You know I'm not talking about the operation, I'm talking about you going along."

"Rank has its privileges, Toni. I was a good field op, once upon a time. I need to get out once in a while. The administration and politics of this job grind you down."

"It's dangerous."

"Crossing the street is dangerous."

He saw she was really concerned about him, and he didn't want to be flip, so he said, "What would make you feel better about this?"

"You not going."

"Aside from that?"

She looked him straight in the eyes. "If I went with you."

He started to shake his head. "I need somebody here to run things—"

"For three or four days? Bring in Chavez from nights, shift Preston over from Operations. They can handle things for that long."

"I don't know—"

"Oh, it's fine for you to go play in the field but not me?"

"It's against regulations for both of us to be on the same plane," he tried. He knew it was lame when he said it.

"You're going to quote regulations at me? You're going to toss the rule book out the window, go along on a mission you'd never get approved if the Director knew about it, and then talk to me about both of us flying on the same plane?!"

Ooh, she was mad. It was a side of her he'd never seen. And of course, she was perfectly justified in feeling that way, and he knew it.

"Okay," he said, holding up his hands in surrender. "Okay, you're right. You can go."

"I can?"

And in those two words, he heard what she must have sounded like as a little girl. In her concern, anger, and her sudden astonishment, she was in that moment drop-dead gorgeous, calling to him like a Siren. He wanted to hug her, kiss her — and he wanted to fall on the couch with her. Not a good idea, and certainly not a good idea here in the office, but that was how he felt.

Something was going to have to be done about this. He was going to have to do something.

"You're right. We'll work something out. That way, we'll both be looking for new jobs if this goes sour."

"I can live with that."

"Good. Now go take care of those other details we need handled, okay?"

"Right," she said. She smiled at him, stood there for what seemed a long time, then very softly, so softly he wasn't sure he had heard it, said, "I love you."

And then she was gone, and he was standing there with his mouth open, caught totally flat-footed and stunned.

Hughes sipped at his drink, a good brandy in a monogrammed crystal snifter, and frowned up at the President's chauffeur/bodyguard.

"You're sure?"

"Sorry, sir, but he wasn't on the plane. I would have recognized him. I did drive him around when he was here before. He's rather difficult to miss."

"Yes. Well, thank you anyway."

The chauffeur departed, and Hughes reached for the Cuban cigar in the ashtray on the table next to the overstuffed chair in which he sat. The cigar had gone out. He carefully relit it, using one of the wooden matches from the carved ivory box.

"This is a concern for you?" Domingos said. He puffed on his own fine cigar and blew out fragrant smoke.

"Not really," Hughes said. "Platt will show up sooner or later. If not today's flight, then tomorrow's or the next day's. I have his money, and the arrangement was for him to collect it in person."

"Giles will take care of him whenever he arrives," Domingos said. "Not to worry."

Hughes swirled the brandy, lifted the snifter to his lips, and sipped it. "I'm not worried at all, Mr. President."

"Please, you must call me Freddie. We are going to have a long and very pleasant association together, no?"

"But of course, Freddie."

Platt had driven his rented Land Rover to Sedhiou, where he'd taken the dinky ferry across the sluggish and brown Casamance River, then south to Tanaf. From there, if he stayed on the road, he was only about five miles away from Senegal's southern border with Guinea-Bissau. If he stayed on the road, it would take him through Olo Province south across the Canjambari River by way of Mansoa, and into Bissau from the northeast. That was if he stayed on the road. Thing with a Land Rover was, you didn't have to stay on the road if you didn't feel like it. And most of the roads around here were dirt tracks anyhow. He didn't particularly trust the guy who'd rented him the Rover, but the guy was white, and he'd said there were more ways to cross the border unseen than you could shake a stick at, and that was probably true.

It wasn't that far, as the crow flew, from where he was to Bissau, maybe fifty miles, but if the crow had to walk it on these crappy paths it was not only longer, it was a lot slower than the bird could fly with one wing busted. Platt would probably get there while it was still dark, assuming he didn't get pulled over by some native Army patrol out for blood. He was prepared for that, having bought himself a K-bar sheath knife, a Browning 9mm semiautomatic pistol, a vintage AK-47, and enough ammunition for both guns to take out a small-town high school football stadium. Plus he had picked up two WWII surplus hand grenades — German potato mashers, the dealer told him, old, but guaranteed to work.

If he ran into some local soldiers who wanted to give him grief, he'd see if could mash them like potatoes. Nobody in this dark land was gonna stop him getting where he wanted to go, not without being real sorry if they tried.

And after he had gotten far enough out in the boonies, he had pulled over and taken time to apply a couple of coats of the darkest tanning foam he could find. He wasn't exactly black, but he was a kind of nutty brown, and with a baseball cap on to hide his hair, he didn't look much like a white man at any distance more than a few yards.

Platt found a cow path or something a couple of miles away from the border, leading through a grassy field and a couple of plowed areas, then into some woods. He stayed on the compass until he came to a fence that stretched off into the woods in both directions.

Must be the border, he figured.

The fence that protected the border was three whole strands of rusted barbed wire tacked to wooden posts that were mostly rotted away.

Damned savages couldn't do any better than that? Jesus. No wonder they never amounted to nothin' over here. This fence wouldn't keep the livestock in back home.

He hacked most of the way through one of the posts with the K-bar, then knocked it the rest of the way down with the Rover's front bumper and rolled across the border.

Welcome to Guinea-Bissau, hoss. Hope you enjoy your visit.

He had gotten kind of turned around, so he pulled over to check the map. And it was a lucky thing too. While the hot engine ticked, he heard another vehicle. He got out of the Land Rover and moved down the trail.

Ahead was a beat-up pickup, painted jungle green, with four soldiers in it, two inside, two in the back. They had AKs like his, and they were cruising along slow, looking.

Platt realized that if he hadn't stopped, he might have run right into them, and with four guns against his one, that could have been real bad — especially if they had seen him first, which they would have probably done, since they were looking and he wasn't.

He hadn't figured on a border patrol. He revised his opinion up a little. Maybe these jungle bunnies were sharper than he'd thought. Bad idea to underestimate the other side.

After the truck had time to get a couple of miles away, he went back to the Rover. Better take it slow and careful from here on in.

He figured he needed to get fairly close to the city, then find himself a place to hide the Rover, ‘cause he'd need it to leave. And he'd have to hole up for a day, until tomorrow night, because he definitely didn't want to be moving around during the day, disguise or not. Tuesday night, good and dark, he'd mosey on in and do his business.

As he drove through a field of high grass, the damp and heavy air rumbled with distant thunder. He could smell the approaching rain.

Oh, good. A storm, just what he needed to slow him down even more.

On the other hand, a thunderstorm would probably keep the local militia inside drinking bull pee or whatever it was they drank, and that would be good. He wasn't lookin' to get shot if he could help it.

He wiped sweat away from his forehead with the back of his right hand. Damn, but it was muggy here.

He saw a cloud of mosquitoes or flies or something buzzing in the air ahead of him, and he reached for the bug dope spray in the bag on the passenger seat. Be another good thing the rain would do, keep the bugs down. All he needed was to catch sleeping sickness or malaria or elephantitis from all this crap.

No two ways about it, he was gonna take a little more than the twenty million when he talked to Hughes. He sure had it coming.

"Banjul, huh?" Joanna said.

Seated next to her in the seat of the team's 747, Fernandez said, "Yep. It's in The Gambia, kind of an insert around the Gambia River, runs right into the lower half of Senegal. A little farther away than we wanted, right on the coast, but it's the only airport south of Dakar where we can put this bird down and not be noticed. The Company has a store there — we're switching to a couple of Hueys for the rest of the trip. So we'll go in at treetop level Tuesday night, land, do our thing, then come out. It worked great on that Chechnya caper, it sure ought to work out here in darkest Guinea-Bissau. I don't think their radar is exactly state-of-the-art. Even if they see us, they don't have much to throw at us or chase us with."

"Heads up, here comes the colonel," Joanna whispered.

"Sir," Fernandez said as John Howard stopped next to their seats.

"Sergeant, Lieutenant." Howard looked at them for a couple of seconds, then smiled.

"Something funny, sir?" Fernandez said.

"Not really. You know that joke you were remembering when I called you on the way back from Washington State? The one you laughed at?"

"I remember."

"I do believe I get it now, Sergeant. Carry on."

After the colonel left, Joanna looked at Fernandez. "What was that all about?"

Fernandez grinned widely. "I expect the colonel knows that you and I have been, ah… intimate."

"How would he know that? You bragging?"

"No, ma'am, as proud as I am of it, I didn't say a word. But I've been working for the man for a long time. He doesn't have a dull edge, and he knows me too well. Any time a man feels as good as I do, it shows. And I expect that it shows more when you're around, seeing as how you're the reason. Is this a problem?"

"Not for me. In fact, I'm going to take a run to the head. You want to come along?" She waggled her eyebrows like Groucho Marx in an old black-and-white movie.

"You know, you are an evil woman, Lieutenant Winthrop, teasing a man that way."

"You don't know the half of it, Sergeant. I'm just getting vanned up with you. Besides, who said I was teasing?"

"Brought your wavy knife, I see," Alex said.

Toni looked up and nodded. She had the kris in its wooden scabbard on her lap. "Guru is convinced the kris is magic. I figured it wouldn't hurt."

He nodded, then said, "I'm just going to have a few words with the colonel. Looks like everything is on schedule. We'll be at the airport in a few more hours. We'll transfer stuff to helicopters there, then on to the target."

"You couldn't talk the colonel into letting you go into the city on the mission, could you?"

He smiled, shook his head. "No. And the truth is, I'm not unhappy with us staying with the pilots at the copters until they get back. My recent success as a soldier in the field was more luck than skill. This is what Howard and his team do. I don't want to get in the way."

"We could stay in Banjul," she said.

"Do that, and we might as well have stayed in Washington."

"Didn't I say that in the first place?"

"Yep. But look, we came this far, we might as well go along for the ride."

"As long as we both go along for the ride," she said.

He smiled at her.

So far, he hadn't said anything to her about that other thing she had said. The "I love you" part. It had seemed the right thing to her at the time, but after she had done it, she'd been almost sick with fear. They had kissed each other for a few minutes in the front seat of a very small car, that was all. It was maybe too early to be hitting him with something that heavy. What if he didn't feel anything for her other than lust? She knew that was there, there wasn't any way to hide the evidence of that. And she wanted it, sex with him, and she would settle for that, for now, but she also wanted a lot more.

Then again, he hadn't said anything about it, and that meant he hadn't refuted it either. Or maybe he hadn't even heard it.

No news was good news — or at least it wasn't bad news.

She wouldn't push it. She would see what happened. The magic in the kris had gotten her this far. Maybe it would help take her the rest of the way…

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Domingos had some pressing state business he had to attend to — probably a ribbon cutting at a new bodega or something — so Hughes enjoyed his cigar and brandy in solitude. Well, save for the brief appearance of a messenger who informed him that the five o'clock plane had come, and that once again Platt was not on it.

This was worrisome. Platt certainly wanted his money, and the only reason Hughes could imagine that he hadn't hurried here to collect it was that something had prevented him from doing so. And the only things that came to mind that were capable of stopping Platt from doing anything were serious injury, death, or being arrested. And Platt hadn't called, another thing that bothered Hughes.

What if somehow Platt had run afoul of the law? What if he had been captured?

Hughes held the cigar in his mouth without puffing on it. He had considered this before, of course, although he had to admit to himself he hadn't really thought it likely. And even if he had been caught, Hughes did not think Platt would say anything about their venture; it would hardly be in his best interest to do so. Still, what if somehow he was made to speak? If the feds had Platt, and if they had squeezed him, then that would alter Hughes's plans considerably.

Going back to the U.S. would be out of the question. As soon as he stepped off the plane, the feds would swoop down on him like a hawk on a chicken, and he'd be in real trouble.

What to do?

The least risky proposition was simply to sit tight. Wait until Platt showed up here, or called. If he didn't do either in the next week or so, Hughes would have to risk some longdistance research and see if he could figure out what had happened to his operative. If Platt was in a hospital from a car wreck or some such, or even dead, well, so much the better. But if the authorities had somehow caught him, if he had slipped up, then one had to assume the worst.

The cigar was out. He reached for a match.

He wasn't due to return to the U.S. from Ethiopia until Thursday, so he had a couple of days. If Platt hadn't shown up by then, Hughes would put in a call to the senator and offer some reason why he had to stay in Africa for a few more days. Easy enough. And if Platt had been caught and had given him up, then here was where Hughes would stay. It would be ahead of schedule, and irritating to have been found out, but not a major setback, all things considered.

He lit the cigar. When he had his house built, he'd have to be sure to include in it a humidor, a walk-in humidor, to keep his own stock of Cubans nice and fresh…

Rain fell on the corrugated metal roof, a constant, almost hypnotic drumming that felt relaxing despite the muggy interior of the staging shed. The hard rain almost drowned out the electrical generator droning on outside the building.

Michaels felt lulled by the rain and the heat. This was supposed to be the dry season, the monsoons were supposed to be over. What must the wet season be like then, if this was dry?

Howard had a map projected on a more-or-less-white concrete block wall. "This is the city of Bissau," he said. "On the north side of the Rio G6ba where it turns into the bay." He waved a laser pointer in a circle of red around the Presidential Palace. "This is the compound."

Howard used a remote, and the viewpoint zoomed in. "This is the main building and this is where our target should be."

He fiddled with the remote, and the map was replaced by a computer-enhanced spysat photograph, the angle altered to give a view from what appeared to be only a few hundred feet above the buildings. "The CIA rerouted one of their fast-flying high-eyes to footprint the city for us, and we'd like to thank them for that, and for the use of the Hueys and this staging area."

Howard would have liked even more assistance from the Agency — like a geosynch spysat with full IR capabilities foot-printing the area from now through the time of the assault — but this operation was strictly unofficial. The Agency had done all it could without risking calling attention to what Net Force was doing out here, and Howard appreciated their efforts. He nodded at a fit-looking gray-haired man in khaki shorts and a T-shirt, who smiled and waved.

There were thirty-four people in the room. Howard had brought four five-troop squads, not counting Fernandez and Winthrop. There was the CIA Liaison, four helicopter pilots, four ground-support techs, plus Toni and Michaels. The troops were already mostly dressed in their SIPEsuits.

Howard put the map up again. "We'll land here, about two miles from the target, where we will switch to local transport, again courtesy of the Company. Alpha Team will proceed to here and initiate our diversion, while Beta Team will proceed to the compound and prepare for the incursion. Look over your house plans one more time, Beta. We don't want anybody getting lost in there and winding up in the bathroom instead of the package's quarters."

That caused a little nervous laughter.

"We would like to avoid casualties on either side if at all possible, so we will utilize flashbangs, puke gas, and pepper fog to neutralize threats. No one is to fire unless fired upon first, and then only if the other side is using armor-piercing rounds, which is highly unlikely. Our intelligence indicates that most of the soldiers in Bissau are armed with Kalashnikovs — when they are armed at all — and issue ammo is standard Soviet Bloc surplus.

"Let me be clear on this point. We are not at war with this country, and we don't want to leave bodies piled up all over the place, understood?"

There was a mumble of acknowledgment.

"We are set to collect the package at 0130 hours. Any questions so far?"

Nobody had any.

"After Beta Team collects the package, we will rendezvous with Alpha at the assembly point, then proceed to the landing site. Whatever our status on the ground, the Hueys will lift at 0230 hours and proceed on the prearranged flight path back to Banjul. If you miss the bus, you'll have a long walk home. Any questions?"

There were no questions.

"All right then. Finish suiting up and lock and load. We leave in one hour. Dismissed."

The pilots and squads filed out into the rain, which was finally beginning to slacken. Michaels, Toni, Winthrop, and Fernandez stayed behind with the colonel.

"Got your gear?" Howard asked Michaels and Toni.

He was referring to the Kevlar helmets and hardweave armor vests he had given them. They weren't going into combat, but he'd insisted that if they were going in the copters they must wear them. And he'd also issued them each a suppressed pistol, which he also wanted to see strapped on. There was always a chance the copter could blow a gasket or take small-arms fire and be forced to land. It was better to be armed than not when moving overland in hostile territory. And with a gun that didn't make a lot of noise.

"Got them," Toni answered for herself and Michaels.

"You know you really should stay here," Howard tried again.

"You've assured us the danger is minimal," Michaels said.

"Minimal is not the same as none," Howard said.

"I appreciate your concern," Michaels said. End of discussion.

"All right. We're set then. Winthrop will be with me on Beta Team, Sergeant Fernandez leads Alpha. Our projections run between eighty-eight-percent and ninety-three-percent success, if we've plugged in all the proper variables. This ought to be a piece of cake. In and out, quick and clean. By this time tomorrow, we should be well on our way home."

Michaels nodded.

"I'll see you at the transports in fifty-five minutes."

Platt hated this damned country. Being stuck in a mud hut that sat there and cooked in the hot sunshine all day hadn't helped his mood. Hell, even when it rained a frog-drowner like it had this afternoon, it still didn't get cool. Just muggier, so your sweat wouldn't even evaporate, it just rolled down your legs and soaked into your socks. It was like sitting in a steam bath with your clothes on.

He looked at his watch for the fiftieth time since it got dark. He was about a mile from the pink palace, the Land Rover parked inside a tin shed next to the mud house. The house's owner, a white-haired old man, was tied up and lying on the col in the corner. The old guy hadn't seemed too fretted about a man with a gun barging in. He'd damned near brained Platt with his walking stick — he was a lot faster than he looked. Another two inches and the party would have been over; as it was, the stick had left a scrape over Plait's left ear.

These jigs weren't complete pushovers like he'd figured. That bothered him. If the palace guards were up to snuff, that could be a real problem.

After he'd gotten the stick away, Platt had trussed the old man up like a hog. Near as Platt could tell, the old boy was asleep. Couldn't get away, hell, might as well take a nap. In the old man's place, Platt didn't think he'd feel so cool.

The idea of being taken out by a nigrah was… was unreal. He had to be more careful.

He'd planned to wait until around midnight before he headed for the palace, but Platt had had enough of this hanging around. He was going now. They'd roll up the sidewalks around here by eight or nine anyhow — if they'd had sidewalks.

He changed into a black T-shirt and black pants, with black tennis shoes and black socks. What skin showed was stained pretty dark, and it wouldn't show up too well at night. He tucked a little flashlight into his back pocket and strapped on the Browning 9mm, with two extra magazines in pouches on the other side of the web belt, next to the sheath knife. He had a screw-on suppressor for the pistol; he'd put that on when he got there. Coiled over his shoulder was a half-inch hemp rope with knots in it every two feel, and a steel grappling hook on one end. He thought about taking the AK, but decided against it and left it in the Rover. But he did hook the pouch with the two old German hand grenades in it onto the web belt. Things got nasty, he would go out with a bang…

As ready as he was going to get, Platt rolled his shoulders and bent his neck left and right to stretch, waved at the sleeping old man, and started out. He was gonna move careful, so it might take him a couple-three hours to get where he was going.

If Hughes had company in bed, they were going to get a surprise along about 1:30 or 2 a.m. Platt was looking forward to it.

Howard piled into the ancient pickup truck last, and dropped the piece of canvas that covered the back opening. The pickup was an old one-ton Chevy, and the owner had built a wooden frame over the bed and stretched canvas over the frame, so the thing looked more or less like a motorized covered wagon.

"Go!" Howard commanded.

One of Beta Team drove. The driver started the motor and the truck lurched off. When he shifted into second, the driver clashed the transmission gears together, and one of the troops said, "Hey, grind me a pound too!"

Howard glanced at Lieutenant Winthrop, whose face looked awfully pale in the darkness, then looked at his watch.

Alpha Team was already on the road in a similar dilapidated vehicle.

Howard had been assured that no matter how bad they looked, the trucks were mechanically sound, and would take them to and from where they wanted to go.

He sure hoped so.

The locals would have heard the copters coming down, no way around that, but local police response time to motor noises in the night wasn't likely to be real fast — if they bothered to come out and check at all. And as soon as Beta Team was another quarter mile farther up the road, its truck would stop, whereupon two soldiers would hop out and rig flashbangs on the road's shoulders. These devices would be controlled by a pressure strip set on the only road leading from town to the helicopters. If any local cops or troops came out to check on things, they'd would get a light and noise show that would make them stop and think. So would anybody else out driving this late, but that wasn't likely to happen. This was a narrow dirt road that dead-ended at a forest, and the people who lived off this path didn't own automobiles. The pressure strip would let a bicycle or motorcycle pass over it without firing the flash-bangs.

The day's heat hadn't abated much, and Howard felt the sweat soaking his clothes. They were wearing tropical-weight assault uniforms under the SIPEsuits, but in this kind of high-temperature, high-humidity weather, any-weight clothes were too much.

"You all right, Lieutenant?"

"Sir, I'm fine," she said.

Then she said, "Actually I'm a little nervous, sir."

He smiled at her. "Only a little? I personally am scared spitless. Pucker Factor of about twelve."

That got a little smile out of her. Yeah, she was a soldier, but she wasn't a combat trooper, she'd never been on anything other than sims or training exercises. She was a computer expert, one of the best, and she didn't have to go into the field. Net Force was not like RA, where if you wanted to advance in rank, sooner or later you had to have some field experience. But she'd wanted to do this, and Julio had vouched for her, so she was here.

"Really?" she said. "You?"

"If you don't feel fear, you can't be brave. Brave is when your bowels are like ice and you're terrified, but you go out and do the job anyway. I don't want troopers who are fearless. They're the first ones to get taken out when the situation goes hot. Fearless and stupid go together."

"Thank you, sir."

He smiled. "You'll do fine, Winthrop. You're wearing state-of-the-art combat armor; anything that might get thrown at you will probably bounce right off."

"That's not how Sergeant Fernandez tells it, sir."

Howard chuckled. "Well, of course, Julio is the exception that proves the rule. He's a good man, Fernandez. Best I have."

"I think quite highly of him myself," she said.

Hughes got up and went to the bathroom. He shouldn't drink anything after ten at night. He knew better; he woke up every time he did having to go urinate.

He was a little peeved too. Monique hadn't shown up tonight, she wasn't answering her com, and nobody seemed to know where she had gone. Domingos said she had done that before, disappeared for a day or two. He suspected she either had a local lover or went off to do drugs. Some of the locals grew prime ganja—it wasn't hard to come by.

Ah, well. It wasn't as if Hughes needed her to be here — he'd done more screwing in the last few days than he had in months — but he didn't like surprises. That was the trouble with whores. No matter how high-priced they were, you couldn't depend on them. You needed to think of them like Kleenex. You used them, then you disposed of them, and the next time you felt a sneeze coming on, you plucked another one from the box.

He smiled at his metaphor, then waded through the thick carpet back to bed. The hum of the air conditioner would put him back to sleep soon enough.

Getting into the compound had been harder than Platt had figured. The trees had been cut back from the walls, and there was all that broken glass on top too, but he'd managed to get over using the rope and grapple without slicing himself to ribbons.

Shit, every time he turned around, things were tougher than he'd expected. He'd been here before, on the inside, but he'd never figured he'd be going in over the wall the next time he came to visit.

He'd figured that once he was inside, all he'd have to do was keep from stepping on one of the sleeping guards, then make his way into the main building. But maybe the guards weren't going to be sleeping. He could get his ass handed to him if he wasn't careful.

He paused, then screwed the sound suppressor onto the Browning's threaded barrel and tightened it. Gun would still make a fair pop! if you shot it — the suppressor wouldn't stop the noise coming out of the slide when it went back and the spent shell ejected — but with subsonic ammo, it wouldn't be like a bomb going off or anything. You could miss the noise if you weren't too close.

Getting in would be tricky, ‘cause the guards in the house would sure as hell be awake and told to shoot first and don't ask questions. But there was a way in, something he had seen when he'd been here before. There was a trash chute coming out of the kitchen that led into a big metal trash container next to the kitchen exit. The chute was big enough to put a whole can of garbage into at once, and it was big enough for a man to get through too, if he didn't mind getting covered with old banana peels and coffee grounds and rotten fruit.

Platt headed for the garbage chute.

Howard and Beta Team went in over the east wall. There was a grove of orange trees between the nearest building and the base of the wall where they came down, offering cover. Fortunately, according to the CIA, the President of this country did not like to hear the barking of dogs, so there weren't any roaming the grounds.

The team moved through the orange grove, got to the prearranged position, spread out, and went prone. The main building was right in front of them.

Howard looked at his watch.

He held up his hand, three fingers spread. "In three minutes, people," he said quietly.

Julio Fernandez counted the seconds off aloud. "Five, four, three, two, one!"

Fernandez pressed the detonator stud on the IR control.

Two hundred yards away, a low-roofed warehouse stored full of cashews and palm kernels for export went up in a blinding white flash and a boom! that rocked the truck in which Fernandez and the others Alpha Teamers sat.

Flames spewed high, and bits of debris pattered back down, in a rain somewhat harder than the locals were used to.

A shower of nuts bounced off the truck's roof and hood.

"Now that's how to roast cashews," Fernandez said. "That ought to give ‘em something to worry about. AMF, we're outta here! Roll!"

The driver cranked the truck and wheeled it out onto the road. They passed a wailing fire engine a mile away, and Fernandez waved at the firemen.

"Good luck putting that one out, boys."

The warehouse flashed brightly, followed in a couple of seconds by the sound of the explosion. Lights went on in the main building, and guards rushed out, weapons held ready, excited voices jabbering away.

"Move in!" Howard commanded.

The two point men, Hamer and Tsongas, scuttled toward the half-dozen guards who were waving their assault rifles and looking puzzled. The point men wore backpack foggers, high-pressure tanks filled with military-grade pepper spray. They were within twenty feet of the nearest guards before they were noticed, and by then it was too late. As the guards turned to bring their weapons to bear on the threat, Hamer and Tsongas cut loose.

The pepper fog boiled out in a long white cloud that enveloped the unfortunate guards. Unlike Mace or even commercial five-percent pepper spray, whose effects a man might shrug off, pepper fog was impossible to ignore. It got into your breathing passages and eyes, and you couldn't stop your body's reaction. Your eyes swelled shut and you dropped to the ground, trying to find air you could breathe. For the next fifteen or twenty minutes, you weren't going to be doing much of anything except wishing you'd never been born.

Howard had gone through the training, he'd eaten the fog, and he knew how those guards felt.

The military stuff was designed to spew hard and settle out fast, but you wanted to wait a few seconds before you ran through the area you'd just fogged, and you wanted your goggles or spookeyes down when you did it.

"Go, go!"

The point men moved in to disarm the squirming guards, while two more troopers offered cover.

Howard and Winthrop headed for the door with the other six team members. He remembered to hold his breath. Two of Beta peeled off to cover their flanks, while two more ran into the building through the open front door, Howard and Winthrop right behind them, handguns drawn.

Nobody in the hall to stop them, Howard saw. The main staircase was just ahead. "Third floor! Go, go!"

With Winthrop next to him, Howard ran for the stairs.

Platt was in the kitchen, scraping what smelled and looked like fermented mayonnaise off his arm, when things went wonky. He saw a bright light strobe the window next to the back door, and heard an explosion in the distance that rattled the hanging pots and pans.

What the hell was that!

He didn't have time to worry about it, though. A guard ran into the kitchen, spotted Platt, and raised his assault rifle to pot him.

Platt already had the Browning nine in his hand. He indexed the guard and shot him twice—pop! pop! — right in the center of mass. Wasn't too loud—

The guard stopped, looked down at his chest as if he was annoyed, then went back to swinging his AK around at Platt.

Man! Platt put the next two into the guard's face. The guy dropped like a boneless chicken. That ended that.

Goddamn pansy nine-millimeter! You couldn't get a decent.45 or.357 in these foreign countries — they restricted you to small-caliber if you were a civilian!

Platt scooted across the kitchen and opened the door to the electric dumbwaiter. The tiny elevator was going to be a tight fit. He hit the button for the third floor, then squeezed himself into the little box and let the door shut. The dumbwaiter groaned, not having been designed for this much weight, but it rose. He heard somebody else make it into the kitchen and start yelling in oogaboog as the dumbwaiter lifted, but by then they didn't know where he was.

Apparently the residents knew enough to stay in their rooms. Nobody tried to stop them as the went down the hall on the third floor.

Winthrop was glad. The H&K pistol in her hand didn't offer the comfort she thought it would. It felt like an alien device, despite her training, too barrel-heavy because of the silencer, the grip sweaty. She didn't particularly want to shoot anybody, though she thought she could if she had to.

"Third door on the left," the colonel said.

The two Beta Team troopers split, one going past the door, the other stopping on the near side. They turned so they were facing away from each other, covering both ends of the hall.

Howard reached the door and tried the knob. Locked. He nodded at her, pointed at the room. "I'll get the door, you go in."

She nodded in return, said, "Okay," through dry lips.

Howard raised his foot and kicked the door open. Winthrop dived in and rolled, just as she had done in VR so many times, and came up on one knee, the pistol pointed in front of her.

Thomas Hughes, dressed in white silk pajamas, sat up in bed, where he had obviously been sleeping until that moment.

"Who the hell are you? What do you want?"

The colonel stepped in behind Winthrop. "Mr. Hughes," he said. He smiled. "Commander Alexander Michaels at Net Force would like to have a word with you."

"I don't think so," somebody said.

Winthrop snapped her gaze to the glass door leading out to the balcony. A tall, dark, and muscular man stood there, holding an odd-looking device in one hand. She swung her pistol around to cover him.

"I wouldn't do that, darlin'," the man said.

Winthrop recognized him now that she heard the corn pone in his voice.

"Platt!"

"You look much better in person than you do in VR, honey. How about you put those guns down?"

"How about I just shoot you instead?" Winthrop said.

"Bad idea. Ask your jig friend there why."

She glanced at the colonel.

"He's holding some kind of a grenade," Howard said.

"Yep, a gen-u-wine World War Two po-tato masher. Shoot me and I drop it, and even if your armor stops most of it, you still probably get stung pretty good. Maybe a piece gets through and punches a hole in an artery and you bleed out. And old Tommy boy here, well, he surely gets turned into hamburger."

"I don't think so," Howard said. "I think if I shoot you, both you and that grenade will fall off that balcony behind you."

"Ah," Platt said. "But then I would die, and you don't want that, now, do you?"

"Why not?"

Damn, Winthrop thought. She knew Platt was right. And so did Colonel Howard. She'd heard Commander Michaels telling him all about the dead-man switches. But she also knew that the colonel didn't necessarily want Platt to know they knew… or that, even now, Jay Gridley was working furiously to defuse the things.

God dammit, Gridley, she thought. Hurry up.

"I'm surprised you haven't found my little surprises yet, boy," Platt said, "but then maybe you Net Force folks aren't as good as ole Tommy-boy here thought. Let's just say that if I don't make it back to my ride out of here — and the little ole computer with its satellite uplink — by a certain time, well, things will happen that will make those last assaults on the net look like kid's stuff."

"What do you want?" Howard said.

"Well, we need to come to some kind of… arrangement," Platt said.

He smiled.

Chapter Forty

At the helicopters, the pilots were relaxed, laughing and joking. Michaels and Toni weren't so animated. They stood a short ways off, swatting at the bugs that swirled around them. The bug dope was enough to keep the insects from landing, most of them, but not enough to keep them from buzzing close enough to be annoying.

Michaels was beginning to get worried. The others were supposed to be back by now.

Even as he thought this, the sound of a truck motor reached them.

Two of the pilots moved away from the copters, assault weapons held at the ready.

The truck rounded a curve a couple hundred yards out, and as soon as it did, it blinked its lights off and then on again.

"It's them," Toni said.

Michaels felt himself relax a little.

The truck pulled to a stop ten feet away from where Michaels stood, and Sergeant Fernandez stepped out. He frowned. "Beta Team is not back." It was not a question.

"We thought they were supposed to meet you, and you'd all come back together," Toni said.

"That's how it was supposed to go. We waited until 0150 hours as planned. The deal was, if for some reason they ran long, they'd meet us back at the Hueys by 0200. I don't like this. The colonel is never late. I think we have to give him a call."

"We're not supposed to break radio silence except in an emergency," Michaels said.

"Sir, we're supposed to lift in twenty-five minutes," Fernandez said. "It's an emergency."

Michaels nodded. "Yeah."

Howard felt the com vibrate soundlessly against his left hip. That would be Julio calling. But he couldn't answer him right now. Their suits' long-range broadcast radio had been put on standby, to make sure nobody who might be listening for such things picked up stray signals. LOSIR was up, and GPS transponders were on, but that wouldn't be much help — they knew where he was, just not why he was still there.

Howard had his pistol trained on Platt, as did Winthrop. Platt, meanwhile, waved the grenade back and forth as if it was a spinning reel and he was fly-fishing for bass in a pond.

"Thing is, Colonel, we can't hang around here all night in this Mexican standoff," Platt said. "We don't leave pretty soon, El Presidente's boys are gonna come up here pokin' around, and we don't want to be here when they do."

"Put that thing away," Hughes said. "Are you crazy?"

"No, sir, what I am is pissed off. You owe me thirty million dollars and I want it."

"Thirty million?"

"Yeah, I figure I'm due a little extra, for all my trouble. Trouble you caused me."

"I don't know what you are talking about."

" ‘Course not," Platt said.

From the hall, Martin called: "Colonel, is everything okay in there?" He couldn't see them, because the kicked-in door had shut behind him when Howard had come into the room.

"Affirmative!" Howard called back. "But listen up! I want you and Hull to go downstairs, collect the rest of Beta Team, and take the truck back to the rendezvous point ASAP!"

"Sir? What about you and the package?"

"We are involved in some… delicate negotiations in here, Martin. Get back to the rendezvous, you copy?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Good move," Platt said. "We'd better be going ourselves." He waved the grenade at the door. "We can leave through the kitchen. It's pretty quiet back there now."

"Maybe not," Howard said.

"Listen up, Colonel Sambo, here's the deal. I need Hughes because without him, I am up Poor White Trash Creek without a paddle. You want him for your own reasons. Let's go somewhere I can get what I want, then you can have him."

"Dammit, Platt—!"

"Shut up, Hughes. You ain't part of this discussion."

"You turn me over to them, why should I give you the money?"

"Oh, I dunno, maybe because if you don't, I'll poke out your eyes or cut off your family jewels?"

"I don't much like your deal," Howard said.

"Only one I'm offering. I got a ride out of this stinkin' country. I'm gonna take an account code with me or I ain't goin'. Grab that laptop there off the bedside table, would you, darlin'? We got to move. You object to that, Colonel?"

Howard shook his head. This guy was dangerous at the very least, maybe crazy enough to let that grenade go and kill or maim them all.

"If that thing is from World War II, what makes you think it will still work?" Winthrop said. "Maybe I shoot you, it drops and fizzles out like a wet match."

"Maybe so," Platt said. "But you know them krauts, they build to last. You want to risk fat boy's ass on maybe it won't blow up?"

"Let's move," Howard said. "He's right about one thing, if we don't we're all for sure dead."

"Age before beauty," Platt said.

As Howard turned to leave the room, he reached down with his left hand, while it was hidden from Platt's view, and triple-tapped the panic button on his com.

"Oh, shit," Fernandez said.

"What?" Michaels and Toni said together.

"My com just started a beeper pulse. The colonel has pushed his panic button. That means he's down or captured, he can't talk."

Michaels said, "Can we locate him from the signal?"

"Yes, it's a GPS pulse."

"Then let's go."

"We're supposed to lift in twenty minutes," one of the pilots said. "Sooner or later the local army is going to get its pants on and come looking for whoever caused all the trouble."

Michaels said. "We don't leave until we bring our people out."

"Sir, the colonel's orders—" the pilot began.

"Negative," Fernandez cut in. "If the colonel's been captured, then I'm in charge, and I say we're not leaving without Colonel Howard. Understood?"

The pilot looked at the ground.

Fernandez said. "If the local army comes around, then you can take off. Otherwise, you wait until we get back."

"I'm going with you," Michaels said.

"And so am I," Toni said.

"Not a good idea, sir," Fernandez began.

"Why does everybody keep saying that? Let's move, Sergeant. Time is running out."

The rest of Beta Team had left by the front gate, which was opened and unmanned. The guards who had been fogged were still on the ground, bound in plastic wrist and ankle cufftape.

Howard, Platt, Hughes, and Winthrop moved out. There was still a big commotion at the diversion fire, less than half a mile away, and nobody seemed to be standing around gawking at the presidential compound.

"He's crazy," Hughes said quietly to the colonel. "He hates black people, or at least black men. He'll kill us all if he gets the chance."

Platt moved over and tapped Hughes on the back of the head with the grenade he held.

"Ow!"

"Didn't I tell you to shut up? You burned all your goodwill up with me."

"Why do they call it a potato masher?" Winthrop said, trying to distract the man.

"Because of the shape," Platt said. "See, narrow here, on the handle, but fat down here. You take your cooked potatoes and pound away at them, like this."

He moved the grenade up and down, as if using it to smash things under the heavy end. "See?"

God. he was crazy. Look at him grin. And what was that stain all over his skin? He couldn't possibly think he was passing for a native, could he?

"Randall, what are they doing?" Fernandez asked.

"Still moving, Sarge. Gotta be on foot, slow as they are going."

They were in the truck, running with the lights off, and the vehicle found every pothole in the dirt road, bouncing them around like Ping-Pong balls. Toni kept one hand on the wooden frame mounted on the back, the other hand on her kris handle. She had shoved the sheath into her belt when they'd gotten on the helicopters, although she didn't know how much luck it was bringing her at the moment.

Could be worse. She could be dead.

"Same direction as before?" Fernandez asked.

"Yep."

"Get us in front of them, Butler, half a mile or so, then shut it down."

"You have a plan?" Toni asked.

"Not really. The colonel's GPS unit is going somewhere at foot speed. If it's still attached to the colonel and he's free, he'll probably like a ride. If he's been captured and is being taken out to be shot or something, then he probably won't be too unhappy to see us. Either way, we need to know — hold on a second, somebody is calling. Go ahead."

"Sergeant Fernandez, this is Martin. Beta Team is at the rendezvous — except for Colonel Howard and Lieutenant Winthrop."

"What happened to them?"

"I don't know, Sarge. They went into the package's room and then things got real quiet. We could hear them talking, but couldn't make out what they were saying through the closed door. After a while, the colonel told us to take off."

"Did he give a reason?"

"Negative. All he said was, he was doing some kind of negotiation."

"Copy, Martin. Hold your ground as long as you can. We're going to collect the colonel and the lieutenant now. See if you can shoo away anybody who comes nosing around until we get back."

"Affirmative, Sarge."

Fernandez looked puzzled. "Doesn't make any sense."

"When we find Howard, we'll get him to explain it," Michaels said.

"Where are we going?" Howard asked. The brush around the little trail was thick, still radiating damp heat from the day. You couldn't see two feet into the forest, and could barely see the trail, even with flashlights.

"Not too much further," Platt said. "A half mile or so. I have my ride stashed up ahead. We get there, Hughes gives me the bank code, I check it out using the laptop, we go our separate ways."

Platt saw Winthrop and Howard exchange quick looks.

"Well, in your shoes, I don't reckon I would much trust me neither. But I got nothing to gain by killing anybody here. And you got your guns and all, right? You get your big-time thief and most of the money back, I get paid what I'm owed and I'm gone, you don't never see me again. I'll even shut off my little surprises, once I'm safely out of here. Now don't that sound like a good deal all the way around? Except for fat boy here, but we don't really care what he thinks, do we?"

Howard didn't say anything, but what he was thinking was, Dammit, Gridley, we're about out of time here. Move your ass!

"This doesn't make any sense," Michaels whispered to Toni. "That's Hughes, in the white pajamas, and I'm pretty sure the big guy behind him is Platt, wearing some kind of disguise."

"Yeah, and Howard and Joanna both have their pistols out, but it doesn't look like they are in charge."

"The big guy's carrying a grenade in one hand, that's why," Fernandez said. "Probably already armed. That's who is in charge, and that's why they don't plug him. He falls, the grenade goes boom. Jesus, it's dark out here. I wish we could use the spookeyes."

"Why can't we?" Michaels asked.

"Flashlights will cause cutouts, they shine in our direction. Safety feature, otherwise it's like looking into the sun."

"Hostage scenario," Toni said. "You have an SOP for this, don't you?"

"Yes, ma'am — only not one set up to cover being in a foreign jungle with enemy troops breathing down our necks and our ride about to take off. Standard negotiations for hostage situations are based on psychology — and hours or days to work. We don't have the time."

Michaels, Toni, and Fernandez were in the bushes fifty yards ahead of the quartet moving toward them. The rest of Alpha Team was spread out behind the four on the trail.

"What do we do?" Toni whispered.

Fernandez said. "Look for an opportunity. Push comes to shove, we take the bad guy down and hope for minimal casualties."

"How much danger are Howard and Winthrop in, given the suits they are wearing?"

"Some," Fernandez said. "They will surely pick up damage, cuts, but the armor will stop most of a low-yield explosive shrapnel. It's the guy in the PJs and the big brown guy who are gonna get shredded for sure."

Toni said, "No great loss — except that Hughes might have left us some electronic bombs of his own. We can't let him die until we know for sure he didn't. And if he did, maybe it was Platt who set them up, if there are any. Can we afford to let both of them die? Don't we need at least one of them alive?"

"Yeah," Michaels said. "But the clock is ticking. We don't move, everybody dies." At that moment his virgil vibrated.

It was Gridley. "Got ‘em, Boss. Every last one of them."

"Good work, Jay," Alex said. "And just in time." Disconnecting, he looked around him. "Jay did it. Get ready to get our people out of there now." He stood and stepped out of the bushes.

"Alex, don't—!" Toni began.

Too late.

"Hold it right there, asshole!" Michaels yelled.

Behind him, Fernandez said to Toni, "I'll flank right, Commander, go left!"

The four people moving up the path stopped.

"Who the hell are you?" Platt said. "Get out here where I can — oh, hello! You're the Net Force honcho, aint'cha? What you doin' out here in the jungle, desk boy? Come to see how real men play?"

Howard made his move — he leaped, grabbed the hand holding the grenade, and squeezed it tight in both of his. "Shoot, Winthrop, shoot!"

Startled, Joanna pointed her pistol and fired, but Platt spun, swung the colonel around one-handed like swinging a small child, and the bullet from Joanna's pistol spanged! off the colonel's back armor.

A beat later, another bullet from somewhere boomed and whistled past, not hitting anything Michaels could see.

Jesus! Everybody dancing around wouldn't leave Fernandez or Toni a clear shot, Michaels knew. And if bullets started bouncing off armor, no telling where they might go — or who might catch one in an unprotected spot.

"Cease fire!" Fernandez yelled. He must have realized the danger too.

Things went into slow motion…

— Platt pulled a knife from his belt even as he danced around in a circle with Howard holding on to his other hand—

— Michaels ran toward the two struggling men, moving as if his feet were mired in thick mud—

— Platt slashed at Howard's arm and drew blood—

— Michaels got to the wrestling men, saw Platt grin, turn the knife in his direction, and cut at him, forcing Michaels to jump back—

— Platt turned back to Howard, raised the knife to Howard's throat, to a gap in the armor. Slow, oh, so, slow…

"Adios, black boy," Platt said. He didn't even raise his voice.

Michaels's gun was still in its holster; he was the only one close enough to shoot and hit Platt. He pulled it, fired without aiming — he couldn't miss this close — but Platt saw him reach, spun Howard around, and once again the bullet hit the colonel's armor—

Damn—

"John!"

— Michaels turned, saw Toni. She had already tossed something at Howard—

— the kris—

Reflexively, Platt batted at the thing he saw twirling in toward him, missed, but that meant his knife was away from Howard's throat—

— Howard let go of the grenade hand, snatched the wavy-bladed knife from the air, turned, twisted into Platt, stabbed as Platt stabbed—

— Platt snarled as his knife hit Howard's armor and skidded off—

— The kris's point slipped between Platt's ribs, the blade sinking in until the hilt almost touched the center of the big man's chest—

Platt moaned, blew out a breath, stabbed again, hit more armor. The knife actually dug in a little — then the blade snapped in half.

"Fuck," Platt said. He fell to his knees, dragging Howard down with him, pulling the kris from Howard's grasp.

Hughes screamed, "Jesus, Jesus, don't shoot me! Don't shoot me! Please!"

Platt toppled to the side, and when he did, he let go of the grenade.

— The grenade—

Michaels dropped the gun, dived, rolled, came up with the bomb, and threw it into the trees to his left. He hoped like hell none of the troops had circled back into that area, or that it didn't hit a tree and bounce right back—

"Down!" he yelled. "Down, down—"

He dropped.

Howard was still on his feet, staring at Platt.

One… two… three…

Boom!

The grenade went off, and metal sleeted through the trees and bushes, punching holes in leaves and bark.

Something burned along Michaels's arm. He frowned. What—!

A long time passed, a couple of thousand years, Michaels figured. Toni grabbed him, and he realized he was still alive. His ears rang.

He hugged her with his good arm, and watched his other arm bleed from the shrapnel gash on it. It didn't hurt, but it was putting out what seemed a goodly amount of red.

"Don't shoot!" Hughes said. He started to blubber, big tears streaming.

"Shut up," Howard said quietly.

Hughes shut up.

Howard moved to stand next to Michaels, holding his own arm, which was also bleeding. "Commander. You okay?"

"Yep. You, Colonel?"

"Better, now. Nice of you to drop by."

"We were in the neighborhood."

They looked down at Platt, who was still breathing. Platt said, "Damn. I can't believe it. A nigrah…"

Howard didn't say anything.

Platt stared at Howard. "I hate this fuckin' country," he said. "Kilt by a goddamned nigrah—"

Platt's last breath escaped and he collapsed.

Howard stared off into the forest. "He was right about the Germans."

"Excuse me?" Michaels said.

"I'll tell you about it later, Commander."

Behind them, Joanna Winthrop and Julio Fernandez were locked in a tight embrace.

"Well," Michaels said, "I hate to break this party up, but it would be a good idea for us to take our leave now."

"Amen, Commander. Amen."

Michaels bent, and with some difficulty, pulled the kris from Platt. He wiped it off on the man's shirt, then gave it back to Toni. "I think you are right, Toni. This is definitely a lucky thing to have around."

"Let's go, people! We got a helicopter to catch!"

They went.