by Tom Clancy
“He’s okay. I had him for Media One. What kind of register you got?”
“Eng Two, Math Three, Bioscience One, Media Two, Physical Three, History Two.”
“That’s pretty heavy redge for the quarter,” he said.
She shrugged. “Not so bad. I tested high ’cause my last school was a couple steps ahead. How about you?”
“Eng Two, Math Three, Media Three, Comp Four, and, uh, MH One.”
“Talk about my redge being heavy, whee-doggy, Ty! Comp Four? I didn’t think you could take that unless you were in high school. And MH? Isn’t that Military History?”
His turn to shrug. “My dad is military. I thought I’d check it out. He’s told me some interesting stuff. He used to throw, and there’s a section about throw sticks in the class.”
“No feek? Wow. A dad who throws? He any good?”
“Well . . . not really. He, like, did it as a kid, had a couple of wooden ’rangs, entry-level plywoods. But he knows all kinds of things about battles and like that, and how the abos used to use their sticks in fights.”
“Exemplary,” she said.
While they were talking, Tyrone felt a strange sensation, as if he was being . . . watched. He glanced around, being careful not to be too obvious. Maybe Essay was around and had targeted him.
Belladonna Wright cruised down the hall with two of her girlfriends, and she was looking right at Tyrone.
His shoulders went tight, his face hot, his bowels loose. He wanted to run and hide under a rock.
She was as beautiful as ever, Bella was, maybe more so, and his memory of sitting on her bed kissing her, putting his hands on her body . . .
Don’t go down that path, Tyrone. It will show. That would be embarrassing cubed.
But it was already too late. He slacked his grip on the carry bag, allowed it to hang lower, in front of his crotch.
“You okay, Tyrone?” Nadine said. “You look like you just swallowed a bug or something.”
“Ah, no—I mean, yes, I’m okay. I—uh, just remembered something I forgot to do. A chore. At home.”
Lame, Tyrone, blankwit slipbrain lame!
Bella steamed by like a battleship with two escort destroyers, awesome to behold in her beauty. She didn’t look at him when she passed.
Nadine must have caught something in his face because she turned to look.
“Whoa. Who is that?”
“Belladonna Wright,” Tyrone said. He fought to keep his voice from squeaking. He almost made it.
“Out of my league,” Nadine said. “Killer wallpaper.”
“Wallpaper?”
“Yeah, you know, it doesn’t have to do anything except hang there and be pretty. Bet she gets invited everywhere, just to be looked at. You know her?”
“Not really,” Tyrone said. He had thought he knew her, but he’d sure been wrong. She’d tossed him like a dirty sock.
“The beautiful get it free. When you’re like me, you have to work for it.”
“What, like you? You aren’t ugly or anything.”
She gave him another little shrug, looked away. “Put me next to that one—” she nodded in Bella’s direction “—I’d disappear.”
Tyrone didn’t say anything, but that was true enough.
“I hope she doesn’t have a brain, too. That would be the dregs—gorgeous and smart.”
She didn’t have to worry about that, Tyrone knew. Bella wasn’t completely dull, but she wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, either. He didn’t want to say that, though. Even after what she’d done, that seemed . . . disloyal, somehow. Besides, if word got back to Bonebreaker that Tyrone was doing oral graffiti on Bella, that would be bad. She might have half a dozen guys in orbit, but Bonebreaker was definitely one of them. Tyrone kept track. And they didn’t call him Bonebreaker for nothing.
“Hey, I gotta go,” Nadine said. “Keep a line open, okay? We’ll get together and throw sometime.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We need to do that.”
He watched her go. She had a muscular step, athletic and graceful, but she wasn’t in Bella’s class for looks, for sure.
Well, fine. Bella was history as far as he was concerned; gone, past, done, and he wasn’t looking for a replacement. Maybe he and Nadine would get together and throw ‘rangs, that was okay. She was good at that, he could learn from her, maybe. It wouldn’t be so bad to have somebody who was into the birds to work out with, even if she was on the plain side. She had an arm and she could make a ’rang fly, that was the thing. He didn’t have to kiss her.
Monday, April 4th
Quantico, Virginia
“Colonel?” It was Julio.
Howard looked up from the holoproj image over his desk, the report upon which he was laboring. There wasn’t any way to make it sound good, what had happened out there in Nevada. The only consolation was that he hadn’t lost any of his troops. Reader was going to need some extensive plastic surgery on her face, but she’d pull through. When she’d heard the launch pop, she’d been prone, facing away from the APW, but she’d turned to look. Her face shield was down, but because of the angle, a couple of the pellets had zipped under the bottom of shield, a freak of bad timing. If her head had been inclined a centimeter or two more, the Lexan would have stopped the shrapnel. As it was, she was lucky the pellets hadn’t gone deeper into her skull than they had. No brain damage—
“I hate to have to tell you this, John, but we’ve got a real problem.”
“Worse than yesterday?”
“Yes, sir, afraid so.”
“Wonderful. Spill it.”
“Lindholm and Hobbs are dead, both shot in the head at close range, small-caliber rounds.”
“What?”
“Their transport is gone. We’ve got teams in the air, deputies and state police on the ground looking, but no sign of it so far.”
Howard stared at him. How could this be?
“Forensics says the teeth and skull bits we brought back are human, but they came from somebody who’s been dead a long time. The blood and other bones, that piece of brain, they all belong to a member of the domestic Suidae family—a pig.”
The implications hit Howard fast and hard. “He’s alive. He wasn’t in the car.”
“Yes, sir, that’s the only thing that makes any sense. He must have hidden somewhere—I’ve got a search unit combing the area—waited until our men were off guard, then deleted them and stole their ride.”
“Shit,” Howard said.
“My sentiments exactly. We underestimated this guy bad, John. He foxed us.”
“Not we, Julio. Me. The buck stops here.”
Fernandez stared at the floor. He knew it was true.
Howard stared into space. This was terrible. In the years he’d been running the Net Force military arm, he’d had several troops wounded in brush firefights, but he’d never had one killed. And now, because he had screwed up, he had two soldiers down. Oh, man!
And worse, the guy who had done it had gotten away.
Now what was he going to do?
Monday, April 4th
London, England
“You sure you don’t want to go?” Toni said.
“I’d like to, I really would,” Alex said, “but I need to go over all this crap.” He waved at the laptop on the bed table.
“I could stay and help you.”
“I appreciate it, but you can’t read it for me, you might as well take a break while you can. Go, work out, burn off some tension. You’ll feel better, and you can spell me later. This class is important to you. I saw your face when you got back from it. Go. Have fun.”
She nodded. She could see his point. She really did want to go to silat class, and Alex was right, her mind did work better after she exercised. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll be back in about three hours.”
He leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips, then smiled at her. “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”
The cab ride though London to t
he school in Clapham was an adventure in itself, and by the time Toni got there, it was growing dark. But she was fifteen minutes early, time enough to change and stretch before the class started.
Inside, eight or ten students were warming up, doing djurus and practicing two-person drills. Toni went to the bathroom, changed into sweatpants, wrestling shoes, a sports bra, and a T-shirt. She joined the other students and began doing leg stretches. She could still do the splits, front and side, but it took longer to warm into them than it had when she’d been fifteen. Leg flexibility helped—not so much in the Bukti, but it was a definite advantage in Serak. The basic turnaround required a drop from a high stance to a low one as you twisted, and the lower, the better. Tight hamstrings made that hard to do.
Guru Stewart arrived, already dressed to work out. He came over to Toni. “Glad to see you made it, Guru. I’m sure we have much to teach each other.”
Toni smiled. “I don’t know how much I can teach you, Guru, but I sure have a lot I can learn.”
He returned her smile, and she felt a small sense of triumph at being able to make him grin.
Stewart walked to the front of the room and turned around. “All right, then. Shall we get started?”
Toni felt a rush of energy as she lined up to bow in. Until now, all of her teaching had been private. She’d never actually gone through a formal class from beginning to end. She was thrilled at the chance to do it.
Michaels pored over the small flatscreen’s holoproj logs, scanning files related to the British investigation of the hacker’s assault. It was tedious work, made worse because they spelled things wrong: labour, colour, like that. He kept mentally correcting the odd words when he came to them, and it slowed his scan speed.
His virgil announced an incoming call.
“Telecom from Angela Cooper,” the virgil’s voxchip said. He had switched the device from Jay’s musical joke to vox, unable to listen to the fanfare after hearing that Jay was in the hospital.
“Connect,” Michaels said.
“Commander Michaels? Angela Cooper here. I have some eyes-only material to add to your reading list. Mightn’t I bring it round?”
“Sure. I’ll be here for the rest of the evening.”
“Shouldn’t take that long. I’m in the lobby.”
He grinned. “Come on up.”
There was a tap at the hotel room’s door two minutes later. Michaels opened it to see that Cooper could dress down as well as up. She wore a pair of snug-fitting blue jeans, oxblood Doc Martin boots, and a black scoopnecked blouse. She carried another flatscreen, but if she was armed, he couldn’t see where she might be hiding a taser or a pistol in those clothes. Very attractive.
“Commander.”
“Come in.”
She did, and offered him the flatscreen. “Not much new here, but there are a couple of things we’ve gotten from the Pakistanis you might want to look at.”
He took the flatscreen. “How goes the airline snafu?”
“Better. Most of the affected computers have been restored. You still wouldn’t want to be flying into Rio tonight unless your pilot was very good indeed, but the situation is improved. They lost a freight jet at Auckland International, three men killed, but so far, no other crashes involving loss of life.”
He nodded.
The MI-6 agent looked around. “Nice room. Ms. Fiorella about?”
“No, she’s at a martial arts class.”
“Ah. Remind me not to get on her bad side. Well, I should be going, I don’t want to interrupt you in your work. We’re very happy to have you aboard, sir.”
“Call me Alex, please. All this commander and sir stuff is for the office.”
“Right. Then you must call me Angela.”
She glanced at her watch.
“Got a hot date?”
She blinked. “What? Oh, oh, no. I was just wondering if I had time to grab a bite to eat before I’m off to my sister’s. I’m supposed to baby-sit with my niece this evening. She’s eight.”
Michaels smiled again. “About my daughter’s age.”
“I didn’t realize you were married.”
“Divorced, actually.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was a relief. Except for Susan—that’s my daughter—everybody is better off.”
“I understand. I was married briefly myself. Awful experience, there toward the end. No children, fortunately, though I do enjoy them. Lucky for me, my sister’s done all the work. Being Auntie Angie who gets to bring presents and spoil the child is ever so much more fun. How’s the food here in the hotel, is it passable?”
“They make good roast beef and Rueben sandwiches in the pub,” he said. He looked at the two flatscreens with the secret information. “I could use a break myself. Mind if I join you?”
“Not at all, please do.”
She smiled and, for a second, Michaels felt a stab of discomfort. Toni was gone, and here he was about to dine with the beautiful Ms. Cooper.
Well, it wasn’t as if he was about to dine on her. They were just having a sandwich, that was all. A man had to eat, didn’t he?
Right. Sure.
He collected the second flatscreen. He wouldn’t feel good about leaving them in the room, even though both were password protected. Given some of the villains Net Force had gone up against, that didn’t seem very much protection.
Angela walked to the door, opened it, and smiled at him again. It seemed a warm smile to him.
Just a sandwich, that was all. He had Toni, a woman he loved, and that was all he needed, thank you very much.
12
Tuesday, April 5th
London, England
Peel stopped into a sandwich shop on Oxford Street, a place open at odd hours, so that you could eat lunch at midnight, if that was your pleasure. After army field rations, anything on relatively fresh bread stood well in comparison, and he was fond of the egg salad they made here.
He took his sandwich, a packet of crisps, and a can of cola to one of the small, circular tables by the window. As he ate, he watched the passersby, mostly civilians scurrying about on their business. The birds were nice, and high platform shoes were apparently in vogue again. Some of the teenage girls who clopped past the sandwich shop wore shoes with soles a good six inches thick. Amazing what people would do to themselves in the name of fashion.
Peel liked sex well enough, though he didn’t feel much like spending time with the women afterward. Or before, actually. There were always girls of the evening about where soldiers spent off-duty time, and if one took the proper precautions against disease, one could enjoy as much female contact as one could afford. With his current job, he could afford as much as he could stand, which translated into sessions of an hour or so once or twice a week. Different bird each time, from assorted out-call services, so as not to establish a pattern that an enemy might track. A man who thought too much with his small head might well lose the larger head.
As he started on the second half of his sandwich, entertaining some vaguely erotic thoughts, he got an ugly surprise. Peter Bascomb-Coombs appeared next to him. The man smiled and said, “You don’t mind if I have a seat, do you, Major?”
Without waiting for an answer, the scientist slid onto one of the high-backed chrome and plastic stools. He waved at the sandwich. “Any good?”
Well, here was a nasty coincidence. How had Bascomb-Coombs come to be here? He’d not been to this place as long as he had been under surveillance, some weeks now. Well, all right, Peel could brush it off as happenstance—
As if reading his mind, the man said, “No, I didn’t just happen by, old chap. I came to see you.”
“Really? About what?” Peel managed. He put the remainder of his sandwich down, his appetite suddenly gone. He wiped at his lips with a napkin. His sense of danger was piqued. How could the man have known he was here?
“About mutual benefit,” Bascomb-Coombs said.
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.�
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“Come, come, Peel. Were you really taken in by my absent-minded scientist act? I suspect not. Just as I have been aware of your surveillance of my person since the beginning.”
“Professor, I’m afraid I don’t know what you are—”
“Let’s dispense with the fencing, shall we? How much?”
“Excuse me?” Peel stalled, trying to make sense of this suddenly too-knowing apparition. This was definitely a bad show.
“To have you on my team, Major. You and I both know that Goswell is off his trolley with his mad scheme to bring back the glory days of the Empire. He really imagines that setting the third-world wogs at each other’s throats and stirring up the Americans and Chinese and Russians will somehow cause Britain to rule the waves again. Surely you cannot believe this?”
Peel was not stupid. The foundations of his job had just shifted, an unforeseen and formidable earthquake had rattled them, and things were, of a moment, changed. He was a pragmatist; best to see where this was leading. He said, “No, of course not.”
Bascomb-Coombs smiled widely. “I thought you were smarter than that. You see, his lordship has me in this neat little pigeonhole, the idiot savant, the boy genius who forgets to do up his fly when he leaves the loo, and he needs to go on believing that. Right now, he controls my project, though I will remedy that soon enough. Sooner or later, your watch team might have gotten in my way, so I decided that it would be best to deal directly with you. Your men are loyal, are they not?”
“They are,” Peel said.
“Good, good. So the only question is, what will it take for you to continue to tell Goswell what a half-wit I am when I am away from my computer? I shan’t require the deception much longer, but the timing is critical just now.”
Peel was a military officer; he had seen action. There were times when you had the luxury to sit and meditate, to plan your attacks and defenses, and there were times when you quickly aimed and fired your weapon and thought about it afterward. He made his decision on the spot: “A piece of your action,” he said.