by Tom Clancy
Drayne had done a tour there once. The winery was tiny, a hole-in-the-wall place, and before he was done, the Wine Nazi had him climbing up on barrels to taste the whites and reds right out of the casks, sucked it out with a long rubber tube and dribbled into a glass. And after a few sips of that, the guy had him helping hand-riddle the champagne bottles. They had to be turned so much every day, so the silt would settle and all.
Drayne was an appreciative audience. The guy was a certified genius when it came to wine, no question, and the champagne was the best of the lot. Of course, the Wine Nazi wouldn’t let him call it champagne, since technically that meant it had to come from that particular region of France, so he called it sparkling wine. Even though it made the average good vintage of the French stuff taste like stale ginger ale.
That was the stuff you saved for special occasions, definitely first-bottle, and not something you shared with Misty-Bunny-Buffy just to get laid. He had six bottles left, and six months left before he could buy another case. If he was lucky. So he had to ration it, one bottle a month, no more, and even then, he might have to wait. Terrible situation.
He grinned. He sure had a lot to complain about, didn’t he? Living in a big house on the beach in Malibu, good-looking naked woman in his bed, a shitload of money, six bottles of the best champagne anybody in this town had. Hell, it really didn’t get much better than that, did it?
Since it didn’t look like Tad was going to go ballistic and destroy the neighborhood, maybe he should go back to bed and nudge Honey awake. He was sure he could think up something new for them to try.
Yep. That seemed like an excellent idea. He lifted his glass in a toast to his own cleverness. Hi, ho, Bobby. Away!
He headed back toward the bedroom.
* * *
Tad felt the power.
It coursed through him like an electric current, filling him with pulsing flashes of juice, set him humming like a dynamo at full spin.
He was a god out here, deciding the fate of all who passed. At his whim, he could strike them down, become Shiva the destroyer, changing the very configuration of the planet with a mere wave of his hand. At his whim, which was how gods operated, far as he could tell.
He took a breath, and the sensation made orgasm seem pale in comparison. The thrills ran through his entire body, he could feel it everywhere at once, in his hands, his body, even his toes. Man. What a rush!
He was a god. Able to do anything he wished.
And what he wished to do right now was… walk. To stride down the beach, to pass among his people, disguised as a reedy, tubercular man all dressed in black, but beyond comprehension to mere mortals.
As far above them as a man was above an ant.
They couldn’t know. He felt sorry for them, being so weak, so stupid. So pitiful.
He started to walk, feeling the sand like a living thing under his boots, hearing the soft chee-chee-chee squeaks it made with each step. He was aware of the evening breeze touching his skin, the smell of salt and iodine from the sea, the taste of the very air. He was aware of everything, not just on this beach, but radiating out to galaxies a billion light-years from where he walked. It was all his territory, all of it. If he reached up his arms, he could encompass it all in his grasp.
He laughed.
Ahead, somebody finished up a Frisbee game and headed for their towels. A beach volleyball game wound down. Traffic roared past on the highway, the cars and trucks taking on the aspect of dragons: fearsome creatures in their element, but creatures who knew better than to cross his path. He was Tad the Bershaw, and any being with enough sense to see him would know he was to be feared.
He walked through his kingdom, feeling for the moment benevolent in his omnipotence. He would suffer them to live.
For now, anyway.
Jayland/Quantico, Virginia
Jay Gridley had always been a man who enjoyed moving fast. When he slipped into his sensory gear and the net blossomed before him, infinite in its possibilities, he had always chosen speed as his vehicle. If he drove, it was a Viper, a rocket with wheels that smoked everything else on the road. Sometimes he flew — rocket packs, jets, copters, whatever. He created virtual scenarios that he zipped through like rifle rounds, clean, fast, slick as a tub full of grease.
Oh, now and then he would do period. He’d make a Western town and mosey into town on a horse. Or a boat. But getting there in a hurry was his pleasure, and most of his programs reflected that. Getting business done had always been about getting it done, not about the trip.
Not today. Today, Jettin’ Jay was out for a stroll, through an Eastern garden. It wasn’t strictly accurate, his program, it had mixed elements in it: Right where he was at the moment stood a Japanese tea house with a little brook running past it. Just ahead was a Zen garden, three rocks in a bed of raked sand. But over to the left was a Shaolin temple, monks out front doing kung fu, and to the right, a second temple, straight out of Bangkok, with traditional Siamese dancers moving like snakes. The Taj Mahal was past that, and there were even some pyramids off a ways behind him. It was a veritable theme park of Eastern religious thought.
The sun shined brightly, the day was warm with a little breeze, and the smell of jasmine and sandalwood mixed with roses and musk.
Welcome to the land of the happy, nice people, Jay. Your kind of place.
He smiled, walking slowly, not in the least bit of a hurry. What he wanted was here somewhere, but you know what? He would get to it when he got to it.
To be honest, he hadn’t exactly embraced the tenets of Buddhism. The eightfold this, or the four ways of that. But there was an energy about what Saji did and how she related to it that he did find worth thinking about. He’d never considered himself much of anything, other than a computer jock, but this go-with-the-flow stuff — that was Taoism rather than Buddhism, right? — well, here of late, it had a whole bunch of appeal.
Thank Sojan Rinpoche for that, along with her other, more earthy talents.
A bee flew past, buzzing, looking for pollen.
Ah, yes, what could be better than a stroll in the cosmic gardens—
“Hey, Jay, you awake?” came the somewhat dissonant voice, intruding on his scenario.
Jay dropped out of VR, and was at once back in his office at Net Force. Standing in the doorway were two coworkers, Alan and Charlie.
“That door is supposed to be locked,” Jay said, mildly irritated.
“Yep, and if you hadn’t wanted somebody good enough to rascal the sucker, you’d have hired somebody other than us,” Charlie said. He waved his key card. “You ought to change the codes every year or two, Jay.”
“Would that do any good?”
“About as much good as me changing the codes on my bike did,” Alan said.
Jay laughed. He had broken into the comp on Alan’s fuel-cell scooter and programmed it so it wouldn’t go faster than nine miles an hour. Well, that was the old Jay. He was a new man these days. No more sophomoric games.
“C’mon, we’re going to Pud’s for burgers and beer.”
Jay spoke without thinking. “Nah, I’ll pass. I’m giving up eating flesh.”
Both Alan and Charlie stared for maybe two seconds before they cracked up. They laughed. They laughed harder. They fucking howled.
“Flesh? Flesh, you said? Ah, hahahaaa!”
“Gee, Jay, we wouldn’t want you to kill and eat the waitress or anything. Flesh? Oh, yeah, I can hear that: ‘Excuse me, ma’am, could I get a fleshburger on an onion bun, and could you sprinkle it with a little ground-up human skull?’ ”
“I dunno, Charlie, come to think of it, maybe we ought to skip Pud’s and go to that new place, you know, Cannibal Moe’s, instead. I hear they have a real good chicken fried thigh there.”
“Nah, Alan, I think we should go to the new Donner’s Pass Pizza, and pick up a pizza with fingers and nipples. Or maybe the spaghetti and eyeballs.”
“Fuck off and die,” Jay said. “You know what I mean.
”
The two men looked at each other and shook their heads in mock sadness.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Alan said. “The man is in love. Next thing you know, he’s gonna be wearing a cowled robe to work and doing Gregorian chants up and down the halls.”
“Yeah, and sprinkling rose petals everywhere and smiling at everybody like a fool.”
“Go away,” Jay said.
They did, cackling down the hall as they went.
Well. That certainly went well, didn’t it? Maybe you might want to be a little bit more low key in your conversion to vegetarianism, hmm?
Too late now. By tomorrow morning, this would be all over the building. He knew the jokes would be coming, and he had better recode his lock and his access, or his computer would be full of crap, too.
Still, he grinned. He could stand a little ribbing. He was, after all, the new, improved Jay Gridley, much more mellow than the old Jay had been. Much more.
8
Washington, D.C.
Toni came up from sleep all of a moment. She looked at the clock on the bedside table. Two A.M., and she was wide awake, not a trace of drowsiness. Well, wasn’t that terrific?
What, she wondered, had awakened her? Another hormone-fueled dream she couldn’t remember?
She glanced at Alex, who slept soundly, tangled in the sheet and a couple of pillows. Sometimes he snored, and that might do it, but while he was breathing deeply, he wasn’t making any noise to speak of.
She listened carefully, but the house was silent. No footsteps skulking down the hall, no creaks of doors being stealthily opened. No feeling of intrusion.
Was it because she needed to go pee?
No, not really, she always needed to go pee these days, and the urge wasn’t particularly strong. She had fallen asleep plenty of times needing to go more than now. Still, as long as she was awake…
She got up, went to the bathroom, did what she needed to do, and padded back to bed. Alex didn’t stir. You could come in and walk off with the place, and he wouldn’t wake up, he slept heavy. He had told her he hadn’t done that before they got married, but now that she was here, he could could relax. That amused and pleased her on one level; on another level, it was mildly irritating. So she had to be responsible for their safety after hours? Not that she wasn’t qualified, but still…
She slipped carefully back into bed and began practicing her djurus mentally, going through them step by step in her mind’s eye, striving to capture all the details of each move. That usually would put her to sleep before she got very far along, but it wasn’t working tonight. She managed to go all the way through the eighteen on the right side, and was halfway through doing them on the left when the phone rang.
It managed less than half a cycle before Toni grabbed it. “Hello?”
“Toni? It’s me, Mama.”
Toni felt her bowels and belly twist suddenly. Mama would never call at two in the morning unless somebody was seriously injured or dying. “Is it Poppa?”
“No, dear, Poppa’s fine. But I’m afraid it’s Mrs. DeBeers.”
“Guru? What happened?”
“She had a stroke. About fifteen minutes ago.”
Toni glanced at the clock again. Exactly when she had awakened. Was this some weird coincidence, or were she and her elderly teacher psychically connected as Guru sometimes said?
“She’s on the way to the hospital,” Mama continued. “When it happened, she managed to reach her medical alert button, and the paramedics and ambulances woke us all up. Poppa is going to the hospital with your brother. I thought you’d want to know.”
Alex finally woke up. “Toni?”
She waved him quiet. “Which hospital, Mama?”
“Saint Agnes.”
“Thanks for calling me, Mama. I’ll talk to you later.”
She cradled the phone. Alex was sitting up. “Who—?”
“Guru had a stroke,” she said.
“How bad?”
“I don’t know.”
He nodded. “I’ll drive you to the airport.”
She blinked at him. Just like that, no question, he knew she was going. “Thank you, Alex. I love you.”
“I know. I love you, too. I’ll call and get you a flight while you get dressed.”
Toni nodded, already up and headed for the shower. Guru had been her teacher for more than fifteen years. Toni had started learning the art of pentjak silat from the old lady when she was already past retirement age, and she was eighty-three now. Guru was still built like a squat brick, but even so, she was not a young woman. A stroke.
Dear God.
She turned the shower control on and waited for the water to warm up. Was she supposed to fly in her condition? Well, supposed to or not, she was going. Guru was like her own grandmother; whatever was happening to her, she wasn’t going to suffer through it alone.
Alex was mostly quiet during the drive to the airport, though he did offer to go with her.
“Nothing you can do to help,” she said.
“Not her. But I can be there for you.”
She smiled at him. “I knew there was a reason I married you. Keep the home fires burning. I’ll call as soon as I know what’s happening.”
It was hard to think about Guru dying. She had been so much a part of Toni’s day-to-day life from her early teenage years until she left for college. Every morning, they’d practice before Toni went off to school. Every afternoon, after she had done her homework, Toni would head across the street to the old woman’s place, and they would practice the Indonesian martial art for an hour or two. Guru DeBeers had become part of the family, was included in all the gatherings: Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, birthday parties, weddings, graduations. She had finally given up smoking that nasty old pipe, but she still drank half a gallon of coffee a day and ate whatever she pleased. And even though she was in her eighties, Guru could still give most big strong men fits if they bothered her enough. She was slower and frailer, but her mind and skills were still sharp.
Toni hadn’t been to Mass except with Mama on home visits for a long time, but she offered a silent prayer: Please let her live.
9
Net Force HQ, Quantico, Virginia
Michaels hadn’t managed to get back to sleep after Toni left for New York, so he was a little tired. Fortunately, as slow as things were, he could probably take off early.
He had a partial staff meeting scheduled, and when he got there, his people were already at the conference table. John Howard, Jay Gridley, and the just-promoted Julio Fernandez. A few months ago, Fernandez’s wife, Joanna, would have been there, as would Toni. He missed seeing them.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Commander,” Howard and Fernandez said in unison.
“Hey, I thought it was your turn to bring the doughnuts, boss,” Jay said as Michaels sat. This was an old joke; they never ate doughnuts at the morning meetings.
“You didn’t give up sugar when you gave up flesh?” Fernandez said.
“Very funny, Julio.”
Michaels raised an eyebrow.
Fernandez answered the unasked question: “Our computer wizard here is turning Buddhist. No more eating flesh for him. Gonna step around ants on the sidewalk, too, I expect, chanting om mani padme hum while he does.”
Michaels shook his head. Never a dull moment around here.
“Okay, what do we have? John?”
General Howard led off with his weekly report. New gear, new troops, old business. Things were slow. They’d be taking various units out on training runs over the next couple of weeks, unless something came up.
Jay didn’t have a lot to report, either. “Nothing on your dope dealers,” he finished. “The DEA’s info was pretty sparse and dead-ended quick. I’ll run some other things into the mix and see what comes up.”
Michaels turned to Howard. “I sent a report your way, but in case you haven’t had a chance to read it, we’re helping the DEA run down some kind of new designer d
rug that turns the users into temporary supermen. And sometimes it makes them jump off tall buildings.”
Howard said, “Yes, sir, I saw the report. Thor’s Hammer.”
Michaels said, “Here’s another little twist. I got a call from an NSA guy yesterday. He’s made an appointment to come see me today, in about an hour, my secretary tells me. He says it’s about this designer drug thing. I’m curious as to why.”
“What’s his name?” Jay asked. “The NSA guy?”
“Last name, George, first name, Zachary.”
Jay shrugged, but tapped it into his flatscreen’s manual keyboard. “Never heard of him, but I’ll scope him out.”
“John?”
“Doesn’t ring any bells with me, either,” he said. “I can check with my Pentagon contacts.”
“Why would the National Security Agency be interested in this?” Michaels asked. “Dope isn’t in their mission statement, is it?”
Howard said, “Mission statements aren’t worth the paper they are written on, sir. Everybody stretches them to fit whatever they need.”
Michaels smiled. He had done that himself more than a few times, and everybody here knew it.
“I suppose I can wait until the man gets here and ask him, but I somehow doubt he’ll be entirely forthcoming. Anybody have any thoughts I might pursue?”
“Overspent their budget and need a little extra cash?” Jay said. “Wouldn’t be the first time an agency sold drugs to make up a shortfall.”