Net Force Part 8

"Hi, Megan. What's up?"

"Susie, why don't you go make Mom a cup of coffee, okay?"

Michaels suddenly felt as if he was in free fall.

A moment pa.s.sed. "Look, Alex, I know you put your job at the top of your list, but your daughter still thinks the moon rises in her father's shadow. Are you going to be able to break loose and come to her play?"

The years of arguments threatened to break out again--fresh blood from old wounds never healed, at least not on his heart. He didn't want to fight with her. "That's in October, right?"

"You remembered. Amazing."

She could still cut him with her sarcasm as easily as a new razor-sliced paper.

This whole deal with Day's death would probably be over by then; if not, it was doubtful it would still be boiling so hot he couldn't step away from the stove long enough to see his daughter's second-grade play. He said, "I'll be there."

"You sure?"

"I said I'd be there." She could always do that, too, spark him to anger without raising her voice, with the most innocent phrase. You sure? You sure? If she'd called him a d.a.m.ned liar, it would have sounded exactly the same to him. If she'd called him a d.a.m.ned liar, it would have sounded exactly the same to him.

There was an uncomfortable pause. In the last year they were together, there had been more of those uncomfortable moments than anything else. Not so much anger as resignation. The inevitable end of their marriage had oozed toward them like a glacier, slow but inexorable, grinding flat everything in its path.

She said, "Listen, there's something else. I'm seeing someone. I wanted you to hear it from me."

The coldness in his belly hardened into shards of liquid oxygen so frigid they stopped his breathing. When he found his voice again, he put everything he had into keeping it level, light, mildly curious.

"Anybody I know?"

"No. He's a teacher at Susie's school. Not her teacher."

"Well. Congratulations."

"We aren't about to get married, Alex, we're just seeing each other socially. You've been dating, haven't you?"

He waited just a little too long before he replied: "Sure."

"Jesus, Alex." Alex."

And that that summed up years of discussions, too. He hadn't been with another woman since he and Megan had split. He'd thought about it a few times. Certainly he still noticed attractive women, even had brief fantasies. But he'd never acted on them. Once the fantasy pa.s.sed, the reality was still out there, the risk. And he still missed Megan, despite all that had happened. She'd been the love of his life. She always would be. If she called and asked him to come home, he'd go, even if it cost him everything else--the condo, the car, the job. He hadn't known that before, but he knew it now. Too late, of course. It wasn't going to happen. They were divorced. She was seeing another man. Maybe even sleeping with him. summed up years of discussions, too. He hadn't been with another woman since he and Megan had split. He'd thought about it a few times. Certainly he still noticed attractive women, even had brief fantasies. But he'd never acted on them. Once the fantasy pa.s.sed, the reality was still out there, the risk. And he still missed Megan, despite all that had happened. She'd been the love of his life. She always would be. If she called and asked him to come home, he'd go, even if it cost him everything else--the condo, the car, the job. He hadn't known that before, but he knew it now. Too late, of course. It wasn't going to happen. They were divorced. She was seeing another man. Maybe even sleeping with him.

It further churned his stomach, made him want to throw up, the idea of Megan naked with another man, laughing, making love, doing things he and she had once done. What was worse was knowing that she wanted another man--and not him. Knowing that she would enjoy enjoy it . . . it . . .

Michaels shook his head. He had to get off this track. He didn't have the right to feel this way anymore--if he'd ever had that right.

"I have to go. Tell Susie I love her."

"Alex--"

"Good-bye, Megan. Take care."

He put the phone's receiver gently back into the cradle, then looked at the purple car upon which he now spent each spare minute. Usually, he was able to fend off the feelings about Megan. As long as he kept busy, as long as he didn't let himself stop and think about it, he was fine. But when he heard her voice, when her words caused him to paint a picture of her in his mind, it was impossible.

Maybe there was a magic spell somewhere that would erase all the bad between them; maybe there were some magic words that would put them back together as they had been when Susie had still been in their future, or even when she'd been a fat and laughing babe toddling around that big old house in Idaho.

Maybe there were such words--but Alex Michaels had not found them.

Sunday, September 19th, 11:15 a.m. Washington, D.C.

Toni Fiorella had just gotten off the phone with her mother, a Sunday morning ritual that usually ran twenty or thirty minutes before Mama began getting antsy: "This must be costing you a fortune, baby," Mama would say.

No matter how many times Toni had told her mother she could afford a couple of hours of long-distance charges a month between Washington and the Bronx, it didn't seem to sink in. Mama remembered the days when long-distance phone calls had been a major luxury, reserved for birth or funeral announcements, maybe a quick ring on holidays. And the idea of getting a computer and simply using Email or voxtrans was out. Mama did not hold with such things.

For the last fifteen minutes while they visited, Toni had been puttering around the kitchen. She'd rinsed dishes, put them into the washer, wiped the counters and chopping block, even dust-mopped the floor. The apartment was small, but the kitchen was bigger than usual in a place this size, and the vinyl floor looked enough like real wood to fool most people at first glance. A nice place.

As she was putting the dust mop away, the phone rang.

Was that her mother calling back for something?

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Deputy Commander Fiorella?"

"Yes?" The voice had a familiar sound, but she couldn't place it.

"This is Jesse Russell. We, uh, met the other day."

A Southern accent, the voice. Wait--she had it. "Spandex."

"Ma'am?"

Toni hadn't realized she'd said the word aloud until he'd responded. She flushed, glad the visual wasn't on. "Sorry, Mr. Russell, never mind. What do you want?"

"Well, ma'am, I wanted to apologize. For that business in the gym. I was showing off for Barry and I kinda put my brain on hold. I shouldn't have acted that way. It was stupid and I'm sorry."

Toni grinned. Well, well. Would wonders never cease? An a.s.shole apologizing. And because she knew she shouldn't have done what she she had done, she could be gracious about it now. "It's all right, Mr. Russell, forget about it." had done, she could be gracious about it now. "It's all right, Mr. Russell, forget about it."

"No, ma'am, I'm not likely to forget that anytime soon. I was, uh, wondering if maybe you might be willing to show me some more of the style sometime? You know, so I could see what you did instead of decorating the floor with my backside?"

Toni chuckled. Maybe he wasn't so bad after all. He had a certain charm. She said, "If we run into each other at the gym, sure."

"Well, Miz Fiorella, if you could tell me when you might be working out again, I could arrange my schedule to break loose for a while. They keep us pretty busy in cla.s.s, but we are allowed some free time now and then."

Toni thought about it for a second. Was this guy hitting on her? Or was he really interested in learning silat silat? Background in another art was a hindrance sometimes, but not always. And Guru kept telling her she needed students, that she'd never really master the art until she taught it.

"I sometimes do mornings, but I usually work out on my lunch hour, noon to one. You could drop by if you want."

"Oh, yes, ma'am, I want."

"Might as well drop the 'ma'am' and 'Miz Fiorella' stuff. I'm Toni."

"I'm Rusty to my friends," he said. "Thank you. You gonna be at the gym Monday?"

"Unless something comes up."

"I'll see you there, ma'am--I mean, Toni."

She found herself smiling as she put the dust mop away. Spandex--Russell--had been pretty much a typical macho idiot from his reactions both before and immediately after she'd decked him. But this call, a.s.suming there weren't any hidden agendas in it, made up for some of that. Most people deserved a second chance most of the time. Lord knows she'd stepped into things she'd regretted, and had been glad to be on the receiving end of somebody's forgiveness. People could change. She had to believe that. And he wasn't all that bad-looking, either.

She immediately felt a twitch of disloyalty. Whatever else Russell might be, he was not Alex, in no way, shape or form. Alex was who she wanted. And sooner or later, if she worked hard enough, maybe he would want her, too.

But a student wouldn't be so bad. And who knows? A good-looking student might give Alex a jolt, show him Toni was somebody to look at. It couldn't hurt.

Sunday, September 19th, 11:15 a.m. Quantico Jay Gridley cranked up the big motor on the Viper, and left a trail of smoking rubber as he popped the clutch and burned up the freeway's on-ramp. Why not? He didn't have to buy new tires in VR.

He had spent a good part of the last few days cruising the net, looking for more roadblocks, but so far, nothing out of the ordinary. Oh, yeah, sure, there were traffic snarls, a fender bender here or there, but those were normal.

He was on the 405 close to LAX when a black kid on a big hog whined past, doing eighty. Gridley smiled at the kid on the Harley. He knew who that was, even if the VR image was a little older and more muscular.

He upshifted, felt the Viper strain to be released and let it go as he pressed the accelerator to the floor. The big V-10 rumbled, roared, and the traffic around him turned into a painting.

He surged the little car from sixty to ninety in a couple of seconds. Ka-wham! Ka-wham!

Born to be wild, and if you can't drive it, pal, park park it! it!

He pulled alongside the black kid on the bike, grinned, honked his horn.

In reality, the two of them were linked via the net in a real-time on-line connection, much as twenty million or so other people did every day on the big commercial nets, but the VR visual mode made it so much more fun, when the software allowed for overlapping scenarios like this one.

"Hey, Tyrone!"

The kid looked over and grinned, showing bright and even teeth. "Hey, Jay Gee! What're you doin' here?"

"Looking for trouble."

"I'm with that program!"

"Yo, there's a truck stop up ahead on the right. You want to pull over and have a cup of coffee? I need to ask you something."

"Sure, nopraw, Jay."

The kid goosed the bike and leaned into the wind, the airstream ruffling his clothes and even his tight curly hair. He pulled away, and Gridley let him get ahead.

Nopraw? Jay considered it for a moment. Ah. Jay considered it for a moment. Ah. No problem. No problem.

He wasn't that that old, but the cutting edge was always moving, and he knew he wasn't on it anymore. The slangspeak hot when he was a kid was ancient history to somebody Tyrone's age. "Nopraw" would be like his "Sweat not," or his father's "No probleemo, Batman." The language shifted, changed and sometimes, circled around completely. "Cool" became "hot" became "bad" became "groovy" became "cool" again. No way you could keep up. old, but the cutting edge was always moving, and he knew he wasn't on it anymore. The slangspeak hot when he was a kid was ancient history to somebody Tyrone's age. "Nopraw" would be like his "Sweat not," or his father's "No probleemo, Batman." The language shifted, changed and sometimes, circled around completely. "Cool" became "hot" became "bad" became "groovy" became "cool" again. No way you could keep up.

He was twenty-eight, but talking to a kid like Tyrone made him feel like a pile of dinosaur bones. He shook his head.

Then again, kids who rode the net seriously saw and heard things that adults missed, and Gridley wanted to use every resource he could get his hands on. This was about getting the job done, not about who lifted what.

He put his blinker on and pulled into the exit lane. If things kept going the way they were, by the time Tyrone was Gridley's age, he'd be doing stuff that would make this look like stick figures carved into stone.

Sunday, September 19th, 10:45 p.m. Washington, D.C.

It was a quiet Sunday evening, the fall air still warm and sticky with humidity. Alexander Michaels's condo was dark, save for a light in an upstairs bedroom. A plain-vanilla, government-issue, black-tire fedmobile with two FBI agents in it sat parked at the curb across the street. They weren't trying to hide, and that was good, because they might as well have a big flashing red neon sign mounted on the car's top announcing they were who they were: Cops! Cops! Cops! Cops! Cops! Cops!

The two men in the car listened to a radio playing country music at a low volume, and played chess using a small magnetic board mounted on the dash. Now and then, one of them would glance at Michaels's place, or up and down the street, checking auto or foot traffic.

There weren't many cars or pedestrians at this hour in this neighborhood on a Sunday. Most of the people in these houses had to get up and go into the office on Monday morning; most of them were home by now, watching TV or reading or doing whatever else upper-middle-cla.s.s people did behind their walls when tomorrow was a workday.

How odd it must be, to have to get up and go to a real job every day. She wondered how people did it--worked at places where they hated what they did, for people they could barely stand. How could you make yourself spend your life without any joy, any pa.s.sion, any real satisfaction? Millions did it--billions did it--but it was beyond her. She'd rather be dead than forced to endure the mundane lives most people led. What was the point?

A Mercury Protection Systems neighborhood patrol car rolled slowly down the street. The uniformed driver in the vehicle--offering "Fast Armed Response," according to the door logos--nodded at the two FBI men as he cruised past them. They nodded back.

A quiet residential street. Nothing out of the ordinary. Moms and pops and two-point-three rugrats, dogs, cats, mortgages, unending blandness. Everything in its proper, boring, dull place.

Well. One One thing was not quite as it seemed. . . . thing was not quite as it seemed. . . .

The Selkie walked along the sidewalk approaching Michaels's condo. The condo was on the west side of the road, and she was eighty yards shy of it, moving slowly north. She had already examined the agents' car with a twelve-power spookeye monocular. The tiny starlight scope was state-of-the-art Israeli issue, made at the Bethlehem Electronics plant. The scope had excellent optics, and offered a good view of the chess-players from a distance where they couldn't possibly see her without using scopes of their own.

The shotgun mike in her purse--a product of the wholly owned Motorola subsidiary Chang BioMed, in Beaverton, Oregon--had sufficient electronic amplification so that from a hundred yards she had been able to hear the soft tw.a.n.g of country music from the surveillance car. The mike was disguised as a hearing aid, and the scope pa.s.sed as a small can of hairspray. Anything less than a determined search wouldn't know these things for what they really were.

And who was apt to be searching her purse, determined or otherwise? n.o.body.

When she was fifty yards away, she saw the agents glance in her direction, then back to their chess game. She kept her expression neutral, even though she wanted to smile. They had seen her--and dismissed her.

The dismissal was based on good reason. For what the agents saw was an old lady, easily seventy, hunched over and walking slowly, hobbling with a cane, while a small champagne-colored toy poodle trotted ten feet ahead of her on a Flexi lead, exploring the neatly cropped wilds of the sidewalk foliage.

The poodle, a well-trained neutered male, had been rented from the Not the Brothers Dog Kennel, in upstate New York. A thousand dollars a week, the pooch, and worth every penny.

The little dog sniffed the base of an ornamental cherry tree planted next to the walk, lifted his leg and watered the trunk.

"Good boy, Scout," the Selkie said. Anybody close enough to have heard her--and n.o.body was--would have recognized the tones of an old lady, the voice weakened by long decades of hard work and too many cigarettes.

She wore an ankle-length cotton-print dress, a thin cotton sweater and stout, sensible, lace-up Rockport walking shoes over black knee socks. Her hair was white and fluffed up into a rounded perm. The latex mask and makeup she wore had taken her an hour and a half to apply, and should pa.s.s inspection from five feet in broad daylight. She was in some apparent pain as she shuffled along--the right hip was bad--but she was bearing it for the sake of her good boy Scout, who stopped to sniff every tree or bush, careful to mark as his own all those with scents from previous canine pa.s.sersby.

She was also hot, her face itched and the stink of latex and face powder was thick, but there was no help for that.

The Selkie knew exactly what the watchers saw when they looked at her: somebody's arthritic granny, out walking her little dog before going home to bed. And home was only three blocks away, rented in a hurry, but using her current disguise. If she was stopped--and she wouldn't be--she had an address that justified her being here, and a pedigree better than the dog's. She was Mrs. Phyllis Markham, retired from her job of forty-one years as a book-keeper for the state government, at the capital in Albany. Her husband Raymond had pa.s.sed away last October, and Phyllis had finally moved to Washington so she could spend her spare time visiting the museums, which she loved. Have you seen the new Russian capsule on display at the Air and s.p.a.ce? Or that gray 1948 Tucker they confiscated from some drug dealer?

Mrs. Markham's daughter Sarah lived in Philadelphia, and her son Bruce was the manager of a Dodge truck dealership in Denver. Her background was all in place, and any kind of computer check would vet it. She could bore the leg off a clothes-store dummy reciting it in her dull and scratchy voice, too. She carried no obvious weapons, nothing to give her away, save the disguised electronics that n.o.body would recognize for what they were if they happened to see them.

Then again, the cane she pretended to need was a three-foot length of hand-crafted hickory, sanded furniture-smooth and lovingly oiled, made by Cane Masters, a small company in Incline Village, Nevada. Cane Masters specialized in building perfectly legal weapons for serious martial artists. An expert--and the Selkie was certainly that-- could beat somebody to a dead pulp with a walking stick such as the one she carried, and do so without breaking a sweat.