Chance nodded. Yes, a smart woman was a great break from mule-headed men. She glanced at her watch. "Well. I need to run along. It's been great visiting with you, Cory."
"As always. I'll call you with updates."
"I appreciate it."
Chance waved the waiter over and paid the bill, and Skye merely nodded her thanks. Another thing a man would quibble over. Skye cleared half a million a year, easy, and she wasn't going to make noise over a little hundred-dollar lunch tab, one way or the other.
As she left the restaurant, Chance looked around. Washington was a dreary city in the winter. It was beautiful in the spring, all the flowering fruit trees, but when the gray and cold settled in, all the marble and wide streets couldn't offset the gloom. She had a couple of other errands to run, including a visit to a key senator. While Cory Skye was scrupulous in her personal life, Chance would use any weapon she had to win a contest. If that meant screwing a middle-aged married senator stupid—which was no great chore, given the starting point of his IQ—she had no problem with that. Whatever worked.
Toni was excited. It had been some time since she had been in the field, back when she and Alex had had their troubles on that trip to England. She smiled at the memory, which was bittersweet. Such heartache they'd gone through, for what was basically a stupid mistake, on both their parts. More his than hers, but, she had to admit, she had jumped to a conclusion she shouldn't have.
She had packed for warm weather, one bag she could fit into the overhead bin on the jet. She was only going for a couple of days, and she had had enough bad experiences with checked baggage to last a lifetime. Once, on a flight to Hawaii, her suitcase had vacationed in Japan.
Documents had provided her with a new ID—driver's license, credit cards, even a library card, no passport needed—that showed she was Mary Johnson, a divorced secretary from Falls Church, Virginia. She was on holiday, going to play the slot machines and soak up the sunshine in the warm Caribbean. She had her flight booked, along with a single cabin on the Bon Chance. It was enough cover to check out the ship, she'd be in and out, and nobody would be the wiser.
"You still packing, girl?" Guru said. She came into the bedroom, Little Alex slung over her right hip.
"Guru, I don't know how you expect him to practice walking if you never put him down."
Guru smiled and bounced the baby on her hip a couple of times. He laughed.
"Don't you worry about him learning to walk. Pretty soon, I start teaching him djurus. Time you get back, he'll be a fighter."
"I'm only going to be gone three days."
"Plenty of time, eh, best boy?"
Little Alex laughed again.
"You sure this is all right?"
Guru shook her head. "Child, I raised a houseful of babies. This little one is an angel compared to a couple of my boys. We'll be fine. And we'll watch out for big Alex, too."
Toni nodded. Guru had recovered from her stroke all right, but she was in her eighties. Then again, her mind was still sharp, and the years of silat practice had given her a balance most people didn't have in their thirties. Little Alex couldn't be safer, and anybody who thought the old lady pushing the baby stroller was a victim would learn a hard lesson otherwise. It was just so strange to be catching a jet and flying off on her own. It felt… weird, somehow. That kind of thing belonged to her life before Alex and the baby.
"Go, I think I heard the cab honking," Guru said.
Toni took Alex and hugged him. "You be good for Guru," she said. She kissed him, and felt a pang of something like loss when she handed him back to the old woman, and hugged her in the transfer.
Once she was in the cab, Toni found she had to force herself to breathe slower. Her belly roiled with nervousness. An adventure. She was going on an adventure.
On the CyberNation Train Outside Berlin, Germany
Keller ached all over. He had taken half a dozen ibuprofen tablets, and they had taken the edge off, but every move, every breath, hurt. He had never felt like this. Once, when he was fourteen, his mother had run a stop sign and their car had been broadsided by another driver. He had wrenched his shoulder and elbow, banged his head against the glass, and had a sore spot on his hip, and he'd thought that was bad, but that was nothing compared to this. Yet, when he looked into the mirror, there was almost no sign of the beating Santos had given him—he had some bruises on his chest, his belly, his legs and back, but they didn't look nearly as bad as they felt. They were just light brown splotches, a little purple in a couple of them. How could it hurt so bad and not look worse than it did?
Santos was a devil, a monster, a psychotic thug! He should get a gun and shoot him!
But even as he dressed, trying to avoid moving as much as he could—he had to sit down to put his trousers on—Keller knew he would not do that. Even with a gun, he was afraid of Santos. If he missed, if the man didn't die immediately, he would come for Keller, and that would be that. The man would kill him, slowly and painfully. And pain was not something that Keller wanted any more of, ever.
1-5, South of Sacramento, California August
Jay wound the RT/10 Viper up into fifth gear and blew past the guy in the Shelby GT at ninety-five. In a few seconds, he was doing a hundred and fifteen, eating up the highway, speed still climbing. This stretch of road was straight as an arrow and in the middle of the desert, nothing to see, and even at this clip, he wasn't gonna get through it any time soon.
He shifted into sixth, and the little car had enough to surge when he did. Who's your daddy, baby? Huh?
The guy in the Mustang must have stepped on it, Jay could see him in the rearview, starting to gain. Jay laughed. The Shelby was fast, maybe even faster than he was on the top end, but he had a mile and some on the guy by now, and by the time the Mustang wound it up and pegged the speedometer, Jay would be at the exit to the olive place and the race would be over.
The olive place was where he was meeting his contact in this scenario, and he was being nothing if not careful this time. He came in with an anonymous persona, a female one at that, under a phony name and addy, and anybody looking for Jay Gridley wasn't gonna see that guy in this car. It would be almost impossible to figure out who he really was, and even if he went places where traps had been set for Jay—which he didn't plan on doing, thank you very much—he was going to make it look like he—or she, in this case—had wandered in there by accident.
There was the exit. The Shelby GT was coming up fast, but not fast enough. Jay put on his blinker and was off the interstate and down to sixty before the Mustang roared past. He heard the man in the car yell at him, and shook his head. Why, none of it—he'd never had that kind of relationship with his mother. The very idea!
The Viper burbled and rumbled, as if anxious to get back up to speed, but Jay nosed it into the olive place's parking lot, a big graveled area that had to run three acres, and parked.
The desert heat beat down on him in the little convertible, and he felt it much more without the wind, hot as that was.
He tossed his long blonde hair back over his shoulder, adjusted his boobs with the backs of his hands, and walked toward the building, the red miniskirt barely covering a very shapely female ass.
Inside, he slipped his shades off and into his purse. There were racks of olives in various jars, ranging from drinking-glass-sized ones to convoluted monsters five feet tall. Mostly they were big, fat green things, pits still in them, but here and there were some stuffed with pimento, and even some black ones that had been pitted.
There were also bottles and tins of olive oil, ranging from cold-pressed extra virgin or somesuch on down. How could oil be better than virgin?
An old lady with a big straw hat and a matching handbag cruised the aisle, her shopping cart half full of jars and cans. She smiled at Jay's young woman persona, and Jay saw the white rose pinned to her yellow sundress that told him this was who he had come to meet.
"Hot day out," Jay said.
"Yes, isn't it? Nice and cool in here, th
ough."
"I wonder, have you seen any Tuscan bread?" This was the code phrase, in actuality, a key to a firewall's back door.
"Funny you should mention that, dearie," the old lady said. "I had picked up two loaves of that very thing, but I realize now I should put one back, one is more than enough for just me, since the mister passed on. Here, why don't you take it? Save an old lady a trip?"
"Why, thank you, ma'am. That's very nice of you."
"No trouble at all, dearie."
The old lady pushed her cart away. Something was stuck to one of the rear wheels, it bumped slightly every time it hit the floor. How annoying. Jay always got that cart when he went grocery shopping.
Jay went to pay for the loaf of bread.
Outside, he opened the packed, removed the bread, and broke it in half. Inside the bread was a mini DVD, the size of a half-dollar coin. Rainbow colors sparkled from its surface in the hot sun. Jay smiled. Easy as falling off a chair.
He hiked his blonde's short skirt up to climb back into the low-slung Viper, and accidentally flashed a man in a ■ Cadillac who pulled into the lot as he hopped into the car. Oops.
But he had half of what he had come for. Another stop a bit farther south, and with any luck, he would have it all. Half the trick to finding information on the web and net was knowing how to look. It was all out there, but if you couldn't narrow your search properly, you'd never find it. After years of practice, Jay knew how to look: It had become almost instinctive, more an art than a science. Yeah, you could turn searchbots loose hither and yon and gather up tons of data, but sometimes you just knew where to go, without knowing how or why you knew. That was zen, Saji said. Knowing without knowing.
Whatever. As long as he could do it. And he could. A few more minutes and he would be ready to start kicking ass and taking names, and he would start with his old buddy Jackson Keller. Because if Keller was in some way responsible for the attacks on the net and web, and more important, if he was responsible for the attacks on Jay personally, then he was gonna be extremely sorry. You don't step on Superman's cape, and you don't mess with Smokin' Jay Gridley. No siree.
29
Washington, D.C.
The baby was asleep, as was Guru, and Michaels was propped up in bed, watching the news when the com chimed. He reached for it, thinking it was Toni.
"Hey, boss." The visual blossomed on the receiver, a tiny hologram of a face that definitely wasn't Toni's.
"Jay. What's up?"
"I've got good news, better news, and not so good news."
"Oh. Give me the good news first."
"I found Jackson Keller."
"I didn't know he was lost. Who is Jackson Keller?"
"Long story. Short version: I believe he is the guy running the web/net attacks."
"Good. Where can we collect him?"
"Well, see, that's the not-so-good stuff. I'm not exactly sure where he is. I know where he was, up until a few days ago, I think, but I'm pretty sure I know who he's working for."
"And that would be…?"
"The better news—CyberNation."
"You're sure about this?"
"Yep. Want me to dazzle you with my brilliance?"
"Do I have a choice?"
Jay ignored that and said, "I scanned public tax records in the U.S. and found he had paid federal taxes last year on foreign income grosses of $250,000. I checked incorporation records, and found a Delaware company called Molotov Software Programs, Inc., the president being one Jackson Keller. Apparently the vice president is his mother, the secretary-treasurer his uncle. That's got tax-dodge or scam written all over it.
"From what I was able to determine, all of MSP's income for the last three years came from another corporation, Systems Upgrade, Inc., which turns out to be a shell owned by Future Tense Computer Engineering, which is, when you run it down, another shell, owned lock, stock, and barrel by—ta dah!—CyberNation.
"Corporate credit cards—Visa, MC, AmEx—have been issued for MSP, Inc., from the International Bank of Zurich, and Three-Cees and TRW both say that the credit is good, which means he pays his bills on time. Without a warrant, I can't get into real specific details on those transactions, but I've checked commercial usage location lists and gotten hits in southeast Florida for the last three months. Before that, he spent some time in Japan, and before that, in Germany. Apparently CyberNation owns some rolling stock and some other ships. The train carries tourists back and forth between Berlin and France, and there is some kind of repair work being done on the boat, or barge, or whatever, in Yokohama."
"He does some traveling," Michaels said.
"Yeah. But the south Florida thing is the deal—he goes to the same places the other programmers on the gambling boat go. Last hit was less than ten days ago, so my guess is he's on the boat. I dunno what his connection to the CyberNation stuff in Germany and Japan is, but I'm gonna find out."
"You think this is the leader of the assault team?"
"I'd bet money on it, boss. He's a programmer out of CIT, second iri his class."
"Isn't that where you went to school?"
"Yeah."
Michaels heard something in Jay's voice. "What?"
"I know the guy. I used to know him, anyway."
"Second in his class, you said? He must be pretty sharp."
"Not as sharp as the guy who was first in the class."
"Ah."
"I'm gonna dig some more. When I think I got enough for a warrant, I'll shoot it past Hang 'Em High Harvey, and then we can pin this moth to the collecting board."
"Good work, Jay."
"Thanks, boss. Discom."
After he broke the connection, the com chimed again.
This time, it was Toni. She looked tired, but she was smiling.
"Hey, babe," he said.
"Hi. I'm all settled in. I'm at the airport Hilton in Fort Lauderdale. I'll catch a shuttle copter to the ship in the morning."
"You're calling from the hotel?" It had been a while since she'd been in the field, but surely she hadn't forgotten something so basic?
"Not on the house phone, I'm using the coded cell."
He nodded. Net Force had field phones that looked ordinary, but sent and received shifting-code encrypted messages; even if somebody managed to trap the signal, they wouldn't be able to translate it into anything they could understand, unless they had a matching transceiver. Mi-chaels's house com was so equipped, just as all the virgils were. SOP.
"How's the boy?"
"He's fine. Conked out about eight. Guru has him in bed with her. She's gonna spoil him."
"How are you doing?"
"Cold and pitiful in this big old bed all alone."
"Poor baby. I'll be all alone in this big old hotel bed, too."
"You better be." That got him a smile from her.
"I just got a call from Jay." He explained what Jay had just told him.
"Does he have a picture of this guy? Maybe I'll spot him on the ship."
"I'll have him upload one to your flatscreen if he has one," he said. "I'll have him bury it in a picture of your aunt Molly's seventieth birthday or something."
"Thanks."
There was a short pause, then she said, "Thank you for sending me to do this. I appreciate it."
"No problem. Just don't do anything other than what is in your mission plan."
"By the numbers, Commander Honey, don't worry."
But of course, he did. Despite what he had told her about how low risk it was, the husband and lover in him didn't like sending her anywhere. He worried about the plane's safety, the helicopter ride, and street traffic, not to mention being on a vessel that he now knew was enemy territory. He knew Toni would resent it mightily if he tried to keep her home and completely out of harm's way, but that's what he felt like doing.
They talked a few more minutes, said their good-nights, and discommed. It had been a long day and he was tired, but sleep was a long time in coming. This was the first time he
and Toni had slept apart since they'd gotten married, and he didn't like it. Not even a little bit.
Woodville, Mississippi
This was not a town where you would expect to find a major Internet locus, Santos thought. Probably why it was here. Not far from the Louisiana border, in the southwest corner of Mississippi, Woodville was a sleepy place that time seemed to have touched only lightly in passing, at least in its last few decades.
Santos drove the old pickup truck along the Lower Woodville Road
carefully. The day was gray, overcast, and cold. This was just a scouting trip to be certain of the information he had been provided. He was a black man in a small Southern town, and while racial profiling was not supposed to be allowed by police departments in this country anymore, he knew they still did it in such places. On the surface, the old tensions had been smoothed over. But a few inches down? Everybody here remembered who had been property and who had been slave masters, just as they did back home. People of color had carried the water and picked the crops. Nobody forgot that. A shiny new rental car would have made him suspect; a beat-up ten-year-old truck with local plates made him less likely to be noted. He wore a baseball cap and an old pea jacket over a workshirt and overalls, windows rolled up against the cold—just another lower-class Negro not worth paying any mind to, Thank you, Officer.
He would only get two passes by the location, one going out, another one half an hour later coming back. Any more than that might raise suspicion, and he did not want that.
The road ran next to a sluggish little river that he assumed was Ford's Creek—he'd been on Ford's Creek Road before, the place he was looking for was farther north, where Lower Woodville Road branched and another section of creek road picked up again, so that would make sense. He would make a pass, drive for fifteen minutes, then turn around and go back. From there, he'd keep right on going, local highway 24 east to Highway 61, then south on that all the way to New Orleans and a flight back to Florida. By mid-morning, he would be back on the ship.
But that was later. Now, he had to pay attention to what he had come for.
A few minutes later, he saw the driveway leading off to the west. There weren't any signs, but a hundred feet off the road was an eight-foot-high chain-link gate and a wooden kiosk behind it. He couldn't see the guard in the little building, but surely there must be one.
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