Night Moves (1999)

by Tom - Net Force 03 Clancy

  "That's to your credit, Jay. You really believe it. If I had known that when we met, I wouldn't have bothered with the disguise."

  "So satisfy my curiosity--why did you?"

  She swirled the ice cubes in her glass. "You want the quick answer or the lecture?"

  "Oh, go for the lecture. Condensed books are usually boring."

  She smiled. "All right. Buddhism is like a lot of traditional religions in that, for a long time, virtually all of the ranking practitioners were men. Oh, there have always been nuns and women laity who walked the path as well as any man, but for a lot of folks even now, there is a gender bias. And in most traditional holy books--the Bible, the Koran, the Upanishads, and most Buddhist literature--when women are referred to at all, it is with a paternalistic and condescending tone, even while supposedly singing their praises: Women are the keepers of life, the bearers of children, the weaker, needs-to-be-protected-from-the-harsh-world sex. Blah, blah, blah. Most old-style religions see women more as property than as people. A man has a farm, goats, cattle, and a wife. Women have had the vote in this country for less than a hundred years. You still with me?"

  "Flow on, I'm here."

  "Okay. So, the philosophies want to keep the girls barefoot and pregnant, tending the home fires while serious business is conducted by the boys. With few exceptions--various kinds of Goddess worship and Wicca and the like--until very recently, women were not really considered major players when it came to doctrine or practice, even in the more "neutral" religions. There still aren't any Catholic priests who are women. In some of the Moslem countries, women still can't show their faces in public. It isn't as bad in Buddhism as some of the other religions, and great strides have been made in the last hundred years, but there is still a kind of unspoken belief among serious students that women aren't quite as good at it as men. Physicality discounted, women don't think the same way as men. Female chess players at the highest levels don't beat the male champions. Most men are better in spatial tests, in pure left-brain thinking, than women. Men--and some women--see this as reason that they should be in charge. Equality has been a long time coming, and in most places it still does not truly exist."

  Jay nodded. He knew this. And he could see where it was going, but he said, "Still here."

  "In a lot of circles, if they think you're an old man, you get a lot more respect than if they think you're a young woman. Truth is truth, but a lot of people look to see who delivers it before they accept it. You know the old Hollywood joke about the producer and the writer? The writer sends in a script to the producer who is in a hurry for it. Weeks pass, the producer doesn't call back. Finally, the writer calls him. Says, 'Well, did you read the script?' 'Yeah, I read it.' 'So, what did you think?' The producer says, 'I dunno what I think. Nobody else has read it yet.' "

  She shook her head. "That's how it works in religion sometimes. If you have a choice between a seventy-year-old man and a twenty-something girl offering nuggets of wisdom, when push comes to shove, you pick the old guy. Old and wise are better than young and stupid."

  "That's dumb," Jay said. "If you can walk the walk as good as an old guy, it shouldn't matter. It's what you say, not who says it that counts."

  She rewarded him with a big smile. "I love you. Marry me," she said.

  He blinked. "Huh?"

  She laughed, a deep and melodious sound. "We'll get back to that part of the Dharma later. How goes the monster hunt?"

  He sighed. "About to get really scary."

  "That's why I'm here. I think I should go with you."

  Wednesday, April 13th

  London, England

  Stephens drove the Bentley along at a proper pace toward the computerworks. Goswell reclined in back, the scent of fresh mink oil hand rubbed into the leather a familiar and pleasing smell. Traffic was, as usual, awful, but Stephens was quite capable of dealing with anything London could throw at him. Goswell leaned back and enjoyed the ride.

  A short while later, Stephens said, "Milord. There is a telephone call for you. Sir Harold."

  "Yes, I'll take it."

  Stephens passed over a mobile phone. "Hallo, Harry."

  "Hallo, Gossie. Out and about, are we?"

  "In the car, yes. Off for a bit of an inspection tour of one of the facilities. Can't let the help get too complacent, can we?"

  "Certainly not. Er ... I say, Gossie ... that is, hmm."

  "Something bothering you, Harry?"

  "Well, yes. You had a conversation with a man by the name of, er ... Pound-Sand recently? Regarding a matter of some delicacy of which we spoke at the club?"

  "I do recall that, yes."

  "Er, well, it seems that Mr. Pound-Sand has ... passed away."

  "Oh, dear."

  "Yes. Quite unexpectedly."

  "A sudden illness?"

  "Very sudden, I'm afraid. I am given to understand that it happened even as he was attending to that very matter of delicacy. That, er, it was a more or less direct result of that very thing."

  "How unfortunate."

  "Isn't it just."

  "Well, these things happen."

  "Yes. Would you like for me to give Mr. Pound-Sand's associates a jingle? See if one of them might be interested in continuing the matter?"

  Goswell thought about it for a second. "That's decent of you, Harry, but perhaps we should wait a bit on that."

  "As you feel best, Gossie. I'm awfully sorry about this."

  "Tut, tut, not your fault at all, Harry. It's obvious I underestimated the difficulty of the problem, myself. Think no more about it."

  As Goswell handed the mobile back to Stephens, however, he thought about it. So, Mr. Pound-Sand was now Mr. Pushing-up-the-Daisies. Which meant that Peel was either lucky or good, or perhaps both. On the one hand, that gave Goswell a certain feeling of pride, that his man was adept enough to thwart an assassination by another professional. On the other hand, that also meant Peel would now be on his guard more than ever, and if he had been difficult to remove before, he would be doubly so now.

  Hmm. That was certainly food for thought, wasn't it?

  "We're very nearly there, milord."

  "What? Oh, yes. Quite."

  Well. One thing at a time. First he would be certain that Bascomb-Coombs was out of the loop. Then he would figure out a way to deal with the turncoat Peel.

  Wednesday, April 13th

  MI-6, London, England

  "We got a break, Colonel," Fernandez said.

  Howard looked up from the stack of reports he was reading. They were in Michaels's temporary office, and the commander and his second were down the hall talking to one of the MI-6 higher-ups.

  "How so?"

  "Miz Cooper just came up with this." He passed a hardcopy wax-laser drum photograph over.

  Howard looked at the wazer image. "Ruzhyo!"

  "Yes, sir." There was a long pause.

  "All right, Sergeant, get off the dime. Where and when?"

  "Sir." He grinned. "Yesterday the London police were called to an incident at a small bookstore near Piccadilly Circus. They found a body on the floor, shot. The dead man is one Henry Wyndham, a former MI-5 agent who ran a 'security service.' Cooper says that the local authorities suspect Wyndham was a high-priced and very discreet ice man for rich clients, but nobody has ever been able to pin him down. Turns out the bullet didn't kill him, he apparently croaked from a fast-acting poison. This picture was from the store's occult door cam, one of two men who left about the time patrons heard the shot. Here's the other man."

  Fernandez offered another picture.

  "Anybody we know?"

  "Not us. Cooper is working on an ID."

  Howard nodded. "So, he's still in London. And he just killed somebody. I wonder why."

  "Why he's here? Or why he killed somebody?"

  "Both."

  "Well, it could be a coincidence, he just happened to be browsing for a nice Agatha Christie novel to while away the hours when somebody got capped the next aisl
e over."

  "Right. Can we backtrack the dead man?"

  "Cooper is working on that, too, sir."

  Howard nodded again. "Good. Would it do us any good to go and talk to the bookstore employees?"

  "Cooper is sending over the police reports, says we can access 'em on the computer in a couple of minutes. But she says nobody saw the two men come in or leave."

  "I bet the late Mr. Wyndham saw them come in."

  "But not leave. The cops haven't seen anything like this before. The dead guy was armed. The guess is, somebody shoved a gun into his back, he tried to get out of the way. He took a small-caliber round at contact range, probably a .22, and it wouldn't have killed him, the examiner said. But he musta figured he was gonna lose, so he erased himself. The poison was one of the new explosive-pellet neurotoxins. Guy had ninety seconds once he bit the capsule and it spewed."

  "Interesting."

  "Yeah, ain't it?"

  "Well, don't just stand there, go see if Ms. Cooper can find some use for you. He's close, Julio. We're going to get him. I can feel it."

  "Yeah."

  Wednesday, April 13th

  Washington, D.C.

  It was sunny, no wind, a perfect day for working the 'rangs, and Tyrone headed for the soccer field, full of himself. Bella had given her smile back to him, she wanted him around, wanted to see him, had invited him to her house this very evening! Life was better than good; life was great.

  When he arrived at the field there, Tyrone saw Nadine. Dee-eff-eff!

  But when he got to where Nadine was, she was already packing up.

  "Hey, Nadine."

  "Hey, Tyrone."

  "Where you going?"

  "My arm's a little sore. I don't want to overtrain."

  "I've got some ibuprofen gel."

  "That's okay. I got some at home. See you."

  Something was wrong, he could feel it, but he couldn't see what it was. "You okay?"

  She looked him straight in the eyes. "I told you my arm was sore. You forget to turn on your implant?" There was a definite hard edge in her voice.

  "Whoa, dial it down, I wasn't calling you a preva, I was just asking, that's all."

  She went back to loading her backpack. "Why do you care? You don't need to be skulking with people like me. You got Belladonna."

  "What's that got to do with anything?"

  She jammed the pack shut, lifted it, swung it over her shoulder. "C'mon, Tyrone, you know what it means. You sweat with the jocks, you don't hunch chair with the gamers. You breakfast with the dressers, you don't eat lunch at the scuzz table."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "You gonna make me say it, aren't you? You skulk beautiful, you don't skulk ugly."

  "Who is ugly?"

  She gave him a sad smile, a little one. "You telling me I'm in Bella's league, Ty? You'd rather be seen with me than with her?"

  He was stunned. He couldn't get his mind on-line. Why was Nadine babbling on about this? Of course Bella was prettier. She was prettier than everybody in the school! What was the point?

  He was trying to figure out what Nadine meant, and what he should say, when she shook her head. "Yeah, I hear the dial tone. Copy you later, Ty."

  She slipped her other arm into the backpack and walked away.

  He watched her go, and while he hadn't done anything wrong he could think of, he felt guilty. Somehow, he had just failed some kind of test, and he didn't even know what it was.

  Damn. He wished his father was home. Dad knew about stuff like this. He needed to talk to him.

  32

  Wednesday, April 13th

  MI-6, London, England

  Something was wrong, Toni knew. The small cracks in Alex's facade had been plugged up, spackled over, leaving a solid wall in front of his emotions. It wasn't so much what he said or did, but an unseen but somehow detectable shift in his posture. From her years of martial arts training, she had a tendency to view things in terms of physical engagements. What it felt like was, all of a sudden, Alex stood in a defensive stance. When they'd met, his guard had been up, but he had relaxed it when they'd gotten together, begun to allow her to get closer. Now he was hunched over, face covered, backing away.

  Sitting in a strange office halfway around the world from her roots, Toni worried about it. What had happened? Sure, he had a lot on his mind, the looming custody battle, the mad hacker, and their relationship had a few bumps in the road, but none of that seemed to be enough to account for this sudden distance between them.

  "Ms. Fiorella?"

  She looked up. Cooper. "Yes?"

  "Your Colonel Howard has some information on his assassin. He'd like your opinion on it. He's in the small conference room."

  "Okay. Be right there."

  Cooper left, and Toni shook the worry about Alex. She did have a job to do, and while Alex certainly was a complicating factor in it, she couldn't sit here worry-warting about her love life all day. She picked up her flatscreen and headed for the conference room and John Howard.

  Howard glanced away from the holoproj as Toni Fiorella entered the room. Julio was there, but Angela Cooper and Alex Michaels were meeting with one of the MI-6 higher-ups and would be a few minutes.

  "John. What's up?"

  "Toni. The commander will be along in a little while, Ms. Cooper went to collect him, but I wanted to bring you up to speed on the Ruzhyo matter."

  "Sure, fire away."

  He laid it out for her, using the holoproj images to punctuate the briefing. He did a fast sitrep through the stuff she already knew, then got to the new information.

  The holoproj image shifted to the occult cam view from the bookstore. "This man left the store after the incident, at almost the same time as Ruzhyo. According to what Ms. Cooper and her people have found, this is Terrance Arthur Peel, a retired British Army major. Julio, would you lay out the rest?"

  "Sir. Ma'am. Peel had a fairly decent career until he was posted to Ireland a couple years back as part of the standing British force at one of the permanent treaty bases. The peace there is fairly fragile, oddball groups still agitating, and from what we're able to gather, Peel was responsible for an incident that might have threatened it. Caught some of the locals doing things they shouldn't have and beat confessions out of them. Apparently, he and his people were ... overzealous. There were some serious injuries, even deaths, as a result."

  Toni nodded. "Uh-huh."

  Fernandez continued: "The British Army is relatively tight-lipped about all this, but Peel was apparently given the choice of falling on his own sword or being drummed out, so he retired, and the incident was swept under the rug. Next time he surfaced, he was providing security for a local bigwig, Lord Geoffrey Goswell. Peel's new boss is not only a nobleman, he is also richer than Midas, a crusty old billionaire who owns half a dozen companies producing everything from computers to catsup."

  Toni considered the information for a moment. She had an idea where this was going, but she wanted to hear Howard's take on it. She looked from Fernandez to the colonel. "I see. And this leads you to believe ... ?"

  Howard shrugged. "We really don't have enough information to make a conclusion yet. But it seems awfully coincidental that a former intelligence operative gets shot and poisoned and dead in a bookstore, and a few seconds later, a known killer and a disgraced army major busted for killing prisoners both saunter out the door. If I was a gambling man, I'd be willing to bet these two had something to do with the death. And with each other."

  "You think Ruzhyo is working for Peel? Hired to catch or kill the guy in the bookstore?"

  "Like I said, it's too soon to make that stretch for sure, but it certainly seems as if we ought to have a chat with this guy Peel. Even if he is totally innocent, at the very least he was there when the trouble went down, and he had to have seen Ruzhyo when he left. If Ruzhyo had been a second slower leaving, Peel would have stepped on his heels."

  Toni nodded again. "All right. How do we go about it?
"

  "Cooper will set it up. We can go along as observers. No guns needed. Apparently, Lord Whatshisname is quite well-connected and beyond reproach."

  Fernandez said, "Right. We knock on the door, have a spot of tea, then politely ask the major, 'I say, old bean, did you shoot somebody in a bookstore recently?' and he says, 'Happens I did, old boy. Is there a problem?' They are all very civilized here, pip, pip, eh, whot?"

  Toni laughed.

  From the sound of her laugh, Howard figured she still hadn't gotten around to discussing Angela Cooper with the commander. Well. It sure as hell wasn't his business, and he wasn't going to--

  His virgil peeped, the tone indicating it was a personal call. He frowned. He wasn't really in the field, so he hadn't shut off everything but tactical reach yet; still, it was unusual for his wife to call. "Excuse me a moment," he said. He walked away from the table and pulled the virgil from his belt. Mindful of where he was, he kept his visual transmission off.

  "Hello?"

  "Hey, Dad."

  "Tyrone. Everything okay? Your mother--?"

  "Mom's fine, we're three by three and go ahead here, Dad."

  Howard relaxed. Nobody had gotten into a car accident or anything. "What's sailing, son?"

  "I don't want to bother you if you're busy."

  "I'm not that busy. Shoot."

  There was a pause. It stretched.

  "We are talking transcontinental rates here, Tyrone."

  "Sorry. Well, there's this girl at school ..."

  Howard listened to his son pour out his problem, and he felt himself grinning. Whenever anybody asked him if he'd like to go back and live his life over, he'd always told them no, not a chance. He hadn't made so many mistakes that he would go through puberty again to make up for them. No, sir.

  Fiorella and Fernandez ignored him, looking at the computer visuals, and after a little while, Cooper and Michaels arrived.

  Finally, his son ran down. "So, whaddya you think, Pop?"

  "Well, I could be wrong, but I think your boomerang girl likes you. And she's maybe a little jealous of Bella."