Sitting on the ground with his leg bandaged and an amp of dorph injected to kill his pain, Fernandez said, "Bet you wouldn't call it that if it was your leg."
Howard grinned.
"Outstanding, Colonel! Congratulations. Please pass it on to your team."
"Thank you, sir, I will. We'll see you at field HQ soon as we get things cleaned up here."
"I'm on my way there now," Michaels said.
Howard frowned. "Sir? You aren't there yet?"
"I, uh, took a little ride in the country," Michaels said. "I picked up a… hitchhiker you might find it interesting to talk to when you get back."
"Sir?"
"Never mind, Colonel, I'll explain it when I see you. You got us out of a nasty spot and I appreciate it. I'll make sure the whole country appreciates it."
"Sir. Discom."
After he signed off, Howard considered his relationship with Commander Alexander Michaels. The man wasn't bad, for a civilian. Not bad at all.
"Can we hurry this up and go home, sir?" Fernandez said. "I have an early tango lesson I don't want to miss."
Howard laughed.
* * *
Chapter Nineteen
Monday, December 27th, 1:30p.m. Washington, D.C.
Tyrone Howard thought he might just go nova, might just shatter into a million billion pieces.
He sat on Bella's bed, his arms around her, and they kissed. Everything he knew about kissing she had taught him in the last couple of months, and he thought he was starting to get the hang of it. Her back felt hot under his hands, even through her shirt, and there wasn't a strap across her smooth skin…
She broke the kiss and let out a big sigh. "You have to leave now, Tyrone. I'm supposed to go to my aunt's house and we have to lift in like ten minutes. I have to change clothes."
"Uh-huh," he said. He leaned in and kissed her again. That went on for another minute or two. She leaned back.
"Really, Tyrone. I have to go."
"Uh-huh." He kissed her some more. It wasn't as if she was trying real hard to get away, given as how she had her hands on the back of his head pulling him closer.
Finally, she pulled away again and said, "I'll see you at the mall tomorrow, you duplicate?"
"Uh-huh. I doop that." He reached for her, but this time she put one hand on his chest and held him off. "Come on, Ty."
"Okay." He blew out a breath. "Okay. But it's hard to leave."
"I bet it is," she said, smiling. "Here, let me make it easier for you." She took his hand in both hers, kissed it on the palm, then pressed it against her left breast.
His mouth fell open, his brain went into vapor lock, he forgot how to breathe. His bug eyes must make him look like a giant frog.
It was the most exciting moment of his life.
She moved his hand away from her warmth and gave it back to him. She grinned real big and stood. "Shoo. Go." She waved at him with both hands in a sweeping motion.
He stood, knowing what a zombie must feel like. He would jump off the top of a tall building if she wanted.
Explode. He was going to just… blow up and splatter all over the room. It would make a big, gooey mess. How could he not? He couldn't stand it!
Monday, December 27th, 2:00 p.m. Quantico, Virginia
Julio Fernandez was in what passed for the infirmary at HQ. It wasn't much, just a few beds in a small ward, and he was the only patient. He lay on the bed flipping through the commercial entcom channels on the TV, looking for something that would keep his attention. He didn't need to be here. Doc had swabbed out the little hole in his leg and patched it with synskin, then given him a tetanus shot and told him to avoid heavy squats or marathon running for a few days. But Net Force policy was that certain injuries required compulsory treatment, which in the case of gunshot wounds meant at least a twenty-four-hour medical observation period. It had to do with liability and insurance and crap like that. He wasn't going to sue anybody. He knew that, the colonel knew it, but a lot of people sued a lot of other people these days—there were more lawyers in D.C. than there were roaches—so they'd stuck him in bed, started an IV with antibiotics, and given him the television remote. They'd also given him one of those short, open-up-the-back hospital gowns.
He looked at the time sig on the TV screen. He'd come back from the raid and been examined at noon. So he was stuck here until noon tomorrow. Boredom and cafeteria food loomed and threatened. Jesus.
A nurse came in, and with her was the colonel. He grinned real big.
"Very funny, sir. Wait until the next time you get shot."
"Not my policy, Sergeant Fernandez. I don't make the rules, I just do what they tell me."
The colonel sat on the foot of the bed and glanced up at the tube. "Anything good on?"
"Best things are reruns of I Love Lucy and trash sports. I just saw the middleweight North American sumo winner—he goes maybe one-eighty, two-hundred—beat the heavyweight—a fat guy pushing seven hundred pounds. Big guy came roaring in, the little guy stepped aside and tripped him. Fatso fell out of the ring, shook the camera he hit so hard."
"David and Goliath," Howard said. "There is a precedent."
"David cheated, he used a sling."
"Goliath had a sword."
"Yeah, and only a fool brings a knife to a gunfight."
"How's the leg?"
"Fine. I could take you on the obstacle course right now."
"Uh-huh. I'd almost rather be doing that than going home."
"Your mother-in-law still there?"
"Until next Sunday."
"Serves you right. Sir."
"I stopped by the office on the way over here. Seems there was a complaint about you from one of the civilian instructors in the feeb unit. Did you know that you were ‘vicious, brutal, perhaps even psychotic'? A man unfit for Net Force service, and a man who was very likely a threat to public safety?"
"Yes, sir, I believe that pretty much sums me up."
"What did you do to this Horowitz, Sarge?"
"I leaned on his desk and told him he should think less about posturing and more about doing his job."
"Lord, Sergeant, how do you expect to get away with such behavior? What kind of savage are you?"
"An unrepentant one, sir."
"Well, I will send word to Mr. Horowitz that I have taken his counsel and disciplined you appropriately." Howard reached over and took the TV remote, pointed it over his shoulder at the wall-mounted set, and clicked the power off. "No television for the next hour, Sergeant."
"I thought the idea was punishment, sir."
Both men grinned.
By the time she got back to HQ, Joanna Winthrop knew the party was over. The terrorists had been taken down, the stolen plutonium recovered, and the only thing she had to do now was figure out who had gotten into her workstation and used it to give the Sons of Whoever the information about the shipments.
But somebody had told her that Julio Fernandez had been shot and was in the infirmary and so, instead, she bought a small vase of flowers and went to see him.
He was the only patient in the infirmary. Since a lot of the Net Force staff had opted for the long holiday, including, apparently, the medical staff, the place had an echoey feel to it.
"Sergeant Fernandez."
"Lieutenant Winthrop."
"I heard you got shot."
"A scratch. I'm stuck here overnight, SOP, but I could go out dancing if they'd let me."
She put the vase on the table next to the bed. "You're just lying here, doing nothing? No books, no entcom?"
"The colonel was here, you just missed him. He turned the set off. I'm being punished."
She raised her eyebrows. "For being shot?"
He chuckled. "No, even Howard's not that hard-assed."
He told her about his computer class.
It was a funny story. When he was done, she laughed. "Tough CO, isn't he?"
"Yeah. I really wanted to see how the middleweight wrestler was going to do
against the light heavyweight."
They both laughed.
"So, how are you doing?" Julio asked. "I heard about the workstation business."
"Oh, don't worry about that. I'll figure it out."
"Any suspects?"
"At the top of my list? Jay Gridley. He doesn't like me. He thinks I slept my way into this job."
"Seriously?"
"That he thinks I used my feminine wiles? Or that he planted the leak in my station? Yes to the former, no to the latter. We aren't buddies, but I respect his abilities. Though if you tell him I said so, I'll deny it."
"Deny what?"
"He might keep stuff from me, but I don't think he's nasty—or stupid—enough to try to implicate me in a federal crime. After this assignment, I'm back with our unit, so I'm no threat to his position. And he has to know I'm going to figure out who did it. Just a matter of time."
There was a moment of quiet when neither of them spoke.
"So how was it?" she asked. "The sortie?"
"By the numbers," he said. "The bad guys weren't in our league. They were outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and outgunned. Only mistake we made was mine. I'd been awake, I wouldn't be spending the night here with my leg propped up and a draft on my butt. One of the yabbos hiding in a sensor nest had a few rounds of AP in her weapon. Fortunately, she was either rattled or a lousy shot. She cooked off most of a thirty-round stick and only nicked me one time. Guy with her was a better shooter, but he was using hardball and tracer, his ammo couldn't pierce the suits."
"Too bad I missed it," she said.
"You've been on a few field ops."
"Nothing lately. The colonel thinks I'm more useful in front of a computer. Last time I was in the field, I was in the HQ tent thirty miles away from the action."
"He's right," Fernandez said. "Grunts like me are a dime a dozen, but a computer genius is harder to replace."
She smiled. "I need to get back to work. Anything I can do for you?"
She saw him hesitate a second, and wondered if there would be an off-color remark. If he was looking for an opening, this was a good one.
He shook his head. "No, ma'am, but thank you for asking. I'll catch up on my sleep. See you when I get out." He flashed her a nice smile.
She resisted a sudden urge to lean over and kiss him. She was really beginning to like this guy.
"Later, Julio. We'll talk about computers when we get all this straightened out."
"I'd like that. Thanks for stopping by." Another hesitation, then: "Jo."
Jay Gridley had given up on the cowboy scenario because it felt too slow. True, speed in a scenario didn't translate to RT—real time—but if you were poking along on a horse when you felt like racing on a big Harley motorcycle, it made a subjective difference.
So now Jay turned to one of his favorite action heroes, borrowing from one of the early classic James Bond movies, Thunderball.
Over the landscape he flew, zipping through the air with the famous Bell Rocket Belt on his back.
Of course, in RW, the Bell device was not a belt at all, but a large and very heavy backpack. And it didn't have much of an operational range in RW either. Jay had done some research when designing his scenario. The original rocket belt was essentially nothing more than a pair of fuel tanks, some handlebars, a throttle, and a couple of rocket nozzles. How it worked was, hydrogen peroxide sprayed into a fine mesh, producing a very hot and hard steam that spewed from the rocket nozzles with a few hundred pounds of thrust. It was loud, dangerous, and you only had twenty-some seconds of lift, maybe thirty with the right fuel mixture and tuned nozzles, and that was it. You could lean in the direction you wanted to go, and later some maneuvering jets were added, but if you were a hundred feet up in the air when the gas ran out, you were going to fall and smash into the ground real hard.
A later version, the Tyler Belt, was a bit more efficient and gave a little more flight time, but the hops were still short and quick. A small jet-engine model that was theoretically capable of giving the wearer half an hour in the air had eventually been designed, but the U.S. military had claimed exclusive use of the new engine for its Cruise missiles.
So the personal backpack craft of science fiction just kind of fizzled out. The existing rocket belts wound up in museums or television commercials or movies, but that was it.
Jay's version of the rocket belt had a secret—but theoretically possible—fuel and a miniature jet engine that gave him an hour in the air and an automatic safety reserve to allow him to land when the fuel ran low. He could have given it infinite power in VR, of course, but that took some of the fun out of it. Realistic limits were better for the scenarios he created. Any fool could do fantasy; it took some skill to keep it believable.
Anyway, while it wasn't as fast as a jet or even his pedal-to-the-metal Viper, it was a real rush to fly along with the wind blowing in your face and ruffling your hair, to be able to leap tall buildings wearing the technological equivalent of seven league boots.
The way Jay figured it, if you couldn't have fun, why bother?
Right at the moment, Jay was zooming over the new sixteen-lane South China Causeway, from just outside Xianggang, Hong Kong, heading north to Jiulong, on the mainland, looking for Wong Electronics trucks. These were easy to spot from the air, given that they had bright orange roofs, each of which was numbered. In RW, without a VR scenario enabled, the "trucks" were actually packets of binary information gathered and collated at nodes and squirted across the net. RW was just too boring.
Wong Electronics made some minor pieces of hardware, but they specialized in transmission software, readers and mailers, and certain kinds of security programs. Whoever had snuck into Winthrop's computer had erected a couple of firewalls and dug two deadfalls on his or her way out to cover his or her ass, and from the size and shape, even without the snipped-off ID codes, Jay knew the walls ‘n' falls were top-of-the-line Wongware.
If he could locate, then sneak a ride on a Wong truck and get into their database, maybe he could find out who had bought the firewalls and deadfalls. It would be a brute-force cruncher of a project, but he had access to the power. Maybe the breaker had gotten sloppy and left a trail he could follow.
Ah. There was one of the orange-roof trucks now, a couple hundred feet below and half a mile ahead. He'd just drop on down and stow away. Breaking a lock on one of the trucks' doors would be easier than taking his shoes off for a player of Jay's ability.
He throttled back on the belt's thrust and started to lose altitude. He would very much like to find out who had used Winthrop's computer before she did. It would be a loss of face she would hate, he'd be shiny as a new wetlight chip, and he would love it: Oh, that? I ran the guy down, didn't I mention it? Piece of cake, I'm surprised you didn't do it yourself by now. No, no need to thank me, Lieutenant, I was just doing my job…
Jay reached the rear of the truck, shucked off the jet pack, and got out his lock picks. It took him forty-five seconds to get the door open. He closed it quietly behind him.
That's Gridley. Jay Gridley…
From a thousand feet above Jay Gridley, Platt watched, holding slow and level the little helicopter he'd found himself flying in when he'd dialed into Gridley's scenario. Kind of neat, the rocket thing the guy wore, and the backgrounds were all sharp and laid in thick too. The little half-breed gook had some skill.
Of course, Platt had a little skill himself. Plus he had access to all kinds of secret crap that a U.S. senator could put his hands on. Anything that White could touch, Hughes could touch, and whatever Hughes had, Platt could play with. There were real advantages to knowing top-secret codes. Platt could rascal stuff from the folks who built Net Force's computers, folks who had done the original hardware and programming, and who knew where all the back doors were hidden.
You hired a guy to build you a castle, he was gonna know where the secret compartments were, ‘cause he put them there.
Platt watched the Net Force operative settle toward th
e orange roof of the Wong Electronics truck on the freeway below. The man dropped his jet pack, opened the truck's door, and climbed inside.
This was gonna be as much fun as goin' upside somebody's head. This little gook with his jet pack didn't have a clue who he was dealin' with. Not a fuckin' clue. He was gonna get his ass kicked, and Platt was gonna love doin' it too.
He let the helicopter sink a little.
When he was over the truck and maybe sixty feet up, he opened the copter's window and leaned out, a twenty-five-pound barbell weight in one hand. He extended the weight, lined up, and let it drop.
The steel plate fell, hitting the cab. The driver swerved into the car in the lane next to him. He slammed on his brakes and skidded to a halt. Nobody got hurt, but it ought to rattle little Jay pretty good.
Platt hit the copter's throttled, rose, and veered away. By the time Jay-Jay got his shit together, Platt would be long gone.
We havin' fun now, ain't we?
* * *
Chapter Twenty
Friday, December 31st, 4 p.m. Quantico, Virginia
It was Jay Gridley who was the bearer of the bad news.
Alexander Michaels was feeling pretty good that there hadn't been any more top-secret leaks into the net for the entire workweek. He was about to go home and enjoy a quiet beer or two on New Year's Eve. He planned to be asleep by the time midnight rolled around, and with it the year 2011 and whatever joys and griefs it would bring. But as he was getting ready to leave his office to beat the traffic, Jay came in with a couple of sheets of hardcopy in his hand.
"I think you ought to take a look at this, Boss."
"It can't wait until Monday?"
"I don't think so."
"Why don't I like the tone of that?"
Jay tendered the hardcopy. Michaels looked at it. He started to read it aloud:
"Overlord Beasts of America:
"Know you Beasts that your days are numbered. Know you Oppressors of the Disenfranchised People, that the Number of the Beast is 666, and that the Number fast approaches. We, the Representatives of the People, we, The Frihedsakse, will bring Low You Despoilers of Earth, You Masters of Tyranny."
Hidden Agendas (1999) Page 15
