by Tom Clancy
Kent wiped his guitar down with the black silk and put it into the case. Jen put her instrument away.
He took a deep breath. “You, uh, want to get some supper?”
She stopped latching the case for a second, glanced over at him.
“Supper?”
“Yes. Food. Dinner. At a restaurant.”
She didn’t say anything.
He said, “Help me out here. I haven’t done this in a long time.”
“You haven’t had food in a long time?”
He laughed.
“Sure. I’d like that,” she said. “Maybe we should leave the guitars locked up here? Safer than in the car.”
“Sure. You know any good places locally?”
“A couple.”
“You want to drive or give directions?”
“I’ll drive.”
The night was chilly as they walked toward her car. She said, “So, Abe, when was the last time you asked a woman out?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Four, five years ago?”
“Really?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She shook her head. “Wow.”
“Better than that—she turned me down.”
Jen laughed.
“I won’t keep you out late,” he said. “Wouldn’t want your cat to get hungry.”
“Don’t worry about the cat,” she said. “She’s got an on-demand feeder in the kitchen. She won’t starve.”
He smiled. So far, so good . . .
She drove them to a little Italian place maybe a mile away from the music store. Dino’s was one of those checkered-tablecloths, candles-in-wine-bottles kind of cafes, ten tables, most of them full. The guy at the front, a good-looking dark-haired kid of maybe twenty, smiled at Jen when he saw her come in. “Ah, Miss Jennifer, how are you this night?”
“Fine, Gino. Got room for two?”
“We do.” He collected a couple of menus and led them to a small table in a dark corner. “Pasta with clam sauce is the special tonight. Enjoy.”
Before they could do more than sit, a busboy brought glasses of water, a basket of garlic bread, and a bottle of red wine with two glasses.
Kent noted the unasked-for wine as he picked up the menu. “What’s good?”
“Pick anything—never had a bad meal here. I come in once or twice a week. Gino’s father is the cook, his mother the cashier, and there are a couple of sisters who work here.”
The waitress, a young woman who was indeed obviously related to Gino, arrived. “Good evening, Miss Jen.”
“Hey, Maria. This is General Abe Kent, one of my students.”
The young woman smiled at Kent. “Ah, welcome to Dino’s, Generale.”
Jen ordered the special, and Abe asked for spaghetti with meat sauce. After Maria left, he took a bite of the bread as Jen poured them each a glass of the house red. Both the bread and wine were excellent. “How did you know I was a general?”
“I have a computer and access to the Internet,” she said. “I looked you up.”
“Ah.”>
“Ah?”
“Well, I looked you up, too. You never mentioned that you had a couple of music CDs out.”
“It’s been a couple years since I did one of those. Old glory.”
“I enjoyed hearing them. I knew you played well, but those were very nicely done.”
She shrugged. “I’m no Ana Vidovic,” she said. “If you get a chance to hear her Prelude to Bach’s Fourth Lute Suite? Best version out there in the last twenty years, for my money, even if it is a little showpiece fast. But now and then, I have my moments.”
She sipped at her wine and looked at him over the rim. The candlelight sparkled in her eyes. “So, we have checked each other out.”
“So it seems.”
“To what end, General Kent?”
“Well, right now, dinner.”
She smiled, large and lazy. “And after dinner? Would you like to come back to my place?”
He paused and took a slow sip of his wine. He had been out of this game for a long, long time.
“Yes, ma’am, I would be honored.”
She smiled at him again.
They drank more wine.
Washington, D.C.
Saji was holding the baby on her lap when Jay got home, rocking him in the creaking wooden chair. It had been a long day, and the traffic had been horrendous. The President had gone to some kind of function and they had shut down so many streets that it had taken Jay an hour and a half to drive home. He was really going to have to start doing more web-commuting. As soon as he could get out of having to do RT visits to the damned Pentagon . . .
“Hey, babe,” he said.
“Hi.”
“You okay? You look tired.”
“No, I’m fine.” There was a long pause. “You got a call a few minutes ago, from a Captain Rachel Lewis.”
Jay felt his stomach clutch. Why was she calling him at home?
“She wants you to call her back as soon as possible. She said it was important.”
“Yeah, sure.” If it was so important, why hadn’t she called him on his virgil? She had the number. Jay’s belly tightened even more. Why did he feel guilty? He hadn’t done anything!
He shrugged. “She’s the Army computer guy I told you about.”
“Funny, you didn’t mention she was a gorgeous blond female guy.”
Made the call on-cam, too. Damn.
“Not my type. I hardly noticed.”
“Uh huh.”
Jay went over and gave Saji a kiss, then stroked Mark’s young head. He loved to touch that silky fine baby hair.
“You’re funny,” he said. And: “I love you.”
He moved to the house phone on the table next to the couch and brought up the number from the caller ID. The call went through, and Rachel answered. She had her phone’s cam lit, and apparently she had just stepped out of the shower—her hair was wet, and she had a towel wrapped around her, covering her from the breasts down.
“Jay.”
“Captain Lewis.”
“Captain Lewis? Oh, come on, Jay, we are way past that!” She laughed and shook her head.
He should have made this call from his office, he suddenly realized. While the phone’s viewscreen wasn’t angled so Saji could see it from where she sat rocking the baby, she wasn’t deaf.
“What’s up?”
“I came across a piece of material, regarding the game. It looks as if somebody posted something on a university board a few years back, using similar tropes.”
“Yeah, I found that, too,” Jay said. “Joint MIT/CIT files, a couple years after I graduated. But it was posted anonymously and when I tried to backwalk it, I hit a dead end.”
“Me, too. But I found a link embedded in the software. Not in the credits, but in a line of code. An old URL. Long gone, but I got a copy of it from Antique Pages—we should check it out. Might mean something.”
“Great work.” Jay felt a sudden stab of . . . something. Irritation? That she had found something he’d missed? Well, he didn’t have time to run down every line of code in an old game, even if it was similar to the bug game. Probably it didn’t mean anything anyhow.
“We should get together and compare notes,” she said. She leaned back in her chair.
The towel wrapped around her chest came undone and all of a sudden Jay found himself looking at Rachel’s bare breasts.
Quite a spectacular view, pebbled and erect nipples and all.
Jesus Holy Christ!
It seemed to take a long time for her to collect the towel and wrap it back into place. “Oops,” she said. “Sorry about that.” She smiled. “Call me later, we’ll set up a meeting to go check out the page.”
After he discommed, Jay had trouble looking over at Saji.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, fine. Here, let me take the boy. I’ve missed him.”
Jay walked over to where Saji sat and lifted hi
s son up to face level. “How’s the world’s best baby doing today?”
His son grinned at him, and chortled.
Jay smiled back. He had a beautiful, brilliant, loving wife and a gorgeous, happy baby. He didn’t need anything else. Certainly not anything that might cause any strain in his family life. No, sir.
But—Lewis was a smart and not-hard-to-look-at woman who obviously didn’t think Jay was all that hideous himself. It was flattering, to have a sharp and good-looking woman flirting with you. As long as you didn’t follow up on that, no harm and no foul, right?
Why, then, was his mouth so dry? Was it because that quick flash of Rachel’s breasts matched exactly the VR view of them he had seen when first they’d met? Right down to the little red mole next to the left nipple?
“Hey, sweet boy,” Jay said, putting his son’s face over his shoulder. “What say Daddy takes you for a little walk, hey?”
Yeah. Out in the nice, cool air, where Jay himself could let some of the heat in his face escape . . .
Lewis smiled as she broke the connection with Gridley. It had taken him long enough to return her call. She’d been sitting around in her apartment for almost two hours in a damp towel, going into the shower every thirty or forty minutes to re-wet her hair, so she’d look as if she had just stepped out to answer the phone. Not the most comfortable way to spend the evening, but effective for what she intended.
The flash of her boobs had been easy enough, the towel was rigged to fall if she inhaled deeply, and the look on Jay’s face as his eyes went wide was priceless. The seduction of Mr. Gridley was coming along nicely. Calling him at home and talking to his wife was part and parcel of it. The little mother and child, stuck at home, waiting for Daddy, bored, maybe, or just a tad jealous of his mobility? If it made Jay’s wife a little frosty toward him? So much the better.
The business with the college game was, she thought, very clever. She had written it, of course, and it was too good not to reuse—it couldn’t be traced to her. But the URL buried in the code? She’d done that last week. She’d expected he would find the old game on his own, and if he hadn’t, she would have pointed it out to him. Posting a revision and ex-post-facto-ing it would have been tricky, save that while she had been at school, she had managed to leave herself a back door in the school’s operating software. And it had been a brilliant piece of work, because she had allowed for updates in the OS and server, and rigged telltales to let her know when such things happened. It wasn’t so much a worm or a virus or even a Trojan horse, but a kind of one-time VR cookie that allowed her to access the upgrades as they came along, keeping her back door current. She would rebuild the cookie each time she updated her password, and was thus able to keep a line into the college’s system. From her hidden server, which nobody would be able to find, even if they thought to look. And anybody looking for problems from a hacker likely wouldn’t spot it, because it didn’t do anything they might be checking on—didn’t steal space, didn’t corrupt anything, didn’t replicate itself or screw with e-mail. It just sat there, waiting for a change in the OS, and then it called to tell her. A one-shot deal, and almost impossible to catch unless you were looking right at it when it happened.
Her giving it to Jay before he found it would have been a nice touch, but even so, finding a bit in it that he’d supposedly missed was just as good. The date was locked into the system, no way to tell it had been posted years after it was supposed to have been.
She laughed. It was good to be the Queen.
She stood, and went to get dressed. There were other fish to fry. She had to talk to Carruth again, and there was also the matter of the new operative she’d found to verify background information on possible buyers. She needed to test the guy, to make sure he was providing her with legitimate information. She’d give him something to run down that she already knew about, and see how well his answer tallied with hers. If he came up gold, that would be great.
So there had been a couple of setbacks; that was to be expected. By and large, things were going along just fine.
21
Washington, D.C.
“Wow,” Kent said.
“I take that as a compliment,” Jen said.
They were lying side by side in her bed. Almiron, the cat—named, Kent had been told, for a famous woman classical guitarist who had been born in Argentina in 1914—lay sleeping next to his feet.
“Yes, ma’am, please do.”
Jen propped herself up on one elbow and smiled at him. “So, what took you so long to ask me out, Abe? You couldn’t tell that I found you attractive after that first lesson?”
“Well, no. I’m a little slow about such things.”
She laughed. “Better late than never.”
“Yes, ma’am . . .”
It was amazing how relaxed he was with her. Well, okay, at the moment being relaxed might not be so amazing, but . . . overall . . .
“In case you think I do this with all the boys, let me disabuse you of that notion. You’re the first man I’ve invited home for, well, for longer than I care to remember.”
“I’m honored.”
“You should be.”
“Why me?”
“Well, don’t take it the wrong way, but you’re like an old pair of shoes I suddenly found in my closet. They fit, they are comfortable, they don’t look too bad.”
He laughed. “You should do stand-up comedy.”
“Why? Don’t you think I’m better lying down?”
“Yes, ma’am, no question.”
She laughed, and he was happy to have caused it.
New York City
East Coast Fencing Championships
“Jamal’s pretty good, isn’t he?” Marissa asked.
Thorn nodded. “He’s getting there.”
They’d come by to offer their support in today’s match. This was the last day of the Sectionals competition—one step below the Nationals—and Jamal was in the title bout. He’d just scored a touch that put him ahead of his opponent. If he scored the next point, he’d win; if he lost the next point, the score would be at la belle and they would likely be fencing for a while, since in this format you had to win by at least two touches.
The air was cool in the large gym. The bleachers had been retracted to provide space for more pistes, so all the spectators were standing off to one side, watching. It was a very quiet crowd, murmuring softly about that last touch. . . .
The director positioned the fencers on the guard lines, asked if they were ready, and when they both indicated they were, said, “Allez!”
Match point.
The crowd fell silent.
Jamal’s opponent, Michael Sorenson, was the favorite. He was twenty-two years old, a former national champion, and everyone had expected him to walk away with the match. The fact that Jamal was giving him a run for his money—indeed, was a touch away from victory—had created quite a buzz.
“I can’t watch,” Marissa said, clutching his arm. “Tell me what happens, Tommy.”
Thorn smiled. She was pulling his leg. If anything, he was more nervous than she was . . . and she knew it.
Jamal was on their left, which was unfortunate. He was a right-handed fencer, so they had a good look at his back, but couldn’t see him as well as they would have liked. That was too bad, but it’s how it was. The fencers came to the strip in the order they were called, and the spectators were confined to a specific spot.
Thorn didn’t mind, though. He could see all that he needed to see.
Sorenson was pressing the attack.
For a time, the only sounds were the sussing of the fencers’ shoes sliding along the copper piste, the tick-tack of the blades working against each other, and the occasional grunt or cry from one fencer or the other.
Sorenson kept pressing, and Jamal kept retreating, giving ground reluctantly, but giving it up step by step.
“He’s gettin’ awfully close to the end line, isn’t he, Tommy?”
Thorn nodded.
“And he’ll lose a touch if he goes off the end with both feet, won’t he?”
“He won’t,” Thorn said.
But Jamal was getting awfully close. His back foot had already crossed over the line, and Thorn suspected that Sorenson was setting him up for a particular feint. He figured there was a good chance that Sorenson was going to drive a hard attack, probably high-line, then suddenly drop off into a darting thrust at Jamal’s lead foot.
The reflexive counter to that was to draw the front foot back and counter with a thrust to the opponent’s mask.
The problem was that, if Sorenson timed it correctly, Jamal could actually win and lose at the same time. If his front foot drew back and touched down beyond the end line even a fraction of a second before his point struck Sorenson’s mask, the director would award the touch to Sorenson, not to Jamal, and the match would be tied again.
“Watch,” Thorn said. “Tell me what you see.”
“With them down at that end of the strip, about all I can see is Sorenson’s back.”
“Can you see Jamal’s face?”
“Through the mask, sure.”
“Watch his eyes.”
Jamal’s defense had stiffened. Sorenson was pressing, pressing, but Jamal resisted, halfway over the end line.
Back and forth the blades. Attack, parry, riposte, parry, remise, parry, press.
Inside himself, Thorn went still. This was the hardest part of coaching. For that matter, it was the hardest part of spectating, being reduced to an observer. It had been a very long time since he had fenced competitively, but every time he watched a bout a part of him longed to be out there.
“Here it comes,” he whispered.
Jamal had overparried Sorenson’s last attack, leaving his own blade a little higher than he should have. Sorenson reacted immediately, stepping forward and starting a compound attack that began with Jamal’s right wrist, feinted to the outside of his right elbow, then circled over his arm to come in toward his shoulder. As Jamal worked to close out that line, Sorenson’s point dropped suddenly, streaking toward Jamal’s front toe.
Beside him, Thorn heard Marissa gasp.
