'Yeah, you can. Then I can beat you and make you feel bad.'
'Hah. Gimme it.'
He smiled as she took the new boomerang and headed out to where they
had chalked a throwing circle. He sure did like her. She wasn't
gorgeous like Belladonna Wright, and Nadine didn't make his heart race
as Bella had done with a touch or a look, but he enjoyed being around
her.
She was somebody he could hang with, not exactly like a sister, but not
somebody who stirred up his hormones too much, either. Outside of his
pal Jimmy-Joe Hatfield, he didn't have any other close friends. And
boy, she could throw.
He watched her limber up her arm and shoulder, drop some pixie dust to
check the wind direction, then set herself for the throw.
The new boomerang whirled from her hand and soared, climbed steeply,
twirling into the morning sunshine. Man.
Look at it go.
Friday, June 3rd Quantico, Virginia
As he usually did when things got dicey in his personal life, Alex
Michaels buried himself in work. Which was why he was at the office at
nine p.m. on a Friday night, keeping busy. He scanned computer files,
logged into reports annotated by his staff, and tried not to think
about anything else.
Somebody was scamming old people by selling phantom retirement property
from a website that appeared to be located in some kind of moving
vehicle in south Florida.
Another third world country had joined the net, peddling drugs you
couldn't buy without a prescription in the U.S.' and for a third the
cost.
Some hacker had broken into the Sears mainframe and was threatening to
wipe all the memory clean if they didn't pay him half a million
dollars.
It was the usual kind of thing that Net Force handled, and there seemed
to be more and more of it coming their way every day.
It had been a long day. He noticed he was getting very stiff in his
chair, hunched over the keyboard. He could operate his computer with
his voice, of course, and voxax was as fast as he could do it
manually--faster, even--but he'd never quite gotten used to dictating
reports. He'd speak, the words would appear on the screen, and he
could do it leaning back and comfortable, but it somehow didn't feel
the same. Maybe they used different parts of the brain, keyboarding
and speaking.
Or maybe he was just getting old and the future was passing him by ...
He thought about going down the hall to the gym and doing his djurus.
Toni had been teaching him pentjak silat for six months, since after
he'd almost been assassinated, and he officially knew four of the short
forms. She'd started him with the simple ones from Bukti, but after
he'd gotten two of those, she decided to skip over the rest and go
right into the more complex Serak system. Bukti was pretty much a
filter, she'd said, a perfectly good system of self-defense, but used
to strain out casual students from the really serious ones. After you
