officers from the base, jogging along at a pretty good clip themselves.
Ordinarily, he enjoyed riding the trike, feeling the burn in his legs
and lungs, knowing he was working his muscles and cooking off that half
carton of Haagen-Dazs he'd eaten the night before. Ordinarily, the
commander of Net Force enjoyed a lot of things, but like his feet
toe-clipped into the pedals, a lot of what he had been doing lately had
been no more than going through the motions.
Work was pretty good. Aside from the ten thousand usual small fish Net
Force had to school and round up, there weren't any major problems in
the world of computer crime just at the moment. Nothing like the mad
Russian who'd wanted to take over the planet, or the senator's aide who
wanted to buy up the world bit by bit, or even the dotty English lord
who'd wanted to bring back the glory days of the Empire. Congress
hadn't cut him off at the knees lately, and his boss, the new FBI
director, was sometimes hardheaded, but basically not too bad, and she
mostly left him alone.
Work was fine. It was his personal life that was an absolute wreck.
He guided the trike to the right, to make sure the two bicyclers coming
from the other direction side-by-side had plenty of room to get by. The
couple, an older man and woman, waved as he went by. He gave them a
quick lift of his hand in return.
His ex-wife, Megan, had gotten engaged, and was petitioning the courts
in Idaho for sole custody of their daughter, Susie. Her new love
wanted to adopt the girl. Susie liked her mom's new friend, which was
more than Michaels could say. That he had decked the man at a family
Christmas gathering had not helped the situation any--even though it
had felt pretty good at the time.
Michaels could fight it. His lawyer said he had a pretty good chance
of winning in court, and Michaels's knee jerk reaction at first had
been to do just that, fight it until his last breath, if need be. But
he loved his daughter, and' she was at a tender age, still years away
from being a teenager. What would a nasty court battle do to her? The
[ last thing he wanted to do was traumatize his only child.'
Would it be better for her to have a mother and father even a
stepfather--there with her all the time? Washington, D.C.' was a long
way from Boise, and Michaels didn't see his daughter as much as he
wished. Had shuffling out to see him in the summers done some kind of
irreparable harm to Susie? Would it make her life worse in the long
run?
The big banked curve on the bike trail was just ahead, and rather than
slow down, Michaels decided he was going to power his way through it.
He upshifted and pumped even harder. But as he started into the curve,
he saw a group of walkers ahead, residents of a local nursing home.
They were spread almost all the way across the path. He didn't have a
warning horn on the trike, and he had a sudden fear that if he yelled
for them to get out of the way, one of the old folks might well keel
over from a heart attack.
He stopped pedaling and squeezed the hand brakes The heavy-duty disk
brakes on all three wheels squeaked from the sudden pressure, and there
