'The Chinese?'
'Possible. They have some people who are pretty good hackers. Maybe
the HAARP guys found some piece of the puzzle and the Chinese knew
where to use it. Nothing for certain, and it's kind of a stretch, but
I'd check it out.'
Michaels nodded.
'I hope you are wrong. I hope nobody else makes the connection and
thinks it is our problem to solve. All right. Find out what you can.
If this thing in China is connected to it, I don't want us to be caught
flat footed At the very least, we need to be able to say we're
investigating it if somebody should ask.'
'Gotcha, Boss. I'm on the case.'
After Jay left, Michaels took several deep breaths. Let it be some
virus they couldn't find and not something they swiped from a U.S.
computer. Please. I really don't need this right now. Or ever...
Thursday, June 9th Washington, D.C.
It was well after dark when Toni's plane landed at Dulles.
She'd had to switch from the jumbo jet to a smaller craft in New York,
and she knew she'd catch hell if her mother found out she had been at
JFK and hadn't called the Bronx to at least say hello, but she couldn't
deal with that yet. Her mother would want to know all about it, what
had happened with Alex, and even Guru would need more details than Toni
was ready to provide. She'd thought the story was over, but maybe it
wasn't, and until she had a better sense of things, she didn't want to
start downloading it into sympathetic ears. She needed a girlfriend
for that, anyhow, somebody who could listen to the gory details--not
her mother or her elderly teacher. Mama Fiorella had raised a houseful
of children, mostly sons, and with six kids, she certainly knew about
sex, but knowing it and talking about it were two different things.
Toni remembered a discussion she'd had with one of her older brothers
when she'd been about nineteen. He'd been asking about women, when
their mother had wandered into the room. Mama heard the words 'female
orgasm' and disappeared faster than Houdini stoked on
methamphetamines.
No, the conversation about Alex and sex and love would have to wait
until she could pay a visit to one of her college buds, Dirisha Mae, or
Mary Louise, women she'd kept in touch with since school. Women who
had been there and done it themselves, and had come back to cry on her
shoulder about it. The Man War, they had dubbed it in the dorm when
they'd lived there. Some battles you won, some you lost, but the war
itself never ended.
The cab ride through the sticky summer night to Alex's was incredibly
fast, as of course it would be, since she was suddenly not in a real
hurry to get there. Back in London, thousands of miles away, this had
seemed urgent and absolutely necessary. The closer she got, the less
brilliant the idea seemed. Just showing up on Alex's doorstep, no
call, no warning? What if he wasn't home? What if he didn't want to
talk to her?
What if he wasn't alone^.
