themselves to the Army and not bothered the Navy, Air Force, or the Corps.”
Kent knew this was going somewhere, but since Roger was his boss and had two stars to his one, he wasn’t going to try and hurry him along. Ellis would get to it.
“The thing is, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is responsible for ’em all, and he is, as I’m sure you realized, highly perturbed even if it is just the Army. He was big on getting all the high-tech stuff on-line, and this is making him look bad.”
Kent nodded. “I hear you.”
“Maybe you can help.”
Kent said, “I don’t see how. I’d be more than happy to lead a team of my troops to hunt these guys down and slap them into a collective coma, but I wouldn’t know where to start looking.”
“Neither does anybody else. But you’re connected directly to the people who are most likely to find out.”
Kent nodded, but said, “Not exactly my area of expertise, Roger.”
“I know that.”
“And it’s not like I can march into the computer geek’s office and order him to hurry up, find the bad guys. He’s not one of mine.”
Ellis rubbed at his eyes with one hand and nodded. “I know that, too. But when the big dog barks, the puppies sit up and take notice. Hadden wants something done and he wants it done yesterday, and you don’t just tell the man to piss off and die.”
Kent grinned at that thought. “Be guarding a warehouse of rancid seal blubber up above the Arctic Circle the rest of your career, if you did.”
“If you were lucky. The thing is, the way I heard it, that’s what your immediate supervisor Mister—ah, I mean
“Man’s got balls, got to give him that.”
“So do we, and I’d like to keep mine, thank you very much. I know and you know there’s nothing you can do to hurry things along, but I will now be able to report to General Hadden that I have leaned on you. If there is anything you can think of, anything at all that will be part of the solution, I want you to effect it at the earliest.”
Kent nodded. “I understand.” And he did. He had been in the service of his country for a long time, and he knew how the chain of command worked—or, sometimes, didn’t work. He knew he couldn’t do anything substantial. Ellis and Hadden both knew
Kent smiled again at the idea of a musical metaphor. It reminded him of his date with Jen. Now that had been a major event. Neither one of them was a dewy-eyed adolescent, and although the magic had certainly been there for him, there was a certain no-nonsense air about her that came from experience. She liked him, he liked her, and the dinner had progressed to something he hadn’t really expected—certainly not on a first date.
It had been a long, long time for him before that.
Did anybody even use that term anymore? Dating?
“Abe?”
He pulled his attention back to Ellis. “Sir. Sorry. I was wool-gathering.”
“Yeah, well, go home, take a nap. If you can light a fire under anybody, even a tiny one, it would help.”
“I’ll do what I can. Either way, I’m sure the eventual result will come back up the chain.” Which meant at the least he could probably get Gridley to confirm that some impetus had come from Ellis’s office to speed him along, and that datum would eventually find its way to Hadden’s desk. It wouldn’t mean an awful lot, but every little bit helped.
Ellis gave him a tired smile. “I appreciate it.”
As Kent left, following the Marine sergeant escort toward the exit, he considered the best way to approach Gridley. Straight on, he decided. Drop by his office, lay it out that Thorn’s boss had leaned on Thorn, then on him, and allow as how he knew it wouldn’t make Gridley go any faster than the flat-out speed at which he was already going, but that this was how the military mind worked. Gridley wouldn’t get his jockey shorts in a wad about it, if Kent presented it that way.
He wasn’t too worried about it; besides, he had a guitar lesson this evening, and however that turned out, given his new connection with Jen, it was going to be much more interesting than the rest of his day.
When they reached the exit, the sergeant said, “Congratulations on your promotion, General Kent.”
“Thank you, son.”
He still hadn’t gotten used to that rank, but he didn’t mind hearing his name with it attached.
“Semper fi, sir.”
“Always, Sergeant. Always.”
The escort gave him a crisp and perfect salute, and Kent returned it with one almost as good. He gave the man his ID badge and exited the building.
Outside, the day was cool, but sunny. It felt almost like an early spring day. Of course, this was Washington, D.C. If you didn’t like the weather, all you had to do was wait—it would change soon enough.
When Jay logged into Lewis’s scenario, he was surprised to find himself walking down the hall of a hospital. It was a well-built visualization—there was that too-clean antiseptic smell, and that soft echo-stopping sound of carpeted floors and thick walls. Jay looked around, saw mothers walking with tiny babies, or in wheelchairs, holding infants on their laps. The maternity floor.
He saw Lewis up ahead, standing with her arms crossed, staring through a wall of glass into a large room marked NURSERY.
Jay approached, not speaking.
“Well-baby nursery,” Lewis said.
There were rows of plastic cribs with babies in them, all kinds, and it made Jay smile to see them. He remembered going to see his son in just such a place.
Not looking at him, Lewis said, “The road partially taken.”
Jay didn’t say anything.
“I was engaged once. My fiance and I got started a little early on our family. I got pregnant, and we decided to wait until after the baby was born before we had the wedding.”
She kept watching the infants behind the glass.
“Sean was a seven-pound, healthy, pink boy. Or so we thought.”
Jay blinked. She had never mentioned having a child before.
“He had a rare condition, he was born with an aneurysm. A congenital defect. His aorta just . . . burst when he was two days old. He died in a few minutes. Right in the RW version of there.”
Jay was stunned by this news. “I’m so sorry.”
She shrugged. “Wasn’t anything that could be done. No way to tell until it was too late. Well. I found out later that this had happened several times in my fiance’s family—apparently it was a genetic thing. One baby in four or five had it.”
