that’ll be good.”
Thorn nodded again. “Anything else?”
“Not really. I’ve been working with Captain Lewis at the Pentagon, but most of what we’ve done has been eliminating stuff, not coming up with any arrows pointing in the right direction. She’s pretty sharp, though. She spotted some things before I did.”
“General?”
Kent smiled. “I don’t know enough to ask intelligent questions. General Ellis has indicated that General Hadden is about to blow a gasket and I’m supposed to hurry things up, but since Jay is already going as fast as anybody can go, me saying, ‘Go faster!’ ain’t gonna help.” He nodded at Jay, then added, “Although, when you do catch these guys, it would be to my benefit and General Ellis’s if you allowed in a report somewhere as how our urging somehow expedited the process, even though we all know it didn’t.”
Jay grinned at that. “I can do that.”
“Thanks, Jay,” Kent said.
Thorn looked around at the small meeting. “Okay, gentlemen,” he said, “I think that’s it for now.”
Kent and Jay left.
Thorn leaned back in his chair. Working for the military had one big advantage—you weren’t running around all over the place trying to stomp out little fires. This was their priority, and it wasn’t going to be diluted by having to attend to other things until it got resolved. Nobody at Net Force was going to be hunting down Internet scam artists or porno-sellers, or people breaking into banks—those were somebody else’s problems now. On the one hand, that was good. But on the other hand . . .
Eventually, the organization of Net Force would have to change. How necessary was the staff they had if their workload was dramatically decreased? What was the need of a military unit of what was now Marines for domestic problems? As National Guard, Net Force’s military had been at least semilegal; as Marines, that got a bit more iffy, even under the relaxed antiterrorism statutes of Homeland Security. A unit of Marines charging across a mall parking lot to kick in a door? That wasn’t going to play well on the evening news—the idea of a strong military operating at home hadn’t been high on the Founding Fathers’ list of things that were good for the country. The Marines were supposed to go to foreign shores to clear the roads for the Army to follow, and, if need be, help defend the U.S. from invaders, but when was the last time the U.S. had been invaded? 1812? Or did the Alamo count, even though Texas wasn’t a state for another eight or nine years?
What Thorn foresaw was a dismantling of Net Force as a separate unit, with the pieces being mainstreamed into other commands. Some of his people would stick around, some would not. In his case, probably not. There wasn’t a lot for him to do with all the generals around him. The DoD ground slow, but fine, and how much longer would there be a Net Force as such?
Not long, Thorn figured. He’d have to quit or be fired, and while it didn’t really make any difference on one level, he’d rather leave the party before they kicked him out. . . .
Well, he had taken on the job, and done it as best he could. He had served his country, given something back, but he didn’t need the work. Maybe it was time for him to smile and walk away. Marry Marissa, go and play for a while. Travel, see the world, get to know the woman he loved.
There were certainly worse ways to spend your time.
As Kent started to uncase his guitar, flipping latches open, he glanced at Jen. “What’s the problem?” he said.
Jen looked up at him. “How do you know I have a problem?”
“Nothing specific. It’s like there’s a . . . darkness around you.” He shrugged.
She played a series of arpeggios up the neck of the guitar, and they sounded somehow sad to him. “Minor chords,” she said. “For when your mood is low.”
Kent didn’t say anything. One thing he had learned from being married was that there were times to speak and times to keep his mouth shut. If she was going to tell him what was bothering her, she would—pushing it wouldn’t help.
She stopped playing. “An old enemy of mine died recently,” she said.
He kept silent. Enemy? Jen? That didn’t seem likely.
“When I was a girl, in junior high, I was a geek—already learning how to play classical guitar, no interest in pop music. Probably a good reason for that—this was the late seventies, when disco was still hot—‘Stayin’ Alive,’ ‘Saturday Night Fever,’ like that. The only pop song I learned was Randy Newman’s ‘Short People,’ and that’s because my best friend at the time was just pushing five feet tall.”
Kent smiled.
“People would see me sitting in a empty classroom practicing, and they’d ask me to play ‘Dust in the Wind,’ or ‘How Deep Is Your Love,’ and I had no interest in any of that. ‘Romanza’? Sure. I’d even try ‘Canon in D,’ though technically you can’t do it on one guitar by yourself. And anything by Bach I could manage. But if you wanted Barry Gibb, I was not your girl, thank you very much.”
Her hand moved lightly on the strings but didn’t make a sound. “It was kind of lonely, not being part of any of the cliques, but that’s where I was. Then I met another classical music fan one day, a girl my age, and since we were the only two people we knew at the school who even liked the stuff, much less played it—she was a cellist— there wasn’t any way we weren’t gonna be friends.”
He waited.
She looked at him. “Elizabeth Ann Braun. She wore braces, her hair in pigtails, and was a short, skinny little thing who never got any taller. We hung out, we played music, we discussed boys, with whom we had almost no experience. We did our homework together. Her mother was divorced, she’d never known her father, and she was half again as geeky as I was. Beth liked poetry—she had memorized ‘The Raven’ and used to go down the halls at school reciting it aloud, giving everybody who looked at her the evil eye.”
He smiled.
She smiled, too. “Those were good days. We gloried in our dweebness—we felt superior to all the mundane jocks and big-hair girls all trying to look like Farrah Fawcett. We thought they were all wasted space. Fourteen- year-old girls with superiority complexes, and we were our own clique, just the two of us, we lived in each other’s pockets, finished each other’s sentences, even had our periods together. Friends to our cores.”
Kent nodded but stayed silent. She was on a roll and he didn’t need to oil the machine.
“We stayed that way through junior high, high school, and the first few months of college. Then she got into a yelling match with a music professor who wouldn’t let her take an advanced class she wanted to take without a required course. Pissed her off so bad she quit school. She had a full-ride music scholarship—it was a state school —but she just . . . left. And to complete shooting herself in the foot, she joined the Army. Didn’t tell me until after she had done it.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, that military is the lowest job on the totem pole, all right. Below the guy who cleans out Porta Potties.”
Jen laughed. “No offense. It just wasn’t for Beth.”
“No offense taken. What happened?”
“She hated it. Really hated it. Discipline was not her thing. So she just . . . left. The Army doesn’t much care for that, once you sign on, apparently.”
“No. They don’t.”
“She came home, hid out in my apartment, sneaked back and forth to her mother’s. Eventually, the FBI came looking for her. Apparently, desertion is a federal offense.”
“Yep.”>
“Scared the hell out of me when the FBI agents showed up on my doorstep one day. They rattled me good— threatened me with dire things if they found out I knew where Beth was, or was helping her. Really scared me because, at that moment, she was hiding in my bathroom, not twenty feet away.”
“The weed of crime bears bitter fruit,” he said.
