Bio-Strike

why he looked back on a past that included being the junior member of a father-son hustling team, a borderline juvenile delinquent, and, by her standards, a victim of child exploitation — what else would you call being kept truant from school to hold a cue stick in a dive full of chronic gamblers? — with such obvious fondness. Whether this was because her own upbringing was so different from his, she couldn’t really say for sure, but Ridgewood, New Jersey, might as well have been worlds away from downtown Philly, and while she’d taken courses on Old and Middle English at Groton prep, there had been nary a mention of draw, follow, left, or right English in the offered curriculum.

She concentrated on her workout now, measuring Nimec with repeated flicks of her outthrust fist as he continued side-shuffling to her right, protecting the outside margin of the defensive circle he’d taught her to imagine around herself.

“Back to Lang,” he said. “We have to utilize the NCIC database if we’re going to get the intelligence we need.”

“And his inclination is to ask the director to okay us,” she said. “Right up to the highest classification levels.”

“Up to,” he said.

She nodded.

“But not including.”

She nodded again.

“That won’t cut it,” he said. “Your average uniformed cop can input the overall system from his prowl if it’s got an onboard computer. I want Lang to arrange for unrestricted access.”

Nimec lifted both mitts in the air. She threw a one-two combination, followed through with a straight left, and blocked another swipe at her head without surrendering any canvas.

“It gets sort of complicated,” she said. “National security’s foremost with him.”

Nimec looked confused.

“He doesn’t trust us?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then complicated how?”

“I’d rather not explain it right now.”

She saw his frown of confusion deepen.

“Leave it alone, Pete. I’m flying to D.C. again in a couple of days. We’ll see what Bob’s got to say.”

Nimec looked at her a moment.

Bob again, he thought.

Then he gave a little shrug and shifted direction, dropping his right mitt to take an uppercut. Megan swung and made only glancing contact.

“You pulled that one. Again.”

She brought her arm up smoothly, throwing her shoulder into the blow, and felt the satisfying impact of her fist thumping the leather dead on.

“Okay, that was perfect. Relax a minute,” he said, coming to a flat-footed halt. “Now listen, this is important.” He patted the middle of his rib cage with his mitt. “A guy comes at you, here’s where you hit him. Do it hard and clean, and it’ll collapse his diaphragm, doesn’t matter how big he is. And he won’t have expected it from a woman. People who don’t know how to fight will generally make the same mistakes. They either aim for the nose or chin, which aren’t easy to tag, or the gut, where there’s more muscle, fat, whatever sort of insulation, than anywhere else.” He lifted the other mitt to the side of his neck, just below the ear. “If you don’t have an opening for the upper body, and you think you have the reach, you’ll want to pop him right here. At the pressure point. Got it?”

“The chest or the neck,” Megan said, the words spaced between long gulps of breath. She brushed a trickle of sweat from her eye with her glove. “You’ve told me that at least a dozen times.”

“Reinforcement’s never hurt anyone I’ve trained.” He wiggled the mitt in front of his ribs. “Quick, let me have some—”

“Pete—”

“And we’ll be through for today.”

She let him have some.

Ten minutes later, they were outside the ropes, towels draped over their shoulders, their T-shirts splotched with perspiration and clinging to their bodies. Nimec went over to his supply locker, put away his target mitts, then helped Megan to unlace her gloves.

“There’s another item of business we need to discuss,” he said, hanging the gloves on a peg inside the locker.

“Concerning?

“Ricci’s brain flash about establishing RDTs,” he said. “I’ve been mulling it over and feel it ought to be done.”

Megan stood undoing her hand wraps, her open gym bag on a bench against the wall behind her.

“I agree,” she said. “Provisionally.”

“Your provisions being…?”

“It would have to be on an experimental basis and subject to constant review. And I’d want everybody on board. Meaning Gord and Rollie.” She looked at him. “You seem surprised, Pete.”

Nimec shrugged.

“You didn’t seem too enthused about the suggestion when it was offered,” he said. “I figured I’d run into more resistance.”

Megan considered how to respond. She finished removing the linen wraps, wound them up neatly, then turned to the bench and dropped them into her bag.

“Ricci’s aptitude isn’t anything that I question,” she said finally, looking back at Nimec. “I just don’t enjoy his contentious solo flier routine. And sometimes I need to be where he isn’t to get past it.”

Nimec shrugged a little, his hand on the locker’s open door.

“Sounds like some kind of solution, anyway.”

“You could call it that,” she said. “I think of it as keeping my sights on the bigger picture.”

He gave her a questioning glance.

“Whoever attacked us in Brazil last spring killed a lot of our people and would have caused even more destruction… would have been able to blackmail every country on earth… if we hadn’t gotten in the way of their plans,” she said. “Put me in our enemy’s shoes, I’d be carrying one serious grudge. And the thought of not being ready if and when it’s acted upon worries the hell out of me, Pete.”

He kept looking at her for several long seconds and then swung the locker door inward. It shut with a dull, metallic clang.

“Makes two of us,” he said.

Some months earlier in Madrid, in the Villanueva building of the Museo del Prado, he had gone to view Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Triumph of Death, and even now was unsure how long he had stood before it. It was as if time had stilled around him. As if his innermost visions had been projected onto the wall of the gallery.

He had not known where to rest his eye. On the molten orange landscape with its pools of fire, its spewing clouds of black, volcanic smoke? Or the medieval village besieged by an exterminating army of skeletons, banners of war hoisted above their skull heads, the hollow sockets of their eyes showing only a pitiless adherence to their single objective? Here they hacked at the living with broadswords. Here they impaled them on the points of spears. There a cadaverous looter knelt over his prostrate victim, holding knife to throat to deliver the finishing stroke. In the right foreground, a peasant woman who had fallen atop a pile of twisted corpses raised her arms in a futile plea for mercy as a bone soldier stood with one conquering foot planted on her body, his battle-ax swinging inexorably downward. Where to rest the eye? On which scene of fabulous annihilation? The death barge advancing over a mire of crushed bodies and blood, its skeletal crew wrapped in the white cerements of the grave? The townsman hanging, limp, from the single forking limb of a shattered tree? The emaciated dog, all skin and protruding ribs, sniffing hungrily at the child in its fallen mother’s embrace? Or the revelers in peacock finery scattering from their