Hidden Agendas

be, even though guns were all kinds of illegal in this city. All Platt had on him was a little aluminum-handled Kershaw liner-lock, blade just about three inches, and while he could snap it open as fast as a switchblade and could slice and dice somebody into bloody mush with it, a knife wasn't the smartest choice against three or four gangbangers strapped with shooters. He didn't like to carry a gun in the city unless he had a particular need for one, and he didn't want to use the knife if it was one-on-one — unless the jig pulled one.

Or unless it turned out the boy was a karate or judo guy who knew his stuff. Most of that crap was worthless, it didn't work on the street, but now and then you'd run into one of them smart enough to keep it simple, with the skill and timing to make it work. Had to give them that, some of them could dance real good. That would get you your ass kicked pretty good. If that happened, he could sneak the knife out and hide it, wait for an opening, though a guy who knew enough of that gook fighting shit to thump you barehanded usually knew how to deal with a blade too. Plait had a few nasty memories about bad guesses he'd made. But this guy in the leather jacket didn't look like no Bruce Lee, and besides, Platt just wanted to stomp somebody a little, not kill him.

'What you starin' at, boy?'

The big black man stopped. 'Who you callin' boy, cracker?'

'I don't see nobody else around, do you? Boy?'

Leather boy took his shades off and carefully slipped them into his pocket. He smiled.

Plait matched the smile. Oh, this was going to be fun…

Monday, December 20th, 10:20 a.m. Of Virginia

Alex Michaels sat at his desk, looking over the latest computer dump into his electronic in-box. Came in every half hour, the new business, faster if it was flagged, and there was always some fresh crisis that Net Force had to take care of or the country would go to hell in a handbasket. He on-screened the latest batch and scrolled through them: Somebody had stolen a couple million dollars worth of Intel's SuperPent wetlight chips from a plant in Aloha, Oregon. There was a name for you, Aloha. Town's founder must have spent a pleasant time in Hawaii. The chips were small enough so that they could all fit neatly into a shirt pocket without causing the pocket to sag, and good luck on finding those before they made their way to Seoul to be restamped and installed.

Next item…

Stanley the Scammer had opened a new VR store, once again selling porno. There was no product, past the handful of public-domain teaser j-pegs and QuickTime VRs he used to sucker his customers in to buy. He took their electronic money, promised to send them a bunch of nasty stuff, then shut the VR shop down and shifted to a new location. They had busted Stanley a couple of times, always in New York City. Stanley would rent a cheap flophouse room with a plug and phone, hook his computer up, run his scam, and usually skip before the local cops got there. While he wasn't moving across state lines himself, his victims were from all over, so it was Net Force's problem. And it was compounded by the fact that most people who got ripped off buying pornography didn't particularly want the proper authorities to know that was what they were doing, so most of the customers ate the loss and kept quiet about it. Explaining to the wife that you lost a hundred dollars trying to get a copy of the 'Darla Does Detroit' VR was something most men wanted to avoid. The wife might get curious about all that time hubby was spending in his workshop with the door closed.

Stanley's was a classic scam, and the reason most confidence men who were any good could continue to pull off their games was that they appealed to the illegal or immoral in people, made them partners in the sting. A guy worried that he was doing something wrong was hesitant to run to the police to complain when he got cheated.

Of course, there was always somebody who cared more about their money than their reputation, and so some sucker always reported Stanley.

The main problem was that there were dozens, scores, hundreds of small-time thieves like Stanley, and anytime they ripped off somebody computronically across a state line, Net Force heard about it.

Michaels shook his head and scrolled the proj:

Here was a report of a money transfer gone bad at a small bank in South Dakota. Some enterprising cyberstealer had siphoned a couple hundred thousand into his account during a series of fast e-shifts. The Feds' safeguards had caught it, albeit a bit late, and the money was quickly recovered, but they still had to catch the thief, who had run in a hurry, and figure out how he had managed to slip the federal wards even as long as he had. It had been an inside job — the thief worked as an auditor for the bank. It almost always was an inside job, given how good the Federal Reserve kept track of money these days.

What else did they have here?

'Sir,' Liza broke in, over the com. 'I've got Don Segal from the CIA on the hot line. He says it's an emergency!'

Michaels smiled at his secretary's excitement. Most emergencies didn't turn out to be all that exciting. 'I'll take it,' he said.

'Hello, Don.' Segal was the AD for foreign intel-gathering, a nice guy whose wife had just given birth to their third child, a boy.

'Alex. We've got a big problem.'

'I've got to appear before White's committee tomorrow morning,' Michaels said. 'Bad as that?'

'I'm serious here, Alex. Somebody just posted to the net a list of all our sub-rosa ops in the Euro-Asian theaters.'

'Jesus!'

'Yeah. Every American spy in Europe, Russia. China, Japan, Korea—all of them have just been outed. State is crapping big octagonal bricks. A lot of the ops are in supposedly friendly countries, our allies. That's going to cost us some favors and a lot of mea culpas, but we've also got agents in places where they'll get shot first and questioned later. We've put out a total recall, but some of them aren't going to get out before they get picked up.'

'Damn,' Michaels said.

'Yeah. Damn. And think about it — if he got Europe and Asia, who's to say he didn't get the Middle East, Africa, or South America?'

Michaels couldn't even speak. 'Damn' wouldn't begin to cover it.

'We got to find this guy, Alex.'

'Yeah.'

Chapter Seven

Monday, December 20th, 10:25 a.m. Quantico, Virginia

Joanna Winthrop washed her hands, reached for the paper-towel dispenser, and looked at her reflection in the large mirror over the sink in the women's restroom.

She shook her head at her doppelganger. All of her life people had told her how beautiful she was, men — both young and old — and more than a few women, but she still didn't see it. She had learned how to pretend to ignore the stares, but people still stopped her on the street, strangers, to tell her how attractive she was. It was flattering. It was interesting.

It got in her way.

And it was a mystery to Winthrop. She had a sister, Diane, who truly was beautiful, and next to whom she had always felt dowdy. Her mother at fifty was a knockout, and her smile wrinkles and gray hair only served to accent her perfect bone structure and muscle tone. True, Joanna wasn't ugly, but of the Winthrop women, she was a distant third insofar as looks were concerned. In her opinion.

Of course, that wasn't what most other people seemed to think. It had been a mixed blessing all of her life. Sure, it had been fun to be invited to all the parties when she'd been a kid, to always be at the top of everybody's lists, to be popular and sought-after. She had accepted it as the norm, never questioned it — until she looked up one day and realized that most people considered her nothing more than a… decoration. All she had to do was stand there, smile, and be pretty, be an ornament, and that was enough for them. It wasn't