Michaels and Toni were checking out of the hotel to catch a taxi to the airport when the desk clerk said, 'It might be a good idea if you rang your air carrier, sir.'
'Oh'
'Yes, sir. We've just gotten word that there's been something of a problem with flight schedules out of Heathrow. And out of Gatwick, as well, I'm afraid.'
The clerk, as it turned out, was a master of understatement. Michaels's attempts to connect with British Airways were unsuccessful. All incoming lines, he was told by a recording, were temporarily busy, and would he please try again later?
While he was doing just that, Toni caught him by the arm and pulled him over to a television set in the hotel pub. The BBC had broken into regular programming for a special bulletin: Apparently nearly all the computer systems at the world's largest airports had gone bonkers. These included not only the ticketing and reservations computers but the flight control systems and auto-nav landing beacons as well. A quick check showed problems in Los Angeles, New York, Dallas — Fort Worth, Denver, Sydney, Auckland, Jakarta, New Delhi, Hong Kong, Moscow, Paris, and London. Passenger air travel at major terminals around the world had been brought to a virtual halt in a matter of minutes. Airline personnel were trying to manage, but without computers, the process was next to impossible. In many places, you couldn't buy a ticket or get a seat assignment. If you could, there wasn't likely to be plane waiting — assuming you could find the proper gate — and if you did find a plane, it wasn't going anywhere any time soon.
Today, at least, man was apparently not meant to fly.
'Jesus,' Michaels said.
'It's a mess, all right. And you know what?'
Michaels nodded sourly. 'Yeah. Somehow, it's going to become our mess.'
He knew he shouldn't have said that, knew that the bored god who stood watch for fools was ever alert for just such comments. The response wasn't long in coming.
'Commander Michaels?'
Michaels found himself staring at a tall, green-eyed woman of maybe thirty. She had short, dishwater-blonde hair, and was dressed in a dark, conservative suit, with a skirt almost to her knees, and sensible flats. When she took a step toward him, he figured she was a gymnast. Or a dancer, maybe. Very nice…
'Yes?'
'My name is Angela Cooper, I'm with MI-6.' She pulled out a wallet with a holographic ID and showed it to him. 'Would you and Ms. Fiorella be good enough to accompany me? Minister Wood and Director-General Hamilton would like very much to have a word with you.'
'We're supposed to catch a plane,' he said.
Cooper nodded at the television, then gave him a small smile. 'I'm afraid that's unlikely in the near future, sir. And if we are going to repair that problem, we could use your help. We've cleared it with your director.'
Michaels looked at Toni. She raised her eyebrows in a what-the-hell expression.
Well, why not? It would probably beat sitting in a crowded waiting room at the airport. Besides, he had heard a lot about the MI-6 building; it would be interesting to see it, if nothing else.
Something about Angela Cooper grated on Toni. As Cooper drove the three of them through the London streets in the big right-hand-drive Dodge toward Vauxhall Crossing, Toni tried to pin it down. The woman was attractive, polite, and well-spoken. She was probably about the same age as Toni, give or take a year, and if she was an agent with MI-6, they probably had a lot in common. On the face of it, there didn't seem to be any reason to dislike Ms. Cooper. Maybe it was chemistry. Or maybe it was the expression on Alex's face when the woman had accosted them. That quickly veiled look of male interest. Alex said he was in love with her, and Toni believed him, but men were hard to fathom at times. If she hadn't been standing there, what would Alex's response to the tall dirty-blonde have been? Would he have flirted? Done more?
She didn't like herself for feeling jealous. There was no reason to believe Alex was unfaithful to their relationship, even in his thoughts, but it was how she felt. Nobody ever said love was logical. Or if they did, they lied.
'This is Vauxhall Bridge Road,' Cooper said. 'It's a straight shot across the Thames from here. You'll see our building coming up on the left, just there. It's right off the tube station.' She pointed, and Toni leaned forward from where she sat in the rear to look.
The MI-6 building was an imposing and — for London — quite unusual-looking structure. The stone appeared to be cream-colored, there were lots of windows, and there seemed also a bunch of green on it — glass, Toni assumed.
Seated in front next to Cooper, Alex said, 'I thought internal security was MI-5's responsibility, that MI-6 handled matters in foreign countries.'
'Rather like the FBI and CIA?' Cooper said. 'Well, to a degree, yes. But there is some overlap. Over the last few years, MI-5 has shifted many of its resources to focus on Northern Ireland and against organized crime and benefit fraud. The consensus at HQ is that this computer threat is probably foreign, which gives us some small leeway to look into it. We're all on the same team, after all.'
Alex smiled. 'That doesn't sound a lot like the FBI and CIA.'
Cooper smiled back at him, flashing her perfect teeth. 'Yes, of course, we have our interdepartmental rivalries as well. And MI-5—we call it Security Service, SS — does get a bit sticky if we tread too hard on their territory. But our ministers are rather put out by all this business, and so SIS — that's us at MI-6, the Secret Intelligence Service — are helping out a bit. The truth is, our computer system is better than SS's, so we're rather on point. Although I suspect we are somewhat behind you in the States in that regard. We've heard very good things about your organization over here. You're an offshoot of CITAC, aren't you? InfraGard?'
She was referring to the old Computer Investigations and Infrastructure Threat Assessment Center the FBI had created in the mid-nineties to deal with computer crime.
'Not exactly,' Alex said, 'but there's a connection, yes. You've obviously done your homework.'
Cooper smiled again, another high-wattage, even-toothed, white flash.
Toni definitely did not like her, no question, and if Alex didn't stop grinning like a fool at everything Ms. Cooper said, he was going to be in trouble.
Ruzhyo's preference for a handgun was a small caliber, like those he had grown accustomed to in
Americans were generally taught to shoot for the center of mass, and a bigger bullet was an advantage, given the relative weakness of all handguns, but they could have taken a page from the Israelis or
When he had come to stay here in the desert, Ruzhyo had bought two guns, both used. The first was a target pistol, a Browning IMSA Silhouette model, based on the company's Buck Mark design. It was a straight blow-back semiauto, held ten rounds in its magazine, and had a nine-inch barrel topped with a Tasco ProPoint sight. The sight was electronic. It created in the field of vision a tiny, red, parallax-free dot. Operation was simple: You chambered a round, turned the sight on, and put the dot on a target, and if you squeezed the trigger with care, that dot was where the bullet went. At ten meters, he could center-punch a dime with the Browning. At a hundred meters, with the gun propped on a secure rest, Ruzhyo could hit a hand-sized target all day long. He had, in practice, hit a human-sized target at almost three hundred meters, once he zeroed in and knew how much the bullet would fall and drift. Even such a small pellet as the Browning spat would be disconcerting if it hit you solidly at that distance. Not the best choice for long-range gunnery, but in theory, the ammunition he used, CCI Minimags, could fly a mile and a half. A rifle was a better weapon, of course, but the pistol could be hidden under a coat if need be, and still be used to strike a man in the head at distances well beyond that at which most shooters could operate most service handguns.
The other weapon in his small arsenal was a Savage Model 69 Series E twelve-gauge pump shotgun. Also
