Jesus, what was Alex doing, telling her stuff like this? And when had he had a chance to tell it? Next thing you knew, he'd be giving this woman pictures of him and Toni in bed together! She said, 'No, I haven't met her. Talked to her on the com a few times. Seen pictures of her. She lives with her mother in Idaho.'
'That's out West, isn't it?'
'Yes. Out West.'
'Ah, well, here we are, then.' She indicated the door with one hand.
'You aren't coming in?'
'Afraid not, other duties. I'll see you later.'
Cooper turned and left, a hint of a sway in her hips as she walked.
The bitch.
Inside, Alex stood next to a table with Hamilton, both of them examining hardcopy photographs under a bright light. Alex looked up at her. He didn't smile. 'Toni. Come check this out.'
She moved to stand next to him. The pictures were spysat overflies of some kind of military installation, computer-augmented for color and dimension. There was what appeared to be a pair of ICBMs on railcar launchers at one end of the complex. 'What am I looking at?'
Hamilton said, 'This is the experimental rocket station in Xinghua, near the coast of the East China Sea. The Chinese have been developing a new long-range nuclear missile here.' He tapped the ICBM in the photograph. 'Last evening, a computer put two of the working prototypes on alert and began a ninety-minute countdown to launch. The missiles were aimed at Tokyo.'
'Lord!' Toni said.
'Precisely. The computer was locked out, they were unable to shut it down. Fortunately, both warheads were dummies, and also fortunately, technicians were able to abort the launches manually. The Chinese, while not normally forthcoming about such things, are terrified. Someone bypassed their computer safeguards and codes and lit the fuses from outside. U.S. spysats that keep the station under observation saw the prelaunch movements, and the U.S. military scrambled stealth fighter-bombers from their base on the South Korean island of Cheju-do. If the Chinese missiles had lifted, the stealth jets would have tried to shoot them down, and they would very likely have bombed the station to prevent any further launches.'
Toni stared at Alex. He looked grim.
'Even without the nuclear payload, a pair of rocks that big dropping into the middle of downtown Tokyo would have caused considerable damage,' Alex said.
'And it's our airline hacker?' Toni said.
'Or somebody just like him. I can't believe there are two of them.'
Toni shook her head.
'We've got to run this guy down, fast. And our best tracker, Jay, is out of commission.'
'Never rains but it pours, eh?' Hamilton said.
Toni looked at the man, then back at Alex. Bad, this was definitely bad.
Tyrone had figured out that if he got to the soccer field immediately after his school shift ended, the field would be empty for forty minutes before the next shift arrived. Forty minutes was plenty of time to get ten or fifteen good throws in.
He stood near the middle of the field, testing the wind with a wet fingertip. There was a pretty good breeze coming in from the north, and he decided to tape a couple of pennies to his MTA boomerang to keep it from getting wind-whipped. That took only a minute, then he was ready.
He angled himself against the wind, took a couple of deep breaths, and shook out his shoulder to loosen the muscle. He'd been considering lifting weights. The top throwers were all in good shape, and he could use a little more power in his arms. The balance was tricky. If you threw too soft, you didn't get any time aloft, and if you threw too hard, you could get a fast nosedive. But there were times when you needed a little more strength, like now, when the wind was gusting, and at his size, Tyrone didn't have any extra muscle. He didn't need to be Hercules or anything, but a little more mass wouldn't hurt.
He made his first throw, to check the angle of the blades and see how the taped coins balanced. The Indian Ocean glowed in a red blur as it spun but wobbled off-center and augured in too fast. He retrieved the 'rang and adjusted the angle on the blades by carefully bending them up. He moved the coin on the long arm in toward the angle a few millimeters, retaped it, then tried another throw.
Better, but still off a hair. Well, he could spend all day adjusting the thing, especially in gusty conditions, and it was close enough for practice.
He was on his seventh toss, having finally gotten above a minute for flights, which was about as good as he expected in the wind, when he heard Nadine yell at him.
'Yo, Ty!'
She came across the field, shrugged out of her backpack, and removed from it her own MTA, a long, L- shaped blue and white striped model. It was a Quark Synlin. He'd never seen one up close, but he'd seen holos, and he saw a couple at the tourney, from a distance, so he recognized it right off.
'Man, how'd you come by that? I thought Quark quit the business.'
'He did, but there are a few still for sale. My mother told me if I could show her I could handle the top-of- the-line 'rang, she'd loan me the money for it. When I won the contest, she figured I was ready. It came air express this morning.' She held it out. Tyrone took it from her as if it was a live baby, holding it carefully.
'How does it throw?'
'Dunno, I haven't had a chance yet. Why don't you give it a try?'
He blinked at her. 'You need to be first, it's yours.'
'No, go ahead. You're already warmed up.'
'Yeah?'
'Sure.'
He wet his finger, checked the wind.
She said, 'Medium-hard, angle up fifty, don't lay over. Better to over-vertical. Five to ten into the wind.'
He nodded. Set his stance. Took a good breath, reared back, and made the toss.
The big Quark zipped out about fifty meters before it started to make its turn, gained height — a lot of height, thirty, thirty-five meters — then started to shift from perp to flat. It bounced a couple of times on an updraft.
'Man,
It was a beautiful flight, wind and all. It just seemed to hang there forever, and it finally came down within twenty meters of where he'd made the throw, slightly down field. He did an easy slap catch.
Tyrone didn't have his stopwatch, but Nadine had hers. 'Two minutes fifty-one,' she said. 'Not bad.'
'Yeah not bad! That beats my PR!' With that time, he would have beaten her at the tourney, too. Damn!
He looked at the boomerang, then smiled at Nadine. 'Thanks.' He handed it back to her. 'Your turn. We've got like twenty minutes before the soccer geeks run us off.'
'Time enough for two throws, you think?'
'You
Nadine was all right. Especially for a girl.
Chapter 15
Jay Gridley stood on a patch of high desert listening to the silence among the rocks and scrub growth. The sun was a blinding mallet, hammering everything beneath it into the dead ground. It looked like the middle of nowhere, and if you headed directly east, west, or south, you'd leave the U.S. and hit Mexico; from here, the
