Night Moves

he retired and joined Net Force, even though the money — and, more importantly, the opportunities for action — were much better. His direct boss was a civilian, so when it came to brass, he was pretty much it.

Julio Fernandez, his top kick for as long as he'd been with Net Force and for a long time before that, delivered the news with obvious glee.

'Say again, Sergeant?' Howard said.

Fernandez stood in the hard shade of the gamp leading to the private hangar. He grinned. 'Which part didn't the general understand, sir?'

'Let me rephrase that, and be succinct, it's already getting warm out here: What the hell are you talking about?'

The two of them walked toward the hangar.

Fernandez laughed. 'Well, sir, the word is that the colonel will be, within thirty days from one April, offered the rank of Brigadier — that's a grade superior to colonel and inferior to major general, sir — in this bastard National Guard outfit he dragged me into.'

'Held a gun to your head, did I?'

'If memory serves, sir.'

Howard smiled. 'Come on, Julio, what are you talking about? I haven't heard squat about any promotion, not a whisper.' He tried to keep the excitement from his voice. Fernandez could be funny, but he wouldn't joke about something like this. Howard had always wanted to be a general, of course, but he'd given that hope up when he bailed from the RA.

'That's 'cause you ain't engaged to the most beautiful and bright woman in the western hemisphere — and probably the eastern hemisphere, too, John. A woman who can make a computer sing, dance, and do back flips without straining her pinkie. I saw the order myself, and it's as official as can be.'

Despite his sudden rush of adrenaline, Howard said, 'And Lieutenant Winthrop isn't supposed to be snooping in certain areas, now is she?'

Fernandez opened his hands, spread his fingers, and held them in an I-give-up gesture. 'What can I do? I'm just a sergeant; she's my superior. What I know about computers you can put in your ear, with room left over for your finger. Besides, what's the point in being part of the world's best geek team if you can't poke around in the stuff wherever you want? It's real. Congratulations, John.'

'Thanks, though I'll believe it when I see it.' He felt his spirits soar. General Howard. Now there was a term.

Fernandez chuckled, reading his mind.

Howard recovered, tamped down his excitement and ego. 'How is Joanna?'

'Pregnant as a crowded maternity ward. Not due until September, and I have to tell you, I don't think I'm gonna survive it. One minute I'm her angel and I can do no wrong, the next minute she takes my head off 'cause I'm breathing too loud. She eats catsup on mashed potatoes and sprinkles salt on her ice cream. She pees forty-nine times a day.'

Howard laughed. 'Serves you right. When are you going to make an honest woman out of her?'

'June first, so I have been told. She'd rather wait a year, it supposedly takes that long to set up a wedding, though that doesn't make any sense. Failing that, she wants to get married before the baby is born, and she doesn't want to look like a brood sow, so it's got to be by then. It's not up to me, I'm just the groom.'

'Weddings and pregnancies are like that, Julio.'

'I do get to pick the best man, though. You interested in the job?'

Howard nodded. 'Are you kidding? I wouldn't miss watching the infamous Sergeant Julio Fernandez tie the knot for all the tea in India. Got a sex on the baby yet?'

'A boy.' He grinned.

'Picked out a name yet?'

'Five of them: Julio Garcia Edmund Howard Fernandez.'

Howard stopped walking and looked at his friend. 'I'm honored.'

'Not my idea, blame it on Joanna. Got a couple of grandfathers in there, too. Me, I'd have named him Bud and let it go at that. You get to be a godfather, too — another of her crazy ideas.'

Howard smiled. He was going to be best man at his best friend's wedding, godfather to a boy wearing one of his names, and promoted to a general in the Net Force version of the army. You didn't get many days like this one.

'I hate to spoil the moment, but how about our fugitive?'

'No spoilers there, sir. He lives in a trailer out in the middle of nowhere, all by himself, doesn't even have a dog. Most ambitious thing he seems to do is building a rock wall along one edge of his property. He keeps a zero profile, doesn't socialize, doesn't talk to anybody, far as we can tell. Just piles up local rocks. Hard to believe this is an ex-Spetsnaz wetwork specialist with forty-four confirmed deletions to his credit.'

'Well, if Vladimir Plekhanov can be believed — and the interrogation shrinks assure me that he can — the man who calls himself Mikhayl Ruzhyo is somebody whose skills are not limited to stacking rocks in the desert. We want to do this by the numbers, nice and clean, and gather him up gently enough so he's alive to answer some questions.'

'No problem, piece of cake. Though I thought the Russians were our friends these days.'

'I believe that is a facetious comment, Sergeant. You know as well as I do that the more we know about our friends, the better off we are.'

'Amen.'

'All right. Let's see what Big Squint has for us.'

'Command post is in the coolest corner I could find, General.'

'Let's wait on that promotion until I see it in writing, Sergeant.' He grinned.

'Something funny, sir?'

'I was just picturing you as a lieutenant.'

'You wouldn't!'

'If I was a general, they'd have to listen…'

The worried look on Fernandez's face was priceless.

Saturday, April 2nd The Yews, Sussex, England

Major Terrance Arthur Peel — Tap to his mates — stood next to Lord Goswell's greenhouse, behind the main house, watching as the beat-up black Volvo arrived. The groundskeeper's trio of dogs — a pair of border collies and an Alsatian — set to barking.

Peel liked dogs. He'd rather have one of those in a tent with him in the bush than the most sophisticated alarm made. A dog would let you know when you had company, and a well-trained dog could tell the difference between your friends and your enemies. And he would rip the enemy's throat out if you set him to it, too. Unlike people, good dogs were loyal.

The Volvo pulled to a halt, and the door squeaked open on the right side, disgorging a tall, spindly man of fifty, hair gone gray, with more ethnicity than perhaps his name would imply: Peter Bascomb-Coombs had a bit of the hooknose in him, Peel knew. He had done the background check himself.

Bascomb-Coombs wore an expensive, if ill-fitting, ice cream suit, a yellow silk shirt and blue tie, and handmade, pale gray Italian leather shoes. Certainly none of his ensemble was cheap. The shoes alone had to set him back three, four hundred quid. His lordship did not stint on what he paid his favored employees, and Bascomb- Coombs was favored, Jewish roots or not.

Not that the scientist's ethnic background mattered. It didn't affect the man's brain a whit, and whatever else he was, Bascomb-Coombs was as bright and shiny a penny as they came. Brilliant, a certified genius, so far ahead of the rest of his field that he was like an Einstein or a Hawking — in a class by himself — except that he couldn't keep track of a sodding social calendar. He was supposed to have been here for dinner last night, and he had simply gotten it wrong. And even if this had been the proper day, he was still half an hour late.

The stereotype of the absent-minded professor certainly had a basis in fact, if Bascomb-Coombs was the indicator. Goswell himself had shrugged off the slight. One had to suffer such things. What could one expect from the working class, geniuses or not? Goswell wasn't entirely foolish, save for his mania about the Empire, and he certainly had sense enough to know that Bascomb-Coombs was too valuable to toss away because he got a dinner