Night Moves

date wrong.

Peel smiled and adjusted the black SIG 9mm in the Galco paddle holster on his right hip. He was a big enough man so the pistol was easily concealed under the white linen Saville Row sport coat he wore. Six-two, fourteen stone and a bit, and still in fighting shape. Naturally, his lordship wasn't the kind of man to have some thug in camouflage clothes standing about with a submachine gun, menacing guests. Peel, though retired from His Majesty's service under a cloud, was presentable. Good regiment, decent schools, still fit at forty-five, able to choose the right fork at formal dining if need be. An educated, civilized man, he could chat with the rich and famous and not seem out of place. He'd be a colonel by now, had it not been for that… unpleasant business in Northern Ireland on his final tour. Bloody country, bloody savages living in it.

The small com unit in his jacket pocket cheeped. That would be Hawkins, at the gate, confirming the arrival of the Volvo at the house, checking to be sure no terrorists had boiled from out of the car's boot to blast Peel.

'G-1 here. Package arrive?'

'Roger that, G-1. We are green at the house.'

'Copy green. All clear here, as well.'

Peel looked at his watch, a black-faced Special Forces analog with glow-in-the-dark tritium inserts, a gift from his men when he retired. None of them had been happy to see him go. The rest of the security team should be reporting in about… now….

'R-1. No activity here.'

'R-2. Got a couple of the fat man's cows chewing cud over here, otherwise clear.'

'Rover-3. Fence is clear from Grid 4 to Grid 7.'

'Gate-2. Slow as bloody Christmas out here.'

Peel acknowledged each of the gate guards and rovers as they called in their reports. He had ten men, all ex-army, spread out over the perimeter. This was not nearly enough for realistic coverage in a shooting situation, but most of his lordship's enemies weren't the kind of men who would try to storm The Yews to attack him. More likely they'd skewer him with sharp bonds or pointed hostile stock deals.

He grinned. Of course, his lordship had enemies who didn't know they were on his list, and now and again, they had to be… attended to, in a circumspect manner, of course. Which is how Tap Peel came to be in his lordship's service. It was because Peel's father and Lord Goswell had been classmates at Oxford, of course, and that the senior Peel had managed a knighthood of his own before he died. One kept these things in the family, or, failing that, among the chums.

Looked like rain to the north. Supposed to do that in London today. A little shower wouldn't hurt the vegetation hereabout, either, though the troops would bitch about it. Well, there was a soldier's lot, wasn't it? If you signed on, you signed on rain or shine, cold or hot, and that was that. God knew, he had stood in enough downpours, water running into his collar, cursing the officers who had posted him wherever he happened to be.

He smiled. It was a great life, being a solider. Too bad this was as close as he could come these days. Well, unless he wanted to traipse off to some third-world republic to be a hired mercenary. Hardly. In his grandfather's day, a soldier of fortune had been a more or less honorable profession, but now, a fool without any military service could answer an ad in an American magazine and wind up protecting your rear in some African jungle. Thank you, no. British fighting men were an odd lot, to be sure, but far and away a better class of soldier than one would find by advertising in a bloody magazine.

He supposed he should move inside now. Dinner would be started shortly, and there would be a round of drinks before. Bascomb-Coombs was a white-wine sort of fellow, and his lordship did not feel comfortable with men who did not drink, so Peel would go and have a sociable whiskey.

His lordship hated to drink alone.

So, a short one, two fingers, no more, to make sure his head stayed clear.

He grinned again. He had certainly had worse duty.

Chapter 4

Saturday, April 2nd

Washington, D.C.

The National Boomerang Qualifying Championships were being held at the new Clinton High School track and field ground, and Tyrone Howard was thrilled just to be there, not to mention how ecstatic he was to actually be entered as a contestant. Sure, it was Junior Novice Division, and he was only in one event, Maximum Time Aloft, but still, it was pretty amazing. He'd only been seriously throwing for, like, six months.

Next to Tyrone, his best friend, Jimmy Joe, blinked through thick glasses at all the contestants doing warm- ups. 'Yo, slip, isn't this, like, dangerous? Happens if you get cracked on the stack with one of these things? This ain't VR, it's the real O'Neal.'

Jimmy Joe was VR all the way, same as Tyrone had been just a few months ago, but Tyrone thought maybe he was coming along okay on this… outside stuff. Even though it had taken him a week to convince his friend to leave the computer and go to an actual competition. He said, 'So you get knocked over and wake up with a bump on your skull. Hey, you could short out a REM driver and get brain-fry, too, hillbilly.'

'Oh, yeah, right, I could. Past a triple fail-safe and with like a half milliamp of vamp? Couldn't fry a pissant's egg with that. Not the same as getting whopped on the head with a big ole stick, slip.' Jimmy Joe shook his head. He gleamed in the sunshine. He had to wear skinblock to walk to the bus in the mornings, and it took him two weeks in the sun just to darken from bright to white. Something of a contrast to Tyrone, who was a nice chocolate color even if he stayed inside all the time. Which he hadn't been doing much of late. He'd been a hardwired compuzoid, sure enough, and good at it, too, until that whole business with Bella blew him out of VR and into RW. Being jettisoned by her had done a doody on him, sure enough. His thirteenth year had been hard, that was a facto, Jacko.

'All right, you got me there,' Jimmy Joe said when Tyrone didn't reply. 'Frame the game, slip. What's all this twirly stick-dick about?'

Tyrone grinned. 'Okay, there are two basic kinds of boomerangs. One is a stick that comes back when you throw it. It might do a lot of fancy stuff on the way out and back, or not, depending on the type. They can range from the basic model that looks like a cross-section of a banana up to helicopter-like things with six or eight blades.

'The second kind is based on the abo war sticks, and it doesn't come back, it just keeps on going until it drops — or it hits somebody in the head. A war boomerang can go farther than anything else as heavy that you can throw. They fly due to gyroscopic precession caused by asymmetric lift. The lift comes from rotation combined with linear motion.'

'Code interrupt that last transmission, slip! Put it in my native tongue.'

'It flies because it turns into a wing as it spins; it comes back because the wing angle is different in different places.'

A red and black German shepherd ran past, chasing a hard-silicone Frisbee Jackarang.

Tyrone shrugged out of his backpack, pulled out his basic Wedderburn. 'See how the edge is slanted on this blade, on the inner aspect? But on this side, the trailing edge has the slant. When it spins into the wind, the push is different every time the thing rotates, so it starts to curve. You throw it right-handed, like this—' Tyrone showed him the grip, with the concave side forward and the end up ' — and it flattens out and curves to the left.'

Jimmy Joe looked at the boomerang. Hefted it. 'Hmm. I could code a pro, put in the factors — weight, RPM, speed, aerodynamics, all like that — and make it work exactly the same in VR.'

'Welcome to the past, slip. Serious throwers all have their own scenarios, since B.C. days. I've got exacts for each of my birds. But the program is just the map—these are the territory.' He opened his backpack to show his friend his other boomerangs. He had three classics and three MTAs, ultrathin and light, rosin- impregnated linen L-shaped blades designed for maximum flight time. His favorite of these was the Moller 'Indian Ocean' model, a standard Paxolin model he had gotten pretty good with.