Night Moves

pretending to be hitting at her with an imaginary stick.

'Ah, shut it down, dip, she's just a player is all!'

'I can see that.'

'You spend too much time in the pervo rooms, JJ. Get a life.'

'Why should I? Yours is so much more fun.'

Tyrone swatted at him, but his friend danced away. He moved pretty fast for such a little creep.

Later, when the juniors were done, Tyrone watched the portable computer sign they'd set up to flash the results. Unofficially, he already knew he was third. Some guy from Puerto Rico had slipped in between him and Nadine with a time three lousy seconds longer than Tyrone's. Even so, third out of thirty-four at a national competition, and with a new PR, that wasn't bad. He'd made the U.S. team.

The sign started to blink, then it went blank. A second later, an image of some kind of flag appeared, waving in a VR breeze.

Tyrone glanced at his friend. 'Hacker got 'em. Why don't you go and offer to fix it?'

Jimmy Joe's eyes lit up. 'You think?'

Tyrone laughed.

Saturday, April 2nd

Las Vegas, Nevada

'Got a problem, Colonel,' Fernandez said.

They were at the staging area, getting the trucks loaded for the drive into the desert. A dozen troops, men and women, hauled gear and made ready to begin the run.

'We haven't even made first contact with the enemy yet, Sergeant. Not the local police, is it?'

Sometimes they called the locals in, sometimes not, depending on the situation. This time, there weren't any cops close enough to the target's location to worry about, and the Clark County Sheriff's Department didn't need to know because it was out of their jurisdiction by a long way.

Fernandez shrugged. 'It's the computer. Take a look.'

Howard drifted over to the tac-comp, where a tech named Jeter sat and cursed under his breath.

'It appears to be the Union Jack,' Howard observed.

'Yes, sir,' Jeter said. 'It is. It's supposed to be the sitrep feed from Big Squint, with a three-dee layout of the target's location.' Jeter thumped the monitor with one hand. 'This is what happens when you buy your electronics wholesale from the damned New Zealanders, begging your pardon, sir.'

Howard grinned. 'I trust you to clear it up before we depart.'

'Yes, sir.'

Howard looked away, took a deep breath and let it out. He looked at his watch. He wondered how Tyrone had done at the boomerang competition. He was tempted to call, but he knew better. Shielded com or not, it was unwise to give away your position in a tactical situation and not a good habit to get into. He'd call his son when they got this target acquired and neutralized. He was a good kid, Tyrone, but he was also a teenager. Life was getting complicated for the boy, and it wasn't going to get any easier. How could a father protect his son from that? He couldn't, and that was painful. The days when Daddy was all-knowing and all-wise were gone. He'd never given it much thought, but now it was staring him in the face: His son was growing up, changing, and if he wanted to maintain contact with him, he was going to have to change, too. That was a strange feeling.

'Got it,' Jeter said. 'We're back on track.'

Worry about child rearing later, John. Keep your mind on the business at hand.

'Good. Carry on.'

Chapter 5

Saturday, April 2nd

London, England

Toni Fiorella climbed the narrow, creaky stairs toward the second floor of the four-story walk-up. The place she wanted was on that floor, over a small appliance shop in an area called Clapham, between a brick-red Indian tandoori restaurant and a charity shop with boarded-up plywood windows. The buildings and the area in general were run-down. Not as bad as the worst of the Bronx, maybe, but not a place you'd want to take your old granny for a stroll after dark. Unless your granny was maybe a dope dealer and armed.

As she neared the top, Toni caught the odor of sweat, stale and fresh.

The heavy wooden door was unlocked.

Inside were fifteen or sixteen men and five women, all dressed in dark sweatpants, athletic shoes, and white T-shirts. The T-shirts had a black and white logo on the back, with a smaller matching version over the left breast: A Javanese wavy-bladed dagger — a kris—set at about a thirty-degree horizontal angle, bounded on the top and bottom by the words Pentjak Silat.

The twenty-odd people were doing djurus.

Toni grinned. The forms weren't the same as hers, since this version of the Indonesian martial art was not Serak but a variation of Tjikalong, which was a western Javanese style, but it looked similar enough to hers that there was no mistaking the djurus—the forms — for karate kata.

The school itself was hardly impressive, nothing as nice as the FBI gyms at home. The ceiling was high, maybe fifteen feet. The floor was dark wood, old and worn but clean. Folded in one corner of the large room were fraying blue hardfoam mats that also showed much wear, plus a couple of heavy punching bags wrapped in layers of duct tape. A brown wooden door had upon it a sign that indicated it led to a bathroom — a loo, it was called over here. Exposed pipes, for water or heat or whatever, ran across the wall in back about ten feet up, and the metal had been painted alternating colors, red, white, and blue. A large roof support in the middle of the floor wore what looked like an old mattress wrapped around it and held tight with half a dozen red and blue bungee cords. A double row of fluorescent lights graced the ceiling. An exhaust fan whirred in one of the windows, blowing the odor of sweat into the evening.

It was your basic large workout room, no frills.

A tall man dressed the same as the students walked around, observing their form, correcting stances, and offering praise when it was merited. He was not quite muscular enough to be a bodybuilder, but he was broad- shouldered and narrow-hipped. He had short gray hair with some brown left in it. He wore aviator-style glasses. A first look might say mid-thirties, but Toni guessed he was in his early fifties, based on his hands and the smile wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

'Hello,' he said in a clipped British tone. 'May I help you?'

'Hello. I'm Toni Fiorella. I called earlier?'

'Ah, yes, the American visitor. Welcome! I'm Carl Stewart, and these are my students.' He waved at the assembly. 'We're just about to finish with djurus.'

'Don't let me get in the way. I'll just stand and watch, if that's all right?'

'Yes, of course.'

'Thank you, Guru.' Toni moved to stand next to the stack of mats.

'All right, then,' Stewart said to the class. 'Any questions about the djurus?'

A few hands went up. Stewart answered the queries about various moves from the forms. He was patient, not condescending, and he would demonstrate the correct move to show how it was done.

He was smooth, balanced, tight. In silat, the ability to perform a djuru precisely wasn't always an indication of fighting ability, but you could tell a lot about a person by watching them move.

Carl Stewart moved as well as anybody Toni had ever seen. And she had seen more than a few fighters over the years.

Interesting.

For the next half hour or so, Stewart worked on self-defense applications from the forms, showing how they