called said he’s banged up and his leg was broken, but he’s going to be okay.”
Howard’s sudden fear, launched like a missile by her first words, dropped fast.
“I’m on the way,” he said. “I’ll meet you there.”
Howard touched a button on his virgil as he stood and pulled off the VR gear.
“Alex Michaels. What’s up, General?”
“Sir, this is John Howard. My son has been in an automobile accident. He is injured but not critically so. I’m going to the hospital.”
“Take a copter,” Michaels said. “It’ll be a lot faster this time of day.”
“Sir, it’s personal business—”
“Take the aircraft, John. Consider it an emergency readiness drill. We’ll eat the cost if anybody kicks.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Call me when you can.”
“Yes, sir, I will.”
Howard ran toward the helipad, calling ahead as he did so. It was good that nobody got in his way as he moved — he would have had trouble slowing down.
13
“How’d the demonstration go?” Jay asked. It was good to see the boss and Toni working together again.
The boss said, “I believe the FBI recruits learned a certain amount of respect for small women with extensive martial arts training.”
“And men in skirts, too,” Toni said.
Jay missed the byplay on that, but both Michaels and Toni thought it was funny.
“So, what do you have for us?” the boss said.
Jay looked up from his flatscreen. It was just the three of them. General Howard’s son, Tyrone, had busted his leg pretty good in a car wreck, so Howard was out at the hospital. Tyrone had his leg in traction — a pin through his shin hooked to a sandbag over a pulley. He was gonna be there a few more days, at least. Jay had dropped by to see him. He was a good kid. Lieutenant Julio Fernandez was out testing some new piece of equipment.
Jay said, “Well, not that much. After that hit on Blue Whale, everything died down again. But I started following a lead I got on CyberNation.”
“CyberNation? Are they still around? ‘Information should be free?’ ”
He looked at Toni. “Oh, yeah, they’re bigger than ever. And they have a point, you know. That genie is out of the bottle, it ain’t goin’ back in.”
“Uh-huh.” She didn’t sound convinced.
Jay shrugged. “And every time the net jigs instead of jags, they get more subscribers. Makes a good motive.”
“Lot of people could have motive,” Michaels said. “All kinds of things thrive in chaos. Have you got anything that makes them a better suspect than a thousand other companies whose stock went up when the net stuttered?”
“Nope, not that I can prove. I’ve got one interesting thing, might be a coincidence.”
“Which is…?”
“You know the vice president, the security guy for Blue Whale who got killed?”
“Yes. Something more on the cause?”
“No. Still an accident, far as the cops are concerned, though they are checking into it further. If somebody cooled the guy, he was good. But here’s the thing: A couple days before he died, our VP went on a cross-country trip and did a little offshore gambling off the coast of Florida, on one of those international water floating casinos.”
“Did he lose more than he could afford?” Toni asked. “Somebody trying to collect?”
“Not according to his coworkers. When he got back, he was up six grand, a happy man.”
“What, then?”
“The gambling ship where the dead guy won his money? The thing is refitted, was formerly some kind of tanker, registered out of Liberia, and is now called
The boss raised an eyebrow at that.
Toni jumped in. “So you’re saying that maybe somebody from CyberNation picked up on who the Blue Whale veep was, followed him home, and extracted security codes from him before they drove him off a cliff?”
Jay shrugged, though he was glad to see Toni hadn’t lost too many steps and could see where he was going. “Naw, I’m not saying that, that’s too big a stretch given what we got. Only that it seems like a coincidence that needs to be checked out, is all. If the guy was murdered, and if it was for what he knew, then you have to at least think maybe there is some connection. Last place I tried to run it down was booby-trapped: The information I went after self-destructed when I got to it. That makes me suspicious, too. You don’t booby-trap info unless it’s something you want kept private.”
Michaels said, “You think you can find a connection?”
“Hey, that’s why you pay me the big bucks. Well, okay, the medium bucks. Which I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. I’m getting married, don’t you think I deserve a raise?”
Michaels chuckled. “You already make as much as I do, Jay. You want to embarrass me by making more?”
“I could force myself to live with it, boss.”
“Not for a while, you won’t.”
Jay laughed.
“So you’re going to follow up on this?” Toni said.
“Yep. I haven’t found anything pointing anywhere else, so this is as good a direction as any. And you got to figure, if CyberNation is involved, they’ll have pirate servers set up somewhere to make it harder to trace ’em. Mobile is better than stationary, and a ship on the high seas is worldwide mobile.”
“Good,” Michaels said. “Keep us apprised.”
“Always.”
Things had just gotten more interesting than Santos had hoped for. Setting up the fiber-optic cable attack had been easy enough. Six cuts, ranged at odd intervals over a two-hundred-mile section, all made at about the same time — not that that mattered. Once cut in one place, the thick cable wasn’t transmitting anything, so they could take hours to do the other five breaks. The idea, however, was to get in, do the job, and get out. If anybody spotted one of the cutters in one place, by the time they got police after him, the attack would be over, the phone company wouldn’t be able to set up extra security in time to do them any good.
Santos had assigned himself the most remote of the attack sites, where the cable was strung out over a gorge, somewhere in cowboy country. He was fairly high up in the hills, five, maybe six thousand feet, he guessed, from how thin the air was in his lungs. Even so, the air did have a clean and fresh, pine-treelike scent, and it gusted and swirled in a fairly stiff turn-your-head-around breeze now and then. It was cold up here, dark and crusty old snow piled in shady patches everywhere. It was clear and sunny, though, and warmer near the larger rocks where it was protected from the wind. It had taken him three hours to hike in from where he’d parked his four-wheel SUV, and he’d worked up a sweat under his warm clothing, though he’d kept his gloves on. His hands never seemed to stay warm when the thermometer’s reading dropped to near freezing. He liked climates where you could run around