was part of the payment, too.
Santos hummed to himself as he headed for the helipad. Good day, so far. Real good.
20
Toni sat at Alex’s desk, going over operations reports. She was glad to be back. She’d forgotten how interesting this work was in the time she’d been away. As Alex’s assistant, she had been privy to the inner workings of the nation’s computer business, all kinds of information the average citizen didn’t even know existed had come across her desk. When she’d quit — over a mistaken supposition that Alex had been too idiotic to correct — she hadn’t missed work, because almost immediately she’d had an offer from the director to start a job for the mainline FBI. The pregnancy, then the baby, had stopped that. It had been the better part of a year, and she’d lost a few steps. But it was like riding a bicycle — the basic balance was still there, and with a little practice, she’d be rolling smoothly again pretty fast.
She felt a quick stab of guilt. Did that make her a bad mother, that she wanted to work? Shouldn’t she be at home, doing mommy things, putting all this away until Little Alex was old enough to go off to school? It wasn’t as if they needed the money. And she did miss the baby, that was true. But her husband needed her, too, and what was she to do? Guru had showed up, and that had seemed like some kind of sign.
Still, she worried.
Well, it was only temporary, after all. A few days, a week, until the crisis was over, that was all…
“Boss still testifying?” Jay said from the doorway.
“I think so,” she said. “Anything new on your front?”
“Yes and no. I’m on the right track, I got ambushed in VR again. But this time, I surprised the sucker. Didn’t get a solid lead, unfortunately.”
“Win some, lose some.”
“Oh, this one ain’t won or lost yet. Too early. But I have some feelers out on the CyberNation gambling ship, down in the Caribbean, and I’m expecting those to come in later today.”
“You think they are responsible?”
“Gut-check? Yes. Proof? None.”
“Lay it out for me.”
“Sure.” He came in, flopped down on the couch. He started ticking points off on his fingers: “One, CyberNation has a lot to gain if people switch to them because of net woes. Two, CyberNation has the talent to pull this kind of thing off. I don’t have a complete list of their programmers and weavers, but I’ve seen their public face, and it is very slick, uses all the latest language. Three, their advertisements increased just about the time all this started, a vigorous campaign to sign up new members, stressing the integrity of their systems. Four, there’s that connection with the casino ship and the dead guy from Blue Whale. Five, I haven’t found anybody better, and I’ve been looking real hard.”
“Circumstantial and iffy,” she said.
“Hey, I got another whole hand of fingers here. Six, CyberNation is pushing on other fronts. They have a powerful lobby working in D.C., and in various major countries around the world. Isn’t that what the boss is over on the Hill about today? Problems with the net that CyberNation claims it can cure?”
She shrugged. “So what are seven, eight, nine, and ten?”
“I haven’t filled those in yet,” Jay said, grinning. “But I’m working on it.”
“How are the wedding plans coming?”
His smile faded. “Okay, I guess.”
“Getting cold feet?”
“What? No!”
“Easy. I was just joking.”
He didn’t speak for a moment. Then he said, “Did you? Get cold feet, I mean?”
“Not really. Of course, I was pregnant, and I didn’t want to have the baby by myself.”
“Hmm.”
“Hey, look, it’s only natural to worry about making major changes in your life. I wanted to get married, but I did think about it. Alex was married before — what if I didn’t measure up to his first wife? And he’s got a daughter from that marriage, a great kid, but I had to wonder, was he going to be thinking about her when he looked at our child? It’s not like buying a new pair of shoes, is it?”
“No.”
“You should talk to Julio Fernandez. He got married after a lot of years on his own, he had to make some adjustments.”
“I was thinking that. I mean, I want to be with Saji, no question, it’s just, I dunno, scary sometimes.”
“Welcome to the human race, computer-boy.”
“Thanks.”
John Howard looked at the computer log and stack of hard copy on his desk and shook his head. Forms and clogged e-file boxes were the bane of military officers everywhere. Yes, they had to be attended to for the command to continue working, and mostly, he managed to pass a significant amount of paper shuffling and signing off to senior officers on his staff, but if you missed a few days, your piece of it always grew, it never shrank. He’d been at it for an hour and a half, and hadn’t really made much of a dent.
How important was most of this junk? An invitation to speak at an upscale military school in Mississippi? He knew the school. Enrollment was ninety percent white males, with a few women and minority students sprinkled in to keep things legal. Yes, he was the commanding military officer of Net Force, but they didn’t want him — he’d bet dollars to dimes they didn’t know he was black. It might be amusing to show up just to see the expressions on their faces. Then again, that wasn’t worth a trip to Mississippi, was it?
Another e-mail was a cc notification from the NF Quartermaster from a military supplier in Maine that there was a recall on part number MS-239-45/A, due to possible stress fractures in materials that might lead to failure in critical situations. The Quartermaster would have already addressed the situation, but it still sounded worth knowing about. A man needed to see where his troops might be at risk.
A check of the Net Force parts catalogue, which naturally changed the supplier’s part number to their own designation, NF-P-154387, showed the part in question to be the “flexible containment system locking device for a Model B dorsal-unit personal supply and equipment carrier.” After years of military jargon, that one was easy: They were talking about the plastic buckle on a backpack strap. The B-model had been in service for approximately three years, according to the computer file, and had been superseded by the C-model.
If the buckles on the old packs hadn’t busted by now, then it probably wasn’t going be a problem that would bring the Net Force strike teams to their knees.
And how many man-hours had been lost to this tidbit?
Here was a directive from the U.S. National Guard regarding the directive from the General Accounting Office, regarding the directive from the Department of Defense’s Revised and Updated Guidelines for Officers Regarding Sexual Harassment.
Oh, please. How relevant to anything was a directive about a directive about a directive about guidelines?
His intercom chirped. “Yes?”
“Sir,” his secretary said. “Lieutenant Fernandez to see you.”
Julio had just left a couple hours ago, but anything to get out of this drudgery. “Send him in.”
Julio arrived.
“Yes?”
“Sir. I’d hate to tear you away from all this excitement, but we’ve got a new shipment of goodies and there are a couple of things you might enjoy seeing.”
