Cybernation

PART TWO The Butterfly’s Wings

21

On the Bon Chance

Jasmine Chance liked to be in charge, a big part of the reason she had taken this job. Here she was, with a corporate budget as big as the treasury in some small countries, on a gambling ship she had named herself, and after a fashion, for herself. She could, literally, decide matters of life and death. If that wasn’t control, what was? But at the moment, with Jackson practically wetting himself, she felt a definite loss of mastery here.

They sat on the bed in her room. She’d thought sex was going to be the main thing on his mind, but she quickly realized she was wrong.

“He’s going to beat the crap out of me,” Jackson said. “I know it.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“You didn’t see him, how he looked at me. I’m telling you, this is not somebody to mess around with. He might as well have sent me an invitation: You are cordially invited to a major ass-kicking — yours.”

“Jackson…”

“I’m not joking around here, Jasmine. This guy isn’t civilized. Yeah, he wears a suit and smiles and can make small talk, but that’s no thicker than a coat of paint. Underneath, he’s a savage. He’s a killer! He wouldn’t think twice about sending me to the hospital, or the morgue.”

“He’s just trying to rattle you, hon, that’s all. He knows how much we need you. He’s playing with your head.”

“And he plans to be playing soccer with my balls. I’m telling you, I know.”

“You need to relax.” She put her hand on his shoulder. The muscles there and in his neck were bunched like wet, knotted ropes.

“Easy for you to say. Listen, I want off the ship. Let me go to the train.”

The train was one of the other two locations for CyberNation’s mobile computer centers. Currently, it was on a siding in Germany, somewhere near the French border.

“Keller—”

“I can take my team there. It won’t be any different. The hardware is the same, the software we built in the last day can be encoded and uploaded in a few hours. By the time it finishes downloading, we can be halfway there.”

“What will you tell your team?”

“No need to tell them anything except they should pack their bags. They do what I say.”

“That’s not the plan,” she said.

“Neither is getting my head stomped in by a jealous assassin!”

She thought about it. It was the fight-or-flight syndrome. Maybe in his place, she could understand it. Still, it wouldn’t really solve anything. What was to stop Roberto from hopping on a plane and dropping round to see Jackson on the train? When he had time to settle down and think about it, he’d see that. There was no safety in distance, not if somebody like Roberto really wanted to do you harm. But no point in saying that now. He was rattled enough already.

Of course, out of sight might be out of mind. She was sure she could divert Roberto’s attention. She could buy him a new toy, something to do with his fighting art. Sooner or later he would feel the call from her to find a place where they could get naked. Roberto was, after all, very primal in his urges. Maybe it would be for the best if Jackson wasn’t around.

“All right,” she said. “Gather your team and make the arrangements. Roberto won’t be back before tomorrow at the earliest. You can be gone before he returns.”

His sense of relief was obvious.

“As long as we are here, why don’t you lie down and let me massage your back? You’re as tight as a violin string.”

He started to protest. “That’s what got me in trouble in the first place.”

“Relax,” she said. “ ’Berto is in Washington. You’ll be gone when he gets back, and we aren’t doing anything we haven’t already done a dozen times. What difference could it make now? Why not relax and enjoy it?”

She didn’t give him time to think about it. She slid her hand down his chest and into his lap. After that, he had other things on his mind.

Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

Michaels was in the Net Force gym, dressed only in a pair of shorts and workout shoes, practicing his djurus. The short dances encompassed all the moves that serak teachers had developed for fighting, armed and unarmed. Somewhere in the djurus were all the tools you’d ever need, he’d been taught.

So far, he had learned more than he thought he’d use if he got into fights every day. But better to have too much ammo than too little.

The creator of the esoteric fighting style had been a cripple called Sera, so named either because he was wise as an owl, or had a hoarse voice, depending on which definition of the Indonesian word sera, you liked. According to the various oral histories and subsequent letters and books, Sera had been born with a clubfoot and missing part of one arm. Such handicaps would not seem to lend themselves to the development of expert fighting abilities. Nonetheless, that had apparently been the case. Evidently the man had been an extremely nasty fighter, and not a man to be sneered at, however gimpy he might have been.

The origins of the art and its first practitioner were somewhat mysterious. Michaels had poked around, trying to research it, because he was curious, and had run into half a dozen dead ends.

He shifted from djuru seven, coming up from the full squat and upward thrust to an attacker’s face that ended it, to eight, moving on the triangle, or tiga. Later, he would practice the footwork on the sliwa, or square pattern.

He had worked up a good sweat; it rolled down his chest and back. He’d always thought it interesting he could get so much work out of stepping around a triangle or square that was less than two feet long on each side.

Djuru eight was essentially a blending of three previous djurus—four, six, and three — and since it was the last one he had learned, once he finished it he repeated it and started going backwards toward the first one. That was how you did the exercises, up and back on one side, then up and back on the other, so that each djuru got at least four reps, two on the right, two on the left.

Pak, or Bapak—those meant sir, or most honorable older sir, more or less — Sera’s date of birth was unknown. He’d been listed as having been born as early as 1795 A.D.; however, this seemed unlikely, given the known lineage of students, and Sera was probably born a quarter century later, in the 1820s or maybe even the 1830s. Current practitioners could not even agree on the man’s real name. The ones Michaels came up with were Eyang Hisak and H. Muhroji.

Toni didn’t know any more about Sera than Michaels did; she’d always accepted what her teacher told her and let it go. Not that it really mattered, but it was a shame they couldn’t give the man his proper due.

The birthplace and tribe of Sera were also open to question. Some claimed he was of the mysterious Javanese people known as the Badui. Since not much was known about the Badui — the White, or Inner Badui remaining cloistered even in modern times and admitting few visitors to their primitive villages — this was difficult to determine. If Sera was of the Outer, or Blue Badui, that would seem more likely, but if he was, he certainly did not stay there, according to the stories.