After a couple of minutes, with a sheen of sweat beaded on his head and body, he switched to elbows, and the rhythm was slower, but similar. Right horizontal elbow inward, then back, followed by the left,
Toni kept pumping, watching the man in the mirrors rather than looking right at him.
He switched from elbows to punches, using hammer fists in the same pattern. Then he went to his knees, and then to a series of instep-then-heel kicks. Right, left, right, left.
He was working really hard. Most people didn’t realize how difficult it was to strike a heavy bag like that — it took a lot more energy than riding a bike or walking on a treadmill, a lot more. And not wearing bag gloves was hard on the hands, too.
The timer on Toni’s bike cheeped. She looked down at it. The black man had been working the bag for twenty minutes, and while he was sweating profusely, he didn’t look particularly tired.
The guy was in incredible shape. And though she couldn’t tell from the strikes what his art was, he was obviously deep into some fighting discipline. He moved in balance the whole time, and his hits, while fast, were also powerful. Interesting.
She warmed down on the bike for another minute, gradually slowing her pedaling. She stepped off the bike, wiped her face with the towel, finished off her water, then started for the exit.
The black man stepped back, threw a hard sidekick at the bag, and lifted it a foot into the air, to drop back on its nylon strap hard enough to shake the mirrors. He reached for his towel, wiped his face and head, slipped his feet into his sandals, and walked away.
He was a few feet behind Toni when she stepped into the hall.
“You a dancer?” he said. He had an accent, sounded like Spanish or Portuguese, maybe.
Toni looked at the man. Was he hitting on her? In her guise of divorced secretary, she would probably be receptive to such things. He was a strong, good-looking man. Then again, she was supposedly from the South and might have a racial prejudice, so perhaps she ought to seem a little timid. If he worked here, maybe she could find out some things from him.
“No,” she said. “Not really.”
“You have the legs,” he said. He nodded at her.
Toni gave him what she thought would pass for an embarrassed smile. “Well, I try to keep in shape. Are you a boxer?”
He shrugged. “Kind of.”
He moved up next to her as they walked. “Your first visit to the ship?”
“Yes. You’ve been here before?”
“Oh, yeah. I work here.”
“Really? What do you do?”
“I’m with Security,” he said.
No surprise, but Toni raised her eyebrows. “How exciting.”
He shrugged again. “Pretty dull, mostly. You maybe want to get a drink later?”
Toni pretended to be more nervous than she felt. “Uh, well, maybe.”
He grinned, showing perfect white teeth. “I don’t bite, Missy. My name is Roberto Santos.” He put out his hand.
“I’m Mary Johnson.” She took his hand. It was damp, but warm, and she could feel the power in his grip, even though he throttled it way back. “From Falls Church, Virginia.”
“It is my pleasure to meet you,” he said. He released her hand. “That drink?”
“Oh. Okay. I want to shower and change. Can I meet you somewhere?”
He smiled again. “How about the Lady Luck, that’s the little bar next to the dining room outside the main casino. In an hour?”
“That would be fine,” she said.
After he had gone on his way, Toni felt her heartbeat start to slow. It had been a long time since she had been in the field working a contact. That he was such a primal, physical man added something to her nervousness. This man was dangerous. No question of that.
When Jay sneaked onto the train, he kept it simple. This close to Keller, he wanted to be sure he wasn’t distracted by historical details or esoteric odors in a complex scenario — Keller was, he had shown, too good to shrug off. So the train was just a train, the era was the present and real-time, and Jay’s plan was to get in and out without raising a ruckus. He hadn’t come to slap Keller’s face with a glove and challenge him to a duel, only to find out whether he was here or not.
The duel would come later. On Jay’s terms.
Not that even this much was easy. He made his way through the baggage car with his utmost stealth, stopping frequently to look and to listen. Cracking any of CyberNation’s secure services would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. These were people who prided themselves on their ability to program and weave, and any chinks in their armor would be microscopically small. But the train ran on public tracks, and it had a connection to the railway system’s computers, which were a lot easier to rascal. Jay wasn’t hurting anything, he wasn’t going to even peek at the rail system’s files, he was just riding their coded sig into the CyberNation train. They had to allow it access, and while it wouldn’t get him past their foot-thick firewalls, the information he wanted wasn’t behind them anyhow.
Jay got through the baggage car. Just ahead was the conductor’s office. Jay knocked, and when nobody answered he slipped the lock with a credit card and stepped inside. If the conductor had been in his office, Jay would have offered some excuse, gone away, and created a diversion that would have drawn the man out.
A file cabinet stood near the conductor’s desk, but it was partially open, not even locked. Jeez, Louise! Not that the lock would have stopped him, but still, they didn’t have to make it so easy. It was amazing to him how often people who should know better left their doors unlocked.
A few minutes shuffling through papers came up with what he wanted: a passenger list. He looked at several other manifests, on the off-chance somebody might someday notice he had poked around in here. No point in being obvious about what he was looking for.
Jay recognized several of the names on the passenger list from his own list of high-end computer program grads. And there, plain as day, was the name he had come to find.
Jackson Keller.
So, this was where he was, and this was where his primary team was, too.
Jay put the list back into the drawer, went to the door, peeked out. Nobody around.
He hurried back toward the baggage car. He had what he wanted. Time to leave.
“We’ve got a hacker incursion,” Taggart said.
Keller stared at her. “Incursion? Not a failed attempt? Impossible!”
“Not in our systems. In the train’s op comp. We got a bounce-back from Deutsche Bahn Access, said he wasn’t who he said he was. I checked it: The hit came in off the sat pipeline from EuroAlliance One, not from any registered Deutsche Bahn connections.”
“Let me see.” He moved to the work station where Samantha Taggart, the security monitor for this shift, sat.
“Nothing to see,” she said. “He’s come and gone.”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing to speak of. He accessed several housekeeping files. Didn’t take anything, didn’t leave a worm or virus behind. Probably some kid trying out a new cracker program.”
“Which files? Never mind—” Keller tapped in a key sequence. The file list appeared in a real-time crawl on the holoproj. Mail manifest, cargo bills of lading. Passenger list. Station stops. Who would bother? There was nothing there to see.
“You back-walked him?”
“Far as I could. It was an anonymous sig from somewhere in the NoAtlantic Net; it frayed eight hundred ways from Sunday past that.”
