34
Toni waited in line for the shuttle boat. The sky had gone gray, and while it wasn’t raining yet, the wind had picked up and the southeasterly breeze felt damp. There was a full load of departing passengers waiting. Apparently more than a few people were worried about the weather, and didn’t want to be on a ship ninety miles away from land if it got nasty.
The boat from the helicopter barge arrived and tied up at the base of the ramp, and after a few seconds, new arrivals climbed the stairs or wheelchair ramp onto the ship.
She hoped they had all come to gamble, because they surely weren’t going to get much sun—
Hold on—
Coming up the ramp was a face she recognized. It took a second for her to realize why.
What was he doing here? He was supposed to be in Germany, wasn’t he? This must mean something.
As soon as he’d passed, Toni left the shuttle boat line, as if she had suddenly remembered that she had forgotten something. The gap she left filled instantly. She glanced at her watch. The comsat wasn’t due for another forty-five minutes. Could she risk calling Alex on the ship’s phones? She could keep it innocuous—
Anybody who didn’t know who she was could hardly tell what she was talking about from that, could they?
Not likely. But if the ship’s phones were tapped, and that would be easy enough to do since they were owned and maintained by CyberNation, they might wonder why a secretary from Falls Church was calling somebody at Net Force headquarters. Or maybe they might be even able to recognize Alex’s name on the home phone or his virgil. And even if her scrambler kept them from hearing anything other than noise, maybe they would wonder what a secretary was
Any of those would be bad.
No, she would wait until the next footprint so she could call on the secure line. There were still a dozen more copters leaving this evening, and she needed to get a better look at this guy, maybe even see where he went or who he might talk to—
As if some bored deity had been listening, Toni suddenly saw Jasmine Chance, now dressed in a black jump-suit and sandals, step into view ahead. Toni turned away and put a hand up to block her face from view.
Keller went straight to her, and while she couldn’t overhear his conversation, he was obviously pretty excited from the way he waved his hands around.
Well, well. What did this mean?
Alex would surely want to know about this. Yes, she could call him from the Mainland, or even from the shuttle copter, but there was no hurry, was there? Maybe she could find out something more before she had to leave.
The old 727’s rebuilt engines were reassuring in their smooth, dependable drone. They were only a few minutes out now, and Julio was going over the checklist a final time as they began their descent into Fort Lauderdale.
“Our boy Mr. Gridley here came through.” Julio smiled at Jay, who sat across the aisle. “First squad and half of second squad will be on Bird A; third squad and the other half of second on Bird B.”
Howard nodded. Next to him sat Commander Michaels. Michaels hadn’t planned to come along at all, even to sit onshore, but he hadn’t heard from Toni, who was supposed to have left the ship by now. According to Jay, Mary Johnson had not gotten on any of the shuttle copters for the Mainland yet. Maybe the weather had more people leaving than normal, delaying the flights, but Michaels was worried enough to go along. Howard didn’t blame him. He knew how he’d feel if it was his wife there.
“Weather radar shows an ugly set of heavy showers moving from the southeast toward the target, the main body of which will have arrived by 2100—we’re gonna get wet.”
“I’ll be sure to bring my umbrella,” Howard said.
“Wind’ll just turn it inside out, sir. Steady breeze will be almost thirty knots, gusting to forty.”
“Go on.”
“Troops all have Class III spider silk vests for armor — that’s the best we can do, given the scenario — so nobody is real bulletproof. Augmented-LOSIR coms will be set on opchan Gamma, and we carry sidearms and subguns, plus the usual assortment of puke gas, flashbangs, and all like that, packed away in our luggage. Everybody knows what he or she is supposed to do.”
Howard nodded.
The seat belt light and audible warning went on.
Julio said, “So, to condense things a little, we get there, take over before anybody knows what is going on, and capture the computers before they can trash ’em. Then our computer wizard here waltzes in and collects the evidence, the bad guys all go to prison, and everybody lives happily ever after.”
The jet started to descend; he could feel the pressure in his ears change.
“No word from Toni yet?” he said.
Michaels looked worried. “No. She should have called by now.”
Toni had a problem. Her room was no longer available, she had checked out, and she didn’t want to be wandering around the ship towing her suitcase. That made it kind of hard to skulk, when the wheels of your little carry-on were clacking over every imperfection in the floor. So when Keller went to a cabin, she ducked into a public toilet nearby, put her suitcase on the commode in an empty stall, locked the door, and climbed out over the top of the stall’s door. It would have been smarter to have found a concierge and checked the bag, but she didn’t want to get too far away from Keller, in case he came out.
He did come out, not ten minutes later, and she stayed far enough back so he didn’t seem to notice her. This was working out all right.
He went straight to one of the guarded entrances to the private decks, and she couldn’t follow him in there.
Okay. He was here, Alex needed that information, and that might be all she was gonna get. It was what it was.
When she went back to get her suitcase, it was gone. And her scrambled cell phone and flatscreen were in the suitcase.
This was not good. Not good at all.
Probably housekeeping had the bag. Somebody had reported the stall locked, a janitor had come by, found the bag. Nothing sinister about it. She had her wallet and ID, she could just go and find housekeeping and pick it up.
Maybe. Or maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.
She sat in the stall and thought about the situation. If Alex and the Net Force teams were going to move on the ship, she didn’t want to do anything that might possibly cause them problems. So making the phone call without her coded phone was out.
If they did show up here, chances were good they’d catch Keller — she could tell them he was here when she saw them. It wasn’t as if she was the only civilian on the ship, now was it? There were probably a couple thousand tourists here — she wouldn’t be in any more danger than any of them. Less, because she knew there might be a reason to keep her head down, and because she had some skill at staying out of harm’s way.
If the suitcase was in the lost-and-found waiting to be claimed, no problem. But if they had opened it, seen who it belonged to, and wondered why it had been sitting in an empty, locked toilet stall, that might make them curious. It would surely make her curious if she were running security on a ship. Once they saw it wasn’t a bomb,
