Private Lives

Offended, Mark gave him a quick look. “I said I would.” Then he vanished, too.

Mark’s exit seemed to open the door for everybody else. A couple of people, David Gray among them, apologized as they left. Matt didn’t say much to them as they vanished, one after another. After Megan’s outburst, what more was there left to say?

Soon Matt’s virtual sanctum was empty except for himself and Leif Anderson.

“I thought you’d be in a hurry to pull out and begin your investigation of Tori Rush.” Matt couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Maybe you’ll discover she was a centerfold model before she went into news. That way we’ll have some interesting pictures to look at — even if Captain Winters gets shafted.”

“I don’t think Tori Rush will be that easy a nut to crack,” Leif said. “At best, I’m hoping all her innuendos will turn out to be nothing.”

“But that didn’t stop you from stepping in and giving Megan a little backup there.”

Leif just raised his eyebrows. “Yeah. And you saw how much she thanked me for it.” He sighed. “No matter what we do, I know Megan’s going to be stirring things up, pushing the envelope to help the captain. As long as she thinks some of us might help her, at least she’ll stay in touch. And that’s a good thing. We don’t need her out there as a loose cannon.”

Matt shuddered. “Okay. You’ve got a point there.” He turned troubled eyes toward Leif. “But you were at the last meeting — the last regular meeting — where Captain Winters asked us to lay off.”

“He asked us to lay off McGuffin, and not to mess around with Steve the Bull Alcista.” Leif spread his hands, the picture of innocence. “And I will observe those requests. I’m not going near either of them. Neither are you.”

Matt had to laugh. “When the time comes for you to decide what you’re going to be when you grow up, you should consider being a lawyer.” He shook his head. “Or, as my Irish grandmother pronounces it, a liar.”

Leif gave him a thin-lipped smile. “It’s a possibility,” he said. “Do you have any ideas on what we as a group can do to tell Winters we all still love him?”

“Nothing very definite — or very helpful,” Matt admitted. “A picket line with a couple of cardboard signs would look more pathetic than supportive. And where would we go? The HoloNews office here in D.C.? Their headquarters in your town?” He managed a sour smile. “Or maybe Jay Gridley’s office?”

“Hangman Hank Steadman’s office.” Leif’s grin was wicked. “He’d love the media coverage.” Then he got more serious. “I’ll bet it’s not just the kids here who’d want to help. We’ll want to do something national — something on the Net.”

“You think I can get David to hack in and stick a message of support on all of America’s phone bills?” Matt suggested.

Leif laughed. “A little extreme, maybe, but I think you’re heading in the right direction.”

The humorous glint in Matt’s eyes faded. “Watching that meeting last night — it was like being told that Captain Winters had contracted some terrible disease. I just want to send him a giant get-well card.”

“Why don’t you?” Leif said. “Draft up a petition, something like that, and send it out to all the chapters. See if you can get every member to sign on.” He shrugged. “It shouldn’t be too hard. Look how quickly you guys got things rolling when you began banging the drums to roast Jay-Jay McGuffin’s tail.”

Matt slowly nodded. “You may have something there. Not exactly a petition, but a statement of support from all the Net Force Explorers, individually and together.”

Leif shrugged. “I’d sign it.”

Matt looked at him. “And to tell the truth, that sort of surprises me. The captain has roasted your tail from time to time over some of the stuff you’ve pulled. He trusts you only about as far as he can throw you.”

Leif wasn’t smiling at all as he leaned forward. “Look, I really like Captain Winters. Maybe it’s because of that suspicion, that continuous back and forth when we talk. I respect him for it. He’s usually right, too. I almost always am up to something when he thinks I am. Or maybe it’s something more than that. Remember what Daniel said? How he likes Captain Winters because the captain believes in him? Well, you’ve got to believe in something in this life. Me, I believe in James Winters.”

Leif looked a little embarrassed, as if he’d said something he shouldn’t. “Do me a favor and don’t spread that around, okay? It would ruin my rep as a cool, cynical playboy-in-training.”

“Yeah, right,” Matt muttered as his friend finally blinked out of his space. “That rep fits you to a T.”

Matt’s “giant get-well card” project succeeded far beyond anything he’d expected. All the local chapters enthusiastically jumped on board when he contacted them. Signatures began pouring in for his statement of support. Even kids who hadn’t been reporting in for meetings lately — including a few kids who’d been in the hospital — signed on to help Captain Winters. In days Matt had the signatures of every recorded Net Force Explorer.

That was the good part. Then he realized he had to get these signatures organized somehow and get them to Net Force and James Winters. Sorting the names against membership data, he got the signatures organized into local groups. Once he had the presentation problem licked, then there was the problem of delivery.

Jay Gridley’s office was easy. All it took was a phone call to Mark to get that Net address. But Captain Winters was a tougher nut to crack. With the captain suspended, it didn’t seem very likely he’d be checking his office e-mail. And when Matt tracked down a personal Net address for a J. Winters that looked promising, he got no response. The captain didn’t answer his home phone, either.

Matt couldn’t say he was exactly surprised. Since Tori Rush’s piece on Once Around the Clock, there had been a steadily growing media circus focused on the car bombings, both the recent one and the older ones. And the center ring of that circus was the alleged Alcista-Winters murder case. With reporters asking him repeatedly for comments and answers to questions, the captain probably had good reasons not to pick up when his phone bleated.

But it also meant that Matt couldn’t warn Winters that a special message was on the way from the Explorers. And that meant he couldn’t depend on sending off the petition electronically.

No, he would have to resort to a hard copy or a datascrip, delivered by hand. Matt spent a day reworking his document, decided how he wanted the final document to look, then tracked down a service bureau to print it out. The message was too massive to manage on his home system. He wanted the statement and signatures to appear in full color all on one piece of paper, and that meant finding a company that still used printers with paper rolls.

David Gray helped in the search, and Matt finally found a place that could handle the job. A few hours later he headed off with the result of his efforts — a very bulky roll of paper — under his arm. As he came out of a suburban Metro station, Matt hailed a cab in the parking lot and gave the driver James Winters’s home address. He winced when he heard the fare. This hand-delivery stuff didn’t just take time out of his day. It meant shelling out some serious money, too. But Captain Winters was worth it. Besides, if costs got out of hand, Matt knew he could get Leif to foot some of the bill.

He looked out the window as he rolled along en route to the captain’s house. It was a pleasant neighborhood, with good-sized houses spaced well apart. There was lots of room for front and back yards. Young kids were playing in several of those yards. Matt passed a little girl riding on a bicycle, and some guys shooting hoops on a backboard attached over a garage.

Matt blinked. He hadn’t really given much thought to how the captain lived outside of work. Maybe it was Winters’s military facade. But Matt somehow thought of his mentor in relation to offices or barracks, not as a suburb-dweller.

When he pulled up at the appropriate address, Matt didn’t expect to see the paneled Colonial-style house overlooking a good stretch of woods. But there was no mistaking the place. This was Captain Winters’s home, all right. The media vans parked across the street were a dead giveaway. Several vaguely official-looking vans were parked in the driveway. And James Winters stood in the driveway with Captain Hank Steadman of Net Force Internal Affairs.

They both turned suspicious eyes on the cab as it pulled up to the place.

They’re probably expecting some idiot reporter to pop out, Matt thought. He