State of War

He nodded.

“Guru told me someone called. She didn’t say who, though.”

“She called again earlier today,” Alex said. “She said she had a meeting with Mitchell Ames and has some interesting information to pass on to me. She wants to meet me at her hotel at seven tonight for a drink.”

Toni’s eyes flicked to the flatscreen and then back to him. “And?”

“And I have a bad feeling about this.”

“What has she done?” Toni asked, her voice still soft and low, but still with that edge of steel.

“Nothing. Nothing specific, anyway. It’s just that she’s been a bit too… suggestive, I guess. But between her innuendos and the timing with this CyberNation suit, I just have this feeling that I’m being set up. And I don’t want to take any chances.”

“So you’re not going to meet her?” Toni asked.

Alex shook his head. “I have to meet her. But I want you to come with me. If Guru won’t mind watching Little Alex for a while longer, that is.”

Toni smiled at that. “I’ll call her right now,” she said. “And I’ll be ready to go by six.”

She rose to leave, but paused in the doorway and turned back to face him. “And by the way,” she said. “I love you. And thanks.”

And then she was gone.

Alex just sat there for a moment, enjoying the warm feeling she had left behind, and then he picked up the manila folder holding her report on the hacker.

In spite of himself, he couldn’t help feeling that one more virus-strewing hacker was not Net Force’s biggest problem. CyberNation and their lawsuit, their bribing a Supreme Court judge’s clerk, their devious ways to get their agenda across, that was a problem. This was nothing. They had caught the guy. End of worry about him.

He looked at the folder. Best he read it, though, and be ready to tell Toni what a good job she had done.

It didn’t take long. It was good work, both on Jay’s and Toni’s parts, even though they didn’t have quite all of it. According to what she had written, there was still this man behind the scenes, supposedly, but that would be a simple enough sting: Wait until he called, set up a meeting, go and collect him.

As Michaels read the description of the suspected kingpin, he thought the man sounded familiar somehow. Like somebody he knew.

He couldn’t pin it down. Ah, well. It would probably come to him in the middle of the night. Besides, a lot of people looked alike. Sometimes when the anchor described a criminal suspect on the evening news, it was all he could do to keep from laughing out loud. “Police describe the suspect as a white male, age twenty-five to thirty-five, five-foot-nine to six-feet-two inches tall, one hundred and sixty to two hundred pounds, with brown hair worn moderately long. He was last seen wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and running shoes.”

That could be any of a million people in any big city on any given day. Maybe one of two million. Who did they hope to collect with such a description?

Well, he didn’t need to worry about it now. He had to talk to the secretarial staff and the ops who were going to be amassing paperwork for that shark Mitchell Ames on behalf of CyberNation.

Just what he needed.

Arlington, Texas

As they came out of the Indian restaurant, Junior said, “I spotted a liquor store down the road a piece. You want to get a fifth of Southern Comfort to take to the house?”

“Sure, why not?” Joan said.

She wore a disguise to match Junior’s, just like he’d told her to — cowboy boots under a long blue denim skirt, and a shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons under a white cowgirl hat.

Even so, the clerk in the restaurant had looked at him like he was some kind of pervert, since Joan did look young enough to be Junior’s daughter.

“So tell me more about this gig,” she said, after they had collected the bottle and gotten back into the rental car.

He shrugged. “It’s just like the last couple,” he said. “This one is a fat, rich Texas oilman who got into politics. You’ll be working as a temp secretary in his office, romance will blossom, we’ll set up a photo shoot at a motel, the usual.”

“My fee?”

“Same as last time.”

She was silent for a moment, only the deep drone of the car’s AC to break the quiet.

“What?”

“I was thinking, maybe I need a raise.”

A cold wind seemed to blow across the back of his neck. That wasn’t like Joan. “Why?” he asked. “You’re making good money for not much work.”

“Well, I heard on the news about that guy out in California. The Democrat? Turned up dead in a park a couple days ago?”

He managed not to react to that. Ames had been right after all. “What’s that got to do with you getting more money, cher?” he asked.

“Come on, Junior, do I have ‘Stupid’ tattooed on my forehead? We caught him with his pants down. You went and had a talk with him, he flipped out, and you capped him. At least that’s how I figured it, unless it is just one huge monster coincidence, which I don’t believe it was.”

He made a show of thinking about it. After a moment he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but okay, maybe I could come up with a little bonus.”

She smiled at him, a big, happy grin. “How much?”

“What you think is fair?”

“Ten thousand. Since people are getting dead and all.”

“No way. I maybe could go three thousand.”

“Eight.”

“Five.”

“Seventy-five hundred.”

Junior pretended to consider it. It didn’t matter how much he agreed to, she wasn’t going to get any of it anyhow, but he had to make it look good. If he’d just rolled over and agreed to the ten, she’d have been suspicious.

He sighed and shook his head. “All right. Seventy-five hundred.”

She reached over and laid her hand on his thigh. “Always a pleasure doing business with you, hon.”

26

Just off the Kona Coast

Big Island, Hawaii

Jay breathed in, and the scuba tank strapped on his back fed him air with a cold, metallic taste. The regulator clicked and he exhaled, bubbles of carbon dioxide hemisphering and heading for the ocean’s surface, thirty feet straight up.

Ahead of him, a gray green moray eel peered from within a small opening in a reef of dying coral. The eel was as big around and as long as Jay’s arm. One beady eye watched him above needle-sharp teeth. It didn’t seem disposed to venture out, though, and Jay flippered past him a good fifteen feet away, staying wary. He had a speargun, one of those air-powered jobs with a trident point, but he’d just as soon not waste one of his two shots on the moray. There were more dangerous predators lurking in the warm Hawaiian seas.

There was a little water in the bottom of his face mask, not enough to worry about clearing, and the glass itself was unfogged. Jay had learned the trick of spitting into the face mask and rubbing it around with his fingertips to keep it from misting up. Worked pretty well, too.

He cruised along slowly, waving his legs, driving himself along with the stiff rubber flippers, only using his