Chapter 29
The next three weeks passed in a flurry of activity, with one day blending into the next. The Los Alamos Hilltoppers basketball team continued their winning ways, although Mark’s scoring settled down to an average of closer to twenty-five points a game. By the time Christmas break came and went, Mark’s workout program was beginning to bring about a noticeable change in his physique. His arms and shoulders had thickened, and his waist had narrowed. Heather had seen him without his shirt after one of his workout sessions, and his stomach looked like it belonged to a comic book superhero.
Apparently his neural augmentation made him incredibly efficient at training his muscles, and they had responded with a vengeance to his indomitable will. It wasn’t that he looked like a weight lifter, far from it. He just looked extremely buff.
January first arrived with little fanfare. Heather had stayed up late the night before to watch the annual dropping of the New Year’s ball in New York City, but she had been the only late bird in her family. Not that she was a party animal herself; she had just had a hard time sleeping, and the televised party coverage provided a welcome distraction. Now she was tired, but anxious to get on with what they had to do.
Today was the day. Virus Day. They had actually been ready to launch the virus for several days now, but just couldn’t bring themselves to do it over Christmas. So the dawn of the New Year would see the first salvo in a war that began decades earlier in the skies above Aztec, a war between good and evil. At least, that is how Heather thought of it.
Mark, Jennifer, and Heather parked their bikes in a rack some distance from their objective. They had selected a public pay phone in the same Los Alamos shopping center where press reports said Abdul Aziz’s car had been found abandoned all those weeks ago.
Thanks to the ancient, acoustically coupled modem Jennifer had scrounged up, they could access the Internet from Jennifer’s PDA without using a traceable wireless connection. She could just hold it up to the phone mouthpiece. As Mark and Heather watched from a distance, Jennifer made her way to the pay phone. She leaned into it in a way that looked like she could be deep in a private discussion with a boyfriend.
It only took her a few minutes to access the Internet and upload the virus. As soon as Jennifer hung up the handset, pocketing her PDA, Heather and Mark moved from their lookout to meet her by the bikes. While crossing the parking lot, Heather had a moment of déjà vu, feeling as if she was a refugee from some 1950s cold war spy movie. The feeling passed as they got on their bicycles. There was just something about the picture of a band of international espionage agents making their getaway on bicycles that didn’t fit the way she felt.
Heather looked down at her hands. She had not been able to stop them from shaking since Jennifer had walked up to the phone booth. Now, as Heather pedaled hard to keep up with Mark and Jennifer as they sped away from the parking lot, she hoped with all her heart that their plan would work. If not, well, she didn’t care to think about it.
From the corner of her eye she glimpsed a tall, thin man with long, stringy, blond hair standing near the corner of the shopping center, but when she turned her head to look, there was no one there. Easy, Heather, she told herself. Don’t get paranoid now. She upped the pace of her pedaling, moving past Mark into the lead as they raced for home.
Behind her, a gaunt, ragged man stepped out into the open. As he watched them disappear around the bend, his expression was as blank as the mannequin in the nearby store window.