1
Thursday, June 2nd
Quantico, Virginia
Alex Michaels pedaled his recumbent trike along the wide bike path between Net Force HQ and the Chinese restaurant where he sometimes had lunch, pumping hard. The day was hot and muggy, despite a cloudy overcast, and sweat had already drenched his T-shirt and spandex shorts. He shifted up another gear as he zipped past a trio of Marine officers from the base, jogging along at a pretty good clip themselves. Ordinarily, he enjoyed riding the trike, feeling the burn in his legs and lungs, knowing he was working his muscles and cooking off that half carton of H?agen-Dazs he’d eaten the night before. Ordinarily, the commander of Net Force enjoyed a lot of things, but like his feet toe-clipped into the pedals, a lot of what he had been doing lately had been no more than going through the motions.
Work was pretty good. Aside from the ten thousand usual small fish Net Force had to school and round up, there weren’t any major problems in the world of computer crime just at the moment. Nothing like the mad Russian who’d wanted to take over the planet, or the senator’s aide who wanted to buy up the world bit by bit, or even the dotty English lord who’d wanted to bring back the glory days of the Empire. Congress hadn’t cut him off at the knees lately, and his boss, the new FBI director, was sometimes hardheaded, but basically not too bad, and she mostly left him alone.
Work was fine. It was his personal life that was an absolute wreck.
He guided the trike to the right, to make sure the two bicyclers coming from the other direction side-by-side had plenty of room to get by. The couple, an older man and woman, waved as he went by. He gave them a quick lift of his hand in return.
His ex-wife, Megan, had gotten engaged, and was petitioning the courts in Idaho for sole custody of their daughter, Susie. Her new love wanted to adopt the girl. Susie liked her mom’s new friend, which was more than Michaels could say. That he had decked the man at a family Christmas gathering had not helped the situation any—even though it had felt pretty good at the time.
Michaels could fight it. His lawyer said he had a pretty good chance of winning in court, and Michaels’s knee-jerk reaction at first had been to do just that, fight it until his last breath, if need be. But he loved his daughter, and she was at a tender age, still years away from being a teenager. What would a nasty court battle do to her? The last thing he wanted to do was traumatize his only child.
Would it be better for her to have a mother and father— even a stepfather—there with her all the time? Washington, D.C., was a long way from Boise, and Michaels didn’t see his daughter as much as he wished. Had shuffling out to see him in the summers done some kind of irreparable harm to Susie? Would it make her life worse in the long run?
The big banked curve on the bike trail was just ahead, and rather than slow down, Michaels decided he was going to power his way through it. He upshifted and pumped even harder. But as he started into the curve, he saw a group of walkers ahead, residents of a local nursing home. They were spread almost all the way across the path. He didn’t have a warning horn on the trike, and he had a sudden fear that if he yelled for them to get out of the way, one of the old folks might well keel over from a heart attack.
He stopped pedaling and squeezed the handbrakes. The heavy-duty disk brakes on all three wheels squeaked from the sudden pressure, and there came the smell of burning circuit boards as the trike slowed dramatically. On a two-wheeler, he’d probably be going sideways now, but the trike just wobbled the rear end back and forth a little as it came almost to a stop.
None of the geriatric crowd, most of whom looked to be in their eighties, even noticed him until he crept around them at walking speed.
That would have been all he needed, to plow into Grandma and Granddaddy on his trike at full tilt. One more brick on the load.
And, of course, there was the big problem in his life: Toni.
She was still in England, practicing pentjak silat, the Indonesian martial art in which she was an adept, studying with that Carl somebody. There hadn’t been anything personal between Carl and Toni when Michaels had left the U.K., but—who knew about now? It had been more than a month. A lot could happen in a month.
Toni Fiorella was smart, beautiful, and could kill you with her hands if she felt so inclined. She’d been his deputy commander until she’d quit. And she’d been his lover—until she’d found out about his indiscretion with the blond MI-6 agent Angela Cooper.
Near indiscretion, Alex, his little voice said. We didn’t actually do anything, remember?
Yeah, we did. It never should have gotten to the point where I even thought about it.
We were tired, half-drunk, and Cooper was working at it—the massage and all—
No excuse.
It was an argument he’d had with himself a thousand times in the last six weeks. With a thousand variations. If only Toni hadn’t gone under the channel to France. If only he hadn’t agreed to a beer and fish and chips with Angela. If only he hadn’t agreed to go to her place to let her massage his back. If, if, if.
It was all pointless speculation now. And he couldn’t lie to himself about it, no matter how much he wished it.
He thought about bringing the trike back up to speed, but it suddenly didn’t seem worth the effort. The Chinese place was not that far away. It wasn’t as if he was in any kind of hurry now, was it? Or was hungry. Or gave a rat’s ass about getting back to work on time.
Even the thought of getting a new project car hadn’t given him any great joy. He’d done a Plymouth Prowler and a Mazda MX-5, a Miata, but the garage at his condo sat empty now. The Miata had been the car in which he’d first kissed Toni. He couldn’t keep it after she’d quit on him and stayed in England.
He blew out a sigh.
You sure are a sorry, self-pitying bastard, aren’t you? Snap out of it! Suck it up! Be a man!
“F*ck you,” he told his inner voice. But that part of him was right. He wasn’t a sensitive New Age kinda guy who got all weepy in sad movies. In his world, men took care of business and soldiered on. That was the way his father had taught him, and that was how he’d lived his life. Wailing and wringing your hands was not what a man did. You screwed up, then you took the heat, and you got on with your life, period, end of story. What was that old saying: You can’t do the time, don’t do the crime? That was pretty much it.
In theory, anyway.
Thursday
Sperryville, Virginia
“Ow,” Jay Gridley said. He slapped at his bare arm, and when he pulled his hand away, there was a splotch of liquid red surrounding the crushed body of a mosquito. At least he thought it was a mosquito—it was hard to tell.
“Murderer,” Soji said. She smiled.
“Self-defense,” he said. “If I’d known I was gonna be attacked by all these itty-bitty vampires, I’d have thought twice about going for a walk in the woods with you. Or maybe brought a bunch of matches I could carve into wooden stakes. This would be so much more pleasant in VR.”
“My father used to say that God made two mistakes,” she said. “Mosquitoes and politicians. Of course, he was an alderman, so he could say that. But he was wrong—both mosquitoes and politicians have their places.”
Jay shook his head. “Sounds like more Buddhistic smoke and mirrors to me. You got to go some to justify mosquitoes.”
“Really? Tell that to the bats who eat them.”
“They could eat something else. Plenty of bugs that don’t bite people. They could double up on gnats or something.”
“Come on, Jay. If you take away everything that causes you discomfort, there’s no way to measure your pleasure.”
They were on a narrow dirt trail that wound through a section of mostly hardwood forest. There was enough shade so the day’s heat didn’t lay too heavy a hand on them, and the air was rich in oxygen, the smells of warm summer vegetation, and decades of damp humus. The backpack was a lot heavier than anything Jay was used to carrying, but since Soji’s was every bit as heavy, he could hardly complain. He had the tent, but she had the cooking gear.
He shook his head. He couldn’t successfully argue philosophy or religion with Sojan Rinpoche. She could talk circles around him. Though only in her twenties, she was much more educated in such things than he was. They had met after the on-line injury he’d got stalking the creator of a quantum computer that had caused Net Force all kinds of problems. Since they had come together initially in VR—virtual reality—via the internet, they had been in persona, and hers had been that of an aged Tibetan monk. She was a lot better looking as a young woman than she had been as an old man. And she had been instrumental in helping him recover from a brain injury that theoretically wasn’t even possible.
“See, that’s the problem with you, Jay. You spend too much time on-line. You need to get out more.”
“I could put mosquitoes in a scenario if I wanted.”
“You could. But have you ever?”
“Well, no.”
“And without experiencing real bugs sucking your blood and going splat when you slap them, you wouldn’t be able to do it accurately. And even then, it would only be an imitation, and not the real thing.”
“But isn’t this all just an illusion?” He waved one hand to encompass the wooded hillside.
“Wrong religion, white boy. Try the Hindus or the existentialists. Buddhists aren’t into denying reality. We like to get down and roll around in it.”
“What about that old man persona of yours on the net?”
“A tool, that’s all. Got me past a lot of preconceptions, and made my patients relax. Besides, an illusion is by definition not real, so altering it one way or the other doesn’t make it any more or less real, now does it?”
He chuckled. Boy, he liked being with her.
“So how much farther is it to this secret place of yours?”
“Not far. Couple more miles.”
He gave out a theatrical groan. “You didn’t tell me I was going to have to hike halfway around the planet carrying a house on my back. This better be worth the walk.”
“Oh, it will be. Guaranteed satisfaction or your money back.”
Well, that sounded promising. He slapped at another mosquito, and was inclined to agree with Soji’s father on at least one point, despite what she’d said.