“And why it is our problem, Jay? How does this end up floating in our punch bowl?”
“When you asked me to poke around in that HAARP thing, this came in almost immediately. It rang a bell. You remember the guy you told me about who came by while I was camping. The scientist from HAARP?”
“Morrison, right.”
“Uh-huh. Well, he mentioned something about mind control and low-frequency radio waves.”
“He said it wasn’t feasible.”
“Maybe not. Or maybe it is. Maybe the Chinese were the ones poking around in the HAARP computers and maybe they swiped it. It just seemed awfully coincidental, given that this was exactly the kind of thing somebody would want to do if they could do it.”
“The Chinese?”
“Possible. They have some people who are pretty good hackers. Maybe the HAARP guys found some piece of the puzzle and the Chinese knew where to use it. Nothing for certain, and it’s kind of a stretch, but I’d check it out.”
Michaels nodded. “I hope you are wrong. I hope nobody else makes the connection and thinks it is our problem to solve. All right. Find out what you can. If this thing in China is connected to it, I don’t want us to be caught flatfooted. At the very least, we need to be able to say we’re investigating it if somebody should ask.”
“Gotcha, Boss. I’m on the case.”
After Jay left, Michaels took several deep breaths. Let it be some virus they couldn’t find and not something they swiped from a U.S. computer. Please. I really don’t need this right now. Or ever…
12
It was well after dark when Toni’s plane landed at Dulles. She’d had to switch from the jumbo jet to a smaller craft in New York, and she knew she’d catch hell if her mother found out she had been at JFK and hadn’t called the Bronx to at least say hello, but she couldn’t deal with that yet. Her mother would want to know all about it, what had happened with Alex, and even Guru would need more details than Toni was ready to provide. She’d thought the story was over, but maybe it wasn’t, and until she had a better sense of things, she didn’t want to start downloading it into sympathetic ears. She needed a girlfriend for that, anyhow, somebody who could listen to the gory details — not her mother or her elderly teacher. Mama Fiorella had raised a houseful of children, mostly sons, and with six kids, she certainly knew about sex, but knowing it and talking about it were two different things. Toni remembered a discussion she’d had with one of her older brothers when she’d been about nineteen. He’d been asking about women, when their mother had wandered into the room. Mama heard the words “female orgasm” and disappeared faster than Houdini stoked on methamphetamines.
No, the conversation about Alex and sex and love would have to wait until she could pay a visit to one of her college buds, Dirisha Mae, or Mary Louise, women she’d kept in touch with since school. Women who had been there and done it themselves, and had come back to cry on her shoulder about it. The Man War, they had dubbed it in the dorm when they’d lived there. Some battles you won, some you lost, but the war itself never ended.
The cab ride through the sticky summer night to Alex’s was incredibly fast, as of course it would be, since she was suddenly not in a real hurry to get there. Back in London, thousands of miles away, this had seemed urgent and absolutely necessary. The closer she got, the less brilliant the idea seemed. Just showing up on Alex’s doorstep, no call, no warning? What if he wasn’t home? What if he didn’t want to talk to her?
What if he wasn’t alone?
That had just come to her for the first time. What if he had a woman in his bed and they were giggling and playing games under the sheets?
The grinning, green-eyed monster popped up like magic in her mind and chortled its nasty laugh. This jealousy crap was really hard to take. It wasn’t like somebody coming straight at her she could elbow or throw, it was this sneaky, insidious beast that popped up unexpectedly, stabbed her with a long trident when she wasn’t expecting it, then ran like hell before she could gather herself to react. She hated the feeling, and she really hated not being able to prevent it. Toni wasn’t altogether dense about this kind of thing. You don’t spend more than half your life learning a martial art that would allow you to kick serious butt without recognizing that you have some… control issues. She didn’t really think Alex would have found somebody else, given his track record — he hadn’t dated anybody to speak of for years after he and his ex-wife split — but you never knew. Having jumped back into the pool finally, maybe he would have found a new partner for synchronized swimming. And certainly that would screw things up, wouldn’t it?
Toni shook her head at her thought. Okay, fine. Whatever. She wasn’t going there for some kind of tearful movie reconciliation, she was going there for some answers. Answers that Alex, by God, owed her.
And thinking of there, all of a sudden, here they were.
Alex’s condo was on a fairly quiet street in a solid upper-middle-class neighborhood filled with condos and houses much like his. Rich people wouldn’t stoop to live here, poor couldn’t afford to, but the residences were comfortable and in keeping with the kind of job Alex had. Nice place, nice neighborhood, and until that horrible moment in London, nice guy.
She had to know what had happened to change that. It didn’t make any sense.
Toni paid the cabbie, towed her single suitcase on its built-in wheels to the front door, and stood there.
And stood there. And stood there some more.
There were lights on inside, and it wasn’t that late. All she had to do was push the doorbell.
She realized that she was breathing too fast, and that her hands were damp. It was a warm, humid night, but that wasn’t what was causing her to sweat. She was, she realized, afraid. And coming from a solid base of being able to protect herself, that was really scary.
She took a deep breath, let half of it out, and gathered her resolve. She pushed the doorbell. She heard it ring. There was a space of time, how long she couldn’t say, but subjectively, about ten or fifteen thousand years.
“Yes?”
His voice over the intercom was the first time she’d heard him speak since he’d left London seven weeks ago. It was a sound she hadn’t realized how much she had missed until she heard it, and the simple question stunned her, so that all she could say was “Hi.”
“Toni!? Don’t move, I’ll be right there!”
And despite whatever she had felt, it warmed her to hear the joy in his voice.
Ventura made the rounds of his surveillance stations. He was running a basic six-person team, not counting himself, and that was not really enough, considering what his client was into, but as much as he was likely to get away with up here in the middle of nowhere. Disguised as a birdwatching club out looking for owls, it gave his people a reason to be out with binoculars and starlight scopes and cameras, but it was still something of a stretch to have them wandering around in the woods. The locals would surely notice his people, and while they had all the proper gear and had done enough quick research to fake it, they wouldn’t fool any real birders they might run into.
Fortunately, there wasn’t much in the way of law enforcement up here, so even if somebody thought the birders were a bit odd, they weren’t likely to call the cops, and even if they did, it probably wouldn’t be the top priority for an overextended Alaskan police force. Weird-looking birdwatchers? Isn’t that redundant? What are they doing? Walking around in the woods looking through their binoculars? Oh, wow. How sinister! What, you think they’ve come to steal the trees? Smuggle Kodiak bears down into tlae lower forty-eight? C’mon!