The plane’s door opened, the little ramp lowering, and Hack Spalding stood there, grinning his gap-toothed grin. He gave Ventura the finger, which meant things were okay onboard. Ventura turned to motion Morrison up the short ramp while he watched their backs. Nobody around.
Well, good. Score another one for the round eyes…
The Mall was hot and muggy even this late in the afternoon, no real surprise this time of year, but Toni didn’t really care. It was good to be outside moving, good to be back in the U.S., and especially good to be walking next to Alex. It was almost as if the last couple of months had been a bad dream. As if she had just awakened from a troubled sleep, the memory of it fresh but somehow unreal.
He wanted her to come back to her job, and the truth was, she wanted to, but that had been a big part of the problem, working for Alex, and she didn’t see how it was going to improve. He couldn’t treat her like an employee in the same way he had before they’d become lovers. It made a difference, and there were all kinds of problems that came from that. He had skipped sending her into a danger zone when she’d come up in the rotation, and while she wanted him to be concerned for her as a man for his woman, she did not want the same concern from a boss to an employee.
She’d have to do some kind of work, though, and the truth was, she’d already been offered several jobs. A couple of computer companies had approached her to head up their security services, and they’d offered a lot more money than she’d been making at Net Force. There were some nice perks, too: cars, condos, a snazzy title. And she had seriously considered taking one of these. Mostly, she could work from anywhere, though there would be some travel for secure-situation setups. But while she didn’t want to work for Alex, she also didn’t want to get so far away she couldn’t see him.
There was the possibility of a transfer. Alex had never put her resignation into the system. She’d quit, but he hadn’t told anybody higher up. She was officially on personal leave, not drawing a salary, but still considered employed. Net Force was more or less freestanding as an operation, but it was still technically part of the FBI. There were people on the other side of the fence at Quantico who would be pleased to have her working in their offices — she had heard from a couple of them, too. Thing was, while that meant she’d be in the same general vicinity as Alex, it also meant she’d be viewed as something of a traitor in Net Force. Just as the CIA and the FBI always had a de facto competition going, and there was little love lost between them, Net Force ops tended to think of regular feebs as dweebs — to be tolerated, but avoided as much as possible.
Alex probably wouldn’t like it very much if she jumped into the Bureau mainline.
Then again, it wasn’t really his choice, was it? She had to do something to earn her living, and she was already in the system — a transfer to another building would be the easiest thing all around, at least insofar as keeping her apartment, getting to work, and not having to learn new systems. And she could still see Alex for lunch or work-outs in the gym every day.
Her phone’s attention-beck came on — an odd little piece of music that came from a movie more than fifty years old, a comedy about a super-secret agent named Flint. The little tune was the same as the ring of the special phone belonging to a fictional U.S. security agency, reserved for incoming calls from the President of the United States: Dah dah dah, dah dah dah, dah DAH, dah dah dah, dah dah daaah. This little sting was courtesy of Jay Gridley, of course, who loved such esoterica, and who also loved to program personal hardware when the owner wasn’t looking.
She looked at the screen but the caller’s ID was blocked. If she’d been carrying a virgil, it wouldn’t have been.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Toni. How are you?”
Some bored god must be reading her mind and taking an interest in her life: It was Melissa Allison herself, Director of the FBI. On a Sunday, no less.
“Fine, and you?”
“Surviving. Listen, I understand you are interested in transferring from Net Force into Mainline, is that correct?”
The director, who had gotten her job by knowing where a soccer stadium’s worth of political bodies were buried, was not one to mince words.
Indeed, Toni had been considering it only seconds before, but she hadn’t made the decision yet. That’s not what the director wanted to hear. She wanted a yes or no answer. Here’s the spot, Toni, and like it or not, you’ve just been put on it. Choose.
Toni glanced at Alex, who was busy watching a young couple with two small children trying to corral the little critters. The boy, about three, was running around in circles, singing a clock song—“One o‘clock, bang, bang, bang/ Two o’clock, bang, bang, bang!” The little girl, maybe a year and half, was running away from her mother at full speed across the lawn in that lurching toddle small children had, laughing as she went. Alex was smiling at the show.
“Toni?”
Toni pulled her attention back to the phone. “Yes, ma’am, I have been considering it.”
“Wise,” the director said, and Toni knew from that one word that the woman knew about her and Alex. “I have an opening in my schedule tomorrow around one. Come and see me and we’ll discuss it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
With that, the director was gone. Toni hooked the phone back into the belt of her jeans.
Alex turned away from the children and looked at her, lifting his eyebrows in question: Who was that?
Maybe it was selfish of her, but Toni didn’t want to kill the rest of the afternoon. If she told Alex it was the director, she’d have to explain the rest, he’d want to talk about it, and she just wasn’t up to that. She’d only been back with Alex for a couple of days, it didn’t feel as secure as once it had, and if he knew she was thinking about going over to the feeb shop, she was sure he would be upset. He might not say anything, he would cover up his feelings — he was good at that, covering up his feelings — and she just wasn’t ready to go down that road.
She slipped her hand around his arm. “Nothing important,” she said. “Come on, I want to see the Smith’s new Ancient Wheels exhibit.”
He smiled at her. “Sure.”
All right. It wasn’t a lie, if maybe not strictly true, but if anything came of it, she would tell him. Why bring it up and ruin the mood now, since it might not amount to anything anyhow? A conversation with the director was all it was.
As they passed the young parents and children, Alex grinned at the little girl, who had finally gotten tired and plopped upon the neatly clipped grass, where she sat quietly cooing.
“Ever think about having children?” Alex said.
Toni was caught flatfooted. She stopped, as if she had forgotten how to walk. She stared at him. Children? With Alex? Of course she had thought about it. Dreamed about it, even. But before she could gather herself enough to say anything, he shrugged.
“Just an idle thought,” he said.
20
No Chinese assassins materialized to try and intercept them as they drove from the old pipeline airstrip just north of Paxon toward Gakona. Ventura said it wasn’t likely, and he had ten of his people checking possible ambush sites along the route, plus cars in front and behind of theirs. The older man, Walker, drove again, with Morrison in the front and Ventura sitting in the back. “If anybody shows up, they’ll probably think I’m you, since the VIP usually rides in the back,” Ventura had explained.