“Sir?” His secretary.
“Yes?”
“The director is on the intercom. Line one.”
Michaels nodded. Of course she was. He sighed and reached for the phone.
Jasmine Chance walked down the hall toward the office Roberto had cleared of furniture and made into a workout space. Music drifted out of Roberto’s makeshift gym, drums and the singsong twang of berimbau, an instrument that looked vaguely like an archery bow strung with a metal wire, and with a gourd attached to one end. Roberto had explained the workings of this device in much greater detail than Chance had ever wanted to know. The instrument was played by hitting the wire with a little stick while rattling a gourd filled with pebbles in the same hand, and the musician could alternate between two notes by touching the wire with a coin or not. Santos liked to have his players use a Krugerrand, gold giving the best tone, so he said. The simple rhythms produced were part and parcel of the acrobatic African/South American martial art of Capoeira that Roberto Santos — a black, Brazilian master of the dance who bore the title of Capoeirista Mestre—practiced for hours every day.
Chance stepped into the doorway just as Roberto leaped into the air and turned a back somersault, landed neatly on the balls of his feet, then dropped into a spraddle-legged posture, sweeping one foot along the floor in a broad half-circle. Only the palm sides of the hands and soles of the feet were ever supposed to touch the ground, he had told her, that was part of O Jôgo, The Game. Capoeira was a fighting system developed by slaves, and while one school of history had it that it had been disguised as a dance so as to fool the white masters, Roberto had been quick to point out that such thinking was simplistic.
Most of what she knew of Capoeira she had learned from Roberto in bed, between bouts of an art at which she was an adept. Roberto was barely thirty years old. He was a decade younger than she was. He was handsome, had great stamina, and his body seemed chiseled from hard cocobolo wood. There was no fat on him at all. He had been a diamond in the rough when they had met. She had polished him and taught him how to be a skilled lover over the year of their association. He was coming along nicely.
Now, wearing only a pair of thin, calf-length red-and-white striped cotton pants, Roberto glowed with passion and sweat as he practiced his exercises. Though he preferred to be musically accompanied by three or four of his fellow game players — you had to learn to play the instruments as part of the dance — the music now was recorded. When he saw her arrive, he finished his sequence, then padded across the bare floor to the sound box and shut it off.
When he spoke, he had an accent, the soft liquid flow of Portuguese translating to his English, a rounding of hard consonants and lengthening of vowels.
“Ah, Missy. How goes the battle?”
She smiled, flashing perfect teeth — all marvels of expensive orthodontia, a thousand dollars a cap. “Keller says the first sortie went perfectly.”
Roberto picked a towel up from the floor and wiped the sweat from his face and shaved head. “Jackson, he’s a fine boy, can make them computers dance like nobody else.”
Chance smiled. That was true. Jackson Keller was a wizard with hardware and software, as good with those technical things as Roberto here was at bashing heads. CyberNation did not hire second-class talent for its key positions. There was much to be gained — or lost — in this game, and cutting corners on personnel would be short-sighted and stupid. When you were trying to create a virtual nation from nothing, to give it weight and substance, you had to do some very intricate things if you were going to pull it off. Having good help alone wasn’t sufficient. You needed the best. All of Chance’s people were just that — the best. And she wasn’t so bad herself, though her talents were somewhat harder to quantify. The higher-ups in CyberNation called her The Dragon Lady when they thought she couldn’t hear, and she took that as a compliment.
To Roberto, she said, “Yes, but this is the easy part. Scrambling software gets their attention, but they’ll fix that, and all it will cost will be some tired programmers and a few hours’ downtime. The next stage will be more difficult. If it gets to that.”
And of course, it would get to that soon enough — the nations of the world weren’t going to just roll over and give away anything, certainly not the kind of power CyberNation wanted for itself.
“You worry too much, Missy.” He grinned. “That part won’t be no harder than Jackson’s jôgo, only different.”
“Good to see you haven’t lost your confidence, Roberto.”
“Ah, me, I ain’t lost nothin’.”
She closed the door and locked it. “Talk is cheap.”
He hooked his thumbs into the waistline of his pants and skinned them down, peeled them off, one foot, then the other, and tossed them to one side.
She laughed, and reached for her shirt buttons. “We’ll have to hurry,” she said. “We have to leave for the ship in an hour.”
“Only an hour?”
“We have to pack.”
“Let me show you how to pack,” he said.
She laughed again. Life was good.
Somebody screamed bloody murder, jerking Toni from her half-doze into full alertness. She came off the couch and onto her feet and into a defensive stance, expecting to be attacked, before her brain got back on track.
It’s only the baby. Just Little Alex.
Toni relaxed. Aloud, she said, “Yeah, little Alex, the demon child from the lowest pit of Hell.” But she was already on her way into the bedroom, and at the baby’s crib before he could get through the second outraged scream.
“Hey, hey, hey, baby boy, what’s the matter? Mama’s here, it’s okay.”
He stood balanced precariously on his little fat feet, holding onto the rail.
She picked the baby up, put him over her left shoulder, and patted him gently on the back.
He gave out one more half-hearted yell, just to let her know he wasn’t happy it had taken her all of thirty seconds to get from the living room to pick him up, then trailed off into a quiet burble before shutting up completely.
“Oh, you’re happy now, are you? Brat. Monster.” She leaned him away and cradled him, smiling with a fierce possessive joy at him. She hadn’t slept for more than four hours at a stretch for what seemed like forever, but he was such an angel when he smiled his new-toothed grin at her, as he was doing now. He was a beautiful child. Yeah, yeah, she knew that every mother thought that about her babies, but objectively speaking, he really was. Objectively speaking. Anybody with eyes could see that.
She smiled at that thought and at Alex Junior — a name his father had fought against but lost. Yes, she had agreed, a junior had a lot to live up to, and no, it wasn’t necessarily the best thing to tag a baby with that. The choice they’d agreed upon was “Scott,” giving him his paternal grandfather’s middle name. But when the nurse had come in with the little flatscreen to log in the newborn baby’s stats, Alex hadn’t been there.
“What’s the baby’s name?” the nurse had asked, ready to log it into the system.
And Toni had smiled and given it to her. Alex hadn’t really been that upset. Secretly, she was sure he was actually very pleased.
Little Alex made sucking noises, but it was not time for his feeding yet. He had gotten off the breast and was taking milk and some solid food full-time now. And she no longer leaked milk when he cried, thank God. That had gotten a little embarrassing while sitting in a restaurant or even just out pushing the stroller.