Roberto said, “An old man and a dog?”
“Not everybody goes for the sex ads,” she said. “Dogs are always good. You know the old story about the book title?”
’Berto shook his head.
“Well, the theory is, people like dogs. They also like Abraham Lincoln and they like their doctors, for the most part. So a book title that would guarantee instant sales would be Abraham Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.”
’Berto smiled.
“It’s all about demographics. We catch a lot of the young male computer geeks with the sex come-ons. But we also have specific ads tailored for generation Xers, aging baby boomers turning into AARPers, young mothers, as many large groups as we can identify and niche-market to. Net, TV, radio, print ads, movie trailers, billboards, bus benches, sports sponsorships — everything from T-shirts to signs on racing cars — high school cable ed, you name it. Since the Blue Whale scramble, we’ve picked up eighty-eight thousand new subscribers on the U.S. West Coast alone.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Not as good as we’d hoped. The Net Force ops got in and patched things up faster than we expected. We should have gotten twice that many new linkers.”
He shrugged again. “So?”
“Truth is, things aren’t moving along as quickly as we want. We are falling short of our projections. It looks as if we are going to have to… step things up.”
“More ads? More software scrambles?”
She looked at him. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “Don’t pull my chain, Roberto.”
He chuckled. “You have a new piercing you haven’t told me about, Missy?”
“Screw you.”
“I’m ready when you are.”
She smiled. Well. He had his charms, even when he played at being duller than he was…
Dressed in Net Force sweats and cross-trainers, John Howard stood under one of the chinning bars at the obstacle course, rotating his head slowly to stretch the muscles of his neck. Physical training was another thing he’d slacked off on during his short-lived retirement. Not that he’d stopped completely — he’d kept up morning calisthenics, and he still hit the weights down in the basement a couple times a week, plus he jogged most days for a few miles; still, he hadn’t run the course in almost a month, and normally he’d do it at least twice a week.
Probably he’d lost a couple of steps, but not that much.
He jumped up, caught the steel bar, palms forward and slightly wider than his shoulders, and started doing chins. He knew after the first couple that his usual twelve or fifteen routine was out of the question. By the fifth one, he was straining, and it was all he could do to gut out ten.
He was glad Julio Fernandez was not here to see this. If he had been, Howard would have had to find three or four more reps somewhere, and like as not, he’d have pulled a muscle doing ’em.
He let himself hang for a few seconds after the tenth rep, to stretch out his lats, then dropped to the ground, disgusted with himself. Who was it — Gertrude Stein? — who’d said that after you hit forty it’s all patch, patch, patch?
Didn’t matter who said it, it was sure true. On the one hand, he still felt like a kid of nineteen. Yeah, his hairline showed a little more face than it used to and there were little tufts of gray at the temples. But there weren’t too many wrinkles, and his general shape and weight wasn’t that different from twenty, twenty-five years ago. If anything, he’d put on some muscle since his first hitch in the regular army. But the days of partying all night and then working a full day were gone. The occasional strain or bruise took longer to heal, and if he didn’t stretch and warm up before he started working out hard, he got a lot more strains and bruises than he had as a kid. He thought he’d come to terms with getting older and slowing down, but he realized that didn’t mean he could slack off. He wasn’t going to get any younger or stronger, but if he didn’t stay on top of things, he was going to get older and weaker a lot sooner. A layoff like this just pointed out what he knew was so — you might not be able to win in the end, but you were going to get there quicker if you didn’t resist it every step of the way.
He took several deep breaths and looked at the obstacle course. He had his stopwatch, an old mechanical sweep-hand job he’d picked up from a Russian surplus place. Like that shotgun he’d given the commander, the Russians still did a lot of stuff the old-fashioned way. Not necessarily because of any desire for quality, but because they didn’t have the technology to do it on the cheap. You could get a windup pocket- or stopwatch with an eighteen-jeweled movement for less than fifty bucks; a shotgun that was sturdy and well-made for maybe three, four hundred. Try that in the U.S. If you could even find such things, they’d cost an awful lot more.
He decided to skip the stopwatch and just run the course. He didn’t really want to know how much he’d slowed down. He’d be happy just to get through without breaking something.
He set himself, and got ready to go. He was a religious man, he believed in God, and he’d been right with Jesus for a long time. He believed he would be admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven if he led a righteous life and he worked at it. But like the old joke his father used to tell, he wasn’t ready to go now. He had a teenaged son and a loving wife, and he wanted to stick around long enough to smile at his grandchildren. Retiring had been part of that, but he realized as he gathered himself to hit the course that sitting back in a rocker on the porch and watching the world go by might not be the solution. You could get hit by a runaway bus sitting on the porch — that had happened to some guy in D.C. only a couple months back — instead of being shot by some psycho while you were leading a Net Force military team. God had His plan, and Howard’s number was gonna be up on a certain day, on a certain hour, no matter where he was or what he was doing. He’d thought that he’d been tempting fate, but after that bus had left the road and squashed a guy younger than he was who’d been sitting in a porch swing, he’d realized that death could come from anywhere at any time.
Run, John, and worry about the meaning of life later — it won’t get you through the obstacle course, all this thinking.
He grinned. That was true. There was a time to think and a time to move. Right now, moving was the order of the moment.
He took a final deep breath and began his sprint.
Michaels looked up from his desk to see Toni, dressed in business clothes, standing in front of him.
“Hey, babe.”
“Commander,” she said with a short nod.
“Uh…”
She smiled. “If I’m going to be working here, even temporarily, we need to keep it businesslike.”
“What, I can’t grope you in the hall?”
“Not unless you want a sexual harassment suit.”
They both smiled.
“Okay,” he said.
“So, what’s the situation?”
“Better than we’d hoped. Jay and the gang managed to find the problem with the server pretty quick. They had help from InfraGuard and the NIPC out of the CWG.”
“And how are the National InfraGuard Protection Center and Crime Working Group?”
“Same as always. If they could make a wish, you and I and all of Net Force would disappear in a reeking puff of sulfur and red smoke.”
Toni chuckled.
“Anyway, give them credit, they pitched in and helped Jay.”
“How’d the terrorists get in?”
“Passwords. They had them up to the highest level.”
“Social engineering,” she said. “They bribed somebody.”
He shook his head. “Maybe not. The VP in charge of Blue Whale’s security was killed a few days ago, along with a couple of ex-FBI bodyguards. At the time, it looked like a simple traffic accident — car ran off a cliff, no signs of anything hinky. That seems awfully coincidental.”