“I’m so sorry,” Chance said, the words absolutely devoid of any sympathy at all.
“No need to leave,” Santos said. “I’m sure this won’t take long.” He wasn’t looking at Toni, either, but at Chance.
If looks could kill, anybody walking between these two would have been turned into crispy critters as if bathed by flamethrowers.
Toni stood. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Chance. Thank you for the drink, Roberto. Maybe I’ll see you again.”
She hurried away, just in time. She had to call Alex, and the window for the call was pretty narrow.
Back in her cabin, she went into the small bathroom and started the shower. That her room might be bugged was unlikely, but it paid to be careful. Once the water was running and making noise, she used her disguised scrambler phone to call Alex, vox only, no visual. There was a long-distance microwave repeater on the ship — they couldn’t expect people to be without their phones even out here — but Toni’s call went through a military comsat she knew would be footprinting the area for the next ten minutes.
“Hey, babe.”
“Hey,” she said.
“How’s it going?”
“Fine. I haven’t seen Jay’s guy.”
“That’s okay, we think he’s in Germany. Anything else?”
“I’ve managed to meet a couple of people who look interesting. You might have Jay run their names and see what he can come up with.”
“Shoot.”
She gave him Santos and Chance, described them. “Santos says he’s with ship security, and that Chance is his boss. They have some kind of thing going between them, if that’s any help.”
“I’ll pass it on to Jay. How are you doing?”
“I’m okay. I miss you and Little Alex.”
“We miss you, too. He’s fine, Guru is fine, I’m fine. Nothing to worry about here. Listen, I need you to plug whatever you’ve got, pix, thoughts, diagrams, into a file and upload it to one of the secure mailboxes. Mark it for John’s attention.”
“I won’t be able to do it until the next comsat pass,” she said. “Unless you want to risk using the ship’s transmitter.”
“No, it’ll wait a couple hours.”
“What’s up?”
He explained Jay’s theory about CyberNation’s train and barge. He finished by saying, “I spoke to the director. Ordinarily, the government would be hesitant to move with so little hard evidence, but the powers-that-be uplevels are really nervous about this whole situation. There are going to be some strings pulled, some favors called in. The German train and the Japanese barge are going to get unexpected visitors. If what Jay thinks is right, that’ll take two of the three computer loci out of action.”
“Leaving the ship,” she said.
“General Howard is working on that,” he said.
“You’re serious?”
“As a triple bypass. If this nest of electronic snakes is about to strike, we need to stop them before they do. Both Jay and John think they might escalate things from pure software attacks to physical attacks on servers and phone companies. That would really screw things up royally.”
“Yes. So, I’m the fifth column agent?”
“No. You leave as scheduled. Finish up, catch the flight back to the Mainland, come home tomorrow.”
“Alex—”
“Not open for discussion,” he said. “If Net Force’s military arm has to flex its muscle, that’s who does the job, not the Assistant Deputy Commander.”
She knew he was right. She was a mother, she had a toddler at home. She didn’t have any business being on a military raid. Still, she felt the excitement at the idea.
“All right,” she said.
The signal started to cut in and out, so they finished their conversation and discommed. Toni shut off the shower and went to collect her flatscreen. She would make notes, draw maps, and add in the pictures she had taken, and fold them into a compressed and encoded packet to send to John Howard via the scrambled cell phone the next time the comsat overflew her. One more day on the ship, and she would head home. It felt good to have gotten back into the field. And while she would have liked to stay on board if Net Force mounted an assault, she had other responsibilities now. It was the right thing to do. Although she hated thinking like a grownup. It made her feel… old…
33
Keller’s jet was more than halfway to Miami when he got the frantic call from the train’s SysOp.
German authorities had stopped them for a “health inspection,” looking for, they said, a carrier of Lassa Valley Fever. Trash protocols had been instigated as soon as the police had arrived, the SysOp said. The onboard computers would be blank before anybody could download anything, all files burned and unrecoverable. There wouldn’t be any sign of anything particularly illegal. Certainly it would seem suspicious, to have that kind of state-of-the-art computer setup on a train, and more suspicious that the machines were all empty, but there would be nothing the German authorities could charge anybody with that would stick. They could haul everybody in, but no evidence, no case, and all the players knew all they had to do was sit tight and CyberNation’s lawyers would eventually spring them. Keller and his crew were safe, and they were what made the programs work.
It was scary, but not altogether unexpected when the scrambled call came in from the Japanese SysOp a few minutes later. The barge’s computers were history, too.
That left the ship, and if Gridley and his guys knew about the train and the barge, they had to know about the Bon Chance.
Fortunately, the ship was in international waters. If the U.S. could get a Coast Guard cutter or Navy ship to go there — not politically likely, according to Jasmine — the gambling boat’s crew would see it coming fifteen miles away. Plenty of time to wipe those computers, too, though that would be a last resort. With Germany and Japan gone, all their work was on the ship. They would have to be damned certain it was endangered before they trashed it. Thousands and thousands of man-hours erased would hurt way too much.
He had better call Jasmine and let her know where he was and what was going on. Better she hear it from him first.
In her office alone, Chance was absolutely pissed off. First there had been Roberto’s little routine with that slut of a secretary — she could have strangled him when he looked at her all innocently and said they were just having a friendly drink. Now there were the goddamned hits on the train and barge, with a terrified Keller on his way back here practically peeing in his pants. She wasn’t worried that the U.S. Navy was going to come calling as much as she was frustrated over the losses. How had they figured it out? Keller had told her it was impossible.
She was going to have to speak harshly with him about this.
And the schedule was going to have to be moved up, just in case. They only had one arrow left in their quiver now, and it had to be strung and loosed before their target had a chance to move out of the line of fire. She paged Roberto, a priority-one call. If he was interrupted trying to get into the secretary’s pants, too bad. She sent half a dozen other pages, also P-1 calls. She didn’t like the way this felt. Not at all. She did not want it to come unraveled now, not when they were so close to winning. Better to move and win a partial victory than to stand still and lose it all. The clock was ticking, and if time ran out before they launched, it would be all over.