Howard looked at Julio. “So, what do you think?”
Fernandez shook his head. “It’s just simple enough it might work. Gridley can get the computer stuff done?”
“He says so.”
“So if we get approval, we’d go when?”
“Tomorrow. After dark.”
Julio shook his head. “Technology. Amazing stuff.”
“Put together three squads, mixed male and female. I want thirty troopers, two pilots and copilots, the usual bells and whistles, given the limitations. Air transport, briefings, maps, assignments, I need everything ready to roll by 0600 tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir. I’m on the way. Guess we’ll see if the new top kick is as good as he thinks he is.”
“He can’t possibly think he’s as good as you thought you were when you were a sergeant.”
“Well, sir, that’s because he couldn’t possibly be that good.”
Howard smiled.
After Julio had left, he looked at the computer images floating in the air above his conference table. The best plans were the simple ones, he knew, but maybe this one was too simple.
Only one way to find out.
Santos didn’t like being hurried. Once he set his mind to a plan, he liked to have it flow naturally. Sometimes, you had to adjust to the unexpected, but this new bug up Missy’s butt was too much, too quick. He’d tried to tell her, but she wasn’t having any of it. Still pissed at him for the secretary.
Too bad, that. This speeded-up schedule was going to put a crimp in his seduction. The secretary was as good as on her back when Missy came in, all Ice Bitch, and started trying to pull his chain. She was gonna pay. It was just one more coin it was gonna cost her.
Meanwhile, he had to get his teams ready to move. Missy wanted it fast. Tomorrow, if possible, the day after at the latest. Too soon — but what could you do? He didn’t want to miss the action.
Toni wandered around, taking more pictures, but feeling a sense of impending something. As the day wound down, nothing new happened she needed to think about. No sign of Santos, so maybe his boss had put the fear of God into him.
She briefly considered trying to get onto the private decks. Even went so far as to seem to get lost and wind up at one of the entrances to one such deck. But the electronic card reader would need a key, and as she started back the way she’d come, the door opened and revealed a couple of men standing on the other side, wearing photographer’s sleeveless vests over their shirts, which in this kind of climate meant they were using the vests to cover pistols tucked into their belts — they certainly weren’t cold.
One more small piece of circumstantial evidence, the armed guards. Of course, maybe they were there to guard a vault room, where the gambling winnings were kept?
Not likely. Most of what Toni had seen was cashless, all done on credit exchanges. You didn’t need guards for that.
No, she would pack up and catch a late-afternoon helicopter out, head home. Earlier, she had heard somebody say it was supposed to rain tonight or tomorrow, a little tropical depression, not a hurricane or anything, but some wind and weather. She would just as soon be gone if that was going to happen — she didn’t like to fly in the rain. She’d known some people who had been on a jet that tried to take off in a typhoon once. The jet had crashed and burned, and the folks she knew had been lucky to survive. Bad weather and flying didn’t go together in Toni’s book.
Jay looked around, and felt a little uncomfortable. The club was noisy, the music playing very loud, lights flashing, and people dancing. Most of the people dancing were men, there were only a handful of women, and some of them looked pretty mannish, too.
He turned back to his virtual beer. According to what he had learned, Le Boy was the biggest gay night club in the city. You kinda had to expect to see a lot of men, now, didn’t you?
A tall, well-built bodybuilder in a pair of skin-tight leather pants and a tank top arrived at the bar to Jay’s left and flashed him a big, toothy smile. “Com lisença,” he said, “voce é ativo? O passivo?”
Jay tapped the tiny translator hidden in his right ear, and the Portuguese the man had spoken was translated into English: “Excuse me, are you a top or a bottom?”
Even in VR, Jay flushed. “I’m waiting for a friend,” he subvocalized. The translator turned the reply into Portuguese.
The buffed bodybuilder — they called them “barbies” here, Jay recalled from his research — kept smiling. “I could be your friend,” the translator said in Jay’s ear.
“Maybe,” Jay said. “Do you know a man named Roberto Santos?”
His would-be friend’s face went dark. “Bicha!” he said.
Jay didn’t need the translator for that one.
“He is a friend of yours?” the barbie said, his voice dangerous.
“No. An enemy.”
The man nodded. “He is a bastard among bastards, a son of a whore, a fucker of his sister and grandmother!” He reached into his mouth and tugged. A partial dental plate came out — his top four front teeth were false. The barbie waved the plate at Jay. “He did this to me!” He put the plate back in.
Jay made sympathetic noises. “Tell me about him.”
The barbie needed no more prompting. “He cruises the gay scene, though he is not gay. He sometimes goes into the — the dark rooms, and lets some poor boy give him oral sex. Then he beats him. He has hurt other of my friends. He always picks big men, strong men. He is a fighter, his fists are like iron. He enjoys hitting. He laughs while he does it.”
“Why haven’t the police arrested him? Has no one complained?”
The barbie nodded. “Oh, yes, many have complained. The police only laugh and shake their heads when they hear his name. He is protected. So protected that once he beat a man so bad the man died, and still the police did nothing. Santos is a devil.”
Interesting. Jay had what he came here for. Time to move on.
Professor Wang, a forty-five-ish woman with a pageboy haircut and a gray business suit so severe it made her look like a business nun, said, “Oh, yes, I remember her.”
They were in a business library, the air conditioning blasting away. Jay nodded. “Anything you’d feel comfortable in saying about her?”
Wang smiled. “The words comfortable and Jasmine Chance don’t belong in the same sentence. There’s a story the students and staff used to pass around. Once, Jasmine was visiting the zoo, and there was a terrible earthquake. Some of the animals got loose. A pair of man-eating tigers escaped from their cage. Free and hungry, the tigers charged a group of school children. At the last second, Jasmine Chance stepped in between the hungry tigers and their prey. The tigers took one look at her, turned tail, and ran back to their cages in terror.”
Jay chuckled politely.
“That’s not the good part,” Wang said. “The good part is, she charged the parents HK$400 each for saving their children.”
“That sounds… harsh.”
“Harsh? Let me tell you something I know is true. Jasmine wanted to be first in her class. But she was not doing well in one subject — and for her, not doing well was being second in her grades, only a high A instead of the highest one. So she seduced the teacher, a middle-aged man with a wife, four children, and three grandchildren. She got her first place. When the professor said he would leave his wife for her, she laughed at him. In great shame over what he had done and her refusal to accept him, he committed suicide. When somebody told Jasmine what had happened, she shrugged. ‘Too bad,’ she said. That woman is as moral as a shark. You don’t ever want to get between her and what she wants.”