"I thought you must be insane. I bought it, when you told me that you enjoyed hurting people."
"I don't enjoy making anything suffer, but I will if I must. That doesn't mean I'm sane, just effective."
"You make weird jokes," she told him. "What kind of a cop are you?"
"The deadly type."
She searched his face to see signs of laughter. She did not find any.
"What kind of a cop are you?" he asked.
"State. We've spent months and I'm the first one to get inside a Harassment Initiation Team, but I can't say I'm a trusted team member."
"Even less so, after we return without our tails."
"What happened to them?" she asked.
"I imagine they were taken care of before they could take care of us."
She shuddered. "Why take care of us? We're following orders."
"Some undercover cop. You do nothing but follow orders, huh?"
"Well, as far as HIT is concerned."
"Don't underestimate them. Those were professional terrorists following us around. Jishin wouldn't waste their energy just to give us backup.''
Deborah shuddered. "You make it sound like we should be under this earth and not on it."
"Let's just say we're into it, but still kicking."
She put her forearms on his shoulders. Her hands nervously twisted the hair on the back of his head. She locked eyes with Lyons.
"Don't get me wrong. I volunteered for this. I wouldn't back out if I were offered the chance, but God! I wantto continue kicking!"
"Of course."
He wrapped an arm around her and pulled her into his lap. Her arms went around him.
"Only those who believe that life is precious risk their own lives to defend it. So, of course you don't want to die. People with death wishes find easier ways to fulfill them."
She rested her head on his shoulder.
"We'd better get back to the war," Lyons said after a long silence.
She slid off his lap onto her back. Her arms stayed around him and pulled him down on top of her.
"Let's remind ourselves we're alive," she whispered.
Lyons laughed. He knewhe was alive.
When they finished making love, when their energy abated, they lay sweating, and panting, tangled in the midst of a huge circle of ruined shrubbery and flowers.
Later they found an employee lavatory with running water. After ten minutes of washing and brushing, they were as presentable as they were going to get. Deborah used the opportunity to telephone in a report.
As the two wandered out of the lobby, Lyons looked back at the desolated jungle.
"People should really be more careful about locking doors," he muttered.
11
July 12, 1905 hours, Smyrna, Georgia
Hal Brognola leaned back in the comfortable leather chair behind the desk in the president's office at Elwood Electronic Industries. He sipped black coffee from a mug and looked across the rim at Lao Ti. She was sitting in a chair in front of the desk, her legs tucked under her. There was a pot of tea on a side table close by and she held a handleless, Japanese teacup.
"What are Gadgets and Pol up to?" he asked.
"They're double checking my security arrangements. I don't think they quite trust me, yet."
"They never fully trust anyone. It goes with the territory. They even check out each other whenever there's time. That's the way they stay alive."
Ti nodded. "Of course. Bushido, the way of the warrior, dictates vigilance all of the time, but I always thought that was theory. I've never seen it in practice before."
"It's rare, because the price is high," Hal reflected. "You see it only where lives are always on the line. I imagine Miyamoto Musashi understood it very well."
Ti grinned at Hal's reference to the "Sword Saint" of Japan.
Brognola took another sip of coffee and then got down to business. "How ready are we for another terrorist attack?"
"An attack will be difficult for us to handle. We hold 'fire drills' to evacuate people quickly from the building, but I think everyone's figured out that they're attack drills. When someone asks what to do if the terrorists show up, I tell them everything is being taken care of. But truthfully, if we don't have at least a few minutes' warning, we're bound to have casualties. We're gambling with these people's lives."
"We've substituted Justice Department employees wherever we can," Brognola said, "but we've had to hire some outsiders with creative potential to keep this company going. Here at Elwood we have a chance of stopping the terrorists. We have no chance of stopping them if they strike a new target."
"But... " Ti began.
She was interrupted by the beeping of a pager that she wore on the belt of her jeans.
"The computer has monitored some activity on the central WAR computer," she said. "Shall we check it out now?"
"Might as well."
When Lao Ti did not have a portable computer, she breadboarded her own. Miscellaneous boards of chips and a riot of wires filled an entire workbench. The only items Brognola recognized were a monitor, a keyboard and a bank of floppy-disk drives.
"Wouldn't this be better pulled together in a cabinet?" he asked.
Ti shook her head. "Not at the rate I've got the clock set. Too much heat. If I really get going, I turn some fans on the bench to move the air faster."
She sat down at the keyboard. Her fingers would blur for a few seconds and then pause while the screen filled with a mishmash of symbols. She would take these in at a glance and then her fingers would start their frantic dance once again.
The messages on the screen were as impossible to follow as the arcane symbols that Ti was entering. Often there was nothing but long strips of ones and zeros.
"Do either of you speak English?" Brognola cracked.
Ti finished her high-speed rattling of the keyboard and then turned to Brognola with a smile.
"As a matter of fact, we both do, but not to each other. Machine language is more efficient."
"I don't recognize any of the standard programming languages on that screen."
Ti shook her head. "Not programming language. Too slow. Machine language, the language the computer regulates itself with. Machine language is both stronger and faster."
"I'll buy that it's faster. What's happening?"
"Just let me finish and the three of us will start speaking English."
She scanned the screen and her fingers danced again. In another minute she had exchanged two more screens full of information with the computer. She then paused and thought for a moment, before starting back on the keyboard.
"I've separated out the everyday transactions from the ones we're interested in," she said. "Can Aaron join us? I think we'll need his help."
Brognola went to the lab next door. There, Aaron "The Bear" Kurtzman was at a more conventional computer terminal, directing the daily running of Elwood Electronic Industries. Brognola had insisted that Kurtzman join him in Atlanta. He knew the Bear was going stir-crazy in his new job at Stony Man Farm.
"You know, Hal, running a company can be fun," the big man said. "I think I'll take over some company when I retire."
"That'll take a fair-sized investment."
Kurtzman looked at Brognola and shook his head.
"Oh, no. I'll just use a computer like this and take over a company. They'll never quite figure out how it all happened."
"Before you get your hand too deep in the till, Ti says we need your help next door."
When they returned to Ti's lab, she had a bunch of pseudo words on the screen. She continued to study them while Kurtzman maneuvered his chair to where he could also see the screen.
"You recognize anything?" she asked, without looking up.
"Where'd you get that stuff?" Kurtzman demanded. His usually soft voice was gruff.