"Mr. President. I am honored."
Domingos waved that away. "No, no, none of that, we are friends! Please, come into my humble home. And I would like you to meet Miss Monique Louis, who has just recently returned from Paris. I am sure you two will get along famously!"
Hughes eyed the blonde, who smiled lazily at him, a hint of come-hither in her expression. "Bonjour," she said. "So nice to make your acquaintance."
Ah…
Unless he was terribly mistaken, the good President had apparently provided him with a… companion. Well. She was attractive enough. And Domingos certainly had enough practice in such matters to have selected an expert trull. Why not? Negotiations could sometimes be arduous, and Hughes might as well relax after they were done — but only afterward.
The tall doors were carved in bas-relief, images of native people, proud faces and young bodies, most of them nude, a kind of gallery of tribal Africa. Platt must have loved that when he'd seen it. Hughes could almost see the cracker shaking his head in disgust. Except for the naked black women, of course.
The doors swung silently open, each operated by a black man dressed entirely in white — shoes, pants, shirt, coat. Monique moved over, took Hughes's arm in hers, and smiled at him, and they followed the President into the palace. The bodyguards swung into position behind them.
This, Hughes decided, should be interesting.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
At Mac's, one of the last old-style hard-core gyms in Manhattan, Platt grunted through a set of heavy squats. Wasn't no ferns or New Age music playing here, no chrome and red leatherette magnomachines or yuppie VR slantwalkers, just racks and racks of iron — dumbbells, barbells — and benches and racks and a concrete floor with a few rubber pads on it. Mirrors on the walls and good lighting, the place had those, but that was it. You didn't come here to get a nice glow, you came here to sweat — and to know pain.
He was in the safety rack, so the weight wasn't gonna fall and crush his ass, but that didn't help his thighs. They burned as though he was standing hip-deep in molten lava. Four hundred pounds on the bar across his shoulders, and after the first set, each rep was a war. He hated squats, hated ‘em, and after a couple of heavy sets, he could barely move. He'd puked more than a few times after squats, in such pain he couldn't even stand up without help, but that was how it went. You wanted to be strong, you had to move big weight, that was the name of that tune. Those little pansies who did leg extensions with fifty pounds and thought they were working out made Platt want to laugh. You didn't see those guys here. Mac would laugh their asses right out of the building.
Excuse me, sir, but where are the cardiowalkers?
Why, just go out the front door and a couple of miles that way, hoss. Look for a spa full of sissies, you'll fit right in.
Down Platt went, legs cooking in their own juices. Below horizontal, butt almost on his heels.
Up he came, vibrating, shaking, quivering, fire flowing through his veins and arteries, burning his muscles, hot right to the bone.
Man!
Three more, and he was able — barely, finally! — to rack the weight. He grabbed a towel, wiped the sweat off his face and neck, and moved to the water fountain. Around him, the clang of steel echoed as men grunted and strained against the big plates. There were a couple of women here, bodybuilders on the juice, so they looked like men. That kind of woman didn't appeal to him at all. He liked to see a woman in shape, but not a male shape caused by mojo steroids that did everything but grow a dick on her.
Well. Enough of this. Time to shower and head for the place in Queens where he had his throwaway computer set up. The feds were about to get another surprise, courtesy of the Fried Sex gang. A big surprise this time.
Platt laughed aloud. He didn't see how life could get much better than this.
Jay Gridley leaned into the fierce wind coming off the East Siberian Sea, a wind so strong and cold that it would blast an unprotected man to death in a matter of seconds. Enough wind so that the rocks along the shore were bare of snow, despite more than ten feet of it having fallen in the last two months. The snow had been blown away like so much dry talcum powder. The locals here liked to joke about how cold it got. There were people in Alaska or Canada who bragged about throwing a pot of boiling water into the air and watching it freeze on the way down. In Siberia, they liked to say, the water would freeze while still in the pot. Sometimes while the pot was still on the fire, da!
It was an unlikely place to be hunting for clues to a Danish terrorist organization, maybe more so than any other, but there was a blowhole in the ice up ahead where seals came up to breathe, and one of those "seals" was the packet of information he wanted to find. Jay was armored against the cold — electrically heated underwear, including socks, hat, and gloves — with four layers of material over that — polyprop, silk, wool, and fur — a face mask, and heavy boots. Even so, he felt the cold prying at the mask he wore, digging at the smallest seams in his clothing. This was as close a VR scenario as he could build to what the locals actually faced, and he wondered how they could stand it. The houses here were all heavily insulated, with triple doors and windows, dead spaces in the insulated walls, and even so, you could store your food in an unheated back room and it would keep all winter long.
Brrr.
A Klaxon began screaming at him, loud and insistent. What the hell was that? Where was the sound coming from? He turned, put his back to the wind, and saw a tower in the distance.
Jay did the mental shift and realized that the Klaxon was his real-time override, back at his workstation. Oops. Something bad — the override's threshold was dialed up high enough so only something really nasty would set it off. A fire in the building, a major system failure, the pizza delivery truck had a flat…
Better check this out quick. Jay logged himself out of VR.
Toni was in the middle of a stack of electronic correspondence when her workstation crashed. One second she was dealing with a memo from Supply telling her that Net Force had exceeded its normal monthly quota of phone and virgil batteries, the next second the screen went blank.
Crap. Just what she needed, a computer failure—
The screen relit then, only out for a second or two, but the memo from Supply was gone, and in its place was a picture of a man's hand. All of the fingers were curled down and held in place by the thumb — except for the middle finger, which stood straight up. The image rotated slowly on its axis, and there was no mistaking the ancient obscene gesture.
She heard her secretary laugh. "What?" Toni yelled.
"My computer is giving me the finger," her secretary yelled back.
Toni had a sudden sinking feeling that this image was not confined to just two stations.
It didn't take long for her to learn she was right.
Good Lord. Somebody had hacked into the Net Force computer system and given the organization the bird.
This was bad.
Toni met Jay Gridley as they both headed for the conference room. Joanna Winthrop beat them there by half a second. Alex was already there. He didn't even wait for them to sit down before he started in.