Alex had a fair-sized tool chest in the back of the van, along with a car battery, several cans of oil, and more cans of brake and transmission fluid.
"You talk to Jay this morning?" she said.
"I checked his vox around six, heard his update."
Toni had also checked the coded message, but to keep the conversation going she pretended she hadn't. "Anything new?"
"No. Nothing good or bad. We haven't run the terrorists down, though we've got all kinds of little clues. No new rascals on any systems — at least none we've found. I'm waiting for it, though. These guys are going to drop a big brick on us, I can feel it coming."
He looked at her. "I also feel a little guilty about taking the day off."
"Nothing you could do at the office."
"I know, but even so—"
A big double-cab pickup truck whipped by in the speed lane. It had to be going eighty-five or ninety. The wind of the truck's passage rocked the minivan.
"Where are the cops when you need one?" Toni said.
That got a little smile from him.
She said, "I've buried the system break-in as best I can, but we probably need to talk about what happens if it becomes known outside the house. Just in case."
He glanced at her, then back at the freeway. "Oh, I'd bet my next paycheck against a stale doughnut that Senator White'll know about it by Monday — if he doesn't know already."
"You thought about what you'll say if he calls you on it?"
"Sure. The truth. It's easier to remember." He smiled again. "I'll throw all of Jay's rationalizations at him, but that won't matter. He would like to get rid of us and pretend we never existed. Any excuse will do."
"We could sacrifice a goat," she said, half-joking. "Somebody high enough up to take the fall."
Now he looked harder at her. "You have somebody in mind?"
All right, if they were going to go down that road. She took a deep breath and started to speak. "Well, yeah, I was thinking maybe I—"
"No," he cut in. "Don't touch that control. I don't want to hear it. Nobody is falling on her sword here, certainly not you!"
The vehemence of his response surprised her. She was at a loss.
"There are always going to be idiots like White," he said. "We'll always have one wolf or another chasing our sled and howling for blood. We'll deal with them, but we won't throw any of our people off, understood?"
"Okay."
He smiled a little, to take the sting out of it. "Besides, if something happened to you, I wouldn't be able to find the door to get into HQ."
Okay, that was a compliment. You can follow that one up. Go—
She heard a siren, looked into the outside rearview mirror, and saw a police car coming up fast. The siren dopplered louder as the car drew closer. The driver sure had his foot in the fuel injector; he was flying.
Alex drifted from the slow lane over onto the wide shoulder and slowed.
The flashing light strobed Alex's face as a Virginia state trooper's unit blew past them.
"He's going after that truck," Alex said. "How about that. There is some justice in the world."
She nodded. She was in a car with Alex going somewhere other than Net Force business. Maybe there was justice.
Or maybe Guru's kris had some magic left in its black and convoluted steel. She grinned.
"Something funny?"
"No, just a pleasant thought," she said.
Joanna wasn't scheduled to work this morning, but she was on her way into HQ anyway. She still hadn't run down the SOB who had used her station to post that fruitcake militia thing, though she had figured out it was done by remote and not in person — big surprise there. This latest incursion with the finger image pissed her off even more, even though it hadn't come through her in particular. It was a slap in the face, a direct challenge to Net Force that she took personally. She was going into the net for some serious webwalking to find these creeps.
Or, at least that was her intention. As she was heading in, she saw Julio Fernandez in his sweats, limping back from the direction of the obstacle course.
Well. She hadn't been able to connect with him for the last couple of days, they'd played message tag, and now there he was, in the flesh. It wouldn't hurt to say hello. Maybe she could kill two birds with one stone.
He saw her, smiled, and nodded. "Lieutenant."
"Sergeant. You on duty?"
"No, ma'am. I just finished hobbling through my morning constitutional and was gonna hit the showers before I headed home."
"I'm going to be doing some work on the web," she said. She waved at the HQ building. "You want to come along, sit in? I can show you some of the more interesting aspects of VR."
"I'd like that. I still ought to hit the showers first. I'm a little ripe."
She sniffed. "You don't stink too bad. I think I can stand being in the same room with you. Come on."
"Yes, ma'am."
They both grinned.
Truth was, she didn't mind a man who smelled like a man instead of a fruity aftershave or deodorant. Nothing wrong with a little clean sweat. It was probably all the pheromones that appealed to her…
The thing was, Tyrone realized, you could only lie in bed staring at the ceiling for so long before it got boring. Real boring.
He had gone over what he'd said, what she'd said, every detail of what had happened between him and Bella a thousand times. Nothing was going to change. It was like a big rock — no matter how many times you poked at it with your finger, it was still going to stay a rock.
He sighed, rolled out of bed, and headed for the bathroom. He did the control finger-jive in front of the vidwall's sensor, and the default channel, the newscom, flicked on. Dad had programmed the house com unit to default to the news channel, the idea being that it wouldn't hurt any of them to watch the news now and then. Tyrone had been meaning to reprogram the thing — lock-chips were a joke if you knew anything — but he hadn't gotten around to changing it yet.
The multimedia local news blared and flared. They were doing the traffic. First, real-time traffic, streets and highways, then virtual traffic, which parts of the net were clear, which parts were clogged, which subservers were down or wounded.
He made it into the bathroom, listening to the news with half his attention while he peed.
Dad was gone, off on his survival thing. Mom had a breakfast with her women friends — the Goddesses, they called each other — and wouldn't be back before eleven, at least. So he had the house to himself. Lying in bed wasn't going to solve anything, so he might as well do something.
The temptation was to log into the net and catch up on his computer work. He'd been slack to the point of droop on that during the last few months, all wrapped up in Bella, Bella, Bella. Now that he thought about it, that was pretty much all he'd done. When he wasn't with her, he had been dreaming about her, thinking about her, or talking about her.
In a flash of clarity, Tyrone realized how boring he must have been to be around lately. It was Bella this or Bella that, or Bella the other, and his friends — such as they were — must have elected him King of the Dull and Stupids on the first ballot. Particularly he owed Jimmy-Joe a big sorry-sorry. He remembered saying to him, "It's just a game," about the computer stuff, and the look of horror on his friend's face when he'd said that.