"For a lover, no. I'd be unhappy if you didn't want that. But for a colleague in the intelligence community, yes, it's wrong. You know I can take care of myself."
"Yes," he said. He knew, he'd seen that demonstrated a few times. She was better able to take care of herself when things got physical than he was, but even so, she wasn't Superwoman.
"I want you to treat me like one of the boys."
He smiled. "That would be a trick. I can't think of you that way, and if I did, well, I wouldn't be interested. I like girls. You in particular."
She gave him a tiny grin in return, a quick flash, so she wasn't totally pissed off at him. "I meant at the office. I very much like being treated as a woman when we're on our own time."
"I understand."
"Do you? You really need to, you know. I want you to hold my hand when we walk in the moonlight — but not when we're at work. You need to separate your personal life from your work life, Alex."
"Okay. I will. Next time you're up, you go, no matter where it is."
She flashed a bigger smile. "Good. Now, you suppose we might find some chocolate somewhere?"
They both laughed, and he felt a great sense of relief. Neither of them had been to England before, and one of the things they noticed early on was that there were chocolate candy machines everywhere: in stores, train stations, even pubs. It had become a running joke between them, finding chocolate. They both expected to gain thirty pounds and have their faces break out before they returned to the States.
His virgil played the first few bars of Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man." He had an incoming telecom. He pulled the device from his belt and saw that the caller was from the office of the FBI's director.
"That's cute," Toni said, meaning the music. She waved her finger as if directing an orchestra.
"Jay must have sneaked into my office and reprogrammed the ringer again. Better than last time, when it was George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone."
"Ta dah dah dah dah dump!" Toni sang.
"Everybody I work with has a warped sense of humor," he said. "This is Alex Michaels."
"Please hold for the director," a secretary said.
Toni looked at him, and he held his hand over the virgil's microphone. "Boss."
"I sure wish Walt Carver hadn't had that heart attack," Toni said.
"I think he's glad he did. It gave him an excuse to retire and go fishing. It's only been a month; we should give her a chance—"
"Commander, this is Melissa Allison. I'm sorry to interrupt your vacation, but we have a situation of which you need to be aware."
Her face appeared on the virgil's liquid crystal display screen, so he tapped his send-visual mode and held the unit so he could see the virgil's cam thumbnail of his own face in the screen's corner.
Allison, forty-six, was a thin redhead with a cool-bordering-on-cold voice and demeanor. She was a political appointee, a lawyer with no experience in the field but an encyclopedic knowledge of where dozens of political bodies were buried. The rumor was that certain high-ranking members of congress had prevailed on the President to offer her the FBI directorship vacated by Walt Carver's mild cardiac event so she'd keep quiet about things better left that way. Outside of a couple of meetings and a few memos, Michaels hadn't had to deal with her yet.
"Go ahead."
"Some hours ago, an unidentified military force attacked a Pakistani train near the Indian border, killed a dozen guards, and then blew the train to pieces. The cargo was a top-secret shipment of electronic components on their way to be used in the Pakistani nuclear bomb program."
"I thought there was a nonproliferation treaty between Pakistan and India."
"There is, but neither country pays any attention to it. The government of Pakistan is convinced the attacking terrorist force was a special unit of the Indian Army."
"Do they have proof of this?"
"Not enough to start a war. Not yet — but they are looking hard."
Michaels looked at the tiny image of the director's face. "With all due respect, ma'am, what's this got to do with us? Shouldn't the spooks be on the hot seat?"
"They are, but if they and the Pakistanis can be believed, there was no way anyone could know about the train and what it carried. The terrorists had plenty of time to get into position for the ambush, and the Pakistanis say this wasn't possible."
"Obviously it was," Michaels said.
"The liaison with the CIA tells him there were only four people who knew about the shipment and the route. The crates were unmarked, and the workmen and train personnel who loaded and were delivering the materials didn't know what they were carrying."
"Coincidence, maybe? They attacked a train at random?"
"Nineteen trains passed that point in the twenty-four hours prior to the one that was destroyed. Only one carried anything of strategic importance."
"Then somebody told."
"The Pakistanis say not. Nobody had a chance to tell. Once the operation began, three of the four who knew were together, and the other one — who happens to be the head of their secret police — didn't get around to decoding the computer message telling him about the shipment until an hour before the attack. Some kind of computer failure on his end had his system down. Even if he had wanted to tell, there wasn't enough time."
"Somebody intercepted the message and broke the code, then," Michaels said.
"Which is why it concerns us," she said. "The problem there is, the security encryption was supposedly bulletproof, a factored number hundreds of digits long. According to the CIA, it would take a SuperCray running full time, day and night, about a million years to break the code."
Great, Michaels thought. He said, "I'll have my people look into it."
"Good. Keep me informed."
Her picture disappeared as she broke the connection.
Toni, who had been listening, shook her head. "Not possible," she said.
"Right. The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer. Come on, let's go see the maze."
"You going to call Jay?"
"It can wait a few more minutes."
Chapter 2
The waiter arrived with a Bombay gin and tonic and set it on the table next to the overstuffed leather chair where Lord Geoffrey Goswell sat reading the Times. The Japanese markets were going to hell in a handbasket, the American stock market was holding steady, and gold futures were up.
The weather forecast for London called for rain on the morrow.
Nothing about which to be concerned.
Goswell glanced up. He watched the servant bide a moment to see if there was anything else required, and gave the waiter a military nod. "Thank you, Paddington."
"Milord."
The waiter glided noiselessly away. Here was a good man, old Paddington. He'd had been delivering the paper and drinks here at the club for what? Thirty, thirty-five years? He was polite, efficient, knew his place, and never intruded. Would that all servants were half as well-mannered. A man to be remembered with a nice tip at Christmas, was Paddington.
Across the short stretch of dark and worn oval Oriental rug, reading a trash paper like the Sun or the New York Times or some such, Sir Harold Bellworth harrumphed and blew out a fragrant cloud of Cuban cigar smoke. He lowered his paper a bit and looked at Goswell. "Can't believe what the American President said today. I don't understand why they put up with that kind of bloody nonsense over there. If the PM did that, he would be tossed out on his ear, and rightly so."
Bellworth, eighty-two, was class of '47, thus eight years older than Goswell.