They crossed the lobby and reached the elevator. Toni beat him to the button.
"Maybe they wanted you to see him. Let you know you were being protected."
"Be better just to tell me I was being covered, wouldn't it?"
"Would we tell them?"
"Maybe. Especially if we thought they'd figure it out anyway."
The elevator arrived and chinged, the cast bronze doors opening with ponderous grace. The operator smiled at them. Good thing the new hotel he and Toni had transferred to was being subsidized by the British — the director would have a stroke when she got the bill, otherwise.
"A friendly test? You used to be a field op yourself."
"Yeah," he said, "but I've lost a few moves since then. Oh, I look in the rearview mirror a couple times when I'm driving, and glance around every now and then. I'm not completely asleep since all that business with the Selkie came down and I was very nearly assassinated, but I don't put a lot of effort into it. Not as much as I should. No, this guy just isn't very good. I can't believe MI-5 or -6 would send him out and think I wouldn't notice him."
"Maybe they just don't want to waste a good man on you. Sent in the second team because they figure you're an ugly American who walks around with his head in a thick and blinding ego fog." She smiled.
"They might be right. But I think I'll give Angela Cooper a call and see what's what."
They got onto the elevator. The elevator operator said, "Floor?"
"Four, please." Toni said. In place of her normal faint resonance of the Bronx, she had a passable imitation of a British posh accent. "Four" came out "Foah." Michaels blinked at her.
In their suite, Michaels used his virgil to call Cooper. Toni started the hot water running in the shower, and he watched her strip off her sweats as Cooper came on-line. He caught her at home, and she had her camera on. She wore something red and silky, what he could see of it. His view stopped just below her shoulders. He flipped his own cam on.
"Alex! What can I do for you?"
"Answer a question honestly."
"Of course."
"Are you or MI-5 having me followed?"
"We certainly aren't. I doubt that SS is, but I can check. Hold on a moment." Her cam froze, and the word holding appeared on his thumbnail screen.
Toni peeled her panties off, pulled her sports bra off over her head. She turned and gave him a glorious frontal view, then waved bye-bye as she stepped into the shower and slid the door shut.
He would make this call short, he decided. He wanted to get into that shower before Toni got out. He'd been horny all through the silat class, and it hadn't gotten any better on the ride home.
"Alex? MI-5 says they are not having you surveilled. Is there something we ought to know?" She smiled.
He thought about it quickly. "No, I think I'm just getting paranoid in my old age."
"Hardly old," she said.
"I'll see you tomorrow. Sorry to bother you at home."
"Call any time. It's never a bother." She leaned back, and the red silky shirt or gown or whatever gaped a little at her neck, showing the top of her cleavage.
He discommed, and as he did, his male radar picked up a blip. Was that… interest? He'd only been with a few women. Since he'd gotten his divorce, Toni was the only woman he had been seriously interested in, and he was out of practice, but it sure sounded as if Cooper didn't find him totally disgusting.
Interesting. Good for the old ego, to have a beautiful and bright woman maybe possibly be interested in him. Assuming he wasn't reading the signals wrong.
Not that it mattered. He had much better waiting for him here. He started for the shower, pulling his damp clothes off as he went.
"What did she say?" Toni called from the shower.
"She said it isn't her people," he called back.
"Then we ought to find out who it is," she said.
He pulled the shower door open, was rewarded with a blast of hot vapor that fogged the mirrors behind him. "Tomorrow. Got room for me?"
She glanced down. "If you stand in front. I don't want to get stabbed in the back."
He grinned. "Well, look at that. I wonder where that came from?"
"A present from Ms. Cooper, perhaps?"
He frowned. "What?"
"Well, you didn't have it before you got on the virgil, did you?"
Was she teasing him? She was smiling, but he wasn't sure.
While he considered that, the point became, well, moot.
Toni noticed. "I was just joking, Alex."
He was embarrassed. He grabbed the bar of soap and a wash cloth. "Turn around," he said. "I'll wash your back."
"Alex—"
"I'm really tired," he said. "It was a hard workout, I'm not used to it. I need to get to sleep." It sounded lame, and he knew she knew it. He rubbed the soap into the cloth, fast, worked up a thick lather. She turned around and he scrubbed at her back. Maybe a little harder than he should.
Something was going on between them, something he didn't understand. Whatever it was, he didn't like it. Not a damn bit.
Toni didn't pursue it, though, and he was glad. He didn't really want to get into a deep emotional discussion right now. He was physically wrung out.
He was tired, but, unlike Toni, who fell asleep a few minutes after their shower, Michaels sat reading for an hour. He finally got into bed, turned off the light, and tried to sleep. After lying there for almost another hour, he realized he wasn't drifting off to sleep anytime soon. He was wound up, too tight to relax.
He got out of bed carefully, went into the bathroom, and slipped into jeans, a T-shirt, and running shoes. He dug his kick-taser out of his kit and checked the battery. The little wireless weapon used compressed gas as a propellant, was nonlethal, and fired a pair of charged darts that would knock a man on his butt if they hit him, even through clothes. The effective range was only a few meters, but that was where most gunfights were likely to happen. The old FBI shoot-out maxim concerning such encounters was, "Three feet, three shots, three seconds." If a guy was fifty meters away from you and pumping elbows and ass in the other direction, he wasn't real dangerous. The armorer at Net Force had told him somebody had come up with an electromesh vest that would defeat a taser's charge, but a vest wasn't a full-body suit; you could always shoot somebody in the leg or head. And it was a simple device. It had a laser sight on it. You put the tiny red dot on the target — allowed for a little spread of the needles in flight — and that's where the darts went when you pushed the button. If you weren't too far away. If your hand didn't shake too bad. He'd only had to fire the thing on the job once, and it had worked well enough then.
He tucked the taser into his back pocket, put a windbreaker on to cover it, and quietly left the room.
Michaels left the hotel via a rear exit, circled around the block, and approached the front of the place from behind where the gray Neon had been parked.
Where the guy in the Neon was still parked, sitting behind the wheel. He had his window rolled down and was smoking a cigar. Michaels could smell it fifteen meters away.
The commander of Net Force looped around the car as a bus passed, sending a blast of night air into the Neon, backwashing the cigar smoke into the vehicle. The guy in the car ducked away from the bus's wake.
Michaels pulled his taser, scooted up to the driver's side — the right-hand side in this country — and put the taser on the windowsill as he squatted next to the car.
"Hi. Are we having fun yet?"
The guy, a thin and balding man of maybe thirty-five, nearly swallowed his cigar.
"Jesus Christ! Don't do that! You scared the piss out of me!"