"I don't go running. For your information, it was my idea to break up with Bella." Well, that wasn't strictly true, but he had opened the conversation that led to it. And when given the choice of being one of her string, he had told her he wasn't interested. Sort of.
"Good for you. You gonna throw?"
Tyrone glanced at Bella, then back at Nadine. "Yeah, I'm gonna throw. Get ready to start your watch, I'm gonna hang you out to dry."
"In your dreams."
She flashed him a small grin, and he returned it, but even as he did, he wondered about what she had said. What if Bella crooked her finger? If she waved him over, told him she wanted him to drop by and sit on her couch and kiss him like she had kissed him before, would he go running?
No way. No. Fucking. Way.
Easy enough to say that when he was pretty sure it wasn't gonna happen. But if it actually did, would he drop everything and trot over?
That was a hard one. He didn't want to think too much about that one.
He gathered himself for the throw. Three steps: one, two, three!
The boomerang soared high into the air, an artificial bird climbing for the sun. And it was gonna be a long hang time, too. He could tell. That ought to shut Nadine up about whether he'd come to throw.
Flying the big jet wasn't a problem for the Net Force pilot, and landing it manually wasn't, either, assuming the weather in England wasn't so foul they needed a ground beacon to locate the airport. The 747's self-contained instruments weren't affected by the international snafu that had ensnarled the major computer systems. But trying to land in heavy traffic at Heathrow or Gatwick without some help from the ATCs on the ground was not at the top of any pilot's list.
"No way in hell, sir," the pilot had put it to Howard.
Fortunately, there were military bases that were self-contained in the U.K., at least insofar as flight operations went, and they could put the big bird down at one of these, even though the wait would be fairly long. Most of the still-operational bases had been hauling in civilian planes affected by the snafu, or allowing takeoffs and landings by those nonmilitary aircraft that simply had to fly: hospital planes, those moving organs for transplants, or assorted heads of state. They might be stacked up a while, waiting to land.
Fine, he had been stacked up before.
Fortunately, most military organizations were, by their nature, paranoid, and few of them put all their eggs in one basket. That half the planet's computer systems had been screwed up was bad, but not so bad that it totally paralyzed the world's armies and navies. Good soldiers always worried about such things, and good soldiers could usually convince the bad ones to have some kind of backup plan. Looked as if that chore might get easier after this, too.
They could have turned the 747 back and landed in the States, but Howard wasn't interested in letting his quarry get away again, not if they could help it. The good thing was, if they were having problems traveling, so would Ruzhyo. And he didn't think the assassin would get far on foot. Although tracking him without computers might be something of a problem itself, it would be easier if he sat still for a while.
Julio drifted down the aisle and stopped next to his seat.
"Colonel."
"Sergeant."
"You still think we can collect this boy?"
"Oh, we'll get him." Howard mentioned his reasoning.
Fernandez laughed. "Begging the colonel's pardon, but bullshit. If the guy's IQ didn't drop by fifty points when he landed, he's plenty smart enough to figure out how to rent a car or boat or even a plane from somebody and get out of England. He waves a handful of that funny Euro money at some college kid or poor fisherman or broke pilot with an ultralight, and he's got wheels or floats or wings. I'd guess the Frogs or the Spanish or anybody else across a body of water from Jolly Olde are gonna be busy trying to stop opportunistic crooks trying to smuggle trains or steamships past 'em while the computers are whacked out. His chances of getting nailed in all the hubbub are probably so close to zero as to practically be zero."
"You're assuming he wants to leave England that bad," Howard said. "Why should he? He doesn't know we're on his tail. He probably thinks he's gotten away clean."
"Would you assume that, were you in his shoes?"
Howard grinned. "Hell, no."
"Me, neither."
"Maybe he won't want to risk it," Howard said.
"I don't think this guy worries an awful lot about risk, given what we've seen out of him so far, John."
Howard nodded. That was true enough. And there was nothing to be done about it.
Julio said, "But, shoot, we could get lucky. He might step off a curb and get hit by a double-decker bus or something. Be waiting for us in a hospital somewhere, nothing but a tongue depressor to fight us with when we show up. Course, with our luck so far, he'd kill a couple of us with it, and wouldn't that look good on the obituary page? 'Assassin Kills Net Force Personnel! It was depressing, Sergeant Julio Fernandez said.' "
"I can always count on you to cheer me up, Sergeant."
"I do what I can, sir."
Michaels sat hunched over a stack of hardcopy, reading that instead of using the computer. It was slow going. Toni had arrived, but left again to go collect some material from a satellite recon site that still had a viable uplink. They didn't want to risk sending the stuff from there to here, even with protected landlines. It was more reliable for somebody to collect it physically.
His neck and upper back were stiff and sore. Part of that was probably from being stuck in a chair reading for hours; part of it was tension from all the other crap going on in his head. Megan and the private eye, Toni, the whole ugly situation with this madman screwing with the world.
"Knock, knock?"
Angela Cooper came in, tapping at the door frame as she did so. She wore a dark blue blazer and a matching short skirt, with a paler blue blouse. She closed the door behind her. "How goes the war, Alex?"
"Our side is still losing."
"We've gotten a bunch of systems back on-line," she said. "We're recovering. So far, no permanent damage to sensitive material."
"That's something."
She moved to stand behind him and looked over his shoulder.
"Statistical analysis of transcontinental telephonic transmissions? My. This must be fascinating reading."
"Oh, yeah, right up there with freshman philosophy papers on German existentialists written in Chinese by Bantu bushmen."
She laid on hand on his shoulder. "Oh, dear. You're like a rock."
"I've been more relaxed," he admitted.
"You should let me work on you." She put her other hand on his other shoulder and started to knead the muscles. He had a moment of alarm. He should not allow this. But — mmm, it felt good. Her hands were much stronger than he would have thought.
"You don't have to do that." Weak. Not the same as telling her to quit.
"I don't mind. It's one of my few talents. My mother was a therapist for a time. She knew some of the more esoteric elements of massage: reiki, shiatsu, Aston-Patterning. I picked up some of it along the way."
God, but that felt good. He could feel the knots in his traps. It also felt as if his head might just nod forward and fall off his neck if she kept this up. It was not sexual, but it was certainly sensual.
"You really ought to lie down to get the full benefit," she said. She continued to work her fingers into his neck and upper back, digging in with her thumbs, working in elliptical spirals.
"However, the couch is too soft, the desk too short. But the carpet is clean. Lie on the floor, on your stomach, next to the desk there."