“Chocolate?”
“Not mousse, moose, like with antlers, from the forest.”
“You’d cook Bullwinkle?”
He laughed. “You know that old TV series? It’s one of my favorites.”
She said, “Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!” in a very good imitation of the cartoon character.
He said, “Again? That trick never works!” in as close an imitation to Rocky the Flying Squirrel as he could manage.
They both laughed.
“Shall we adjourn to the living room for after-dinner wine?”
She followed him into the room. He poured her a glass of the wine he’d selected, let her appreciate it to him, then poured his own glass. He directed her to the form-chair, while he sat on the leather couch.
The chair hummed and fitted itself to her exquisite contours. She smiled. “Ah. I’ve never tried one of these. Very comfortable.”
He shrugged. “If it isn’t comfortable, what’s the point?”
They sipped their wine for a moment. Then he said, “Well, much as I hate to bring up business, I wouldn’t want you to think I invited you here on false pretenses.”
“Heaven forbid,” she said.
“So, how goes the war on the entrenched bureaucracy?”
She put her glass down. “Better than I expected. We’ve got a couple of unexpected senators who have climbed on board the issue, and believe me, I had nothing to do with it. Also, the unofficial word is that the Supreme Court will be ruling on TransMetro Insurance versus the State of New Mexico next week, and there’s a strong rumor that they will rule for TransMetro.”
He knew this, of course. The decision concerned some minor litigation about whether or not the New Mexico regulatory agency could force the Swiss company that sold policies exclusively via the Internet to obey certain arcane state laws. By all rights, of course, the agency should be able to, but there was an oddball section of Internet laws that might prevent that. If so, there would be a precedent set that, while it wouldn’t seem relevant to most observers, would benefit CyberNation down the line. Ames thought of it as part of a basement walclass="underline" unseen, but a part of the foundation that needed to be in place.
“Good,” he said. “A little more wine?”
“I’d love some.”
He smiled. Things were going along very nicely here. He wouldn’t make a move on her tonight. Nor the next time they were together, and maybe not even the third time. Like a fine sauce, some things should not be rushed, not if they were to be enjoyed to the fullest.
And he was certainly going to enjoy Corinna Skye to the fullest. Like everything else he had ever wanted, it was only a matter of “when,” not “if.”
8
John Howard was not used to feeling ill at ease anywhere on the FBI base. This place, though, he had to admit, had him feeling decidedly nervous.
He was sitting in an exam room in the ENT office at the FBI/Net Force Clinic, having his hearing checked. Nadine had been after him for months to do that. His right ear had been bugging him on and off since that shoot-out in Gakona, Alaska, almost two years ago. Blasting away with a.357 without earplugs was a risky thing. Sometimes, though, if you wanted to stay alive, you did what you had to and worried about the cost later.
Net Force’s annual physicals were fairly perfunctory, and didn’t routinely include a hearing test unless the patient brought it up. Howard never had. It wasn’t as if he was deaf, after all. He could hear the doctor asking his questions, and that had been enough for the physicians to sign off on him each year. Besides, it hadn’t really seemed that bad until recently, but it was becoming obvious that his hearing was no longer quite up to par.
Howard said, “No, I don’t hear the ringing anymore. But I have noticed if I’m not right next to the phone, I might not notice its cheep. And my wife says I miss half of what she’s saying. Sometimes I can hear her voice, but not quite make out the words. We can’t talk from room to room, if she’s in the kitchen and I’m in the den. She can hear me just fine, but I can’t understand her. And my virgil’s alarm? I don’t pick that up at all.”
The doctor nodded, making a note on his flatscreen with his stylus. “What about in a crowded room? Any problems?”
“Sometimes it’s hard to pick a single voice out of the background noise. But that’s normal, right?”
“Mmm. Let’s have a look.”
The doctor put the flatscreen down and pulled the ear instrument from where it hung on the wall next to the exam table. He put a little throwaway plastic sleeve on the end, dialed up a light, and stuck it into Howard’s ear.
“I always meant to ask, what’s this thing called?”
The doctor pulled it away from Howard’s ear and showed it to him. “This? It’s called an ‘ear-looker.’ ”
Howard grinned. “Funny,” he said.
But the doctor, a young guy who looked to be in his early thirties, shook his head. “No, General, I’m serious. The technical name for this is an ‘otoscope,’ but that translates literally as ‘ear-looker.’ ”
With that, he stuck it back into Howard’s ear and resumed the exam.
Howard bore the tugging and poking. After a few moments the doctor pulled the scope out. He slipped the plastic throwaway off and tossed it into the foot-operated trash bin. Switching off the instrument’s light, he reracked it and turned back to Howard.
“The tympanic membrane — your eardrum — looks fine,” he said. “And I don’t think there is any damage to the bony structures past that.”
“Malleus, incus, stapes,” Howard said.
“Yes. Hammer, anvil, stirrup. Good to see you’ve done your research.”
“So what are we talking about here?”
The doctor leaned back against the wall. “Nerve damage,” he said. “My guess would be that it’s probably in the organ of Corti — those sensory hair cells that make up the auditory epithelium are there. That’s pretty common. In fact, unless you live in a quiet forest all alone and don’t listen to music or have a TV, you’re bound to lose some of your hearing if you live long enough. It’s just one of the costs of a mechanical civilization. Mostly, it’s gradual, and you don’t notice it until it gets bad. Sometimes, though, after a very loud blast very close to one’s unprotected ear, the effect is sudden and pronounced.”
“Like a gun going off.”
“Yep.”
“So what do we do about it?”
“I’ll have the audiologist give you a hearing exam. When we see what that shows, we’ll know what we can do.”
Howard nodded, thanked the man, and went straight over to the audiologist’s office.
The technician there turned out to be a very good-looking young black woman. She asked Howard to sit in a chair, put a set of headphones on him, and handed him a wireless control with a single button on it. There was a sign on the wall certifying that one Geneva Zuri was licensed to practice audiology in the state of Virginia.
“What kind of a name is ‘Zuri’?”
“Swahili.” She had a deep, throaty voice. “Some generations removed. My grandfather went back to the old country as a young man and found our distant kin. After that, he started using the family name from before slavery.”
Howard nodded. Interesting.
“Okay,” she said, “I’m going to generate some tones from the computer here. When you hear one, push the button.”
“Okay.”
She did that for a while, first one ear, then the other. At one point, she introduced a roaring waterfall-like noise in his good left ear while she sent tones to his bad ear. Curious, he asked her about that.
“What we’ve learned is that people with one weak ear tend to recruit their stronger ear to help out. They are not aware of this, of course. What is actually happening is that the sound is traveling through your head by way of bone conduction. You think you’re hearing a tone in your right ear, but actually you are picking it up in the left, compensating without realizing it. So we mask that ear with white noise to prevent that.”