Now, wearing only a pair of thin, calf-length red-and- white striped cotton pants, Roberto glowed with passion and sweat as he practiced his exercises. Though he preferred to be musically accompanied by three or four of his fellow game players-you had to learn to play the instruments as part of the dance-the music now was re
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corded. When he saw her arrive, he finished his sequence, then padded across the bare floor to the sound box and shut it off.
When he spoke, he had an accent, the soft liquid flow of Portuguese translating to his English, a founding of hard consonants and lengthening of vowels.
“Ah, Missy. How goes the battle?”
She smiled, flashing perfect teeth-all marvels of expensive orthodontia, a thousand dollars a cap. “Keller says the first sortie went perfectly.”
Roberto picked a towel up from the floor and wiped the sweat from his face and shaved head. “Jackson, he’s a fine boy, can make them computers dance like nobody else.”
Chance smiled. That was true. Jackson Keller was a wizard with hardware and software, as good with those technical things as Roberto here was at bashing heads. Cybernation did not hire second-class talent for its key positions. There was much to be gained-or lost-in this game, and cutting corners on personnel would be shortsighted and stupid. When you were trying to create a virtual nation from nothing, to give it weight and substance, you had to do some very intricate things if you were going to pull it off. Having good help alone wasn’t sufficient You needed the best. All of Chance’s people were just that-the best. And she wasn’t so bad herself, though her talents were somewhat harder to quantify. The higher-ups in CyberNation called her The Dragon Lady when they thought she couldn’t hear, and she took that as a compliment.
To Roberto, she said, “Yes, but this is the easy part. Scrambling software gets their attention, but they’ll fix that, and all it will cost will be some tired programmers and a few hours’ downtime. The next stage will be more difficult. If it gets to that.”
And of course, it would get to that soon enough-the nations of the world weren’t going to just roll over and
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give away anything, certainly not the kind of power CyberNation wanted for itself.
“You worry too much, Missy.” He grinned. “That part won’t be no harder than Jackson’s jogo, only different.”
“Good to see you haven’t lost your confidence, Rob- erto.”
“Ah, me, I ain’t lost nothin’.”
She closed the door and locked it. ‘Talk is cheap.”
He hooked his thumbs into the waistline of his pants and skinned them down, peeled them off, one foot, then the other, and tossed them to one side.
She laughed, and reached for her shirt buttons. “We’ll have to hurry,” she said. “We have to leave for the ship in an hour.”
“Only an hour?”
“We have to pack.”
“Let me show you how to pack,” he said.
She laughed again. Life was good.
Washington, D.C.
I Somebody screamed bloody murder, jerking Toni from * her half-doze into full alertness. She came off the couch and onto her feet and into a defensive stance, expecting j to be attacked, before her brain got back on track. I It’s only the baby. Just Little A/ex. | Toni relaxed. Aloud, she said, “Yeah, little Alex, the demon child from the lowest pit of Hell.” But she was already on her way into the bedroom, and at the baby’s crib before he could get through the second outraged scream.
“Hey, hey, hey, baby boy, what’s the matter? Mama’s here, it’s okay.”
He stood balanced precariously on his little fat feet, holding onto the rail.
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She picked the baby up, put him over her left shoulder, and patted him gently on the back.
He gave out one more half-hearted yell, just to let her know he wasn’t happy it had taken her all of thirty seconds to get from the living room to pick him up, then trailed off into a quiet burble before shutting up completely.
“Oh, you’re happy now, are you? Brat. Monster.” She leaned him away and cradled him, smiling with a fierce possessive joy at him. She hadn’t slept for more than four hours at a stretch for what seemed like forever, but he was such an angel when he smiled his new-toothed grin at her, as he was doing now. He was a beautiful child. Yeah, yeah, she knew that every mother thought that about her babies, but objectively speaking, he really was. Objectively speaking. Anybody with eyes could see that.
She smiled at that thought and at Alex Junior-a name his father had fought against but lost. Yes, she had agreed, a junior had a lot to live up to, and no, it wasn’t necessarily the best thing to tag a baby with that. The choice they’d agreed upon was “Scott,” giving him his paternal grandfather’s middle name. But when the nurse had come in with the little flatscreen to log in the newborn baby’s stats, Alex hadn’t been there.
“What’s the baby’s name?” the nurse had asked, ready to log it into the system.
And Toni had smiled and given it to her. Alex hadn’t really been that upset. Secretly, she was sure he was actually very pleased.
Little Alex made sucking noises, but it was not time for his feeding yet. He had gotten off the breast and was taking milk and some solid food full-time now. And she no longer leaked milk when he cried, thank God. That had gotten a little embarrassing while sitting in a restaurant or even just out pushing the stroller.
She walked into the living room, cooing at little Alex, looking for his binky. They had half a dozen kinds of different pacifiers, but somehow, the baby could tell the
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‘?
difference among them, and would spit out all but his favorite. This had caused some not-so-funny moments while they turned the house upside down looking for it against the background of unhappy baby squawls. Unfortunately, the favorite binky had come as a baby shower gift from somebody, and neither Toni nor Alex had been able to find a match for it anywhere. There was no brand name on it, and nobody remembered who had given it to them. A web search came up empty, and friends with babies were no help, either. Normally, they had the thing strapped to a clip attached to the baby’s shirt so they wouldn’t lose it, but somehow, they managed to lose it anyhow.
Jay Gridley had come up with a tiny responder that could be hooked to the clip strap. All you had to do was say “Binky!” in a loud voice, and the electronic device, about the size of a penny, would say “Here I am!” over and over until you could find it and squeeze it off. Jay had put the thing inside a little sleeve of waterproof silicone, just in case little Alex managed to somehow get that part into his mouth.
Life since the baby was just full of these kinds of problems, and they only sounded little to people who didn’t have children of their own.
And being a full-time mama was a far cry from being a Net Force operative second in command to her now- husband, or working for the mainline FBI as a special liaison to Net Force.
Just then, the baby distinctly said, “Da da.”
Toni stared at him, astounded. “What? What did you say?”
Little Alex smiled and said it again, repeating it a third time for good measure: “Da da da.”
She had to call Alex! He had to hear this, this child 1 was a prodigy, a genius!
She hurried to the phone, picked it up, and punched in iAlex’s number.
But naturally, the phone wasn’t working.
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Okay, fine, she’d tell him when he got home. Meanwhile, she could bundle the baby up, put him in the stroller, and go for a nice long walk. It was chilly out, but at least the sun was shining, no rain in the forecast. Some fresh air would do them both good. “Want to go for a walk, sweet babboo?” He understood her, and she was sure he nodded, a little bit. Of course. He was a prodigy, after all, wasn’t he? The smartest, prettiest, best baby in the world. Without a doubt-none at all.
2
Madrid, Spain Summer 1868
The summer’s day was scorching in Madrid, time for siesta.
Jay Gridley sat in the shade of a wide awning at a sidewalk cafe”, sipping warm red table wine, waving flies away from the dirty checkered tablecloth, and watching a sleeping dog under a nearby table twitch as it dreamed its mysterious canine dreams.
Isabella II, eldest daughter of Ferdinand VII, still sat
upon the Bourbon throne on this hot day, but her rule,