“You think they are responsible?”
“Gut-check? Yes. Proof? None.”
“Lay it out for me.”
“Sure.” He came in, flopped down on the couch. He started ticking points off on his fingers: “One, CyberNation has a lot to gain if people switch to diem because of net woes. Two, CyberNation has the talent to pull this kind of thing off. I don’t have a complete list of their programmers and weavers, but I’ve seen their public face, and it is very slick, uses all the latest language. Three, their advertisements increased just about the time all this started, a vigorous campaign to sign up new members, stressing the integrity of their systems. Four, there’s that connection with the casino ship and the dead guy from Blue Whale. Five, I haven’t found anybody better, and I’ve been looking real hard.”
“Circumstantial and iffy,” she said.
“Hey, I got another whole hand of fingers here. Six, CyberNation is pushing on other fronts. They have a powerful lobby working in D.C., and in various major coun-
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i around the world. Isn’t that what the boss is over on ?Hill about today? Problems with the net that rNation claims it can cure?” shrugged. “So what are seven, eight, nine, and
‘. haven’t filled those in yet,” Jay said, grinning. “But i working on it.”
ow are the wedding plans coming?” i smile faded. “Okay, I guess.” ting cold feet?” it? No!”
y. I was just joking.”
: didn’t speak for a moment. Then he said, “Did you? ;-cold feet, I mean?”
“lot really. Of course, I was pregnant, and I didn’t : to have the baby by myself.”
i.”
ey, look, it’s only natural to worry about making changes in your life. I wanted to get married, but I ? think about it. Alex was married before-what if I |’t measure up to his first wife? And he’s got a daugh- from that marriage, a great kid, but I had to wonder, I he going to be thinking about her when he looked at ild? It’s not like buying a new pair of shoes, is it?” Mo.”
fou should talk to Julio Fernandez. He got married a lot of years on his own, he had to make some stments.” . was thinking that. I mean, I want to be with Saji, no
on, it’s just, I dunno, scary sometimes.” Welcome to the human race, computer-boy.” ^Thanks.”
t Howard looked at the computer log and stack of hard on his desk and shook his head. Forms and clogged
‘, boxes were the bane of military officers everywhere, they had to be attended to for the command to con:
working, and mostly, he managed to pass a signifi-
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cant amount of paper shuffling and signing off to senior officers on his staff, but if you’missed a few days, your piece of it always grew, it never shrank. He’d been at it for an hour and a half, and hadn’t really made much of a dent.
How important was most of this junk? An invitation to speak at an upscale military school in Mississippi? He knew the school. Enrollment was ninety percent white males, with a few women and minority students sprinkled in to keep things legal. Yes, he was the commanding military officer of Net Force, but they didn’t want him-he’d bet dollars to dimes they didn’t know he was black. It might be amusing to show up just to see the expressions on their faces. Then again, that wasn’t worth a trip to Mississippi, was it?
Another e-mail was a cc notification from the NF Quartermaster from a military supplier in Maine that there was a recall on part number MS-239-45/A, due to possible stress fractures in materials that might lead to failure in critical situations. The Quartermaster would have already addressed the situation, but it still sounded worth knowing about. A man needed to see where his troops might be at risk.
A check of the Net Force parts catalogue, which naturally changed the supplier’s part number to their own designation, NF-P-154387, showed the part in question to be the “flexible containment system locking device for a Model B dorsal-unit personal supply and equipment carrier.” After years of military jargon, that one was easy: They were talking about the plastic buckle on a backpack strap. The B-model had been in service for approximately three years, according to the computer file, and had been superseded by the C-model.
If the buckles on the old packs hadn’t busted by now, then it probably wasn’t going be a problem that would bring the Net Force strike teams to their knees.
And how many man-hours had been lost to this tidbit?
Here was a directive from the U.S. National Guard re
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I directive from the General Accounting Office, ; the dkective from the Department of Defense’s and Updated Guidelines for Officers Regarding i Harassment, -please. How relevant to anything was a directive
directive about a directive about guidelines? |iintercom chirped. “Yes?” ” his secretary said. “Lieutenant Fernandez to see
had just left a couple hours ago, but anything to ; of this drudgery. “Send him in.” ‘ arrived, s?”
jjf. I’d hate to tear you away from all this excitement, p’ve got a new shipment of goodies and there-are a : of things you might enjoy seeing.” fpeally need to get this done,” he said. He waved at
ii’re the general, General.” He started to leave, lit a second, I’ll go with you. This can wait.” i grinned. “I thought it might.” i.,they walked out, Julio said, “I ran into Jay Gridley i the hall a few minutes ago. He seems to be a little us about his upcoming nuptials.” at did you tell him?”
being married is worse than death by Chinese torture, of course. That if I had it to do all over
, I’d jump in front of a speeding train before I said
” ”
jfou’re a braver man than I thought, Lieutenant. What
: somehow gets back to Joanna?” E’ll deny having said it to my last breath.” Mch wouldn’t be long in coming if she thought you :h a thing.”
chuckled. “I’m a career military man, sir. Not i she could do would scare me.”
could make you watch little Hoo on your poker
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“I was only joking. I told Gridley that. I also told him it was natural that he should feel nervous about taking the big step. That everybody does.”
“I never did,” Howard said. “Never crossed my mind.”
“And you were what-twelve when you got married? Never had a room of your own, much less a life before you met Nadine. You didn’t have anything to give up, except your virginity, now did you, sir?”
Howard laughed. “Unlike you, who lived alone so long that you had to relearn how to pick your socks up because you had never had to do that before? No, I knew Nadine was the best thing that was ever going to happen to me. Just like Joanna is the best thing that ever happened to you.”
“Yes, sir. But don’t let that get back to her, either. I’d never hear the end of it if she knew that was true.”
“She knows, Lieutenant, she knows.”
If he had had time, Santos would have taken the train up from Florida to the District of Columbia. The East Coast trains usually ran pretty well, they were clean, and it was relaxing to watch the country roll past your window at a speed where you could see much of it. The trip would have taken most of the day, and he could have gotten up, moved around, stretched out, eaten, drank, enjoyed the drone of wheels on steel.
But time was a luxury he seemed to have too little of, so he caught the jet shuttle, and what would have been a relaxing all-day ride became a two-hour hop. Not counting the forty-five minutes they circled the airport, waiting to land.
He rented a car at the airport. The car was a full-sized sedan, as big as they had, and he took out full insurance coverage on it. The name on the card he used matched the name of his fake driver’s license, both of which had been issued to a man in Georgia a few weeks ago. The card and license had not been used before, and the man whose name was on them had not reported them missing,
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j he had been dead before they were issued. It was a ill way to move around semi-legitimately. Some- in CyberNation’s computer hutch had figured this papplying for credit cards and duplicate licenses in the of the recently departed who already had such before the family thought to let anybody know. The ; rented post office boxes, applied under several dif- : names, and had the cards sent there. Once they had used for a few days, the IDs could be tossed into