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enough cover to check out the ship, she’d be in and out, and nobody would be the wiser.
“You still packing, girl?” Guru said. She came into the bedroom, Little Alex slung over her right hip.
“Guru, I don’t know how you expect him to practice walking if you never put him down.”
Guru smiled and bounced the baby on her hip a couple of times. He laughed.
“Don’t you worry about him learning to walk. Pretty soon, I start teaching him djurus. Time you get back, he’ll be a fighter.”
“I’m only going to be gone three days.”
“Plenty of time, eh, best boy?”
Little Alex laughed again.
“You sure this is all right?”
Guru shook her head. “Child, I raised a houseful of babies. This little one is an angel compared to a couple of my boys. We’ll be fine. And we’ll watch out for big Alex, too.”
Toni nodded. Guru had recovered from her stroke all right, but she was in her eighties. Then again, her mind was still sharp, and the years of silat practice had given her a balance most people didn’t have in their thirties. Little Alex couldn’t be safer, and anybody who thought the old lady pushing the baby stroller was a victim would learn a hard lesson otherwise. It was just so strange to be catching a jet and flying off on her own. It felt… weird, somehow. That kind of thing belonged to her life before Alex and the baby.
“Go, I think I heard the cab honking,” Guru said.
Toni took Alex and hugged him. “You be good for Guru,” she said. She kissed him, and felt a pang of something like loss when she handed him back to the old woman, and hugged her in the transfer.
Once she was in the cab, Toni found she had to force herself to breathe slower. Her belly roiled with nervousness. An adventure. She was going on an adventure.
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CYBERNATION
i the Cybernation Train ‘. Berlin, Germany
eller ached all over. He had taken half a dozen ibuprofen s, and they had taken the edge off, but every move, ‘ breath, hurt. He had never felt like this. Once, when : was fourteen, his mother had run a stop sign and their had been broadsided by another driver. He had ched his shoulder and elbow, banged his head against i glass, and had a sore spot on his hip, and he’d thought at was bad, but that was nothing compared to this. Yet, \ he looked into the mirror, there was almost no sign the beating Santos had given him-he had some iises on his chest, his belly, his legs and back, but they a’t look nearly as bad as they felt. They were just light own splotches, a little purple in a couple of them. How ild it hurt so bad and not look worse than it did? Santos was a devil, a monster, a psychotic thug! He [ild get a gun and shoot him! But even as he dressed, trying to avoid moving as much (‘he could-he had to sit down to put his trousers on- eller knew he would not do that. Even with a gun, he afraid of Santos. If he missed, if the man didn’t die iiately, he would come for Keller, and that would that The man would kill him, slowly and painfully. 1 pain was not something that Keller wanted any more ever.
1-5, South of Sacramento, California
wound the RT/10 Viper up into fifth gear and blew st the guy in the Shelby GT at ninety-five. In a few
ids, he was doing a hundred and fifteen, eating up ; highway, speed still climbing. This stretch of road was aight as an arrow and in the middle of the desert, noth-
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ing to see, and even at this clip, he wasn’t gonna get through it any time soon.
He shifted into sixth, and the little car had enough to surge when he did. Who’s your daddy, baby? Huh?
The guy in the Mustang must have stepped on it, Jay could see him in the rearview, starting to gain. Jay laughed. The Shelby was fast, maybe even faster than he was on the top end, but he had a mile and some on the guy by now, and by the time the Mustang wound it up and pegged the speedometer, Jay would be at the exit to the olive place and the race would be over.
The olive place was where he was meeting his contact in this scenario, and he was being nothing if not careful this time. He came in with an anonymous persona, a female one at that, under a phony name and addy, and anybody looking for Jay Gridley wasn’t gonna see that guy in this car. It would be almost impossible to figure out who he really was, and even if he went places where traps had been set for Jay-which he didn’t plan on doing, thank you very much-he was going to make it look like he-or she, in this case-had wandered in there by accident.
There was the exit. The Shelby GT was coming up fast, but not fast enough. Jay put on his blinker and was off the interstate and down to sixty before the Mustang roared past. He heard the man in the car yell at him, and shook his head. Why, none of it-he’d never had that kind of relationship with his mother. The very idea!
The Viper burbled and rumbled, as if anxious to get back up to speed, but Jay nosed it into the olive place’s parking lot, a big graveled area that had to run three acres, and parked.
The desert heat beat down on him in the little convertible, and he felt it much more without the wind, hot as that was.
He tossed his long blonde hair back over his shoulder, adjusted his boobs with the backs of his hands, and
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1 toward the building, the red miniskirt barely cov- ; a very shapely female ass.
side, he slipped his shades off and into his purse, were racks of olives in various jars, ranging from ng-glass-sized ones to convoluted monsters five feet P Mostly they were big, fat green things, pits still in , but here and there were some stuffed with pimento, 1 even some black ones that had been pitted.
were also bottles and tins of olive oil, ranging cold-pressed extra virgin or somesuch on down. r could oil be better than virgin? i old lady with a big straw hat and a matching hand- cruised the aisle, her shopping cart half full of jars 1 cans. She smiled at Jay’s young woman persona, and ‘ saw the white rose pinned to her yellow sundress that : him this was who he had come to meet. MHot day out,” Jay said. ff’Yes, isn’t it? Nice and cool in here, though.”
I wonder, have you seen any Tuscan bread?” This was ft code phrase, in actuality, a key to a firewall’s back r.
Funny you should mention that, dearie,” the old lady “I had picked up two loaves of that very thing, but lize now I should put one back, one is more than ugh for just me, since the mister passed on. Here, why n’t you take it? Save an old lady a trip?” P’Why, thank you, ma’am. That’s very nice of you.” “No trouble at all, dearie.”
| The old lady pushed her cart away. Something was ck to one of the rear wheels, it bumped slightly every it hit the floor. How annoying. Jay always got that : when he went grocery shopping. Jay went to pay for the loaf of bread. Outside, he opened the packed, removed the bread, and he it in half. Inside the bread was a mini DVD, the of a half-dollar coin. Rainbow colors sparkled from surface in the hot sun. Jay smiled. Easy as falling off fchair.
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He hiked his blonde’s short skirt up to climb back into the low-slung Viper, and accidentally flashed a man in a Cadillac who pulled into the lot as he hopped into the car. Oops.
But he had half of what he had come for. Another stop a bit farther south, and with any luck, he would have it all. Half the trick to finding information on the web and net was knowing how to look. It was all out there, but if you couldn’t narrow your search properly, you’d never find it. After years of practice, Jay knew how to look: It had become almost instinctive, more an art than a science. Yeah, you could turn searchbots loose hither and yon and gather up tons of data, but sometimes you just knew where to go, without knowing how or why you knew. That was zen, Saji said. Knowing without knowing.
Whatever. As long as he could do it. And he could. A few more minutes and he would be ready to start kicking ass and taking names, and he would start with his old buddy Jackson Keller. Because if Keller was in some way responsible for the attacks on the net and web, and more important, if he was responsible for the attacks on Jay personally, then he was gonna be extremely sorry. You don’t step on Superman’s cape, and you don’t mess with Smokin’ Jay Gridley. No siree.