Howard nodded.
The seat belt light and audible warning went on.
Julio said, “So, to condense things a little, we get there, take over before anybody knows what is going on, and
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capture the computers before they can trash ’em. Then our computer wizard here waltzes in and collects the evidence, the bad guys all go to prison, and everybody lives happily ever after.”
It won’t be that easy, Howard knew. It never is.
The jet started to descend; he could feel the pressure in his ears change.
“No word from Toni yet?” he said.
Michaels looked worried. “No. She should have called by now.”
On the Bon Chance
Toni had a problem. Her room was no longer available, she had checked out, and she didn’t want to be wandering around the ship towing her suitcase. That made it kind of hard to skulk, when die wheels of your little carry-on were clacking over every imperfection in the floor. So when Keller went to a cabin, she ducked into a public toilet nearby, put her suitcase on the commode in an empty stall, locked the door, and climbed out over the top of the stall’s door. It would have been smarter to have found a concierge and checked the bag, but she didn’t want to get too far away from Keller, in case he came out.
He did come out, not ten minutes later, and she stayed far enough back so he didn’t seem to notice her. This was working out all right.
He went straight to one of the guarded entrances to the private decks, and she couldn’t follow him in there.
Okay. He was here, Alex needed that information, and that might be all she was gonna get. It was what it was.
When she went back to get her suitcase, it was gone. And her scrambled cell phone and flatscreen were in the suitcase.
This was not good. Not good at all.
Probably housekeeping had the bag. Somebody had re
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ported the stall locked, a janitor had come by, found the bag. Nothing sinister about it. She had her wallet and ID, she could just go and find housekeeping and pick it up.
Maybe. Or maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.
She sat in the stall and thought about the situation. If Alex and the Net Force teams were going to move on the ship, she didn’t want to do anything that might possibly cause them problems. So making the phone call without her coded phone was out.
If they did show up here, chances were good they’d catch Keller-she could tell them he was here when she saw them. It wasn’t as if she was the only civilian on the ship, now was it? There were probably a couple thousand tourists here-she wouldn’t be in any more danger than any of them. Less, because she knew there might be a reason to keep her head down, and because she had some skill at staying out of harm’s way.
If the suitcase was in the lost-and-found waiting to be claimed, no problem. But if they had opened it, seen who it belonged to, and wondered why it had been sitting in an empty, locked toilet stall, that might make them curious. It would surely make her curious if she were running security on a ship. Once they saw it wasn’t a bomb, they might start to ask themselves other questions: Why on Earth would anybody leave their luggage there? What possible reason could there be?
The flatscreen was clean, no damaging files on it; she’d run the burn program. The cell phone was iffy. It looked fine, just another commercial model, tens of thousands of them around. There weren’t any numbers programmed into it, and they’d have to be real inquisitive to take it apart and discover there was hardware and software built in that scrambled calls, coming or going.
But-just for the sake of argument-suppose they did that? Mary Johnson goes toddling in to collect her missing bag, and security-in the form of Jasmine Chance, who obviously bore Ms. Mary no love whatsoever for moving in on her Roberto real estate-decides to have a long chat
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with her? International waters, no constitutional rights, that would be, well… bad.
That word seemed to be cropping up a whole lot in the last few minutes.
Okay, she decided, that was what she would do. She would go to ground, find a hidey-hole, and stay there, see if Alex showed up. If so, good. If not, she’d worry about that when she got there.
Where to hide?
She had an idea. Probably the last place they’d look if they decided they needed to find her.
Chance called Santos into her office. He came in, a slow stroll, as if he had all the time in the world. He was like a big tomcat, coming and going as he pleased, not going to hurry for anything.
She wanted to slap him.
“Okay,” she said, “whatever problems you and I are having, they have to go on hold now. We need to get this done, and we can sort the rest of it out later.”
He shrugged. “Problems? What problems?”
Now she really wanted to slap him. Instead, she smiled. Fine. He’d pay for all this later. He truly would.
Santos looked at his watch. He had an hour and a half before he needed to leave. Plenty of time, since he was all packed, and since he could take the private launch to the copter platform without waiting for the regular boat. Maybe he should go and find that secretary? Fifteen minutes would be more than enough time to relax them both, no? Tune enough for a shower afterward.
Why not?
He headed for the Security Cam Center. If she was still on board, she would have passed in front of a glass eye recently. The computer system that ran the surveillance gear couldn’t search for a particular person, but it could, within limits, hunt for kinds of people. Women, brunettes, a certain size, smaller or larger. All you had to do was
A
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tell it what you wanted. Well. Generally. The computer probably wouldn’t appreciate what he really wanted, and it couldn’t see that as long as she had her clothes on anyway. He smiled.
Fort Louder dale, Florida
Michaels stood in line behind Lieutenant Fernandez, who was behind Jay. General Howard was already on board the Sikorsky. They all wore touristy civilian clothes, and carried assorted sizes and shapes of luggage. The bags were a little heavier than what most tourists would be bringing, but there weren’t any metal detectors to pass through before boarding the choppers, so that didn’t matter.
Everybody in the passenger line was from Net Force. At a different hotel helipad ten minutes away,- another group of Net Force troopers stood in a similar line. Jay had booked them all into two nights, making sure nobody else would be on those particular craft but them. Well, except for the copter crews, and they weren’t going to be a problem, the general had assured him. They didn’t know the passengers were anything other than folks going to gamble. If something unforeseen happened, John had his own pilots who could take over.
It was simple enough. They would fly out to the helicopter barge, take the boat from there to the ship, and infiltrate the ship. It was not a direct assault, it was an undercover operation. By the time security on the ship realized it, it ought to be a done deal. Much less likely there’d be any shooting this way, and less chance of civilians getting wounded by accident. A pretty clever idea, actually.
Though Michaels had planned to stay in Quantico and wait until it was over, Toni’s failure to report wouldn’t
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let him do that. Right up until the last minute, he was hoping she’d call, but she didn’t. And he wasn’t going to let his people and all their hardware go without him, not as long as Toni was on that ship.
It wasn’t politically or tactically smart, but hey, hell with it, he was the boss. At least for now.
The line moved along easily, with a military precision. Michaels had to grin at that. The copter’s crew wouldn’t have any idea their passengers were all part of the same group. Jay’s work had made them appear to be from all over the country, singles, couples, a trio of college friends, no reason to think they were anything other than tourists.
As he climbed the short flight of steps into the craft, Michaels heard two troopers, a man and a woman, talking to each other.
“So, this your first trip to Florida?”
“No, actually, my family used to vacation here when I was a girl. Of course, that was up north, a little town called Destin, near Fort Walton Beach.”