Roberto was there when Chance arrived.
“What do you have for me?” he asked.
She smiled. “Keep your shirt on, bucko. Don’t be so eager.”
“That’s not what you usually tell me.”
She allowed herself a tiny smile. “We have on board tonight Mr. Ethan Dowling, of Silicon Valley. He’s doing fairly well at the tables, up about five or six thousand dollars at the moment. He is also VP of Programming for Blue Whale Systems. We need to know everything he knows about the security codes for his company.”
“No problem.”
“Well, that’s not strictly true. First, we can’t do it here. You’ll have to follow him and grab him elsewhere. His chopper will ferry him to the airport in Miami, where he
47
CYBERNATION
| has a corporate jet waiting to take him to San Francisco. |We want him to be on the Mainland, and preferably back feon the West Coast, when this goes down.”
“Still no problem.”
She handed him a holograph of Dowling. He looked at it, nodded.
“He has a pair of armed security guards with him. They are ex-FBI, expert shots, big, strong, and well-trained in mono a mono combat, too.” She gave him two more pictures, and he glanced at them.
“Only two of them?” He flashed his white teeth in a big grin.
“God, you’re an arrogant bastard, aren’t you?”
He shrugged, still grinning. “Why they call it ‘Blue Whale?'”
“Because that particular creature has the largest backbone of any animal on Earth. His company is a backbone server, and if not the largest, quickly getting there.”
‘
*i I “What are you smiling at?”
|4L; “You. You’re so cute.” What he was thinking was, :œ’!&ere / can, a grown man, talking about baby poop with H”y wife. Isn’t life strange?
He heard a thin squawk in the background. Toni said, Gotta go. He’s waking up. You gonna be late?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll order in Thai tonight, that okay?”
“Great.”
50
NET FORCE
The baby’s I’m-awake-cry grew louder as Toni broke the connection. Michaels smiled. Whatever was going on with work, life wasn’t so bad. The first time he’d become a father, he’d spent way too much time away from home. That had cost him his marriage, but it wasn’t all bad. Susie would always be his little girl, and he’d never have gotten together with Toni if he and Megan hadn’t split. His ex had remarried, she had a new baby boy, Leonard, and her husband was a decent guy.
Sometimes, things worked out for the best, though it didn’t seem like they would at the time. He couldn’t complain.
6
mr:-
K Grot-Fat Tuesday 1970 i Orleans, Louisiana
evening was warm, the smells of too many sweaty and too many spilled beers heavy in the damp air l Jay wandered into a bar named Curly’s on Canal Street, ; outside the mobbed French Quarter. The floats were t rolling, various krewes throwing beads and coins and dy to the crowds packed shoulder-to-shoulder next to streets, and the volume was turned way up. H’Not that the bar was quiet or empty, far from it-but the patrons weren’t throwing hurricane glasses Pat O’Brian’s at each other, and they all had their on. A fair number of them were sailors, dressed r whites, and while the atmosphere was festive, it n’t quite as manic as the bars on Bourbon Street in Quarter had been. ‘Even though it was 1970, there weren’t a lot of long- hippie types in here. The sixties came late to the , and a sailor’s bar was probably not the best place find the counterculture in any event.
52
NET FORCE
Tomorrow was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, and the party would be over as good Catholics gave all this up-until next year, anyway.
Jay found an empty stool at the bar and slid onto it. The bartender, a woman of maybe thirty, with dishwater blonde hair and a harried look, spotted him.
“What can I get you, mister?”
“Beer.”
She nodded, reached into the cooler, came up with a cold can of Jax, opened it, and slid it to Jay.
In his research for the scenario, Jay had learned that Jax was a local brew, and there was a rumor (which was ‘untrue) that the water they used in making it was drawn straight out of the Mississippi River, passed through a strainer no finer than needed to keep the crawfish out, and mixed with the other ingredients just like that. Given that there was a major petrochemical complex eighty miles upriver that used arid discharged a lot of the water, and this was just before the days of OSHA and the EPA looking over everybody’s shoulder, the river would have been pretty vile for a whole lot of reasons. According to the locals, it was like the old saw about only mad dogs and Englishmen going out into the noonday sun, only in this case, only mad dogs would drink the water in New Orleans. They said that fishing was easy at night up over the levee, because the fish all glowed in the dark…