Plait matched the smile. Oh, this was going to be fun.
Monday, December 20th, 10:20 a.m.
Quantico, Virginia Alex Michaels sat at his desk, looking over the latest computer mail to jump into his electronic in-box. Came in every half hour, the mail business, faster if it was flagged, and there was always bar some fresh crisis that Net Force had to take care of or the country would go to hell in a hand basket.
He scanned the latest batch and scrolled through them: bar Somebody had stolen a couple million dollars worth of In Bid’s Super Pent wet light chips from a plant in Aloha, Oregon.
There was a name for you, Aloha. Town’s founder must have spent a pleasant time in Hawaii. The chips were small enough that they could all fit neatly into a shirt pocket without 1 caret causing the pocket to sag, and good luck on finding those “”before they made their way to Seoul to be restamped and installed.
Next item… Stanley the Scammer had opened a new VR store, once” again selling porno. There was no product, past the handful of public-domain teaser j-pegs and Quick Time VR’S he used to sucker his customers in to buy.
He took their electronic money, promised to send them a bunch of nasty stuff, then shut the VR shop down and shifted to a new location.
They had busted Stanley a couple of times, always in New York City.
Stanley would rent a cheap flophouse room with a plug and phone, hook his computer up, run his scam, and usually skip before the local cops got there. While he wasn’t moving across state lines himself, his victims were from all over, so it was Net Force’s problem. And it was compounded by the fact that most people who got ripped off buying pornography didn’t particularly want the proper authorities to know that was what they were doing, so most of the customers ate the loss and kept quiet about it. Explaining to the wife that you lost a hundred dollars trying to get a copy of the “Daria Does Detroit’ VR was some thing most men wanted to avoid. The wife might get curious about all that time hubby was spending in his workshop with the door closed.
Stanley’s was a classic scam, and the reason most confidence men who were any good could continue to pull off their games was that they appealed to the illegal or immoral in people, made them partners in the sting. A guy worried that he was doing some thing wrong was hesitant to run to the police to complain when he got cheated.
Of course, there was always somebody who cared more about their money than their reputation, and so some sucker always reported Stanley.
The main problem was that there were dozens, scores, hundreds of small-time thieves like Stanley, and anytime they ripped off somebody computronically across a state line, Net Force heard about it.
Michaels shook his head and scrolled the proj: Here was a report of a money transfer gone bad at a small’ bank in South Dakota. Some enterprising cyberstealer had siphoned a couple hundred thousand into his account during a series of fast e-shifts. The Feds’ safeguards had caught it, albeit a bit late, and the money was quickly recovered, but they still had to catch the thief, who had run in a hurry, and figure out how he had managed to slip the federal wards even as long as he had.
It had been an inside job–the thief worked as an auditor for the bank.
It almost always was an inside job, given how good the Federal Reserve kept track of money these days.
What else did they have here?
“Sir,” Liza broke in, over the comm.
“I’ve got Don Segal from the CIA on the hot line. He says it’s an emergency!” Michaels smiled at his secretary’s excitement. Most emergencies didn’t turn out to be all that exciting.
“I’ll take it,” he said.
“Hello, Don.” Segal was the AD for foreign intel gathering, a nice guy whose wife had just given birth to their : third child, a boy.
“Alex. We’ve got a big problem.” “I’ve got to appear before White’s committee tomorrow backslash morning” Michaels said.
“Bad as that?” “I’m serious here, Alex. Somebody just posted to the net a be list of all our sub-rosa opsin the Euro-Asian theaters.” “Jesus!” “Yeah. Every American spy in Europe, Russia. China. Japan, Korea–all of them have just been outed. State is crap ping big octagonal bricks.
A lot of the ops are in supposedly friendly countries, our allies.
That’s going to cost us some favors and a lot of mea culpas, but we’ve also got agents in places where they’ll get shot first and questioned later. We’ve put out a total recall, but some of them aren’t going to get out before they get picked up.” “Damn,” Michaels said.
“Yeah. Damn. And think about it–if he got Europe and Asia, who’s to say he didn’t get the Middle East, Africa, or South America?” Michaels couldn’t even speak.
“Damn” wouldn’t begin to cover it.
“We got to find this guy, Alex.” “Yeah.”
Chapter 7 Monday, December 20th, 10:25 a.m.
Quantico, Virginia Joanna Winthrop washed her hands, reached for the paper towel dispenser, and looked at her reflection in the large mirror over the sink in the women’s restroom.
She shook her head at her doppelganger.
All of her life people had told her how beautiful she was, men–both young and old–and more than a few women, but she still didn’t see it. She had learned how to pretend to ignore the stares, but people still stopped her on the street, strangers, to tell her how attractive she was. It was flattering. It was inter esting.
It got in her way.
And it was a mystery to Winthrop. She had a sister, Diane, who truly was beautiful, and next to whom she had always felt dowdy. Her mother at fifty was a knockout, and her smile wrinkles and gray hair only served to accent her perfect bone structure and muscle tone. True, Joanna wasn’t ugly, but of the Winthrop women, she was a distant third insofar as looks were concerned.
In her opinion.
Of course, that wasn’t what most other people seemed to think. It had been a mixed blessing all of her life. Sure, it had been fun to be invited to all the parties when she’d been a kid, to always be at the top of everybody’s lists, to be popular and sought-after. She had accepted it as the norm. never questioned it–until she looked up one day and realized that most people considered her nothing more than a. decoration. All she had to do was stand there, smile, and be pretty, be an ornament, and that was enough for them. It wasn’t enough for her, it wasn’t anything she had done –nothing she had earned, she’d been born that way.
Who could take credit for that?
Boys were tongue-tied in her presence, but they lined up for the chance to be fumble-mouthed, and eventually she realized that to most of them, she wasn’t a real person, but a trophy–to be pursued, captured, then displayed. Looky here, guys, look what’s hanging onto my arm. Don’t you wish she was yours?
She was smart, she did well in school, stacked up well against objective academic standards, but nobody seemed to care about that. Being pretty was more important than being smart to everybody. Everybody except Joanna Winthrop.
Being pretty got old. Too many people couldn’t see past it–or didn’t want to see past it.
She tossed the damp paper towel into the trash can and glanced back at the mirror again. The first boy she’d slept with, at seventeen, had been the president of the science club, not any of the dozens of jocks who had chased her. He was intelligent, soft-spoken, and handsome, in a consumptive dying-poet kind of way. A sensitive, caring, bright young man who respected her for her mind. That was what she had thought.
He’d bragged about sleeping with her to his friends the next day. So much for his sensitivity, his caring, his respect for her mind. It had broken her heart.
Most of the girls she knew were jealous of her looks, especially the pretty ones, and they were resentful and catty. Her only real friend in school had been Maudic Van Buren, who had been plain, fifty pounds overweight, and addicted to black sweat suits and running shoes. Maudie didn’t care about looks–hers, Joanna’s, anybody’s–and she didn’t understand why Joanna was so upset about being popular. She’d love to be on anybody’s list for anything, she always said.
They’d gone off to different universities, Winthrop to MIT, Van Buren to UCLA. But they kept in touch. And each year, they got together for a week at Maudie’s uncle’s mountain cabin outside Boulder, Colorado.
During the break between their junior and senior terms, they had managed one of their best ever conversations. Maudie had gone on a diet, started working out, and in six months had dropped her excess weight, tightened up, and emerged from her sweatsuitfat-chrysalis stage as a slender–and beautiful–butterfly.