Hidden Agendas nf-2 Page 4

  Why, it must be the schoolmarm.

  Jay relaxed, and reached up and tipped his hat as the woman approached.

  "Howdy, ma'am," he said, in his best cowboy-speak.

  As the buggy drew closer, he could see she was a good-lookin' woman — no, not just good-lookin', she was downright gorgeous, a few stray blond hairs escaping the bonnet, beautiful green eyes—

  Aw, hell. It warn't no schoolmarm, it was—

  Lieutenant Joanna Bimbo Winthrop.

  Damn!

  She pulled the buggy to a stop ten feet short of Jay and smiled. "Well, well. Jay Gridley. Fancy meeting you here." She climbed down from the buggy and stood facing him from a few feet away. Her face went blank for a second.

  Jay knew what she was doing. She was in her own net program and she was re-phasing to allow his to set the joint scenario.

  Her face came back to life and she looked around, seeing now what Jay was seeing.

  "Well, yee-haw, little doggies," she said. She smiled.

  "What are you doing here, Winthrop?"

  "Perhaps this silver bullet will tell you." She held out her hand, and upon it was a shiny handgun cartridge. "Go ahead, bullet, tell him."

  The cartridge was silent.

  "Very funny." Jay wasn't in any mood to be insulted by the likes of Bimbo Winthrop. "And what freeware are you running?"

  "Not freeware, horsie-boy. Something with a little subtlety." She waved at the high desert around them. "And a little complexity."

  Oh, really?

  In the Real World, Jay was sitting in his office chair at HQ, wearing full VR gear, connected to his workstation and the net. In RW, he finger-jived out of his Old West program to let Winthrop's vehicle become the default. In half a second, the VR blinked and reformed into Winthrop's—

  He found himself on the boarding platform at a train station. Winthrop stood across from him, and a passenger train was stopped behind her. Her hair was in a bun, tucked under a wide-brimmed hat, and she wore a long, dark cloth coat over an ankle-length gray wool dress. From her clothes and the style of the train, he guessed it was late nineteenth or maybe early twentieth century. A sign on the station to his left said "Klamath Falls." It was winter, the air crisp and cold, and fresh snow was six inches deep on the ground, with higher drifts piled up outside the roofed platform. Passengers boarded the train, the women in long dresses and coats and hats, the men mostly in suits, hats, and overcoats. There were a few working-class souls mixed in among the more affluent passengers, wearing caps and jackets and workboots. A big pale guy who looked like a bodybuilder in a tan duster stopped to help an old lady lift her bag onto the train. A little girl ran by, trailed by a dog. It looked like a setter or a retriever of some kind. The smell of coal smoke hung heavy in the air, mixed with the dregs of cooling steam… and just a hint of unwashed body odor.

  People hadn't bathed every day back when. That was a nice touch.

  And looking around, he saw she had done a pretty clean job on the scenario. No gray areas, no sketchy backgrounds, plenty of detail, even to the wood grain in the fir posts supporting the platform roof.

  He looked at himself and saw he wore a three-piece gray wool suit and black-leather dress shoes. A gold pocket-watch chain draped across the vest. He saw a slip of colored paper in one of the vest's pockets and removed it. A train ticket. He could read every word on it, down to the fine print. A very nice touch, that.

  Well, okay, he had to admit it, this was a first-class piece of work.

  He didn't have to admit that to her, however.

  "All abooard!" the conductor yelled.

  "Well?" she said.

  "It's a little busy," he said. "I prefer mine." He overrode her program, and half a second later was back standing in the desert next to Buck, looking at her and the buggy.

  "What do you want?" he asked her.

  "I was looking for you. We're going to be working together, whether either one of us wants to or not. I know you don't like me, and you're not on my top-one-hundred list either. But I'm a professional, I can get around that."

  "Meaning I can't?"

  "No, Gridley, meaning exactly what I said. This isn't about who is the better programmer, it is about getting the assignment done. Commander Michaels wants me on the project, I'm on it. We don't have to hold hands and walk through the spring meadows, but we also don't have to get in each other's way, can we agree to that?"

  Jay looked at his horse. He could see why cowboys spent so much time on the trail. Women, especially pretty women, tended to complicate things. He knew he was a better programmer. He hadn't gotten any doors opened because of his looks, and he was damned sure Winthrop had. But he sighed and nodded. "All right. We can stay out of each other's way."

  "If I come up with something before you do, I'll pass it along."

  "Fat chance of that," Jay said. It was under his breath, however.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Nothing. I'll do the same for you."

  She said something he didn't catch.

  "Pardon?"

  "Nothing," she said. "I'll leave you to your scenario."

  She climbed back into her buggy and snapped the reins over the big mare's back. "Giddyap," she said. She waved as she drove away from town.

  Jay watched her go. The horse whinnied.

  "Yeah, pal, my sentiments exactly," Jay said. "Come on, we got bidness in town, Buck old boy."

  Jay put his left foot into the stirrup and mounted up.

  They moseyed toward town.

  Saturday, December 15th. 11:45 a.m. Chevy Chase, Maryland

  Hughes had his virgil — his Virtual Global Interface Link — in the limo, but he didn't want to use it to call Plait. Supposedly, the telephone signal was binary-encoded and nobody could understand him if he used the phone in the virgil, but he didn't trust it. It was a great toy, about the size of an electric shaver, and in addition to the phone it had in it a GPS, clock, radio, TV, modem, credit chip, camera, scanner, and even a fax. Of course, if he hadn't been White's chief of staff, he wouldn't have access to such a device. He couldn't have afforded it, and likely couldn't have gotten on the list to get one even if he had saved up the money.

  There was a pay phone just ahead, a landline, and as random as any. He directed his driver to pull over.

  It was cold out, a damp wind blowing, and the sky had that dark, heavy, nacreous gleam of snow clouds about to let go. Hughes stepped into the graffiti-covered clear-plastic paneled booth and pulled the door shut. He set the phone for vox-only, no vid, slipped the one-time throwaway scrambler over the mouthpiece, tapped in the number, let it ring once, then hung up. Platt had the gear to trace the number on his end, and also a matching scrambler. Nobody was going to decode their conversation.

  Thirty seconds later, the phone rang. Unless it was a very large coincidence, that would be Platt.

  "Yes," Hughes said.

  "Hey," Platt said. He managed to shoehorn a whole lot of southern Georgia into that one drawn-out word.

  "Okay, what's the situation?"

  "Well, we got us a little problem there. Seems the Lord High Ooga-Booga wants to see you face-to-face ‘fore he seals the deal."

  "Not possible. I sent you to be my representative."

  "What I told El Presidente Sambo, but he ain't listenin', it's some kind of native thing. You know how these darkies are, it's always somethin'."

  Hughes ground his teeth together. Platt was a cracker, a racist, and probably a member in good standing of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan and the Sons of the Confederate Veterans. Sending him to Guinea-Bissau, a little dirt-poor tropical country on the North Atlantic coast of west Africa shoehorned in between Guinea and Senegal, was an invitation to disaster. Platt was so white he gleamed, and ninety-nine percent of the population in Guinea-Bissau was black; worse, they spoke Portuguese or Criola, or French, plus a slew of African languages with names like Pajadinka, Gola, Bigola, and the like. As far as he knew, Platt didn't have any foreign languages. He had trou
ble enough making himself clear in English past that Georgia cane syrup of his, but somehow he always managed. Being six and a half feet tall with a build like Hercules probably helped — people tended to be polite to Platt even if they didn't like him. And while he was crude, he wasn't stupid. He liked to play the good old boy and let people think that was all there was to him, but he knew his way around computers, from laptops to extended mainframes, he could shoot any weapon capable of firing, and fix a computer or a gun if either of them broke.

  "Anyway, what El Presidente said was, you don't come and set down for a little chat, it's nooo deal."

  Damn! Hughes fumbled for his electronic calendar, punched up the month of January, and looked at it. It would be tricky. He'd have to come up with some kind of hurry-up junket not too far away, then sneak into the country. He had a couple of passports and visas he could use. It was a bitch, and it wasn't going to be cheap, but it was doable. He said, "All right. Tell President Domingos I will be there on… January 13th. That's a Thursday."

  "Thursday, the 13th. I got it."

  "And you come to Washington. I have other business for you."

  "Washington." That came out as "Warsh-ing-ton."

  "Shoot, there's almost as many jigs there as there are here. You know what else? There ain't but four thousand telephones in this whole country. They still use drums, I reckon. You know, the natives are restless? And uppity too. I get one more buck staring at me, I'mon put the hurt on him."

  "Don't kill anybody."

  Platt laughed. "Me? Shoot, I ain' gone kill nobody. I'mon just knock a few ub'm off the sidewalks." He laughed again, a gravely, raucous noise. "Only thing is, they ain't got no sidewalks most places here. I guess I can wait to do that in Washington."

  "Just come back. What about the leaks?"

  "I got the next one on a timer. Set to go off bright and early Monday morning, matter of fact."

  "Good. Good-bye."

  Hughes uncapped the phone's mouthpiece and dropped the scrambler into his pocket. Jesus. Platt was a lunatic, probably psychotic and sociopathic, and a sharp and dangerous tool. Necessary, but just as apt to cut the hand that held it as anything. Hughes would have to be careful, and pretty soon he would have to figure out a way to make Platt… go away. For good.

  Hughes opened the phone booth's door. A blast of cold wind hit him, raising chills on his neck. He could smell the snow coming. Better get back to the city before it turned the roads into parking lots.

  He nodded at the driver as he got back into the limo. "Let's go home."

  Chapter Five

  Monday, December 20th, 8:55 a.m. Washington, D.C.

  The invisible green-eyed demon had its claws sunk deep in Tyrone Howard's back, and it hurt like he wouldn't have believed only a couple of months ago. He felt sick to his stomach, he wanted to throw up, scream, or punch somebody — maybe do all three at once — and none of these were viable options. The students at Eisenhower Middle School were used to seeing some weird things in the dingy green halls, but a thirteen-year-old boy running amok in a jealous rage was not one of them.

  The reason for Tyrone's pain stood thirty feet away, smiling up at the quarterback of the football team, one large and muscular Jefferson Benson. Belladonna Wright was a year older than Tyrone and, without a doubt, the most gorgeous young woman in D.C. On the East Coast. Maybe in the whole world. And since he had done her a favor by helping her pass her computer class, they had spent a little time together. She had more or less ditched her old boyfriend, Herbie "Bonebreaker" LeMott, who was in high school and the captain of the wrestling team. Since then, she and Tyrone had gone to the mall, had done VR, and had sat in her bedroom and kissed until he thought he was going to explode. He was absolutely, totally, triple-back-somersault-in-a-full-layout in love with Bella. And there she stood, in her microskirt and halter top and squeegee slope-plats, talking to another man. Smiling at him. At a man who could tie Tyrone into a square knot and shotput him fifty feet without breaking a sweat. All Tyrone had going for him was his brain, and while the mind might be mightier than muscle in the long run, in a face-to-face matchup, the guy with the muscle would pound you into a breaded cutlet if all you could wave at him was your brain.

  "Uh-oh. Looks like trrrrouble in paradise," came the voice from behind him.

  Tyrone wasn't looking directly at Bella. He was using his peripheral vision as he stood fiddling with the door to his locker. He didn't have to look at the speaker — it was James Joseph Hatfield, a hillbilly from West Virginia who had such bad eyes he couldn't even wear contacts, and thus went around peering through thick plastic lenses that made him look like a giant white hoot owl.

  "Shut up, Jimmy-Joe."

  "Hey, nopraw, rider, she's just talkin' to him, not fishin' for his trouser eel—"

  Tyrone turned to glare atomic bombs at his best friend.

  "All right, all right, be cool, fool," Jimmy-Joe said. "But think about it, bro. If she wanted a big dumb jock, she'd still be with Bonebreaker, right? I mean, he makes Benson look like a shrimp."

  And Benson made Tyrone look like a microbe. "Yeah. Maybe."

  "Go slowmo, Joe, you worry too much." Jimmy-Joe slapped Tyrone on the back.

  As Tyrone watched peripherally, pretending not to, the large and muscular Jefferson Benson turned and headed down the hall, moving in that oiled-ball-bearing rolling walk of his. People moved aside to let him pass.

  Bella looked up, saw Tyrone and Jimmy-Joe. She smiled and waved. "Hey, Ty!"

  Tyrone's sick feeling lifted when he saw her smile at him. He felt like Atlas must have felt when Hercules took the world from him. All of sudden, life was wonderful. He could sing, he could dance, he could float like a cloud.

  Bella came toward him. People stopped to watch her. Queen of the Hall, she swayed like a palm tree in a tropical breeze as she walked. His heart pounded like native drums in Tyrone's head. Man—!

  She stopped in front of him. "I'm going to the mall after school, if it doesn't snow again," she said. "You going?"

  "Oh, yeah," Tyrone said. "I planned to."

  "Exemplary, Ty. See you at the Shop."

  Bella flashed her perfect smile again, patted him on the shoulder once, then left. Tyrone watched her go, a man in a trance, unable to look away. His shoulder was hot where she'd touched him.

  "Calls you Ty. Puts her hand on you. Slip, you are about as DFF as it gets," Jimmy-Joe said. "Data flowin' fine."

  Tyrone grinned. Yes, yes, that was true. Life didn't get much better, did it? How could it? The most beautiful woman in the world had just arranged to meet him instead of the football thud. It was absolutely amazing, was what it was. Amazing. Wonderful—

  "So, how's the upgrade goin'?"

  Tyrone watched Bella round the corner and vanish from view. He savored the memory of her from behind.

  "Hel-lo? Mission Control to Deep Space Vessel Tyrone, do you copy?" He made the sound of a staticky radio. "Come in, DSV Ty…"

  Tyrone shook off the trance. Jimmy-Joe was asking about the revision to the netgame he'd built and posted, DinoWarz. "Oh, that. I haven't had much time to work on it."

  "Haven't had time? You are feekin' me, right?"

  "No feek," Tyrone said. He had been spending every spare minute he could scrounge with Bella. And when he wasn't with her, he was thinking about her. Dreaming about her.

  Lusting after her…

  "Rider, you are stalled out!"

  "It's just a game," Tyrone said.

  Jimmy-Joe stared at him as if Tyrone had just morphed into a giant roach and started doing a demented jitterbug.

  "Just a game? Just a game? You got a testosterone short in your cerebrum, chum."

  The bell for class rang, and Jimmy-Joe walked off, shaking his head. "I will see you later, slip."

  Tyrone stared at his friend. He didn't understand. Games were fine, but how could a game compare to holding hands with Belladonna Wright? To kissing those warm and magical lips. To putting his hands on those warm a
nd—

  Don't follow that thread, Tyrone. Not here and now.

  A video game? Even a VR full-flex, compare with Bella? It couldn't. No way.

  He hurried toward his own first-period class. And he was going to the mall after school, dupe that to the eighth power.

  Monday, December 20th, 9:05 a.m. Quantico, Virginia

  Julio Fernandez looked at the holoprojection floating in the air behind the instructor. The image was a series of mathematical equations interspersed with pictures of what appeared to be an old-fashioned paper theater ticket, a crumbly cookie, and a heavy metal safe with a big mechanical tumbler lock dial. Remedial computer imagery for dumbots.

  The instructor said, "All right, who can tell me what the phrase ‘security through obscurity' means?"

  Fernandez stared down at the screen built into the top of his desk. Pick somebody else, he thought. There were fifteen people in the computer programming class, so the odds weren't that bad that the dipwit teacher would call on one of his classmates, except that the dipwit seemed, for some reason, to have it in for Fernandez. The teacher's name was Horowitz. He was maybe twenty-four, short, dumpy, wore frazzled suits, had acne, and his face always looked as if he had a painful rash on his private parts. Horowitz also looked as if he would rather be scratching that rash naked in public than suffering through this class, and Fernandez knew how that felt. If there was any other way, he wouldn't be here either. At least the man was a civilian and not — thank God — an officer.

  That the classroom smelled like old sweat long gone sour didn't help.

  Of course, he could have downloaded all the lectures and texts for this class and studied them at home on his own. Nobody was holding a gun to his head and making him attend. Most of the other students were new feebs — FBI Academy students — and this class was mandatory for them, though more a matter of form than anything. They were all college grads, most of ‘em law school grads too, and this dinky little access course was a snoozer they could pass in their sleep.

  Not so for Sergeant Julio Fernandez, whose computer literacy was right up there with his knowledge of quantum mechanics, or the mating habits of great blue whales, which was to say, very lame on his best day. He'd tried absorbing the stuff on his own, and it slid out of his mind as if his brain were made of solid Teflon. He'd hoped that listening to the teacher and having other students ask questions and offer answers would somehow help, but so far, after three sessions, it hadn't done much to advance his knowledge of the subject, which he hated, but which he needed to know. When it came to using his hands or his weapons, Fernandez didn't give away anything to anybody. He could set up camp in a jungle or a desert and live off the land, but when it came to anything past button-punching a computer, he was dense, and that wasn't good for a Net Force man—