Net Force - Tom Clancy [38]
Hey, Tyrone!
The kid looked over and grinned, showing bright and even teeth. Hey, Jay Gee! Whatre you doin here?
Looking for trouble.
Im with that program!
Yo, theres a truck stop up ahead on the right. You want to pull over and have a cup of coffee? I need to ask you something.
Sure, nopraw, Jay.
The kid goosed the bike and leaned into the wind, the airstream ruffling his clothes and even his tight curly hair. He pulled away, and Gridley let him get ahead.
Nopraw? Jay considered it for a moment. Ah. No problem.
He wasnt that old, but the cutting edge was always moving, and he knew he wasnt on it anymore. The slangspeak hot when he was a kid was ancient history to somebody Tyrones age. Nopraw would be like his Sweat not, or his fathers No probleemo, Batman. The language shifted, changed and sometimes, circled around completely. Cool became hot became bad became groovy became cool again. No way you could keep up.
He was twenty-eight, but talking to a kid like Tyrone made him feel like a pile of dinosaur bones. He shook his head.
Then again, kids who rode the net seriously saw and heard things that adults missed, and Gridley wanted to use every resource he could get his hands on. This was about getting the job done, not about who lifted what.
He put his blinker on and pulled into the exit lane. If things kept going the way they were, by the time Tyrone was Gridleys age, hed be doing stuff that would make this look like stick figures carved into stone.
12
Sunday, September 19th, 10:45 p.m. Washington, D.C.
It was a quiet Sunday evening, the fall air still warm and sticky with humidity. Alexander Michaelss condo was dark, save for a light in an upstairs bedroom. A plain-vanilla, government-issue, black-tire fedmobile with two FBI agents in it sat parked at the curb across the street. They werent trying to hide, and that was good, because they might as well have a big flashing red neon sign mounted on the cars top announcing they were who they were: Cops! Cops! Cops!
The two men in the car listened to a radio playing country music at a low volume, and played chess using a small magnetic board mounted on the dash. Now and then, one of them would glance at Michaelss place, or up and down the street, checking auto or foot traffic.
There werent many cars or pedestrians at this hour in this neighborhood on a Sunday. Most of the people in these houses had to get up and go into the office on Monday morning; most of them were home by now, watching TV or reading or doing whatever else upper-middle-class people did behind their walls when tomorrow was a workday.
How odd it must be, to have to get up and go to a real job every day. She wondered how people did it-worked at places where they hated what they did, for people they could barely stand. How could you make yourself spend your life without any joy, any passion, any real satisfaction? Millions did it-billions did it-but it was beyond her. Shed rather be dead than forced to endure the mundane lives most people led. What was the point?
A Mercury Protection Systems neighborhood patrol car rolled slowly down the street. The uniformed driver in the vehicle-offering Fast Armed Response, according to the door logos-nodded at the two FBI men as he cruised past them. They nodded back.
A quiet residential street. Nothing out of the ordinary. Moms and pops and two-point-three rugrats, dogs, cats, mortgages, unending blandness. Everything in its proper, boring, dull place.
Well. One thing was not quite as it seemed
The Selkie walked along the sidewalk approaching Michaelss condo. The condo was on the west side of the road, and she was eighty yards shy of it, moving slowly north. She had already examined the agents car with a twelve-power spookeye monocular. The tiny starlight scope was state-of-the-art Israeli issue, made at the Bethlehem Electronics plant. The scope had excellent optics, and offered a good view of the chess-players from a distance where they couldnt possibly see her without using scopes of their own.
The shotgun mike in her purse-a product