Time to leave the party, Jay, he thought. He turned to sprint away, but three more Shawnees materialized ahead of him.
Hmm. Another trap. How interesting.
One of the Shawnee chanted something. Probably something like, “Say your prayers, round eyes, you’re a dead man!” but Jay shook his head.
“Not this time, pal,” he said.
He dropped his long rifle, tore open his buckskin shirt to reveal a Kevlar and spider silk vest, along with an Uzi slung from a strap under his armpit. He pulled the black subgun out and pointed it at the three Shawnee in front of him. “Rock ’n’ roll!” he yelled. “Rock ’n’ roll—!”
He pulled the Uzi’s trigger. Thirty-odd rounds of jacketed 9mm bullets spewed. The air filled with smoke and noise. At this range, it was hard to miss. He waved the gun like a water hose—
The soft lead bullet from the Shawnee’s rifle whacked him square in the middle of his back. He felt it flatten against the vest, sting, but do no damage—
By the time he spun to attend to the other three, the extra-long fifty-round magazine was running low, so he limited himself to five-round bursts: Braaaap! Braaap! Braaap!
He held the final burst down, and stitched the sixth very surprised Indian across the thighs. The last ambusher fell; unlike the other five, he was down, but not dead.
The woods got very quiet after the angry roar of the submachine gun.
God bless the Israelis and their dependable technology.
He held the muzzle of the subgun up in front of his face and blew away the thin tendril of smoke rising from the hot barrel.
“How’d you like them apples, pard?”
He moved toward the wounded Shawnee. He had a few questions to ask him, and if he hurried he might get an answer before his opponent realized what was going on…
“Son of a bitch,” Jackson Keller said. He grinned. “So you haven’t lost all your moves after all, Jay. Good for you.”
He looked at the holoprojic recording floating above his console. The packet Jay had managed to snag wasn’t going to take him anywhere useful, but it was surprising he had managed to avoid the scenario-destroying trap like that.
Well. Maybe it shouldn’t have been so surprising. At his peak, back in their college days, Jay had been sharp, as sharp as anybody. They had run with CIT’s and MIT’s best. It wasn’t unreasonable that some small part of his edge wasn’t completely dull. That just made it more interesting, didn’t it?
So he avoided a trap. No big deal. The next one would be better. He reached for his sensor set. Let’s play, Jay. Show me what you got…
His com chirped. He was tempted to ignore it and jack back into VR, but he glanced at the ID sig. Better get that.
“Hey,” he said.
Jasmine said, “Hey. Listen, there’s something you ought to know, just FYI.”
“Sure, shoot.”
“It seems that Roberto has, ah… found out that you and I have been… intimate.”
Keller both felt and heard himself take a deep breath. And his belly knotted as if somebody had stabbed him in it with a shard of dry ice. “Excuse me? How did that happen?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t say anything.”
“Well, I sure as hell didn’t.”
“It’s not anything to worry about.”
Not anything to worry about? Santos killed people with his bare hands! Keller had heard the story of the two militia guys at the site of the telephone cable cut. About the ex-FBI bodyguards for the Blue Whale veep. They’d all been trained, they’d all had guns and that hadn’t mattered! He’d killed five people, bap, just like that! And there had been others…
He knew it had been a mistake to sleep with her. Good as she was, it had been a mistake.
He tried to keep his voice calm. He should have expected this. It was a big boat, but not that big. They weren’t invisible. “Oh. Really.”
“He’s part of the team. He doesn’t want to screw that up, he’s making way too much money — he knows I’d fire him if he hurt you.”
Well, wasn’t that comforting! I’m dead, but he’s fired?
He didn’t say anything.
“Anyway, that’s it. I’ll be sending him on a little chore later today. We can… talk about it more when he’s gone.”
He blinked at the frozen holoproj over his computer. Was she saying what he thought she was saying? That once Santos was off the ship, they’d get back into the sack together? Was she that stupid?
Was he?
Careful there, Jacko. Pissing off The Dragon Lady might be worse than pissing off the stone killer!
He mumbled something, and she discommed.
His heart was definitely beating faster, and his breathing was rapid and unsteady, too. All of a sudden, this little intellectual match with Jay Gridley didn’t seem anywhere near as interesting and fun as it had only a few minutes ago.
A man who looked like he was chiseled out of granite, who killed people without batting an eye, a man with old ideas of machismo, had found out Keller was sleeping with his woman. How the hell was Keller supposed to just smile and shrug that off?
He forced himself to breathe slower. Maybe she was right. Maybe Santos was too smart to cause any problems. They were all getting rich off this project, and they stood to get a whole lot richer once their shares started really appreciating in value. He wouldn’t want to screw that up over a woman. Santos was not that stupid.
But Keller wasn’t sure about that. Not sure enough to bet his life on it.
Michaels surreptitiously glanced at his watch. Next to him, Tommy Bender, the Net Force lawyer, caught the look and squelched a smile.
The senate subcommittee room was hot and stuffy. There were no windows. The senators were talking for the camera again. One of the senators got up and walked away, as a second returned to his seat on the dais. They came and went like a roomful of small children who had drunk too much lemonade. One would go, another would return. There was more motion from the subcommittee than a soccer team playing a match. Michaels couldn’t leave to stretch or get a drink of water, though. He had to sit here at the table looking up at the sometimes-six, sometimes-eight, sometimes-five of them milling back and forth like somnolent sheep. Already it had been two hours, and there were no signs of an end in sight.
Senator Theresa Genaloni, from the great state of New Jersey, made her obscure point about the dangers of invading citizens’ privacy, and finally shut up. This hearing didn’t have anything to do with on-line privacy per se, but she was the junior senator from her state, her party was in the minority, and this pissant committee was hardly Ways and Means, so she had to make her points where and how she could. Otherwise, how would the folks back home know she was on the job? She certainly wasn’t delivering jobs in their direction, nor much in the way of pork-barrel spending.
Stewart George Jackson, the once red-haired but now mostly bald and gray junior senator from the great state of Arkansas, took over the microphone. Jackson liked to be called “Stonewall,” after the Southern Civil War hero. He was usually called “SJ” by his staff. While these were his initials, somebody had told Michaels that they also stood for “Strawberry Jell-O,” due to his extremely flexible ethics. Jackson had all the backbone of a baby squid. He’d sometimes switch sides on an issue faster than a speeding bullet. General Jackson must be spinning in his grave like an atomic-powered gyroscope every time somebody called Jell-O “Stonewall.”