He smiled. So far, so good . . .
She drove them to a little Italian place maybe a mile away from the music store. Dino’s was one of those checkered-tablecloths, candles-in-wine-bottles kind of cafes, ten tables, most of them full. The guy at the front, a good-looking dark-haired kid of maybe twenty, smiled at Jen when he saw her come in. “Ah, Miss Jennifer, how are you this night?”
“Fine, Gino. Got room for two?”
“We do.” He collected a couple of menus and led them to a small table in a dark corner. “Pasta with clam sauce is the special tonight. Enjoy.”
Before they could do more than sit, a busboy brought glasses of water, a basket of garlic bread, and a bottle of red wine with two glasses.
Kent noted the unasked-for wine as he picked up the menu. “What’s good?”
“Pick anything—never had a bad meal here. I come in once or twice a week. Gino’s father is the cook, his mother the cashier, and there are a couple of sisters who work here.”
The waitress, a young woman who was indeed obviously related to Gino, arrived. “Good evening, Miss Jen.”
“Hey, Maria. This is General Abe Kent, one of my students.”
The young woman smiled at Kent. “Ah, welcome to Dino’s, Generale.”
Jen ordered the special, and Abe asked for spaghetti with meat sauce. After Maria left, he took a bite of the bread as Jen poured them each a glass of the house red. Both the bread and wine were excellent. “How did you know I was a general?”
“I have a computer and access to the Internet,” she said. “I looked you up.”
“Ah.”>
“Ah?”
“Well, I looked you up, too. You never mentioned that you had a couple of music CDs out.”
“It’s been a couple years since I did one of those. Old glory.”
“I enjoyed hearing them. I knew you played well, but those were very nicely done.”
She shrugged. “I’m no Ana Vidovic,” she said. “If you get a chance to hear her Prelude to Bach’s Fourth Lute Suite? Best version out there in the last twenty years, for my money, even if it is a little showpiece fast. But now and then, I have my moments.”
She sipped at her wine and looked at him over the rim. The candlelight sparkled in her eyes. “So, we have checked each other out.”
“So it seems.”
“To what end, General Kent?”
“Well, right now, dinner.”
She smiled, large and lazy. “And after dinner? Would you like to come back to my place?”
He paused and took a slow sip of his wine. He had been out of this game for a long, long time.
“Yes, ma’am, I would be honored.”
She smiled at him again.
They drank more wine.
Washington, D.C.
Saji was holding the baby on her lap when Jay got home, rocking him in the creaking wooden chair. It had been a long day, and the traffic had been horrendous. The President had gone to some kind of function and they had shut down so many streets that it had taken Jay an hour and a half to drive home. He was really going to have to start doing more web-commuting. As soon as he could get out of having to do RT visits to the damned Pentagon . . .
“Hey, babe,” he said.
“Hi.”
“You okay? You look tired.”
“No, I’m fine.” There was a long pause. “You got a call a few minutes ago, from a Captain Rachel Lewis.”
Jay felt his stomach clutch. Why was she calling him at home?
“She wants you to call her back as soon as possible. She said it was important.”
“Yeah, sure.” If it was so important, why hadn’t she called him on his virgil? She had the number. Jay’s belly tightened even more. Why did he feel guilty? He hadn’t done anything!
He shrugged. “She’s the Army computer guy I told you about.”
“Funny, you didn’t mention she was a gorgeous blond female guy.”
Made the call on-cam, too. Damn.
“Not my type. I hardly noticed.”
“Uh huh.”
Jay went over and gave Saji a kiss, then stroked Mark’s young head. He loved to touch that silky fine baby hair.
“You’re funny,” he said. And: “I love you.”
He moved to the house phone on the table next to the couch and brought up the number from the caller ID. The call went through, and Rachel answered. She had her phone’s cam lit, and apparently she had just stepped out of the shower—her hair was wet, and she had a towel wrapped around her, covering her from the breasts down.
“Jay.”
“Captain Lewis.”
“Captain Lewis? Oh, come on, Jay, we are way past that!” She laughed and shook her head.
He should have made this call from his office, he suddenly realized. While the phone’s viewscreen wasn’t angled so Saji could see it from where she sat rocking the baby, she wasn’t deaf.
“What’s up?”
“I came across a piece of material, regarding the game. It looks as if somebody posted something on a university board a few years back, using similar tropes.”
“Yeah, I found that, too,” Jay said. “Joint MIT/CIT files, a couple years after I graduated. But it was posted anonymously and when I tried to backwalk it, I hit a dead end.”
“Me, too. But I found a link embedded in the software. Not in the credits, but in a line of code. An old URL. Long gone, but I got a copy of it from Antique Pages—we should check it out. Might mean something.”
“Great work.” Jay felt a sudden stab of . . . something. Irritation? That she had found something he’d missed? Well, he didn’t have time to run down every line of code in an old game, even if it was similar to the bug game. Probably it didn’t mean anything anyhow.
“We should get together and compare notes,” she said. She leaned back in her chair.
The towel wrapped around her chest came undone and all of a sudden Jay found himself looking at Rachel’s bare breasts.
Quite a spectacular view, pebbled and erect nipples and all.
Jesus Holy Christ!
It seemed to take a long time for her to collect the towel and wrap it back into place. “Oops,” she said. “Sorry about that.” She smiled. “Call me later, we’ll set up a meeting to go check out the page.”
After he discommed, Jay had trouble looking over at Saji.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, fine. Here, let me take the boy. I’ve missed him.”
Jay walked over to where Saji sat and lifted his son up to face level. “How’s the world’s best baby doing today?”
His son grinned at him, and chortled.
Jay smiled back. He had a beautiful, brilliant, loving wife and a gorgeous, happy baby. He didn’t need anything else. Certainly not anything that might cause any strain in his family life. No, sir.
But—Lewis was a smart and not-hard-to-look-at woman who obviously didn’t think Jay was all that hideous himself. It was flattering, to have a sharp and good-looking woman flirting with you. As long as you didn’t follow up on that, no harm and no foul, right?
Why, then, was his mouth so dry? Was it because that quick flash of Rachel’s breasts matched exactly the VR view of them he had seen when first they’d met? Right down to the little red mole next to the left nipple?
“Hey, sweet boy,” Jay said, putting his son’s face over his shoulder. “What say Daddy takes you for a little walk, hey?”
Yeah. Out in the nice, cool air, where Jay himself could let some of the heat in his face escape . . .
Lewis smiled as she broke the connection with Gridley. It had taken him long enough to return her call. She’d been sitting around in her apartment for almost two hours in a damp towel, going into the shower every thirty or forty minutes to re-wet her hair, so she’d look as if she had just stepped out to answer the phone. Not the most comfortable way to spend the evening, but effective for what she intended.