The flash of her boobs had been easy enough, the towel was rigged to fall if she inhaled deeply, and the look on Jay’s face as his eyes went wide was priceless. The seduction of Mr. Gridley was coming along nicely. Calling him at home and talking to his wife was part and parcel of it. The little mother and child, stuck at home, waiting for Daddy, bored, maybe, or just a tad jealous of his mobility? If it made Jay’s wife a little frosty toward him? So much the better.
The business with the college game was, she thought, very clever. She had written it, of course, and it was too good not to reuse—it couldn’t be traced to her. But the URL buried in the code? She’d done that last week. She’d expected he would find the old game on his own, and if he hadn’t, she would have pointed it out to him. Posting a revision and ex-post-facto-ing it would have been tricky, save that while she had been at school, she had managed to leave herself a back door in the school’s operating software. And it had been a brilliant piece of work, because she had allowed for updates in the OS and server, and rigged telltales to let her know when such things happened. It wasn’t so much a worm or a virus or even a Trojan horse, but a kind of one-time VR cookie that allowed her to access the upgrades as they came along, keeping her back door current. She would rebuild the cookie each time she updated her password, and was thus able to keep a line into the college’s system. From her hidden server, which nobody would be able to find, even if they thought to look. And anybody looking for problems from a hacker likely wouldn’t spot it, because it didn’t do anything they might be checking on—didn’t steal space, didn’t corrupt anything, didn’t replicate itself or screw with e-mail. It just sat there, waiting for a change in the OS, and then it called to tell her. A one-shot deal, and almost impossible to catch unless you were looking right at it when it happened.
Her giving it to Jay before he found it would have been a nice touch, but even so, finding a bit in it that he’d supposedly missed was just as good. The date was locked into the system, no way to tell it had been posted years after it was supposed to have been.
She laughed. It was good to be the Queen.
She stood, and went to get dressed. There were other fish to fry. She had to talk to Carruth again, and there was also the matter of the new operative she’d found to verify background information on possible buyers. She needed to test the guy, to make sure he was providing her with legitimate information. She’d give him something to run down that she already knew about, and see how well his answer tallied with hers. If he came up gold, that would be great.
So there had been a couple of setbacks; that was to be expected. By and large, things were going along just fine.
21
Washington, D.C.
“Wow,” Kent said.
“I take that as a compliment,” Jen said.
They were lying side by side in her bed. Almiron, the cat—named, Kent had been told, for a famous woman classical guitarist who had been born in Argentina in 1914—lay sleeping next to his feet.
“Yes, ma’am, please do.”
Jen propped herself up on one elbow and smiled at him. “So, what took you so long to ask me out, Abe? You couldn’t tell that I found you attractive after that first lesson?”
“Well, no. I’m a little slow about such things.”
She laughed. “Better late than never.”
“Yes, ma’am . . .”
It was amazing how relaxed he was with her. Well, okay, at the moment being relaxed might not be so amazing, but . . . overall . . .
“In case you think I do this with all the boys, let me disabuse you of that notion. You’re the first man I’ve invited home for, well, for longer than I care to remember.”
“I’m honored.”
“You should be.”
“Why me?”
“Well, don’t take it the wrong way, but you’re like an old pair of shoes I suddenly found in my closet. They fit, they are comfortable, they don’t look too bad.”
He laughed. “You should do stand-up comedy.”
“Why? Don’t you think I’m better lying down?”
“Yes, ma’am, no question.”
She laughed, and he was happy to have caused it.
New York City
East Coast Fencing Championships
“Jamal’s pretty good, isn’t he?” Marissa asked.
Thorn nodded. “He’s getting there.”
They’d come by to offer their support in today’s match. This was the last day of the Sectionals competition—one step below the Nationals—and Jamal was in the title bout. He’d just scored a touch that put him ahead of his opponent. If he scored the next point, he’d win; if he lost the next point, the score would be at la belle and they would likely be fencing for a while, since in this format you had to win by at least two touches.
The air was cool in the large gym. The bleachers had been retracted to provide space for more pistes, so all the spectators were standing off to one side, watching. It was a very quiet crowd, murmuring softly about that last touch. . . .
The director positioned the fencers on the guard lines, asked if they were ready, and when they both indicated they were, said, “Allez!”
Match point.
The crowd fell silent.
Jamal’s opponent, Michael Sorenson, was the favorite. He was twenty-two years old, a former national champion, and everyone had expected him to walk away with the match. The fact that Jamal was giving him a run for his money—indeed, was a touch away from victory—had created quite a buzz.
“I can’t watch,” Marissa said, clutching his arm. “Tell me what happens, Tommy.”
Thorn smiled. She was pulling his leg. If anything, he was more nervous than she was . . . and she knew it.
Jamal was on their left, which was unfortunate. He was a right-handed fencer, so they had a good look at his back, but couldn’t see him as well as they would have liked. That was too bad, but it’s how it was. The fencers came to the strip in the order they were called, and the spectators were confined to a specific spot.
Thorn didn’t mind, though. He could see all that he needed to see.
Sorenson was pressing the attack.
For a time, the only sounds were the sussing of the fencers’ shoes sliding along the copper piste, the tick-tack of the blades working against each other, and the occasional grunt or cry from one fencer or the other.
Sorenson kept pressing, and Jamal kept retreating, giving ground reluctantly, but giving it up step by step.
“He’s gettin’ awfully close to the end line, isn’t he, Tommy?”
Thorn nodded.
“And he’ll lose a touch if he goes off the end with both feet, won’t he?”
“He won’t,” Thorn said.
But Jamal was getting awfully close. His back foot had already crossed over the line, and Thorn suspected that Sorenson was setting him up for a particular feint. He figured there was a good chance that Sorenson was going to drive a hard attack, probably high-line, then suddenly drop off into a darting thrust at Jamal’s lead foot.
The reflexive counter to that was to draw the front foot back and counter with a thrust to the opponent’s mask.
The problem was that, if Sorenson timed it correctly, Jamal could actually win and lose at the same time. If his front foot drew back and touched down beyond the end line even a fraction of a second before his point struck Sorenson’s mask, the director would award the touch to Sorenson, not to Jamal, and the match would be tied again.