Point of Impact

  Jay made the translation mentally: “Do you want gravy with your mashed potatoes?”

  By the time he’d figured out what she said, the server had already poured the warm goo all over the plate, slopping into the green beans, the hamburger steak, and the little empty slot where Jay had planned to have a piece of cherry pie. Forget that.

  “Uh ... sure,” he said, way late.

  She handed him the plate back, under the angled glass sneeze guard.

  This was where Mr. Brett Lee of the Drug Enforcement Administration had gone to high school, graduating at age seventeen, third in the class of’91, before going off to Georgia Tech to get his master’s in criminology. He’d gone to work for the DEA the year after he had graduated college and had thus spent nearly thirteen years working for them.

  In the real world, Jay would be looking at the school yearbooks, talking to teachers and fellow students, downloading pictures and stats, and putting together an education history of Mr. Lee. In VR, he had built a scenario that would let him walk through the school itself—or rather what he imagined a place named after a Southern Civil War hero might look and feel like—and absorbing the information in a much more interesting manner.

  Lee had been well-liked, had gotten good grades, and had hung with jocks, having been a middle-distance runner on the school’s track team.

  Jay had come as far back as high school because he had not been able to discover any connection between Brett Lee and-Zachary George either in their work careers or college. While the two men were only a year apart in age—George was thirty-seven, Lee, thirty-six-Lee had been born and raised in Georgia, while George had grown up in Vermont. When Lee was at Georgia Tech, George had been at New York University. They had not crossed paths that Jay could tell until they were both working for the federal government, and while there was no record of their first meeting there, there was some kind of friction apparent by the time both had been in harness for a few years.

  Jay had all that—the two didn’t like each other, maybe they just rubbed each other the wrong way or something—but the cause of the conflict had not come to light. He could pass on what he’d come up with to Michaels, but it didn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know.

  The young Lee, sitting at a table with four guys and two girls from the track teams, dipped a French fry in catsup and ate it as Jay moved to sit at a conveniently empty table behind the group.

  Convenient, hell. He had designed the setup that way himself.

  The conversation was hardly enlightening. They talked about things of interest to teenagers: music, movies, who was going out with whom, teachers they hated, the usual. And in the twenty-year-old jargon, it was pitifully dated. Lee was close to Jay’s age, and if he’d talked like this, he must have seemed a terrible dweeb to any passing adult. Or dork. Or dickhead. All phrases the boys used fast and furiously, mixing and matching as needed:

  “Yeah, well, Austin is a dickhead dweeb,” one of the boys said. “He gave me a fuckin’ C on the midterm because I didn’t use the right color ink!”

  “Yeah, Austin’s a dork, all right,” another boy said.

  One of the girls, a pretty bottle-blond in a gray T-shirt held together with safety pins, said, “Yeah, but he’s kinda cute.”

  The other girl, a brunette with hair worn so short as to almost be a crew cut said, “Yeah, too bad he’s gay.”

  One of the boys said, “Gay? Shee-it, he ain’t gay. I seen him lookin’ up Sissy Lou’s skirt and gettin’ a hard-on in debate one, you know how she sits with her knees apart. You’re just pissed’cause he don’t look at you that way. Maybe if you wore a skirt instead of jeans all the time, you’d see.”

  “I don’t think Jessie here owns a skirt,” the third boy said, poking the short-haired girl on the shoulder. “But I hear she’s got some black bikini panties.”

  Jessie slapped at the third boy. “You won’t never find out, dickhead.”

  “Whatever, ” the safety-pinned girl said, dismissing the topic.

  He could die of boredom here, Jay thought. Or worse, start laughing so hard he’d spray milk out of his nose.

  Brett Lee said, “He’s not queer, he’s just smart, is all. He got us that trip to the Debate Finals in Washington, D.C.”

  “Pro’lly had to give somebody a blow job to do it,” Safety-Pin said.

  “I’m tellin’ you, he’s not queer,” the second boy said.

  “Hell, Hayworth, maybe he was lookin’ at you instead of Sissy when he got the hard-on,” Jessie said.

  “Your ass!” Hayworth said.

  “Whatever,” Safety-Pin said.

  Jay shook his head. Oh, yeah, he was gonna learn a lot here. Jesus.

  “So,” Jessie said to Brett, “you going to the debate thing?”

  “Yeah. There’s gonna be people from all over the country there.”

  “Mostly Yankees,” Hayworth said. “ ’N’ queer Yankees, at that.”

  “I’m goin’,” Lee said. “I’m not gonna live the rest of my life here in Hickburg. I’m gonna meet people, make friends, get myself a job where I can make a shitload of money and retire by the time I’m forty.”

  “Your ass,” Hayworth said.

  Jay shook his head. He’d heard enough of this.

  Then, as he was about to leave, he had a thought.

  Maybe Zachary George had been interested in debate in high school?

  Hmm. Well, he could take a little run up to Montpelier High and check that out. Easy enough to do when you were Jay Gridley, master of virtual space and time.

  18

  Washington, D.C.

  Michaels walked into the Columbia Scientific Shop, not expecting much from the small size of the storefront. An error, he quickly found.

  The place didn’t have much frontage, but it opened up once you were inside. It wasn’t the size of a Costco or anything, but it was a lot bigger than he’d expected.

  There were racks and racks of items, ranging from Van de Graaff generators to home dissection kits to chemistry sets to huge telescopes.

  Lord, he’d wander around in here forever.

  “May I help you, sir?”

  Michaels turned to see a woman who looked as if she might be the perfect TV grandmother smiling at him. She was short, slight, wore her gray hair in a bun, a pair of cat’s-eye reading glasses hung from a string around her neck, and she had a white sweater draped over her shoulders. The blue print dress she wore went almost all the way to the floor. She looked to be late sixties.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’m looking for a stereomicroscope.”

  “Ah, yes, aisle nine. What kind of working distance would you need between the lens and object?”

  Michaels didn’t have a clue. “I don’t know.”

  “Perhaps if you told me the purpose?”

  “Um, it’s for my wife. She’s pregnant and has to stay at home, so she’s taken up scrimshaw.”

  Granny beamed and nodded. “Congratulations! Your first child?”

  “Yes.” Well, it was his and Toni’s first child. And their last, too, according to Toni.

  “If you’ll follow me.”

  He did, and in due course, they arrived at aisle nine and a rack of optical equipment, most of which he couldn’t put a name to. None of it looked cheap, however.

  Granny said, “Your wife will need a focus distance at least the length of her inscribing tool, eight or nine inches. This unit here will give her a foot, so that will do it. It’s a Witchey Model III, and it comes with ten times and twenty times. Much more power than she needs, but if you put an oh point three times auxiliary lens on it, right here, that will give you three times and six times, which should be sufficient for scrimshaw. Just to be sure, we can add in another lens that will ramp it up to five times and ten times.”

  Michaels nodded, not really understanding what she was talking about.

  “We could use an articulating arm, but probably a standard post mount would be fine.” She looked aroun
d and leaned a little closer toward him. “My supervisor would just as soon I sell you a fiber-optic shadow-free ring light to go with it, but frankly, you can get a gooseneck lamp and a hundred watt bulb and save yourself three hundred dollars.”

  Michaels blinked. “Uh, thank you.”

  She gave him a perfect grin, full of smile wrinkles and dimples. “The basic scope is eight hundred dollars, and the two lenses normally retail for about one hundred dollars each, but I can knock a bit off that. Say, nine hundred and fifty dollars all total? And I’ll throw in a gooseneck lamp at a discount, too.”

  Michaels blew out a small sigh and nodded. The profit he’d made on the Miata rebuild was pretty much shot after the honeymoon and the Chevy, but he had a thousand or so left. Toni wanted this but wouldn’t buy it for herself, and the truth was, he was feeling guilty about not being more supportive about the pregnancy. It was his son she was carrying, after all, and the least he could do was try to make her enforced inactivity more bearable.

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  Granny laser-beamed another smile at him. “Excellent. If you’ll follow me, I’ll have one brought up to the checkout counter.”

  Michaels followed her toward the front of the store. On the way there, a pair of small boys ran past on the cross aisle in front of them. A second after they passed, there was a crash, yells, then what sounded like glass shattering.

  Granny said, “Shit! You little bastards! You’re not supposed to be running in here!” Whereupon she herself took off at a good sprint. The long dress’s hem kicked up enough for Michaels to see that Granny wore a pair of flaming red Nike SpringGels, high-end running shoes that went for almost two hundred bucks a pair.

  He had to smile. Another example that things were not always what they appeared to be.

  Quantico, Virginia

  John Howard, in shorts, a T-shirt, and his old sneakers, was working up a pretty good sweat on the obstacle course near Net Force HQ. There were a few Marine officers he recognized running the course, a few FBI types, and there, just ahead on the chinning bars, none other than Lieutenant Julio Fernandez.

  Julio saw Howard but kept doing his chins, palms forward and hands a little wider than his shoulders.

  Howard stopped and watched. He counted eight before Julio gutted out the last one and let go, then leaned forward and started rubbing at one bicep.

  “How many did you do?”

  “Twelve,” Julio said.

  Howard raised an eyebrow.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, I used to do fifteen, sometimes twenty on a good day. I haven’t been getting out here as often as I should.”

  “The joys of family life,” Howard observed.

  “Yes, sir, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but it does change things some. Before I met Joanna, if I woke up in the middle of the night and felt like it, I could suit up and hit the gym or go run a couple miles, whatever. Now when I wake up in the middle of the night, it’s to the sound of a crying baby. Changing a diaper full of gooey yellow poop at three in the morning was never in my flight plan. I don’t think I’ve had three hours of sleep at any one stretch for three months.

  “How’d you do it, John? How’d you live through a tiny baby?”

  Howard laughed. “I stopped working out. I stopped going to have a drink with the boys after dinner because I was falling asleep in my chair watching TV. You have to change your priorities.”

  “Yeah, I hear that. I can see it all now: I’m gonna wind up like a certain fat old general, too stiff and tired to walk from the couch to the bed. It’s a pitiful thing to think about.”

  “Fat old general? You want to run the course, Lieutenant, and see just how fat and old I really am? Perhaps I should give you a handicap. Ten seconds? A minute?”

  “Your ass, General, sir. I might be in terrible shape, but that’s compared to a twenty-five-year-old SEAL, not a man your age.”

  “I’m not a man my age, Julio. I’m getting better every day.”

  “You got your stopwatch?”

  Howard smiled. “As it happens.” He pulled the watch from under his shirt where it hung on a loop of old boot-lace.

  “Start it. I’ll see you at the end. Time you get there, I can probably shower, shave, and catch up on my sleep.”

  “Go, Lieutenant. The clock is ticking. But be careful of your heart.”

  Julio smiled, and took off.

  On the way home, Michaels’s virgil played a few bars of Franz Liszt’s Les Preludes, a somber, regal musical sting that, according to Jay Gridley, was the basis for the theme that announced the Emperor Ming in the old Flash Gordon movie series in the ’30s. Buster Crabbe, the swimming champion, had starred in those, Jay had told him. Jay had been to what had once been Buster’s house, as a boy in SoCal. It had a big swimming pool in the backyard. Talking a bigggg pool...

  It was Susie. He saw her tiny picture appear on his virgil’s screen, and he activated his own minicam so she could see him.

  “Hey, yo, Daddy-o!”

  “ ’Daddy-o’? What happened to ‘Dadster’?”

  “Oh, that’s so yesterday,” she said. “You really did go to school with the dinosaurs, huh?”

  “It’s true. I had to hike a prehistoric trail ten miles long every morning, in the tropical heat, uphill both ways, and be careful of stepping into the tar pits. You have it easy, kiddo.”

  “So Mom says.”

  “How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “Everything going okay with, ah, Byron?”

  “Yep. He’s a good guy, really.”

  Michaels felt his belly clutch. He had thought he was going to lose contact with her after the nasty business with Megan, but somehow, his ex-wife had relented. Thank God for large miracles.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said. Boy, that came hard.

  “He argued with Mom something awful about letting me see you.”

  Michaels felt the heat begin in him, threatening to rise and shut off his breathing and vision. That bastard!

  “Didn’t like the idea, huh?” he managed to say, faking a smile. She could see him, after all.

  “Oh, no, Daddy-o, it was Mom who didn’t like it. Byron said it wasn’t right to keep a father from seeing his daughter. He wouldn’t give up until she agreed.”

  Michaels’s anger turned to wonder. “Really?”

  “Yeah, he doesn’t like you much after you insulted Mom and knocked him down, but he tries to be fair. He’s just not you. I miss you, Dad.”

  As always, that broke his heart. “Me, too. You tell Byron thank you for me, would you?”

  He debated for a moment about whether to tell his preteen daughter that she was going to have a new little brother. Well, half brother. Then he decided she ought to hear it from him.

  “I have some news for you. Did you know you’re going to have a baby brother in a few months?”

  “Mom told?” she said. “She told me I couldn’t say anything to you. But it’s not a brother, it’s a sister.”

  For a moment, he couldn’t track what she said, it was as if she had spoken words he understood but arranged them wrong. What she said made no sense.

  Then it came to him:

  Megan was pregnant!

  “Daddy-o, where’d you go?”

  “Huh? Oh, sorry, sweetie, I’m in my car, I had to, uh, switch lanes.”

  “Pretty cool, huh?” she said. “A baby sister. Almost none of my friends have any that little. Chellie’s got a brother who’s two, and Marlene’s got a sister who’s like one, but nobody else’s mom is preggers.”

  “Pretty cool,” he said. “Congratulations.”

  Susie’s slip brought up a whole wave of things he didn’t want to think about. He loved Toni, and she loved him in a way Megan never had. He was over his ex-wife, finally. Well, almost over her. There was always that little wonder about the road not taken, even though the roads they had traveled the last few years had been pretty ugly. But she was Susie’s m
other, and there had been some good times. Wonderful times, at the beginning.

  Now that she was having another man’s baby, the old jealousy tried to rear its viperlike head, and for a moment, he almost let it.

  No. That serpent was dead.

  And now what did he tell Susie about her half brother? Should he say anything? He didn’t want to get into any kind of competition with Megan for his daughter’s affection as much as he didn’t want to lose it.

  And yet, if he was going to continue to be part of Susie’s life, Toni was also going to be a part of it, as would their unborn child.

  Sooner or later, word would get back to Megan; somehow it always did, and he would rather Susie hear it from him.

  “Well, Li’l Bit, it looks like you are going to be really cool.”

  “Huh?”

  He smiled into the virgil.

  19

  Santa Monica, California

  The Safari Bar and Grill was first on Tad’s list. This was an old but little-known watering hole not far from Santa Monica City College. The food was good, the drinks generous, and the place was far enough off the main drags so the locals had mostly kept it hidden from the tourists.

  Tad approached the assistant manager on duty and gave him the bullshit story he’d worked up.

  “Say, man, I got a problem maybe you can help me with?”

  The assistant manager, a smiling black guy of thirty with nice teeth, dressed in khaki safari shorts and matching shirt, said, “What’s the problem, bro?”

  “Okay, look, a while back, my brother and his wife were having some difficulties. I uh, got together with her to, you know, help them out. We had lunch here a few times.”

  “Uh-huh, so?”

  “One thing kinda led to another. My sister-in-law and I, well, we, ah, stepped over the line, you know what I mean?”