Night Moves Read Free

think of you that way, and if I did, well, I wouldn't be interested. I like girls. You in particular."

She gave him a tiny grin in return, a quick flash, so she wasn't totally pissed off at him.
"I meant at the office. I very much like being treated as a woman when we're on our own time." "I understand."
"Do you? You really need to, you know. I want you to hold my hand when we walk in the moonlight--but not when we're at work. You need to separate your personal life from your work life, Alex."
"Okay. I will. Next time you're up, you go, no matter where it is." She flashed a bigger smile.
"Good. Now, you suppose we might find some chocolate somewhere?" They both laughed, and he felt a great sense of relief. Neither of them had been toEngland before, and one of the things they noticed early on was that there were chocolate candy machines everywhere: in stores, train stations, even pubs. It had become a running joke between them, finding chocolate. They both expected to gain thirty pounds and have their faces break out before they returned to the States. His virgil played the first few bars of Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man." He had an incoming tele com He pulled the device from his belt and saw that the caller was from the office of the FBI's director.
"That's cute," Toni said, meaning the music. She waved her finger as if directing an orchestra. "Jay must have sneaked into my office and reprogrammed the ringer again. Better than last time, when it was George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone." "Ta dah dah clan dah dump!" Toni sang.
"Everybody I work with has a warped sense of humor," he said. "This is Alex Michaels."
"Please hold for the director," a secretary said. Toni looked at him, and he held his hand over the virgil's microphone. "Boss."
"I sure wish Walt Carver hadn't had that heart attack," Toni said. "I think he's glad he did. It gave him an excuse to retire and go fishing. It's only been a month; we should give her a chance--"

"Commander, this is Melissa Allison. I'm sorry to interrupt your vacation, but we have a situation of
which you need to be aware."
Her face appeared on the virgil's liquid crystal display screen, so he tapped his send-visual mode and held the unit so he could see the virgil's cam thumbnail of his own face in the screen's corner. Allison, forty-six, was a thin redhead with a cool bordering-on-cold voice and demeanor. She was a political appointee, a lawyer with no experience in the field but an encyclopedic knowledge of where dozens of political bodies were buried. The rumor was that certain high-ranking members of congress had prevailed on the President to offer her the FBI directorship vacated by Walt Carver's mild cardiac event so she'd keep quiet about things better left that way. Outside of a couple of meetings and a few memos, Michaels hadn't had to deal with her yet. "Go ahead."
"Some hours ago, an unidentified military force attacked a Pakistani train near the Indian border, killed a dozen guards, and then blew the train to pieces. The cargo was a top-secret shipment of electronic components on their way to be used in the Pakistani nuclear bomb program." "I thought there was a nonproliferation treaty betweenPakistan andIndia ." "There is, but neither country pays any attention to it. The government ofPakistan is convinced the attacking terrorist force was a special unit of the Indian Army."
"Do they have proof of this?"
"Not enough to start a war. Not yet--but they are looking hard." Michaels looked at the tiny image of the director's face. "With all due respect, ma'am, what's this got to do with us? Shouldn't the spooks be on the hot seat?" "They are, but if they and the Pakistanis can be believed, there was no way anyone could know about the train and what it carried. The terrorists had plenty of time to get into position for the ambush, and the Pakistanis say this wasn't possible."
"Obviously it was," Michaels said.
"The liaison with the CIA tells him there were only four