Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 Read Free

a rounding of hard consonants and lengthening of vowels.
    “Ah, Missy. How goes the battle?”
    She smiled, flashing perfect teeth—all marvels of expensive orthodontia, a thousand dollars a cap. “Keller says the first sortie went perfectly.”
    Roberto picked a towel up from the floor and wiped the sweat from his face and shaved head. “Jackson, he’s a fine boy, can make them computers dance like nobody else.”
    Chance smiled. That was true. Jackson Keller was a wizard with hardware and software, as good with those technical things as Roberto here was at bashing heads. CyberNation did not hire second-class talent for its key positions. There was much to be gained—or lost—in this game, and cutting corners on personnel would be short-sighted and stupid. When you were trying to create a virtual nation from nothing, to give it weight and substance, you had to do some very intricate things if you were going to pull it off. Having good help alone wasn’t sufficient. You needed the best. All of Chance’s people were just that—the best. And she wasn’t so bad herself, though her talents were somewhat harder to quantify. The higher-ups in CyberNation called her The Dragon Lady when they thought she couldn’t hear, and she took that as a compliment.
    To Roberto, she said, “Yes, but this is the easy part. Scrambling software gets their attention, but they’ll fix that, and all it will cost will be some tired programmers and a few hours’ downtime. The next stage will be more difficult. If it gets to that.”
    And of course, it would get to that soon enough—the nations of the world weren’t going to just roll over and give away anything, certainly not the kind of power CyberNation wanted for itself.
    “You worry too much, Missy.” He grinned. “That part won’t be no harder than Jackson’s jôgo , only different.”
    “Good to see you haven’t lost your confidence, Roberto.”
    “Ah, me, I ain’t lost nothin’.”
    She closed the door and locked it. “Talk is cheap.”
    He hooked his thumbs into the waistline of his pants and skinned them down, peeled them off, one foot, then the other, and tossed them to one side.
    She laughed, and reached for her shirt buttons. “We’ll have to hurry,” she said. “We have to leave for the ship in an hour.”
    “Only an hour?”
    “We have to pack.”
    “Let me show you how to pack,” he said.
    She laughed again. Life was good.

    Washington, D.C.

    Somebody screamed bloody murder, jerking Toni from her half-doze into full alertness. She came off the couch and onto her feet and into a defensive stance, expecting to be attacked, before her brain got back on track.
    It’s only the baby. Just Little Alex.
    Toni relaxed. Aloud, she said, “Yeah, little Alex, the demon child from the lowest pit of Hell.” But she was already on her way into the bedroom, and at the baby’s crib before he could get through the second outraged scream.
    “Hey, hey, hey, baby boy, what’s the matter? Mama’s here, it’s okay.”
    He stood balanced precariously on his little fat feet, holding onto the rail.
    She picked the baby up, put him over her left shoulder, and patted him gently on the back.
    He gave out one more half-hearted yell, just to let her know he wasn’t happy it had taken her all of thirty seconds to get from the living room to pick him up, then trailed off into a quiet burble before shutting up completely.
    “Oh, you’re happy now, are you? Brat. Monster.” She leaned him away and cradled him, smiling with a fierce possessive joy at him. She hadn’t slept for more than four hours at a stretch for what seemed like forever, but he was such an angel when he smiled his new-toothed grin at her, as he was doing now. He was a beautiful child. Yeah, yeah, she knew that every mother thought that about her babies, but objectively speaking, he really was. Objectively speaking. Anybody with eyes could see that.
    She smiled at that thought and at Alex Junior—a name his