Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 by Tom Clancy

clothes.
    “Missy,” he said. “How goes it?”
    “Fine. Meet me in the greenroom in ten minutes. I have a small chore for you.”
    He grinned, probably thinking it was carnal.
    Four decks down, past a heavy, locked steel door operated by a fingerprint reader, and manned by a pair of armed guards, was the greenroom. The term came from the entertainment industry: It was the traditional name of the place where actors, prepared to go on camera, waited until they were called.
    Roberto was there when Chance arrived.
    “What do you have for me?” he asked.
    She smiled. “Keep your shirt on, bucko. Don’t be so eager.”
    “That’s not what you usually tell me.”
    She allowed herself a tiny smile. “We have on board tonight Mr. Ethan Dowling, of Silicon Valley. He’s doing fairly well at the tables, up about five or six thousand dollars at the moment. He is also VP of Programming for Blue Whale Systems. We need to know everything he knows about the security codes for his company.”
    “No problem.”
    “Well, that’s not strictly true. First, we can’t do it here. You’ll have to follow him and grab him elsewhere. His chopper will ferry him to the airport in Miami, where he has a corporate jet waiting to take him to San Francisco. We want him to be on the Mainland, and preferably back on the West Coast, when this goes down.”
    “Still no problem.”
    She handed him a holograph of Dowling. He looked at it, nodded.
    “He has a pair of armed security guards with him. They are ex-FBI, expert shots, big, strong, and well-trained in mano a mano combat, too.” She gave him two more pictures, and he glanced at them.
    “Only two of them?” He flashed his white teeth in a big grin.
    “God, you’re an arrogant bastard, aren’t you?”
    He shrugged, still grinning. “Why they call it ‘Blue Whale?’ ”
    “Because that particular creature has the largest backbone of any animal on Earth. His company is a backbone server, and if not the largest, quickly getting there.”
    “Ah.”
    “It needs to look like an accident. If anybody suspects his brain has been picked, they’ll start changing codes.”
    “No problem.”
    “This is important, Roberto.”
    His smile vanished, and for just a second she saw a feral gleam in his eyes. “This is what I do, Missy. You don’t need to tell me about it.”
    She felt a chill course through her. Looking at Roberto now was like being inside a cage with a partially tamed jaguar. It could kill her with one swipe of a paw, and only its conditioning kept it from doing so. “Of course,” she said, with an offhand ease she did not feel. “That’s why I’m asking you to do it.”
    Asking . Not telling . Roberto was picky about such things.
    “Then you must consider it done,” he said.
    She nodded. “Of course.”

    Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

    Mid-morning in his office and fairly quiet, Michaels got a call.
    “ Aloha , bruddah,” the voice said.
    The call was vox only, but even if the ID hadn’t been working, Michaels would have known who it was. The caller was Duane Presser, one of the FBI close-combat trainers, a big, broad-faced Hawaiian who’d been with the Bureau for fifteen or so years.
    “ Aloha, ” Michaels said. “What can I do for you, Duane?”
    “Make me skinny and handsome and rich.”
    “You don’t want me, you want a magician. And he’d have to be the best one who ever lived.”
    “You a funny man, bruddah.”
    “Convince my wife.”
    “Now who needs a magician?”
    Presser used his island-boy talk to lull people into thinking he was maybe a little slow; anybody who thought that would, however, be making a mistake. Michaels knew the man had graduated first in his law school class, and was sharp as a room full of razors.
    “Why I’m callin’, we got a new class of recruits to the point they think they each can whip a platoon of Marines. I thought maybe they tried to see how their stuff works against a fat old haole Net Force Commander and