F. Paul Wilson - All the Rage

That was the way it was. A death settled problems, cleared the air, and Milos believed in doing his own wetwork when he could. Not because it was personal—never personal. It simply kept everyone on their toes.

But with Petar it had been personal, too personal to allow anyone else to do. He'd grieved for months, and to this day he missed his older brother.

Ah, Petar, he thought looking at the photo in Cino's hands, if only I could have seen the future then. Had I known of Loki and the millions it would bring, I would not have bothered with the KLA deal, and you would be here with me today to share in the bounty.

Milos's throat tightened as he lifted his glass to the photo. "To my beloved brother."

Wishing to hell it was vodka, he forced the rest of the Petrus past the lump in his throat.

16

Nadia blinked and bolted upright to a sitting position. Dark. Where were her clothes? Where was she?

She glanced out the window and saw the underside of the Manhattan Bridge and remembered. She was in Doug's bed—alone.

God, what time was it? The red LED digits on the clock said it was late.

Where was Doug? She called his name.

"Is that Sleeping Beauty I hear?" he called back from somewhere in the apartment.

"Where are you?"

"I'm in the office. Come here. I want to show you something."

She stretched, arching her back under the sheets. She and Doug had returned to his place with the intention of hacking into the GEM mainframe together, but made a detour to the bedroom on their way to the computer. She smiled at the memory. Doug hadn't been the least bit distracted during their lovemaking. She'd had his full attention then.

And afterward, lying snuggled in his arms, she'd dozed off. She never did that. Well, almost never. But she hadn't been getting enough sleep lately.

She slipped out of the bed, pulled on her clothes, and detoured to the kitchen where she found a Jolt Cola in the fridge. She preferred Diet Pepsi, but this would do. She carried it to the second bedroom that Doug had converted to an office.

She found him, dressed only in his boxer shorts, munching cereal from a blue box as he stared at the monitor. She loved the broad wedge of his shoulders.

"Eating something good?" she said, leaning against his back and watching the numbers run across the screen.

He handed her the box without looking up. She was startled to see a familiar cross-eyed propeller-headed alien on the front.

"Quisp?" She flashed back to the cute Quisp versus Quake commercials of her childhood. "I thought they stopped making this ages ago."

"So did I, but apparently it's still sold in a couple of places around the country. I ordered some on the Net."

She tried a few of the crunchy saucer-shaped pieces and nearly gagged. "I don't remember it being this sweet."

"Gotta be ninety-nine percent sugar. But what's even better…" He held up his wrist. "Look what you can get."

"A Quisp watch?"

"But wait—there's more!" He handed her a little gold ring set with an image of the cereal's alien mascot. "Will this do until I can get you that diamond?"

She laughed. "You've gone bonkers."

"I think the term is qwazy"

She pointed to the monitor screen. "What are you up to now?"

"Trying to get into GEM's financial data. Not the cooked figures they publish in their annual reports, I want the real skinny."

"My God, Doug! They'll trace you!"

"Not to worry. I routed the call through a Chicago exchange."

"Chicago? How—?"

"Old hacker trick."

"Please, Doug," Nadia said, riding a wave of foreboding, "don't do this. It'll only get you in trouble."

He sighed. "You're probably right. But it's eating at me, Nadj. They're paying me commissions on sales that aren't there. The profits they've supposedly allocated for R and D should be enough to fill a ten-story building with researchers and equipment, yet we both know that the GEM Basic division occupies a single floor and that's sparsely populated. The money's going somewhere. If not to GEM Basic, then to what? Or whom?"

"Where the money's going won't help you when you're going to jail."

"I'm being careful."

"Why don't we just say it's a mystery and leave it at that."

He smiled. "You know, I remember in catechism class back in grammar school when I used to ask the nuns all sorts of questions about God and heaven and hell. Lots of times the nuns would say, 'It's a mystery,' and that would be that. Subject closed. That didn't satisfy me then, and it doesn't satisfy me now."

Nadia remembered kids like Doug from her own years in Catholic school. There was always one in every class for whom pronouncements from On High and exhortations simply to "have faith" never cut it. They kept asking questions, kept probing and pushing. Everyone else in the class had already swallowed the latest bit of dogma and was ready to move on. But not these guys—they wanted an explanation. They had to know.

"OK, try this: it's none of our business."

"When both of our livelihoods depend on GEM, I think it's very much our business."

Their livelihoods, Nadia knew, were only a small part of it. Even if Doug had won a multimillion-dollar lottery this afternoon, he'd still be picking away at GEM's computer defenses. It was an itch he had to scratch.

She leaned around and kissed him on the lips. "Call me a cab. I've got to go."

"What about your hacking lessons?" he said.

"Some other time. I've got to be at the clinic bright and early."

He picked up his cell phone and ordered her a cab. Doug's apartment was in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn; you could get old waiting under the Manhattan Bridge for a cab to cruise by.

When he clicked off, he reached out and pulled her onto his lap. "If you lived here," he said, nuzzling her throat, "you'd already be home."

Nadia puffed her cheeks as she let out a breath. "We're not going to get into this again, are we?"

"You're going to be living here anyway when we're married." His nuzzling was sending goose bumps down her back. "Why not just move it up a few months?"

"It's over a year. And do you want to convince my mother?"

He laughed. "No thanks!"

She'd moved in with her mother during her residency. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. She'd been spending so much time at the hospital, it didn't make sense to rent a place when Mom's little two-bedroom rent-controlled apartment on the upper border of Kip's Bay was just a few blocks from the medical center. Might as well pay the rent stipend to her rather than a stranger.

Now she wished she hadn't. Not that they didn't get along. Just the opposite; they got along too well. Mom was seventy and a widow—Dad had died five years ago. She'd come over from Poland before the war. She might be an American citizen now, but she had never really let go of the Old Country. Her accent was thick, and pictures of Pope John Paul II papered her apartment walls.

Except for religion—Nadia had stopped going to Sunday mass while Mom went daily—they got along fine. Well, maybe Mom was skeptical about her daughter the doctor taking a research job instead of practicing medicine like a "real doctor," but that was a minor point.

Moving out of Mom's and into her own place would not be a problem—Mom was independent and could handle living alone just fine. Moving in with Doug, on the other hand, would become an issue. She'd wail about her daughter living in sin and embark on a string of Novenas to try to save Nadia's soul.

What was the point in putting the poor woman through that torment? She and Doug would be married before long. Until then she'd hang in with the current arrangement, which wasn't hard to take. They saw plenty of each other, and living apart certainly hadn't stunted their sex life.