One Is the Loneliest Number by Tom Clancy

Author:Tom Clancy [Clancy, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

It was a very late night for Maj after she got home again— not because she didn’t want to sleep, but because she couldn’t. She watched dawn come up, not in Greece but in Alexandria, Virginia, and as soon as she decently could, before she would have to leave for school, she went into her workroom and told it to link her to Net Force. A moment later, she was standing in James Winters’s office. The first light of morning was shining in through the blinds, patterning the piled-up papers on the desk. Winters looked at Maj, past the papers and what was apparently his first cup of coffee, judging by his slightly bleary look, and said, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

She told him. It took a while. Winters did nothing while he listened but nod once or twice, while Maj paced up and down and related everything in order. At the point where isolationism and free silver had begun to be mentioned, Maj finally had to stop.

“Something to drink?” Winters said.

“Tea, please,” Maj said, “if you’ve got it. But—Mr. Winters, he went out of his head. Just completely cuckoo. Incoherent, uncoordinated. We broke the whole group out of the sim and called his house. I couldn’t get an answer—so another of our crew called the emergency services. They told us that the paramedics broke in and found him unconscious … and since then we haven’t heard anything.”

“You don’t have any contacts with his parents?”

Maj shook her head. “We tried to reach them last night. They weren’t home.”

Winters looked unfocused for a moment as he gazed off to one side, checking some data that was visible to him but not to Maj, and blinking a few times, apparently sorting through a set of menu options as they appeared. “Thurston?” he said. “14-302 Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn?”

“That’s it.”

“He’s in Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan,” Winters said. ‘ The short public-level bulletin says he was in intensive care until this morning, but they’ve downgraded him to a normal ward for observation for tonight. .. apparently whatever treatment they used on him must have worked.”

“What was the matter with him?”

“This listing won’t say. Confidentiality. Half a second.” There was a pause, and Winters looked toward the Venetian blinds on his window and said to the air in that direction, “Hi, Magda. James Winters at Net Force. Yes, how are you? Long time no see. Listen, Magda, I need a release on a diagnosis, someone’s class-2’d it because the subject was a minor admitted unaccompanied. Yeah. Thurston, Alain. That’s right. Yes, pre-investigation. I’m trying to rule something out.” He paused a moment more, then said, “Thanks, Magda.”

Winters turned back to Maj, and got up. He went to the office door and opened it. A tray with a cup of tea was sitting outside. He brought it in and handed it to Maj. “This is of course confidential,” he said. “They diagnosed him as having a noncontagious meningeal inflammation, probably secondary to a systemic infection.

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