Designated Targets

The place was full of her type of people, though. Twenty-first and their friends. He was getting quite good at spotting the uptimers, and he could see a few of them in the bar, and at the restaurant tables. Julia held his hand and cut through the crush like a salmon swimming upstream in a series of leaps. They found themselves at a lectern, where a smart young woman with her blond hair tied back in a ponytail asked them if they had a reservation. But Julia was already waving and calling out to someone. Without missing a beat, the girl smiled, produced a couple of menus, and asked them to follow her.

Again, Dan was dumbfounded. The restaurant—Julia called it a brasserie—was obviously a high-tone affair. The wine and white linen, the cutlery, and the food all looked expensive, at least to his untrained eye. And yet the atmosphere had none of the heavy, leaden feeling he recalled from his own very limited and generally disastrous forays into the world of fine dining—all of them in pursuit of various women over the years.

The crowd seemed to be much younger than he would have expected, and none of them was dressed for dinner. He couldn’t see a lounge suit anywhere. Some of the men sat in rolled-up shirtsleeves, their ties undone. Others wore no ties at all! And some, who must have been artists, surely, even wore T-shirts. He felt very much out of place in his dress whites, but there were a number of other AF uniforms there, too, and even a scattering of ’temps. It was as though the whole world had come to the table just as they damn well pleased.

“Dan. Hey, Earth to Dan! Over here, baby. It’s Maria. Come say hello.” Julia had let go of his hand and got away. Now she was shouting at him, over the din of the bar and the slightly less deafening clamor of the dining room. It was the most extraordinary thing he’d seen since Midway. Although, now that he thought about it, he might have to qualify that, having seen her apartment.

She was already seating herself at a small round table with a woman who was very obviously twenty-first. He noticed the woman’s looks right away, but he then noticed how well conditioned she appeared: the width of her shoulders, which were bare; the strength of her arms; the crushing power of her handshake. She wasn’t long out of the service—probably the Marine Corps.

“Hey, Dan,” she said, without any further introduction.

“Ms. O’Brien.”

“No, please. Call me Maria.”

“Okay,” he agreed. “Maria.”

“Jules tells me you’ve just come out of the Zone for a couple of days.”

“It’s my first long spell of liberty since we got back from Midway,” he said. “I thought I’d surprise her.”

“Ah, that’s great to see.” She smiled. “She’s got you well trained already.”

“So where’s Sinatra?” Julia asked, leaning forward and openly scoping out the other tables.

“Oh, he’s in the back with Slim Jim and the local Mafia,” said O’Brien. “He’s going to do a few numbers later on. D’you want to come backstage later and meet them?”

“Shit, yeah. Are the mob guys going to be there?”

“Probably,” replied the lawyer. “But don’t worry about them. Davidson is a silent partner in the club, and he’s way too big for them now. Plus I let them know the first time they came that they were welcome to have a drink and enjoy themselves, but they definitely had no business here, if you understand what I’m saying.”

Dan watched Julia’s eyebrows climb halfway up her forehead. He had no idea what they were talking about, but she’d obviously been taken by surprise, which he found astonishing.

“Shit,” she said. “How’d that go down?”

O’Brien shrugged. “I played some footage taken off a couple of microcams we planted on them. They had no idea what we’d done or how we did it. But they know we’re totally out of their league. So they won’t fuck around. They’re just here because it’s the hottest fucking joint in town. Oh, and the food, of course. They love the food.”

“I can imagine,” said Julia. “Dan, darling, you’ve got to try everything on the menu. Joybelle used to produce Sir James Oliver’s show on Fox, before she moved over to the news.”

Dan’s blank look was eloquent.

“He’s a chef, sweetie. Modern Italian, by way of Cool Britannia.”

He was still floundering.

Julia sighed. “She had all his books and shows on stick. Not just recipes, but the actual chef demonstrating how to put them together. Then she grabbed a crew of young guys out of kitchens all over town. Of course they’re going to kill for the chance to jump their own cooking up to warp speed—you know, eighty years ahead of the game. And it’s like . . . honest to God . . . it’s like eating in New York the week we left.”

“Well, not exactly,” O’Brien corrected her. “Try getting a decent plate of wagyu in this town.”

The young waitress reappeared. In the rush of the arrival, he hadn’t noticed before, but she was dressed like a man. In a white shirt and a business tie. “So, have you made any decisions?”

The two women didn’t even bother checking the menu. O’Brien ordered her usual, whatever that was.