by Tom Clancy
“Congratulations, Lieutenant Fernandez.”
“You can’t do this, John. Gunny’ll never let me live it down.”
“Already done, Julio. Paperwork is signed, sealed, and delivered.”
“John—”
“More money, which you need with a new baby. Plus now you don’t have to take orders from your wife. Well, no more than any of the rest of us have to take orders from our wives.” Julio’s wife was Joanna Winthrop, and a lieutenant in Net Force herself, although she was on extended leave at the moment.
“But ... but ... who can you get to replace me?”
“Nobody will be able to replace you, Julio. But there are some new recruits who can manage a top’s chores if you show them how it is done.”
Julio shook his head. “I’ll be damned.”
“No doubt, but at least you can tell the devil you earned your money for part of your career before you got the free ride.”
Julio nodded slowly, then looked up. “All right. Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t look so sour, Julio. Welcome to the officer-and-a-gentleman club. Or at least the officer part of it.”
“Yeah, right.”
Under the bitching, Howard was pretty sure that Julio was pleased. They’d been working together for more than twenty years, first in the regular army, then in Net Force. Julio had known about Howard’s promotion to general before Howard himself had, and there were times when the two of them were practically telepathic. Julio didn’t have the educational background of a lot of officers, but when a situation went hot, he was the man you wanted covering your back. He had another few years before he was going to think about retiring, and the higher his grade, the bigger his pension. He was a married man with a baby; he needed it.
“Go take your nap, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir.”
Washington, D.C.
Normally, at seven in the morning, Jay Gridley would be at Net Force HQ, plugged into his computer and making war on the bad guys. He’d be hunting lubefoots who’d dumped the latest ugly virus into the world’s e-mail, or searching for clues to some computer fraud, or trying to track down some sicko posting kiddie porn on church web sites. Now and then, there’d be a big shark cruising the virtual waters of the net, like the mad Russian or the crazy Georgia redneck or the British genius who’d been using a quantum computer to try and restore England’s lost glory, though those were relatively rare. But a few months ago, Jay had finally met his on-line guru who had been helping him recover from a stroke, an old Tibetan monk named Sojan Rinpoche. And as it turned out, the old man was actually a young and beautiful woman. Saji, she liked to be called, and one thing had led to another, which had led to another, which had led to her lying beside him in the bed.
Now, there were days when he called in sick and never left that bed except to pee.
He giggled.
“What is funny?” Saji asked.
He smiled at her. “You. Me. This. Us.”
“What time is it?”
“Who cares?”
“No, you don’t, goat-boy. I’m teaching an on-line class this morning.”
“You don’t have to get up to do that. You can lie right there.”
She laughed. “I don’t think so. I remember the last time I tried to do that. Somebody kept distracting me.”
“You’re a master Buddhist, you’re supposed to be able to meditate and tune out little distractions.”
“Yeah, but the problem was, the little distraction kept getting bigger every time I looked at it.”
They both laughed.
“Work is dead. I could stay home. It’s totally boring there these days. Seriously.”
“Seriously,” she said, “no, you can’t.”
“You are a party pooper.”
“Life is full of suffering, haven’t you learned that yet?”
Jay rolled out of the bed, scratched his chest, and padded toward the bathroom. “You’ll be sorry when I’m gone. You’ll finish your class and be all alone in this big old condo, and you’ll wish I was here.”
“I’ll try to be brave.”
“You want to shower?”
“Yes. After you leave.”
“You don’t trust me. I’m hurt.”
“I can see that. Go on. I’ll cook supper when you get home.”
“What, roots and twigs?”
“You said you liked my cooking.”
“That was before you threw me out into the cold,” he said.
“It’s supposed to hit seventy-two today,” she said. “Not so cold.”
“I was speaking metaphorically.”
“Go and shower, Jay.”
He grinned at her. Boy, did he like having her around. Really. A lot. More than anything he could think of. He headed for the shower and considered for the hundredth time the proposition he’d been working on in his head for the last couple of weeks. Was it possible to make it permanent? Legally permanent? As in getting married? Would she go for it?
There was only one way to find out, but he was hesitant. What if she said no?
That would be ... bad.
The hot water began to steam up the bathroom. He called out to Saji: “Hey—?”
“No,” she cut him off. “Definitely not.”
But he was rinsing the shampoo from his hair when the shower door slid open and Saji followed the draft of cool air in, gloriously naked and grinning.
“Why, Sojan Rinpoche! What are you doing here?”
“I came to wash your back is all.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Turn around.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He turned around. She reached out, and her soapy hand began rubbing him.
However, the hand was definitely not stroking his back, nope, no sir, no indeedy!
He laughed, and she laughed with him.
Yep, he was going to be late to work, no two ways about it.
“Hey, I think you missed a spot there.”
“I didn’t miss it. I was ignoring it. Easy to do, it’s so ... small.”
“Ooh. You are a cruel woman. Cruel.”
“Suffer, big daddy, suffer....”
3
Malibu, California
Robert Drayne looked up from his mixing bench in front of the big picture window as a pair of young women in thong bikinis jogged past on the hard-packed wet sand, just at the water line. No rain today, the sky was clear, the Pacific Ocean a nice blue and fairly calm, and the two honeys were blond and tan and bouncy. Not bad for a Monday. He grinned. He loved this town.
He looked back at the bench. He had a batch ready to time and encapsulate, only six hits, and where the hell was Tad? You didn’t want to start the clock ticking and then have the stuff sit on the table for an hour or two. That might cut things a little close. Even with a master such as himself, the timing could get a little tricky, could be an hour either way.
As if in response, the door alarm ching-chinged as somebody disarmed it and entered the house.
That had better be Tad....
Drayne dumped a bit of catalyst into the white compound, stirred in the fine red powder so that the resulting mix started turning pale pink. Drayne worked by sight and smell, he kept adding catalyst until the right shade was achieved—a shade somewhere between titty and bubble gum—and that sharp, cherry-and-almond odor drifted up and told him it was about right, too.
Ah, there we go....
“About fucking time,” Drayne said. There was no real anger in his voice, just making a comment was all.
“Traffic is bad on the Coast Highway,” Tad said by way of explanation. “The tourists are all slowing down to look at the house coming down in the mud slide. How’s it coming?”
“Catalyst mixed, as of thirty seconds ago.”
Tad looked at his watch.
Drayne grabbed one of the big purple gel caps, a special run he’d had made three years ago by a guy in Mexico who was, unfortunately, no longer among the living. Well, wh
at the hell, he had more than a thousand caps left. Worry about it when he ran out.
He opened the cap and scooped up the mix with both halves, expertly judging how much so that he could put the cap together again without overfilling it. He looked up and smiled. This was the easy part. The real work was in the creation and mixing of the various components. That had to be done in a lab, and the current one was an RV parked in a dinky burg on the edge of the Mojave Desert, a couple of hours away from here. By tomorrow, it would be parked a hundred miles away, the old retired couple driving it looking about as illegal and dangerous as a bowl of prunes. In this biz, appearance counted for a lot. Who’d pull over Ma and Pa Yeehaw in their RV with Missouri plates for anything but a traffic ticket? And Ma could talk her way out of that by making a cop think about his sweet little ole granny. And if the cop got really horsey, Pa would cap him with the .40 SIG he kept under the seat.
Tad Bershaw was Drayne’s age, well, actually, he was a year younger at thirty-one, but he looked fifty, rode hard and put up wet, like Drayne’s grandma used to say. Tad was black-haired, skinny, pale, and had dark circles under his eyes, a real heroin-chic kinda guy. He always wore black, even in the middle of summer, long sleeves, long pants, pointy-toed leather boots. And sunglasses, of course. He looked like a vampire or maybe one of the old beatniks, because he also had a little patch of hair under his lip.
Drayne, on the other hand, looked like a surfer, which he had been: tanned, sun-bleached dishwater blond hair, still enough muscle to pass for a gymnast or a swimmer. He had to admit, they made an odd-looking couple when they went out. Not that they went out that often.
Drayne put the finished cap down and picked up another empty. He had enough mix for six. Five for sale and one for Tad. At a thousand bucks each, it wasn’t a bad day’s work, not bad at all, given that their costs were about thirty-five dollars a cap.
“You heard about the guy in Atlantic City?” Tad asked.
Drayne worked on the third cap. “Olivetti?”
“Yeah.”
“No. What happened?”
“Hammer ate him. He ran amok, tore up a casino, beat the shit out of some rent-a-cops and local police before they cooked him. DOA.”
Drayne shrugged again. “Too bad. He was a good customer.”
“We got a guy coming from NYC says Olivetti referred him. Are we interested?”
Drayne finished the fourth cap. Found one of the special-special empties for number five. “No. If Olivetti is dead, the reference is dead. We don’t sell to him.”
“I figured,” Tad said. “Just checking.”
“You shouldn’t have to check. You know the deal. A vetted customer vets a newbie, always. First time we get a guy we can’t check out, that will be a narc, you got to figure it that way.”
“I hear you.”
Drayne finished the fifth cap, reached for Tad’s empty. “How are you working today’s produce?”
“Three off the net, FedEx Same Day as soon as we get the payment transfers to the dissolving account. One is a pickup, three-messenger drop. One is hand-to-hand.”
“Who’s the hand-to-hand?”
“The Zee-ster.”
Drayne grinned. “Be sure to tell him we want tickets to his next premiere.”
“Already in the pipe.”
“Okay, here you go. Last one is yours, be sure the double-special, that’s number five, goes out.”
“You’re crazy, you know that,” Tad said, as he took the caps.
“Yeah, so what else is new?”
The two men smiled at each other.
“What’s cold?” Drayne said. “I need to sit on the deck and watch the waves roll in.”
“Got a bottle of the Blue Diamond, one of the Clicquot, and one of the Perrier-Jouët in the little fridge. Dunno what’s in the garage.”
“The Diamonte Bleu, I think,” Drayne said. “You want a glass before you take off?”
“I’m not rotting my liver out, thank you.”
They laughed again.
“I’m gone.”
“See you later,” Drayne said.
Tad left, and Drayne went to open a bottle of champagne. He had three-quarters of a million cash in a suitcase hidden in a floor safe under his bed, another two hundred and some thousand dollars in a safe-deposit box in a bank in Tarzana, and five cases of assorted but all high-quality champagne in the cool room downstairs.
Life was pretty damned good.
Tad swung his souped-up, reconditioned Charger R/T Drayne had given him out into the road the locals called the PCH and stomped the gas pedal, heading south toward Santa Monica. The big motor roared and laid five hundred miles worth of expensive rubber compound behind it, tires squealing and smoking. Tad grinned as the car accelerated. No big deal. The radials were good for fifty thousand miles, and he didn’t expect either the car or himself to be around when the tires’ warranty ran out.
He never expected to live past thirty, maybe thirty-five, max. Depending on how you looked at it, he was either four years shy or a year overdue for the big sleep, and it didn’t much matter to him which it was. He’d been on borrowed time for years.
He roared past a white four-runner with out-of-state plates, a middle-aged couple in the front, and a pair of big old German shepherd dogs looking out the windows in the back. Goddamned tourists. He cut sharply in front of the car, but the tourists were too busy looking at the ocean to even notice. Dogs were probably smarter than the people in that car.
That Bobby, now there was a smart one. He was a certified fucking genius, no shit. IQ way up in Mensa territory, one sixty, one seventy, something like that, though you’d never guess he was anything more than a big ole dumb surfer dude by looking at him. He could have gone into any kind of legit work and made a mint, but he had these quirks: One, he hated his old man, who was a retired FBI agent, and two, the guy he most wanted to be like was some flower-power drug guru from the sixties, a guy named Owsley, who came out of the psychedelic movement. Owsley was so long ago that when he started making LSD, it was still legal. Problem was that he kept making the stuff after it got to be illegal, and got busted, but Bobby thought the sun rose and set in the guy’s shadow.
Bobby wanted to be the Owsley of the twenty-teens. An outlaw to the core.
Tad patted his pocket for the fourth time, making sure the five caps were still in there. The other cap—his cap—was tucked away in his private stash bottle in the special pocket in his right boot, right next to the short Damascus dagger he carried there.
He lit up a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and coughed. His lungs were bad, never had gotten much stronger after the TB was cured and he got out of the sanitarium in New Mexico, and smoking only made em worse, but the hell with it, he wasn’t gonna live long enough for cancer to get him anyhow.
The air conditioner blasted the smoke away as he reached for the music player to crank up some volume. Something with a lot of bone-vibrating bass, but none of that techno-rap junk the kids were listening to today.
He glanced at his watch. Still had half an hour before he had to make the first delivery.
He rolled the window down, took a final drag off the cigarette, and thumbed the butt out the window. He couldn’t do the Hammer today, too much work, so it would have to be tonight or tomorrow. He knew when he needed to drop to get off. He didn’t want to miss that window. Sure, Bobby would make him another, but it would be such a waste there was no way Tad was gonna let it happen.
Tonight, definitely. He could become Thor, and he would swing the Hammer high, wide, and anywhere he damned well pleased.
Oh, yeah—
Some asshole in a low-slung Italian something or the other whipped around Tad, caught rubber as he upshifted, and blew past. Guy looked like a movie star, might even be one: tan, fit in a tank top, designer shades, and a big expensive smile when he flashed his caps to show Tad there were no hard feelings.
The way he felt right now, Tad wouldn’t bother chasing the guy. Even if he c
aught him, the guy would certainly be able to stomp his butt for his trouble.
Come back and see me tonight, pal. See how your SoCal pretty-boy tough-guy act plays when I’m swinging Mjollnir high, wide, and repeatedly. Be a different story then, old son, a whole different story.
4
On 1-95, Approaching Quantico, Virginia
Michaels was on the way to his office when his virgil blared out the opening chords for “Mustang Sally.” He smiled at the little electronic device. Jay Gridley had been at it again, reprogramming the attention call. It was one of Jay’s small delights, to do that every so often, usually coming up with some new musical sting Michaels never expected.
He shook his head as he unclipped the virgil—for virtual global interface link—from his belt and saw that the incoming call was from his boss, Melissa Allison, director of the FBI. Her image appeared on the tiny screen as he said, “Answer call,” and activated the virgil’s voxax control.
“Good morning, Alex.”
“Director.”
“If you would please stop by my office on your way in, I would appreciate it. Something has come up that I think Net Force needs to address.”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m on my way. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
She looked at something off-screen, then said, “I see you’re on the freeway. You might want to take an alternate route. There’s an accident a couple of miles ahead of you. Traffic will start backing up pretty fast.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Discom.”
It used to bother him that they could GPS him that way, using the virgil’s carrier sig to tell exactly where he was. Then he reasoned if he wanted to keep his whereabouts secret, all he had to do was kill the unit’s power. That is, if there wasn’t some hidden internal battery that kept the carrier going, even if the thing looked like it was turned off.
He smiled at his thought. Paranoid? Maybe. But stranger things had happened in the U.S. intelligence service, and he wouldn’t put anything past certain factions, nothing.