by Tom Clancy
“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, what 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 caught 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.
* * *
The man was big, he was stark naked, and he had an erection. He walked through the hotel hallway, got to a window at the end, and stopped. The window was closed, one of those that couldn’t be opened, and from the skyline visible in the distance, it was fairly high up.
The man put his hands on the window and shoved.
The window exploded outward. The man backed up a few steps, took a short run, and dived through the shattered window, looking like he was diving off the Acapulco cliffs or maybe pretending to be Superman.
* * *
Melissa Allison said, “Agent Lee?”
The man who’d been introduced to Michaels as Brett Lee, of the Drug Enforcement Administration, shut off the InFocus projector and his laptop computer, and the image of the broken window faded.
“This was taken by security cameras in the new Sheraton Hotel in Madrid,” he said. “The man was Richard Aubrey Barnette, age thirty, whose Internet company License-to-Steal.com earned him fourteen million dollars last month. He fell twenty-eight stories onto a cab, killing the driver and causing a traffic accident that killed three others and injured five.”
Michaels said, “I see. And this is related to the casino owner who trashed his competitor’s place of business before being killed by local police?”
“Yes.”
“And to the woman who attacked a gang of construction workers who whistled at her and put seven of them into intensive care?”
“Yes,” Lee said. “And to others of a similar nature.”
Michaels looked at his boss, then at Lee. “And I take it that, since you are DEA, you think drugs were somehow involved?”
Lee frowned, not sure if Michaels was pulling his chain or not. Which, Michaels had to admit to himself, he was, a little. Lee seemed awfully stiff.
Lee said, “Yes, we are certain of that.”
Michaels nodded. “Please don’t take offense, Mr. Lee, but this concerns Net Force how?”
Lee looked at Allison for support and got it. She said, “My counterpart at DEA has asked for our assistance. Naturally, the FBI and any of its subsidiaries are happy to help in any way we can.”
“Naturally,” Michaels said, knowing full well that interagency cooperation was more often like competing football teams than the least bit collective. Rivalries among the dozen or so agencies that comprised the intelligence community in the U.S. — everybody from CIA to FBI to NSA to DIA to NRO — were old, established, and more often than not, nobody gave up anything without some quid pro quo. Yes, they were all technically on the same team, but practically speaking, an agency was happy to shine its own star any way it could, and if that included using another agency’s shirt to do it, well, that’s how the game was played. Michaels had discovered this early in his career, long before he left the field to take over Net Force. And DEA wasn’t a major player anyhow, given its somewhat limited mission.
Michaels said, “So how is it that Net Force can do something here DEA can’t?”
Lee, a short man with a fierce look, flushed. Michaels could almost see him bite his tongue to keep from saying what he really wanted to say, which was undoubtedly rude. Instead, Lee said, “How much do you know about the drug laws, Commander Michaels?”
“Not much,” he admitted.
“All right, let me give you a quick and rough overview. Federal drug regulation in the United States comes under the authority of the Controlled Substances Act — that’s CSA — Title II, of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, with various amendments since. Legal — and illegal — drugs are put on one of five schedules, depending on what uses have been established for them and on how much potential for abuse they have. Schedule I is reserved for dangerous drugs without medical applications that have a high potential for abuse, Schedule V is for stuff with low abuse potential.”
“We’re talking about the difference between, say, heroin and aspirin?” Michaels said.
“Precisely. The CSA gets pretty specific about these things.”
“Go ahead, I’m still with you.”
“In the last few years, there has been a resurgence in so-called designer drugs, that is to say, those that don’t slot neatly into the traditional categories. Variations and combinations of things like MDA and Ecstasy and certain new anabolic steroids, like that. The government realized that certain individuals were trying to circumvent the intent of the law by adding a molecule here or subtracting one there to make a drug that wasn’t technically illegal, so there is a provision for analog drugs not addressed by the code.
“So, basically, any salt, compound, derivative, optical or geometric isomers, salts of isomers, whatever, based on a drug that is regulated become automatically de facto regulated the moment it is created.”
Michaels nodded again, wondering where this was going.
“And in case we have a really clever chemist who comes up with something entirely new and different — which is pretty much unlikely, if not impossible, given the known things that humans abuse — the attorney general can put that on Schedule I on an emergency basis. This is done if the AG determines that there is an imminent hazard to the public safety, there is evidence of abuse, and there is clandestine importation, manufacture, or distribution of said chemical substance.
“Basically, the AG posts a notice in the Federal Register, and it becomes valid after thirty days for up to a year.”
Michaels nodded again. He thought Lee was a stuffed shirt, and he dec
ided to give another little tug on his chain. “Very interesting, if you are a DEA agent. Are we getting to a point anytime soon?”
Lee flushed again, and Michaels was fairly certain that if the director hadn’t been sitting there, the DEA man would have lost his temper and said or maybe even done something rash. But give him credit, he got a handle on it.
“What it means is, we have some pretty specific tools we can use to get dangerous, illegal drugs off the street. But in this case, we can’t use them.”
Ah, now that was interesting. “Why not?”
“Because we haven’t been able to obtain enough of the drug to analyze it properly. We know what it does: It makes you fast, strong, mean, and sexually potent. It might make you smarter, too, but that’s hard to say from our samples, since if they were that smart, they ought not to be dead. We know what it looks like; it comes in a big purple capsule. But we can’t make it illegal if we don’t know what it is in the cap.”
Michaels grinned slightly. He could hear that conversation: “Yes, sir, this is the vile stuff, all right. Could you put it on the list so we can bust the guys who made it? What’s in it? Uh, well, we don’t exactly know. Can’t you, uh, you know, just make big purple capsules illegal temporarily?”
Be interesting to hear the AG’s response to that one.
“And where does Net Force come in?”
“We have evidence that the makers of the drug — they call it Thor’s Hammer, by the way — are using the Internet to arrange delivery.”
“If the drug isn’t illegal, then using the net to distribute it isn’t illegal, either,” Michaels said.
“We know. But if we can find them, we can damn well ask the miscreants making it to give us a sample. So to speak. ”
Miscreants? Michaels didn’t think he’d ever actually heard that word used in a conversation before. He said, “Ah, pardon me for asking a stupid question, but wouldn’t it be easier just to buy some on the street and analyze it?”
“Believe it or not, Commander, that thought did occur to us, it being our job and all. It isn’t a common street drug. The cost of it is extremely high, and the sellers are very selective about who they sell it to. So far, none of our agents have been able to make a connection.