by Tom Clancy
“I’m walking over to where I parked my car,” he told Adam. “Don’t fucking shoot me when I come back.”
“Why waste a bullet?” Adam said. “You look like somebody could kill you with a hard look. Hell, you look dead already.”
“You need to work on your material, Adam. I heard that one already.”
“Lots of times, I bet.”
Tad thought about his route for a minute. Out the front gate and along the road was longer. But walking along the beach through the sand would be harder. The road would be noisier, all the traffic. The beach would be hot. He’d have to walk around cars parked on the highway. He didn’t need any more obstacles at the moment. Until he got his medicine mixed and working, just breathing was an effort.
Okay, the beach. He headed for the deck stairs.
* * *
Michaels said, “One of those three or four houses?”
Howard drove, Michaels rode shotgun, Jay sat in the back. As they idled slowly along the highway, looking toward the beach, Jay said, “Got to be. Permit specifies this part of the beach. That sandwich shop over there is in the movie. I pulled it up and scanned location shots. That house to the far left was built two years ago, so it wasn’t there then.”
“Do we have owners on these?”
“Yes. The pinkish one is owned by the actress Lorrie DeVivio. She got it in the divorce settlement with her fifth ex-husband Jessel Tammens, the movie producer.”
“DeVivio is what… sixty and rich? Hard to image her making and peddling dope,” Howard said.
“Ah, you know the old movie stars, eh, General?”
“She won an Oscar,” Howard said. “And not for her looks.”
“What about the other houses?”
“Second one belongs to the chairman of the board of the Yokohama-USA Bank. He’s also sixty-something and also richer than God.
“Third one, the pale blue and white one, is owned by a corporation called Projects, Inc. Some kind of corporate retreat, maybe. I’m running down the incorporation stuff now. They are out of Delaware.
“Fourth one belongs to one Saul Horowitz. Don’t know who Solly is, and the searchbots haven’t been more forthcoming so far.”
“That sounds promising. Pull over there, into that restaurant lot, and let’s think about this for a minute,” Michaels said.
All four of the houses had security gates and fences, at least to the road side. As Howard parked the car, a Mercedes convertible arrived in front of the third house and pulled up to the gate. The car’s top was down, and a sun-bleached blond, deeply tanned young man in a Hawaiian shirt who looked like a surfer held up an electronic remote and pointed it at the heavy steel gate, which slowly swung open to admit his car. He pulled into the drive, and the gate started to close behind him.
“Yo, kahuna dude!” Jay said, in a valley-boy voice, “Surf’s up!” Jay held up his hand, the middle fingers closed, his thumb and little finger extended. He waggled his hand back and forth. “Mahalo!”
“Thank you, Brian Wilson. You get the license plate number?” Michaels said.
“Crap! I’m sorry, boss—”
“It’s a vanity,” Howard said. “P-R-O-J-E-C-T-S.”
“Run it,” Michaels ordered.
Jay, chagrined at his failure to catch the number, dialed up the California DMV and logged in, using his Net Force access code.
A few seconds later, he said, “Car is owned by Projects, Inc.,” he said. “Big surprise there, huh? Looks like you get wheels to go with the house. Nice perks.”
“So, what do you think?” Michaels said.
“Either it’s that one or the Horowitz place,” Howard said. “Rich bankers and rich movie stars might use dope, but they don’t need to sell it.”
“Just FYI, General, they found a bug on your car. That’s how the shooter kept from losing you.” Jay pointed at the flatscreen. “Also, Mr. Lee, who as we all know couldn’t have been said shooter, called in sick today.”
“Something fatal, I hope,” Howard said.
“And to keep things interesting, Mr. Zachary George is on vacation this week and next,” Jay said.
Michaels said, “Anything on the searchbots for Mr. Horowitz here yet?”
“Nope,” Jay said. “But I don’t think we need it.”
“And why would that be?”
“Take a look at the death-warmed-over stick in black walking along the road there, coming from the sandwich place,” Jay said.
“So?”
“Look again, boss.”
Michaels did. He frowned.
“Yeah,” Jay said. “Kind of hard to picture him beating the crap out of a room full of bodybuilders and trashing a gym, isn’t it?”
Michaels nodded. “But that’s the guy.”
“Never thought I’d see an actual match to a police ID composite,” Jay said. “All we have to do is watch and see if he chooses door A or door B. Whichever one he picks, I’d bet my next month’s salary against a bent quarter that’s our dealer’s house.”
The three watched the man, who looked as if he might fall down any second, as he shambled along. It took him a while to get there, but he finally did.
“And we have a winner,” Jay said. “It’s the surfer dude’s pad. Net Force rules!” He looked at Michaels. “Now what, boss? We gonna go kick ass and take names?” He held up his air taser and waggled it.
Both Howard and Michaels laughed.
Michaels said, “I see your experience in the field didn’t teach you anything. We’re not going anywhere. We’re calling the FBI. They’ll go in.”
* * *
Drayne parked the car and went in. He saw one of the bodyguards skulking behind the banana and short palm trees nod and wave at him. Good to know they were watching the place like they should.
Inside, Drayne walked out to the deck. Adam was there, looking at the ocean. “Where’s Tad?”
“He stepped out, said he was going to his car,” Adam said. “Said he’d be back in a few minutes.”
Drayne nodded. Tad would be self-medicating as soon as he was ambulatory again, and his pharmacy would be in his car, parked away from the house. It better be.
The front door opened, and speak of the devil.
“Hey, Bobby.”
“Tad. You all right?”
“Will be in about half an hour.” He headed for the kitchen.
Drayne followed Tad into the kitchen, watched as Tad counted out ten or twelve pills, caps, caplets, and tablets, filled a glass with water from the tap filter line, and washed the drugs down in one big swallow.
“While you were napping, I set up some things,” Bobby said. “I was gonna send one of the bodyguards, but now that you’re awake, you can make the FedEx run.”
“Okay.”
“We’re moving forty-five hits of the Hammer.”
Tad raised an eyebrow.
“Might as well make hay while the sun shines,” Drayne said.
“You mixed it already?”
“Yep. Did the final at the new house, so the stuff is just under an hour old.”
“Got mine?”
“It’s too soon, Tad, you ought to sit this batch out. I’ll be doing another bunch next week.”
Tad didn’t say anything, and Drayne shook his head. “It’s your ass.”
“Such that it is, yeah,” Tad said. “Give me thirty minutes for the stack to kick in, I’ll be ready to roll.”
Drayne shook his head again. “Your funeral.”
“Geez, Boss, you don’t think the three of us could take one surfer dude and a zombie?”
Michaels had already put in the call to the director, and she in turn had called the local FBI shop and started the ball rolling. He said, “Isn’t this the zombie who wiped up the floor with a gym full of guys strong enough to pick up tractor trailers? Didn’t you just bring that up?”
“Yeah, but—”
“And don’t you recall the recordings of a white-haired old man who shrugged off a cloud of
pepper gas and air tasers like they were mosquitoes and tossed guards and cops around a casino like a kid throwing toy soldiers? Or a woman who ripped an ATM machine out of a wall with her bare hands?”
“Yeah, but he can barely move now. He can’t be on the drug.”
Howard said, “There are too many things we don’t know here, Jay. Think about it. What is the lay of the house? Can they sneak out the back while we’re climbing the front gate? Are they armed? Who else is in there with them? I’m the only one with a gun here, so do you and the commander run around back and make sure they don’t escape with your tasers while I try to kick in what might be an armored front door? Not to disparage your shooting ability, but even if you hit something, you’ve only got one shot before you have to reload, and the fastest AT reload I’ve ever seen took almost two seconds. I’d guess you couldn’t do it in five or six. In two seconds, a man can run twenty, twenty-five feet, knock you down, and take off. In six seconds, he could be down the road having a beer, figuratively speaking. And that’s unarmed. If the surfer or the zombie have weapons, what do you think they’ll be doing with them if you miss? Or if you yell ‘Stop!’ and they shoot first? They could have a submachine gun in there, and they could take out twenty civilians out there on the beach. That would be after they cut you down.”
“Mm,” Jay said. “That would be bad for public relations, not to mention my personal love life. So why didn’t we call in Net Force troops? We can trust them.”
“That would have been my choice,” Howard said, “but the commander is right. We found them, but it isn’t our operation, we aren’t supposed to even be here, we’re outside our job description. If we had a dozen Net Force military troops kick in the door of a Malibu beach house, we’d all be looking for jobs. Assuming we could even get our people here in the next couple of hours, which we could not.”
Michaels said, “By rights, this belongs to the DEA. Even if the director decides to let FBI agents make the arrests, it’s still a hot political potato. The director can risk pissing off a brother agency, we can’t. We can’t even get warrants, so even if we were willing to get fired, the capture wouldn’t be legal. Even an ambulance-chaser lawyer with a lobotomy could get them off. The arrests would be completely illegal.”
“Yeah, okay, I can see all that,” Jay said. His voice was reluctant.
Michaels looked at his watch. “We should have agents showing up within thirty or forty minutes, if we’re lucky. We do it by the numbers, get part of the credit, and most importantly, the drug dealer is off the street. The end result is the same, no matter who hauls them off.”
“For how long is he off the street?” Jay asked.
“Excuse me?’
“This guy is carrying around a secret that is worth millions, maybe tens of millions, you said so yourself. Won’t the drug companies be falling all over themselves to be first in line to hire him the best legal team in the world? How high can his bail be?”
Michaels nodded. He knew what Jay said was true. “Probably. But that’s not our worry. We were supposed to find him. We found him. We did our part. What happens to him after they catch him isn’t our problem, we don’t have any control over that. We’re just a cog in the big machine, Jay. We do our job, we have to hope the rest of the system does its job. Can’t be everywhere.”
“That sucks,” Jay said.
“Welcome to the real world, son,” Howard said.
35
Drayne gave Tad the minipackets with the Hammer caps, the list of addresses, and pointed him at the door. By now, most of the payments would have already been transferred electronically into the safe accounts. Before Tad stuck a packet into the FedEx clerk’s hands, he’d check again to make sure the payment for it had cleared.
As the door closed behind Tad, the phone rang. It was the business line.
“Polymers, Drayne—”
“If you have a lawyer, call him,” came his father’s voice. “You’ll need him soon.”
His father hung up without identifying himself, and Drayne felt a rush as cold as liquid nitrogen envelop him.
“You!” he said, pointing at the nearest bodyguard. “Go get Tad! Don’t let him outside the gate!”
The bodyguard hurried away.
Drayne’s fear, cold at first, now flushed into an uncomfortable warmth that suffused his whole body.
The old man had turned him in!
No. If his father had done that, he wouldn’t have had any second thoughts. The old man never apologized for anything once he decided it was the right thing to do. And though he hadn’t said anything specific, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to read the volumes between those lines.
Drayne was about to be busted. The old man had found out about it, and he’d called to warn him.
Son of a bitch.
Almost more important than getting arrested was that his father had gone against thirty years of duty to tell his son he was in trouble. Couldn’t bring himself to give it all away, of course, but even this much, knowing how smart Drayne was, and that he would figure it out, was nothing short of a miracle.
Son of a bitch.
Drayne went to the security console in the kitchen and looked at the camera focused on the front gate. Nothing there. He touched the controls. The cam was mounted on a gimbal, could look pretty much in any direction. He put the cam into a slow 360-degree pan.
Across the street at the Blue Gull, a car was backed into a parking slot, and a man sat in the passenger seat, the window down, looking in the direction of Drayne’s house.
Drayne stopped the pan and focused the cam on the car.
Okay, that could be somebody waiting for his wife to come out of the bathroom or something.
He hit the zoom. The glare on the windshield wouldn’t let him see inside, but the security folks knew about glass glare, and a dial let him polarize the lens. The windshield cleared to show a second man in the driver’s seat and a third man in the back.
Shit! They were already in place!
Tad came back into the kitchen. “What’s up?”
“Company,” he said. “Look.”
Tad looked at the screen. “So? Some guys in a car. Don’t mean nothing.”
“Yeah, except that my father just called and told me to call my lawyer.”
“Your father? Oh, shit.”
“Exactly.” Drayne took a deep breath. He said to Adam, “Go see if anybody is hanging around out back.”
Adam returned in thirty seconds. “Nope. Couple of girls with their tops off lying facedown on beach towels next door, that’s it.”
“Okay, they haven’t covered the rear of the house yet. Tad, Adam, we’re going for a walk. The rest of you stay here. If anybody comes to call in the next five minutes, don’t let them in. After that, it doesn’t matter. You don’t know anything. Not who I am, not where I’ve gone. You got that?”
There was a murmur from the guards. They pulled their pistols out.
To Adam, Drayne said, “You have an extra one of those?” He pointed at the gun in Adam’s holster.
“Sure.”
“Give it to me.”
Adam did so. The gun was kind of squarish, black, and made out of some sort of polymer. Drayne said, “What do I do?”
“It’s a Glock.40,” Adam said. “Point it like you would your finger and pull the trigger. It’s ready to go. You have eleven shots.”
Drayne hefted the black plastic gun, then tucked it into his pants in the back, under the tails of the Hawaiian shirt.
“Let’s go,” he said.
* * *
“Here comes the cavalry,” Howard said.
Three unmarked late-model sedans cruised slowly up the highway from the south. The cars turned into their parking lot and pulled to a halt.
“More behind us,” Jay said.
Howard looked around and saw three more cars and a van convoy into the lot.
A tall man in a gray sweatsuit got out of the lead vehicle and walked to the passenger sid
e of their car. “Commander Michaels? I’m Special Agent in Charge Delorme.”
Michaels waved at Howard and Gridley. “SAC. General John Howard and Jay Gridley.”
“No offense, sir, but isn’t Net Force supposed to be a computer-based operation?”
“It is.”
“With all due respect, sir, once you located the suspects, you should have called the proper agency in right away, not come out here on your own.”
Gridley leaned forward and said, “Yeah, well, last time we found a suspect, the proper agency rolled in like gang-busters and shot him dead. We were kinda hoping to avoid that this time.”
Howard grinned a little. He was a mouthy kid, but he did put his finger right on the problem from time to time.
“Thank you, Jay,” Michaels said. To Delorme, he said, “Don’t worry. We’ll sit right here out of your way while you do your job.”
“Sir,” Delorme said. He stood and waved his hand in a circle, index finger pointing up at the sky. Three of the cars pulled out of the lot and across the highway, skidding to stops on either side of the target house. Doors opened, and agents in body armor with FBI lettered in big Day-Glo yellow on their backs, armed with assault rifles and wearing goggles and LOSIR headsets, boiled out of the cars. Delorme pulled a headset on, caught a vest somebody tossed at him, and moved toward the highway.
Other agents alighted from the cars still in the lot and ran across the road.
Two cars rolled toward places where the beach was accessible from the road, and more agents leaped out and hut-hut-hutted toward the ocean, to circle around behind the house.
“Not bad deployment,” Howard said, after watching them move into position outside the gate. “A little slow, kind of sloppy, but not bad for civilians.” All the high-tech gear in the world, and when it came right down to it, it was still going be the ground troops who had to gain the territory.
“Might as well sit back and enjoy the show,” Michaels said. Then he said, “Shit!”
“What?” Howard and Jay said together.
Michaels pointed. A big Dodge rolled out of the sandwich shop parking lot and roared away, heading north.
“Sir?” Howard said.
“The zombie is driving that car!”