by Tom Clancy
Santos had assigned himself the most remote of the attack sites, where the cable was strung out over a gorge, somewhere in cowboy country. He was fairly high up in the hills, five, maybe six thousand feet, he guessed, from how thin the air was in his lungs. Even so, the air did have a clean and fresh, pine-treelike scent, and it gusted and swirled in a fairly stiff turn-your-head-around breeze now and then. It was cold up here, dark and crusty old snow piled in shady patches everywhere. It was clear and sunny, though, and warmer near the larger rocks where it was protected from the wind. It had taken him three hours to hike in from where he’d parked his four-wheel SUV, and he’d worked up a sweat under his warm clothing, though he’d kept his gloves on. His hands never seemed to stay warm when the thermometer’s reading dropped to near freezing. He liked climates where you could run around with no shirt on if you wanted, tropical heat, with snow seldom, if ever.
When he had gotten close to the spot where he intended to burn through the protected cable, using a few coils of Thermex welding cord he carried in his pack, he ran into unexpected company.
He thought this strange, since the place was in the middle of nowhere, a long way on foot from the nearest road.
There were two of them, big men. They wore back-country cold weather clothes — dark wool trousers and hiking books, plaid wool shirts and heavy Gore-Tex parkas, and orange caps with state logos on them. The logos indicated that the pair were game wardens.
Bad luck. For them.
Santos was not carrying a gun, and thus shouldn’t be thought a hunter, unless they thought he was chasing mountain goats and throwing rocks at them, but the two men decided to give him a hard time anyway. Santos figured out why in a few seconds when one of them said, “Well, well, whadda we got here — a hiker? Hey, Jerry, you ever hear of niggers hiking?”
“Can’t say as I have, Rich. They only have two forward speeds — cock-stroll and feets-do-your-stuff! But they show up nice against the snow, hey?”
Both men laughed at the lame humor.
That made it easier, not that it was necessary to be easier. He would have had to take care of them anyway, since they’d seen him, but it made him feel better that they weren’t nice men.
Santos waited for the two to get closer. Both men wore sidearms in holsters, visible under the unzipped jackets, the guns being Glocks, probably in 9mm or.40. The one named Jerry had a scoped bolt-action rifle slung over his shoulder on a hand-tooled leather strap. Looked like a Winchester Model 70, no way to tell the caliber. A good weapon, the Winchester.
“Colorado game wardens. Let’s see some identification, boy,” Rich said.
“Am I doing something illegal?” Santos said. “I thought this was public property. I’m not hunting or fishing.”
“Ooh, listen to that accent, we got us a foreign nigger. You from Mexico, boy?” That from Jerry. “Habla Spicko?”
“We want to take a look in that backpack of yours,” Rich said. “See if you have a gun you might be using to illegally hunt with. Hand it over.”
“Okay,” Santos said. “You’re the law.”
Both men smiled, glancing at each other, secure in their ability to whipsaw this one black man into subservience out here in the cold mountains.
He swung the backpack into Jerry’s face, hard, and before Rich could react, Santos did a cartwheel and kicked the surprised man flush on the mouth. Yes, it was a flashy move, one his Mestre would have slapped him for trying so quickly in even a street match, but these were not players, they were white racists. He wanted to bash them with style.
Rich went down, hard, and as Jerry managed to recover from being hit in the face with the backpack, Santos danced in and slapped the man, slinging his arm around using the twisting of his hips like popping a whip to deliver the power. The heel of his hand connected with Jerry’s temple and sent a shock up Santos’s arm. A good hit.
Jerry sprawled, and Santos would bet gold against sawdust the man was out of it.
Rich came up, clawing for his pistol, but Santos got there, grabbed his wrist and wrenched it, turned the gun so the muzzle faced Rich’s belly, then grabbed Rich’s fist with his own free hand hard enough to trigger the weapon.
The explosion was very loud in the quiet afternoon.
The empty shell ejected in a lazy, slow-motion arc, glittered in the sunshine, and fell, bounced from a flat rock, and tumbled from sight.
It shocked the hell out of Rich as the bullet hit him in the belly, you could see that.
The wounded man released his grip on the gun and fell to his knees, trying to stop the blood flow with his hands. That didn’t work. Red seeped through his fingers, dripping to the ground. It smelled like warm copper.
Santos grabbed the pistol, pointed it at Rich’s head.
“No, please, don’t—!”
Santos grinned. “Vaya con Dios,” he said. “That’s Spicko, right?”
“Don’t—!”
He shot the man right between the eyes.
Jerry was still down, feet twitching. Must have knocked him cold.
Santos took two steps, aimed, and put a round into Jerry’s head. The man spasmed, then went limp.
Two men, armed, and too easy. He sighed. In his country, the women fought better.
Santos tucked the gun into his belt. He would get rid of it later, where it wouldn’t be found. His prints weren’t on record in the United States, but he didn’t want this coming back to bite him twenty years from now. The authorities had long memories when you killed any of their own. Fingerprints, DNA, whatever they could get, these things stayed in the system forever. He had heard about guys picked up thirty years after they did a murder when something that had been sitting in a refrigerator at some lab for all that time matched with new crime scene evidence. He didn’t want that, always to be looking over his shoulder.
He went to the bodies and squatted. He already had his gloves on so there was little risk as he went through the dead men’s pockets.
He found two wallets on each man, which puzzled him. A look at the contents brought a big smile to his face. Huh. What do you know about that?
He dropped the wallets, collected his backpack, and headed back toward his target. He’d be done in an hour, long gone by nightfall… This high up, cold as it was, if the animals didn’t get them, they would keep a long time, turning to dessicated mummies. But the authorities would discover what the scavengers left when they came to find the broken cable, which would be sooner rather than later.
When he was far enough away, maybe he’d use a throwaway phone to call the authorities about these two. Just to make sure they didn’t go undiscovered. That would be amusing, no?
Yes. Most amusing.
* * *
Toni came into Michaels’s office looking at a computer printout. “Here’s something that will probably make the director happy,” she said.
“What?”
“You know those two federal fugitives, the militia guys? Ones suspected in the killings of a couple of game wardens in Colorado a few weeks back?”
“Bank robbers and armored car hijackers, right? Numbers five and six on the Ten Most Wanted? The ones the regular FBI has been combing the mountains looking for for the last three months?”
“That’s them. Seems some anonymous call tipped off authorities about where to find the pair. And sure enough, they had the game wardens’ ID and some of their clothing on them when they were located.”
“Captured alive? I seem to recall they swore they’d never be taken that way.”
“They were right. But they were both cold when the local sheriff’s deputies got there. Shot to death.”
“Who shot them?” he asked.
“Nobody knows. I’d venture to guess nobody really cares, either. Somebody who saved the state and the federal government the costs of a couple of trials.”
“Life is strange sometimes, isn’t it?”
“Isn’t it just? The local cops also found a major transcontinental fiber-optic phone
cable nearby had been cut.”
“Maybe the phone company shot them. Hear anything from home?”
“Yes, I just talked to Guru. Little Alex is sleeping. Has been no problem at all.”
“Ask her if she wants to move up here permanently, be a full-time nanny. Just for, oh, fifteen or so years?”
“You think you’re joking,” she said. “I’m considering it.”
“Now you’re joking.”
“Nope. She’s an old lady and I love her. I owe her a lot — what she taught me helped make me who I am. She’s all alone in New York. Her own family doesn’t pay much attention to her. And she’s really good with the baby. Would it be so awful if she lived in the spare bedroom and helped take care of him?”
Michaels blinked. The idea was something of a shock. “Uh. Um.”
“Think about it.”
He nodded. “Okay. I will.”
14
Mercy General Hospital
Washington, D.C.
Tyrone lay in a restless, Demerol-induced sleep. His breathing was mostly slow and heavy, but now and then he would moan softly and breathe faster, and try to turn on the bed. When he did that, Howard would reach out and put his hand on the boy’s head, speaking soft reassurances until his son calmed down.
Nadine had gone to the cafeteria to get some sandwiches and coffee. Howard expected her back in a few minutes. She was a wreck, had seldom left this room since they’d gotten here. He had tried to send her home to rest, but she wasn’t having any of that.
Leave her baby here, in a hospital, alone?
Well. He was fourteen, and hardly a baby, but she had spoken with such fierceness that he hadn’t brought it up again.
And he understood her feelings. Even though he was pretty much out of the woods, one or the other of them was going to be right here until they let Tyrone go home.
Tyrone’s left leg was supported in a sling. A titanium pin the size of a big nail had been driven through his leg just below the knee, skewering his shin bone. The pin was connected on both ends by a looped cord to a cable, which was in turn attached to a big sandbag, supported by a pulley on the steel frame over the bed. They needed to keep things a certain way until they could do the rest of the surgery with plates and screws, an open reduction, they called it, and even then, the boy was going to wear a fiberglass cast for a couple of months, from his hip to his ankle.
It hurt Howard to look at it. The doctor had assured him that there weren’t any nerves in the bone, and that the pain where the traction device pierced the skin was minimal. Where Tyrone hurt the most was where his muscles had been torn and bruised in his upper leg when the thigh — the femur — had snapped. This had happened when a half-ton pickup truck, driven by a forty-three-year-old construction worker, had crossed the center line and plowed head-on into the car in which Tyrone had been a passenger in the rear seat. His seat belt had held, but the car had compacted and accordioned enough so that the seat in front of him had been thrust back into his leg, breaking it just above the knee.
Tyrone’s friend, a fourteen-year-old girl named Jessie Corvos, who had been riding in that front seat was in Intensive Care with massive internal injuries, and her prognosis was poor. The car’s driver, the girl’s older brother, Rafael, had three broken ribs, a punctured lung, shattered right arm, broken ankle, and had undergone surgery to remove a ruptured spleen, but was expected to recover.
The man who’d been driving the truck had a tiny cut on his forehead that had taken three stitches to close; otherwise, not a mark on him. The man had been playing pool and downing pitchers of beer with friends at a bar. He had been arrested for driving under the influence and released on bail. His blood alcohol level was 0.21 percent, nearly three times the legal limit when they’d tested it.
Howard had met Jessie and Rafael’s father, Raymond, in the ER. The older Corvos had been pale and shaking, probably in shock, but there had also been in him a tightly suppressed rage. Howard had caught only a glimpse of it. It was like seeing a nuclear fireball through a pinhole some distance away from the aperture: only a speck of intensely bright light was visible, but to move your eye closer would guarantee instant blindness. Raymond Corvos was an accountant, a slightly built, balding man, and mild-looking, save for that hint of white-hot anger.
If Jessie or Rafael Corvos died, then Howard would not want to be the driver who had killed them — he had the impression their father would come for the killer, and Howard would not wish to be standing in his way when he did.
As he watched his sleeping child, he could understand that. Vengeance belonged to the Lord, and Jesus had preached forgiveness for sins, no matter how heinous; but if Tyrone died as a result of some negligent idiot too plastered to be driving, he could easily see appointing himself judge, jury, and executioner, even at the risk of his own soul.
There were some things a man had to do, no matter what the cost.
Nadine came back into the room, carrying a plastic bag and a drink holder with four paper cups of coffee in it.
“He wake up?”
“No. He’s still out. Resting better, I think.”
She handed him a cup of coffee with a corrugated cardboard sleeve on it. He pulled the lid off and blew on the hot liquid.
“They had tuna on white, turkey on rye, and ham and cheese on whole wheat,” she said. “I got two of each. You want one?”
“Maybe later,” he said. “Coffee’s fine for now.
She nodded, took a cup of coffee for herself, and pulled her chair closer to his, next to the bed. She reached out with her free hand, and he took it in his.
He knew they would get used to this. You could get used to almost anything if you had the time. One of them would eventually go home, shower, get a nap, bring back clean clothes, while the other stayed. They’d swap off. But with any luck, they’d be going home soon. There were portable traction devices they could hook up to Tyrone’s leg, once the doctors were sure he’d be okay. The surgery that would come later was relatively safe. There were some rare, but potentially dangerous complications following this kind of accident they’d told the Howards about: fat emboli, blood clots that might break loose and get into the circulatory system to cause problems. After a few days, the risk of these would be minimal.
Tyrone was going to be okay. But — what if Howard had been off on assignment somewhere in some hellhole, doing Net Force’s business when this had happened? It was bad enough, but — what if it had been worse? If his son had been injured so badly that he didn’t make it? Died while his father was a thousand miles away, unable to get back in time?
When he thought about it reasonably, he knew this was an irrational argument. Tyrone could have died in the accident and Howard could have been a block away and it wouldn’t have made any difference. You couldn’t live your life looking over your child’s shoulder, worried every minute of every day about what might happen to him. The Almighty had His own plans. And if He wanted to call Tyrone — or Nadine — home? Well, that’s what would happen, and there was nothing Howard could do about it.
Man proposes, God disposes.
But in his heart of hearts, he felt that if he was there when the call came, Howard might be able to talk God out of it. Offer a trade, himself for his child or wife, and maybe God would go for it. There wasn’t any basis for believing that, God was not known for horse-trading souls, but on some level, he believed it might be different if he was there to make the offer. So going away and not being around to try that deal was heavy on his mind. Maybe he had made a mistake in going back to work for Net Force.
It was something he was going to have to think about some more.
Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia
Toni stuck her head into Alex’s office.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“The BCIII sting is about to go down.”
“Really? That was fast.”
She nodded. “Turned out the ‘Chinese hackers’ were in Richmond, they didn’t have far to
travel. Jay’s run the feed from a case — and a sticky-cam into the conference room’s big monitor, if you want to watch.”
Alex glanced at his desk. “Might as well. I’m not getting much done here.”
The two of them headed for the conference room. Toni hadn’t been here when this sting had been set up, but she’d seen others like it when she’d been working here before. It was simple enough. Certain kinds of criminal hackers into extortion had been around for years. Generally they’d break into a company’s system, steal files, crash the system, or set up a worm or virus for later, sometimes all three. Then they’d contact the company and offer their services as “computer security consultants.” If the company wasn’t interested, they would trash or steal valuable files, put client lists on the net, and other manner of devilry until the company came around. A lot of mid-sized corporations found it cheaper and easier just to pay the hackers to go away, as long as they weren’t too greedy, and the RBs — that came from “rule benders,” which is what they liked to call themselves instead of “law breakers”—would take their money and move on to another victim.
No harm, no foul, and the company eats the loss as part of doing business.
But a few years ago, the FBI, then Net Force, began using their skills to create fake companies whose profiles were attractive to the RBs. They’d set up shop, drop fake histories and credit ratings into places where they’d be found and believed, and wait. Too confident of their abilities in the electronic world, the extortioners would never stoop to actually going to a library — using shoeware-to-treeware, they called it — that would give the lie to the fake histories posted. Only squirrels played in trees.
You’re not an ape — use a tool!
The RBs were always looking for fat and easy targets, and the Net Force decoys were set out like overweight turkeys too heavy to run.