Cybernation nf-6

by Tom Clancy

Michaels realized for him, it was gonna be family first, and then work. It didn’t used to be that way, but that’s how it was now. He hadn’t noticed when that had happened, that shift, but it had.

  He could understand a whole lot better now why John Howard had taken a leave and had thought seriously about retiring.

  Just when he thought he had a handle on life, it went and changed on him.

  Damn.

  19

  Western Pennsylvania

  June 1770

  Jay crept through the thick woods along a deer trail with as much stealth as he could manage. This mixed evergreen and hardwood forest was disputed territory, and dangerous. On the Indian side, technically at least, this area still belonged to the Iroquois-speaking Six Nations — the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora — but there was a Chippewa camp not far away, parties of Delaware passing through now and then, even some Ottawa in the area, supposedly. A white man clad in buckskins prowling in any of their territories uninvited might be viewed with a certain amount of hostility; better that nobody saw him.

  The deer trail wound serpentinely through the forest, wide enough for a man to traverse, but a bit low in spots, causing Jay to duck overhanging tree branches. The smell of fir was strong, and his own sweat added a sour note to it. He carried a long rifle, a flintlock as tall as he was, a powder horn, lead balls and patches, a single shot pistol of a matching caliber, a sheath knife, and a tomahawk, much as any frontiersman of the era might. No coonskin cap, though — the idea of a dead raccoon on his head seemed ghoulish, even in VR. Instead, he wore a plain leather cap. Maybe there wasn’t any real difference between cowhide and small furry animal skin, but everybody drew the line somewhere.

  The mosquitoes were bad, but as long as he kept moving they didn’t settle too thickly on his exposed face and hands; they couldn’t penetrate the thick buckskin shirt and pants, nor what he wore under them. A few big wood spiders had spun card-table-sized webs here and there, and he avoided those when he saw them.

  A bird called out ahead of him, a cheerful whistle he didn’t recognize. A man couldn’t know everything.

  He came to a small clearing in the forest, a place where a couple of huge old-growth conifers had fallen and flattened a dozen smaller trees. The big trunks had mostly rotted away under sun and wind and rain, turning to reddish brown, pulpy food for termites, and fertilizer for the new growth that wiggled and broke through their corpses. There were also sedge grasses here, many of which had been nibbled short by the deer. It was maybe thirty meters across, the clearing, and the sun shined down upon it through the rent in the forest’s thick canopy.

  He waited a few seconds, listening, looking, sniffing the air. Everything seemed okay.

  He started across the clearing. Halfway to the other side, he heard something behind him. A startled animal, perhaps?

  He looked over his shoulder in time to see a Native American warrior step out of the brush. The man had an iron-tipped lance, and from his dress Jay realized he was a Shawnee. He had forgotten about them — they were a Johnny-come-lately tribe in Pennsylvania, having arrived here only around the end of the 1600s.

  Another warrior stepped into view, also armed with a long lance. A third slipped from the brush, and he had a rifle much like Jay’s, though the stock of his was decorated with a pattern of brass nail heads. They weren’t wearing feathers or war paint, but they weren’t smiling at him, either.

  Time to leave the party, Jay, he thought. He turned to sprint away, but three more Shawnees materialized ahead of him.

  Hmm. Another trap. How interesting.

  One of the Shawnee chanted something. Probably something like, “Say your prayers, round eyes, you’re a dead man!” but Jay shook his head.

  “Not this time, pal,” he said.

  He dropped his long rifle, tore open his buckskin shirt to reveal a Kevlar and spider silk vest, along with an Uzi slung from a strap under his armpit. He pulled the black subgun out and pointed it at the three Shawnee in front of him. “Rock ’n’ roll!” he yelled. “Rock ’n’ roll—!”

  He pulled the Uzi’s trigger. Thirty-odd rounds of jacketed 9mm bullets spewed. The air filled with smoke and noise. At this range, it was hard to miss. He waved the gun like a water hose—

  The soft lead bullet from the Shawnee’s rifle whacked him square in the middle of his back. He felt it flatten against the vest, sting, but do no damage—

  By the time he spun to attend to the other three, the extra-long fifty-round magazine was running low, so he limited himself to five-round bursts: Braaaap! Braaap! Braaap!

  He held the final burst down, and stitched the sixth very surprised Indian across the thighs. The last ambusher fell; unlike the other five, he was down, but not dead.

  The woods got very quiet after the angry roar of the submachine gun.

  God bless the Israelis and their dependable technology.

  He held the muzzle of the subgun up in front of his face and blew away the thin tendril of smoke rising from the hot barrel.

  “How’d you like them apples, pard?”

  He moved toward the wounded Shawnee. He had a few questions to ask him, and if he hurried he might get an answer before his opponent realized what was going on…

  On the Bon Chance

  “Son of a bitch,” Jackson Keller said. He grinned. “So you haven’t lost all your moves after all, Jay. Good for you.”

  He looked at the holoprojic recording floating above his console. The packet Jay had managed to snag wasn’t going to take him anywhere useful, but it was surprising he had managed to avoid the scenario-destroying trap like that.

  Well. Maybe it shouldn’t have been so surprising. At his peak, back in their college days, Jay had been sharp, as sharp as anybody. They had run with CIT’s and MIT’s best. It wasn’t unreasonable that some small part of his edge wasn’t completely dull. That just made it more interesting, didn’t it?

  So he avoided a trap. No big deal. The next one would be better. He reached for his sensor set. Let’s play, Jay. Show me what you got…

  His com chirped. He was tempted to ignore it and jack back into VR, but he glanced at the ID sig. Better get that.

  “Hey,” he said.

  Jasmine said, “Hey. Listen, there’s something you ought to know, just FYI.”

  “Sure, shoot.”

  “It seems that Roberto has, ah… found out that you and I have been… intimate.”

  Keller both felt and heard himself take a deep breath. And his belly knotted as if somebody had stabbed him in it with a shard of dry ice. “Excuse me? How did that happen?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t say anything.”

  “Well, I sure as hell didn’t.”

  “It’s not anything to worry about.”

  Not anything to worry about? Santos killed people with his bare hands! Keller had heard the story of the two militia guys at the site of the telephone cable cut. About the ex-FBI bodyguards for the Blue Whale veep. They’d all been trained, they’d all had guns and that hadn’t mattered! He’d killed five people, bap, just like that! And there had been others…

  He knew it had been a mistake to sleep with her. Good as she was, it had been a mistake.

  He tried to keep his voice calm. He should have expected this. It was a big boat, but not that big. They weren’t invisible. “Oh. Really.”

  “He’s part of the team. He doesn’t want to screw that up, he’s making way too much money — he knows I’d fire him if he hurt you.”

  Well, wasn’t that comforting! I’m dead, but he’s fired?

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Anyway, that’s it. I’ll be sending him on a little chore later today. We can… talk about it more when he’s gone.”

  He blinked at the frozen holoproj over his computer. Was she saying what he thought she was saying? That once Santos was off the ship, they’d get back into the sack together? Was she that stupid?

  Was he?

  Careful there
, Jacko. Pissing off The Dragon Lady might be worse than pissing off the stone killer!

  He mumbled something, and she discommed.

  His heart was definitely beating faster, and his breathing was rapid and unsteady, too. All of a sudden, this little intellectual match with Jay Gridley didn’t seem anywhere near as interesting and fun as it had only a few minutes ago.

  A man who looked like he was chiseled out of granite, who killed people without batting an eye, a man with old ideas of machismo, had found out Keller was sleeping with his woman. How the hell was Keller supposed to just smile and shrug that off?

  He forced himself to breathe slower. Maybe she was right. Maybe Santos was too smart to cause any problems. They were all getting rich off this project, and they stood to get a whole lot richer once their shares started really appreciating in value. He wouldn’t want to screw that up over a woman. Santos was not that stupid.

  But Keller wasn’t sure about that. Not sure enough to bet his life on it.

  Capitol Hill Washington, D.C.

  Michaels surreptitiously glanced at his watch. Next to him, Tommy Bender, the Net Force lawyer, caught the look and squelched a smile.

  The senate subcommittee room was hot and stuffy. There were no windows. The senators were talking for the camera again. One of the senators got up and walked away, as a second returned to his seat on the dais. They came and went like a roomful of small children who had drunk too much lemonade. One would go, another would return. There was more motion from the subcommittee than a soccer team playing a match. Michaels couldn’t leave to stretch or get a drink of water, though. He had to sit here at the table looking up at the sometimes-six, sometimes-eight, sometimes-five of them milling back and forth like somnolent sheep. Already it had been two hours, and there were no signs of an end in sight.

  Senator Theresa Genaloni, from the great state of New Jersey, made her obscure point about the dangers of invading citizens’ privacy, and finally shut up. This hearing didn’t have anything to do with on-line privacy per se, but she was the junior senator from her state, her party was in the minority, and this pissant committee was hardly Ways and Means, so she had to make her points where and how she could. Otherwise, how would the folks back home know she was on the job? She certainly wasn’t delivering jobs in their direction, nor much in the way of pork-barrel spending.

  Stewart George Jackson, the once red-haired but now mostly bald and gray junior senator from the great state of Arkansas, took over the microphone. Jackson liked to be called “Stonewall,” after the Southern Civil War hero. He was usually called “SJ” by his staff. While these were his initials, somebody had told Michaels that they also stood for “Strawberry Jell-O,” due to his extremely flexible ethics. Jackson had all the backbone of a baby squid. He’d sometimes switch sides on an issue faster than a speeding bullet. General Jackson must be spinning in his grave like an atomic-powered gyroscope every time somebody called Jell-O “Stonewall.”

  “Perhaps Commander Michaels can explain to this committee why this latest round of attack on the Internet structure has continued despite Net Force’s efforts to stop it?”

  What Michaels wanted to say was “Because I am here listening to the senatorial windbags blow warm hurricanes instead of at the office helping them?” That would have been very satisfying. Stupid, but satisfying. He had this fantasy every time he testified, and he had never acted on it; still, he thought about it.

  “Don’t do it,” Tommy said under his breath. It didn’t take much of a mind reader to glean what Michaels was thinking.

  No, he’d better not say anything nasty. Not only would that be career suicide, his agency would suffer, and he didn’t want to cause that.

  “Commander?”

  “I’m sorry, Senator. I didn’t realize you were asking me to speak.”

  That earned him a glare from Jell-O, and grins from three of the other senators.

  “We are following up leads on the attacks,” Michaels said. “Our operatives have narrowed down the suspects and are getting closer to a resolution.” You could always say that and it would be true enough.

  “Would you care to give us more specific information, Commander? Who, where, and when?”

  “I am sure you realize that this is an ongoing investigation, Senator. I would not wish to compromise it by releasing details in public. If you would like a private briefing, I will have my staff follow up.”

  Of course, Jell-O didn’t care about the investigation, and would no more want to spend his time going over the details of it than he would want to give up cigars and whiskey. This was a piddling committee, and one had to milk what one could from it. Scoring a few points for law and order was always good for the voters back home to see. He would have a staffer listen to the report and boil it down to half a page or so, highlighting key words to be spoken in his syrupy Foghorn Leghorn drawl next time Michaels had to show up and sit in the hot seat.

  The senator droned on, and Michaels listened with half an ear. This was the part of the job he hated most, the sitting in front of a bunch of old farts and being treated like a grammar school boy by men and women who, for the most part, couldn’t understand what it was he did. They were mostly lawyers, half of them were technophobes, if not Luddites, terrified of anything more complicated than a phone or television set, and their main strengths seemed to be the ability to get re-elected.

  Face it, if they had anything on the ball, they wouldn’t be stuck on this committee, now would they? The only one here who had more than two neurons to spark at each other inside his hollow head was Wayne DeWitt, the recently elected junior from West Virginia. He was young, sharp, and technically educated, with a degree in engineering. He was one of the few senators willing to stand up and say that the idea of CyberNation was stupid in the extreme. He was a fairly right-wing Republican, but even so, Michaels was willing to cut him a lot of slack — better a right-winger with a brain than anybody without one.

  Not very charitable of him, those thoughts, but, hey, if it was true, it was true.

  He glanced at his watch again. Another two hours of his life he’d never get back.

  Damn.

  On the Bon Chance

  Santos had left his most recent coin buy in a safe-deposit box at a bank in Fort Lauderdale. They’d be secure enough there, but he would prefer to have them in his own bank. He had worked out an arrangement with an assistant ambassador in Washington who flew home to Brazil now and again, and who had access to diplomatic pouches. For a healthy fee, he would transport whatever Santos gave him back there, where Santos’s cousin Estaban would collect it and take it to the branch of the Banco Vizinho where Santos did his business. He had an arrangement with a bank officer there to make sure his coins were well-cared for.

  Estaban was blood, and the bank official was also related, by marriage, to another cousin. Both were well-paid, and both knew what would happen to them if they got greedy and decided to pocket a few of the coins. Once, when they were much younger, Estaban had seen Santos take out a crooked policeman who tried to shake him down too hard. Crooked or not, killing a punño, a “fist,” as they were sometimes called in the shanty towns, was the act of a man with bolas grande. Those who dealt with Santos at home knew his reputation. He was not a man to be fooled with — aside from his own skills, he had a couple of paid friends in high places, always necessary in Brazil, and he was protected, at least to a degree.

  Once his gold was home, it would be safe enough.

  When Missy ordered him to take care of some business in Washington, D.C., this was perfect. He would stop at the bank in Florida and retrieve his Maple Leafs, speak with the diplomat once he got to the capital, and all would be well.

  The business Missy wanted him to handle? Well, that was of small importance. One man who needed to have a bad accident. He didn’t even have to die, merely be put out of commission for a month or two. Easy as falling out of a tree.

  He made a point of swinging by the computer rooms just bef
ore lunchtime. He saw Keller with two of his people as they headed for the private cafeteria. Keller was laughing at something one of the others said.

  Keller looked up, saw Santos.

  Santos gave Keller a quick two-fingered salute, a how-you-doin’-amigo? gesture, nothing the least bit threatening in it. He smiled.

  Keller went pale, as if somebody had just punched him in the belly.

  Santos didn’t stop. He turned away and ambled off down the corridor. All he’d wanted to do was make Jackson aware that he knew. That was enough, for now. Let him sweat a while, worry that maybe something hard was coming. Because it was coming, no question. There were some lines you did not cross, and Jackson had crossed one. He knew it. How much it would cost, when, where, he did not know. And that was part of the payment, too.

  Santos hummed to himself as he headed for the helipad. Good day, so far. Real good.

  20

  Net Force HQ

  Quantico, Virginia

  Toni sat at Alex’s desk, going over operations reports. She was glad to be back. She’d forgotten how interesting this work was in the time she’d been away. As Alex’s assistant, she had been privy to the inner workings of the nation’s computer business, all kinds of information the average citizen didn’t even know existed had come across her desk. When she’d quit — over a mistaken supposition that Alex had been too idiotic to correct — she hadn’t missed work, because almost immediately she’d had an offer from the director to start a job for the mainline FBI. The pregnancy, then the baby, had stopped that. It had been the better part of a year, and she’d lost a few steps. But it was like riding a bicycle — the basic balance was still there, and with a little practice, she’d be rolling smoothly again pretty fast.

  She felt a quick stab of guilt. Did that make her a bad mother, that she wanted to work? Shouldn’t she be at home, doing mommy things, putting all this away until Little Alex was old enough to go off to school? It wasn’t as if they needed the money. And she did miss the baby, that was true. But her husband needed her, too, and what was she to do? Guru had showed up, and that had seemed like some kind of sign.