by Tom Clancy
“Go.”
“Our shotgun mike picked up the exchange. Guys in the car say they are U.S. Marshals, come to serve a federal arrest warrant. They asked where they could find Morrison. The guard told them, and let them pass.”
“Got it. Pull back to Rendezvous A, call the other teams and tell them.”
“Copy.”
Ventura made another call. “Mercury falling,” he said.
“Copy. We’ll be there.”
“Discom.”
Ventura looked at Morrison. “These guys convinced the gate guard they were U.S. Marshals. They’ve come to collect you.”
Morrison shook his head. “No way. They can’t know I had anything to do with this. I covered myself.”
“Convince me.”
“Nobody actually took anything from the computer files; it only looks like they did. I got into the HAARP system from a Mac store in San Francisco, using a floor demo model connected to the net. I had a password, but I banged on the door a few times to make it look good before I used it. I damaged a few files on the way in. It was a crowded Saturday morning, nobody noticed me, I didn’t speak to anybody in the shop. Even if somebody could backtrack it through the store’s server, it ends there — I was just another customer browsing the hardware and I used voxax to light the system. No hands, so no prints, no DNA. Nobody could possibly connect it to me.”
“All right. So if they aren’t real feds, then they must be from the Chinese.” He shook his head. “But that doesn’t scan.”
“Why not?”
“The Chinese know I’m with you, and they know who I am, at least partially. But they only sent four people. They must be banking on us buying the trick, and that’s too many eggs in one basket. Unless… this is a feint. A ploy designed to keep our attention while they try something else. Yes, that makes more sense.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Leave. That little scooter is quiet and in the dark; they won’t see us. A pickup car is waiting at a spot where nobody will notice it.”
“There are plenty of outside lights until you get well away from the buildings,” Morrison said. “And the pad is also lit up like a Christmas tree. They’ll notice us.”
“No, they won’t. Come on.”
* * *
As he followed Ventura from the trailer, terror gripped Morrison in its clammy hand. He needed to visit a bathroom, bad, and it was hard for him to breathe without wanting to pant. None of this had been in his plan, none of it. It didn’t feel real. It felt like some kind of demented dream.
Since there was no way the FBI or Net Force could know who he was, it had to be the bastard Chinese coming for him. And he had no doubt that if they caught him and put him in a cell with somebody who even threatened to pull out his fingernails or crush his testicles, he’d tell them anything they wanted to know.
And it wouldn’t take long in the telling, either.
The technique for disrupting the human brain into a temporary psychosis wasn’t something easy to figure out, but once it was grasped, it was easy enough to do. The trick that had eluded researchers for all those years was that while they had all the pieces to the puzzle, they just hadn’t been able to put them together. Or even known they should. The broadcast frequencies had to be varied precisely, they had to run for a very specific duration, and they had to be repeated at exact intervals. It took a computer to run the sequence — it was too involved for a human hand — and if one variable was off even a hair, the technique simply wouldn’t work. The odds of happening on the proper code by accident were astronomically high, even to achieve the partial results Morrison had managed. He didn’t deny to himself that he had been lucky, as well as good. And the truth was, driving people mad had never been his goal — controlling their actions in a more deliberate manner had been, and he had failed in that. It was as if he had gone searching for diamonds but had found opals, instead. Still valuable stones, but not what he had sought, and — Hey! Where was Ventura going?
“The scooter is over there,” Morrison said. “We’re heading the wrong way!”
“No, we’re not. We need to do something first.”
Ventura had his pistol out, and they were moving toward the power building. Morrison had his little gun in the pocket of his jacket, but it offered him little comfort. If they got past Ventura, he didn’t believe he was going to be able to stop them. He could die here. Tonight. Soon.
The headlights of the approaching cars shined through the trees. They were almost here!
He voiced the thought: “They’re almost here!”
But they were at the power building. Ventura said, “You stay put. I’m going to go have a short conversation with the power supply.”
Ventura vanished inside the building.
Morrison tried to calm down. He forced himself to take long, slow breaths, but it didn’t help. His heart was racing so hard he could feel it pulse all over his body. Come on, come on, come on—!
The lights died, and the heavy thrum of the diesel generators began to fade.
Ventura appeared from nowhere. “They want lights, they are going to have to crank those babies back up. Let’s go.”
“What about nightscopes? Won’t they have those?”
“I would, but it won’t matter if they do. I have a little something for any spookeyes that might go on-line.” He patted his pocket. “Come on, time to leave.” He smiled. It was the most joyful expression Morrison had seen Ventura make.
It was like a glass of cold water in the face. The realization that came with it was: “You’re enjoying this!”
“Of course. It’s what I do, Doctor. Stay with me.”
They ran.
Ventura felt the adrenaline surge in him, and he didn’t try to stop it. Riding the hormonal high was like climbing onto a half-wild stallion. If you could stay there and point him in the right direction, it would be a thrilling trip at breakneck speed. Bend him to your will just enough, and you could fly like the wind. Lose control, and you would surely perish.
This was the zen of life and death, and the part of him he kept hidden from the world. It was the stretch, the reach, the ultimate test, the perfect way to be totally in the moment. The past was dead, the future not yet born, there was only the now! Fail, and you die. Succeed, and you live.
Ah, but to make it a real test, you had to level the playing field. Four against one was not fair, not when the one was Ventura. He had the advantage. They had to capture Morrison alive, so they were hobbled. Therefore, he would give them a chance. He could have taken Morrison and fled immediately. Turning out the lights wasn’t necessary — they wouldn’t be looking for two men on a scooter, they would be expecting their quarry to be in a trailer. Even if they were nothing but a probe designed to keep him busy while the real attack was mounted, Ventura was aware of this possibility, too. He was way ahead of them, he knew it, and in no real danger. So he delayed. Killed the power, which gave him darkness, but which also gave them a warning: I know you are here. Let’s play. Come and find me.
There was no joy in slaying an unarmed man. The challenge was in bypassing his trained guards to get to him. It was the stalk that mattered most not the shot, the path and not the destination. Once in the proper position, any fool could pull a trigger. Getting to the proper position was the trick. Always.
“This way,” Morrison said.
“How can you tell? I can’t fucking see anything!”
The two cars pulled to a halt, and Ventura heard doors slamming and voices raised.
“Trust me,” Ventura said. “I know exactly what I am doing.”
His phone vibrated.
“What?”
“Another player approaching. Black man in a new Dodge van, Alaskan plates, looks like a rental car. Just passed me.”
Ventura frowned. Who was this? Just a coincidence? Some fisherman running late for his hotel reservation, or part of the backup plan? And a black man? That would be unusual. The Chinese didn’t much like black
people. Of course, they didn’t much like anybody who wasn’t Chinese. A lot of people in the West didn’t realize that Eastern societies were the most racist on Earth. They not only despised and looked down on Westerners, they despised and looked down on each other. The Chinese hated the Japanese who hated the Koreans who hated the Vietnamese, and all variations thereof. The only thing worse than being a foreigner was being a half-breed.
Well. Whoever he was, it didn’t matter. As long as Ventura knew where the man was, he was no problem, just one more piece on the board he needed to track. “Keep me advised,” Ventura said. He tapped the headset off.
“Let’s go for a little ride in the cool summer night, shall we, Doctor?”
Morrison stared at him, and that wide-eyed sense of amazement that arrived when he’d realized that Ventura was having fun here was still on his face.
A man like Morrison couldn’t understand it, of course. Men like him never did.
23
Sunday, June 12th
Beaverton, Oregon
Tyrone stood by the Coke machine at the hotel and ran his credit card through the scanner slot. The credit appeared on the screen, and he tapped the button that delivered a plastic bottle of the cola. The noise it made seemed loud in the quiet night.
He was still rattled. Once everything seemed to be okay, his dad had gone off to Alaska, to help collect the man supposedly responsible for what had happened at the boomerang tournament. Tyrone, Nadine, and his mother were at the motel, miles away from the park, and the madness had stopped, but he couldn’t forget it. It was like some kind of nightmare. He had wanted to kill people, and if he’d had a weapon — a knife or a gun or a stick — he would have killed somebody. And the thing was, it would have felt just great to do it, too.
He sipped at the soft drink. Life had been easier when he’d been into computers. He sat at home, jacked into the web, lived his life in VR. Once he’d discovered girls and boomerangs, things had gotten a lot more complex. Nothing risked, nothing gained — but nothing lost, either. But the thought of going back to where he’d been before, a web-head with butt calluses from sitting in a chair? That just didn’t resonate. Data interruptus, Jimmy-Joe would say.
The tournament had been canceled after all the crazy stuff. He’d never even gotten a chance to compete. Given all the other crap, winning or losing a contest like that meant zed, but even so, he wondered how he would have done.
“Hey, Ty.”
He looked up to see Nadine standing there. “Hey,” he said.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
“Yeah.”
“Me, neither.”
They stood silently for a few seconds. “You want a Coke?”
“I’ll just have a sip of yours, if that’s okay.”
“Sure.” He passed her the plastic bottle and watched her sip from it.
She handed the bottle back to him. “You think it’s true?” she said. “That somebody did it on purpose?”
“My dad thinks so, and he knows about stuff like this, so, yeah, I think so.”
“Why? Why would somebody do a thing like that? Zap people and make them go crazy? Make people hurt each other?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I can’t think of any reason good enough.”
“I didn’t like how it made me feel,” she said. “I was so angry. I wanted to hurt people. I didn’t care about them at all. I was watching the vids on the news. They showed a Catholic school somewhere. Some nuns beat a janitor to a pulp. How could that be? Something that could make nuns do that, that’s really scary.”
He could see she was on the edge of tears, really upset. “Yeah. Scares me, too. But it’s okay. My dad is going to get the guy. It’ll be all right.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. I do.”
She gave him a little smile, and he felt better himself. He took another sip from the Coke. He hoped his dad would kick the guy’s ass.
Monday, June 13th
Gakona, Alaska
Howard was still peeved. The marshals were supposed to meet him at the airport, but his plane had been delayed an hour coming out of SeaTac, and they hadn’t waited for him. He hated being late, but there had been no help for it. He couldn’t really bitch about it officially; Net Force didn’t have any jurisdiction in the matter per se, even though they had gotten the warrants and the marshals would be delivering Morrison to HQ in Quantico. And as the commander of Net Force’s military arm, he shouldn’t be out in the field on this kind of errand anyhow, no job for a general, but it pissed him off being left behind just the same. It was no more than professional courtesy — he’d have waited for them.
Howard rented a car and burned the speed limits trying to catch up, but by the time he got to Gakona, he still hadn’t seen any sign of the marshals. He couldn’t believe he had gotten ahead of them, so they must have already reached the HAARP compound. Probably had already collected Morrison and were on the way back. Well, if they passed him going the other way, he’d spot them, there wasn’t that much traffic. He’d seen only a few cars and trucks in the last hour of travel, and nobody in the last fifteen minutes. Of course, it was almost two in the morning, and in the middle of the great northwest woods, too, not exactly the Harbor Freeway in downtown L.A.
The narrow road he was on ran parallel to a tall chainlink fence topped with razor wire and hung with government warning signs. HAARP would be on the other side of the fence, somewhere past the thick forest of evergreens.
The call of nature that had been nagging at him for miles finally couldn’t be denied any longer. If he didn’t stop and take a whiz, he was going to drown.
He pulled the car over, shut off the engine, and killed the headlamps. He waited for a moment for his night vision to clear, then stepped out of the car.
He watered the plants nearest the shoulder, felt a lot better, and zipped up.
It was really dark out here, nothing offering relief save for a clear sky thick with glittery stars and the glowing face of his watch. It was cool, but not cold, and the scent of evergreen, car exhaust, and even urine blended into a not-unpleasant odor. It was also quiet, save for a few mosquitoes buzzing about. There was something very relaxing about being out in the middle of nowhere, nobody else around.
From the last road sign he’d seen, he judged that he was almost to the compound’s gate. He started back toward the car when he saw a bright flash of light over the treetops, almost like distant heat lightning, a brief strobe against the night. What was that?
But the light was gone, and once again the fierce darkness claimed the night. And that was odd, because this close, he expected some kind of glow from the HAARP compound bleeding into the sky. He had been on night patrols in the outback where you could see the light from a campfire or a propane lantern for miles. They must keep some lights on, right?
Almost immediately after the light faded, he heard three shots, a stacatto pap! pap! pap! followed by two more that resonated with a louder, sharper crack! crack! The shots echoed, and it was hard to pinpoint the direction, but it sounded as if they were to his right and behind him. Inside the fence, and not too far off. There was no question in Howard’s mind that the reports came from weapons, and they sounded like handguns. Two shooters, close together, using different calibers. The second of them, he was almost certain, was a.357 Magnum, a round with which he was very familiar, having fired tens of thousands of them himself. Two shooters firing at the same target? Or at each other?
Almost reflexively, he reached down to where the new revolver rode back of his right hip, to touch the gun’s butt and reassure himself it was still there.
It could have been a lot of things — spotlighters doing some illegal hunting, drunks blasting at beer bottles, maybe even a couple of campers attacked in their tent by a bear and cutting loose at it — but knowing there were U.S. Marshals serving an arrest warrant on a man suspected of involvement in multiple deaths, Howard had to consider that maybe something had gone wrong with the
operation. And what would campers or hunters be doing inside the fence?
He pulled the door open and slid back into the rental car, started the engine, and hit the light switch. The entrance gate was ahead of him, and that was the way to get into the compound, but he spun the wheel and the car into a one-eighty and headed back the way he had come. When guns go off, that’s where you find the action.
It was half a mile away when things got tricky. Because it was so dark and he was moving and watching the fence to his left, and because the black SUV was parked off to the right in the trees, he almost missed it. A glint of light off the windshield — the SUV was facing the road at a right angle — was what he caught, and a fast glance didn’t give him much more. He took his foot off the gas pedal, but managed to keep from hitting the brakes, so his tail-lights didn’t flare. He kept going, considering his options.
The SUV could have been parked there empty for days, for all he knew. Maybe it belonged to those hypothetical campers shooting at the equally hypothetical bear. For some reason in that moment, an old memory popped up: An Alaskan hunter he’d known had once told him that if you had to stop a really big bear, you needed a heavy rifle or a shotgun with slugs to do it. He said that when newbies to the tundra asked about which caliber handguns to carry, they were told it didn’t really matter, but that they should file the front sight off nice and smooth — that way it wouldn’t hurt so much when the bear took it away from them and shoved it up where the sun didn’t shine…
Options, John, options!
He could keep going and do nothing. He could keep going, use his virgil, and call for help. Of course he was hours by road or even air from any law to speak of, and that was too long. Besides, until he knew what he was facing, he couldn’t risk using his virgil. There was a chance that the perpetrators, whoever they were, would pick up his call. They wouldn’t be able to decode it, but they might trace his location — and at the very least they would know he was still out there.
No, it was against SOP, but he had no choice. What he was going to do was keep going until he was around a curve or far enough away so anybody who might be in the SUV would think he was gone, then he would pull over and backtrack on foot. He was dressed in jeans, black running shoes, and a dark green T-shirt, with a dark green windbreaker, so he’d be practically invisible in the trees. He had some bug dope in his kit, though the mosquitoes didn’t usually bother him that much. He had his little SL- 4 flashlight from Underwater Kinetics, and he had the Phillips and Rodgers with its six rounds, a speed strip with six more rounds zipped into his jacket pocket. What else did he need for a walk in the Alaskan woods at night?