Deep as the Marrow

by F. Paul Wilson

  “You probably did. But they’re not out there marching, and they probably can’t get through on the phone or fax. Maybe e-mail.” He barked a laugh.

  “E-mail! The queue is endless!”

  “You’ll probably find a lot of support on the Internet. Lots of free-thinkers out there.” He stared at John, holding his gaze.

  “How about you, good buddy? I change your mind?” Clearly the answer was important to him, and John longed to tell him what he wanted to hear.

  Tom had announced last night that he was going to the International Drug Summit in The Hague next week to advocate a cease fire in the war on drugs. John was already familiar with most of the arguments, but he’d hoped some rhetorical magic would make him a believer.

  He shrugged. “Intellectually I can see it. But emotionally…” He shook his head as he tapped his chest. “Something in here won’t go along with the idea of an America where I can drop by the local drugstore for some toothpaste, some dental floss, and a fix of heroin.”

  Tom smiled tightly. “Et to, Brute?”

  “What can I say? You’ve got a fight on your hands. The fight of your life.” And you’re going to go down in flames, old buddy.

  “I need your support, Johnny.”

  “No, you don’t. I’m just one guy. You need the support of those four-fifty odd guys on the Hill.”

  “No, Johnny,” he said softly. He put his hand over his heart. “I need your support here. I need to know the one guy I could always count on is still watching my back. Somehow it’ll be easier to win knowing you’re with me.” He jutted his jaw defiantly at the protesters. “But with you or without you, I am going to win.”

  John knew that look. He remembered the time when they were seventeen and had been tipping a few brews behind Ebersol’s gas station outside Freemantle. A couple of the guys started making fun of the beat-up old Kharman Ghia Tom drove, wondering if it could top fifty.

  Tom couldn’t defend the car’s speed, so he said something like, “Yeah, but I can drive all the way home without ever using the brake.” Well, nobody believed that, so they challenged him to prove it. A crazy idea, an insane dare—he’d have to drive through the center of Freemantle to reach his house on the far side of town. Four traffic lights stood between him and home, and they were not sequenced. Freemantle’s lights changed whenever they damn well pleased.

  John never expected Tom to take them up on it, but he drained his beer and said, “Sure. Follow me and watch. You see my brake lights once, you guys can have the car.” Truth was, nobody wanted that pint-size rust bucket, but after checking to make sure the brake lights worked, everybody piled into their cars to follow. Everyone except John. He got in beside Tom. No discussion. It was understood, expected.

  Off they went. John still got shaky when he remembered that ride. The first light was green, and that had been fine. But the next three turned red as Tom approached. He never slowed. Playing the manual gear shift like a Stradivarius, he passed stopped cars ahead of him on the left or swung onto the shoulder and shot by. But never once did he hit the brake pedal. Ran three red lights, and each time he flashed through an intersection his face wore the same expression it did now, with that same jutting jaw.

  And he seemed to be demanding that same kind of loyalty now. But John couldn’t quite bring himself to slip into the passenger seat on this trip.

  “Why, Tom?” John said. “It’s not only bad policy, it’s bad politics. Even your own party—”

  “Will eventually come around.” He ground a fist into his palm. “The ones that really irk me are the budget cutters. They wail about federal spending? Well, I’m giving them something real to cut: sixty billion a year. Every year. For what? Drugs are more available on the street now than they’ve ever been. Sixty billion, Johnny. The truth is, I want that money. I’ve got better places to spend it.”

  “But the social cost…”

  “How can the social cost be higher than what we’re paying now? You mentioned buying heroin at the corner drugstore. You can do that now, John—on the corner outside the drugstore. Legalization is not going to change availability—drugs are everywhere now! And you talk about social cost? What about every sociopath in the world fighting for a piece of the profits?”

  “My point exactly,” John said. “Why become the enemy?”

  “Aw, Johnny,” he said. “Don’t look at it that way. There’s so damn much money in drugs that the cartels have been able to corrupt entire police forces, buy entire town governments… towns with airports. It’s mind boggling and stomach turning. And the worst of it is, they can make those kinds of profits for one reason and one reason alone: We’ve declared their commodity illegal. If we legalized it, we could even start taxing the profits on the legal sale of those same drugs. I see a net gain of seventy or eighty billion dollars.”

  “All of it dirty money,” John said.

  “No dirtier than taxes we take from tobacco and alcohol. It’s money we can put toward educating people to stay away from drugs, and rehabbing those who are already hooked.”

  “Come on, Tom. Do you really want to collect taxes on crack? I mean, don’t we have enough crack heads and crack babies already?”

  “Crack wouldn’t even exist if cocaine were legal. It’s just like the hundred-ninety-proof industrial-grade alcohol of the Roaring Twenties. People bought it to spike their drinks. It had a huge market—which disappeared overnight when Scotch, beer, and wine became legal again. The same will happen to crack when you can buy cocaine powder, cocaine drinks—where do you think the ‘Coca’ in Coca-Cola came from?—even cocaine chewing gum.”

  “Cocaine chewing gum—Christ!”

  “So I’ll give in on crack. But what I—” The phone rang. Tom picked it up, listened for a few seconds, said, “Thanks,” then hung up. He started for the door, motioning John after him. “In here.” He followed Tom into the presidential living quarters where a giant rear projection TV was already on. John had been here two or three times for drinks and dinner.

  Tom grabbed the remote and switched to Today. An elderly, balding man with thick, horn-rimmed glasses was speaking to the camera. The screen tag read MILTON FRIEDMAN.

  “Friedman?” John said. “The economist? Wasn’t he—?” The screen answered his question by adding FORMER ADVISOR TO PRESIDENT REAGAN.

  Bryant Gumbel asked him what sort of America he envisioned after the decriminalization of drugs, and the professor said he saw an America with half the number of prisons, half the number of prisoners, ten thousand fewer homicides a year, inner cities in which there was a chance for poor people to live without being afraid for their lives…

  Professor Friedman fielded several more questions, each answer stressing the propriety—for economic as well as philosophical reasons—of legalizing drugs.

  As the station cut to a commercial, Tom hit the mute and turned to him.

  “That’s why I’m going to win. My staff has been talking to the mass media for weeks. The networks, the major magazines, and newspaper chains are ready to support me on this.”

  “They sure didn’t sound that way as I was driving down here.”

  “Oh? You’ll notice that they all carried my address in toto. They’ll start off with subtle support. Like Milton Friedman there. He’s opposed antidrug laws from the gitgo. When he was with Reagan, he pushed for it. But the millions who saw him just now don’t know that. They heard him say drugs should be legalized and they saw ‘Former Advisor to President Reagan.” He mimicked a viewer: “ ’Reagan? Really? Hmmm… ‘ Believe me, none of that was accidental. You’ll see a lot of Friedman in the coming months. William F. Buckley will be out there too. And—”

  “Buckley?” John couldn’t believe it. “You and William F . Buckley on the same side?”

  “He’s favored decriminalization for years, and hasn’t been shy about saying so. We’ll have senior judges from all over the country who are refusing to hear drug cases because they think the laws are unfair…”

>   “If you think that’s going to make any difference…”

  “Every night, every day, every random act of violence, every drive-by shooting, every overdose, every single crime that can be blamed on the huge, unconscionable profits from illegal drugs—and believe me, those points will be punched home—will be dragged before the viewing public. So will all the statistics that certify the War on Drugs as unwinnable. The facts are on my side, John.”

  “But the people aren’t.”

  “They will be. They’ll see that there’ll always be a sizable segmen of humanity that wants drugs and will find ways to get them. We have millions of them in this country—twelve million occasional marijuana users alone. They’re here and they’re not going away. Passing laws won’t change them. And we sure as hell can’t lock up all of them.”

  “I can’t see the average American citizen surrendering to the druggies.”

  “Changing tactics is not surrender. Look, we have millions of Americans who want to dose themselves with various chemicals. Mostly they’re only hurting themselves, and if they happen to hurt somebody else while under the influence, we already have laws on the books for people who do damage while intoxicated. Let’s deal with them as people with a hang-up, not criminals.” Tom radiated sincerity and conviction. He was a mesmerizing speaker and a master of mass media. And he truly believed.

  “You know,” John said slowly, “you just might bring this off.”

  “I am going to bring this off. I may not get complete legalization, but I know I can get marijuana decriminalized. That’s a foot in the door. And once that door is open, it’s just a matter of time.” John was beginning to believe him.

  And then the phone was ringing again. Tom answered, listened, then turned to John.

  “I need to get back down to the offices. Heather’s getting ready to leave for the talk-show circuit and I have to speak to her. Want to hang around?”

  John shook his head. “I’ve got to head over to my own office. I’m sure HHS will be neck deep in this before the day is out. But I want to come back and check your pressure again before you head for the drug summit.”

  “Good idea. But you still haven’t answered me: Are you with me on this?”

  “Publicly, I’ll stand with you, of course. But privately I’m not there yet, Tom.”

  “You will be,” Tom said with that crooked smile. “I know I can count on you.” John didn’t argue. He was nowhere near as sure as Tom.

  9

  Snake hovered over his keyboard, staring at the monitor as he wove through the now familiar memory banks of the C&P Telephone mainframes.

  He’d been inside every day this week, smoothing the way to the switching programs, finding the path of least resistance, the one that left the fewest traces. And that was rarely the most direct path.

  He’d spent the last two weeks probing the system until it felt like home. Like old times, reminding him of his high school days as a phreaker when he’d pull all-nighters with his Apple II+, hacking into phone companies, banks, and universities all over the country, free in cyberspace, hunting the electronic grail of system mastery, suffused with the sheer joy of the doing. He’d never stolen, never destroyed data. Never even left taunting electronic graffiti like some of his jerkier brother hackers. He wasn’t looking for attention; he was looking to see how far he could go, how many barriers he could overcome, how deep he could get. The idea was to conquer the hacked system, defeat all its security, open all its doors, declare victory, and move on.

  Snake felt an echo of that old thrill even now. He smiled. Mikey MacLaglen had been such an idealist. Such a nerdy purist. Such an asshole. So awed with the novelty and grandeur and immensity of cyberspace that he’d missed out on endless opportunities to exploit his power.

  Truth was, he hadn’t even realized he had power. Just as well. If he had he wouldn’t have been able to resist exploiting it, probably would have been caught, and would even now be on the FBI’s hacker list. No thanks.

  He could have been nabbed in college too. He’d been heading for an engineering degree at MIT when he started hacking cable boxes for his classmates who wanted free HBO and Showtime. Somehow a video pirate named Mitchell Fuller—hacker handle: “Brushman”—caught a blip about Mike MacLaglen’s skills and offered him a job hacking video boards for satellite dishes. The six figures he offered was four times the entry-level salary his engineering degree would net him after graduation—if he could even find a job—and all tax free. Things were great until Fuller ripped off Mac’s elegant and excruciatingly difficult hack of the latest Videocipher board. When Mac complained, Fuller laughed in his face and said, “Whatta you gonna do—sue me?” Something snapped in Mac then. He’d always had a bad temper but that was the first time he completely lost it. A red haze seemed to envelop him and suddenly he had a tire iron in his hand and was beating Fuller over the head. Before he could stop himself. Fuller was unconscious.

  Shocked, Mac stared down at the battered, bleeding s.o.b. and wondered what to do. He still wanted to kill him, but he was thinking now… and he had a better idea.

  He dumped him in the trunk of his car, then called Fuller’s wife. He told her she wouldn’t see her dear Mitchell alive again unless she delivered $100,000 in cash.

  Now. When Fuller came to, Mac let him talk to his wife, to tell her how to get the cash together. The way Fuller looked at him when Mac made him get back into the trunk, the fear in his eyes, wondering if he’d ever see daylight again… it somehow opened a door within Mac, and stirred something on the other side.

  Fuller’s wife delivered the money within hours. She never called the cops or the FBI. Couldn’t. They’d want to know how her husband earned his money. It all went down so smooth and fast, Mac wished he’d asked for more. But a deal was a deal and, after all, he was netting a hundred large for less than a day’s work. He let Fuller go. And he got out of the video-hacking business. He’d found a better line of work.

  Snake was born.

  Simply amazing how many people were out there making tons of money illegally, or in legit cash businesses but not declaring it.

  They became Snake’s prey. They weren’t fighters. The sight of a pistol, a hint of casual brutality with a promise of more to come—letting them know they were no longer a person; they were a commodity, a package— usually bought instant cooperation. Snake liked calling their buyers—their families or business cronies—threatening all sorts of injury if they didn’t pay up quickly and quietly. Even if they hated the guy, they were stuck.

  Snake remembered one time when a package’s partner told him to go ahead and kill the fucker… and do it slow. Snake hadn’t been prepared for that, but he’d come up with the solution. He told the partner he would indeed kill the guy slowly, and during the process extract the full details of their gun-running operation… which he’d record and send to the ATF.

  Snake had the ransom within hours.

  Yeah, like Fuller’s wife, the last thing any of these clowns wanted was the attention of a federal agency.

  Trouble was. Snake couldn’t do it alone. He needed someone to baby-sit the packages. Paulie Dicastro had fit the bill. Not the brightest bulb in the box, but no dummy either. And his rep was dependable: A guy who showed up when he was told to, did what he was supposed to—mostly he made deliveries—then went home and kept his mouth shut.

  Snake had used Paulie for his first couple of jobs, and things went swimmingly. But on the third job, Paulie had brought his new girlfriend along. Poppy. Paulie swore she was all right, and that this would be better. This way they could take shifts watching the package. One would be on duty while the other slept. Snake hadn’t liked the idea— this Poppy was a wild card—but it’d been too late to call off the snatch. He had held his breath through that whole gig, but things turned out okay.

  This job, though, was a little different. Snake usually made the snatch himself. He could say he was better at it, more experienced, that he was the only one he could trust
not to screw things up, but truth was, he liked doing the snatch. He liked to see that look in the package’s eyes when he realized what was happening to him.

  Snake had never known anything else that even approached the rush he got when it dawned on the package that he’d become property—stolen property. That his life was no longer his own. Someone had taken control of his world.

  Someone who called himself Snake.

  Even now Snake could feel the first faint stirrings in his groin. But this would be different. This would be a kid, and kids weren’t in control, anyway. So he’d found it easier to let go of the actual physical snatch.

  Besides, he had a lot more riding on this one. Other people involved. Heavy people. Snake preferred to operate on his own, but the heavies had come to him and made an offer he couldn’t refuse. Literally. Offered him a fortune for this job, but even if they hadn’t, you didn’t say no to these guys.

  He’d been startled that they were even aware of his little enterprise, and rattled by how much they knew. They told him they liked the idea that he was experienced in the art of the snatch and so they were hiring him. That was it. Not: Do you want to do one for us? More like: Here’s what we want you to do.

  Snake was trusting Paulie not to screw up. He knew this would be the last job with Paulie. Poppy would see to that. Snake had the distinct impression the only reason Paulie was in on this one was because the payoff was so big. Poppy’d got all spooked when the last snatch got a little rough. Last time he’d seen her she’d looked like a rat on an electric grid, waiting for the next shock.

  Too bad. Paulie was a reliable dude. Hard to replace. But that’s what you get when you let yourself get attached.

  He stretched, picked up the snub-nosed.38 special he kept by the keyboard—a Colt Cobra… something about that name—and swiveled in his chair, sighting at the toys that filled his current domain. Three computers—two Pentium 166s and a Mac 7100/80 Power Station—each with a hex-speed CD-ROM drive, all of them up and running twenty-four hours a day, connected to an HP 1200-C printer and a flatbed color -scanner; three cellular phones, all hacked to the same account; a projection TV with Surroundsound, a laser-disk player, two VCRS, a CD player with a 100-disk switcher, all hitched to a pair of Bose 701s and a monster fourteen-inch subwoofer.