Breaking Point

21

At home, Jay came out of VR, took a deep breath, and removed his headset and gloves. It had been a milk run, a visit to a library, and no matter how skilled you were in creating scenarios, sooner or later, reading a pile of material came down to reading a pile of material.

He had all he could find on Dr. Patrick Morrison, and while he had skimmed it as it was being copied, he hadn’t begun to take it all in. From what he’d gleaned so far, the guy was legit enough. Degrees, work experience, marriages, the usual living-life stuff. No trouble with the law, no beefs at work, pretty much Mr. Dull N. Boring right down the line.

The only blot on an otherwise white-bread career was at the job he’d had before going to work for HAARP. He’d been doing some kind of behavioral modification experiments on chimps, working with extremely low-frequency radiation, a post-doc research project at Johns Hopkins, and it had apparently petered out. He failed to get the results for which he had been looking. His grant, as the report mildly and politely put it, had not been renewed, and he’d been out of a job.

A small red flag went up in Jay’s mind, but when he thought about it, it wasn’t that big a deal. Yeah, the guy was into ELF stuff, but that’s what a lot of HAARP was about. If you were looking for a plumber, you didn’t hire a cabdriver, now did you?

“All work and no play make Jay a dull boy,” Soji said.

He smiled up at her. She stood there in a bathrobe. “Look who’s talking. You’ve been so deep into the web I haven’t been able to see anything but your back for days.”

“Want to see something else?” She undid the bathrobe and held it open.

“Oh, mama! Come here!”

Before she could move, however, the phone played the opening strains of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Unfortunately, his phone was programmed so it played that particular tune only if the call was IDed as coming from Net Force HQ or Alex Michaels’s virgil.

“Shit,” he said.

Soji closed her robe and belted it shut. “He who hesitates stays horny,” she said.

“Hey, Boss,” Jay said.

“Better get to the office, Jay,” Michaels said. “There’s been another case of collective madness.”

“In China?”

“No,” Michaels said. His voice was grim. “Closer than that.”

John Howard watched as his son came up to make his throw. The boy stopped, rubbed his fingers back and forth, and allowed some glittery dust to fall to check wind direction. He held a stopwatch in one hand and his boomerang in the other. The judges waved Tyrone into the circle.

Howard felt more tense than he’d thought he would. It was a big deal to Tyrone, of course, but it was just a game, after all. No reason to be digging his fingernails into his palms.

Off to one side and behind Tyrone, Little Nadine stood, waiting for her turn to compete. She was three contestants behind Tyrone, so she’d know what time she had to beat. So far, the times hadn’t been very good, according to Tyrone, and both kids had done better in practice.

The judge nearest the circle held up his hand in a halt sign, then called another judge over for some kind of consultation.

“Come on, come on!” Howard said. “Let the boy throw before his arm gets cold!”

Next to him, his wife said, “Asshole.”

He looked at her. “You talkin’ to me?”

“Not particularly, I was referring to the judge, but if the shoe fits…”

That pissed him off. What was she on the rag about now? He hadn’t done anything. He glared at her. She glared right back.

Tyrone stood there for another few seconds, then walked to where the judges were. Howard couldn’t hear what his boy had to say, but apparently the judges really didn’t like it.

The head judge reached out and slapped Tyrone upside the head.

“Fuck!” Howard yelled. “You see that? He hit our son!” Even as he spoke, Howard ran toward Tyrone and the judges.

The second judge must have figured the slap was rude, because he hauled off and punched the head judge square in the mouth, knocking the man down. Certainly this was justice, but that irritated Howard even more.

“Leave him!” Howard yelled as he ran. “That bastard is mine!”

Tyrone stepped in and delivered a solid kick to the fallen judge’s ribs. It sounded like somebody dropping a watermelon, thoo-wock!

Even as he drew near to the trio, Howard was aware of noises coming up the hill: horns honked, metal crashed into metal. He slid to a stop as the second judge spun to face him.

“Get off the circle!” the man screamed. “You can’t be here!”

“Oh, yeah?” Howard said. “Hey, pal, I’m already here! What are you gonna do about it?”

Tyrone gave the fallen judge another kick. Not as good as the first one; it had a flatter sound. Weak, son, weak.

The second judge threw a haymaker at Howard, who ducked it, came up, launched a fast left hook to the face, then a right cross to the chin, bap-bap! That straightened the sucker out like popping a shoe shine cloth. The guy sailed backward and to the ground. Get off that, asshole!

The judge Tyrone was kicking got to his feet and lurched at the boy, but before Howard could get there, both Nadines arrived. His wife kneed the guy in the crotch as Little Nadine latched onto his arm and sank her teeth into his shoulder.

Irritated, Howard moved toward them. This was his business to take care of, he didn’t need the goddamned women getting in the goddamned way—!

A car came across the field, lights on and horn honking, a big, powder-blue Cadillac. It plowed into a group of five men who stood there giving the driver the finger. The men flew like dolls in all directions as the driver gunned the engine.

Not real smart to shoot the bird at a man coming at you in a car at speed.

“Eat shit and die!” the driver screamed. Then he started to laugh.

Four or five other people attacked the Caddy, slamming their fists and feet at it. The driver spun a donut in the grass, still cackling madly.

Something wrong here, Howard thought. He shook his head, then looked at the man he had just decked. What was he doing?

He looked down the hill and saw a dozen people fighting. One of them was a policeman. The cop pulled his gun, and a quick succession of shots—pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! — echoed up the hill. Gunshot victims fell, and added more screams to the din.

Dazed, Howard looked up the hill. There were people there, too, but they weren’t fighting; they were watching, staring in surprise.

Howard’s thoughts were fogged with rage, but something was trying to make its way through the anger: This was a bad place. Down the hill it was worse, but up the hill, it was better. Therefore…

“Come on!” he yelled to his family. “We have to get up the hill!”

“Fuck off!” Tyrone yelled back.

Little Nadine released her hold on the judge, who was screaming in pain. She stared at Howard. “What is going on?” she said, her voice high and frightened.

“I don’t know. Gas, maybe. We’ve got to get out of here. Help me.”

His wife kneed the judge in the nuts again. The man gurgled in agony. Howard grabbed her, pulled her off.

“Leave me alone! He hit my son!”

Howard jerked her backward. “Tyrone!”

The boy turned, and the mask of primal rage on his face slipped a little. He raised his eyebrows. “Dad?”

“Up the hill, son, up the hill. Go, go!”

Tyrone nodded. Little Nadine grabbed his hand and they started running.

Howard had to pin Nadine’s arms to her side and he half carried, half dragged her away from the meadow. She kicked and screamed at him for a hundred meters before she stopped. She was a lot stronger than he’d realized.

Finally, when they were two hundred meters away, Nadine came back. “J-John? What—?”

“I don’t know, hon. But whatever it is, the farther away we get, the better. Come on.”

They caught up to the children, and the four of them kept moving. Howard looked back as they ran. The Cadillac was lying on its side, and a mob had the driver out and on the ground, kicking him. He was a dead man. More gunshots echoed from farther below. Horns honked. Cars crashed. People screamed in voices full of incoherent fury. This beautiful park, what the locals like to call God’s country, had gone mad.

It was the Devil’s land, now.

Howard reached for his virgil. Who to call? The local cops were down there shooting people. They needed help, and they needed it bad.

Toni had come with him this time, and he was glad to have her here. Along with Toni was Jay Gridley. It was seven P.M. on a Sunday, but they wouldn’t be going home tonight.

“All right, here is what we have so far,” Michaels said. “It’s still kind of sketchy. Late this afternoon, people inside what appears to be a rough circle ten miles across and centered in the Westmoreland area of Portland, Oregon, went nuts. So far, there are sixty-seven confirmed deaths — murders, self-defense, traffic and freak accidents. There have been hundreds of people hurt bad enough to require hospitalization, and thousands more lesser injuries. Whatever caused it seems to have stopped, but the city is in chaos. The numbers of dead and injured keep climbing.”

“Lord, Lord. How is General Howard?” Jay asked.

Howard had been the one who’d called it in. He’d gotten hold of the National Guard, then Michaels.

“He and his family are fine. They were apparently right at the outmost edge of the phenomenon’s effect. A couple hundred meters closer in, and they’d have been in a lot more trouble. What have you got for me?”

Jay said, “If we assume this is coming from some very powerful broadcast station, then it’s a matter of figuring out which one, and who is running it. I played a hunch and put in a call to HAARP, talked to a guard there. They are supposedly on hiatus, except for some calibration tests.”

“That’s what Morrison told me,” Michaels said.

“Well, Morrison is up there right now running one of these tests. And guess what — according to the guard’s logs, he was running other ’calibrations’ on the same days those two villages in China went bonkers.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. Awful coincidental, ain’t it?”

“Toni? What do you think?”

“I think maybe you ought pick up this Dr. Morrison for a serious chat.”

Michaels nodded. “I’ll get a federal warrant and some marshals on the way.”

“You don’t want to toss this one over the fence to the mainline feebs?” Jay said.

“Not yet,” Michaels said. “This looks like our mess. We should clean it up on our own if we can.”

Maybe Morrison wasn’t involved with this, but given the situation in Portland, they couldn’t afford to take the chance. The next incident might happen anywhere — New York, Chicago, even Washington, D.C. While the thought of senators and congressmen beating each other to bloody pulps sounded fine as a joke punch line, the reality of it was different.

Getting a warrant would be easy enough, and there were probably federal marshals somewhere in Alaska who could serve it. And while he was at it, he would give General Howard a call. After his personal experience, John might like to go along to have a few words with Morrison himself. In his position, Michaels knew he would.

22

Ventura looked at his watch. It had been six hours since the real test had ended, but Morrison felt he had to play out the fiction of conducting his calibrations. In the end, Ventura knew that wouldn’t matter, but Morrison felt the need. It was late, and Ventura, while not tired, was feeling somewhat edgy. There had been no contact from the Chinese, and he didn’t much like sitting in one place for so long, not this far into the game. The trailer had a stale smell to it, and the night had cooled some, because an electric heater kept kicking on and off.

As the HAARP system did its automatic thing, Morrison himself was lying on the ugly brown fake-leather couch at the end of the room, fast asleep.

Ventura’s com vibrated soundlessly against his hip. He touched the mouthpiece of the small wireless headset he wore hooked over his left ear. “Yes?”

“We have company. Two cars, four men. They just passed Rim One.”

“Talk to me.”

“Tan Fords, unmarked, new, blackwall tires, what looks like government fleet plates. Three men, one woman, couldn’t get much more than that. Cunningham will get a better view with his digital scope when they go under the rail overpass.”

“Got it.”

Ventura felt chill bumps rise on his neck, the gooseflesh warning him of danger. Who would come here in the middle of the night? He looked at his watch again. If they were traveling the speed limit, they’d be reaching the overpass… right… about… now…

The phone vibrated.

“Go.”

Styles said, “From the front, three men, one woman. Clean-cut, mid-thirties, matching dark windbreakers, blue maybe. Hold on, they are going past… Angle is bad here, I can’t see their backs. I got a flash of what looked like some kind of logo on the jackets from the side, can’t get it all, last letters look like H-A-L… That’s it. Plates are like Zach said, U.S. permanent fleet.”

Sounded like feds. H-A-L. Last few letters of “Marshal,” as in reflective yellow letters on the back of a windbreaker: U.S. Marshal. Of course, if it was him coming to collect Dr. Morrison, this was the kind of thing he’d do. Disguising your kidnap team as cops or firemen or federal agents was clever. Who stops a fireman on the way to a fire? Or a cop on his way to an accident?

Unless, of course, they were real feds.

“Got it. Discom.”

Ventura called the leader of the two men watching the gate into the compound. “Let them pass, but see if you can get an ear on the guard at the gate if he lets them in.”

“Copy.”

Ventura broke the connection, walked to where Morrison lay sleeping. “Wake up, Dr. Morrison.”

“Huh? What—?”

“Listen carefully. My people report that there are two cars that look like they belong to the feds on their way here.”

The phone vibrated yet again.

“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

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.

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?

The idea of action filled him with sudden purpose. As the road curved, he killed the lights and coasted off the shoulder. He pulled the car behind a patch of scrub brush — not perfect, but what cover was available. He switched the dome light off before he opened the door, and as soon as the trunk light went on, he grabbed it to block the glow, and collected his kit bag with his free hand. He fished out the flashlight and stuck it into his back pocket, found two more speed strips of ammo and pocketed those. Found the bug dope and a packet of waterproof matches, too. He remembered to shut off his virgil, then started working his way back along the treeline toward the SUV. It was maybe three-quarters of a mile back. It would only take a few minutes to get there. He’d scope out the scenario and see what he could figure out. He could call Net Force or the local state cops and give them a sitrep after that.

Man. He’d never expected this, but he was in it now, and he’d have to follow up and see it through — whatever it was…

Ventura glanced at his watch. Just past 0200. He had given them the clue by killing the lights, but the kidnap team still hadn’t spotted him. He frowned. Were they really that bad? And where was the genuine attack, if these four were only faking? Were they that good, that his people hadn’t spotted them?

He called the surveillance team. “Where is my black man?”

“Still heading toward the gate. He passed the Mercury Falling point a minute ago. Should be there soon.”

They’d be long gone by the time anybody came through the front gate and got here. “All right. Let me know when—” He cut it off as he spotted the threat.

Two seconds later, Morrison saw it, too. “Look!”

One of the kidnappers had left his vehicle and circled around one of the trailers. The man was twenty-five, maybe twenty-eight meters away. Dim as it was, it was only his darker form against the lighter color of the building that gave him away. Was he sight- or hearing-augmented? Did he see them? Could he hear the little fuel cell motor?

Ventura could hear the man, because Ventura was wearing bat ears — tiny electronic plugs that functioned both as a hearing aid for normal sounds and suppressors for sudden loud noises.

Ventura pulled the flash grenade from his pocket, thumbed the safety ring out and flipped the cover up, then pressed the timer button. He had five seconds, and he wanted it to go off in the air. One… two… three… four — throw, the overhand lob, up and outward…

Ventura closed his eyes against the bright flash he knew was coming. It wouldn’t make much noise.

He could see the photonic blast through his closed eyelids anyway. It faded, and he opened his eyes at the same time he heard the kidnapper’s startled yell. If the man was wearing spookeyes, that would close the automatic shutters for a heartbeat. If he wasn’t, his night vision was going to be gone.

Ventura drew his pistol and goosed the little scooter. The kidnapper fired three shots, but from the angle of the flashes, he was shooting way behind them. Probably no spookeyes, then.

Ventura indexed the flashes and shot back, two rounds. His own earplugs cut out the harsh noise within a hundredth of a second, suppressing the hurtful decibel level. He heard the man scream, and heard him hit the ground.

One down.

He circled the scooter away and back toward the fence, along the path he’d decided upon earlier. He did a tactical reload, changed magazines, dropping the one missing a round into his pocket. Something bothered him, something was wrong, and it took a few seconds before he figured out what it was:

Why had the kidnapper shot at them? Two men on a scooter, more than twenty meters away, in the dark? It was a very risky shot; Ventura was an expert with his pistol and he wouldn’t have chanced it. Even if the shooter knew which man was which, how could he take the risk of hitting Morrison? He’d have to know that if he killed the scientist, the game was over, and his ass would be fried. Could the Chinese have hired somebody that foolish? Somebody who would panic at a bright light and accidentally cook the golden goose?

It was one more inconsistency that didn’t add up. But he’d have to work it out later — there were still three of them running around, and the one who had gotten into range had surprised him. You didn’t want to tilt the playing field too far in your enemy’s favor. Ventura did not have a death wish.

“You shot him,” Morrison said.

“Yes, I did.”

“Is he… dead, do you think?”

Ventura shrugged. “Who cares? He knew the job was dangerous when he took it. If he didn’t, then he’s an idiot. Or he was an idiot. And he shot at us first, remember? We were just defending ourselves.”

Morrison didn’t say anything.

The fence was through that patch of woods just ahead, and there was a path through them. They could play Q&A later. One step at a time.

Be in the moment…

24

It had been a long time since Howard had done any real hunting, and even the most realistic VR scenario was not the same as creeping through the woods and sneaking up on a vehicle that might or might not contain unfriendlies. In this case, it had to be done by feel — it was so damned dark he ran a real risk of smacking his face into trees if he didn’t go slow. He couldn’t use his flashlight, that would be way too easy to spot, and he didn’t even want to think about bumping into some hungry critter bigger than he was.

His advantage was that if he couldn’t see them, they probably couldn’t see him. Even if there were a couple of bad guys in the SUV and they had starlight scopes, he’d be hard to spot unless they were looking right at him, and unless they had eyes in the backs of their heads, or just happened to have their scopes pointed at the rearview mirror, they weren’t apt to be looking right at him.

Once he’d left the edge of the woods and moved in deeper to circle around behind the vehicle, it took a few minutes to crawl up behind it. He inched his way forward in the old knees and elbows locomotion, until he was only a couple of meters behind the black SUV, a Ford Explorer. The thing had tinted windows so dark he probably couldn’t have seen inside even in bright sunshine, much less the near-pitch night out here. Nobody inside smoked cigarettes to reveal themselves with a telltale glow, there was no radio playing, nobody talking. No sign that the Explorer was anything but empty. And wouldn’t he feel stupid if it turned out he was stalking an empty car?

Yeah. But worry about that later.

He inched closer, until he was right at the back bumper. He had in mind listening very carefully, maybe making a little noise to see if there would be any kind of response, but he didn’t get that far. A man’s voice said, “I gotta piss.”

“We’re supposed to stay in the car until we see the signal.”

“Fuck the signal. I can see it just as well taking a leak as I can from in here.”

The passenger door opened, but the dome light didn’t go on. The door stayed open and the sound of footsteps approaching on dry fir needles got louder fast. The guy was walking around to the back of the truck!

Even this dark, he’d likely see or hear Howard if he tried to crawl away.

Howard flattened himself fully prone and used his knees to push himself under the Explorer.

Three heartbeats later, the sound of a stream of urine splashing against the side of a tree came loud in the night. It went on for a long time, and Howard could even hear the man’s pants’ zipper going back up when he was done.

The peeing man was halfway back to the car door when the driver said, “There it is! Come on, get in!”

From his vantage point under the vehicle, Howard couldn’t see much, but he was able to catch a glimmer of light from across the road.

That would be the signal.

Who was giving the signal and what exactly it meant, well, that wasn’t altogether clear, but the gist of it was fairly evident to Howard. Somebody was on the other side of the fence that surrounded HAARP, and these two were there to meet whoever it was. His money was on that somebody being Morrison, otherwise it was going to be one hell of a coincidence.

The Ford’s engine cranked, and that was incredibly loud from where Howard lay, his head directly under it. He heard the clunk! as the driver shifted the transmission from park into gear.

If the guy swung any kind of sharp turn when he pulled out, he’d feel a big bump at the same time John Howard felt the back wheel crush him. He took a deep breath—

The driver pulled straight out, and across the road before he wheeled the big SUV into a tight right turn broadside to Howard. The peeing man jumped out and ran around the car toward the fence, Howard could see him in the red glow of the brake lights. He was carrying what looked like a big pair of hedge clippers, and it took a second for Howard to realize that the tool wasn’t for trimming bushes but was actually a pair of bolt cutters.

This was definitely a bad business, whatever it was.

Howard came up, pulled his revolver and started across the narrow road toward the Explorer, crouching low as he moved. There would be at least three of them, maybe more, and covering them all would be a bitch, but what choice did he have? He couldn’t just let them drive away — at least not until he knew what was going on.

The plinks! of the cutters snipping the chainlinks sounded crisp in the night.

Howard had almost made it to the Ford’s passenger door when the driver looked up and saw him.

“Incoming!” the driver screamed. “Incoming!”

Howard zigged to his left, toward the car’s rear, just as a gunshot exploded inside the Explorer. An orange tongue of fire reached from the driver, the passenger window shattered, and the bullet passed somewhere to his right, close enough so he heard it whistle by.

Bad guys — no goddamned doubt about it.

The noise inside the SUV must have been deafening. The driver took his foot off the brake, and the brake lights went out, plunging the scene back into darkness.

Howard still had the after-image of the gunshot seared into his retina, and his rods and cones or whatever weren’t doing their job. He rounded the back of the Explorer, dropped prone, and looked for a target.

“Move the car,” somebody said. They didn’t sound the least bit excited.

The driver stepped on the gas. The smell of burned tire filled the air as the Explorer screeched and lurched forward.

Howard’s central vision was still fogged, but he turned his head to the left and caught a peripheral movement. They had shot at him, therefore they were bad guys. He hesitated for maybe a quarter second, then lined the revolver up on the movement and squeezed the trigger. He remembered to close his eyes as the shot went off, to save what vision he had left, and then he rolled to his left as fast as he could, three complete revolutions.

Somebody screamed, and somebody returned fire. The dragon’s tongue muzzle blast lit the scene just enough for Howard to see there were two men standing next to a hole clipped through the fence, a third man lying on the ground. A bullet spanged off the road where he had been and the ricochet whined off into the trees.

Howard scraped his elbows on the road as he swung the revolver sideways and pointed it where he’d seen the flash—

“Move,” a man said, insistent, but not panicky.

Whoever he is, he’s a lot calmer than I am—

The scream of brakes forced Howard to glance away from his target zone just as he cranked off two more shots. He rolled again, and saw the Explorer’s headlights flash on as the SUV did a rubber-burning one-eighty.

The driver was going to put some light on the subject, and that was bad—

An answering pair of shots spewed more orange, and two more bullets hit the road inches away. If he hadn’t rolled, he’d have eaten both of them, and even so, the shooter had almost anticipated enough to hit him.

Howard leaped up. He had to get off the road before—

Too late. The SUV’s headlights found him. He took three steps then dived for the side of the road, hit in a sloppy shoulder roll, came up, and ran for the trees. More gunshots reached for him, but missed. The roar of the SUV’s engine increased as it headed back in his direction. The driver angled the vehicle, trying to find him with the light.

Howard slipped on something, fell, and rolled, ending up on his back, feet facing the oncoming Explorer. He pulled his feet toward his butt, propped the revolver on top of his left knee, got a nice clear sight picture outlined against the oncoming headlights. He aimed at the windshield on the driver’s side. The SUV was fifty meters away and closing. He pulled the trigger, one, two, three, four—

The gun stopped shooting after three times, clicked empty, but the SUV slewed off the road and angled into the fence, bowing a big section before it took out a post and stopped.

His piece was empty, and there was still too much reflected light out here; he felt like a bug under a microscope. He scrabbled up and into the trees, managed to run into one with his right shoulder and spin himself around, but at least he was hidden. He dropped to the ground on his butt, thumbed the cylinder latch, shoved the cylinder out with his left hand, hammered the extractor rod with the palm. Empty shells flew. He grabbed a speed strip and started to reload. One, two, three—

The SUV’s motor raced, and there came the sound of metal tearing. The motor roared louder, the tires screamed—

He must have missed the driver. Either that, or the other two had gotten to the SUV.

Load, load, come on, come on—!

— four, five, six!

He snapped the cylinder closed and crawled toward the road. As he reached the edge of the trees, the Explorer roared past, accelerating away.

“Fuck that!” Howard yelled. He scrambled up, ran into the road, and whipped his gun up in both hands. The SUV was really moving; it was eighty, ninety meters away as he cooked off all six as fast as he could, closing his eyes to avoid the muzzle flashes—

Again the SUV squealed into a one-eighty turn, and the lights came around to find Howard. But the car didn’t start back, it just sat there. Ninety meters — okay, okay, he had time to reload again—

The SUV’s door slammed shut. Somebody got out?

Howard ejected the empties, reached for another speed loader. Plenty of time—

He saw the muzzle flash, felt the kick in his belly from a heavy boot as he went down, then heard the boom! from the weapon.

Fuck! He was shot and his gun was empty. His side burned, over his right hip. Get up, John, get up, now!

He half-crawled, half-rolled off the road and back to the woods. In the trees, he kept moving, his fist jammed over the bullet wound. He got as far as he could before his legs just quit working. He sat, fumbled for his virgil, managed to trigger the distress signal as he felt himself graying out. His last thoughts as he lost consciousness were of disbelief: How could somebody have hit a target at ninety meters like that? With a handgun, and only the headlights of a car in the dark?

Hell of a shot…

“What the hell happened?” Morrison said again and again. “What the hell happened?”

The cool night air whistled through the car from the three holes in the windshield. Morrison, in the back, was probably in shock, but at that, he was a lot better off than Ventura’s two men. One of them was dead on the seat next to him, slumped against the passenger door; he’d taken one right between the eyes. The other man was lying next to the fence back at the pickup point, and he was just as dead, one to the heart. Nice work.

The black man had done it. Ventura didn’t know who the hell he had been, but he’d screwed things up pretty good. How had the black guy managed to find them and set up his ambush? That had been a good trick. Still, it didn’t matter. He was probably dead or dying himself by now. Ventura had put one solidly into him; he wasn’t going to be causing any more trouble. If he was the Chinese’s primary attack, he’d failed, even though he had caused a lot of trouble. He should have been wearing a vest. Odd that he wasn’t. Ventura had his on.

The client was alive, and they would rendezvous with more of Ventura’s team in a couple of minutes. Nice try, but no cigar.

“What the hell happened?”

“Relax, it’s okay now. They tried, but they failed. We’ll regroup and wait for them to contact us.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Listen, you can’t take this personally. It’s just business. They tried, they missed, so now they’ll deal. Nothing has changed.”

“I could have gotten killed!”

“And you still could. But none of this matters. What matters is that you aren’t dead now. You still have something they want, and they are still going to have to pay to get it. You move on.”

“This is madness,” Morrison said.

“Way of the world, Doctor. If you don’t want to get hit, don’t step into the ring. You’re here now, so we have to make the best of it. Think of it as a great story to tell your new friends someday.”

He saw Morrison in the rearview mirror, his face dimly lit by the instrument lights. The man looked as if somebody had just told him there was a rattlesnake in his pocket.

Ventura watched the road, his pistol in his lap. Amateurs just didn’t understand how the world worked. They took everything so personal.

25

“Sir?”

Michaels came out of a shallow sleep, blinking. He was in his office, on the couch. What—?

One of the night crew — Askins? Haskins? — stood in the doorway. Must not be time for shift change yet. Michaels sat up. “Yes?”

“We got a distress signal from General Howard’s virgil. From Alaska.”

“What?” He still wasn’t quite awake and tracking yet. Where was Toni?

“Federal Marshals found him, he’s been shot. An Alaska National Guard copter is on the way; he’s up near Gakona.”

He looked at his watch. It was six A.M. He needed to wash his face and to find Toni. What had John gotten into?

But before he could reach the door, his own com chirped its top-priority tone. He hurried to the receiver and picked it up. “John?”

“No, it’s Melissa Allison.”

The director. What was she doing up at this hour?

She didn’t give him time to wonder: “I just got a call from Adam Brickman in the U.S. Marshals office. One of his men was wounded in a shoot-out in Nowhere, Alaska, attempting to serve an arrest warrant authorized by your office. So was General John Howard. They are alive, just barely, on their way to a hospital in Anchorage, but Brickman isn’t happy. I’m not happy, either, Commander, because when he started chewing me out for not warning his people this was a shoot-sit, I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.”

Uh-oh. “I’m sorry, Madam Director, I didn’t realize there was any danger.”

“You sent marshals and the head of Net Force’s military arm to pick up somebody — which is outside your charter, unless there are special circumstances. I’m going to be in my office in forty minutes. I suggest you be there when I arrive.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Michaels said.

He cradled the receiver. Great. Just great. He had a federal marshal and John Howard shot up and the director of the FBI ready to tear him a new asshole. Great way to start the day, wasn’t it? Maybe if he was lucky, a big meteor would fall on him.

“Alex?”

Toni. “Hey,” he said.

“What’s up? The place feels as if it’s about to explode.”

He rubbed at his face with both hands. “Walk with me and I’ll fill you in.”

Because Ventura wanted to have a few words with the Chinese, he had Morrison’s phone when it rang. He used the headset, the engine and wind noise of the DC-3 being enough to interfere with hearing.

“Dr. Morrison?”

“No. Ventura.”

“Ah, Luther. How are you?”

“Why, I’m just fine, Chilly. Though I can’t say the same for your people. The feint was pretty good, but the follow-through was, well, sad. I expected better.”

There was a moment’s hesitation. Then Wu said, “Much as I’d like to turn this to my advantage, I have to confess I don’t know what you are talking about, Luther.”

“Come on, we’re professionals here, I don’t hold it against you, I realize it was just business.”

“Nope, sorry, I’m not tracking.”

Ventura considered it. There was no real reason for Wu to be coy. He knew that if they tried to snatch Morrison and failed, Ventura wouldn’t care; it was how things were done, they were men of the world here. “So you didn’t send people to, ah, have an informal chat with my client?”

“No.”

Ventura heard the “Not yet” in that single word, but he also had to stop and think real hard about the implications. Of course Wu would lie if it was to his advantage, that was to be expected. But Wu had to know he couldn’t gull anybody into believing that the Chinese were benevolent businessmen who’d never stoop to such a thing as kidnapping and torture. Sure, they’d pay if they had to pay, but if they could get what they wanted for free, they’d do it. They were as cheap as anybody else.

So lying wouldn’t serve him at this point — Ventura didn’t trust Wu as far as he could fly by flapping his arms, and Wu knew it. And if Wu hadn’t sent a team, then who were those men?

Had he just shot a couple of real federal marshals?

“Dr. Morrison is okay, isn’t he?” Wu asked. “No problems with our little transaction? We were quite impressed with the test. We are ready to get down to brass tacks.”

“He’s fine. Here he is.” Ventura waved at Morrison, who was listening to his half of the conversation. He held his thumb over the transmitter mike. “Wu. He’s ready to deal. And don’t get bent with him — he didn’t send his people after you. Those were legitimate feds.”

Morrison’s eyes went wide. “It couldn’t be—”

“You screwed up, Doctor. They figured it out, somehow, and now we have a whole new set of problems.”

He handed Morrison the phone and headset. He had to make a couple of calls on his own to verify this, but if it turned out to be what he was now sure it was, he had some serious thinking to do. Very serious thinking.

Alex had gone off to see the director, and Toni took the opportunity to go to the gym. It wasn’t as big as the rooms in the main FBI compound, but she didn’t need much space. And early as it was, she was the only person there.

Nobody had gotten around to cleaning out her locker — there was still a pair of sweats and a sports bra folded neatly there, along with her Discipline martial arts shoes, and, by chance, the clothes were still clean, though a little stale. She shook everything out and dressed, then padded into the gym. She could have worked out in her street clothes, she made a point of doing that every so often, but since she didn’t have any clean ones to change into afterward, that would have to wait for another time. If you couldn’t do it in your ordinary wear, it didn’t matter how terrific a move was; if you couldn’t use it when you needed it, it was pointless for self-defense. In a streetfight, you wouldn’t have time to take off your shoes, get dressed in your gi, nor ten minutes to stretch and warm up. Sweats and limbering exercises saved wear and tear on your clothes, muscles, and joints in the long run, that was why you did them, but they were luxuries, not necessities—

“Toni?”

She looked up and saw Jay. “Hey, Jay.”

“Boss around?”

“He had to go see the Dragon Lady.”

“Okay, I’ll call him.” He was in a hurry. He turned and started to leave.

“What’s up, Jay?”

He paused. “You knew they found John Howard shot in the woods across the road from the HAARP compound?”

“Yeah.”

“He was choppered to a hospital in Anchorage, and it looks like he’s gonna be okay.”

“Thank God.”

“Yeah. He was supposed to be on vacation with his family. How’d he get to Alaska?”

Toni shook her head. Here was another problem for Alex, one he didn’t need.

He needed her. But she couldn’t go back to work for him. She couldn’t.

Madam Director Allison was royally pissed. In her shoes, Michaels might have felt the same way, but he wasn’t in her shoes, he was in his, and they were getting real damp from nervous sweat.

“And you felt you couldn’t pass this along to me? I had to find it out from some other agency?”

He sat in the chair in front of her desk and nodded. “I didn’t see the need. Four federal marshals went to pick up one desk-jockey scientist. I met the man. He could hardly stand up without losing his balance. He had no history of violence, no record of having purchased weapons. I asked John to go along to keep us in the loop. It was a milk run.”

“Yes, a run that turned into the milkman taking a bullet in the pelvis under the edge of his vest, and your meek scientist disappearing, not even to mention the head of your military arm taking a round.” She looked at the flatscreen on her desk. “According to the guards at this HAARP place, Morrison wasn’t alone. He was accompanied by a Dr. Dick Grayson. His identity turns out to be bogus.”

Despite the situation, Michaels smiled.

“Something funny about that I’m missing, Commander?”

“Dick Grayson is the secret identity of Batman’s side-kick, Robin.”

“Yes, well, ‘Robin’ is likely the man who plugged the marshal, along with John Howard, on his way out of town. The rest of the arrest team managed to gather themselves enough to pick up the trail. Morrison and his gun-toting friend took a small cart through the woods, cut a hole in the fence, and were presumably picked up by accomplices. The marshals found an armed dead man next to the hole in the fence, shot in the heart. No ID on the man.

“There were signs that a car had left the road and plowed into the fence fifty yards away. The marshals called in the state police, and a few minutes ago a shot-up Ford Explorer was found at an old airstrip. There were three bullet holes in the windshield, five more holes in the back loading gate and bumper, and another dead man in the front seat. No identification on him, either. Probably Howard’s work.”

“Huh,” Michaels said.

“Oh, you can do better than that, Commander. You are supposed to be playing with computers. You are supposed to be finding and busting pirate ships in the Gulf peddling Viagra and steroids and diet pills over the internet without prescriptions, or hunting down teenaged hackers who post porno in church web pages. You went outside your authority, and I don’t know what it is you stepped into, but whatever it is, it is on your shoes and it is your responsibility now. I want to know just what the hell is going on—”

His virgil, which he had forgotten to turn off, bleated the opening notes from the old rock and roll song, “Bad to the Bone.”

Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dump!

The director frowned.

“Sorry,” he said. He reached for the virgil to shut it off, but saw Jay’s face on the tiny screen. If Gridley knew he was here, he wouldn’t have bothered him if it wasn’t important. “Jay?”

“Looks like John Howard is gonna make it, Boss.”

“Thank God!”

“Already sent a few prayers in His direction.”

“I appreciate the call, Jay,” Michaels said. He discommed, then looked at the director. “Howard is going to pull through.”

“That’s good news, at least. Why don’t you see if you can’t add to it?”

26

When John Howard awoke, the first face he saw belonged to Sergeant Julio Fernandez. With consciousness came the awareness that he was in a bed, in a hospital room, and that his right side and belly hurt like hell. He also had a headache, his mouth was dry, and his arm had an IV tube running into it. His last memory was of passing out in the woods, and of all the hoopla before that — he knew what had happened. He had been shot.

“He’s awake,” Fernandez said.

“How bad?” Howard asked.

“John!” That was Nadine.

He turned his head slightly — that was a good sign, he could do that. “Hey, babe. Julio?”

“You’re shy a loop of small intestine, but you won’t have to poop into a bag for the rest of your life or anything. Won’t even have a bullet scar in the front, they took that out when they went in to fix your plumbing, but you will have one in the back — round went right through, didn’t hit anything else worth mentioning. Missed a kidney by a cun — uh, by a hair.”

Howard nodded. “Thanks.”

Nadine was there then, and there were tears and hugging. After which she called him a few names, the least of which was “stupid.”

Man, he was glad to see her.

“Dad?”

“Hey, son.”

Fernandez cranked the bed so Howard could sit up. Tyrone came over and smiled at him.

Howard said, “Where’s your little friend?”

Tyrone frowned, then saw Howard grin and realized it was a joke. “She’s in the waiting room. I’ll go tell her you’re okay. They wouldn’t let anybody but family in.”

Howard looked at Fernandez. He shrugged. “I told them I was your brother. They decided it wasn’t worth arguing about.”

A nurse came in, asked a couple of questions, then looked at the beeping machine to which he was wired. “The doctor will be in to see you in just a minute.”

“Uh-huh. Sure. I’ve heard that one before.”

She shook her head and left.

“How long have I been out?”

“Not long,” Fernandez said. “Been about six hours since you got here.”

“Where is here?”

“Anchorage. That’s in Alaska.”

“Thank you for that information, Sergeant. How did you get here so fast?”

“I have a friend in the Air Force who owed me a big favor. You haven’t lived until you’ve done a supersonic barrel roll. Yee-haw.”

Nadine said, “Are you okay, John?”

“I’ve felt better, but yeah, I’m okay.”

“Good. I have to go to the bathroom. Stay right here.”

He laughed. “Don’t do that. It hurts to laugh.”

She headed for the bathroom. Howard grinned as he watched her walk away, then looked at Fernandez again. “You want to tell me about it?”

“Why don’t you go first? I’ll fill in what we know that you don’t.”

Howard nodded. He laid it out, the whole thing; it was vividly clear in his mind.

When he was done, Fernandez nodded in return. “Ninety yards, huh? Hell of a shot.”

“That’s what I thought. I wouldn’t want to meet this guy one-on-one in the daylight.”

“Your tactics could have been better.”

“I lie corrected, Sergeant. Your turn.”

“Well, you actually did better than he did. The marshals had one wounded, but they collected two corpses, one by the fence, one in the SUV. One in the car was in the passenger seat when they found him, but holes in the windshield and spatter pattern says he got it while driving. How many rounds did you fire at the driver?

“Three.”

“All in the glass, four-inch group. And they counted five holes in the back.”

“I shot six.”

“You missed one. You need more practice.”

“Five out of six at ninety yards, in the dark, car going away? I don’t think so. I do think I’m gonna keep that Medusa,” he said. “I feel a certain bond with it. Go ahead.”

“No ID on the dead men, nothing useful in their pockets or clothes, which makes them pros. Feebs are running prints, nothing yet, but I’d guess we’re talking some kind of mercenaries. Our boy Morrison must know he has reason to rent serious muscle. Everybody and his kid sister is looking for him. Some kind of plane took off from an old field not far away, no ID on it yet, but it must have hugged the ground for a ways. Nobody’s radar spotted it.”

Howard’s wife came back from the bathroom, and within a few seconds the doctor came in. He was maybe sixty, iron-gray hair cut short, in a white shirt and slacks and a lab coat. “Good afternoon. I’m Dr. Clements. How are you feeling, General?”

“I’m ready to run a marathon. Right after breakfast.”

“Yeah, I bet. Let me poke and prod a little here. Folks, if you’ll step outside?”

“Nothing he’s got we haven’t seen,” Fernandez said.

“Humor me,” Clements said.

“You heard the man,” Howard said. “Maybe I don’t want you to see my new tattoo.”

Fernandez grinned. “I got a few calls to make, anyhow. I don’t know why, but there are people who care if you croak.”

As he started to walk away, Howard said, “Thanks for stopping by, Sergeant.”

“Hey, no problem. It was a slow day at the office anyway.”

Nadine said, “You stupid, stupid, stupid men! Would it break your faces to say you care?”

Fernandez looked at her deadpan: “No, ma’am, but I’m pretty certain our balls would fall off.”

You really shouldn’t laugh after being shot in the gut, you really shouldn’t.

Toni stood outside HQ and stared into the cloudy blue sky. Going to rain, she guessed.

Yeah, and maybe if you’re real lucky, lightning will strike you.

She sighed. How did she get into situations like this? She had just come from her meeting with Director Allison, and the good news was that she had been offered a job. The bad news was… that she had been offered a job. And what a job — a newly created position, special assistant to the director, and liaison to Net Force.

She would be working with Alex, but not for him. And she would be responsible for conveying the wishes of the director to Net Force in such a way as to make certain that the “interface” between the bureau and Net Force would be more “cleanly meshed.”

Translation: She would be looking over Alex’s shoulder, making sure he didn’t screw up.

She didn’t have to take it, of course. She could walk away, and she would have, except that it was the perfect job. She’d be in fairly close contact with Alex, she could cover him if he did stub his toe now and then, and she’d still be working for the government. With a grade and pay raise, to boot. Essentially, she would be Alex’s equal at work.

The thing was — how was she going to tell him? He might not see it for what it was, and knowing Alex, he might feel, well, upset.

She didn’t want to upset him. Then again, it wouldn’t really hurt him, would it? And in the long run, it could be better for their relationship.

Ah, said her inner voice, rationalization rears its ugly head!

“Shut up,” she told her inner voice.

A Marine lieutenant walking past glanced at her, but apparently decided she wasn’t talking to him.

She didn’t have to take the job. She told the director she’d have to think it over, that she’d get back to her. But she had made up her mind.

Morrison never thought he would be glad to see the gates of a racist militia compound, but as soon as they closed behind the car, he felt a lot better.

General Bull Smith was waiting at the main compound, and as soon as Ventura had alighted, he made straight for the man.

“Everything go okay, Colonel?”

“More or less, sir. We had some problems. I don’t want you to get blindsided by this, so I’ll just tell you up front — we are going to get some heat because of a few things that went down.”

Smith smiled. “Heat doesn’t bother us at all. Idaho summers’ll give Hell a run for the money sometimes.”

“Some of this could be from our own side.”

Morrison watched Smith take this in. “That a fact?”

3”You’ll hear about it on the news soon enough. I lost two men. A couple of federal marshals went down, too.”

“No shit?”

“I don’t think they know who we are. And they can’t know where we went.”

Smith nodded. “Well. Revolution might be starting sooner than expected. We’re ready, if it comes to that.”

“I don’t believe it will, General, but I had to bring you up to speed.”

“I appreciate it, Colonel. Why don’t y’all come on in and have a beer? Got barbecued pork cooking.”

“That sounds great,” Ventura said.

After Smith was out of earshot, Morrison, mindful of listening devices, said, “Good that you updated the general.” What he meant was “Why the hell did you tell him?”

Ventura’s answer also carried a hidden meaning: He said, “I expect the general’s own intel sources would have gotten it in short order anyhow.” And what Morrison heard was “He needed to hear it from us, just in case he ever got a clue.”

“What now?” Morrison asked.

“We wait for our friends to get in touch with us as to the transfers on both sides of the negotiation. Since nobody trusts anybody — nor should they — certain safeguards must be put into effect. We’ll have to work those out.”

“They won’t come here?”

“Wishful thinking, Doctor. No, they’ll want a place of their choosing. They’ll settle for one of our choosing, but it’ll have to be a lot more neutral than an armed camp where the shape of their eyes and sallow skin color might get them shot, just for the fun of it. Wouldn’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“You suppose correctly. This is where it really gets tricky.”

Morrison stared at him.

Ventura chuckled. “We’re in the tiger’s cage, and he’s not made of paper. Any mistakes now, and he eats us. Speaking of which, shall we try some of that barbecue? I’m starving.”

Morrison shook his head. The last thing he felt like doing was eating.

27

On the phone, Michaels realized he was all knotted up as he sat hunched forward in his office chair. He tried to relax. Probably an oxymoron, that, trying to relax. Nonetheless, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and allowed his shoulders to slump with his exhalation. It helped a little. He said, “So what’s your take on it, John?”

Howard didn’t sound as if he had been shot and almost killed only hours ago. He said, “Morrison is our boy. No reason for him to resist the marshals otherwise, and damned sure no reason for him to have shooters on hand to resist with. If we can keep him away from HAARP or any of the other transmitters like it, we can stop the attacks.”

Michaels asked the question that had been bothering him. “Why would he do this? Drive people to a killing madness?”

There was a pause. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s crazy himself.”

Michaels sighed. The man hadn’t seemed crazy when he’d been sitting right here in this office, talking about this stuff. In retrospect, it was obvious that Morrison had been covering his ass, trying to misdirect Net Force, and except for Jay’s talking to a security guard, he’d done a good job of it. So he wasn’t that crazy. He’d known they might come looking for him, known it and thought to head it off in advance. Didn’t sound crazy.

Why had he done it? To see if he could? Once would have proven that, twice made it certain. Three times was overkill. If he had planned on extortion, he’d screwed up — they knew who he was, and had an idea of what it was he had done, if not actually how he’d pulled it off, so any threat he had in mind was dead — especially since he no longer had the tools to do it at his disposal. This wasn’t something you could cobble together with a kit from RadioShack.

So far, Jay hadn’t been able to find anything else that directly connected Morrison to the events in China or Portland. Hell, if he hadn’t come in, Net Force wouldn’t have had a clue about any of this. Maybe the guy was too smart for his own good. What he’d overlooked had been so simple, so basic, that it seemed incredibly stupid on the face of it. Like that mission to Mars a dozen years or so ago where the scientists had mixed up English measures with metric and plowed the little vessel right into the surface of the planet at speed because the calculations had been so basic nobody had even thought about them. Overlooking something as simple as a security guard’s log was the kind of thing a scientist just might do because it would never occur to him. A mistake so basic he never even thought about it.

If Jay was right about the technology and the possibility of using it in such a manner, then Morrison had had the means and opportunity, but what had the motive been?

“Any leads on where he went?” Howard asked.

“Not yet. The mainline ops are on the case, and we’ve got bulletins out to every state police agency in the U.S., as well as to the Canadian authorities. Flight plans in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest are all being checked.”

“I’m going to be out of here in a day or so,” Howard said. “I’ll get to the office—”

“You will go home, General. We will run this guy down doing the things we know how to do. What we haven’t done enough of lately — computer detection.”

“I’ll be okay to work.”

“Not according to your wife you won’t. We’ll keep you posted as to progress.”

Howard wasn’t happy with that, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. They said their good-byes.

Michaels headed to Jay’s office. He tapped on the door and stuck his head into the room. Gridley was off-line. “Hey, Boss.”

“I just got off the com with John Howard. He is going to be okay, so the doctors tell him.”

Jay relaxed a little. “Good to hear it.”

“I trust you are well on the way to catching the man responsible for shooting our teammate?”

Jay smiled. “Oh, sure. Well on the way.”

“Which means?”

“We’ve got all his personal records. We know where he’s been and what he’s done that required use of his credit cards, or his driver’s license. We have his work records, too, but there are some gaps. He took out a second mortgage on his house and cleaned out his bank accounts, so he has a big chunk of cash, and not everybody requires ID for every transaction. He could have bought a cheap car, rented a private plane, maybe even gotten himself some phony ID for whatever.

“We have a description of the guy who was with Morrison from the guards at HAARP, but ‘your average-looking science geek’ isn’t a lot of help. No surveillance cameras managed to catch an image of ‘Dick Grayson,’ and it was ole Dick who must have done the shooting — unless Morrison has a stash of guns we don’t know about and also practiced his fast draw without anybody we talked to knowing about it.”

Jay smiled. “Hey, you know who Dick Grayson is?”

“Robin, the boy wonder,” Michaels said.

Jay looked disappointed, but he continued: “FBI field agents have questioned Morrison’s wife, and she doesn’t know anything. Really. According to the reports I just read, she isn’t exactly the brightest bulb on the string — she doesn’t know what her husband does for a living, and it is the opinion of the interviewing agents that she wouldn’t know HAARP from a harpoon.”

“What else?”

“Nothing else. We have a respected scientist who apparently figured out how to drive people crazy using a giant walkie-talkie, then up and did it. We know when, and we think we sort of know generally how, but not why.”

“Conjecture?”

“I dunno, Boss. Doesn’t make any sense to me. Revenge, power, money — those are the big motivating factors that come to mind.”

Michaels said, “Anybody ever screw him over so bad he’d want this kind of revenge?”

“Not that I’ve seen. His ex-wife lives in Boston. If he wanted to get her, he missed by three thousand miles. No alimony, no kids, and the new trophy wife is a lot prettier, anyhow. He lost his funding on a research project, but got a higher paying job right after. ”

“Power?”

“Never had an ambition to run things, far as I can tell.”

“Money, then?”

“How does zapping a couple of Chinese villages and then downtown Portland get him rich? Extortion, maybe? But that wouldn’t be too bright, ’cause he’d have to know the authorities would be on his tail forever for multiple murder. He’d never be able to relax, it’s too high-profile. Too late for that now, anyhow, we have the gun. Ammunition is no good without it, and he can’t walk into another of these radio palaces and ask pretty please to use the transmitter, can he?”

No, it didn’t make a lot of sense.

Michaels had a sudden thought. “Suppose you wanted to buy a new computer system, something experimental, way ahead of what everybody else had?”

“Yeah?”

“How would you go about buying it if you weren’t sure what it would do?”

“Sit down and put it through its paces,” Jay said. “Crank it up to high and let it fly, find out what it would do — ah.”

Michaels saw that Jay was going down the same path. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe that’s what Morrison was doing. Maybe he was showing it to a potential customer. How much you figure such a thing might be worth, to the right customer? The power to drive your enemies bonkers?”

“Damn,” Jay said.

“Yeah. I think we just might have found ourselves an even uglier can of worms. As long as it is Morrison, we get him eventually. But what if he passes it along to somebody else? Somebody we can’t get so easily?”

“That could be a problem.”

“It already is a problem. Ours. As of now, this is your reason for living. Hit the net. Get all the help you can get. Find this guy, Jay. And find him fast.”

“Yeah.”

Michaels looked around. “You seen Toni? I kind of lost track of her around lunchtime.”

“Uh, no. I haven’t, uh, seen her.” He looked back at his computer.

Michaels said, “I’m hoping to get her to come back to work. I think she’s considering it seriously.”

“Really. That’s, uh, good, Boss.” Something on Jay’s desk suddenly seemed fascinating to him. And something in his tone of voice didn’t sound quite right.

“What?” Michaels said.

“What, ‘what’?” Jay responded, still not looking up.

Michaels realized he was maybe not the most perceptive man in the world when it came to reading people, but Jay Gridley wasn’t one of the world’s great adepts when it came to hiding his feelings, either.

“You aren’t telling me something I need to hear.”

“Boss, I—”

“I have a lot on my mind right now, Jay. How about you don’t add worrying the unknown to it?”

Jay blew out a sigh. “All right. Last time I was in the feeb mainframe, I left myself a couple of doors, you know, just in case we had problems like when the Russian got into the government systems?”

“Skip the rationalizations, you’re a hacker to the bone. It’s what we pay you for, remember.”

“Yeah, well, I kind of left myself a door in the director’s office subsystem.”

“And you found something I need to know but that you don’t want to tell me. What — am I going to get fired?”

“No, no, nothing like that. It’s just that, well, Toni had a meeting with the director today. At one.”

Michaels’s immediate urge was to cover and say, Oh, sure, I knew about that. But since he hadn’t known, and since there seemed to be more, he didn’t say that. Instead, he said, “And now you can drop the other shoe.”

“You really ought to hear it from her, Boss.”

“Maybe so, but I’m going to hear it from you.”

Jay shook his head. “The director just put in the e-forms for a new staff job in her office. Special assistant. She was offering the job to Toni.”

Michaels blinked. “And she took the job?”

“Not that I can tell.”

Michaels felt an absurd sense of relief. A job offer, fine, that was no big deal. Sure, she should have told him about it, but, hey, things were busy, and maybe she’d planned to brush the director off before she mentioned it. That would be like her. Nothing to worry about.

Yeah? Then why is your stomach suddenly all twisted and cold?

When he used his phone to check his e-mail, Tyrone Howard saw a priority call from Jay Gridley. Huh. What was that about?

It took forever to scroll the message on the tiny screen, but it was pretty straightforward. Jay had put out a call to all his contacts on the web. He was looking for some information, and he was asking for help.

Tyrone stared at the phone. What seemed like a thousand years ago, he had helped Jay chase down a bad guy in VR. He and Jay knew each other from way back, ever since Tyrone’s dad had been at Net Force. Of course, that time he’d helped Jay had been when he was spending six or seven hours a day jacked in to his computer, something he hadn’t done in a while. These days, he was on-line two hours a day, tops, almost nothing, just enough time to read his mail, run through a few VR rooms, and maybe a few minutes of an on-line game. But if Jay was asking, Tyrone bet it had something to do with his dad getting shot, and he was ready to sit down, plug in, and get the data flowin’ fine and fast for that. This was the guy who had pack-pronged Portland, killed people, and ruined the championships, too. A dragfoot juicesucker who needed to be shorted out, no feek. He had his laptop with him, in his pack in his dad’s room. He’d get it and get on-line.

Nadine could help him. She didn’t know a whole lot about computers, but he could take her along and show her as they went. He was not as sharp as he’d been, but he could still lubefoot the net okay. He’d help Jay and they would catch the sucker who had shot his dad.

28

Inside the car, even with the motor running and the air conditioner going on high, it was warm. It was just the two of them, Morrison in the back, Ventura driving. They passed the odd militiaman on the dusty gravel road as they crept along at just over walking speed.

Over the phone, Wu’s voice was silky, relaxed, lulling. He said, “Of course we trust you. It’s just that some of your… ah… associates seem to have a bias against people of our… persuasion. No point in tempting fate, now, is there?”

Morrison nodded at the unseen speaker. Both phones had their picture transmission off, so neither man could view the other. Not that it would have helped Morrison much to see Wu. He wasn’t particularly good at reading expressions on Western faces; as far as he was concerned, the Chinese were inscrutable. Besides, it didn’t matter. Ventura had coached him, and so far, everything the bodyguard had said was right on the button. In theory, their conversation was scrambled, encoded so that it couldn’t be understood even if somebody was able to intercept and record it.

“Perhaps the Chinese embassy might be more to your liking?”

Wu had the grace to laugh. “Well, of course, we could arrange that, but somehow I don’t think Luther would feel very comfortable under such circumstances. In his place, I would not.”

“Let’s cut to the chase,” Morrison said. “I’ll name a place, and we’ll meet there.”

Ventura had told him they wouldn’t like that, getting right to the point. The culture from which Wu came was more patient than America’s, by and large, and the Chinese were willing to engage in as much ceremonial talk as necessary to please all the speakers. They viewed Americans’ lack of formality and impatience as signs of youth and poor breeding.

“Let them think what they want,” Ventura had told him. “The lower an opinion they have of us, the better.”

“Perhaps,” Wu said. “Where?”

Morrison glanced ahead at Ventura, who saw him in the rearview mirror. He nodded.

“There’s a theater in Woodland Hills, California. That’s just outside Los Angeles.”

“I know where Woodland Hills is, Doctor.” His voice was dry, and no overt anger came through, but Morrison smiled. Ventura had told him that would irritate Wu, too.

Morrison continued: “The theater is fairly new, an IMAX. It’s on the edge of a big shopping center—”

“Ah, yes, on Mulholland, just north of Oxnard,” Wu broke in. “I saw the latest James Bond picture there a few months ago. You take the Ventura Freeway.”

Again Morrison smiled. “He’ll one-up you,” Ventura had said. “But it’ll be subtle.”

“Good, that’ll save me having to give directions. Tomorrow at noon.”

“Any particular reason for this meeting place?”

“I haven’t seen the picture they’re showing.”

“I see. All right. But there are a few details to which we must attend.”

“Such as?”

“Well, you can hardly expect us to show up hauling a suitcase with four hundred million dollars in small bills, now can you? It would take a truck to carry that much.”

“I have a secure account in an island bank,” Morrison said. “Electronic transfer will do. Bring a laptop with a secure wireless modem.”

“Ah, but there is the rub. You expect us to deliver that much money to you, and then you will give us the information, is that correct?”

“I’m the only one who can. It isn’t written down anywhere.” His meaning here was clear enough: If something happens to me before you get what you want, you won’t get it. The truth was something else: He did have a copy of it — but only one. Any other references to the sequence had been erased, and he’d done that using a deletion program that made all those files unrecoverable. The remaining file was well hidden, too. Nobody would ever find it. He could not imagine forgetting the sequence, but if for some reason he did, he wouldn’t lose it.

That’s what you thought about the feds connecting you to all this, too, remember?

He tried to ignore the thought. He still couldn’t figure out how they had done that. He had been so careful.

“How do we know you will deliver?”

“You know I have the information. I’ve demonstrated it to your satisfaction, haven’t I? Once I have the money, why wouldn’t I? It doesn’t make any sense not to, does it?”

“Having it and giving it to us are not exactly the same though, are they?”

“I’ll be sitting right there next to you. You transfer the money. I transfer the information. I assume you will have scientists standing by who can verify the information. I can give you the names of some of yours who have the ability to confirm it — Dr. Jang Ji, or George Chen, or Li Hun—”

“That won’t be necessary. We know who our scientists are. But can they verify it immediately?”

“If they have a test subject and access to ECG equipment and a couple of basic transmitters, they can be ready to run the experiment as soon as they get the code sequence. They’ll be able to confirm it before the movie is over. Only on a small scale, of course, but in this case, size doesn’t matter. It will work as well in the field as it does in the tab — you’ve seen that.”

There was a short pause as Wu apparently digested this information.

“That’s the deal, Mr. Wu. Take it or leave it.”

“All right. I’ll see you at noon tomorrow. Have a pleasant trip.”

Wu disconnected, and Morrison blew out a big sigh of relief. This had all gone a lot more crossways than he had ever anticipated. A large part of him wished he could turn back the clock and reconsider this whole idea.

“He went for it,” Ventura said. Not a question.

“Yes.”

“Good. We’re in business.”

Morrison was worried. “This sounds very risky to me. A public movie theater? It will be too easy for him to bring men with guns in and hide them among the audience. He could have fifteen or twenty of them and we wouldn’t know it.”

Ventura smiled into the rearview mirror. “Do I tell you how to program your signals? Offer advice on frequencies?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“Don’t worry, we’ll know who they are. The theater will be having a special screening tomorrow at noon, for screenwriters, members of the WGA. They’ll have to show a card to get in the showing. Everybody else will either be one of ours or belong to the Chinese. We’ll let their people in, because we will have the advantage. The employees, from the booth to the concession stand to the guy who tears your ticket in half, will be our people. For every one they get inside, we’ll have one in a nearby seat covering them. Everybody our men don’t know will be a potential target. If click comes to bang, they will know who to shoot. And if they miss? Well, nobody will notice if there are a few less screenwriters anyhow. Everybody in L.A. is working on a script.”

“How can you do this? You know the guy who owns the place?”

“I am the guy who owns the place. Over the years, I’ve done pretty well for my retirement, Doctor. I own that theater, a bar, part interest in a health club, and a couple of high-profile restaurants. Plus the blue chip stocks and bonds, of course. I’m not in the same class as you are about to be, but I could live fairly comfortably off the investments and interest without ever touching my principal. If your money isn’t working for you, it’s just gathering dust.” He smiled.

Morrison shook his head. This was incredible. Why would a man of wealth and property risk his life to work as a bodyguard?

Ventura must have read his mind. “ ‘Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.’ A man likes to keep busy doing work he enjoys.”

Morrison looked away from Ventura.

This was getting stranger — and more frightening — all the time.

Michaels sat at his kitchen table, holding a cup of coffee. It was early, just about dawn, and Toni was still asleep. He drank and stared at the wall, his gaze going through the paneling and Sheetrock and wood and focusing on nothing a thousand miles away.

And how is your life, Mr. Michaels?

Why, just fine, thank you very much. My ex-wife is getting remarried to some Idaho dork and taking my child away from me — unless I want to get into an ugly child custody case that will probably scar my daughter for life, something she doesn’t deserve and I won’t do.

I personally spoke to the man who almost certainly killed scores of Chinese by using some kind of radio beam to drive them crazy, and if I had been on the fucking ball, I would have stopped him before he did it again to scores of Americans. He walked into my office and I smiled and let him walk out.

The head of my military arm was shot and seriously wounded because I wanted him to go along and keep the federal marshals company, and the guy I sent them all after plugged a marshal while he was at it, got away, and is still on the loose.

My boss is ready to nail my ass to the nearest wall for not keeping her in the loop.

What else? Oh, right. My woman is back and sleeping in my bed, but she’s considering taking a job where she’ll be looking over my shoulder at my work and then telling my boss all about it. And she didn’t think it was worth mentioning.

He had come home late, Toni had already been asleep, and he’d stewed about this particular problem until he conked out. And he woke up thinking about it.

That it?

Yeah, I think that just about covers it. My life is just swell.

He sipped at the coffee. It was cold. He considered getting up to warm it, but it wasn’t worth the effort. Sitting and staring at the wall was ever so much more important.

Sure, sitting and whining about how hard your life is, that’s the way to go, all right.

“Up yours!”

“Hey. What did I do?”

Michaels looked up. He hadn’t realized he’d said it aloud until he heard Toni. She stood there, wearing one of his dress shirts and nothing else, and she looked absolutely gorgeous, even though her face was sleep-wrinkled and her hair was a tangled rat’s nest. That didn’t help, that she was beautiful and he loved her. He’d thought things were okay when she came back, he’d thought all was right with the world.

Well, think again, pal.

“Nothing, I was just talking to myself.”

She took a mug from the dishwasher and poured coffee into it. She inhaled the vapor, blew it out, then drank. She turned and leaned against the counter, looked at him. “You want to talk about it?”

Did he want to talk about it? Goddamned right he wanted to talk about it. They could start with How come you didn’t tell me you’d been to see the director to discuss going to work for her? Slip your mind? Not important enough to even mention? Don’t want to let me in on little details in your life, like where you are going to work?

But he didn’t say that. Instead, he said, “Not really.”

She took another sip of the brew. “Okay.”

Fine. Fine. If she wasn’t going to bring it up, he would rot in hell for all eternity before he brought it up!

He said, “I need to go in early. I’m having a meeting with the mainline SAC to coordinate our investigation to find Morrison.”

“Want me to ride along?”

“Suit yourself.” That came out a little snippier than he wanted, but what the hell, it was how he felt.

She blew out a sigh, then put the coffee mug down on the counter and crossed her arms. “All right. What’s eating you? You’re so pissed off you’re about to spit. Did I do something wrong?”

“Wrong? No, you didn’t do anything wrong.” He could feel the acid drip from his voice, feel the rage just barely buried under his words.

“So why are you taking my head off?”

He was not going to say it, he was not going to say it! “No reason. I was just wondering, since you are always hammering at me for keeping to myself, not telling you what is going on inside my head, I was just wondering why you didn’t tell me you were considering going to work for Melissa Allison, that’s all.”

Well. So much for his burn-in-hell resolve not to mention it.

She unfolded her arms, put one hand to her mouth, and she had, by God, the grace to at least look guilty. She said, “I… I’m sorry. I was going to tell you.”

“When? When I saw them painting your name on your new parking space?”

“Alex—”

“No, no, you don’t have to explain. You can do what you want, I don’t have any strings on you. You want to work for the folks on the other side of the compound, hey, it’s not my business. You are going to take the job, right?”

Her arms came back up and she crossed them tightly in front of her breasts. She stared back at him. “Yes. I am.”

His gut twisted. Well. There you go. Signed, sealed, delivered.

He stood. “Congratulations. I’m so glad we had a chance to discuss it before you made your decision.” He stalked past her toward the bedroom. Probably not as impressive as it might have been, since he was wearing nothing but his old ratty bathrobe with the frayed cuffs and torn shoulder.

“Don’t do this, Alex! Don’t shut down on me!”

“You have no room to say that right now,” he said. “No room at all. I’m going to work.”

“If you do, I won’t be here when you get back!”

“Fine, you’re going to do what you want anyhow — why bother to tell me!”

And that pretty much ended that conversation.

29

In the cab on the way to the rental car place, Toni fumed. Why did Alex have to be such a horse’s ass?

All right, yes, she should have told him about the job interview, and that she was seriously considering taking the offer. But, really, when did she have the chance? After she had seen the director, Alex had been out of his office and busy. He hadn’t come back to his condo until late, and she’d been in bed. The first time she could have reasonably brought it up was this morning, and before she had a chance to say anything, he’d jumped down her throat. How fair was that?

Uh-huh. You can make the case that way to him if you want, but let’s not bullshit ourselves, okay? You could have mentioned it before you went to the meeting. And you were only pretending to be asleep when Alex got home because you didn’t want to talk about it. Try again.

All right, yes, yes, it was true. But even so, he still didn’t have any right to blow up like that. He wasn’t her father!

No, but he’s the man you love. And he was right about one thing — you did to him what you absolutely hate to see him do to you — you kept him in the dark about what was going on inside your head. And all that business about you not being there when he got home? What was that?

Toni sighed. She hated these arguments with her inner self. She always lost. She could rationalize to somebody else, but she couldn’t fool herself — not for long, anyhow. Alex’s anger had ignited her own, and when they’d both had a chance to cool down, they’d be able to discuss things more rationally. He did love her, she knew that, and just because they’d had a fight didn’t mean all was lost forever. She hadn’t had much practice at that, fighting with somebody you loved, and every time it happened, she had a belly-twisting fear that it would be the end. One cross word, blap! they’d go their separate ways. Maybe you got over that, in time. She hoped so.

All right. So now the question was, Should she wait and hash this out with Alex? Or should she go to Quantico, see the director, and tell her she was going to take the job? Her ego said to hell with him, do what you want. But her heart said she should at least sit down and explain to him why she wanted to do it. Okay, so he was pissed off at her, he was busy, and he had a lot on his mind, but they could find a few minutes to work this out. This was more important than anything else in her life, she couldn’t just turn and walk away from it.

“Here we are, lady,” the cabbie said.

Toni blinked. The trip had been a blur, she couldn’t remember any of it.

“Thanks,” she said.

Her mind was set. She would get the rental car, drive to the office, and find a time and space to talk to Alex. She could make him understand. She knew she could.

The bar was a rat hole — shoot, a self-respecting rat would think twice about sticking its nose in here, and if it had two neurons to spark at each other, it would decide not to risk it. The lighting was mercifully dim, but you could still see the knife scars in the wooden bar, the initials carved in the tables and stools. There were flats and holographs on the walls lit by neon beer signs, the posters of mostly naked women perched in various poses on Harley Davidson motorcycles. On a couple of the pictures, certain portions of the women’s anatomy had been worn through to the dark wall underneath, caused by somebody rubbing or kissing the images. The mirror behind the bar was cracked in two places, held together with glass-mend strips, and few of the liquor bottles on the shelves behind the bartender were more than half-full.

The bartender was six and a half feet tall, probably weighed three hundred pounds, and he wore a leather vest and oil-stained jeans that presumably went to the tops of his big old motorcycle boots. He had tattoos all over what was visible of his body, everything from Li’l Hot Stuff to naked women with large breasts — and large fangs. The centerpiece was a Harley logo on his chest, partially obscured with thick patches of graying hair.

Lined up at the bar and seated at the tables were other bikers, men and women, and none of them looking what you would call… wholesome…

On a raised platform off to one side of the bar, red and blue lights played over a listless dancer. She was naked, save for several rings piercing various body parts, and a few small but interesting tattoos of her own, including a flame-colored one shaped like an arrow that pointed at one of the more intimate piercings — or what was being pierced. The music was some bump-and-grind number with saxophones and a lot of drums, and the dancer could have phoned in her performance. From her face, one could see the dancer was well past her prime; from stretch marks and scars, one could guess that she’d had children, cosmetic surgery, and probably an appendectomy. The overall effect was as erotic as a chunk of concrete, and nobody was watching the woman dance.

Jay Gridley, wearing a sleeveless blue denim jacket sporting colors from the Thai Tigers Motorcycle Club — TTMC superimposed over a growling tiger’s face — stood between two bruisers a foot taller than he and probably half again his weight.

One of the bruisers accidentally tapped Jay with his elbow as he turned to speak to a mama on the other side of him.

“Watch it,” Jay said.

The biker turned back to Jay, death in his eyes, but when he saw Jay, he blinked and said, “Sorry, man.”

Jan grinned. Well, what the hell, it was his scenario, wasn’t it? If he was gonna be in a bad biker titty bar, he might as well be the baddest guy in the place, right? Jay knew he had the moves to wipe up the virtual floor with anybody in the place, and even in VR, people could sense a real expert from his moves and stance.

It probably said something about his fantasy life that he would come up with such a scenario, and was able to flesh it out-as well as he had, but hey, if you can’t have fun, what is the point?

The bartender came over, and Jay pointed at his empty glass. The giant nodded, reached behind himself, and pulled a bottle of tequila off the shelf. When he poured, the worm sloshed into the glass with the fiery liquid. He looked at Jay.

Jay shrugged. “Leave it. It adds texture.”

The bartender started to turn away. Jay said, “I’m looking for somebody.”

“Yeah?” He locked gazes with Jay.

“Yeah. A shooter.” He pulled the smudged drawing from his jacket pocket. This was the composite put together by the computer artist, based on the HAARP guards’ description of “Dick Grayson.”

The bartender never took his gaze from Jay’s. “Don’t know him, ain’t seen him,” he said.

“Look at the picture.”

“Don’t need to. Won’t matter.”

“So that’s how it is.”

“Yeah. That’s how it is.”

Jay grabbed the bartender by a clump of chest hair and jerked him against the edge of the bar. With his free hand, he pulled an automatic knife with a five-inch blade from his jeans. He put the point against the bartender’s throat, just under his chin.

In the real world, Jay had grabbed the home address of the guy playing bartender and force-fed the generating computer a virus-laced cookie. If he didn’t pull the knife away, the guy’s system was going to go belly up in about ten seconds after he “cut” him.

“Look at the picture or I give you a new smile.”

The bar patrons hadn’t noticed the action, save for those closest to Jay, and they quickly edged away. The dancer continued her sleepwalking shuffle.

“Okay, don’t get twitchy.” The bartender glanced down at the image.

Jay grinned. This visit to a mercenary chat room on VR was a lot more interesting than running facial points of comparison against the image files of the NCIC, NAPC, or the FBI, looking for a match — which he had already done, and come up with zed-edward-roger-oliver.

“Jeez,” somebody said from the doorway. “Jay?”

The voice sounded familiar. Jay released the bartender and turned.

Tyrone Howard stood there, looking around the inside of the biker’s hangout.

“Tyrone? What are you doing here?”

There were a few people to whom Jay had given his forwarding code, so that if they needed to contact him electronically, they could in essence meet him on the net wherever he was. It wouldn’t work in a high-classification security area, but any hacker worth three bytes could follow the line into anything as simple as this kind of public access site if Jay allowed him past the fire wall. Tyrone Howard had been very helpful during the mad Russian thing a few months back, and Jay had added him to the list of people who could contact him in a hurry.

Might have been a mistake, considering the overlay.

Apparently Tyrone had decided to let Jay’s scenario be the default, and it wasn’t one you particularly wanted to have a thirteen-year-old boy see you in. He might get the wrong idea.

“Yeah, I seen him,” the bartender said.

Jay turned back to the giant biker, breaking character: “Really?”

“Yeah. He’s been in once or twice.”

“Where can I find him?”

“I dunno. But the guy over by the pool table, the one in the Army shirt, drinking boilermakers, he’s had some dealings with him.”

Jay nodded.

Tyrone walked into the place toward Jay.

“Gimme a second here, Ty, I’ll be right with you.”

“No hurry, Jay. I’ll just… enjoy the ambience. Jeez, this is as bad as Jimmy-Joe’s strip joint.”

Great. All he needed was Tyrone telling his father about this scenario.

Worry about that later, Jay. Let’s go see the man who likes boilermakers.

But the man who enjoyed dropping a shot glass of whiskey into his beer stein, depth-charge style, wasn’t really there — he was a proxy.

While it was true that none of the people in the ersatz biker bar were really “there,” some were less so than others. A proxy was a shell, little more than a link to another location, something to mark a place, and not somebody you could interface with directly. A ghost of a shadow.

Jay was able to get a location, but a quick pulse in that direction did a reverb with nothing more than an RW street address, somewhere in the District. Apparently Mr. Boilermaker here didn’t like to reveal too much on the net, and if Jay wanted to speak with him, he was going to have to drop out of VR and go RW.

Huh. Who did that anymore?

He wasn’t a field op, he was a netjet, so he could pass this along to one of the staff investigators to have them look up Boilermaker here and have a face-to-face chat with him.

Jay shook his head. That might take days, given the way the field ops took their sweet time about such requests. Even if the boss put a rush on it, Jay didn’t altogether trust the shoe skidders — some of them weren’t particularly sharp, and it would be his luck to get a dull one who’d mess up the interview.

Soji had been after him to get out more. No reason why he couldn’t drop by and do the interview himself, was there? It wasn’t as if he was afraid of going outside.

He looked around for Tyrone, but the boy had vanished.

“Tyrone?”

A biker with the physique of a competition bodybuilder whose monthly steroid bill was higher than his house note smiled at him. “Hey, Jay.”

“Nice suit,” Jay said, waving at the mound of muscle.

“I thought it was a good idea. It’s a modified pro wrestler, all I had to do was change the clothes and add a couple of tattoos. I didn’t want to stand out.”

“Come on, let’s leave this pit. I’ve got a private room.” He rattled off the password and headed for the door.

As he reached the exit, the exotic dancer’s music changed, and the first notes of Destroyers’ version of “Bad to the Bone” rumbled its bass beat from the speakers. Jay grinned. For a second, he’d forgotten he’d programmed that in. Yep, that’s me. Jay Gridley, better not step into my path, ’cause I’m b-b-b-b-bad!

30

Ventura wiped a thin film of sweat from his forehead as he stood outside the theater, smiling into the parking lot. It was probably almost eighty degrees, and it was not yet nine A.M. Hardly a surprise that the sun came up bright and hot here this time of year. The Los Angeles basin pretty much had two seasons — hot and real hot. Ventura could remember going to the beach in January, and getting sunburned lying on the sand, watching girls hip-roll past in bikinis. He grinned again. That had been a long time ago.

He and Morrison had been here for almost two hours, and of course his people had been in place since before Wu had called yesterday. The regular staff had been given three days off with pay and told that a special training session for employees of a different theater was being conducted. If anybody had wondered about it, the free days off were apparently enough to keep them from asking.

Wu would expect Ventura to get there early, of course, and he wouldn’t know who normally worked there, but he’d figure Ventura hadn’t chosen the place because he liked breathing hot smog.

Like a game of chess or go, any move in this level of play, no matter how innocuous it might seem, could have a major impact later on. You had to be very careful, always looking ahead.

Only a fool would choose a neutral meeting place if he could pick one that would tilt the playing field in his favor. Taking the high ground was an old and battle-tested adage. The Chinese knew this — their culture had been steeped in war for thousands of years, and it made for a pungent, bitter drink. They knew this brew.

Within three hours of the call, Chinese agents had put the theater under surveillance, and a couple of them had tried to con their way inside. Ventura’s people had kept the place secure, though they really couldn’t do anything about the watchers outside. Well. That didn’t matter.

The arrival of an ostentatious stretch limo in the front two hours ago had likely drawn most of the outside attention while Morrison and Ventura slipped in the back door, bracketed by four of his best shooters. The guy having coffee in the Starbucks all morning would have seen them and reported it, but Wu wouldn’t want to risk a shoot-out in broad daylight next to a major street — it would be too easy for Morrison to take a round, and nobody wanted that. Yet.

Once inside, Morrison felt a lot safer, and Ventura let him believe that, though the truth was, it didn’t much matter. If Ventura screwed up, the client was in deep shit no matter where he was.

Still, Ventura knew they had the advantages: He had chosen the time and place, he controlled the building, and they needed Morrison alive, whereas Ventura could pot anybody on their side he wanted. And when it got right down to it, he was pretty sure he was better at strategy and tactics than Chilly Wu.

Of course, that was the crux of it—“pretty sure” was not the same as “absolutely certain,” which you could never be in such an encounter. And in that was the secret shared by serious martial artists everywhere. If you were a warrior — a real warrior — there was only one way to test yourself. You had to go into battle, guns ready, and face the enemy. No amount of virtual reality, no practice with targeting lasers against others, nothing other than the real thing mattered. In the end, the only way to know you were better when it came to life and death was to pull the triggers, rock and roll, and see who walked away when the smoke cleared.

That instant of truth, when the guns and knives came out, that was as much in the moment as a man got. That was the ultimate realization that you were alive, when you stared laughing Death in the face and backed him down. Death always laughed, of course, because he knew that in the end, he always won. That was Death — but life wasn’t about the destination, it was about the trek. Playing the song was about the flow of the music, not about reaching the end.

If a man spent years, decades, perfecting a skill, no matter how awful the skill was in application, some part of him wanted to test it. To know.

So, part of this was protecting his client. And part of it was, if necessary, defeating the one who would harm his client. You stepped up and knocked the other guy’s dick into the dirt, and thus you knew that in this instance, however briefly the moment lasted, you were better than he was.

It was not the best measure of a man, to pit yourself against another, but it was a method that gave at least a partial answer right then and there.

Ego, and no way around that, but Ventura had come to terms with his ego a long time ago. Yes, he had to accept that there were likely better assassins out there now than he was — younger, stronger, faster. And while old and devious beat young and strong most of the time, that didn’t happen when it was quicker reaction time that made the crucial difference.

So, yes, there were better assassins, but he was pretty sure that Chilly Wu wasn’t one of them. If the deal went smoothly, well and good, but if things went sour, well, then they’d see.

They’d dance the dance, and then they’d know for sure.

Ventura looked around the parking lot, which was still mostly empty. The first showing in the theater was usually noon or later; most of the stores in the shopping center didn’t open until nine or nine-thirty, so the sub rosa ops fielded by the Chinese had to work a little to hide. In the parking lot of the mall, broadside to the theater, there was a supposedly empty delivery van purporting to be from a carpet store, but Ventura would bet rubies to red rust that somebody was hidden in the back watching every move he made. Maybe through rifle sights, though he didn’t think they’d shoot him.

Another smile. During the American Revolution, there had been a British sniper, a crack shot, who had once lined his rifle sights up on George Washington. From the reports, it would have been an easy shot, but the sniper hadn’t taken it. Washington had been standing with his back to the shooter, and a true British gentleman wouldn’t shoot an officer in the back, now would he? Could have changed the whole course of the war, that one shot un-taken, but that wasn’t the issue. There were rules, after all. Otherwise, what was the point?

A public works-type truck was parked next to a manhole cover nearby, orange rubber cones and blinking lights blocking the area, with three men in hard hats industriously pretending to be working on something down under the street.

A telephone truck was backed up to a junction box across the street at the pizza place.

There were also joggers, dog walkers, women pushing baby carriages, bicyclists, and little old ladies in tennis shoes strolling to the stores for their daily mall walks. Ventura figured that any or all of them could be other than what they seemed. Probably some of them were legit, but he couldn’t make that assumption about any particular one — that kind of thinking got you killed. That old lady might be a kung fu expert; and instead of little Mac, that baby carriage might hold little Mac-10. If you were prepared for the worst, then anything less was a gift.

He smiled as he headed back toward the theater. He liked films, but he had always found those movies hilarious where the bad-guy kidnappers or extortionists showed up to collect their money and never looked twice at the wino on the park bench, or the young couple holding hands, or the priest feeding the pigeons, all of whom might as well have had big flashing neon signs on them saying “Cop!” Crooks who were that stupid deserved to get shot — it was good for the gene pool.

Of course, good people were always hard to find, in most any line of work. Ventura himself had only a dozen pros he’d personally let watch his back when the bullets started to fly, and it had taken twenty-odd years to find that many he trusted. They all worked for him on and off. There were another twenty or thirty second-tier shooters who could do things like the theater setup today, who would follow instructions and hit their marks if push came to shoot. Past that? Well, most of the people he’d met who played at being soldiers of fortune or freelance bodyguards or hitters were okay at best, coffin fodder at worst. He figured the Chinese would send the sharpest they could round up on short notice to play here today, but how many they could get inside was tricky. Too few and they wouldn’t feel covered properly; too many, and it would alert anybody half-awake. If he had to trade places with Chilly Wu, he’d be a little concerned about that.

Morrison stood by the concession stand, nervously sucking on a straw stuck in a cup of fizzy orange drink.

He’s going to ask me if everything is okay, Ventura thought.

“Everything okay?”

Ventura smiled. “Under control.”

“I’m worried about this screenwriter business,” Morrison said. “Aren’t you concerned that the Chinese might know about it, slip some ringers in?”

“Not really. The op in the ticket booth is checking membership cards. He’ll scan those into our systems. I have a man in the manager’s office with links to the WGA database. He’ll match the names on the cards against a list of members, and the faces on the closed-circuit secircuit security cam in the booth against those in the guild’s database — those are new, the pictures — and also against California driver’s licenses. Anybody who shows up to sneak in using a friend’s card had better not sneeze at the wrong time.”

“You aren’t worried at all? Wouldn’t a hidden metal detector or X ray be wise?”

“No point. They know we chose this place for a reason, and they know we’re here several hours early. I figure they’ll try to slip a minimum of eight men in with Wu, a maximum of twelve. I am assuming they will all be armed. I have twenty men on call, but I probably won’t use all of them. Remember, the idea here is not to get into a shooting match, but to keep the balance of power even. It’s our place and Wu knows that. If he gets his people in, he’ll be a lot more comfortable. If he couldn’t get them in, then it might make him twitchy; and that’s not what we want.”

“No?‘

“No. A nervous man might do something rash. They’ll take what you have for free if they can get it that way, but if they realize they can’t, they’ll pay for it. What we want is a nice smooth negotiation in which the Chinese get what they want, and you walk away a rich man, everybody’s happy, a nice win-win situation.”

“But if they try something—”

“—they won’t live to regret it, Doctor. Then we have to start all over again with a new negotiating team. Nobody wants that.”

But secretly, a small part of Ventura wanted exactly that.

C’mon, Wu. Show me what you got. Reach for your pocket — and let’s see who goes home.

31

Michaels stopped at Jay’s office, but didn’t see him. He saw instead one of the techs, Ray DeCamp, carrying a stack of hardcopy printouts. The man always wore thick, round computer glasses while at work, so of course he had a nickname appropriate to that:

“Hey, Owl. Jay around?”

“Commander. Nah, he said he hadda go into town, said he’d be back inna couple hours.” Owl had a strong Boston accent, so the last word came out “ow-wuz.”

That surprised Michaels. Jay seldom left during the day for any reason. A lot of times, before he’d hooked up with the Buddhist girl Soji, Gridley would stay in his office for days, sleeping on the couch and showering in the gym dressing room. There were jokes that he was a vampire, that exposure to sunlight would cause him to burst into flames. And coming from other ghost-white computer geeks who spent a considerable amount of their own time in semidark rooms, that was saying something.

Oh, well. Given everything else going on around here lately, Jay leaving the building during the day was no weirder than the rest of it.

“Hey, Alex.”

He looked up and refocused on Toni. “Hey,” he said. He repressed a sigh. He’d flown off the handle this morning. Sure, she had provoked him, but he expected better of himself. A man who couldn’t control his temper was weak — losing it almost always got you in more trouble than it solved.

“You want to talk to me?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Come on, we can go to my office.”

“Kind of stuffy there. How about the gym?”

He had to smile. His office, his advantage. The gym was where she was stronger. He said, “Why don’t we go to the conference room instead?”

She smiled back at him, and he knew she understood what he’d been thinking. What they had both been thinking. God, he loved smart women!

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea coming here, Jay thought.

“Here” was a kind of Army-Navy surplus store, though that wasn’t strictly true — there were odds and ends from other branches of military surplus for sale here, too, including some stuff from what looked like the Coast Guard, the U.S. Marine Corps, and the Russian Air Force. And on one scratched glass counter next to a rack of moldy uniforms from some unrecognizable African army, there were even Net Force buttons and insignia.

The whole place had a sour odor, like unwashed cotton socks mixed with damp wool, and instead of air-conditioning, a pair of large and loud metal fans mounted on seven-foot-tall posts circulated the too-warm and fetid air without doing much to cool it, or the people inside. Some of the patrons looked familiar — maybe Jay had seen their pictures on the post office’s Most Wanted website — and none of them were what you would call savory.

Still, he was Jay Gridley, a master scenarist. He’d built uglier scenarios in VR.

The guy perched on the stool behind the counter next to the old-style mechanical cash register was the least appetizing character in the place. He was fat, bald, and wore an eyepatch made of what looked like rattlesnake skin over his right eye, and vaguely green Army-style fatigues that had probably been unwashed since the Spanish-American War.

As Jay watched, a customer who looked old enough to have been a veteran of that same war shuffled to the register. The old man was in baggy green parachute pants and a stained and ratty green T-shirt over untied combat boots, the laces dragging along the floor. The man plunked a bayonet onto the counter. “How much for this here baloney slicer?” the old man said. He cackled, amused at his own poor joke, a laugh that ended in a dry wheeze.

Jay took a step backward, so he wouldn’t have to share too much of the man’s air. Surely the guy must have something contagious.

“That’s for an ’03 Springfield,” Eyepatch behind the counter said. His raspy voice sounded as if it had been pickled in high-proof whiskey, then left out in the desert to bleach for a few years.

Jay made a mental note of the sound. He could use it in a scenario. This whole place was great research; he could get all kinds of material from it.

Patch picked the bayonet up. It was rusty, the wood handle cracked and worn. “Don’t see a lot of these around much anymore.”

“I know what it is, sonny. I just need to know how much it costs.”

“I could let it go for… eighteen.”

“What, cents?”

“Dollars.”

“Sheeit, sonny, you cain’t get ten for it. Look at it. It’ll take me a week to scrape the rust offen it. And lookit the handle.”

“I can sell you some naval jelly that’ll eat the rust right off. I might take fifteen.”

“Eleven.”

“Twelve.”

“Now you’re talking.”

The old man pulled a clump of greasy-looking bills from his voluminous pants and peeled a dozen ones off a wad that would choke a rhino.

Patch rang the sale up. “You want a bag for it?”

“No, I’m gonna walk down the streets of D.C. carrying it where the cops kin see me and shoot me fulla holes. Yes, I want a bag for it. I’mona track me down a couple of cats been diggin’ in my garbage and give um a new haircut.”

Patch pulled a purple plastic bag from under the counter, with the store’s logo printed on the side: “Fiscus Military Supply,” it said under a pair of crossed rifles and stylized lighting bolts.

When the customer shuffled out, Jay watched to see if he was going to trip on the untied bootlaces and break his neck, but the old man achieved the door without incident.

“Old fart couldn’t track an elephant herd across a football field covered with fresh snow. What can I do for you?” Patch said.

“You Vince Fiscus?”

“That would be me, yeah. And who wants to know?”

“I’m Jay Gridley. I called earlier.” Jay pulled out his Net Force ID card.

Fiscus took the card and looked at it carefully, turned it over and examined the back. The hologram flashed a rainbow reflection under the overhead lights. “You want to sell this? Tell ’em you lost it, they’ll give you another, but I don’t have any Net Force ID.” He waved one flaccid arm to take in the store.

“I don’t think so.” He took his ID back. He wanted to wipe it off, but thought that might not look too good.

“All right. What it’s about, Mr. Net Force Agent?”

Jay kind of liked the sound of that. He tendered the picture of the mystery man. He said, “You know this guy?”

Fiscus looked at the picture. He grinned, showing a gap where a front eyetooth had once been.

“That’s ole K.S., sure I know him.”

Jay felt a sudden surge of excitement. Aha! Gotcha! “K.S.?”

“Yeah, stands for ‘Killer Spook.’ Ain’t seen him in a while. He never give me a real name, so I just called him K.S.”

“How is it that you know him?”

“Oh, he’s been coming around for — must be five, six years now. We first did a little business back in, what? ought-four or ought-five. Sold him some fourth-gen spookeyes — starlight scope image intensifiers, Army Ranger surplus, off an old SIPEsuit. He’s bought a few things since then, some of it in person, some of it over the wire. What are you looking for him for? He’s not into computer stuff.”

“I am not at liberty to say,” Jay said. “It concerns an ongoing investigation.”

Fiscus shrugged.

“Why ‘Killer Spook’?”

Fiscus showed the tooth-gap again. “I asked around, some people I know. Rumor was, this guy made a living doing odd jobs for various folks, including a few guvamint ones. Black bag ops, wetwork, stuff you don’t want to show up on the books, you know what I mean?”

This was getting better by the minute. Colorful ole Vince here was giving him all kinds of information. This exterior investigation stuff was a walk in the park — why did the field ops make it sound so tough? Must be worried about job security.

“What kind of weapons you guys carrying now?” Fiscus asked. “I heard that issue was some kinda pansy stun-gun.”

“Kick-tasers,” Jay said. That was true. Jay did have a compressed-gas electric dart gun. His was in a drawer somewhere at home. Or maybe at the office — he hadn’t seen it in a while. Since he wasn’t a field agent, he didn’t have to qualify with the weapon, and he had only fired the thing once, a long time ago. He did all his shooting in VR.

“Now about this K.S. guy,” Jay said. “Where might I find him?”

“Well, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to ask you why you need him again,” Fiscus said.

“Like I said, I can’t tell you that.”

“You wanna bet?” Fiscus raised his whiskey-soaked voice a couple of notches. “Vic, Rudy! C’mere!”

Two fairly young men in green-on-green camouflage shirts and pants tucked into gleaming combat boots seemed to materialize from nowhere behind Jay. The pair of them were huge, five, maybe six hundred pounds combined.

Uh-oh.

Jay had seen enough vids to know he was maybe in a little trouble here. He was alone, unarmed, and it looked as if he was about to make the unwilling acquaintance of Vic and Rudy. Maybe it was time to see if discretion was indeed the better part of valor. He smiled nervously and started to head for the door.

“Whoa, hold up there, Mr. Net Force Agent.”

Jay looked at Fiscus and saw that the man held a big, dark metal pistol. “You aren’t supposed to have that in the District. It’s illegal.”

“Do tell. Take your hands away from your belt and put them where I can see them.” He waved the pistol.

Jay had another sudden flash. The only reason Fiscus had told him any of this stuff about the man he’d come looking for was because he didn’t expect Jay to be able to act on it — or tell anybody else.

He had seen a lot of vids.

Jay suddenly had a vacuum in his belly that must rival deepest space. This was not VR. He couldn’t just ax a command and drop back into his office. That gun was real.

He was turned slightly so Fiscus couldn’t see his right hip. He double-triple-pressed the panic button on his virgil — one-two-three, one-two-three — then slowly moved his hands away from his body.

“Take it easy,” Jay said. “Let’s be reasonable here.”

“That’s real good, Mr. Agent. Now, let’s mosey on into the back room, and have ourselves a little talk, hey?”

Morrison leaned against the counter in the bathroom, staring at himself in the mirror. His face had a psychedelic cast to it — it was as if he was seeing a stranger.

He washed his hands, bent, and rinsed out his mouth. He had the little gun in his sport coat pocket, but the small weight of it bumping against his right hip was not comforting. He was scared, frightened to the point where all he wanted to do was to take off at full speed and run until he couldn’t keep going. He wanted to find a place to hide when he got there and sleep until all this somehow went away.

He looked at the frightened man in the mirror again. Running and hiding wouldn’t do any good now. It was too late. In a few minutes, an agent for the Chinese would arrive — already some of his people were probably lined up outside the theater waiting to get in — and Morrison was going to have to sit and negotiate a deal with the man who called himself Chilly Wu.

Morrison stood there for what seemed like a long time, staring into the mirror, but not really seeing himself any longer.

Ventura came around the comer behind him, and Morrison jumped.

“Wu just pulled up. You ready?”

“I — Yes, as ready as I can be.”

“Don’t worry. My man in the projection booth has an Anschutz Biathlon rifle that will be lined up on the back of Wu’s head the second he takes his seat. The shooter can hit a quarter ten for ten at that distance. Every one of Wu’s people will have somebody watching him. We have this covered.”

Despite just washing out his mouth, it was dry again. “Listen,” he said, “there’s something I want you to know. I have a hidden copy of the data. If something happens to me, I want you to have it. Sell it, give it away, whatever you want, I don’t care, but — sell it to anybody but the Chinese.”

“Nothing is going to happen to you.”

“I believe you. But just in case. This is the only original research I’ve ever done that amounted to anything. It’s important work. I don’t want to see it lost.”

“If it makes you feel better, fine. I’ll see that it gets to a good home.”

“It’s not here,” he said. “The copy.”

“All right. Where is it?”

Morrison told him. When he was done, Ventura smiled. “That’s pretty clever.”

“Maybe the Pakistanis, they hate the Chinese. They’d find a use for it.”

“This is all moot. I can guarantee you, the Chinese will not be walking out of this theater with you as their hostage. At the first sign of trouble they will all become past tense. This is what I do, Patrick.”

The use of his first name rattled him even more. Morrison

took a ragged breath, let it out, then took a larger one and held it for a moment. Deep breaths. Calm down. “All right.”

The movie wasn’t scheduled to start for another thirty minutes — but it was definitely show time.

32

Toni had planned to sit down and tell Alex what she felt, to apologize for losing her temper, and to try to get him to see her side of things.

It seemed like it would work out, because the first thing he said was “Listen, I’m sorry about losing my temper.”

That was a great start. She said, “Me, too.”

But that was as far as it got. Alex’s secretary opened the conference room’s door and said, “Commander, we just got a distress call from Jay Gridley’s virgil.”

“What?”

“District police are on the way. Here is the location.”

Alex came to his feet.

Toni said, “I saw Jay earlier, he was here—”

“He went into town,” Alex said. He headed for the door in a hurry. To his secretary, he said, “Get the helicopter warmed up and get the GPS location to the pilot. I want to be in the air in three minutes.”

“Alex?”

“This place is falling apart,” he said. “Nothing is going right!” He looked at her. “You coming?”

She nodded.

“Hit him again,” Fiscus said.

Rudy nodded. He threw a short uppercut that slammed into Jay’s belly like a steel brick.

Jay doubled over, the pain overwhelming. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see for the tears clouding his vision, couldn’t believe how much it hurt! He would have fallen if Vic hadn’t been standing behind him, holding him up, his huge paws meaty clamps on Jay’s upper arms.

Nothing in VR had ever come close to this, nothing.

“Catch your breath, Mr. Net Force Agent, and think about it a second.”

Jay managed to breathe again after a few seconds. He felt like puking, the urge was almost impossible to resist.

“You feel better? Good. Now tell me — why are you looking for K.S.?”

How long had he been here? It felt like years, but it couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes. He’d tried to stall them, but Fiscus wasn’t buying it, and after the second punch, Jay didn’t know how much longer he could hold out. One more, maybe.

“Fuck you.”

“You’re not my type, but maybe Rudy will take you up on that later, hey? Boys, girls, sheep, cows — doesn’t matter to him. One more, Rudy.”

Jay went out with the third punch, at least partially. The intense flash of pain went from red to gray, and time seemed to ooze lazily, like tar on a hot summer street.

“—got all day,” Fiscus was saying. “And Rudy ain’t even broke a sweat. I seen him work the heavy bag for ten, fifteen minutes, four, five hundred punches. You ain’t a bag full of batting, son. How long you figure you’ll last?”

Jay’s blurry vision was enough to let him see that gap-toothed smile, and he knew that Fiscus and his two apes could and might beat him to death. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I’ll tell you.”

“Sheeit,” Rudy said.

“See, I told you he was just getting warmed up. Don’t worry, Rudy, you can throw a couple more if Mr. Net Force Agent gets too sluggish. Okay, let me hear it.”

Jay took a raspy breath. The guy didn’t know, so it didn’t matter what he said. Jay could create scenario, and writing the description and background and dialog was part of that. He could spin it, and how would this guy know different?

“Okay. We came across a computer break-in, in New York. A stock trading company, and—”

“Rudy.”

The punch took Jay under the armpit on the right side, a left, hooking move, and he felt, and thought he heard, one of his ribs crack under the impact.

“Uuuhhh! Ow, ow, what did you do that for?! I’m telling you!”

“Nah, you ain’t. You’re lying. I might look stupid, but I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday, kid. Every lie buys you another slam. Try again. ”

Jay felt a great wave of despair wash over him. He was going to die. He knew it. No matter what he told them, in the end, they were going to kill him.

“That’s it, that surplus store,” the cop said.

In the big tactical van, Michaels nodded. According to the protocols for Net Force distress calls established with the police, the local cops had arrived Code 2—fast, but without sirens. They set up a perimeter and the local version of SWAT or SERT or whatever was ready to go in, but Michaels had gotten there before they hit the building, and he wanted to go along.

The police lieutenant in charge of the scene looked at Michaels’s taser and shook his head. “Not a good idea, Commander. We know who this guy is that runs the store. We’re pretty sure he’s got enough illegal hardware in there to equip a third-world army, and he’s usually not alone. Your little zapper won’t cut it.”

“I’ll stay behind the team. That’s my man in there.”

“I’m going, too,” Toni said. She held her own taser.

“What is this, a goddamn parade? Where’s the marching band and the baton twirlers?”

“I can make some calls, Lieutenant, and get the heavy hitters into it if I have to. My boss can call yours. You want me to do that?”

“Shit. No. Put masks and vests on and stay in the back and the hell out of the way, you understand? If you get killed, don’t bitch about it to me.”

“All right.”

He looked at Toni. This was not the time to tell her to stay behind, he could see that, but it was the first thing he wanted to say. Maybe she was right. Maybe she couldn’t work for him. Maybe he was too protective. He did not want her in there.

“Heads up, people,” the lieutenant said into his com. “We’re going in thirty seconds. And we got two feebs riding the caboose. Don’t nobody shoot them by accident.”

The lieutenant pulled a pair of spidersilk vests with ceramic interlock armor and the initials D.C.P.D. stenciled in reflective yellow on the backs. “Put these on. They’ll stop handgun rounds and a lot of rifle bullets. Grab a gas mask and helmet. We’re going in with flash-bangs and puke gas.”

Michaels nodded.

“Fifteen seconds,” the lieutenant said into the com. “Go get into position. Behind Sergeant Thomas over there. And stay behind him.”

Michaels glanced at Toni, and they jumped from the back of the mobile command post and ran.

Morrison and Ventura were in their seats in the theater when an “usher” walked Wu down the aisle. The section they were in had been roped off, so that they sat in the middle of a block of four rows alone; the other seats in the block were all empty. There were maybe forty people already in their seats, with a few others trickling in.

Wu carried a fold-out laptop computer slung over one shoulder — and a big tub of popcorn.

Ventura smiled at that. Had to give the man credit for style.

Ventura and Morrison both stood, and Wu moved to join them. He slipped under the velvet rope to sit between Ventura and Morrison. While he was talking and concentrating on the scientist, Ventura would be behind him.

Wu held up the tub of popcorn. “Want some? I think it’s got real butter on it. It should be real, it cost four bucks.”

Ventura was tempted to dig around and see if there was a pistol hidden there — he’d have a small one under the popcorn — but both he and Morrison declined the offer.

Ahead of them, the huge screen was still dark. There wouldn’t be any coming attractions or ads run today.

“What time does the movie start?”

“We have a few minutes,” Ventura said.

“Good, good, we can get this business taken care of and enjoy the picture. Same people did this who did Quin-ton’s Revenge, and it’s gotten good reviews.”

He sounded relaxed enough, and that was a good sign. He’d brought in ten people, who were scattered around the theater with their own tubs of popcorn or boxes of candy, so he ought to feel as if he was in control of the situation, or at least be on a par with Ventura. He either couldn’t sense the sights lined up on his skull from the projection booth, or he really was a chilly character not afraid to die.

“Now you know we Chinese like to dawdle and make polite small talk before we discuss business, but this is America and I like to fit in, so what say we get down to it?” He slipped the computer off his shoulder and unrolled the flexible pop-up LCD screen, locked it into place, and then unfolded the keyboard. The computer came on with a small chimed chord, and the screen lit up.

Morrison’s computer was already up and running, on the seat on the other side of him. He picked it up.

“Ah, here we are,” Wu said. “Your bank account number?”

Morrison read off a fifteen-digit series of numbers and letters.

Wu typed it into his computer. He looked up at Morrison and smiled. “And that was for… three hundred million dollars, U.S.?”

“Four hundred million,” Morrison said quickly.

“A small joke, Doctor.” He tapped in the numbers. He said, “It’s a fair-sized transaction, but nothing huge. It’ll take only a few seconds for them to verify the account we’re transferring from, and acknowledge the credit.”

Ventura did a sweep of the room. It seemed as if this might come off with no problems. His team was on alert. If anything that looked like a gun, or a canister of gas, or any kind of weapon, made an appearance in the still-well-lit theater, things would happen fast. Nobody was going to be yelling “Drop it!” or “Don’t move!” At the first sign of aggression, his people were to cook the Chinese — all of them — no hesitation, no questions. Any screwups, and Wu’s people were all history. It was a harsh response, but the only way to go here. One guy blasting away indiscriminately with a small subgun or even a pistol could do a lot of damage — and it wasn’t going to happen.

“There you are, Dr. Morrison. You should see it on your machine.”

Morrison tapped keys. “Yes. It’s in and verified.” He typed in another sequence. “The account number and password are both changed.”

“Then you have it. We can deposit but we can’t take it back. You’re a rich man. Now it’s your turn.”

Morrison nodded. He still looked like a man sitting in an electric chair, waiting for the current to flow.

“Here is the address for our people,” Wu said. He held the computer up so Morrison could see the screen. “You send them the data, they say they can have it tested in less than two hours. They work, we watch the movie, everybody goes home happy.”

Wu turned to look at Ventura. “You know, Luther, if it had been left up to me, I expect I would have tried for a — how shall we say? — cheaper offer.”

Ventura gave him a small smile. “Such an offer couldn’t have been… acceptable, Chilly.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I know so.”

Wu’s smile matched Ventura’s own. “It would have been very interesting to see whose opinion was right, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes.”

The two of them held gazes for another moment.

Wu said, “Well. Another time.” He looked away, back at Morrison. “Doctor, if you would?”

Ventura was victorious. His smile broadened.

Morrison nodded and started to type in the electronic address.

“Gun!” somebody screamed—

— and sure enough, guns started to go off.

33

Toni was right behind Alex. The gas mask had big, wide lenses that left her peripheral vision clear, but there was an annoying clicking sound every time she inhaled. And she was breathing pretty fast, too. She forgot about her breathing and the noise fast enough when the first of the six-man team ahead of them crashed through the door into the back room of the surplus store. Bright flashes of actinic light strobed her, but the mask’s polarizers kicked in and blocked the glare within a hundredth of a second or so. She should have worn earplugs, she realized, because the noise was loud inside the building. A misty cloud of green gray vapor boiled up with the explosions and lapped against the walls with the racket.

She heard a triplet of quick, smaller explosions—pap! pap-pap! — gunshots, she was sure — and Alex doglegged to the left. She followed him. Somebody yelled something she couldn’t make out, and somebody retched so loudly it sounded as if he was turning his guts inside out.

Alex looked back at her. “You okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine.”

Then it was all over.

The mist, which felt greasy on her bare skin, started to clear, and the police team spread out enough so Toni could see four men who weren’t cops. Three of them were on their hands and knees, vomiting. One was on his back, blood oozing from holes in his side and one leg. He had his head sideways and he was throwing up, too.

One of the men on his knees enjoying the purging benefits of emetic gas was Jay Gridley.

“Thank God,” Toni said into the mask. The sound was muffled, but she saw Alex nod.

“Yeah,” he said.

Wu was quick. He dropped from his seat onto the sticky floor and tossed the tub of popcorn into Ventura’s face as he fell.

Ventura was able to hear the rifle shot from the projection booth, was aware even as he pulled his own gun that the flat crack of the small-bore longarm was distinct from the duller, louder handgun sounds—

Wu came up with a gun — it must have been underneath the popcorn tub — and jammed it at Ventura. He fired twice—

Quick and good, too—

The bullets hit Ventura square in the chest, but the titanium trauma plate in the pocket of the blended Kevlar/ spidersilk vest under his shirt stopped the rounds, even though they felt like sledgehammers against his sternum—

Ventura cleared his own weapon and brought it around—

Morrison was up and running, screaming wordlessly—

Wu cursed and got off another round, higher this time, right on the edge of the trauma plate—

More gunshots blasted in the theater—

One-handed, Ventura fired—one-two-three! — letting the recoil raise the muzzle each time, so the shots walked up Wu’s body, in case he was also wearing a vest, so the hits were chest-throat-head—

“Stop, stop, stop—!” Morrison screamed.

Ventura looked up from Wu, saw that Morrison had his own little.22 revolver out and pointed in front of himself as he reached the aisle—

One of Ventura’s best shooters — the ex-SEAL, Blackwell — moved to grab Morrison, to pull him down and out of the line of fire — good, good! — but Morrison was panicked, and he thrust his weapon out at the man—

“Morrison, no!” Ventura screamed. “Don’t—!”

Too late. Morrison pulled the trigger. Blackwell, coming to save the scientist, was five feet away, and even Morrison couldn’t miss every time at that range. At least two or three of the six shots chewed into Blackwell. The vest he wore stopped a couple, but one went high, hit him in the jaw, and Ventura saw a tooth explode from the torn mouth in slow motion as Blackwell’s head jerked to one side—

Ah, shit—!

And he saw with razor-edged and expanded clarity as Blackwell did what any really good trained shooter instinctively did if somebody pointed a gun at him when the situation went hot—

“No!” Ventura screamed, trying to bring his own gun up around, but he was mired in subjective slow-time, and too late.

Blackwell knew Morrison was wearing a vest, and Blackwell didn’t want to die. So even as he fell, wounded, Blackwell lined his pistol up on Morrison and stopped the threat—

He shot him right between the eyes.

The back of Morrison’s head blew out in a spew of brains, blood, and bone.

He was going to be okay, Jay realized. The doctor had taped him up, given him a shot to counteract the puke gas, and another for pain. Every breath he took still hurt his ribs a little under the tape, and his stomach was sore from vomiting, but he was real happy to be feeling anything at all.

It was sure better than the alternative.

The boss said, “What on Earth possessed you to go into the field on your own?”

Jay started to shake his head, but that made him dizzy, so he stopped. He said, “I dunno. Pure stupidity would be my best guess. Not ever gonna happen again, I guarantee that. Reality sucks.”

They were in the hospitial’s lock ward, where one-eyed Fiscus had been transferred after they’d patched him up. He’d been hit twice after firing at the cops, in the side and in the leg, but neither hit was life-threatening once they stopped the bleeding. He was awake, and the boss had flexed his Net Force muscle to get in and question the guy before the mainline boys and the D.C. detectives got there.

Jay and Toni were with Michaels as he walked into the room, and they all nodded at the cop sitting in the chair next to the bed.

“We want some information,” Michaels said to Fiscus.

Full of IV tubes and things clipped to his fingertips or taped to his chest, Fiscus flashed his gap-toothed grin. “People in Hell probably want ice water, too,” he said. His snakeskin patch was gone, and the eye it had hidden had a milky film over it.

“Which you’ll find out all about if you don’t tell me what I want to know,” the boss said. “Way I figure it, you have kidnapping, assaulting a federal officer, attempted murder of a policeman, and a shitload of illegal weapons charges staring you in the face, at the very least. A man your age? You’re going to die in prison.”

That seemed to get his attention.

“And so why the fuck should I help you, I’m gonna die in prison anyhow?”

“It’s real simple. I can make the federal charges go away. No kidnapping, no assault, no visits from the BATF about all that hardware. I might even be able to convince the locals to cut you some slack on the shooting, since you didn’t hit anybody. You could be out in five, six years, maybe.”

Fiscus hesitated for a moment.

Jay could almost see the wheels going inside the man’s head. Don’t do it. Jay beamed his thoughts at Fiscus. Go and rot in jail forever, asshole!

“I can get you a lawyer if you want,” Michaels said.

“No, no lawyers. I’ll take the deal. What do you want to know?”

Michaels nodded.

“What a mess,” Ventura said to himself again. He was on the freeway with the same name as his own, driving in the general direction of Burbank. “What a fucking mess.”

And it was, too. Back in the theater were ten shot-up Chinese agents, all of them either dead or well on the way by now. Two of his men had taken stray bullets from the Chinese, but neither were fatal wounds. Four screenwriters had been hit, one was dead, another one pretty bad, two fairly minor. Blackwell was in bad shape, but he’d probably live, even if he wouldn’t be eating any caramel apples for a few months.

Wu was absolutely dead.

And Morrison was also gone, killed by somebody on his own side.

What a pisser that was.

The wounded civilians were being hauled by cars to the nearest hospital, where they’d be dropped off, the drivers not staying to answer questions. Ventura’s men would be taken to a doctor who was paid to take care of people and keep his mouth shut. The remaining unwounded screenwriters, twenty-three of them, had been stuffed into a storeroom and locked in. Probably half of them were already working on their next movie, one involving a shoot-out in a theater. They wouldn’t starve; there were a lot of candy bars and hot dog buns in there with them.

Outside, team members had distracted the Chinese surveillance team where feasible — a pepper bomb in the carpet truck, a sap of lead shot against the head of the coffee drinker in Starbucks, like that, but thankfully, no more guns.

Everybody else had taken off on prearranged escape routes.

Ventura realized that he could kiss the IMAX theater good-bye. Too bad. It had been making a profit for the first time in three years.

What a crappy, stinking, rotten piece of work this had been. Not only had he lost the client he was supposed to protect, but one of his own men had done it. No choice, really. In Blackwell’s shoes, he’d have probably done exactly the same thing.

I never should have given Morrison that gun.

Yeah, 20/20 hindsight there. Too late to think about that now.

Though there never would be a way to be absolutely sure, Ventura knew what had happened. One of the Chinese agents had gotten careless, since his own people were more adept than to show a gun that was supposed to be hidden. One of the Chinese agents had gotten careless. Whichever of his people who saw the piece must have felt it was being brought into play. All of his shooters had been told to stay cool — unless a weapon came out. The shout of “Gun!” had been the agreed-upon signal for his shooters to take out their targets, and once that happened, all bets were off.

Had the Chinese intended to take the shortcut? To grab Morrison instead of paying for the data?

Well, it didn’t matter. Done was done, no point in crying over it now. Still, there were consequences to consider. The Chinese were going to be most unhappy, and they might well decide that Morrison and Ventura had ripped them off for their four hundred million and decide to try and get it back, and that was real bad. Morrison wasn’t going to be giving anything back, and Ventura didn’t have it.

He changed lanes, and a fat man in a black Porsche honked at him for cutting in. Ventura had a sudden urge to pull his Coonan and put a round into the fat man’s windshield. Honk at somebody else, dickhead.

He resisted the urge. That wouldn’t help matters, to start shooting morons on the L.A. freeway. Once you started, you’d run out of ammo quick. Probably couldn’t carry enough extra rounds in a moving van to get them all…

He giggled at the thought. He was stressed out, yes, better just take a few deep breaths and think this through.

He did just that. Three deep breaths, in and out, and now think about it calmly.

Well. The first thing was, the couple of million he had tucked away didn’t seem like all that much money anymore. The way he figured it, he was going to have to disappear, just as he had told Morrison he would have to disappear, forever. Yes, he was living on borrowed time and had been for a long time, but the truth was, he wasn’t quite ready to check out yet.

If the deal had come off, he’d have been safe enough from the likes of Wu. They’d have gotten their money’s worth, and pros didn’t need to take each other out for doing their jobs.

But it hadn’t come off. The Chinese were out that money; they didn’t get what they wanted, and too bad for them. This was certainly going to make them real unhappy.

Morrison hadn’t given Ventura the account number, so he couldn’t get his hands on it, either. Too bad for everybody.

The fat man found an opening on the outside lane, whipped the Porsche around Ventura, and zipped past. He waved his middle finger at Ventura as he went by, and though he couldn’t hear him, Ventura could read the man’s lips easy enough. A fourteen-letter word.

Maybe he could shoot just the one and stop?

The Porsche accelerated and gained away, and Ventura forgot the fat man.

The Chinese money was out of reach, but — there was more where that had come from. Because if he had been telling the truth — and Ventura had no reason to doubt that he had been — Morrison had told him where to find the secret that had just caused more than a dozen people to die. And the Chinese weren’t the only oysters in the ocean who had pearls.

Yeah, okay, it was a bad deal all around, a major disaster, a perfect example of Murphy’s Law. But now that it was done, Ventura had to get on with his life. That moment was past. If you drove down the road looking only into your rearview mirror, you were going to plow into somebody ahead of you. Time to look forward.

Somebody could still benefit from all this, and it might as well be him. He could even drop the price a little. He didn’t need four hundred million, he could get by on half that. No point in being greedy, was there?

He drove toward the airport in Burbank. He had a flight leaving in an hour. It would probably take the screenwriters longer than that to figure a way out of the storeroom. Yes. He had a course of action now. He knew what he was going to do.

34

“I just got a call from Julio Fernandez,” Jay said. “John Howard is home.”

“That was quick,” Toni said.

Michaels nodded at her. “Yeah. Old soldiers never die, but they don’t hang out in hospitals tempting fate if they can help it.”

They were in the conference room at HQ. Somebody had put a pot of coffee and a box of assorted pastries on the table. Michaels picked up a bear claw, examined it, and put it back. He selected a glazed donut instead. A nice sugar rush and a little caffeine, just what he needed, so he could rot his teeth, court diabetes, and raise his blood pressure all at the same time.

Hell with it. Given the way things had been going lately, what difference would it make? He took a big bite of the donut.

“Julio says Howard’s ready to come back to work now.”

“He can take a few days off and heal. So can you.”

Jay shook his head. “I’m fine. I want to be here for this. It’ll be a lot less strenuous in VR. I can ride the net here, or I can do it at home, but I’m gonna ride somewhere.”

“All right,” Michaels said. “Let’s review what we have. According to your Mr. Fiscus, the man we are looking for used to be some kind of freelance hired assassin who supposedly got out of that business and into bodyguarding a few years back. Aside from ‘Dick Grayson,’ he uses a variety of names, among them Diego, Gabriel, Harbor, Colorado, and Ventura. Is he Hispanic, do we think?”

Jay laughed, then said, “Ow.” He pressed his hand against his sore rib.

“What?”

“I shouldn’t laugh. I don’t think he’s necessarily Hispanic or Latino, Boss. Those are all names of Los Angeles freeways.”

Michaels nodded. “Okay, so he knows about Batman and the SoCal highway system. What else do we have?”

“Zip. I looked in the phone directories,” Jay said. “He ain’t listed, and we haven’t been able to get a facial-points match on any police agency computers. Man has a very low e-profile.”

Michaels looked at Toni. He had to ask. “You’re going to take the job with mainstream, aren’t you? Working for the director?”

“I — yes.”

“So is the information flow going to be both ways?”

“That’s what the job description says.”

“Okay. See what you can get from them on this.”

If they could find out who this Ventura character was, if they could background and history him, they might be able to track him down. And if they found him, they’d find Morrison.

The intercom blipped. “Yes?”

His secretary said, “Sir, we have an incoming call from the director for Toni Fiorella.”

Michaels frowned. He waved at Toni, who picked up a handset on the table.

“Yes, ma’am?”

The director said something, and Toni nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I have decided.” She glanced at Michaels. “I’ll take it.”

His gut twisted a little at that, but she was a grown woman, she had to make her own choices.

“Yes, ma’am, go ahead.”

Toni listened for what seemed like a long time. Neither Michaels nor Jay made any pretense they were doing anything other than listening to her end of the conversation.

“I see. Yes, I’ll tell them. Yes, ma’am, I’m glad to be onboard.”

She cradled the phone, looking disturbed.

“What?” Michaels said.

“Sheriff’s deputies in Woodland Hills, California, were called to a disturbance at a movie theater there a few minutes ago. Inside, they found more than a dozen bodies, all shot dead, plus a locked storeroom full of screenwriters.”

“Corpses and a room full of screenwriters? This concerns us how?” Jay put in.

“One of the bodies was IDed as a man named Qian Ho Wu, a registered foreign lobbyist who the FBI Counter Espionage Unit has tagged as a probable spy for China.”

“Uh-huh?”

“One of the bodies has been identified as Dr. Patrick Morrison.”

“Oh, shit,” Jay said. Then he thought about it a second, and said, “But that solves our problem, doesn’t it? Dead men don’t generate radio broadcasts.”

Toni said it before Michaels had a chance to say it: “You’re assuming he didn’t tell anybody how he did it before he died.”

“Well, he probably didn’t tell the Chinese. Maybe they were after him because they figured out he was responsible for what happened to their villages. They caught up with him, there was a shoot-out, end of story.”

“Too easy,” Michaels said. He tapped the com. “Get me on the next flight going to Los Angeles.”

“You’re not a field agent, Alex,” Toni said. “The FBI will take care of this, you can’t—”

“But I can,” he said, cutting her off. “Portland got zapped with some kind of death ray, the leader of my strike team is in bed nursing a gunshot wound, and my top computer whiz just got the crap beat out of him — not to mention I had the guy responsible for all of this in my hands and I let him walk away. This has been a FUBAR from the word go.”

“You didn’t know—”

“But I know now. You want to tell your new boss I’m overstepping my bounds, fine, go ahead. I can take some vacation days myself if I have to.”

“You don’t have to,” she said. “And if you want, I’ll go with you.”

He considered his next words carefully. He considered not saying anything, but decided he needed to: “This is Net Force’s problem, Toni, and I think Net Force should take care of it.”

She blinked at him. “And I’m not part of Net Force anymore, is that what you’re saying?”

“You said it, not me.”

She nodded. “I see.”

He didn’t like the way it made him feel, didn’t like the distress on her face, but it was going to come out eventually, and better sooner than later. Maybe they could salvage their personal relationship; he sure hoped so. But the job had already changed. It wasn’t going to be the same as it had been. If Toni didn’t work for him anymore, okay, fine, he could learn to deal with that. If she was going to report about what he did to somebody else, he needed to have some control as to what he let her see and hear. If the director wanted to keep tabs on him, all right, that was her prerogative. Nothing said he had to make it easy for her.

Toni had made her choice. Now they’d both have to live with it.

Ventura glanced around, uneasy. There was nobody looking at him, and he hadn’t seen anybody following him, but something felt… off, somehow. He was in full-alert mode, scanning, listening, being aware, and he hadn’t spotted anything about which to be worried, but even so, something was not quite right.

He glanced at his watch. Maybe it was the flight. He was concerned about being in the jet’s first-class cabin—

“Can I get you anything?”

Ventura gave the young flight attendant a polite smile. “No, thank you.” He had booked a business-class e-ticket, using one of a dozen fake IDs he always carried, but the flight had been full, and by the time he’d checked in, the only empty seats remaining had been in first class. Normally, he didn’t fly first class; it was harder to blend into the herd when you were up front. But demanding to sit in the tourist section would really make you stand out — who refused a free upgrade? — and the idea was to be as anonymous as possible. You wanted to be just another middle-aged businessman, do nothing to stick in somebody’s memory, and hope you didn’t remind the stewardess of her favorite uncle.

The attendant moved on, and Ventura turned to stare out at the terrain. The flight from L.A. to Seattle took about three hours. He’d rent a car at SeaTac and drive to Port Townsend, probably another three or four hours — you had to allow for the ferry ride, plus he wanted to do a little circling for his approach. That would put him there in the evening, but it didn’t get dark up this far north in the summer before maybe nine-thirty or ten. So there was no real hurry, since night was your friend. Plenty of time to stop and have supper, get set up, do the job.

He looked out through the jet’s double-plastic window. There was a big snow-covered mountain below and in the distance. Shasta? Must be.

Ventura figured the local authorities in L.A. had uncovered the mess in the theater by now, and if so, they had certainly identified Dr. Morrison. As hard as the feds would have been looking for Morrison after the shootings in Alaska, they’d be on the case quickly. He had considered hauling the corpse away, disposing of it, but since the man was dead and no longer his responsibility, it was tactically much smarter to let him be found. He’d made sure that Morrison’s wallet was still in the dead man’s pocket, to speed things up. That would certainly stop the direct search, and maybe the feds wouldn’t be all that interested in looking for accomplices.

It wouldn’t slow the Chinese down. Surely Wu had passed his intel along to somebody higher up the food chain — Ventura couldn’t imagine that the man’s stingy government had given him hundreds of millions of dollars to spend without knowing every detail of what they were buying. The Chinese would very much like to speak to anybody connected to the deal. Once they found out Morrison was dead, they’d really have their underwear in a wad. Ventura would be at the top of their list of people to see.

The feds would have dropped their surveillance of Morrison’s house as soon as they realized what had happened to him — dead men didn’t move around a lot on their own, and the only way he’d be coming home would be in a box. Ventura’s team was, of course, long gone, pulled off as soon as he’d realized the man he’d shot in Alaska was a marshal and not a Chinese agent, and that more feds would thus be coming to have a little chat with Morrison’s spouse. He hadn’t told his client, who thought his young trophy wife was protected — no point in giving him anything else to worry about.

The feds would probably want to have a few more chats with the widow Morrison, and certainly the Chinese would pay the young lady a visit, but since she didn’t know anything, she couldn’t tell either side anything. She might be joining her late husband by the time the Chinese figured that out, but that wasn’t his problem — as long as he wasn’t there when the Yellow Peril came to call.

The Yellow Peril. He smiled. He wasn’t a racist. Sure, he played that card for people like Bull Smith, to allow them to believe he was simpatico with their beliefs, but he didn’t care one way or another about somebody’s skin color or gender. He’d worked with people of every race, male and female, and the single criterion that mattered to him was how well they could do the job. If you could pull the trigger when it came to that, and hit your mark, you could be a green hermaphrodite with purple stripes for all he cared. He’d learned the term “Yellow Peril” from the old Fu Manchu books, material that had been written in an age where racism was the default belief and nobody thought much about it.

Normally for this kind of work Ventura would have wanted to take his time. He’d get to know the territory, learn the patterns, who went where, when, and how, and not move until he had everything pinned down. The more you knew, the fewer chances for surprises. He didn’t have that luxury now. He needed to move quickly, get his business done, and leave this behind him. He had his money cleared, clean IDs, and safe places where he could hide until he had a chance to work out his longer-term plans. Being in the moment didn’t mean you couldn’t think about the future; it merely meant you didn’t live in the future.

He was, he figured, in a fairly good position. Still there was that nagging uneasiness, that sense of being a bug on a slide. As if a giant eye could appear in the microscope at any time, staring down at him. He did not like the feeling.

Well. You did the best you could, and that was that; nothing else mattered.

They were still an hour or more away from SeaTac. He’d get some rest. It might be a while before he had another chance. He took a series of slow, deep breaths.

In three minutes. he was asleep.

35

Toni went to the small gym to work off the tension and anger she felt. There was a guy in steel-rimmed glasses, a T-shirt, and bike shorts doing hatha yoga in the corner, otherwise the place was empty. She hurried through her own stretching routine, bowed in, and began practicing djurus, working the triangle, the tiga. Half an hour later, when she was done, she started footwork exercises on the square, langkas on the sliwa.

The moves were there, automatic after so many years, but her mind was elsewhere.

Alex was upset with her, that was obvious. Well, what had she expected? That he would smile and pat her on the head and offer his congratulations? She tried to see it from his viewpoint, but she knew she couldn’t have it both ways, not this time. This was the best thing. Working for him had become a sore point even before they had gone to London; he wasn’t treating her like he did the other members of the Net Force team, he was shielding her, and she didn’t want that, not in the work. So, okay, there was going to be an uncomfortable period while he adjusted to her new job. She didn’t like it, but that was how it seemed to be working out.

In the long run, she kept telling herself, it would be better for them. They’d be able to relate to each other more like equals, the personal relationship wouldn’t be bogged down in the professional one.

Yeah, but in the long run, we’re all dead, aren’t we? So what happens after a couple months of nobody having a good time if you or Alex get hit by a bus crossing the street? How is that going to fit in with your “long run” plan, hmm?

Toni stopped moving and stared into the mirror at the end of the room. Crap. I really don’t need this.

But — what help was there for it? What else could she do? She had to make a living!

She sighed, went back to her footwork.

A few minutes later, she was aware that the yoga guy had finished his routine and left, but that he’d been replaced by a trio of other men. Two of them were in karate uniforms, the third wore dark blue FBI sweats. One of the karate guys wore a brown cloth belt tied around his waist to keep his gi shut, the other a black belt. They were watching her. Watching and smiling. Then the guy in sweats leaned over and said something to the other two.

Pentjak silat wasn’t a flashy art; a lot of what went on in it didn’t look particularly impressive to the uninitiated. The last time a martial arts player from another style stood here and watched her practice, he had made the mistake of making some ignorant remarks out loud. She had been having a bad day when that happened — not nearly as bad as this one — and she had demonstrated to the loudmouth that what she was doing was in many ways superior to what he knew about fighting. It had been a painful lesson for the man.

The lesson she had learned was pretty painful, too.

She didn’t want to think about what had happened with — and to — that man later, but she couldn’t avoid it. Rusty had become her student, then her lover, however briefly, and as a direct result, he was dead.

Given the day so far, the opportunity to offer a correction to any — or all — of these three if they spouted off would feel pretty good. It wasn’t part of a self-defense mind-set to entertain such thoughts, but silat wasn’t primarily a self-defense art, it was a fighting art, and there was a big difference in your level of aggressiveness.

Toni stopped what she was doing and walked toward the trio.

“Afternoon,” she said. “Can I help you with something?”

The guy in sweats was the oldest of the three men; he had short and curly gray hair. He smiled and gave her a small bow. “No, ma’am,” he said. “We were just admiring your art, guru. Silat Tjimande?”

That surprised her. He got the subset wrong, but he knew it was silat and he had enough appreciation and understanding to call her “guru,” as well. Damn.

“It’s Serak,” she said, the “k” silent. “But it’s Western Javanese, like Tjimande. I’m surprised you recognized it.”

“I used to work out with an old Dutch kuntao teacher in San Diego,” he said. “He had done a little training in silat as a boy. My JKD teacher also had some training in Harimau, tiger-style.”

Toni nodded. JKD — jeet kun do, the way of the intercepting fist — was the style created by the late Bruce Lee. It was a hybrid system, and while they weren’t big on forms, many of the moves were based on wing chun, which to some people looked at least superficially like silat. At least the WC players knew in theory what the centerline was, even if they didn’t cover it adequately according to Serak standards…

If Curly here knew enough to recognize and respect what she was doing, he probably wouldn’t be interested in trying to deck her to impress his friends. Silat fighters didn’t go in much for point-sparring, and for that matter, neither did JKD players.

Well. Too bad. Kicking somebody’s butt would feel pretty good about now.

And she was going to have to do something or she would explode.

But — what could she do?

It was dark by the time Michaels got to the theater, and there really wasn’t much left to look at by then. Truth was, there really wasn’t any good reason for him to be here, except to see things — such as they were — for himself. Anybody involved with this who was still alive was undoubtedly long gone.

The bodies had been removed, the screenwriters released after giving their statements, and the local police still puzzled as to what had happened. The mainline FBI op who showed up to meet Michaels was a junior man, not the special-agent-in-charge, but he was willing to say what he thought. His name was Dixon.

Michaels and Agent Dixon ducked under the yellow crime-scene tape covering the doors and went into the building.

“Here’s what we know,” Dixon said. “The dead men, all thirteen of them, were shot in the theater proper. We have identification on six so far”—he looked at his palm computer—“Wu, Morrison, a screenwriter named C. B. Shane, and three men with criminal records: two Vietnamese-Americans, Jimmy Nguyen and Phuc Khiev, and a man named Maxim Schell. Nguyen, Khiev, Schell, and Morrison were armed with handguns. Nguyen’s was in his hand, Khiev’s on the floor under his body, Schell’s still tucked into his belt. None of them got a shot off, though some of the other dead men did fire their weapons.

“Morrison’s gun, a little.22, was locked in his right hand in a death grip, and shot empty. Nobody got hit with a.22 that we can tell. We haven’t come up with IDs on the other dead men yet, but all of them had guns, too.”

Michaels said, “So what do you think happened here?”

“No way to tell for sure. The dead guys were mostly shot in the back or back of the head, so what it looks like is some kind of ambush. You have to figure that if you have a dozen armed men, most of whom didn’t do any shooting before they got taken down, there were a lot of other guys in here blasting away, too. Forensics hasn’t gotten the blood all sorted out, but a quick prelim says there were a few who got hit hard enough to bleed, but who didn’t stick around.”

“Jesus.”

“We’d take his help if he offered. You must have some ideas. You got anything for us?”

Michaels thought about it. Toni would tell the director anyway, it was her job now, so it didn’t matter if Dixon knew. He said, “Morrison had some kind of valuable data and he used it against the Chinese. We think maybe they were after him. Maybe they caught up with him.”

“What kind of data?”

“Sorry, that’s need-to-know only.”

Dixon shook his head. “Doesn’t seem right. The dead guys were all sitting down when the shooting started. And according to the interviews with the screenwriters, everything was quiet until somebody yelled ‘Gun!’ At which point, all hell busted loose. It sounds more like a negotiation than a face-off.”

“It must have been an ugly scene in here.”

“Yeah. Though a couple of the screenwriters were more pissed because they didn’t get to see the movie than they were upset about all the corpses. Welcome to L.A.”

Michaels considered what Dixon had said. A negotiation. Yes, it did, didn’t it? Why would the Chinese be negotiating with a man who had wiped out a couple of their villages?

Maybe they wanted him to tell them how. Maybe they were willing to pay for it?

Well, if Wu was the guy negotiating, he hadn’t done too good a job of it, had he? And Morrison wasn’t going to be pedaling anything, either.

Jay sat slouched in a wicker chair at the Cafe Emile, looking out on the Champs Elyseés, not far from the Arc de Triomphe. He sipped black, bitter espresso from a tiny china cup, and smiled at the couples who strolled past. The war was over nearly two years, the Nazi occupation history. Postwar Paris in the spring was a much nicer place than a military surplus store in any season.

Henri, the waiter, approached. He had in his hand a small paper tablet. He gave Jay a nod that was both servile and arrogant and offered him the tablet. “ ’Ere iz ze list you wanted, Monsieur Greedlee.”

“Merci.” Jay took the tablet and waved Henri away. He looked at the list, scanned down the row of names — no… no… no… wait!

Jay sat upright, bumped the table, and sloshed espresso from the cup. Yes! There it was!

He snapped his fingers loudly, caught Henri’s attention. “Garçon! Voulez-vous bien m’indiquer ou se trouve le téléphone? Je desire appelez faire!”

Henri rewarded Jay with a sneer. “Bettair you should work on ze pronunciation and ze grammar first, monsieur!”

The arrogant prick knew he wanted to make a call, but he had to correct his French first.

“Montrez du doigt, asshole!”

Henri shrugged off the insult and did as Jay requested — he pointed toward the café.

Jay stood and hurried to find the phone.

Michaels had supper at the hotel, and when room service brought him the chicken sandwich, it had bean sprouts on it. Well, of course. This was L.A.

He ate the sandwich mechanically, not really tasting it. He was screwed, there was nowhere to go from here. Toni had been right, he wasn’t a field agent. He couldn’t just hop on a plane, fly to a crime scene, and expect to spot some crucial clue that the local police and FBI forensics team had somehow missed. He knew better. But he had needed to see the place for himself, hoping it would somehow jog something in him.

Well, it hadn’t. And here he was in a hotel in La-La Land, eating a chicken sandwich with bean sprouts, without a clue as to what he should do next.

On the bedside table, his virgil lit, telling him it was bad to the bone. That was probably Toni, calling to tell him what an idiot he was. At the moment, he was inclined to agree with her.

The tiny screen on the multipurpose toy didn’t show Toni’s face, however. It was Jay Gridley.

“What’s up, Jay?”

“I think I got him, Boss.”

Michaels stared at the virgil. “What? How? Where?”

“I crunched all the commercial airline flights leaving SoCal in the last twelve hours. Burbank, LAX, John Wayne, in Orange County.”

“And you found Ventura?”

“No. But I did find a Mr. B. W. Corona.”

“I don’t see—”

“It’s another freeway name, Boss.”

“Kind of a reach, isn’t it?”

“Maybe not. Guy booked a ticket two days ago, a round-trip to Seattle. He was originally scheduled for this evening, but he called and changed it to an earlier flight. Return is open-ended.”

“I don’t see how that makes it any more certain.”

“Okay, look. He planned to leave tonight, but there was some kind of a problem, a shoot-out, so he had to take off early.”

“But he’s planning to come back, your Mr. Corona.”

“If you’re on the run, you don’t buy a one-way ticket, that’s a red flag, first thing cops look for.”

“But why would he use a name we might know?”

“Because he doesn’t know the freeway names have been compromised. He doesn’t know we picked up his pal at the surplus store in Washington, so why would he throw away perfectly good ID?”

“Still sounds like a stretch.”

Jay did an imitation of a late-night infomercial: “But wait, but wait, don’t order yet, listen to this!”

The virgil’s screen was tiny, but it had good resolution, and Michaels could see Jay’s grin easily enough.

“I checked the car rental places at SeaTac. A Mr. B. W. Corona walked into Avis, no reservation, and rented a midsize Dodge ten minutes after the flight from L.A. landed late this afternoon. You got a computer terminal there in your room, Boss?”

“Yes.”

“Plug your virgil into it, I want to show you something.”

Michaels opened the terminal, lit the screen, and tapped the infrared send-and-receive code into his virgil. Jay’s face appeared on the hotel’s computer screen. “I’ve got your visual on the hotel’s computer,” Michaels said.

“Stand by.”

The image of Jay was replaced by a digital line-by-line image. It was a close-up of a California driver’s license.

“This came from the counter scanner at Avis. They log all licenses.”

The man in the hologram had short hair, but a full beard. Could that be Ventura?

Michaels couldn’t tell. “I don’t see the guy in our sketch.”

“No law against growing a beard, having your picture taken, then shaving. But forget the picture.”

Michaels was already scanning the information on the license. He got no farther than the name. “Son of a bitch! Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?”

“C’mon, Boss, you always save the best part of a story for last. You want me to call the Washington state police and have him picked up?”

“I suppose you know where he is, too, huh?”

“Sure.”

“Oh, really?”

Jay laughed. “You are really gonna love this part. Avis has theft-recovery devices installed in their fleet. Somebody decides to keep a car instead of turning it in? They can dial a number and turn on a little broadcast unit wired into the car’s battery. The unit sends a GPS signal to the nice folks at Brink’s, and they can tell you exactly where the vehicle is.” He shifted back into the infomercial announcer’s voice: “Now how much would you pay?”

“Son of a bitch.” Michaels looked at the computer’s flatscreen. The name on the license was the final selling point: The “B.W.” stood for “Bruce Wayne.” And everybody who read comics, watched television cartoons, or went to action adventure movies knew that Bruce Wayne was the secret identity of Batman, mentor and elder partner of Robin the Boy Wonder, aka Dick Grayson.

If this wasn’t the guy they wanted, it was one hell of a coincidence.

“All right, Jay, I’m impressed. What will it take to get the car rental company to give us the tracking information?”

“Already done, Boss. You want to guess where he’s going?”

“Surprise me.”

Jay laughed again.

36

It was almost nine P.M. when Ventura rolled into the small tourist village of Port Townsend. And though he had the GPS maps his ops had sent in with their electronic reports, he spent thirty minutes driving around, getting a feel for the place. Situated on a fat, semi-hook-shaped isthmus jutting into Puget Sound, the sleepy town had once upon a time been the gateway to the U.S. Northwest via the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Those glory days were long past, and now the tourists came to see some of the prime examples of Victorian-style houses left in the country. Ventura had been here in the daylight, and it looked almost as if somebody had gone back in time, grabbed a section of San Francisco just before the Great Earthquake of 1906, and dropped it up here. Some of the larger and more ornate old houses were now commercial businesses or bed-and-breakfast lodgings, but many of them were still in use as regular housing. There was a paper mill still working down on the waterfront as you got to town, but other than that, not much industry.

The main drag downtown was Water Street, where most of the old buildings were pre-turn-of-the-century. There was a restaurant and marina at the end of the street, and a lot of nicely kept wooden boats moored there.

Above downtown, overlooking a bluff, Lawrence Street was the parallel uptown road. Here were stores, a theater, and other odds and ends. From Lawrence Street, Taylor Street ran up the hill to Foster, which was where Morrison’s house was. A bit farther to the north was the old Fort Warden Military Reservation, now a park where you could rent an officer’s or a noncom’s old house and spend a few days hiking and exploring the long-empty bunkers. Morrison hadn’t snagged one of the Victorian homes, but a more modest stone house built in the 1920s. It hadn’t been cheap, according to his operative’s research, but it wasn’t outrageously expensive, since he’d bought it just before the big real estate boom hit here. Houses that had been going for two hundred thousand three years ago now went for half again that much. The town was in the Olympic rain shadow, and while they did get some rain and wind, it was a lot less wet than much of northern Washington state. A lot of the baby boomers had decided this was a good place to retire and enjoy their golden years.

After his reconnaissance patrol, Ventura found a restaurant still open and had a late supper. He took his time, and when he was done, he parked downtown and located a busy pub. He bought a beer and nursed it, killing more time. It was after ten-forty-five P.M. when he left, having spoken to nobody but the waitress.

At this time of night, given the lack of traffic — there was almost none — Ventura didn’t drive past Morrison’s house even once. If the Chinese had people watching, or if some laggard fed had hung around, a car passing by would certainly be an object of interest if it was the only one they’d seen for an hour or two. He knew where the house was, knew how to get there, and he would be a lot harder to spot on foot, as long as he didn’t walk down the middle of the road waving a light.

He had made some purchases when he’d gotten here. There was a big grocery-department store complex on the highway into town, not quite a Wal-Mart, but big enough. He stopped there and bought black jeans, a black long-sleeved T-shirt, and a navy blue windbreaker, as well as a pair of thin-soled black wrestling shoes. He’d changed clothes in a public rest room downtown after he left the bar, putting the new clothes on under his pale gray slacks and white shirt. The rest room was not far from the police station, which appeared to have all of two people manning it.

He parked the car five blocks away from Morrison’s, in a line of other cars at the curb. If some sharp-eye local patrol cop happened to notice a vehicle that didn’t belong to anybody he knew on the street, likely he would think it was somebody visiting. A rental car with Washington plates wouldn’t exactly scream “trouble.”

He had the Coonan under the windbreaker — it was chilly enough to justify a light jacket, if not two shirts and two pairs of pants — and he carried a set of lock picks and spare magazines in one windbreaker pocket, a small flashlight in the other. Probably nobody would notice him at this hour. In his mind, he was B. W. Corona, married, two kids, up to meet his family for a holiday. He was staying at a local B&B down in town — he couldn’t remember the name, but it was that big Victorian place on the corner, you know? — and he was out walking because he couldn’t sleep.

Subterfuge was in the attitude. A cop might stop somebody skulking from shadow to shadow if he spotted him, but a tourist out walking had a different look, a different feel to him. Until he got closer to his destination, that was what Ventura was going to be, a tourist. A local cop would see nothing more. And when the bars started to close, that was probably where the local patrol car would be — looking for drunks.

Once he was within a block or so of his destination, Ventura would shuck the white shirt and light slacks and become a ninja, part of the night. He would be invisible in the darkness, but if a cop did somehow miraculously see him, then it would be the cop’s bad luck.

At this stage of the game, he couldn’t leave anybody behind to tell tales.

He’d find a quiet spot and wait until it was late enough for the widow Morrison to get to sleep, then he would move.

The rental car waiting at the Port Townsend Airport was a six-year-old Datsun that was badly in need of a tune-up. Only thing they had available, the guy from Rent-a-Beater had told him. Somebody had rented the good Dodge only half an hour earlier. The contract had been done over the phone, the rental place was closed, and the keys were over the sun visor.

Trusting souls up here. Then again, somebody would really need a ride pretty bad to swipe this hunk of junk.

The Datsun chugged and rattled along, ran ragged, and nearly stalled several times. The dash GPS was broken, but there was a worn and greasy paper map in the glove box, and between that and his virgil’s GPS, Michaels was able to locate the address he wanted.

He knew that Ventura had been headed here. Jay had gotten the GPS readings from Brink’s, and Port Townsend wasn’t really on the way to anywhere else, unless you planned to catch a ferry to the San Juan Islands. By nine, Ventura’s rental car was in the town, and it was still here now, at eleven, but Michaels had to hurry, he might already be too late.

It wasn’t that outlandish, when you thought about it. This was where Dr. Morrison had lived, and within an hour of his estimated time of death, a man going under the name of Corona, who was in all likelihood the late doctor’s bodyguard, had gotten on a plane headed this way. He could be going somewhere else in this town, that was true, but this was one more coincidence that didn’t play.

There must be something in Morrison’s house that Ventura/Corona wanted, something worth taking a hurried flight here for. And what did Morrison have of value? Well, that was pretty obvious.

Maybe it was something else. Maybe he was coming here for some other reason entirely, but Michaels couldn’t think of any offhand.

Michaels could call the local police, get some backup from the county sheriff, and maybe a few state police officers for good measure. Surround Morrison’s house and grab Ventura when he showed up. Simple.

He could do that, but he didn’t want to scare the guy off. If there were a dozen local cops tromping around this quiet little burg in the middle of the night, Ventura would have to be blind to miss them. So what Michaels had in mind was to find the house, hide somewhere he could watch it, and wait. When Ventura showed up, then he’d call in the cavalry. Give him time to find what he came for, maybe, to save Net Force having to look for it themselves. If Ventura was already there, as soon as Alex saw him come out, he’d make the call. Ventura might be able to run, but he couldn’t hide, not as long as he drove his rented car. And that car, according to Jay, was parked not far from here, and had been there for at least fifteen minutes.

Michaels certainly didn’t plan to try and take the guy down on his own. This was the man who had outshot John Howard, and the general was no slouch when it came to guns, a lot better than Michaels was. He didn’t even have a gun with him, only the issue taser, and while that would knock a man on his ass with a single hit, you had to be pretty close to get that hit. He had no desire to go up against a highly skilled killer who was certainly better armed and more desperate than he was. No, Michaels had a strike team in place, five minutes away — as close as they could get without risking alerting their quarry — ready to move on his signal. He’d watch, make sure the guy showed up, and then get all the help he needed. At least Net Force would get partial credit for the capture. And if they were lucky, maybe the workings of the mind control ray as a bonus. That would go a long way to making up for all the mistakes.

He looked at the map. He was still a couple of miles away. Might as well make the call he had been putting off. He pushed the button for Toni’s phone. Her message came on before even one ring.

“Hey, you’ve reached Toni Fiorella. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you soon as I can.”

He frowned. Was she not taking any calls? Or just not taking his calls? Well, okay, it was the middle of the night here, so it was the wee hours in D.C. Maybe she was just asleep and had turned off the ringer.

“Toni, it’s me. Just calling to see how you’re doing. I — well, look, I’m sorry about everything. I’ll be back in town tomorrow, let’s sit down and talk about it, okay? We can work all this out.”

He thumbed the discom button, tucked the virgil back onto his belt. After he collected Ventura, that would give Toni something she could pass along to her new boss.

He had to hatch this egg before he could count it as a chicken, though.

37

Ventura had studied the overview maps his ops had done of the neighborhood when he’d taken on Morrison as a client. He knew as much about the houses and inhabitants for a block in either direction as a team of good surveillance ops could learn in a short time. He knew which houses had dogs, which houses had kids, which houses had night owls who stayed up watching vids until all hours. And, fortunately, there weren’t a lot of any of these close to Morrison’s.

So it was that Ventura now sat in the backyard of the house behind Morrison’s, nestled into a gap between a small metal utility shed and a couple of cords of firewood. From the look of it, the wood was fir, alder, and madrona, a good combination. The fir, when dry, would burn very quickly. The alder could be used without seasoning, and the madrona would burn longer and hotter than oak. once it got going.

Odd, the things you learned along the way.

Ventura glanced at his watch. Almost twelve-thirty. The lights had been off in Morrison’s house for more than an hour, so the widow was likely asleep by now. What was her name? Ah, yes, Shannon. That sounded like the name of a teenaged starlet, or somebody who was a cheer-leader for some NFL football team. Hardly the name one would connect to a scientist who had been twice her age.

Ventura looked around carefully. It was quiet, cool, and he hadn’t seen anything to worry him as he had sneaked to this hiding place. If there were other watchers here, they must be working the street out front. Good and bad, that. If they were there, he hadn’t been able to see them, which meant they were adept. Then again, if they were out front, they wouldn’t see him as he went to the back door.

He took several deep breaths, inhaling and letting them out slowly, oxygenating his blood, trying to relax. He would go at one.

Michaels had left his beat-up Datsun at the bottom of the hill, half a block away from where Ventura’s rental was parked, and hiked up toward Morrison’s house. It had been a while since he’d done any covert surveillance in the field, a long while, and his skills were not as sharp as he would have liked. A lot of it came back as he worked his way toward his target. He used trees for cover, went through backyards when possible, kept low, listened carefully for dogs. He moved steadily when he left cover, and he stayed in the shadows as much as possible. That nobody seemed to notice him was probably more a testament to the hour than any real skill on his part, but, hey, he’d take it.

His hormones were flowing pretty good, too. He sometimes had to remember to breathe. He had remembered to shut the ringer off on his virgil. It wouldn’t do to be skulking in the bushes somewhere and suddenly start chiming out “Bad to the Bone.”

As he drew closer to the house, Michaels wondered exactly what he was going to do once he got there. He knew that Ventura’s rental car was still parked down the hill, so unless he missed him in passing, he was out here on foot somewhere. Maybe already in the house.

There was a streetlight up ahead on the right. Michaels crossed the road, to stay in the darkness.

One A.M., straight up, time to go. Ventura ran in a crouch toward the back door. It was only a ten- or twelve-second trip, but it seemed to last for hours. He kept expecting to feel the impact of a bullet in the back, even though he knew that wasn’t likely — there was no point in shooting him on the way in.

The trip ended; the bullet had not come. He tried the doorknob. Locked. And the dead bolt would also be locked, if Shannon had been doing what her husband told her.

Ventura took the leather pouch with his lock picks and torsion tools from his jacket. The button lock on the doorknob would be a snap, and that was all he needed. He had a key for the dead bolt, since his people had overseen that lock’s installation.

He put the torsion tool into the key slot on the doorknob, used a triple triangle pick to rake the pins. Might as well try it the easy way first, before picking each tumbler separately…

The torsion tool rotated the barrel mechanism on the second rake. Maybe six seconds from start to finish

Ventura grinned. He still had the touch.

He slipped the key into the dead bolt, turned it, and came up from his crouch as he opened the door and stepped into the hallway that led to the basement and the kitchen. He closed the door silently behind him.

The alarm keypad was on the wall just past the light switch. He could see the red On diode gleaming. The only other light was from instrument glows in the kitchen, no help this far away, so he flicked on the flashlight and covered most of the lens with one hand, allowing only enough illumination to see the keypad. He punched in the four-digit number—1-9-8-6—the year Shannon had been born. Morrison had said she wasn’t very good at remembering numbers, so he’d wanted to keep it simple.

1986. Ventura had shoes older than that.

The hard part was done. The master bedroom was upstairs, and the living room/study was just on the other side of the kitchen/dining room. That was as far as he needed to go. If he didn’t bump into the furniture or sneeze, the young widow would likely continue her beauty rest. He’d reset the alarm and relock the door when he left. Shannon would never know he’d been here.

He moved through the kitchen. There was enough ambient light from the digital LCD clocks on the stove, microwave oven, and coffeemaker for him to keep the flashlight lens covered completely. He didn’t like to use a flashlight on a hot prowl; it was a dead giveaway to anybody who might be passing by or watching a place. Unless there was a power outage, residents normally didn’t move around their own houses using flashlights. But he didn’t want to use the overheads or a lamp in here, either. Watchers would at the very least be alerted that somebody was up and about. And some people had a hypersensitivity to light, even when they slept. It was as if they could somehow feel the pressure of the photons on their bodies, although they couldn’t see them. It wouldn’t do for young Shannon to come yawning and padding down the stairs in her birthday suit, wondering who’d left the light on. If she saw him, it would have to be the last thing she saw, and while killing her didn’t bother him per se, finding her corpse would give the authorities pause to wonder why it had happened. Whoever had done it must have wanted something, they’d figure, and Ventura reasoned they would figure out what pretty quick. Right now, they didn’t know that Morrison had passed on anything to anybody. Best to keep it that way until he was in a safe harbor.

He let a thin ray of the flashlight peek from between his closed fingers as he stepped into the dining room, just enough to avoid the furniture. He crouched low and duck-walked toward the study. There was what he wanted, just ahead and to the right.

Michaels was prone in a clump of bushes, across the street to the east side of Morrison’s house. The plants were evergreens, big junipers of some kind, trimmed into wind-blown bonsai shapes, but thick enough to crouch beneath and be mostly covered. He had worked his way there through the yard from the east, so he hadn’t been visible from the street or, he hoped, from Morrison’s house.

He had just gotten settled when he saw the man all in black scurry in a crouch to the back door.

That must be Ventura. A minute later and I would have missed him!

The man fiddled with the lock, and in what seemed no time at all, he’d opened the door and slipped inside. Either the door had been unlocked, or this guy was an expert with picks. Long ago, Michaels had covered that in his training, picking locks, but it had taken him half an hour to open even simple locks, and complicated ones were beyond him. His teacher had told him it was a thing of feel, that you either had the touch or you didn’t. If you didn’t, you could get better, but you’d never be a master at it.

Well, enough ruminating on old training classes. Time to call in the Marines.

Michaels pulled his virgil from his belt and hit the button. Five minutes, tops, and the cavalry would arrive. All he had to do was remain alert until they showed up.

Unless his young wife had unknown sensibilities, Morrison had been quite the classical music fan. A CD/DVD rack above the Phillips/Technics R&P held a couple hundred titles. The titles tended to favor the Baroque composers: Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Telemann, Heinichen, Corelli, and Haydn.

And Pachelbel, of course.

Fortunately, the man had been meticulous in his cataloging. The titles were alphabetized, so it took only a few seconds to find the DVD Ventura wanted: Pachelbel’s Greatest Hit.

He grinned at the name and turned the case over. The disk was a compilation, several versions and variations, of the contrapuntal melody Canon in D, a total playing time of 41:30. You’d have to be a real fan to listen to what was essentially the same simple tune played over and over again for that long.

He opened the case to make certain the disk inside matched the title, and the silvery disk gave off a rainbow gleam in the flashlight’s narrow beam.

The markings looked genuine to Ventura, the little RCA dog and Gramophone, the cut titles and numbers. Maybe an expert could tell the difference; he couldn’t.

Put this disk into an audio player, and you would get forty-plus minutes of variations on a musical theme. Put it into a computer and look in the right spot, using the right binary decoder, and you would get something else. Between the end of “Canon of the Three Stars,” by Isao Tomita and the Plasma Symphony Orchestra, and the beginning of “Pachelbel: Canon in D,” by The Baroque Chamber Orchestra, led by Ettore Stratta — if Morrison had been telling the truth — lay a secret the Chinese had been willing to pay nearly half a billion dollars to get their hands on.

He grinned again, put the disk back into the case, and slipped it into his inside windbreaker pocket. He looked at the stairs.

No sounds drifted down from the sleeping widow. Good. Always good to avoid complications when possible.

He retraced his steps to the back door. He keyed in the alarm code, cracked the door open a hair, and set the button lock on the door. He had thirty seconds to close the door behind him before the alarm kicked on. It only took one of those seconds for him to draw his pistol and slip the safety off. If somebody had been watching him, it made more sense for them to wait until he left with whatever he had come for before they took him down; otherwise they might never find it. If somebody was watching.

He held the pistol down by his leg. He took a deep breath, released half of it, and stepped outside.

38

Michaels was watching the house when the whole situation suddenly changed. Whatever Ventura had gone into the house for, either he knew where it was, or he’d changed his mind, Michaels thought. He was in and out in maybe two minutes. And the cavalry was still at least three minutes away.

Michaels watched as the man did something one-handed with the dead bolt lock. Save for a quick glance, he did it without looking at the door — instead he scanned the yard, his gaze sweeping back and forth, seeking. His other hand was hidden behind his leg.

Even though he knew he was pretty much invisible on the ground under the bushes across the street, Michaels froze. His pucker factor went right off the scale.

Ventura finished his manipulation with the door’s lock, glanced around again, and started across the backyard.

Michaels gathered himself to get up. He was going to follow Ventura, come hell or high water, but he was going to be real careful doing it. His hand hovered over the call button on his virgil, but he didn’t press it. Hitting the distress signal now would bring the cavalry with full lights and sirens, and he still couldn’t risk alerting Ventura.

He was on his hands and knees about to crawl out from under the evergreen when two men stepped out from behind the shed and pointed guns at Ventura.

“Hold it right—!” one of them began.

He never finished the sentence. There were several bright flashes and terrific explosions, and all three men went down. But Ventura rolled up, hardly even slowing, ran to the two fallen men, and fired his pistol twice more.

It all happened so fast and unexpectedly Michaels wasn’t sure what he had seen, but his brain raced to fill it in: Two men with guns braced Ventura, who was either the fastest draw who ever lived or already had his own gun out. One, two, three shots, yes, three, two from Ventura, one from one of the dead guys — and they were surely dead because Ventura sprinted over and put one more round into each one, looked like the heads, but it was hard to be sure about that, the after-images from the first shots had washed out Michaels’s vision some, and—

Ventura didn’t stop to examine the pair he’d shot; he took off at a run, straight to the street.

Michaels scrambled from under the bushes and followed, but he stayed crouched, using cover. He did not want Ventura to look back and see him, no, not after that display. Not only was the man a killer, he was expert at it. To take out two men with guns already pointed at you? That was either great skill or great luck, and Michaels didn’t want to test either.

Lights started to go on in houses along the street. They probably didn’t get a lot of gunfire up here on a week-night. No, probably not.

Michaels ran on the darker side of the street, and he had his taser in his hand. He hoped he wouldn’t have to get close enough to Ventura to have to use it.

Ventura smiled to himself as he ran. He did a tactical reload, changing magazines, dropping the one missing three shots into his windbreaker pocket. Those had probably been Chinese agents — feds would have yelled out their ID, and there would have been more of them.

Speed was the most important thing now. Gunfire in a quiet neighborhood would wake people up, somebody’d call the police, and even if they were slow, it would only be a few minutes before cops got here. He’d have a little while longer before the locals unraveled things, enough time to get clear of the city, but he had to figure they might have spotted him earlier, noticed his car, so a different vehicle was going to be necessary. The sooner he found one, the better.

He was going to have to get rid of this Coonan, too — he hadn’t had time to stop and pick up his expended brass here, and this gun already had two shootings on it, in Alaska and in California. Under better circumstances, he would have dropped the pistol into a lake or ocean after the first time he’d used it, but there simply hadn’t been time. Only a fool would hold on to something that would get him the death penalty if he was caught with it. He had other guns, and as soon as he could get to them, he’d lose this one.

There was an old pickup truck parked on the street half a block ahead of him. That would do. He could break the window, get inside, crack the ignition for a hot-wire, be gone in another two minutes.

He glanced behind him. No sign of pursuit, no men chasing him with guns. Maybe those were the only two. Maybe.

But even as he ran, that part of him that feasted on danger grinned and smacked its chops, looking for more. There was nothing like an adrenaline rush, the immediate sense of danger and possible death. He should be afraid, but what he felt was closer to orgasm than fear. He had the prize, he was on his way, enemies were down. All around him, life was crystalline, razor-sharp, throbbing with triumph.

He lived, they died.

It didn’t get any better than this.

Here was the truck. Try the door — hah! not even locked! He reached up over the visor, just in case — and lo! the keys!

He laughed aloud. No. It couldn’t get any better than this!

He put the gun down on the seat and shoved the key into the ignition slot—

“Going somewhere, Colonel?”

Surprised, Ventura jumped, started to grab the Coonan—

“Don’t! You won’t make it!”

Ventura froze. He looked up.

Standing six feet away, a shotgun aimed at Ventura’s head, was General Jackson “Bull” Smith. Smiling.

This was not in Ventura’s game plan. “General. Odd running into you here.”

“Not odd at all, Luther. Me and a few of the boys have been waiting for you to show up.”

“Those two were yours?”

“They were.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. They deserved what they got — it was a bonehead move, going at you face-on.”

Smith smiled again, and the shotgun didn’t waver a hair. Ventura was looking right down the muzzle. Twelve-gauge, he noted. Modified choke.

“There was a pair of other guys here before us, commie agents, near as we could tell, but they… went away.”

“I thought there might be. Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me yet. I had a couple other boys tailing you, but you lost ’em after that mess in Los Angeles. Lost your client, too, that’s a real shame. Figured you’d show up here sooner or later.”

“You continue to surprise me, General. How?’

“Because there are better surveillance gadgets than the ones you had in your car at the compound, that’s how. You think because we live up in the woods and stomp around in the bear shit we don’t have access to modem technology? You get a flunking grade for underestimating folks, Luther. Especially your friends. You should have cut me in, instead of trying to bullshit me with that story of yours.”

Ventura smiled and shook his head. “I sit corrected, General. Real impressive work. Not too late to make amends, is it?”

“I’m afraid it is, Colonel, I’m afraid it is.”

When he saw the man with the shotgun point the weapon at Ventura where he sat in the truck he was presumably going to steal, Michaels slid into a front yard and behind a thick-boled Douglas fir tree. He was across the street and they were busy enough with each other that they hadn’t noticed him. Reaching down, he hit the alarm button on his virgil. It would take them a minute or two to react, but he was no longer worried about alerting Ventura.

Now what? Who was this guy? Was he connected to the two dead men at Morrison’s? What the hell was going on?

Michaels was sixty, seventy feet away, and the taser was accurate for fifteen or twenty feet, if you were lucky. But he’d only get one shot and then he’d have to reload, and as John Howard and Julio Fernandez had pointed out to him, the fastest taser reloader in the world could not outpace a handgun with multiple rounds. Net Force computer and management people were supposed to be desk jockeys, they didn’t need guns, that’s what the military arm was for.

If he got out of this alive, Michaels planned to start carrying a real gun.

Yeah. Unfortunately, the military arm was not here, he didn’t have a real gun, and a taser was what he did have. So — who to shoot? — assuming he could get close enough to shoot either one of them?

He couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other, but he was able to hear what the shotgunner said next, because he said it loudly: “Bubba!”

A shaven-headed bodybuilder in dark camo approached the truck from the passenger side, a long-barreled pistol in his hands. He was careful not to come in straight on, but angled slightly from the back. Good move — that would keep him out of the shotgunner’s line of fire if things started cooking.

Nothing like another little complication to make his life harder.

Even if he’d had an assault rifle instead of the taser, Michaels didn’t like those odds. And he didn’t know who these new players were — in theory, they might even be on his side.

Maybe he should wait a second and see what happened before he stood up and commanded everybody to drop their weapons. Maybe a couple of seconds.

Ventura felt the adrenaline pop and bubble in him, heard its siren song calling him to action. You’re invincible, it said. Nobody has ever been able to beat you. You’re the best there ever was! Kill them!

“All right,” Smith said. “Here is how it is gonna go. You give me whatever it was you came here to collect. Then you can be on your way, your life for the data. I figure that’s an even trade. If anything that looks like a weapon comes out of your pocket, we take what we want off your body. This pump’s carrying eight rounds of number 4 buckshot. I don’t have to tell you what that will do to your face at this range.”

“No.”

Smith might not be a real general, but he had been a real soldier, and he did have a shotgun pointed at Ventura. Bubba, on the other side of the truck, had a handgun. But if Bubba fired first, he would have to shoot through the glass, and his angle might partially deflect the bullet. If Ventura ducked suddenly, Smith would probably pull the trigger, and with any luck, the charge of BBs would go right over his head and through the passenger window. It would take half a second for Smith to rack the slide for a second shot, and while a full-sized American pickup truck’s door would not stop a deer or sabot slug from a twelve-gauge, it would stop a load of number 4 buck, or most of it.

Ventura weighed his chances. This was it. He had assessed the situation as best he could. As soon as he handed over the disk, he was a dead man anyway. Smith couldn’t let him walk away and expect to sleep nights, because sooner or later, he’d know that Ventura would come for him. And a wire enclosure full of men playing soldier wouldn’t be enough protection, Smith knew that. The only reason he didn’t shoot him now was to make sure he had the data, and to find out what he could about it.

Here was the moment. No past. No future. Be here now.

He smiled and made his decision. The only one he could make.

“All right, General. We’ll play it your way—”

— but as fast as he could move, Ventura ducked and grabbed for his pistol—

39

As it sometimes did when things turned violently dangerous, time narrowed and slowed. Michaels saw Ventura disappear from sight, and the blast of the shotgun was a tremendous boom! immediately after that—

Bubba fired his pistol, a thin and almost quiet crack! crack! and two holes appeared in the truck’s windshield—

Somehow, amazed at himself, Michaels found himself on his feet, running toward the shooting, his tiny, insignificant taser stretched out in front of himself at arm’s length—

Ventura’s hand came up inside the truck like a periscope, a pistol in it, and he fired at the shotgunner, twisted, and fired at Bubba—blam! blam! — that quick—

The shotgunner went down, hit in the body, but Bubba had dodged as soon as Ventura’s pistol came up, and he fired his own gun wildly, six — eight? — times; it sounded almost like a full-auto, one continuous crackcrackcrackcrack! and it must have run empty because it stopped—

Ventura sat up, and he shoved his pistol toward the shotgunner, but the man rolled and came up and pointed the shotgun at Ventura again and fired—

Michaels saw Ventura take the blast in the chest and bang into the steering wheel, but he managed to get off another shot that seemed to hit the shotgunner without major effect. The shotgunner let go a third blast—

Ventura disappeared from view—

Michaels realized he was screaming, as the shotgunner turned his head and stared at him in surprise. He started to bring the shotgun around, and it was too far for a taser shot, but Michaels triggered the thing anyway. Twin silvery needles lanced at the shotgunner — he could see the electric darts — but they hit the shotgun, one in the butt, one in the forestock, and that wouldn’t do shit—

The shotgun’s muzzle came around, slowly… slowly… and it was almost lined up when the shooter realized Michaels was about to barrel into him at a dead run, so he fired—

Too soon! The blast went past Michaels’s right ear; he felt a tug and a quick burn, but that was all, and then he slammed into the shooter at a dead run and they both went down—

The impact stunned them both, but Michaels recovered first. He rolled up and kicked at the other man’s head. He missed, but caught a shoulder as the shotgunner tried to roll away—

The shotgun was on the street five yards down the hill.

Michaels was aware that Bubba was on the other side of the truck, probably reloading his pistol, and that he didn’t have time to fool around here. The shotgunner came up, groggy, hands rising in a defensive posture, and Michaels didn’t wait, but leaped in and snapped his elbow right at the man’s temple, as hard as he could. There was a damp snap! and the man went down bonelessly limp, but Bubba was coming around the front of the truck, Bubba and his pistol, and Michaels knew he was screwed—

He was going to die—

Somebody flew out of nowhere and slammed into Bubba from behind, knocking his pistol loose as he went to one knee. His attacker dived and rolled up, two yards past Bubba, spun to face him—

Michaels stared, unable to believe what he saw.

Toni?!

The big man went down to his knee, and she had too much momentum to stop, so Toni stretched out into a shoulder roll, hit the road hard enough to clack her teeth together, but came up mostly unhurt. Shoulder was gonna be real sore — assuming she survived that long.

The big man was up, coming at her. He swung a punch that would have flattened a horse had it hit, a hard right cross—

Toni ducked, double-tapped the man’s thick and muscular arm with her left palm and right backhand, used the momentum of the second tap to cock her elbow, and stepped in at an angle to her left — he was too big to meet head-on — then slammed her right elbow into his ribs.

She felt the ribs go, heard him grunt and slow his advance a little, but it wasn’t enough to stop him; he kept coming. He was too big, too strong — if he grabbed her, that would be bad—

Too close for the foot sweep, she had to use her thigh. She caught his upper leg with hers, snapped her knee upward, and shoved with her right hand at his belt line—

The seesaw lever worked. He lost his balance and sprawled facedown on the street, hands outstretched to absorb his fall—

Toni followed him. When he lifted his head, she kicked for his chin, but he fell away and blocked at the same time, and her shin met his left forearm bone—

His arm was weaker. The ulna snapped—

Damn, he was tough. He grabbed at her foot, missed when she dodged back, and used the grab’s moment to regain his feet. He jumped in again and fired a hard straight punch, using his good right arm—

Toni was in the zone, fighting in a righteous rage, no longer thinking, blending with her attacker. She punched her right fist at his head, stretched out over his punch, and blocked with her left at the same time, deflecting his arm just behind the elbow. Her punch hit his ear, no big impact, but she was in position for the putar kepala—the head twist. She scooped inside his right elbow with her left hand, caught his neck with her right, and circled her hands, left up, right down, pulling them close into her body as she dropped her weight. The motion twisted him around clockwise, and she grabbed his head with both hands.

A twist alone was a neck crank, painful but not damaging.

A twist and pull, putting an arch in his back, was a break.

She twisted sharply counterclockwise and pulled at the same time—

The sound of the vertebrae cracking seemed louder to her than the shotgun blast had been.

The man fell. He might survive, but he wasn’t going to be getting up on his own. Not now, and maybe never again.

The fury left her as she turned, looking for more opponents.

There were none. Only Alex standing over the downed shotgunner, staring at her in amazement.

Sirens approached, growing louder, and neither of them could find words. Finally as the flashing lights of the first police car strobed them, Alex said, “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Nobody moves!” a cop nervously clutching his pistol yelled.

No problem. Alex and Toni stood very still — and nobody else there could have moved anyway.

40

The sleepy little scenic tourist town was certainly wide awake up on the hillside now: City police, firemen, deputies, and most of the neighbors all stood in the glow of headlights and emergency flashers, trying to figure out what was going on. It was noisy, bright, and hectic.

It didn’t take all that long to get it sorted out. Michaels explained who he and Toni were, and when their Net Force/FBI identification checked out valid, that made things a lot less tense.

There were two dead men in Morrison’s backyard, and their IDs indicated that they were members of some paramilitary group based in Idaho.

The shotgunner was alive, with a fractured skull, and it seemed he was the leader of that same group, a general. He had been hit twice by bullets from Ventura’s pistol, both of which had been stopped by his body armor.

Bubba the bodybuilder had a broken neck.

And Ventura? He had taken two blasts from the general’s shotgun, and unfortunately for him, he hadn’t been wearing body armor. The first shot apparently hit him in the chest, the second in the face. Either would have killed him, the fireman-paramedic said, the head shot faster than the one in the pump.

Michaels and Toni went through Ventura’s personal property. He had the gun, extra ammunition, flashlight, lock picks, car keys, and, inside what was left of his windbreaker pocket, a DVD disk inside a plastic case. Both had been shattered into tiny bits by the shotgun blast, some slivers of which had been driven into the dead man’s heart by the impact.

“Want to bet that disk is what he stopped by Morrison’s to find?” Toni said.

“No bet,” Michaels said. “You think the FBI lab could put this thing back together?” Some of the bloody pieces were the size of needles.

She shook her head. “Enough to retrieve whatever was on it? I doubt it. If the secret to the crazy ray was on that disk, it’s gone.”

Michaels nodded. “Probably just as well. I’m not sure I’d want our government getting its hands on it any more than anybody else.” He looked at her. “You’re the one who got the good car from the rental place, aren’t you? Just before I got there?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know where to find me? Was it Jay?”

“No. You left a public trail. You weren’t trying to hide. I’m not totally inept on the net.”

“Why did you come?”

She looked at him. “Are you sorry I did?”

He shook his head. “I’d have to be a fool to say that, given the circumstances. I can’t remember the last time I was so glad to see somebody as when you knocked Bubba down. Thank you.”

“I was acting in my capacity as liaison, you know.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why are you so pigheaded, Alex? You know that I love you. And you love me just as much.”

“Yeah.”

“It was going bad for us. And work was the problem, you know that, too. I’d rather lose the job than the relationship.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Me, too.”

She looked at the firemen hauling away Ventura’s body. “It’s going to be a long night before we’re done here. Do you have a place to stay?”

“No.”

“I’ve got a room at a bed-and-breakfast at the far end of town. What say we go there and take a long nap when this is done?”

He thought about it for a second. She was right. He did love her, and he would rather save their personal relationship than either of their jobs. He gave her a small grin. “Okay,” he said. “You twisted my arm.”