Net Force

12

It was a quiet Sunday evening, the fall air still warm and sticky with humidity. Alexander Michaels's condo was dark, save for a light in an upstairs bedroom. A plain-vanilla, government-issue, black-tire fedmobile with two FBI agents in it sat parked at the curb across the street. They weren't trying to hide, and that was good, because they might as well have a big flashing red neon sign mounted on the car's top announcing they were who they were: Cops! Cops! Cops!

The two men in the car listened to a radio playing country music at a low volume, and played chess using a small magnetic board mounted on the dash. Now and then, one of them would glance at Michaels's place, or up and down the street, checking auto or foot traffic.

There weren't many cars or pedestrians at this hour in this neighborhood on a Sunday. Most of the people in these houses had to get up and go into the office on Monday morning; most of them were home by now, watching TV or reading or doing whatever else upper-middle-class people did behind their walls when tomorrow was a workday.

How odd it must be, to have to get up and go to a real job every day. She wondered how people did it — worked at places where they hated what they did, for people they could barely stand. How could you make yourself spend your life without any joy, any passion, any real satisfaction? Millions did it — billions did it — but it was beyond her. She'd rather be dead than forced to endure the mundane lives most people led. What was the point?

A Mercury Protection Systems neighborhood patrol car rolled slowly down the street. The uniformed driver in the vehicle — offering "Fast Armed Response," according to the door logos — nodded at the two FBI men as he cruised past them. They nodded back.

A quiet residential street. Nothing out of the ordinary. Moms and pops and two-point-three rugrats, dogs, cats, mortgages, unending blandness. Everything in its proper, boring, dull place.

Well. One thing was not quite as it seemed…

The Selkie walked along the sidewalk approaching Michaels's condo. The condo was on the west side of the road, and she was eighty yards shy of it, moving slowly north. She had already examined the agents' car with a twelve-power spookeye monocular. The tiny starlight scope was state-of-the-art Israeli issue, made at the Bethlehem Electronics plant. The scope had excellent optics, and offered a good view of the chess-players from a distance where they couldn't possibly see her without using scopes of their own.

The shotgun mike in her purse — a product of the wholly owned Motorola subsidiary Chang BioMed, in Beaverton, Oregon — had sufficient electronic amplification so that from a hundred yards she had been able to hear the soft twang of country music from the surveillance car. The mike was disguised as a hearing aid, and the scope passed as a small can of hairspray. Anything less than a determined search wouldn't know these things for what they really were.

And who was apt to be searching her purse, determined or otherwise? Nobody.

When she was fifty yards away, she saw the agents glance in her direction, then back to their chess game. She kept her expression neutral, even though she wanted to smile. They had seen her — and dismissed her.

The dismissal was based on good reason. For what the agents saw was an old lady, easily seventy, hunched over and walking slowly, hobbling with a cane, while a small champagne-colored toy poodle trotted ten feet ahead of her on a Flexi lead, exploring the neatly cropped wilds of the sidewalk foliage.

The poodle, a well-trained neutered male, had been rented from the Not the Brothers Dog Kennel, in upstate New York. A thousand dollars a week, the pooch, and worth every penny.

The little dog sniffed the base of an ornamental cherry tree planted next to the walk, lifted his leg and watered the trunk.

"Good boy, Scout," the Selkie said. Anybody close enough to have heard her — and nobody was — would have recognized the tones of an old lady, the voice weakened by long decades of hard work and too many cigarettes.

She wore an ankle-length cotton-print dress, a thin cotton sweater and stout, sensible, lace-up Rockport walking shoes over black knee socks. Her hair was white and fluffed up into a rounded perm. The latex mask and makeup she wore had taken her an hour and a half to apply, and should pass inspection from five feet in broad daylight. She was in some apparent pain as she shuffled along — the right hip was bad — but she was bearing it for the sake of her good boy

Scout, who stopped to sniff every tree or bush, careful to mark as his own all those with scents from previous canine passersby.

She was also hot, her face itched and the stink of latex and face powder was thick, but there was no help for that.

The Selkie knew exactly what the watchers saw when they looked at her: somebody's arthritic granny, out walking her little dog before going home to bed. And home was only three blocks away, rented in a hurry, but using her current disguise. If she was stopped — and she wouldn't be — she had an address that justified her being here, and a pedigree better than the dog's. She was Mrs. Phyllis Markham, retired from her job of forty-one years as a bookkeeper for the state government, at the capital in Albany. Her husband Raymond had passed away last October, and Phyllis had finally moved to Washington so she could spend her spare time visiting the museums, which she loved. Have you seen the new Russian capsule on display at the Air and Space? Or that gray 1948 Tucker they confiscated from some drug dealer?

Mrs. Markham's daughter Sarah lived in Philadelphia, and her son Bruce was the manager of a Dodge truck dealership in Denver. Her background was all in place, and any kind of computer check would vet it. She could bore the leg off a clothes-store dummy reciting it in her dull and scratchy voice, too. She carried no obvious weapons, nothing to give her away, save the disguised electronics that nobody would recognize for what they were if they happened to see them.

Then again, the cane she pretended to need was a three-foot length of hand-crafted hickory, sanded furniture-smooth and lovingly oiled, made by Cane Masters, a small company in Incline Village, Nevada. Cane Masters specialized in building perfectly legal weapons for serious martial artists. An expert — and the Selkie was certainly that — could beat somebody to a dead pulp with a walking stick such as the one she carried, and do so without breaking a sweat.

A mugger who looked at her and saw somebody's tired and helpless old granny and an easy score, well — that would be a big mistake. And possibly his last mistake if she chose to make it so.

When she was at the first condo past the target's, she whispered, loud enough for the dog to hear but not the agents: "Scout, dump."

The little poodle was very well trained. He stopped, squatted and left a little pile on the grass next to the edge of the walk. With some apparent effort, the old lady bent and half squatted, and scooped the poop up with a little cardboard-and-plastic container designed for that purpose. "Good boy, Scout!" she said, loud enough for the agents to hear this time. She proceeded onward, seemingly oblivious to the young men playing chess in the car across the street. She would bet dollars to dimes they'd be smiling. Aw, look at that, isn't that cute, old granny's little toy dog crapping on the grass.

She didn't know if the guards were permanent — probably not, but it didn't matter. Two men in a parked car on a street were not much of a threat. Now they had seen her as she wished them to see her. She would be back in the morning, and again at night, for at least the next week, perhaps longer. Soon, the day and night sets of guards would file her away under "harmless." Mrs. Phyllis Markham was but one of several shadows who might become an unseen part of the target's life. Another one was an office temp who could soon go to work for the Marines Civilian Liaison Office at Quantico. There was a new driver for a Taco Tio lunch wagon that sometimes fed part of the FBI, and half-a-dozen other possibilities, if necessary. She would chose the ones best suited, after she had done a little more observation.

And if it was Phyllis Markham who drew the assignment to delete the target, he would probably die quietly in his bed one night in the next week or two, with nobody the wiser. The old lady could circle around the condo after the deed was done, then walk right past the agents assigned to watch the target, and they would never have a clue.

By the time anybody knew the target was dead, the poodle would be back in upstate New York at his kennel, and the old lady would have ceased to exist.

"Let's go around the block and go home, Scout. What do you think?"

The toy poodle wagged his tail. He was a sweet pup. And just like the T-shirt said, the more she learned about people, the better she liked dogs.

Colonel Howard had just finished a field-strip and reassembly on the H&K G3A3Z assault rifle. This was a major piece of small-arms ordinance. It roared like a thunderclap and fired the big 7.62mm NATO round full-auto. The expended brass ejected so hard that anybody within fifty or sixty feet to the right and slightly back of a shooter risked having an eye put out by a spinning shell. Sometimes the empties flew so fast they whistled as air blew across the mouth of the fired cartridge.

He wiped excess dry lube from the weapon and put it back on the table. Maybe he should clean his handgun, too?

He pulled the S&W Model 66 from its holster and looked at it. It was a six-shot stainless-steel revolver in.357, with a four-inch barrel and Craig Spegel custom-wood boot grips. Hardly regulation, the sidearm — most of the teams carried H&K USP tactical pistols in.40, with high-density plastic slides and frames, laser sights and suppressors, and more than twice as many rounds per magazine as the old wheelgun carried. But it was his talisman, the Smith, and he trusted it. He could shoot it well enough to hit a man-sized target out to a hundred meters on a good day, and it never jammed the way an auto-pistol sometimes did. He opened the cylinder and checked the loads.

"Your hardware gets any cleaner you'll be able to do surgery with it, sir."

He looked at Fernandez. "You know, a less indulgent commander would have thrown you into the stockade years ago and left you there."

"Yes, sir. Your patience does you proud, Colonel."

Howard shook his head.

"Zero-eight-one-eight, sir," Fernandez said.

Howard raised his eyebrows. "I wasn't going to ask what time it was, Sergeant."

"No, sir, of course not, sir."

Howard grinned again. He closed the cylinder on his revolver and reholstered it. All right, he was fidgety. They had a location on the terrorists, and a meeting was supposed to take place for the leaders of the group at 1130 hours. Once the woman trooper had gotten the drunk to an empty room where he had been expecting something much more fun than what actually happened, he had been relatively quick to volunteer that information.

Which meant Howard and his troops wanted to be in place an hour and a half before then, by 1000. It was a fifteen-minute drive to the warehouse district where the meeting was set. Allow twice that for traffic problems, plus a half hour for X-factor, which meant they should roll at 0900. Most of the troops were already outside the embassy compound and assembled at the takeoff point.

Which meant that they had at least forty minutes before they should crank up.

Time flowed as it did when undergoing a root canal — slow. Very, very slow…

Fortunately, Howard's appearance wasn't going to be a problem. A local bus had been secured, of the kind used to ferry workers to and from various industrial sites in the area. He and Fernandez would leave the compound in a limo and meet the bus, and he could sit in an aisle seat where nobody would notice him from outside, if they bothered to look. And since everybody inside the bus was working for him — about twenty-five troops — that wouldn't be a problem. Combat gear was on the bus. The troops would wear civilian coveralls. They would be just another group of workers going to a construction site in the warehouse district on the river. In theory, there should be no problems. The CIA chief, Hunter, had the routes laid out, and the local police were supposed to be advised to turn a blind eye. It ought to run like warm oil on clean glass.

There was no reason for Howard to feel as nervous as he did, but that didn't matter. He had already paid two visits to the bathroom, and a third would be likely. The idea of eating made his stomach queasy, and the coffee he had already drunk had only added to his jitters. It might not be a major firefight in a jungle somewhere, but it was very possible bullets would fly and men would die. And it was his responsibility. He most assuredly did not want to foul it up.

"Oh-eight-two-two, sir," Fernandez said.

This time, Howard didn't reprimand the sarge. They knew each other too well. The colonel nodded. He picked up one of the H&K's magazines and checked the loads. Didn't want to overfill it, jam the rounds in so tight they wouldn't strip off and feed. That would be bad. Of course, he had counted them twice already. Probably the number hadn't changed since the last count.

Dentist-chair time, moving as slowly as five o'clock rush-hour traffic on the Beltway.

The way he felt right now, a root canal would be almost welcome.