Net Force

18

No real progress had been made on Steve Day's death.

Oh, the labs had cataloged all kinds of hair and fiber and bullet casings, but in the end, none of it meant anything without the people, clothes and guns the things belonged to — and they didn't have any of those.

Alex Michaels was more than a little bothered. He sat at his desk, staring into the wall. He knew there was nothing to be done about it; the best minds in the FBI were hard at work looking for the smallest clue, and standing there yelling "Hurry!" wouldn't help.

It wasn't as if he didn't have other things to worry about. As head of Net Force, he'd suddenly found out what it meant to have the buck stop on your desk. Aside from having to assign high-level cases to make sure they were handled right, there was all the political bullshit. He had to justify what his organization was doing, why they did it, and how much it cost, first to the Director, then, if they were feeling snoopy — and they always were — to Congress.

He had to appear in front of Senator Cobb's Security Committee on Thursday to answer questions about something Day had done a year ago that had mightily upset the Senator. Cobb, unaffectionately known as Tweety Bird in intelligence circles—"I taught I taw a puddy tat!" — was always imagining conspiracies, no matter where he happened to look. Cobb thought the military was scheming to violently take over the reins of government; that the Germans were secretly re-arming themselves to eat Eastern Europe; that the Girl Scouts were Commies. He had been the bane of Steve Day's life, and it looked as if he was going to be giving Michaels the same grief.

And if that wasn't enough, the political side of the job required a lot more of something else Michaels hated — socializing. Since he'd taken over, he'd gone to four black-tie political soirées, suffering through vulcanized chicken or salmon cooked to blackboard-eraser consistency. All of these events had featured after-dinner speakers who could put a room full of dexadrine addicts into a suspended animation that made Sleeping Beauty look like an insomniac.

No, this was definitely not a part of the job he enjoyed.

At least he didn't have to worry about building appropriations. That was the Director's job. And given all the new structures that Net Force had recently constructed, was in the process of constructing, or was planning on constructing, that would be a major chore in itself. J. Edgar Hoover would never recognize the FBI Compound, it had grown so large in just the last five or six years. It was a small town unto itself.

He stared at the pile of hardcopy and the blinking To Do list on his computer screen. He had a stack of stuff to read, things to sign, all the minutiae of any mid-level office manager that had to be taken care of, regardless of the more important things that had to wait. And it wasn't going to get done if he just sat there and stared at it.

It was going to be a long day. And when it was done, he would go home to his empty condo, eat a meal alone, watch the news, read his mail and slog through reports on his flatscreen. Probably fall asleep reading — that was what happened most of the time. Either that, or get called out to one of the Nights of the Boring Politicos.

He missed Megan. He missed his daughter. He missed having someone to share his day with, to care that he came home, that he lived or died…

He shook his head. Poor you. You're just so damned sad, aren't you?

Michaels chuckled. The Island of Self-Pity was a waste of time; he never could stay there very long. He had a job to do, and he was part of the solution and not part of the problem, wasn't he? Hell with the rest of it.

He reached for the hardcopy.