Net Force

27

Alex Michaels stood by the sliding glass door and watched the dog wander around in the backyard. He'd been asleep when Scout came and hopped up onto the bed. It was a pretty good hop for a dog his size. Once up, he hadn't barked or anything, just sat there staring patiently until Michaels got up and went to let him out.

Michaels had some part of the alarm system lit all of the time now; a tech from the unit had come out and fine-tuned it, connected it to the voxax program of his house computer. All he had to do was say the word "Assassin!" loud enough for the house mikes to pick up, and the alarms would start screaming. He'd shut the system's sliding-door link off to let the dog out, but he had his taser in his robe pocket. He hadn't played with the taser much since it had been issued to him, but he was going to be spending a little more time at the indoor range practicing. He was going to work especially hard on getting it out of a pocket or belt clip in a hurry.

There was a car parked at his curb with a pair of agents in it. A third guard stood by the gate on the side of the condo. Michaels wouldn't have known about the third guard, except that the dog had seen the man and yapped at him until he'd been hushed. Better than the house alarm, the little pup.

The dog finished watering and fertilizing the lawn and, now sure the territory was secure from intruders, trotted back to the kitchen. He stood by Michaels' feet, tail wagging, looking up at him.

"You hungry, boy?"

Yap!

"Come on."

Michaels had bought some expensive canned dog food. He peeled the lid from the little aluminum container and dumped the contents into a small bowl, then put it down on the floor next to the water bowl.

As he always did, the dog waited. He was hungry, but he stood over the bowl looking up at Michaels, waiting for permission. Whoever had trained him had done a good job. "Go ahead, eat."

Scout bent and gobbled the stuff up as if he'd never been fed before.

When the dog was done with his meal and enough water to wash it down, he followed Michaels into the living room. Michaels sat on the couch and patted his lap. The little dog leaped up and into his lap, and began to lick one of its paws as Michaels scratched behind Scout's ears.

It certainly was soothing to sit and pet the little critter. Susie had always wanted a dog. Megan had told her she had to wait until she was old enough to take care of it. She was getting there — faster than he liked. Eight, his daughter was, going on eighteen…

Michaels liked dogs. He hadn't gotten one after he'd moved to D.C. because he hadn't wanted to leave it alone while he was at work, but as small as Scout was, the house was plenty big enough to roam around in. The previous owners of the condo had owned a cat, and they'd left a litter box stuck up in the rafters. Michaels had bought a sack of kitty litter, and during the day the plastic tub full of litter sat by the sliding glass door. So far, the dog had used that faithfully when he couldn't get outside.

Scout licked Michael's hand. The man grinned at him.

"You don't care if I had a crappy day at work, do you? You're perfectly happy to see me no matter what, aren't you?"

The dog gave out a small yip, almost as if he understood what Michaels said. He snuggled his head under Michael's hand.

Michaels laughed. That was the thing about dogs — you didn't have to be anything special to impress them. He liked that. If you were as good a person as your dog thought you were, you'd be able to stroll across the Potomac without getting your ankles wet.

Well. Time to get moving. Better shower and shave and get dressed.

He had a thought: Why not take the dog with him to work? He could let him run around the office, take him out to pee once in a while. There wasn't any policy against it. He was the boss, wasn't he? At least for another day or two he was. Sure. Why the hell not?

John Howard wore an Army-green T-shirt and faded, frayed cargo-pocket fatigue pants over his Kevlar combat boots. He also wore a black headband — he sweated pretty good once he got going, and keeping a garrison cap on was hopeless — but otherwise, he looked like any of the other fifty troopers doing the obstacle course this early Sunday morning.

John Howard was no armchair commander ordering his troops to do something he wouldn't — or couldn't — do himself.

He was last up.

Fernandez blew his whistle. "Go, go!"

Howard felt his belt transponder buzz, starting his personal clock. He sprinted toward the water hazard, jumped, caught the thick rope and swung out over the pit, more mud than water. The trick was to let your momentum swing you back and forth, pump a little with your arms and crunch your body, then jump on the second swing…

Howard released the rope, fell, landed two feet beyond the edge of the pit. He ran for the razor-wire tunnel. There was a backstop at the end of the razor-wire approach, enough to stop machine-gun bullets. The gunners had the day off, but during the graduation run, a steady stream of jacketed full-auto fire, every tenth round a tracer, laid a roof over the wire. This would scare the crap out of a green recruit, but most of his troops were old hands: They knew you couldn't catch a bullet unless you stuck your head up through the razor wire, a difficult proposition even if you wanted to do so.

"Clock is running, Colonel!" Fernandez yelled.

Howard grinned, dropped prone, began knee-and-elbowing his way under the razor wire. As long as you stayed low, the only thing you'd get is dirty. If you got uppity, the razor wire would bite you.

Clear!

Ahead was a fifteen-foot-high wall with a rope draped over it. If you got there at speed and jumped high as you caught the climbing line, you could make it over with two or three pulls, roll and hit the sawdust pit in three seconds. If you had to climb eight feet of rope, it took longer.

Howard leaped, grabbed the two-inch hawser with both hands a good ten feet up, reached high with his right hand and caught the rope again, did it on the left side, and was over.

The next obstacle was essentially a forty-foot-long telephone pole lying in a series of six-foot-high, X-shaped, four-by-four supports. You had to boost yourself up on the end — there was a short step built in there — mount the pole and walk the length. If you fell, you had to go back and start the walk over. The trick was to move steady, not too fast, not too slow. It wasn't that high, but a fall from six feet could sprain an ankle or break an arm. Once, they'd had a man break his neck when he slipped and landed on his head.

Howard reached the step, bounced up, stood on the pole. He had walked this hundreds of times, he had the pace down. Steady — not too slow, not too fast.

At the other end, there was another sawdust pit, though the archaic term was not really appropriate — the dust was not wood, but reconstituted buckyball-plastic. The best way to land on the stuff without sinking to the bottom, a good three feet, was to do so in a sitting position or stretched out and supine.

The colonel reached the end of the pole walk, jumped outward, lay back and hit flat on his back, hands extended, palms down. Buckyball-plastic splashed, but quickly settled back. Howard rolled, sank a little, but reached the edge of the pit and came to his feet.

The trooper in front of him was slower than he was. He had just gotten free of the pit himself, and was on the way to the minefield.

Howard came up behind the man. "Track!" he yelled. The trooper moved to the side and allowed Howard to pass.

He was making good time. Not his best, but not bad, he felt.

The minefield was a twenty-foot-wide corridor of sand thirty yards long. The mines were electronic, about the size of a softball, and not dangerous, but if you stepped on one, you knew it — it let out an amplified scream that would wake a man six days dead. Every one you hit cost you fifteen seconds. You could see where the mines were; there were little depressions that dropped the sand a half inch or so over them. If you were first through, it was easy, you could see them and run the field in ten or fifteen seconds, but after a few people went through ahead of you, it got harder to spot the mines among all the boot prints.

There were two troopers still walking the sand when Howard got there. Newbies tended to think they could run in the old boot prints and get home free, and if the mines had been real, that would have worked. But the traps reset randomly every two minutes, and stepping where somebody had gone before might earn you fouls. You couldn't be sure.

You couldn't learn a pattern, because Howard had his techs change it every week or so.

Again, steady was the key. Try to hurry, and you'd get sonicked good. Too slow and you started worrying, seeing traps where there weren't any.

He stepped into the sand.

Forty seconds later, he was clear, without triggering a sonic blast, and feeling pretty good since he had passed one of the troopers in the sand and caught the other on the way to the final obstacle.

The last test this day was Sergeant Arlo Phillips, a six-foot-four-inch 240-pound hand-to-hand-combat instructor. Phillips's role was simple: You tried to get past him to slap a buzzer button mounted on a post in the middle of a white circle marked on the soft ground; he tried to knock you out of the circle before you did it. Troopers were only allowed to enter the circle one at a time, and if you got thrown out, you had to go back to the end of the line and try it again. While your timer stopped when you reached the circle — your belt transponder clicked it off when you lined up in the quay zone — and resumed only as long as you were in the circle, this was where most testees hurt their scores. The combat instructors did not like to lose. They took turns in the circle, and they were all good, but Phillips was strong, skilled, and he loved this. One-on-one, face-up, Phillips would hand you your head if you tried to outmuscle him. There were troops who swore they'd seen Phillips lift and pivot the front end of a Dodge pickup truck into a too-tight parking space. The only way to beat him was to keep out of his range, and that wasn't easy.

When Howard's turn came, he went straight in at Phillips, jinked left, then right, faked high, then dived to the left and rolled. Phillips got his hand on Howard's right ankle as he came up, but too late — the colonel swatted at the buzzer, barely brushed it with his fingertips as Phillips jerked him prone on the ground. It was enough — the buzzer went off. His timer stopped, his run over.

"You got officers' luck, sir," Phillips said.

Howard rolled up, brushed himself off and grinned at the larger man. "I'll take it. Better to be lucky than good."

"Yes, sir." Phillips turned away. "Next!

Howard walked around to where Fernandez and a couple of techs were scoring the exercise.

"You must be getting old, Colonel, sir. You're gonna come in third."

"Behind…?" He pulled off his headband and used it to wipe the sweat from around his eyes.

"Well, sir, Captain Marcus is first by a good sixteen seconds. You missed him throwing Phillips with that jujitsu move he likes."

"And second…?"

Fernandez grinned. "Modesty forbids, sir."

"I don't believe it."

"Well, sir, I was first up."

"How long?"

"Two seconds faster than you," Fernandez said.

"Jesus."

"I do believe He favors me, yes, sir."

"If you were first up, you should have flown through the minefield."

"I stopped to have a beer, sir. Since I figured I had plenty of time and all."

Howard shook his head and grinned. "How are they doing?"

"Pretty good overall. I'd put all our AI boys — and girls — up against any SpecForce outside of maybe the SEALs' best, and they'd give them a pretty good run."

"Carry on, Sergeant."

"Sir."

Howard walked toward the new officers' dressing room — hell, it was all new, none of this had even been here a few years ago — to change his clothes. If he hurried, he'd just have time to get home and join his wife in time for church.

Mora Sullivan looked through the jet's window at the ground far below. She had both of the first-class seats to herself this flight, and that was not due to chance — she usually bought two tickets to each destination, in case she needed to change identities before she boarded the flight.

Coach was only half full, so nobody was getting a free upgrade to take the empty seat next to her.

Fall colors were up — the hardwoods in the Georgia mixed forests below were shades of orange and yellow and red among the evergreen pine trees. She tended to sleep on plane trips, but she was too awake and edgy for that this morning.

During all her years in the biz, she had only deleted two of her own clients. The first, Marcel Toullier, had been for a contract from a different client six months after she'd worked for the Frenchman; being one of her clients did not confer immunity, and it had been strictly business, nothing personal. She'd liked Toullier.

The second deletion, the gun dealer Denton Harrison, had been because Harrison had done stupid things and gotten himself arrested. The authorities had enough on him to put him away for fifty years, and Sullivan knew he was a talker, he'd be willing to give up what he knew to stay out of prison. Sooner or later, Harrison might have gotten around to mentioning that he had hired the Selkie. The numbers he had for her were, of course, dead ends, disconnected and untraceable, but the authorities did not know for certain there even was such an assassin. She did not want them to find out.

Wearing class-two body armor, on his way to a safe house, Harrison had come out of a courthouse in Chicago, surrounded by federal marshals.

She had made the shot from six hundred yards. Class-two Kevlar didn't much slow the sniper rifle's.308 bullet: it had punched through Harrison's aorta and left a fist-sized hole in his back when it exited his body. He was effectively dead before the sound of the shot reached him.

And now there was Genaloni.

A flight attendant came by. "Coffee? Juice? Something else to drink?"

"No, thank you."

Did she have to take the crime lord out?

If she had reflexively thought she must, she would hardly be any better than he was. Yes, she had to do something, and since what she did for a living was delete people, that was where her strength lay, and naturally, she had to consider that an option. But there were other ways. Having made the decision that it was time to retire, all the old IDs, the houses and rentals, all of those were going away. She could lay a trail that ended in a car crash or other accident that would convince any pursuers she was dead. Or she could set Genaloni up for some criminal rap and know he'd get put away. He would still wield power from a prison cell, of course, these guys always did, but he'd have other things on his list. Even somebody like Genaloni would probably forget about her after five or ten years in the gray-bar hotel.

Men like Genaloni tended to die relatively young, or wind up in prison. They made a lot of enemies on both sides of the law, and the odds were that one of those enemies would get to them.

Of course, there were ninety-year-old ex-mobsters rolling around in wheelchairs, sucking oxygen from portable bottles and pretending to be feeble or insane, who had beaten the odds. Old Mustache Petes who, despite the dangers, were still free.

She sighed. Which was the best way to go? She had to decide pretty quick. After she paid for the lost dog at the kennel upstate, she'd go to her place in Albany and think about it.

Tyrone stood at the door to Bella's house, taking deep breaths, trying to calm himself. Yesterday's session had gone pretty well. She was not a great net rider, but not that bad.

Twice, she had brushed her hip against his. Once, when she reached across to grab a stylus, he had felt the weight of her breast on his arm.

The memories might cool someday, but just at the moment, they did not help slow his pulse rate.

He touched the buzzer.

Bella opened the door. Today, she wore a less-revealing outfit — a sweatsuit. She had her hair pinned up, and she looked scrubbed fresh, smelled clean, and a little bit soapy.

"Hey, Ty. I just got out of the shower. Sorry I look so undone."

There was an image he could imagine all too clearly, Bella in the shower. "No, no, you look fine," he said. And he said it too fast, his voice too high. He was too stupid to live. Man!

"Come in."

Upstairs, they donned VR gear and got started. He said, "Okay, let's use my program today. You mind riding double on a big motorcycle?"

"Nopraw," she said. "Whatever you want to do."

Yeah, right. What he wanted to do had nothing to do with the net. No, sir, definitely not. But he said, "Okay. Here's how scenario translates…"

Plekhanov settled in, lit his VR, then realized he still had not deleted the car program. The shiny blue Corvette sat parked at the curb in front of him. He mentally shook his head. He really should get rid of this thing. All right. As soon as he finished the little drive over to Switzerland, he would dump it. Definitely.

Riding the Harley along the curvy road through the Swiss Alps, Tyrone yelled over the wind noise: "You see how this works? My program translates their programs into compatible visual modes. That truck over there? If we were in a water scenario, it would probably be a barge or a ship."

"But how does it do that?" Bella yelled.

He glanced back at her. Her hair streamed free behind them, whipping back and forth in the wind.

"Easy. If we're in totally different modes, my program just overlays the other guy's imagery. Angle and relative speeds will be the same — air, water, land, even fantasy. If we are in similar enough modes — like the truck is doing roads and not water or something else — my program will take his image and stet it, to keep the VR speeds up. Most people who meet pick one program or the other and use it. Otherwise, you get a couple of microseconds lag on the refresh rate."

"Ah, I see."

"That truck? It's really a big info packet. It contains a lot of code, so it moves slow. Watch."

He twisted the throttle and the Harley's powerful engine roared. They passed the lumbering truck, and whipped back in front of it as a car approached from the other direction.

"Wheee!" Bella said.

Oh, he liked the sound of that.

"So this is all off-the-shelf software?"

"Well, I've modified this one a bunch."

"You can do that?"

"Sure. I could write one from zero, but it's easier to alter an existing one."

"Could you show me how to do that? Write my own program?"

"Yeah, sure, nopraw. It's not that hard."

"Exemplary!"

In that moment, Tyrone remembered talking to his father. Offer the locals something they can't get from your enemy, he'd said. Although Tyrone didn't really see Bonebreaker as an enemy, exactly, the old man was right. Tyrone had something LeMott didn't have, a skill, a talent, and right at this moment, Bella wanted it. This was dee-eff-eff for sure, data flowin' fine to the fourth power!

They came to an intersection with a stop signal. CyberNation was to the left. Maybe he should take her there? It was interesting the few times he'd explored it, but they didn't let you see the really good stuff unless you joined, and that wasn't gonna happen. He could hear his father: "Give up your citizenship to join a computer country that doesn't exist? I don't think so."

Cross-traffic rolled past, and Tyrone was so much in his own head that he almost missed the Vette when it zipped across the intersection.

Almost. A mental alarm went off. Corvette… Corvette… what—?

Oh, yeah, Jay Gee's bulletin in yesterday's Email. Keep your eyes open for a young guy in a business suit driving a blue Vette.

The car was past before he had a chance to see the driver, and there were two cars and a small van lined up in front of Tyrone at the light. Probably it was nothing.

On the other hand, maybe it was something. He ought to at least check it out, right? And if Bella asked, he'd have to tell her why, wouldn't he?

Bonebreaker wasn't helping out a major federal agency, was he?

Tyrone tapped the Harley's gears into first and gave it a little gas. He pulled over onto the shoulder and zipped past the waiting cars, earning a couple of horn blasts for his trouble.

"Whoa! Is this legal?"

"Well, not really," Tyrone said, "but we gotta do it." They reached the corner, and he leaned into it, straightened it out, upshifted and goosed the bike. "You see that blue Vette up there?"

"Yeah?"

"I need to check it out. I'm, uh, helping out a buddy of mine at Net Force."

"Net Force? Really?"

"Oh, yeah. Jay Gridley, he's their top computer guy. I do stuff for him every now and then."

"Wow. Exemplary, Ty!"

Was that his imagination, or did she tighten her grip around his waist a little?

"Can we catch him?"

"Nopraw. There's not much that can outrun me in this scenario. Hang on."

Definitely, she was holding him tighter. Yes!

Plekhanov was on his way back from the bank in Zurich when he saw the motorcycle coming up fast behind him. He frowned, felt a moment of worry. He watched the bike in his rearview mirror. It wasn't long before the vehicle caught up with him. It swung out into the incoming lane, then started to pass, apparently oblivious to the lorry bearing down from the opposite direction on the narrow two-lane feeder road. He watched the motorcycle peripherally. Two riders, teenagers, a boy and a girl, neither of whom appeared to take much notice of him. After a few seconds, the motorcycle passed, cut back into his lane and accelerated, missing the oncoming lorry by what seemed like centimeters. The two-wheeler quickly left him behind.

Plekhanov shook his head at his paranoia. It was nothing. A Kaffir boy, showing off for his pretty friend by blowing past the fastest vehicle on the road, risking the dangers of oncoming traffic. He had been that young once, although it had been aeons ago. He would not go back to those days, exchange his hard-earned knowledge and wisdom for the hot hormones and reckless carpe diem philosophy of youth. Teenagers thought they would live forever, that they could do anything in the world. He knew better.

Always, there were limits to such things. Even the richest and most powerful men who ever lived eventually went the way of all flesh. Another fifty or sixty years, and his time would be up. But at least in his case, it would be quality time. Quality time indeed.