Point of Impact

9

Michaels hadn’t managed to get back to sleep after Toni left for New York, so he was a little tired. Fortunately, as slow as things were, he could probably take off early.

He had a partial staff meeting scheduled, and when he got there, his people were already at the conference table. John Howard, Jay Gridley, and the just-promoted Julio Fernandez. A few months ago, Fernandez’s wife, Joanna, would have been there, as would Toni. He missed seeing them.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Commander,” Howard and Fernandez said in unison.

“Hey, I thought it was your turn to bring the doughnuts, boss,” Jay said as Michaels sat. This was an old joke; they never ate doughnuts at the morning meetings.

“You didn’t give up sugar when you gave up flesh?” Fernandez said.

“Very funny, Julio.”

Michaels raised an eyebrow.

Fernandez answered the unasked question: “Our computer wizard here is turning Buddhist. No more eating flesh for him. Gonna step around ants on the sidewalk, too, I expect, chanting om mani padme hum while he does.”

Michaels shook his head. Never a dull moment around here.

“Okay, what do we have? John?”

General Howard led off with his weekly report. New gear, new troops, old business. Things were slow. They’d be taking various units out on training runs over the next couple of weeks, unless something came up.

Jay didn’t have a lot to report, either. “Nothing on your dope dealers,” he finished. “The DEA’s info was pretty sparse and dead-ended quick. I’ll run some other things into the mix and see what comes up.”

Michaels turned to Howard. “I sent a report your way, but in case you haven’t had a chance to read it, we’re helping the DEA run down some kind of new designer drug that turns the users into temporary supermen. And sometimes it makes them jump off tall buildings.”

Howard said, “Yes, sir, I saw the report. Thor’s Hammer.”

Michaels said, “Here’s another little twist. I got a call from an NSA guy yesterday. He’s made an appointment to come see me today, in about an hour, my secretary tells me. He says it’s about this designer drug thing. I’m curious as to why.”

“What’s his name?” Jay asked. “The NSA guy?”

“Last name, George, first name, Zachary.”

Jay shrugged, but tapped it into his flatscreen’s manual keyboard. “Never heard of him, but I’ll scope him out.”

“John?”

“Doesn’t ring any bells with me, either,” he said. “I can check with my Pentagon contacts.”

“Why would the National Security Agency be interested in this?” Michaels asked. “Dope isn’t in their mission statement, is it?”

Howard said, “Mission statements aren’t worth the paper they are written on, sir. Everybody stretches them to fit whatever they need.”

Michaels smiled. He had done that himself more than a few times, and everybody here knew it.

“I suppose I can wait until the man gets here and ask him, but I somehow doubt he’ll be entirely forthcoming. Anybody have any thoughts I might pursue?”

“Overspent their budget and need a little extra cash?” Jay said. “Wouldn’t be the first time an agency sold drugs to make up a shortfall.”

“I thought Buddhists weren’t supposed to be cynical.”

“Nope, not according to Saji. You can be pretty much anything and still be a Buddhist. Cynical works.”

“Except, apparently, a flesh-eater,” Fernandez said.

“Well, actually, that, too. Some parts of the world, like Tibet, where food is scarce, meat is okay. As long as you do it with the right attitude.”

Fernandez laughed. “Yeah, I can see you praying over a Whopper, chanting and all. Bet they’d love that at BK.”

“You obviously have never been to a D.C. Burger King,” Jay said. “You could do a Hawaiian fire dance over your fries there and nobody would look twice.”

Fernandez laughed. He looked at Michaels and said, “Maybe one of their people is into drugs. Could be they are looking at some kind of internal security.”

Howard blew out a small sigh. “There’s another possibility that springs immediately to mind. Military applications.”

Michaels looked at him.

Howard continued. “If you have a compound that makes a man think he’s faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive, when you put a weapon in his hands and point him at an enemy, you could have something of military value, assuming there are controls in place.”

“Didn’t the Nazis try that kind of thing?”

“Yes, sir, and other armies have tried it since, from speed to steroids. Nobody has come up with something cheap and dependable enough yet, but if they did, it would certainly have useful applications.”

“Would you use such a thing, General?”

“If it was safe, if it was legal, and if it would give my people an advantage over an enemy? Bring more of them back alive? Yes, sir, in a heartbeat.”

“From what the DEA has given us, this stuff is neither safe nor legal.”

“But it might be made both. Legal is the easy part, if it’s useful enough. Safe might be harder, but it might be possible to make it so, and a lot of services would be willing to explore the possibility. And there are some armies with fewer scruples about testing things on their own people than we have.”

Jay said, “When did the U.S. military develop scruples, General? Remember The Atomic Café? ‘Here, men, put on these goggles when you look at the nuclear explosion. And don’t worry about that glowing dust if it gets on you, just brush it off, you’ll be fine.’ ”

“That was a long time ago,” Howard said.

“Yeah? What about Agent Orange in Vietnam, or the vaccines against nerve gas and biowarfare in Desert Storm? Or the new, improved, supposedly safe defoliants in Colombia?”

Before Howard could respond, Michaels said, “Give it a rest, Jay. We didn’t come to argue about the military’s checkered history. And whatever happened, we can hardly blame General Howard, can we?”

Jay shut up, having expressed his standing liberal attitude.

“All right. If there’s nothing further, I’ve got a ton of files to review.”

Forty-five minutes later, as Michaels sat developing eyestrain scanning computer files using his new sharp-goggles, supposedly designed to keep the letters so clear you wouldn’t get eyestrain, there was a tap at his door.

“Jay.”

“Boss. I uploaded what I could find on this George guy. I didn’t know if you’d get to it before he showed up.”

“Thanks, Jay, I appreciate it.”

After Jay left, Michaels found the file and read through it. Not much. There was a brief bio on Zachary George, place and date of birth, education, family, and shorter work history. Seemed Mr. George had been with the NSA since leaving college fifteen years ago, and the only references to his status there was a GS number only a grade below Michaels’s own before he was booted upstairs.

“Sir?” came the voice of his secretary over the com. “Your nine o’clock is here.”

Well, speak of the devil. “Show him in.”

Mr. George wasn’t particularly impressive upon first look. Average height, average weight, brown hair cut short but not too short, fair skin, and clothes that were standard midlevel bureaucrat: a gray suit expensive enough to look decent, not so expensive as to stand out in your memory. Black leather shoes. Put him in a room with four other people, and he’d be invisible. The guy in the comer who looked totally average? No, no, not him, the guy next to him.

Michaels stood and extended his hand. “Mr. George.”

“Commander. Good of you to see me.”

“Well, we like to keep relations good with our fellow agencies. Spirit of cooperation and all.”

“With all due respect, sir, bullshit. Almost anybody at my agency would cut the throats of everybody at yours if they thought it would gain them two brownie points at review time. And that’s pretty much my experience with all the security agencies I’ve dealt with.”

Michaels had to smile at that. “Don’t sugarcoat it that way, tell me what you really think.”

George returned the smile, and whatever he was up to, he was interesting.

“Have a seat.”

The NSA man sat, leaned back, crossed his ankle over his knee. “You figured out what it is I’m up to yet?”

“I have some thoughts. Why don’t you just tell me?”

George smiled again. It started on the right side and worked its way across his face. “Well, sir, I don’t want to make it too easy for you.”

“Much as I’d like to fence with you, I do have a couple of other things on my plate. Twenty questions isn’t high on the list. Talk or walk.”

George nodded, as if that was what he expected to hear. “Sir. You may be aware that there are qualities connected to this drug we spoke of that might be of use to certain of our military organizations.”

“That thought has crossed my mind.”

“As it happens, my agency has a… research facility engaged in studying certain pharmaceutical aids for possible use in… field operations.”

“Really?”

“More information is need-to-know, I’m sorry. Suffice it to say, we would be very interested in speaking with the chemist who has come up with this compound when you find him.”

“Why aren’t you talking to the DEA?”

George smiled. “We have. Frankly, we don’t think the DEA has much of a chance of catching the guy.”

“It is their area of expertise, isn’t it?”

“Then why did they come to you for help?”

That was a good point, but Michaels didn’t speak to it. Instead, he said, “And why didn’t you just go after the dealer on your own? NSA has a finger in just about every pie there is, don’t they?”

“True. And as a result, we are stretched somewhat thin. Net Force has had some excellent results in its short history, and continuing to speak frankly, your computer operatives are better than anybody else’s. Including ours. You probably know we’ve tried to, ah… recruit some of them.”

Michaels smiled. He knew. “No luck?”

“Oh, yes, plenty of luck… all bad. Your organization seems to engender a very high degree of loyalty.”

“We try to treat our people right.”

“So it seems. But the bottom line is, we think you’ll uncover this dealer before either the DEA or our own ops will, and we’d like you to keep us in mind when you do.”

Michaels leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers in front of his face for a second, then quickly put his hands down on the desk. He’d read somewhere that steepling your fingers was a sign of feeling superior, and while he certainly felt he had the upper hand in this discussion, he didn’t want to give anything away. He said, “Even if we did, what good would it do you? DEA has jurisdiction. We turn the information over to them, they make the arrest. End of our participation.”

George hesitated for a second, then said, “Of course. We wouldn’t want to usurp the DEA’s legal position. But a heads-up from you would allow us to, ah… begin negotiations with that agency from a position of knowledge. I’m sure we can convince them that the nation’s best interests would be served if we were allowed to question the criminal before he was locked away to await a long, drawn-out trial.”

Michaels smiled again. George would know this conversation was being recorded, and he didn’t want to say anything that sounded remotely illegal, but it was easy enough to read between the lines here. One developed a certain expertise in verbal fugue working in Washington. You said one thing, you meant something else, and you used expression or tone or gestures to make sure your listener got it. Tape recordings missed visual clues, and even videos couldn’t pick up between-the-lines stuff.

George’s fugue was simple: You give us the dope dealer, we rattle his cage real good and get what we want, then we turn him over to the DEA.

Interesting.

Michaels’s immediate gut reaction was to tell Mr. Zachary George to scuttle back to his NSA hole and not let the door hit him on the way out. But he had learned a thing or two about political survival in this town, and peeing in somebody’s corn flakes was not a smart move, especially when they had clout. NSA knew where a lot of bodies were buried, some figurative, some no doubt quite literally, and a direct confrontation, while it might be emotionally satisfying, was not the smart move. It wasn’t just Michaels, it was his agency, and he had to keep that in mind. A hard lesson, but one he was learning better and better all the time.

“Well, I suppose we could keep you in the loop,” Michaels finally said. “As a courtesy to a brother agency.” There was no real fugue here, he wasn’t going to give them squat, but he strived to leave that impression: Why, sure, we’ll scratch your back. What will you do for us?

George flashed his crooked smile again. “We would appreciate it, Commander. I’m certain we can return the favor in some small way.”

The meeting was over, George had said what he came to say, and it was but the matter of another minute to exchange good-byes before the man left.

Interesting, indeed. So the National Security Agency had some kind of clandestine operation involving drugs. Not really that big a surprise, when you thought about it. There were more sub-rosa operations going on at any security agency than you could shake a stick at, some well-known in the trade, some hinted at, and some surely buried so deep that nobody had happened across them yet. Net Force was fairly public, but they didn’t air certain articles of their laundry in public. And for sure the FBI had its own black-bag ops skulking about in the shadows. It was all part of the game. You couldn’t sneak up on somebody if you had to yell at him through a bullhorn and flash your warning lights. Even local police departments knew you sometimes had to use unmarked cars.

When and if they came across the drug dealer, then Michaels could decide whether to let NSA know about it. Probably they wouldn’t. Almost certainly not in time to do anything nasty with the knowledge. If NSA swooped in and grabbed the dope dealer from under the DEA’s nose and someone figured out that it was Net Force who gave the guy up, heads would roll.

Right now, it was a moot point anyhow. They didn’t have anything to give.

Before he could get back to his reading, the intercom cheeped again.

“Sir, Agent Brett Lee is here. He doesn’t have an appointment, but he seems, ah… quite insistent on seeing you.”

“Show him in.”

Lee arrived in a huff, glowering. “What the hell is Zach George doing here?!”

“Nice to see you, too, Mr. Lee.”

“You didn’t answer my question!”

“Nor do I intend to. What goes on in my office is none of your damn business.”

Lee stepped forward, as if he planned on doing something physical.

Michaels was tired and cranky. He came to his feet, ready to move. Go for it, pal. Let me show you what my wife taught me!

But Lee stopped, having apparently realized that throwing a punch at the head of Net Force might not be a smart career move.

Too bad. Michaels felt like decking him. This clown had no right storming into his office demanding anything.

“You and George are up to something, and I’m warning you, it better not get in our way! My boss will be calling yours,” he said, still red-faced and angry.

“I hope they have a pleasant conversation, Mr. Lee. But right now, I’m busy, so if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.” He sat and reached for his viewer.

In another second, Brett Lee was gone, leaving an angry wake behind him.

This was a very interesting development. Much more fun than reading reports on a dull morning.