Point of Impact

11

The woman was young, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three, and dressed in jeans, a black T-shirt, and running shoes, nothing that unusual about her appearance. She was nobody you’d cross the street to get a better look at, but nobody you’d cross the street the other way to avoid because she was hideous, either. Average-looking.

The woman approached an automated bank teller, put in her card, and stood back. Apparently there was some malfunction. The woman smiled, then, without preamble, drove her fist through the teller’s vid screen. Shattered glass flew every which way, and even before it finished falling, the woman was grabbing at a garbage basket on the sidewalk. She picked up the basket and began hammering at the teller, smiling all the while.

Alex Michaels leaned back in the chair and said, “There’s something you don’t see every day.”

Jay Gridley said, “Actually, it happens quite a lot, according to Bureau agents I’ve talked to. Although the level of violence is usually much less. People tend to spit at the screen or camera, slam it with the edge of their fist once or twice, even kick at it. Sometimes they scratch the glass with their car keys. Nobody’s ever seen one quite this… ah… active before.”

“What happened after she trashed the videocam recording it?”

Jay said, “According to witnesses, the destruction continued until she really got pissed off, whereupon she somehow managed to rip the machine free of its mountings, scattering several thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills all over the sidewalk. A small riot ensued as concerned citizens sought to… ah… recover the money for the bank.”

The boss laughed. “I bet. How much of it was turned in?”

“About fifteen percent.”

“Well, at least there are still a few honest citizens left. So we have another drug berserker who destroyed a bank machine. Why is this more special than the others?”

“The woman is Mary Jane Kent.”

“Related to the arms and chemical companies Kents?”

“Yes, sir. She’s the secretary of defense’s daughter.”

“Oh, my.”

“Slumming in those clothes,” Jay said. “Way I hear it, she could paste her diamonds all over herself and show less skin than in jeans and a T-shirt. With enough left over to make a cape.”

“The family has a bit of money.”

Jay nodded. There was an understatement. The Kent family had become modestly rich during the Spanish Civil War in the ’30s, running guns into Spain via Portugal. They made out like bandits in World War II, and had done quite well in assorted revolutions and border wars, since. The men in the family generally took turns managing the family fortune and tended to became ambassadors, cabinet officers, or U.S. senators; the women did charity work, ran foundations, and tended to marry badly. Every now and then, a couple of the scions would switch roles, and the girl would manage the company while the boy ran a foundation.

Certainly, the rich had their problems, too, but Jay couldn’t feel too sorry for somebody with half a gazillion dollars tucked away waiting for them to come of age. It was one thing to start poor and earn your way to luxury, another thing to be born with a platinum spoon in your mouth.

He said, “She beat the crap out of four of LAPD’s finest before she ran out of steam. A passing doctor happened along during the struggle and sedated her. Hit her with a hypo full of enough Thorazine to knock out a large horse, according to the reports, and it slowed her down, but not completely. She isn’t talking about what drug she took or where she got it, but she was apparently on a shopping trip, and she used her credit card until it maxed out. That was why the bank machine wouldn’t give her any cash.”

“Ah,” the boss said. He thought about it for a few seconds, then said, “Just how much does a billionaire’s daughter have to spend to max out a credit card?”

“Take a look.”

He handed Michaels a ROM tag, and the boss thumbed the pressure spot and looked at the number that appeared on the tag.

“Good Lord!”

“Amen. Enough to buy a yacht and an island to sail it to,” Jay said. “I got most of the credit card company’s tags. If we can backtrack her and find out how and where she spent her money, the DEA guy you sicced on me says they are willing to put more bodies on the street to check everything out. It’s not much, but it’s what we have.”

Michaels nodded. He looked at the tag again.

“Never fear, boss, Smokin’ Jay Gridley is on the case.” He gave Michaels a two-finger Cub Scout salute and headed for his office.

Michael’s com chirped, and the caller-ID signal told him Toni was trying to reach him. He grabbed the headset. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“How’s Guru doing?”

“Doing okay,” Toni said. “Doctor says she’s gonna be all right.”

“Good. I know you’re relieved to hear that.”

“Yes, I am. Anyway, I’ll be catching a shuttle back this afternoon. I should be home when you get there.”

“Great. You want me to stop and pick up something for supper?”

“Nah, we can just call the Chinese place when you get home, if that’s okay.”

“If you promise not to get the octopus/squid special again,” he said.

She laughed. “I get cravings, what can I say? It’s part of the pregnancy.”

“Me eating in the other room is going to be part of the pregnancy, too, you keep slurping that slimy stuff down.”

She laughed again. “How’s work?”

“The usual. Got a lead on that drug thing we talked about. It’s not much, but Jay is running with it. Other than that, it’s pretty quiet around here. A yawn in the park. Be nice if things picked up a little.”

“Careful what you wish for. I miss you.”

“I miss you, too. Fly safe.”

“I will. See you tonight.”

She hung up, and he blew out a relieved sigh. With all the pregnancy stuff, having her silat teacher kick off would have been another brick on Toni’s load, and she didn’t need any more weight right now.

A nice, quiet evening at home with Chinese take-out would be fine by him.

“Sir. You have a call from Richard Sharone on line five.”

Michaels shook off his daydream of supper and Toni. “Who is Richard Sharone, and why should I talk to him?”

“He’s the president and CEO of Merit-Wells Pharmaceuticals.”

Michaels blinked. Why would the head honcho at one of the world’s largest drug companies be calling him?

Oh.

Michaels stared at the com’s headset. He might not be the sharpest needle in the package, but he wasn’t completely dull. What did Net Force have to do with drugs? Nothing, until the DEA asked for their help with this esoteric dope they were trying to find. First it was NSA, now the overlord of a drug company. Man. Somebody wanted this stuff bad.

Probably get a call from the Food and Drug Administration next.

“This is Commander Alex Michaels. How can I help you, Mr. Sharone?”

But he was pretty sure he already knew.

John Howard stood on the line at the firing range, ready to start. He said, “Eight meters, single. Go.”

A three-hundred pound crazed biker blinked into existence eight meters down the alley. The biker held a tire iron, and he lifted it and charged right at Howard, no hesitation.

Fast for a fat man, he was, too.

Howard slipped his right hand under his Net Force windbreaker, cleared the jacket, caught the smooth wooden grips of his side arm, and pulled the weapon from the custom-made Fist paddle holster. He brought the Phillips & Rodgers Model 47 Medusa up and shoved it one-handed toward the biker as if punching him.

The biker was less than four meters away now, three, two…

Howard pulled the trigger, once, twice…

The gun roared and bucked hard.

Two rounds hit the biker five feet away. The running man collapsed and slid to a stop inches from Howard’s spit-shined, patent-leather-bright shoes.

Cut that a little close, John.

The biker disappeared, like turning off a lamp.

Which, in essence, was what happened. The hologram was, after all, just a particularly coherent brand of light. But the computer cams that watched it all calculated the flight path of Howard’s two.357 slugs as they zipped down range, and having decided they would have struck vital areas on a real human target, gave him the ersatz victory.

Score one for the good guys.

Howard reholstered the handgun and looked at the score screen. He saw the image of the biker there and noted the pulsing red spots where the bullets hit. The one marked with #1 was in the heart, the #2 round was slightly higher and to the right. With the best.357 Magnum or.40 rounds, one-shot knockdowns hovered right about 94 to 96 percent with a solid body hit, as good as a handgun got — and it didn’t even have to be to a fatal area. The first shot would have done the trick, and probably a real attacker would be dead or well on the way there by now. Dead wasn’t the thing, though, it was the stopping power that was important. You could shoot somebody in the leg with a.22 and it might nick a big blood vessel and eventually kill him. Thing was, eventually wouldn’t do you much good if the guy kept coming, beat you to a pulp with his tire iron or crowbar, then went home and died in a few days, a few hours, even a few minutes. No good at all. When you shot somebody, you wanted them to fall down right now; anything less was bad. They lived or died, that was something to worry about later. You didn’t have time to ponder on it in the moment.

Handguns were lousy weapons for instant stops, relatively speaking. A shotgun was better, and a good rifle better still. He smiled as he remembered the old story about a civilian who carried a handgun. A friend asked him, “Why do you have a pistol? Are you expecting trouble?” And the guy answered, “Trouble? No. If I was expecting trouble, I’d be carrying a rifle.”

Then again, it was kind of hard to slip a scoped.308 sniper rifle under your Gore-Tex windbreaker. And the first rule of a gunfight was…

Come on, John. You gonna shoot or stand here day-dreaming?

“Reset,” he said.

The screen went blank.

“Ten meters, double. Thirty-second delay. Go.”

This time, the scenario computer gave him two attackers. One looked like a pro wrestler holding a long knife, the other an NFL lineman with a baseball bat. They charged.

Howard drew, gave the wrestler two, shifted his hand, and gave the lineman two. The last of the four cartridges in the revolver left the barrel at about the same time the lineman got within bat range.

Both attackers fell.

Howard thumbed the cylinder latch open with his right, pointed the gun at the ceiling, and used his left hand to slap the extractor rod hard enough to punch the empties out of the chambers. The hulls fell to the range floor. He pulled a speed loader with six more cartridges from his left windbreaker pocket. Reloading the P&R was trickier than doing it with his old S&W. There were spring-loaded clips in each chamber of the black-Teflon-coated P&R, to allow for using various calibers — the thing would shoot.380s, 38s, 38 Specials, and 9 mms, as well as.357 Magnums — and you had to keep the extractor partway out to make the speed loader work, and even so, it was slower than the Smith was.

Still, if you couldn’t get the job done with six, you probably weren’t going to be able to get it done at all.

He managed to get all six of the reloads into the chambers. He dropped the speed loader on the floor, hit the cartridges with the heel of his right hand a couple of times to get them fully seated, closed the cylinder, then brought the gun up into a two-handed grip as the third attacker appeared.

The attacker was a naked woman with a samurai sword.

Well. Somebody was getting creative with their programming. He wondered who Gunny had doing the scenarios. He’d have to ask.

Since he was ready when the woman came to life, he had plenty of time. He lined the front sight up on her nose and fired one round.

One to the head was plenty.

He looked at the score screen. Three for three. Not bad for an old man.

Gunny’s voice came over the intercom, easy to hear with the smart earphones that kept loud noises out but let normal sounds in. “General, we have a troop of Explorer Scouts coming by in a few minutes. Okay if they watch you shoot?”

Before he could respond, Gunny said, “That’s ’cause we want to show them how not to do it.”

“You want to come out here and let me show you how it is done, Sergeant?”

Gunny chuckled, and Howard had to smile. That was less than an idle threat. Gunny could shoot the pants off Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, and John Wesley Hardin all at the same time, either hand, and you pick it. He was outstanding with anything you could pick up and fire. Came from being a full-time range officer and daily practice. Too bad Gunny didn’t want to compete anymore. They could use him in the annual shoot against the other services. He claimed he was too old, and as he was only three or four years past Howard’s age. Howard didn’t much like hearing that.

Howard himself was lucky if he got to the range three or four times a month. Usually Julio came with him, but with a new baby at home, he was doing father duty, and that cut into his practice time.

Julio was about to learn that a baby changed all kinds of priorities.

Gunny said, “Thirty seconds for a reload? Two-plus seconds to take out two goblins you started halfway to Los An-ju-leeez? Lord, we could have gone out for dinner and a movie and gotten back before you finished. I don’t guess you’re about to threaten the Ragin’ Cajun’s records anytime soon, sir.”

Howard chuckled at that. The Ragin’ Cajun was Jerry Miculek, a pro shooter who’d set the modem revolver record a dozen or so years ago, down in Mississippi. Using an eight-shot.38 Special revolver, he put all eight rounds on a target in one second flat. He also fired at four different targets, two rounds each, and hit them all just 0.06 of a second slower. And with a six-shooter, he was was able to put six hits on one target, reload, and put six more there in just over three seconds. By those standards, thirty seconds was a couple of eons.

Howard had had his revolver fitted with a set of grips designed by Miculek, but it hadn’t helped that much.

Of course, more than sixty-five years before Miculek, the legendary Ed McGivern fired five shots from a 1905 Smith & Wesson Hand Ejector Military and Police.38 into a playing card in a mere 0.4 of a second.

No way Howard could ever get close to any of that, not if he practiced every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Still, for his purposes, he was good enough for government work. Tests had shown that a fair-to-middling shooter took between a second and a second and a half to draw a handgun from concealment and get a shot off. If a man with a tire tool or a knife was inside twenty or so feet and was in a hurry, he’d get to you before you could shoot him. If he was closer than that, and your gun was in the holster, best you make some space or be ready for hand-to-hand to hold him off long enough to draw your piece.

Of course, if Howard went somewhere expecting trouble, he was sure going to be carrying a rifle. Maybe a submachine gun, and it would be pointed in the general direction of any trouble, too.

Then again, he had gotten shot when he hadn’t been expecting it, so this was a skill he needed to hone.

“Don’t forget to stop and have your ring reprogrammed on the way out, sir.”

Howard nodded. All Net Force guns were smart technology now. You wore a ring with a code that changed every month or so. If somebody not wearing a properly coded ring picked up a Net Force weapon and tried to use it, it wouldn’t fire. Howard still didn’t trust it, but so far there hadn’t been any failures of the system, at least not with his people. It was a good idea in theory, but if one of his team ever pointed a gun that didn’t go bang! when it was supposed to, there would be hell to pay, and he’d be leading the devil’s collection team himself, assuming it wasn’t his gun that malfunctioned and got him killed.

“Reset,” he said. “Seven meters, one.”

Make it a little more challenging, this time…

“Go!”

He reached for his gun.