Point of Impact

38

Michaels had just finished shaving and was getting dressed when there came a knock on the hotel room’s door.

It was Jay. He said, “FBI got a lead on Bershaw.”

Michaels waved Jay in as he continued to button his shirt. “Yes?”

Jay held up the flatscreen so Michaels could see the image thereon. A blond-haired man with glasses, dressed in casual sports clothes.

“They sure this is him?”

“Check the side-by-side.”

A magnified image of the blond appeared next to an identical-sized head shot of Tad Bershaw. Overlay grids appeared, numbers scrolled, and yellow highlight outlines pulsed over the features.

“The feeb surveillance matchware doesn’t worry overmuch about hair, eye, and skin coloring, it compares ear size and lobe shape, nose length and nares spacing, eye spacing and brow angle. Plus somatotypes, though those can be altered by shoe lifts and padding. This is him.”

“Where was this taken?”

“LAX, last night. The matchcam sent a sig to FBI HQ, but the priority tag imprint apparently was malfunctioning; instead of an A-1 stamp, the file was batched with a bunch of routine no-hurry PPOIs… that’s possible persons of interest. So they should have seen it last night, but nobody got around to scanning the file until a few minutes ago.”

“So much for infallible technology,” Michaels said. He sat on the bed, pulled on his socks. “So where did he go?”

“According to the gatecam at CrossCon Air, he took a nonstop red-eye to Washington, D.C. Plane landed around two A.M. this morning, eastern time. Dulles matchware showed him getting off the jet, but that’s the only image they got. FBI checked the rental agencies, he didn’t get a car, and they are talking to bus and limo drivers and cabbies. No hits yet. From the passenger list, they know he’s using the name Raymond Selling.”

“Like the marathon runner?”

“Who?”

“Selling is the fastest long-distance man in the country, probably the world.”

“I don’t follow the sport. Running for twenty-six miles hurts me just to think about it.”

“Why Washington?”

Jay shrugged. “Why not? Maybe he’s got an old girlfriend there, somebody he used to run with. Easier to disappear in a big city than a small one.”

“Well, maybe we’ll bump into him when we get home.”

“I hope not,” Jay said. “If he’s got any of that dope left, he’s not somebody I want to meet face-to-face.”

Michaels tied his shoes, stood, and reached for his sport coat, which hung on the bathroom door. “What time does our flight leave?”

“Couple hours. Be back in Washington about seven P.M. Five-hour flight, add three for the time zones.”

“Well, let’s go have breakfast and enjoy the L.A. sunshine. It’ll probably be raining when we get back to the East Coast.”

Jay closed the flatscreen, and they started for the door. He still had a worried look.

Michaels said, “Something else?”

“Yeah, a major problem. In-house Security says somebody got past the Net Force firewalls and into the mainframe last night.”

“I thought that wasn’t possible.”

“It’s not, for most people. I could do it. And if I could, some others could. A handful.”

“Was anything damaged or stolen?”

“Fortunately not. The file protection programs make that real hard without the encryption keys. Even I might have trouble wrecking any big part of the system from outside. Security says the probe rode in on a GAO line and managed to get into the personnel files. It didn’t damage them, they are read-only for the GAO auditor, who, by law, we have to let in. Somebody had to know about that to use it.”

“Who would know?”

“Ex-programmer, maybe ex-ops, FBI, GAO. Maybe even Net Force.”

“Really?”

“We’ve had people quit. Fired a few, too. Programmers always leave themselves a back door when they are building secure systems. We vetted ours, and I had our people checking, but the guy who builds it can hide a few things when you are talking millions of lines of code.”

“So what now?”

“We’ll run down all ex-employees with enough skill to pull it off. My hope is that it’ll turn out to be some kid hacker counting coup. But that wouldn’t be the way smart money bets.”

“Mm. Stay on it, Jay. In the meantime, let’s don’t keep General Howard waiting.”

On the way to the elevator, something about what Jay said bothered him. He couldn’t quite nail it down as they stepped into the lift. Jay pushed the button for the lobby; they were on the sixteenth floor.

As the elevator descended, pinging as it passed each floor, Michaels said, “That intrusion last night. Do we know where it came from?”

“Not really,” Jay said. “It bounced off a couple of satellites. We were able to track it as far as the West Coast, that’s it.”

Michaels thought about that for a second. “Why would anybody capable of breaking into a secure system like Net Force’s mainframe want to look at our personnel records?”

“If that’s what they planned to do, boss, rather than just stumbling into those records by accident.”

“Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume they meant to go there.”

Jay shrugged. “Who, where, what, when, why,” he said. “Find out if somebody works there, what they do exactly, how long. Maybe how much somebody gets paid.”

“You skipped one,” Michaels said. “Find out where somebody lives.”

“Yeah, that could be.”

Michaels felt a sudden chill frost him.

Jay said, “I see where you’re going here, but it’s probably just a coincidence.”

“What if it isn’t? What if it’s Bershaw? What if he is looking to even the score for the death of his friend?”

“That’s a reach, boss. Guy who pulled the trigger on Drayne is dead.”

“Bershaw wouldn’t know that. He went over the side of the hill as soon as the shooting started.”

The elevator reached the ground floor and opened. The two men stepped out and walked toward the hotel’s coffee shop.

“He could have heard or watched news reports about it,” Jay offered.

“You were on CNN’s coverage. The FBI and DEA weren’t saying much. Nobody said who shot Drayne, only that he was killed. And who was getting most of the credit for finding the drug dealers?”

“Uh, that’d be us,” Jay said.

“Yes. And there were only three of us there: you, me, and General Howard.”

“Still a reach,” Jay said. “It doesn’t necessarily follow.”

“Bershaw escapes. Somebody on the West Coast gets into Net Force’s personnel files within a few hours. Bershaw disappears, then shows up on a flight to Washington. I don’t like it. If you were him and you were pissed off because somebody had murdered your friend, blasted him while he stood there with his hands up, and you wanted to do something about it, who would you go after?”

Jay didn’t say anything.

“Yeah. That’s what I thought. The man in charge, who was right there on the scene. You could be waiting for him when he got home. Only thing is, Toni is already there.”

He pulled his virgil, hit the voxax, and said, “Call home.”

The virgil made the call.

After five rings, the message recorder came on. “Hello. You’ve reached area code two-oh-two, three-five-seven…”

“Toni, if you are there, pick up or call me back ASAP.”

Michaels felt a sense of panic threaten to take him as he ended the call. He tapped the resend button and selected five-minute intervals, to repeat until a connection was made or he shut it off.

“She’s not answering.”

“She could be asleep. Outside watering the plants. A dozen things,” Jay said.

John Howard stood in the short line of people waiting to get into the coffee shop. He saw Jay and Michaels approaching, smiled at them. Michaels didn’t feel like smiling back.

Howard caught it. “What’s the matter, Commander?”

Michaels ran through it, feeling more and more nervous as he laid it out.

Howard said, “Jay’s probably right, it’s probably nothing. But just to be on the safe side, how about I have a couple of my people drop by and check.”

“I would appreciate that.” Being all the way across the country made him feel helpless. Once he knew Toni was okay, he’d feel a lot better.

Howard looked at Michaels a moment longer. “One more thing, Commander,” he said. “Jay’s the one who got all the attention on TV. It might not be a bad idea for him to get hold of Saji and tell her to get somewhere safe.”

Michaels nodded, but Jay was already pulling out his virgil. A few seconds later, Saji answered, and everyone relaxed a little.

Howard pulled his own virgil and spoke quietly into it, muted the sound so he had to hold it to his ear like a mobile phone to hear the reply. When he was done, he turned to Michaels and said, “Somebody will be there in twenty minutes. They’ll call you back or have Toni call you.”

Michaels nodded. “Thank you. Call home yourself, John, just to be sure, then we might as well go have breakfast.” But until he heard from Toni, he wasn’t the least bit interested in eating.

It was almost noon, and Toni was in the kitchen and about to fix herself some lunch when there came a terrific crash, as if a truck had slammed into the house.

She knew who the intruder was as soon as he came through the side door — a door he opened by kicking it, smashing the lock, and almost tearing it from its hinges. Splinters of shattered wood flew everywhere, and the door slammed against the wall hard enough for the knob to break the spring stop and punch a hole in the Sheetrock.

She didn’t recognize him, but it had to be the drug guy who had escaped. His hair and eyebrows were bleached and his skin color was dark, but it was him.

As she stood there in her nightgown and ratty bathrobe, she knew she had only one advantage: What he saw was a small, pregnant woman who couldn’t possibly be a threat to him.

And in truth, she wasn’t much of a threat. Any strenuous activity could cause her to lose the baby. A full-out hand-to-hand fight would certainly do it. Even if her skill at silat was enough to overcome his drug-induced strength, she couldn’t risk applying it. She had to fall back on one of the first principles of her art: deception.

So she played it as he would expect: “Who are you? What do you want?”

“Alexander Michaels,” he said.

“He’s not here.”

“I figured that. He’s still in Los Angeles, isn’t he?”

She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t make it too easy.

He grinned, a maniacal, over-the-edge expression. There was a wooden coat tree by the door. He grabbed it, turned it sideways, brought his knee up and the rack down, and snapped it over his thigh as if it were a twig. He dropped the broken halves. “Don’t fuck with me, lady, I’m not in the mood, okay?”

It wasn’t hard to act afraid. She had never seen anybody do anything like that before. The man was a scarecrow missing half his stuffing, and no way should he be able to do what he had just done.

“He… he won’t be home until tonight. His flight gets here around s-s-seven o’clock.”

Bershaw — that was the name Alex had told her — grinned his mad smile again.

“Ah. Good. That will give us plenty of time to get acquainted. What’s your name?”

“Toni,” she said.

“Wife or girlfriend?”

“W-w-wife.”

“Well, don’t worry, Toni, I’m not gonna hurt you.” He looked at her. “Got a bun in the oven. How far along are you?”

“Five months.”

“Congratulations. You do what I tell you, you and the kid will live to get to know each other. You can call me Tad. Why don’t you take me on a tour of the place, since we have some hours to kill?”

“Okay.”

The com chirped.

“Don’t answer it,” he said.

Toni’s thoughts ran at top speed, banging into each other as she tried to keep them straight. She had to get word to Alex somehow. This man had come here to kill him, she was certain of that, and he might or might not kill her and the baby. She had to go along with whatever he wanted until she could figure out a way to stop him.

Tad followed Michaels’s wife as she led him through the condo, where he made sure there weren’t any surprises waiting for him. It was an okay enough place, nothing special, and there were some pictures of her and her husband here and there, other images of their families, easy to see the resemblance in those.

Every five minutes or so, the phone would ring, and he’d just shake his head at her. He didn’t want her talking to anybody, especially her husband, and maybe giving him some secret code kind of clue.

In the garage was an old Chevrolet convertible, the hood up, and parts of the engine laid out on a workbench.

“Very nice,” he said. He walked over and put one hand on the car’s fender, rubbed it lightly. “Your old man is into cars.”

“Yes. He rebuilds them. It’s his hobby.”

Tad needed to work off some of the Hammer’s bubbling and insistent energy, and while he was horny again, a pregnant woman didn’t do it for him. He looked around for a pry bar or a hammer. A little drum work on the Chevy would do fine. He’d be sure to let Mr. Michaels see his project car was gonna need a lot more effort to bring back to cherry condition before he did the same deconstruction on him.

He saw a ball peen hammer hung on pegs over the workbench and went to get it. The Hammer working a hammer, he liked the symmetry in that.

But when he got to the bench, he noticed something else. Little pieces of ivory, needles, a microscope. Scrimshaw.

“Your husband has a lot of time on his hands,” he said. He nodded at the bench. “Cars and art. That’s when he’s not having guys murdered.”

“My husband doesn’t have people murdered,” she said. She glared at him.

He smiled. She had balls, this pregnant woman did. She’d seen what he could do, and she knew he could kill her with a backhand, but here she was defending her old man anyway. Tad had never heard his mother ever say a kind word about his father. “That fucking asshole,” was about as good as it ever got. Give Toni here a point for loyalty.

“Tell that to my friend Bobby,” he said. “He was standing in the middle of the road with his hands in the air, and the feds gave him an instant craniotomy. Blam! Blew his head apart.”

“My husband didn’t order that. Net Force does computer investigation, they aren’t field operatives on drug busts. And they’d never shoot a prisoner, anyway.”

“Yeah, well, he was there, I saw him on the evening news. He should have stayed at his desk on this one.”

He twirled the hammer in his fingers, was about to go do the car, when he saw the capsule. He looked at it, saw that it was open under the microscope, and the powder emptied out. He put the ball peen hammer down and moved to look.

He shook his head. “That fucking Bobby. He was too smart for his own good sometimes.” He turned to look at her. “You know about this? Your old man talk to you about his work?”

“Yes. Sometimes.”

“Bobby was a genius, you know. Certifiable, high MENSA grade, smarter than almost everybody. Even when I’m Hammering and all my edges are sharp, Bobby could still think circles around me. He had contempt for the feds, ’cause of his father. You don’t know about that part, but his father was with the FBI for like a hundred years. He and Bobby didn’t get along. So Bobby left clues in every fifth cap: little riddles, each one different.” He waved at the cap. “That’s how they found him, isn’t it? Some geek at your husband’s computer farm turned the machines loose on this and figured it out, didn’t he?”

She didn’t say anything.

“C’mon, you might as well tell me. I can’t kill him any deader than dead, can I?”

“Please don’t kill him.”

“Bobby might have fucked up and gotten caught because he underestimated his opposition — you tend to do that when you are always smarter than them — but he should be alive. Somebody has got to pay for that.”

He was really ready to pound the car now, and he reached for the tool to do it with, when the doorbell rang.

“Don’t answer it,” Bershaw said. “They’ll go away.” He considered it for a second. “No, maybe we ought to see who it is.”

The security cam Alex had installed showed two men in uniform, with holstered pistols. Net Force troopers.

“Cops?”

“Net Force Security.”

“I thought your husband was a desk jockey.”

“He is, but they have some special teams for certain situations.”

“Yeah, like executing drug dealers.”

The two at the door rang the bell again. And again. They weren’t going away, and she wondered why they were here. The missed phone calls, maybe.

Toni felt a surge of hope, but she quickly quelled the feeling. The two men at her door were in immediate danger. Bershaw was a killer, and he had a drug-driven rage that couldn’t be easily stopped. A wrong word, and he might go off like a bomb.

“Get rid of them, some good reason to go away, and you better not give them a fucking hint,” Bershaw said. “You do, they die, you and the kid die, and I might get bored waiting here alone for hubby to come home, but that’s how it will go down.”

“I understand.”

Bershaw stood behind her and to one side, out of sight, as Toni opened the door. He didn’t have a weapon that she could see, but he didn’t really need one.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Michaels. We’re sorry to bother you, but Commander Michaels has been trying to contact you.”

“Oh. Oh, yes, I’m sorry about that. I was working out, doing my aerobics, and then I took a long hot bath to relax.” She was in her bathrobe. “I turned off the ringer and let the computer take messages.”

“Yes, ma’am. If you would call Commander Michaels at your convenience, that would be very helpful.”

“I will. I’m going to go take a nap, and I’ll call him when I wake up. Sorry to have caused you any trouble.”

“No trouble at all, ma’am. Have a good day.”

When they were gone, Bershaw said, “That was all right, except for the part about calling your husband. Now you’ll have to do that. But I’m gonna write a script for you. You will make the call, and you will say exactly what I tell you to say, not one word more or less, you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good. We have a little time to work on it, since you are going to take a nap and all. Tell me about your family, brothers, sisters, like that. I’ve seen some of the pictures, so don’t lie to me. If I think you’re lying, I’ll just kill you, okay?”

Toni felt her heart pounding harder than usual. He was being very cautious, and she might not get another chance to warn Alex. She had to hope he would get the message she had been able to send.

They had almost finished breakfast when Michaels’s virgil announced an incoming call. He had it off his belt and thumbed to receive in two seconds. “Yes?”

“Sir, this is Chris Carol, military ops. We just spoke to your wife at your house. She seems fine, sir.”

Michaels blew out a sigh. Thank God!

“Did she say why she wasn’t answering the phone?”

“Yes, sir. She was taking a bath, sir, and had the ringer turned off.”

He shook his head. Of course. It had to be some piddly thing like that.

“We’ll remain in the area on surveillance, sir, as per General Howard’s orders.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Ask Toni to call me as soon as she can, will you?”

“She says she will call you, sir, after she has a nap. She must be tired from her workout.”

“What? What did you say?”

“Sir?”

“About her being tired?”

“Sir, I just assumed she might be. She said she had been doing her aerobics, before her bath, sir.”

Michaels felt a shard of icy steel stab deep into his bowels. He looked at John Howard. “He’s there,” he said. “He’s got Toni.”