Point of Impact

6

Michaels was almost home and wishing he was already there. What he had in mind was a nice, cold beer, his bare feet propped up to watch the news hour, maybe falling asleep on the couch. Might make a sandwich, if he felt up to it. He was tired. It had been a long day, made longer because it was dull and mostly uninteresting, and just as he was about to leave, they’d had a small crisis over some hacker who was flooding every church web page his autopost-bot could find with obscene pictures taken during an orgy in a Thai whorehouse.

There was a threat to the republic.

Graffiti had certainly changed from simple spray-paint tags on the fence next to the local drugstore when it went electronic, but it was still stupid. Who gained anything by such foolishness? Did the idiot posting think people were going to see the pictures and abandon their faith? Run screaming into the streets?

No, probably he just thought it was funny. Which right off indicated a somewhat retarded sense of humor.

The church fathers and mothers were not the least amused, of course, and there were plenty of them in high enough government positions to get Net Force’s attention in a hurry, including the president himself, and what was worse, a minor annoyance suddenly became a priority project.

Find whoever was doing this and stop him. Now.

Turning the other cheek didn’t apply when the cheek was below the waist, so it seemed.

The e-tagger called himself The Tasmanian Devil, and as it turned out, that was a major clue. Net Force ops traced the postings to the north coast town of Devonport, Tasmania, overlooking the cool waters of the Bass Strait. The tagger was clever, he’d found some meltware that got him through a lot of firewalls, but he slipped up. His anonymous reposter was six months out of date, and in this business, six months was ancient history. Jay Gridley’s team ran the cable sig to a house, informed the local constabulary, and they went round and knocked on the door. There they found a sixteen-year-old kid running a six-year-old IMac.

The boy was the son of a local minister, which probably explained a lot.

It had taken a while, and when it was done, Michaels called several heavyweights and told them they could rest easy, then left the building.

He was only a mile or so away from home when his virgil came to life.

He was tempted to ignore it, but it might be Toni, so he pulled the device from his belt and looked at the ID sig.

It was blank.

Michaels frowned. FBI com-watchware was supposed to circumvent any commercial ID blocker, so the only people who could reach out and touch him at this number without him knowing who they were would have to be somebody with federal-level blockers. He thumbed the connect button.

“Yes?”

“Commander Michaels, this is Zachary George, with the National Security Agency. Good evening. I hope I’m not interrupting your dinner?” The voice was smooth, even, just deep enough to sound authoritative. There was no picture transmission. The tiny screen was blank.

“Not yet. What can I do for you, Mr. George? Oops, can you hold on a second? I have another call.”

This was not true, but it gave Michaels a few seconds to key in a trace, which he did. He didn’t like not knowing to whom he was talking.

“Sorry about that. Go ahead.”

“Sir, we understand your agency is involved in a joint investigation with the DEA. We’d like to speak to you about this, if we could.”

“You can set up an appointment with my assistant, Mr. George. Although I’m not sure why NSA would have any interest in such a thing if it was so… and I wouldn’t confirm it over the com in any event.”

The incoming diode lit, that would be his trace. He tapped it, and a number scrolled up on the view screen, with an ID: George, Zachary, National Security Agency. Well. At least that much was true.

“I understand your reluctance, sir, and I will be happy to explain it all to you when I see you. This was just a courtesy call to let you know of our interest.” There was a pause. “Ah. I see you’ve traced the call and confirmed my ID. Excellent. I’ll be contacting your assistant for an appointment at your earliest convenience, sir. Thank you. Discom.”

He went away. Michaels frowned again. What did NSA want with the drug investigation? And why was their stealthware better than the FBI’s, to know they had been traced? He was going to have to talk to Jay about that. Maybe he could come up with a better program.

He dropped the virgil onto the seat and shook his head. Two more blocks to go.

Beer. Couch. Television. Soon…

Not that easy, of course. When he walked in, Toni was all aglow over her new hobby, so of course he had go into the garage and admire her toys.

Well, what the hell, it made her happy, that made him happy. With all the mood swings lately, anytime she was smiling was good, better make the most of it.

“… and this is the pin vise, see, you put the needle in here and twist it, like so, and it holds it. I glued a fishing weight — this lead ball here — onto the end to give it some heft, so when I stipple, I won’t have to use so much muscle.”

“Such a clever girl,” he said, smiling.

She smiled back at him. “And look here, this is the magnifier….”

He listened with half an ear, not being that interested in the artwork per se. When she ran down, he smiled again. She couldn’t drink, given her pregnancy and all, but maybe she could take some vicarious pleasure out of watching him enjoy a cold one.

“Not yet,” she said.

“Huh?”

“You need to work out first. Do your djurus. ”

Michaels wanted to say a bad word, but he wisely refrained. Toni wasn’t just his wife, after all, but also his silat teacher, and that was the hat she had just put on. If he tried to beg off, that would be bad.

“Oh, yeah, sure, that’s what I meant. After I work out.”

That didn’t fool her for a second, she was way too sharp, but hey, you had to give it a shot. Might catch her dozing.

She said, “It takes a few thousand repetitions to get the moves down, Alex. Latest scientific research I read says somewhere in the fifty- to one-hundred-hour range.”

He did the math mentally. “So, for eighteen djurus, I need to practice for nine hundred to eighteen hundred hours before I get them? At thirty minutes a day, that works out to about one hundred and eighty hours a year, so we’re talking about ten years?”

“Well, to get them really smooth, it’ll take maybe another five years.”

“I’ll be retired by then.”

“Good. Give you more time to practice.”

He laughed. “You are a slave driver.”

He went to the bedroom, shucked his street clothes, and put on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. He didn’t need any shoes since he was inside. He went back and sat down in the living room and began to do some basic yoga exercises Toni had showed him. Stretching was a luxury you wouldn’t get in a real fight, but for somebody over forty, it was better to do it before working out than not. A street fight might last ten seconds; a workout was gonna run thirty minutes to an hour, depending on how ambitious you were, and the older he got, the longer it took for a strain to heal.

As he was doing spinal twists, Toni wandered back in from the garage. “So, how was your day?”

Given that she had been his assistant and knew as much about his work as he did — more in some areas — it was natural for her to ask and just as natural for him to tell her.

“Dead calm,” he said. “Except for a flurry at the end with a kid hacker posting porno.”

“Oh, boy. And me here missing it all.”

“Well, there were a couple of things mildly interesting.” He told her about the drug stuff and about the cryptic call from the NSA guy.

She watched him, said, “Keep your back straight when you turn.” Then, “So what does Jay say about tracking down the dope dealer?”

“He said it was going to be a bitch. Apparently, drug sales over the Internet have always been a problem. Back in the early days, a lot of it was technically illegal but not prosecuted. ”

“How so?”

“Well, suppose you were seventy years old and living on social security in North Dakota or maybe south Texas. If you got sick and needed medicine, a prescription might cost, say, fifty bucks a bottle. Suppose you had to take two or three bottles a month for years. That could cut way into your food budget. So you’d hop a bus to Canada or to Mexico, where the same drug might cost sixteen or eighteen dollars. A local doc writes you a scrip based on your existing one from the U.S., and even with twenty bucks for that, you still come out way ahead in the long run.”

“Yeah?”

“So with the net and cheap home computers or access through cable TV or whatever, you don’t even have to take the bus ride. You log onto a site, order what you need, maybe answer a couple of questions over the wire to keep things more or less legal in Canada or Mexico, and your prescription shows up in your mailbox in a day or two, assuming you are dealing with a reputable outfit.”

“All the way down,” she said. “And keep your knees straight.”

He chuckled. “Being pregnant has made you mean, woman.”

“Oh, you think so? Just wait. So the DEA didn’t leap all over these folks for importing medicine illegally?”

“Ha! Think about that for a second. Here’s somebody’s little old granny on a pension who’s got a bad heart after working forty years teaching grammar school kids. Would you want to be the DEA guy in charge of arresting her for buying her nitroglycerin or whatever across the border to save enough money so she doesn’t have to eat dog food? Imagine how many federal prosecutors would want to hop on that career bandwagon. The press would swarm you like a cloud of starving locusts. Can’t you just see the headlines? ‘Grandma Busted for Heart Meds!’ ”

“It could be a political problem,” she said.

“Oh, yeah, it could. Then there are the drugs that are legal in other countries but not approved by the FDA, which, according to Jay, is another whole can of worms. Let’s say you want to take Memoril, one of the new smart drugs that improves your short-term memory something like seventy percent. The FDA is still out on that one, but it’s been legal in most of Europe for a couple of years. So, you log onto a web page in Spain, give them your credit card number, and order a hundred tabs. A few days later, you get a package from Scotland that looks like a birthday gift from your Uncle Angus, and inside is your drug, made by a pharmaceutical company in Germany. And all of this is perfectly legal in Spain, Scotland, and Germany, and it’s not their concern about laws in the U.S.

“If Customs happens to guess what’s in the package, they’ll confiscate it, because technically it is illegal, but it’s a gray area. If you went to Spain and got the stuff from a doctor there, you could bring it home for your own personal use. What’s the difference if it comes by mail or you carried it home in your pocket? It’s malum prohibitum—bad because it’s illegal — not malum in se— bad in itself.”

“When did you start speaking Latin?”

“Since I asked our lawyers about all this.”

“Watch your shoulder.”

“And then we get to the illegal stuff, which is easier to prosecute, assuming you know what it is and know for sure that it is illegal, which is the problem here. Big purple caps aren’t illegal in themselves.”

“Ipso facto,” she said.

“Talk to me about Latin,” he said. “So, there you have it. It’s really the FDA’s problem, only the boss made it mine. She probably owes somebody over there a favor, and this is it. And the NSA listens to everything on the air or over the wire, so I can understand how they know about it, but I don’t see why it should interest them. Fortunately, I have plenty of time to think about it, things being slow. I wish you were still working there. It would be more interesting. We all miss you at the office. Me most of all.”

“You’re loose enough. Up. Do your djurus. You’ll feel better after you work out.”

He came to his feet. That was true. He almost always did feel better afterward. It was the damned inertia that was so hard to overcome sometimes. Good that he had Toni here to prod him. Among her many other virtues.