Net Force (18 page)

    He pulled the Viper to a halt on a long and relatively straight stretch of the new Thailand-Burma Highway. A reporter stood next to a smoldering limo with a bunch of cops, making notes on a little flatscreen. Jay knew the guy slightly; he was a distant cousin a couple of times removed.

    “Hey, Chuan, how’s it goin’?”

    “Jay? What are you doing here? Something I ought to know about?”

    “Nah, just cruising.”

    The other man looked around, seeming to shift his gaze as he blinked. “Ah, your highway metaplay. I see you’re still driving that bomb on wheels. I disremember what it’s called, some kind of lizard or snake?”

    “Viper. It gets me there.” He looked at the limo. “So who’s the cookie in the shake-and-bake portable oven there?”

    “A mess, isn’t it? Behold, our beloved Prime Minister Sukho. This is what’s left of his career, anyhow. Somebody got past the OS security wards on his personal system, and then became very clever with the nasty pictures hidden therein. Gave them to my bosses. My service somehow managed to accidentally send a pair of them out with the feed-or so the editors say. I know a few would have happily done it on purpose.

    “So, on the sports screen, instead of the photo of the Indonesian football team winning the World Soccer Cup in Brazil, we got our beloved Prime Minister being attended to by an enthusiastic professional girl well known in Bangkok as Neena the Cleaner. And two jumps later, on the international screen, instead of Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamad doing a nice ribbon-cutting with a bunch of dignitaries for a new rec facility at Cyberjaya, we gave our viewers Sukho on a big round bed with two other very naked Bangkok working girls seeing what will go where. Bet those pix raised an eyebrow or two at the old water cooler during break.” He smiled. “Hey, you ever been to Cyberjaya? In RW, I mean?”

    His cousin was talking about a nine-mile-by-thirty-mile zone in Malaysia called the Multimedia Super Corridor. Begun in ‘97, the MSC stretched south from Kuala Lumpur, and included at the south end a new international airport and a new federal capital, Putrajaya. “Once,” Jay said. “I spent a few days there a year or so back, a real-time seminar on the new graphic platform. Unbelievable place.”

    “They say that’s where CyberNation’s programmers came from.”

    “Yeah? I hadn’t heard that. I heard nobody knew where they came from.”

    “Rumors.” He shrugged. “So much for the sordid tale of a political career gone south. I gotta get back and file my story.”

    “Not a lucky man, your Prime Minister.”

    “Oh, he’s
real
lucky-thing is, it’s all
bad
. This ain’t America where the politicians can get away with such things, you know. It don’t play with the family vote over here. Plus it is well known that Sukho’s wife’s brother was one of the Secret Bandit Warlords before he died. Word is, the wife’s still got a couple SBW nephews out in the jungle who would just as soon cut you in half as look at you. The Prime Minister’s wife is in big shame over this. Some pictures were of her, taken from a hidden camera, and I bet she didn’t know about ‘em.” He waved at the burned-out limo. “I was Sukho, I’d tap my Swiss accounts and retire someplace in a galaxy far, far away. And I’d do it under another name, and with fifty grand’s worth of false teeth, hair dye, and plastic surgery, while I was at it.”

    “I’d have thought his computer security would have been better than normal, given what he had to hide and him being a PM and all.”

    “Yeah, you’da thought so. My guess is, next guy selling a pick-proof OS around here is gonna make a fortune.”

    “Here and everywhere else.”

    “I scan that. See you, Jay.”

    “Later, Chuanny.”

    After his cousin was gone, Jay considered the situation. So Thailand was going to get a new Prime Minister. That might or might not have much effect on the world, but he had to figure that whoever was doing this rascal had picked his targets carefully. To what end, Jay didn’t know, but his gut feeling was that it was a real bad end.

    He better get back himself. The boss would want to know about the newest developments.

    On the way, however, something else caught his attention.

    Holy
shit
!”

    

    “Alex? I think you better see this.”

    Michaels looked up and saw Toni in his doorway.

    “In the conference room,” she added.

    He followed her. The big-screen viewer was on, CNN.

    A newscaster was doing a voice-over as images flashed across the large screen.

    “Bombay, India-known by the locals as Mumbai-is the capital of Maharashtra and
the
major economic power of western India. Located on the shore of the Arabian Sea, it is a city steeped in culture. From the Victorian façades of the British Raj, to the tourist ghetto of Colaba, to the pulse-of-the-city Fort, eighteen million people call Mumbai home. Most of them are dirt-poor.”

    There was an aerial shot of the city. Stock footage.

    Michaels glanced at Toni and raised an eyebrow. Why did she want him to see a documentary on India?

    “This is the sidebar,” she said. “Wait a second and they’ll get back to the main story.” She sounded grim.

    “Modernization has brought at least some of Bombay into the twenty-first century,” the newscast continued. “And modernization has reared its ugly head here today.”

    The image shifted. Two buses had crashed together in an intersection. One of the red double-deckers lay on its side; the other was tilted, resting against the back of a fruit truck. Some kind of yellow-orange melons were scattered and shattered all over the street. Bodies were laid out along the narrow street’s narrower sidewalks. Rescuers ran to the buses, pulling more dead or injured from the wrecks. A man covered with blood wandered in front of the camera, yelling something over and over. A small boy sat on the curb, staring at a woman lying next to him who was obviously dead.

    “All over the city, computer-controlled traffic signals apparently turned green at the same instant.”

    Another image. A major intersection with at least a dozen cars melded together by impacts. The cars were on fire, and an explosion rocked the scene, knocking the cameraman down. Somebody cursed in English: “Shit, shit,
shit
!”

    Here was a high-angle helicopter shot-scores of cars, trucks, motor scooters and bicycles compacted into jagged masses. The voice describing the event was excited, but not overly so: “There are at least fifty known dead in a massive traffic pile-up on Marine Drive, with hundreds more injured, and estimates of other traffic fatalities in the city go as high as six hundred-”

    Again the image shifted, showing a train station. A passenger train lay crumpled like a child’s toy next to a stretch of track. Freight cars were scattered among the coaches, some of them turned onto their sides.

    “At Churchgate Railway station, malfunctioning train signals apparently caused the collision of a Central Railways passenger train northbound from Goa, with a freight train heading south. At least sixty are known dead at this point, with more than three hundred injuries. We have unconfirmed reports of electric commuter trains colliding in suburban areas with fatalities, but travel in the city is impossible and we are unable to get to those locations except by air.”

    Another scene shift. A twin-engine airplane, engulfed in flames. Bodies-and
parts
of bodies lay scattered around it like broken dolls.

    “Air traffic control malfunctions have reportedly caused at least four plane crashes. This one, a sightseeing flight filled with Japanese tourists, crashed into the yellow basalt monument known as the Gateway to India at the northeastern end of the Colaba tourist district, killing all twenty-four on the aircraft and at least fifteen on the ground, with dozens more injured. We have unconfirmed reports that an Air India jet with two hundred and sixty-eight passengers on board has crashed into Back Bay just south of Beach.”

    “My God,” Michaels said. “What the hell happened?”

    “The computer programmer.” Toni’s voice was grim.

    “Somebody did this on
purpose
?”

    “That’s what it looks like. Jay is on it, but he’s too busy to talk about it right now.”

    Michaels watched a rescue truck, lights flashing, frozen in gridlock. Jesus. They were dealing with a madman. A homicidal madman. Until he was caught, nobody was safe.

    

    
Monday, September 27th, 8:41 a.m. Quantico

    No real progress had been made on Steve Day’s death.

    Oh, the labs had cataloged all kinds of hair and fiber and bullet casings, but in the end, none of it meant anything without the people, clothes and guns the things belonged to-and they didn’t have any of those.

    Alex Michaels was more than a little bothered. He sat at his desk, staring into the wall. He knew there was nothing to be done about it; the best minds in the FBI were hard at work looking for the smallest clue, and standing there yelling “Hurry!” wouldn’t help.

    It wasn’t as if he didn’t have other things to worry about. As head of Net Force, he’d suddenly found out what it meant to have the buck stop on your desk. Aside from having to assign high-level cases to make sure they were handled right, there was all the political bullshit. He had to justify what his organization was doing, why they did it, and how much it cost, first to the Director, then, if they were feeling snoopy-and they always were-to Congress.

    He had to appear in front of Senator Cobb’s Security Committee on Thursday to answer questions about something Day had done a year ago that had mightily upset the Senator. Cobb, unaffectionately known as Tweety Bird in intelligence circles-“I taught I taw a puddy tat!”-was always imagining conspiracies, no matter where he happened to look. Cobb thought the military was scheming to violently take over the reins of government; that the Germans were secretly re-arming themselves to eat Eastern Europe; that the Girl Scouts were Commies. He had been the bane of Steve Day’s life, and it looked as if he was going to be giving Michaels the same grief.

    And if that wasn’t enough, the political side of the job required a lot more of something else Michaels hated-socializing. Since he’d taken over, he’d gone to four black-tie political soirées, suffering through vulcanized chicken or salmon cooked to blackboard-eraser consistency. All of these events had featured after-dinner speakers who could put a room full of dexadrine addicts into a suspended animation that made Sleeping Beauty look like an insomniac.

    No, this was definitely not a part of the job he enjoyed.

    At least he didn’t have to worry about building appropriations. That was the Director’s job. And given all the new structures that Net Force had recently constructed, was in the process of constructing, or was planning on constructing, that would be a major chore in itself. J. Edgar Hoover would never recognize the FBI Compound, it had grown so large in just the last five or six years. It was a small town unto itself.

    He stared at the pile of hardcopy and the blinking To Do list on his computer screen. He had a stack of stuff to read, things to sign, all the minutiae of any mid-level office manager that had to be taken care of, regardless of the more important things that had to wait. And it wasn’t going to get done if he just sat there and stared at it.

    It was going to be a long day. And when it was done, he would go home to his empty condo, eat a meal alone, watch the news, read his mail and slog through reports on his flatscreen. Probably fall asleep reading-that was what happened most of the time. Either that, or get called out to one of the Nights of the Boring Politicos.

    He missed Megan. He missed his daughter. He missed having someone to share his day with, to care that he came home, that he lived or died…

    He shook his head.
Poor you. You’re just so damned
sad,
aren’t you
?

    Michaels chuckled. The Island of Self-Pity was a waste of time; he never could stay there very long. He had a job to do, and he was part of the solution and not part of the problem, wasn’t he? Hell with the rest of it.

    He reached for the hardcopy.

    

    
Monday, September 27th, 9:44 a.m. New York City

    “Yes, I’ll be there,” Genaloni said. His voice was curt and he was irritated, but he tried, as always, to hold onto his temper. “Good-bye.”

    He put the phone’s receiver down gently when what he wanted to do was slam it into its cradle hard enough to break both. Women. Jesus.

    As wives went, Maria was probably as good as any. She stayed home, took care of the kids, supervised the maids and butler and cook and gardener, was active in charity affairs. He’d met her in college. She was smart, and she’d been drop-dead gorgeous when he’d married her. She worked out, and had spent some time under the knife, so she was still damned attractive for a woman her age-hell, any age; and if anything, she had gotten smarter, too. She looked good on his arm, was always dressed better than anybody else in any room they went to, but she was a pain in the ass sometimes. Because she was smart and good-looking, and because she came from a rich family, she was used to getting her way. She wanted his time, and she always wanted it most when he least had it to give. He was going to have to break a date with Brigette, his mistress, to go to some cure-a-disease ball his wife wanted him to go to, and he wasn’t happy about it.

    That Maria probably knew about Brigette and had done this on purpose also crossed his mind.

    There was a tap on the doorjamb. He looked up and saw Johnny the Shark Benetti standing in the open doorway. Shark was a good name for Johnny. He was young, quick, and could cut you to tatters with a knife no longer than your finger. The Shark also had a degree in business from Cornell. As people in his organization retired or went away for legal reasons, Genaloni replaced them with equally tough but more educated ones. Sure, smart people had their drawbacks-too much ambition was usually part of the package, but you could deal with that. Bury a guy chin-deep in money, and mostly he would think long and hard before messing with the golden goose. Ignorant people caused more trouble in the long run. And in any event, you always watched your back-you never totally trusted
anybody
.