Net Force (26 page)

    Names flashed on-screen.

    “Of the eight, our agents have so far interviewed five. Four of these produced the canes they are recorded as having purchased. One gave the item as a gift to a friend, and we have found that one.”

    Five of the names faded away.

    “Of the three remaining subjects, one is a survivalist in Grant’s Pass, Oregon, who refuses to allow local, state or federal agents on his property. The gentleman in question is seventy years old and according to his medical records, has had a surgical hip-replacement. We have a judge signing a search warrant as we speak, to look for the cane on his property. I’d guess they’ll find him leaning on it when they get there.”

    The name on-screen began to blink, alternating red and blue.

    “So that’s pending. The remaining two names…” He shook his head. “Well, they are… interesting.”

    Michaels said, “Interesting?”

    Jay waved at the screen. One of the names began to pulse in yellow. “Wilson A. Jefferson, of Erie, Pennsylvania. Mr. Jefferson, in the last three years, has bought a cane, two sets of
escrima
sticks and a set of custom-designed
yawara
sticks. These were delivered to a post office box. The cane is the right model. The
escrima
sticks are used in a Filipino fighting art called, oddly enough,
escrima;
the last items are used in several different fighting styles, but the name is Japanese. According to the post office box rental agreement and state driver’s license records, Mr. Jefferson is a white male, forty-one years old, and he resides at this address.”

    A street number and name blossomed.

    “However, a check at this address came up negative. Nobody by that name has ever lived there. On the surface, Jefferson’s credit records seem fine, but below the surface, they vanish. What we have here is an electronic man.”

    “So this is our assassin,” Toni put in.

    “Sort of,” Jay said. “Then there is Mr. Richard Orlando.”

    More screen action.

    “Mr. Orlando has bought, over a period of four years, five canes, including two of the models we have in hand. All were delivered to a post office box in Austin, Texas. And a check of his background says he is an Hispanic male, twenty-seven years old, and as far as we can tell, also exists only in a few record computers and apparently nowhere else. The photographic image on his driver’s license is blurred so badly he could look like anybody in this room. Oddly enough, so are the photographic records of Mr. Jefferson.”

    “Same person, using two fake IDs,” Michaels said.

    “That would be my opinion,” Jay said. “Very dissimilar and a thousand miles apart. Fakes, and unless you were looking for them, you’d never accidentally spot them.”

    “Great,” Toni said. “So, what’s the good news?”

    “That
is
the good news,” Jay continued. “Nobody remembers either Mr. Jefferson or Mr. Orlando. We’ve interviewed postal workers, and come up blank. There are no trails leading away. As far as we can tell, the only reason these two E-men ever existed was to take delivery of some fancy but perfectly legal
sticks
half a country apart. And I’d give you good odds that the real person who has these things-if he or she still
has
them, knowing we’ll be trying to trace him or her through them-isn’t in Pennsylvania
or
Texas.”

    “Dead end,” Toni said.

    “Deader than black plastic in the noonday sun,” Jay said. “We’ll keep on it, but whoever this is, he or she, they are real good. They went to a lot of effort for such a small thing.”

    “Seems to be paying off, too, isn’t it?” Michaels nodded. “I’m still betting on a she,” he said. “It didn’t feel like a man under that old-lady disguise. Okay, thanks, Jay. Toni?”

    “We’re running checks on all known professional assassins. So far, nothing substantial on anybody as good as this one seems to be.”

    “What about insubstantial?”

    “Rumors about this shadowy figure or that. Usual stuff-the Iceman, who can kill you with a hard look. The Specter, who walks through walls. The Selkie, who can change shape. Urban legends. Problem with the really good hired killers is that they keep very low profiles. Pretty much the only time anybody bags one of them is when a client gives them up.”

    Michaels nodded. He knew this. He’d been thinking about it since Steve Day’s murder.

    “Anybody got anything else?”

    Brent Adams, the FBI head of Organized Crime, said, “Something is going on inside the Genaloni organization.”

    Michaels looked at Adams. Raised his eyebrows.

    The OC man said, “Our people went back and strained out a year’s worth of everything with a Genaloni tag. A couple of weeks ago, the FBI regional office in New York City got an inquiry from one of Genaloni’s lawyers regarding the detention of Luigi Sampson. Sampson is Ray Genaloni’s enforcer-the head of his legal and illegal security operations.”

    “Yes?”

    “Well, our agents in New York didn’t detain Sampson. Genaloni’s people didn’t follow up on it, so nobody thought anything else about it. A mistake of some kind.”

    “Which means…?”

    Adams shook his head. “We don’t know. But since then, our wiretaps and surveillance cams haven’t heard or seen anything of Sampson.”

    “Maybe he went on vacation,” Jay said.

    Adams shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe he pissed off Ray Genaloni and he’s in a field outside Dead Toe, South Dakota, pushing up the daisies.”

    “I don’t think they grow daisies up there. Too cold,” Jay said.

    “You’d be surprised,” Toni put in.

    Michaels said, “So, why would Genaloni’s people be calling the FBI, supposedly looking for Sampson, if they deleted him?”

    Adams shook his head again. “Establish an alibi, maybe. With these guys, you never know what they’re going to do. They make some smart moves now and then; then they turn around and make a stupid one.”

    Toni said, “Maybe this Sampson was responsible for Steve Day’s death and Genaloni got nervous? Wanted to erase the link?”

    Adams said, “I don’t know. It’s possible. Ray Genaloni is a careful man. He doesn’t step out on the street without having it checked for six blocks in all directions first.”

    Michaels stared at the table. Something was bothering him, rattling around inside his head. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Something about all this…

    He sighed. “All right. If you’d stay on top of that, Brent? Jay, you run the cane stuff as far as you can, see if you can get anything. And check out those New Orleans links-we can’t spend all our efforts on the Day investigation. Anything else?”

    Nobody had anything they wanted to put on the table.

    “Okay. Let’s get back to it.”

    Michaels headed toward his office. Things were not looking good for the home team. And the clock was ticking on his job. A few more days and this might be somebody else’s worry.

    Maybe it was time to get out of government service. Move back to Idaho, get a job programming game computers or something, spend weekends with his daughter. Just walk away from all this.

    Yeah, right. Until Steve Day’s killer was caught, he wasn’t going anywhere, even if they put him in charge of counting paper clips in the underground storage bins. Whatever else he might be, Alexander Michaels didn’t bail when the going got rough. No way.

    

    
Saturday, October 2nd, 11:05 p.m. Grozny

    He would have preferred a walk on his quiet trail, but because he was in a hurry and could not afford the time to dawdle, Plekhanov drove the car. It was the program that was loaded, and he had planned to trash it after the unfortunate interface with the American Net Force agent-such was only prudent. And he
would
erase the software eventually, but just at the moment, it was more trouble than it was worth to go off-line, degear, switch to a new scenario, then regear. It was one of the disadvantages of the old-style system he liked-with the newer VR units, you could do it on the fly without missing a step.

    It didn’t matter. This was just a short run to make a few minor adjustments on a legal scenario running in Canberra. The chances of Net Force seeing him were practically nil, and besides, there were a lot of blue Corvettes out there, probably tens of thousands of them.

    He put the VR automobile into gear and pressed on the accelerator.

    

    
Saturday, October 2nd, 3:05 p.m. Washington, D.C
.

    When Belladonna Wright opened the door to let him in, the first thing Tyrone noticed was that she wore tight shorts and a baggy sweatshirt with the sleeves and neck cut out to reveal a lot of bare skin.

    A lot of beautiful bare skin.

    The second thing he noticed was the hulking form of Bonebreaker LeMott sitting on a couch in the living room behind Belladonna.

    Tyrone was pretty sure his heart stopped for at least five seconds. Then his belly rose up and lodged in his throat. And his bowels and bladder both threatened to empty. The end was near.

    “Hi, Tyrone. Come in.”

    The voice of self-preservation couldn’t even form words. It babbled and whimpered mindlessly.

    His feet didn’t seem to belong to him. They took him into the house.

    “Tyrone, this is my friend, Herbert LeMott. Motty, this is Tyrone.”

    
Motty
?! He would have laughed-except that he was sure that would be the last sound he’d ever make through his own teeth.

    Bonebreaker wore a tight T-shirt and cotton shorts that strained all their seams as he came off the couch. He had muscles on his muscles. He loomed like a human tyrannosaur; Tyrone expected to hear Godzilla’s shriek any second…

    But Bonebreaker’s voice was soft, quiet and actually fairly high-pitched. He said, “Oh, wow, hey, Tyrone, glad to meet you.” He extended his right hand.

    Tyrone took the giant hand, and was amazed at how gentle the grip was.

    He had a sudden image of a cartoon mouse looking for a thorn in a lion’s paw.

    “It’s real nice of you to help Bella out with her computer class. I never was much good at that stuff. I appreciate it a lot. If I can ever do anything for you, just lemme know, okay?”

    If Bonebreaker had suddenly turned into a giant toad and begun hopping around looking for flies to eat, Tyrone could not have been anymore amazed. Holy shit!

    “Okay, Bella, I gotta go, we got practice at the gym. I’ll call you later.” He bent down-a long way for him-and kissed Bella on top of her head. She smiled and patted him on the back, as if he were a favorite horse. “Okay. Be careful.”

    After Bonebreaker left, Bella must have seen something in his face, because she smiled at Tyrone. “What, did you think Motty was going to get
physical
?”

    “The thought briefly crossed my mind.”
Yeah, briefly-like a snail with a broken shell crawls over a salt flat briefly
.

    “Motty is a big sweetie. He wouldn’t step on an ant. My room is upstairs. Come on.”

    
Unless the ant put its hand on your butt
.

    Still marveling over being alive, Tyrone followed Bella upstairs.

    She had a standard home computer, and the VR gear was not top-of-the-line, but pretty decent. And it only took a few minutes for him to realize she was better at general systems than she’d let on.

    He said so.

    She said, “Well, I’m okay on theory and real-time, but my network is slow.”

    “You came to the right guy, then. You have another set of VR gear?”

    “Right here.”

    “Gear up. Let’s walk the web. We’ll start on one of the big commercial nets-that’s easy enough for anybody to do well.”

    “You’re in charge, Tyrone.”

    Flushed with a sudden fearlessness, he took a leap: “Call me Ty,” he said.

    “You’re in charge, Ty.”

    She geared up as he did, then sat next to him on the bench in front of the computer. She sat close enough that he could feel the heat from her bare leg. A hair closer and they’d be touching.

    Man! He most surely did not want to forget this moment.

    Life might never
get
any better than this.

    And even as he thought it, he realized that there were ways it
could
get better. If he could figure out a way to move half an inch to his left, it would get better instantly. That half inch might as well be a light year, though. He wasn’t completely stupid with bravery.

    

    
Sunday, October 3rd, 6 a.m. Sarajevo

    “First squad, flank left! Second squad, take the rear!”

    Small-arms fire rattled, bullets chopped bark from trees, dug furrows in the ground. They were in a city park-what was left of one-and the attack had been unexpected.

    John Howard opened up with his tommy gun, felt it buck in his hands as the fat and slow.45’s went off.

    “Sir, we’ve got-ah-!”

    The lieutenant went down, a stray round in the neck.

    Where were they
coming
from?!

    “Third squad, suppressing fire at five o’clock! Move! Shoot-!”

    His men began falling, their armor wasn’t working, they were getting their butts kicked-!

    

    
Washington, D.C
.

    John Howard jerked the VR gear off and dropped it in disgust. He shook his head. Crap.

    Upstairs, his wife and son slept. It was still hours away from when they’d get up, get dressed and go to church. He hadn’t been able to sleep, so he’d come down to the computer to run battle scenarios. He should have stuck to chess or
Go
-every combatsit he’d tried had been a loser.