Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 (55 page)

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Authors: Tom Clancy

Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure

BOOK: Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10
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He stuck his head out again and glared at the two in front of his car. “Listen, I am going to drive into my garage. It would be a good idea for you to move. I wouldn’t want anybody to get hurt.” He smiled, the expression as fake as a three-dollar-bill.
The pair, both men, both with cameras, stayed where they were.
To hell with you,
he thought. He dropped the smile, pulled his head back into the car, took his foot off the brake and let the car idle forward.
They didn’t move until the car was almost touching them, but finally, they did.
He pulled into the garage and hit the remote to shut the door. None of them followed him inside, which was good, because he would have been hard pressed not to toss them out physically.
Once the garage door was closed, he got out of the car. Tommy had told him he’d be seeing reporters, and that whatever he did he was
not
to let them provoke him. Be polite, don’t say anything except, “No comment,” smile, nod, wave, and get away from them. They were like mosquitoes, Tommy had said. They will bite you and suck your blood, and if you swat one, another will quickly take its place. Better to leave than stand there squashing them.
Toni met him at the door.
“I’m sorry about all this,” he said, waving at the garage door.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. She stood up on her toes and kissed him. “Other than that, how was your day?”
He grinned.
The grin didn’t last, though. In the living room Guru sat watching the evening news. He waved at her, and she pointed at the TV.
Michaels looked over and saw himself on the screen. He stopped.
The view was from one of the cameras that had been blocking the driveway, and a tight close-up of his face showed a flash of anger, then a smile that looked more like a leer. “Move,” he said, as he pulled his head back into the car and started forward.
They cut out the rest of what he’d said—the “It would be a good idea,” and “I wouldn’t want anybody to get hurt.” A different angle, from another camera, cut in, showed the car heading toward the cameramen in front of the car. They made it look as if he was trying to run them down.
His virgil cheeped. It was Tommy Bender.
“What are you doing, Alex? I’m watching you on the news trying to run over Channel Nine’s and Channel Four’s cameramen. Why is that?”
“Tommy, it isn’t what it looks like.”
“It never is. And remember I told you so.”
New York City, New York
Corinna Skye leaned back in her chair and smiled. “That may be the best meal I have ever eaten,” she said.
She wore a blue silk blouse with a matching bow at her throat, both of which went with her blue eyes, and a dark maroon pleated silk skirt that stopped just above her knees. He guessed the shoes were Gucci pumps, the leather complimenting the rest of her outfit. Very classy.
Ames smiled at her. “Thank you. I can do better. Ideally, I should have prepared the sauce the day before yesterday to let it age properly. Then it would have been really good.”
“I can’t believe it could have possibly tasted any better.”
“Next time, we’ll try something different. You like moose?”
“Chocolate?”
“Not mousse,
moose
, like with antlers, from the forest.”
“You’d cook Bullwinkle?”
He laughed. “You know that old TV series? It’s one of my favorites.”
She said, “Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!” in a very good imitation of the cartoon character.
He said, “Again? That trick never works!” in as close an imitation to Rocky the Flying Squirrel as he could manage.
They both laughed.
“Shall we adjourn to the living room for after-dinner wine?”
She followed him into the room. He poured her a glass of the wine he’d selected, let her appreciate it to him, then poured his own glass. He directed her to the form-chair, while he sat on the leather couch.
The chair hummed and fitted itself to her exquisite contours. She smiled. “Ah. I’ve never tried one of these. Very comfortable.”
He shrugged. “If it isn’t comfortable, what’s the point?”
They sipped their wine for a moment. Then he said, “Well, much as I hate to bring up business, I wouldn’t want you to think I invited you here on false pretenses.”
“Heaven forbid,” she said.
“So, how goes the war on the entrenched bureaucracy?”
She put her glass down. “Better than I expected. We’ve got a couple of unexpected senators who have climbed on board the issue, and believe me, I had nothing to do with it. Also, the unofficial word is that the Supreme Court will be ruling on TransMetro Insurance versus the State of New Mexico next week, and there’s a strong rumor that they will rule for TransMetro.”
He knew this, of course. The decision concerned some minor litigation about whether or not the New Mexico regulatory agency could force the Swiss company that sold policies exclusively via the Internet to obey certain arcane state laws. By all rights, of course, the agency should be able to, but there was an oddball section of Internet laws that might prevent that. If so, there would be a precedent set that, while it wouldn’t seem relevant to most observers, would benefit CyberNation down the line. Ames thought of it as part of a basement wall: unseen, but a part of the foundation that needed to be in place.
“Good,” he said. “A little more wine?”
“I’d love some.”
He smiled. Things were going along very nicely here. He wouldn’t make a move on her tonight. Nor the next time they were together, and maybe not even the third time. Like a fine sauce, some things should not be rushed, not if they were to be enjoyed to the fullest.
And he was certainly going to enjoy Corinna Skye to the fullest. Like everything else he had ever wanted, it was only a matter of “when,” not “if.”
8
Net Force Medical Clinic
John Howard was not used to feeling ill at ease anywhere on the FBI base. This place, though, he had to admit, had him feeling decidedly nervous.
He was sitting in an exam room in the ENT office at the FBI/Net Force Clinic, having his hearing checked. Nadine had been after him for months to do that. His right ear had been bugging him on and off since that shoot-out in Gakona, Alaska, almost two years ago. Blasting away with a .357 without earplugs was a risky thing. Sometimes, though, if you wanted to stay alive, you did what you had to and worried about the cost later.
Net Force’s annual physicals were fairly perfunctory, and didn’t routinely include a hearing test unless the patient brought it up. Howard never had. It wasn’t as if he was deaf, after all. He could hear the doctor asking his questions, and that had been enough for the physicians to sign off on him each year. Besides, it hadn’t really seemed that bad until recently, but it was becoming obvious that his hearing was no longer quite up to par.
Howard said, “No, I don’t hear the ringing anymore. But I have noticed if I’m not right next to the phone, I might not notice its cheep. And my wife says I miss half of what she’s saying. Sometimes I can hear her voice, but not quite make out the words. We can’t talk from room to room, if she’s in the kitchen and I’m in the den. She can hear me just fine, but I can’t understand her. And my virgil’s alarm? I don’t pick that up at all.”
The doctor nodded, making a note on his flatscreen with his stylus. “What about in a crowded room? Any problems?”
“Sometimes it’s hard to pick a single voice out of the background noise. But that’s normal, right?”
“Mmm. Let’s have a look.”
The doctor put the flatscreen down and pulled the ear instrument from where it hung on the wall next to the exam table. He put a little throwaway plastic sleeve on the end, dialed up a light, and stuck it into Howard’s ear.
“I always meant to ask, what’s this thing called?”
The doctor pulled it away from Howard’s ear and showed it to him. “This? It’s called an ‘ear-looker.’ ”
Howard grinned. “Funny,” he said.
But the doctor, a young guy who looked to be in his early thirties, shook his head. “No, General, I’m serious. The technical name for this is an ‘otoscope,’ but that translates literally as ‘ear-looker.’ ”
With that, he stuck it back into Howard’s ear and resumed the exam.
Howard bore the tugging and poking. After a few moments the doctor pulled the scope out. He slipped the plastic throwaway off and tossed it into the foot-operated trash bin. Switching off the instrument’s light, he reracked it and turned back to Howard.
“The tympanic membrane—your eardrum—looks fine,” he said. “And I don’t think there is any damage to the bony structures past that.”
“Malleus, incus, stapes,” Howard said.
“Yes. Hammer, anvil, stirrup. Good to see you’ve done your research.”
“So what are we talking about here?”
The doctor leaned back against the wall. “Nerve damage,” he said. “My guess would be that it’s probably in the organ of Corti—those sensory hair cells that make up the auditory epithelium are there. That’s pretty common. In fact, unless you live in a quiet forest all alone and don’t listen to music or have a TV, you’re bound to lose some of your hearing if you live long enough. It’s just one of the costs of a mechanical civilization. Mostly, it’s gradual, and you don’t notice it until it gets bad. Sometimes, though, after a very loud blast very close to one’s unprotected ear, the effect is sudden and pronounced.”
“Like a gun going off.”
“Yep.”
“So what do we do about it?”
“I’ll have the audiologist give you a hearing exam. When we see what that shows, we’ll know what we can do.”
Howard nodded, thanked the man, and went straight over to the audiologist’s office.
The technician there turned out to be a very good-looking young black woman. She asked Howard to sit in a chair, put a set of headphones on him, and handed him a wireless control with a single button on it. There was a sign on the wall certifying that one Geneva Zuri was licensed to practice audiology in the state of Virginia.
“What kind of a name is ‘Zuri’?”
“Swahili.” She had a deep, throaty voice. “Some generations removed. My grandfather went back to the old country as a young man and found our distant kin. After that, he started using the family name from before slavery.”
Howard nodded.
Interesting.
“Okay,” she said, “I’m going to generate some tones from the computer here. When you hear one, push the button.”
“Okay.”
She did that for a while, first one ear, then the other. At one point, she introduced a roaring waterfall-like noise in his good left ear while she sent tones to his bad ear. Curious, he asked her about that.
“What we’ve learned is that people with one weak ear tend to recruit their stronger ear to help out. They are not aware of this, of course. What is actually happening is that the sound is traveling through your head by way of bone conduction. You
think
you’re hearing a tone in your
right
ear, but actually you are picking it up in the
left
, compensating without realizing it. So we mask that ear with white noise to prevent that.”
After he pushed the button a bunch of times and she made notes on the computer, she gave him another test that checked how loud a noise could get before it became painful.
The next test included a recorded voice that spoke certain words at various speeds and different volumes. His job was to repeat whatever he heard. The voice had a syrupy southern quality, which drew out some of the sounds and made them harder to distinguish.
Finally, the audiologist did a repeat of the tone test, then took the earphones off him.
“All right, sir,” she said. “We’re all done. Take a look.”
She turned the computer’s flatscreen around to show him a pair of charts. “This one is your left ear, the other is your right. The red lines on both charts represent the norms. The blue lines show the results of your tests. As you can see, for your left ear you’ve dipped some in the high frequencies, but you are pretty solid in the middle and bass range. Over here in the right ear, however, it’s not so good. You’ve dropped way down on the high and middle ranges.”
He could see that easily enough. “What does it mean?”
“Well, I’m not a doctor. Your physician should be the one to discuss this with you. I’ll send these results to his flatscreen right away.”
“Come on,” Howard said. “You do this for a living. You know what it means.”
She paused, then nodded. “Okay. My guess is you are having trouble hearing people talk, or the phone ring, or the high notes on your old Ray Charles CDs. This chart shows that, and it also shows why. It’s pretty clear that you’ve damaged your hearing.”
Howard frowned. He’d expected that, of course, but he still didn’t like hearing it. “Will it heal?” he asked. “Will it get any better at all?”

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