Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 (73 page)

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Authors: Tom Clancy

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BOOK: Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10
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The one on the right, the new rounds, was much larger than the one immediately to its left.
“The stuff you carry is one-twenty-five-grain jacketed hollow point. It comes out of your barrel at about fourteen hundred feet per second. The energy in foot/pounds is around four hundred. RBCD’s .357 Mag bullet is only sixty grains, but it leaves a three-inch barrel at better than eighteen hundred feet per second, with an E/fp of around five hundred. Expands like a balloon when it hits, you see. That’s a
permanent
stretch cavity, twenty by twenty-seven centimeters. It dumps the energy into the target without overpenetration.”
“Impressive,” Howard said, and he meant it.
“The best is yet to come, sir. Look at the glass-protected blocks.”
They did. The impact of his usual round with the glass had partially deformed the bullet. It shattered the glass, then went through and hit the gelatin, and it still penetrated and left a big hole, but it was shallower and smaller around than the block without the glass. Which was to be expected. Glass was a serious pain.
However, the cavity in the second glass shot, the one with the new ammo, was virtually the same as the one without the glass in front of it.
“See, the RBCD stuff is designed to punch right through a solid, almost like military ball ammo, but when it hits a hydraulic substance, the expansion cranks up. The powder is progressive-burn, so you get standard pressure for the full length of the barrel. That way you don’t have to worry about blowing your gun up.”
Howard nodded. It definitely seemed like superior ammunition.
“Now for the fun stuff.” Julio pulled the covers off the clay blocks. The left one had the usual small entry hole, and was ballooned up with a big cavity.
The one on the right? The whole block was splashed open wide.
“More accurate, more powerful, better penetration through cover, better expansion on soft targets. Though you can’t tell with that old hog leg you carry, it feeds very nicely through a semiauto, and they have a nine that will feed like oil through a full auto. What’s not to like?”
“I know you well enough to know there’s another shoe. Drop it, Lieutenant.”
Julio grinned. “Well, sir, it’s a tad more expensive than standard ammunition.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“But when it is your life on the line, you aren’t going to begrudge a few cents, now are you?”
He had a point.
“I’m not saying we should buy carloads of it to practice or plink with, but as a duty round, this is the top of the line. I’m going to carry it in my Beretta even if I have to pay for it myself, and you ought to use it in your wheelgun. At the very least, you could order a few cases for evaluation. Think of it this way—if you have to shoot somebody, you’ll save money ’cause you’ll only have to shoot them
once
. . . .”
“Given our experiences with the legal system of late, Lieutenant, you might have to explain to a jury why you are carrying these rhino-stoppers in your sidearm if you do have to shoot somebody.”
“Better twelve men trying me than six men carrying me,” Julio observed.
Howard nodded. Yes. You didn’t want to shoot anybody unless it was a matter of life or death, but if you did have to shoot, you wanted them to cease their attempts to kill you immediately.
“All right,” Howard said. “Get a few cases. Nines, forties, forty-five, thirty-eight Special, and a couple boxes of .357 Magnum.”
“Yes, sir!”
“A
few
cases, Lieutenant. Not a warehouse full.”
“You wound me, sir.”
“I don’t think so, Julio. I think even these things would bounce right off—you’re bulletproof when it comes to this kind of thing.”
“I try, sir. I do try.”
24
Net Force HQ
“They can’t be serious,” Michaels said, looking at the list of requested documents. It had come via e-mail and certified letter, both. He had the e-mail open on his computer.
“They are, Commander,” Tommy said. “They are quite serious.”
Michaels shook his head. “They want copies of every e-mail sent by every operative of this agency between these two dates? We’re talking about eight or ten thousand letters, maybe more.”
“That’s correct.”
Alex pointed at a line on his screen. “And all these work files, personal notes, and official reports? If we printed them out, we’d have to rent a moving van to haul them!”
“Electronic copies are acceptable, Commander, as long as they are certified by a DOJ or GAO inspector.”
“Do you know how much time we’ll waste pulling all this up? Time that could be better spent solving crimes—or stopping new ones from happening?”
“The only option is to allow Ames or his representatives access to your computer systems, which, of course, we can’t do, in the interests of national security—unless they hire somebody with adequate clearance, and that’s not going to happen since just about anybody with that kind of clearance already works for us. You have to cough it up, Commander. It’s the rule.”
“But it’s stupid,” Alex said. “Stupid, inefficient, and wasteful.”
“I understand. And I’m sure they’ll be happy to take it in small pieces.”
Alex glared at him. “Yeah, well, you know what? That’s not how they are going to get it. I’ll wait until I have a chunk big enough for them to choke on. And you know what else? I am going to print it all out, too.”
“What about that moving van?”
“I’ll eat the cost. If we send it to them as hard copy, then they’ll have to
read it all
. They won’t just be able to do a nice and easy word search to find stuff they want. I don’t have to make their job easy for them, do I?”
Tommy smiled. “I believe you are finally beginning to get into the spirit of things, Commander. No, you don’t have to make it easier for them. You may, within the bounds of the law, make it as difficult as you can.” He smiled again. “Of course, we are all looking for truth and justice, but it’s up to a judge and jury to decide that part. Ames will have readers go through it, and I don’t expect they will miss much, but if it takes them longer to find it than they’d like, that is their problem. By the time this comes to trial, and that will be months from now, key witnesses might decide to come clean and tell things straight. Or they might skip town and not leave a forwarding address. Or have a heart attack and pass away. Lots of things can happen, and you can never figure on a sure win in advance. It doesn’t hurt to take all the time you can get when you’re on the receiving end of one of these suits.
“On the record, as your attorney and as an officer of the court, I must instruct you to move with all deliberate speed to comply with judicial orders. But you must be the judge of what is appropriate celerity and manner. If you can justify it to a judge—which means if
I
can, and I can—then you can bury them in a snowstorm of paper. They won’t like it, the judge won’t like it, but he knows how the game is played, too. Time is the plaintiff’s friend when it comes to gathering evidence, but not necessarily when it comes to being able to utilize it.”
“Thanks, Tommy.”
“Just doing my job.”
Tommy took off, and as he did, Michaels’s private line chirped. He picked it up.
“Alex? It’s Cory. How are we?”
He blinked, caught unawares by her call. How did she get this number?
“Cory. What can I do for you?” His voice was guarded, giving nothing away.
There was a part of him that couldn’t help being flattered by her apparent interest in him, even though the larger, more logical, more experienced part knew that she wasn’t really interested in him. She was just doing her job, and if her job meant appearing to be interested in him—or if, as he suspected, her job meant going farther than that, well, he suspected she was pretty good at that, too.
But he just wasn’t interested, and his job didn’t require him to give any such false impressions. Besides, the “information” she’d given him earlier turned out to be nothing he didn’t already know about CyberNation.
After a brief pause, she said, “I think I have something more useful to you this time.”
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“I had dinner with Mitchell Ames recently.”
Despite himself, he perked up at that. “Really?”
“Yes. He had a few things to say I’m sure you’d find interesting.”
“I’m sure I would. Why don’t you drop by—?”
“Can’t,” she said, cutting him off. “I have to fly to the west coast tonight, won’t be back for a couple of days, and I’ve got appointments all day. But I can make time for that drink. Meet me at the Roosevelt Hotel in the lobby at seven P.M. Bye.”
Cautious, he had drawn a breath to tell her he couldn’t make it, but she hung up before he could speak.
He frowned, then thought about it for a second. What could it hurt, to meet her in a public bar? No danger in that. And maybe she could give him something he could use against Ames, some kind of shark repellent.
Okay, he’d do it. He’d have a drink with her. But he’d do it his way.
He touched the intercom control.
“Sir?” his assistant asked.
“See if you can find Toni for me, would you please, Becky? I think she’s in the building. Ask her if she would stop by.”
His new executive assistant, a young woman from Oregon who was apparently part Indian, said, “Yes, sir.”

 

Jay showed up before Toni did.
Leaning against the wall near the door, his arms crossed in front of him, Jay was grinning like a cat. “His netnom is ‘Thumper,’ ” he said, “but his real name is Robert Harvey Newman. Julio Fernandez’s report ought to be along soon with all the details of the takedown, but I can give you the gist of what we know so far.”
“Go ahead.”
“We got him by backwalking the thing and finding out there was a hacker’s group that didn’t get hit. We found one of them and squeezed him, and he gave Thumper up. Rolled over quicker than a lubed steel ball bearing.”
“Go on.”
“So once we kicked in his door—I used the royal ‘we’ here, since it was Julio and his team who did the actual kicking and collecting—Thumper was brought in. He is being, um, ‘interviewed’ as we speak.”
“Who’s got it?”
“Toni.”
“Good,” Michaels said. “And thanks, Jay. Good work.”

 

“How about a lawyer? Don’t I get a lawyer?”
Toni shook her head. She was alone with the hacker, but a digital camcorder recorded every word and gesture that either one of them spoke or did.
“No, Mr. Newman, you don’t get a lawyer,” she said. “You’re a terrorist, and we have different rules for dealing with people like you.”
She sat across the long table from the hacker, in the back conference room. They didn’t really have interrogation facilities here to speak of. Net Force hunted and found a lot of criminals, but didn’t normally do much in the way of actually arresting them. The way it usually worked was they’d track down a guy scamming the net and call in the regular FBI or, when it worked out that local laws were better, the local cops, to bust the perps.
Still, they were good at improvising. The back conference room was a designated safe area. If somebody dangerous somehow slipped into the building, some guy waving a gun up and blasting his way down the halls, you could come in here and deadbolt the door against him. The door was steel, and the walls had sheets of Lexan in them that would stop most small arms’ fire. It would do just fine for interrogating a white-collar crook like Newman.
“But—I’m not a
terrorist!
I’m a
computer programmer!
”
“Not according to the law,” Toni said. “You unleashed a series of debilitating viruses upon the Internet and the web, causing millions of dollars in downtime damage. It was an attack upon America, upon the world, clearly a terrorist act, and as such, qualifies you just fine under the statutes.”
“That’s absurd!”
Toni gave him a toothy smile. “A man who calls himself ‘Thumper’ needs to watch very carefully for predators. You are a rabbit in among the wolves, Mr. Newman. What you are is
lunch
.”
“I’ll sue you!”
Toni let an edge creep into her voice. “What, you mean if we let you ever see daylight again? Listen, pal, I can ship you to a cell so deep it’ll take until noon Friday for Monday morning’s sunshine to
get
to you. By the time you come up for trial, and I think I can guarantee a military tribunal, open-and-shut and you get to go right back to your hole, you’ll look like Rip van Winkle’s clone. All alone. No contact with anybody, and no computer to play with, just you and four walls. Ten, fifteen years. That’s if they don’t decide to
execute
you.”
Not true, of course, almost none of it, but this guy didn’t know it. And right now, Toni’s job was to gather as much information from him as she could, not be his best friend or act as his attorney or his civil-rights activist.

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