Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 (24 page)
Keller went pale, as if somebody had just punched him in the belly.
Santos didn’t stop. He turned away and ambled off down the corridor. All he’d wanted to do was make Jackson aware that he
knew
. That was enough, for now. Let him sweat a while, worry that maybe something hard was coming. Because it was coming, no question. There were some lines you did not cross, and Jackson had crossed one. He knew it. How much it would cost, when, where, he did not know. And that was part of the payment, too.
knew
. That was enough, for now. Let him sweat a while, worry that maybe something hard was coming. Because it was coming, no question. There were some lines you did not cross, and Jackson had crossed one. He knew it. How much it would cost, when, where, he did not know. And that was part of the payment, too.
Santos hummed to himself as he headed for the helipad. Good day, so far. Real good.
20
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Quantico, Virginia
Toni sat at Alex’s desk, going over operations reports. She was glad to be back. She’d forgotten how interesting this work was in the time she’d been away. As Alex’s assistant, she had been privy to the inner workings of the nation’s computer business, all kinds of information the average citizen didn’t even know existed had come across her desk. When she’d quit—over a mistaken supposition that Alex had been too idiotic to correct—she hadn’t missed work, because almost immediately she’d had an offer from the director to start a job for the mainline FBI. The pregnancy, then the baby, had stopped that. It had been the better part of a year, and she’d lost a few steps. But it was like riding a bicycle—the basic balance was still there, and with a little practice, she’d be rolling smoothly again pretty fast.
She felt a quick stab of guilt. Did that make her a bad mother, that she wanted to work? Shouldn’t she be at home, doing mommy things, putting all this away until Little Alex was old enough to go off to school? It wasn’t as if they needed the money. And she did miss the baby, that was true. But her husband needed her, too, and what was she to do? Guru had showed up, and that had seemed like some kind of sign.
Still, she worried.
Well, it was only temporary, after all. A few days, a week, until the crisis was over, that was all . . .
“Boss still testifying?” Jay said from the doorway.
“I think so,” she said. “Anything new on your front?”
“Yes and no. I’m on the right track, I got ambushed in VR again. But this time, I surprised the sucker. Didn’t get a solid lead, unfortunately.”
“Win some, lose some.”
“Oh, this one ain’t won or lost yet. Too early. But I have some feelers out on the CyberNation gambling ship, down in the Caribbean, and I’m expecting those to come in later today.”
“You think they are responsible?”
“Gut-check? Yes. Proof? None.”
“Lay it out for me.”
“Sure.” He came in, flopped down on the couch. He started ticking points off on his fingers: “One, CyberNation has a lot to gain if people switch to them because of net woes. Two, CyberNation has the talent to pull this kind of thing off. I don’t have a complete list of their programmers and weavers, but I’ve seen their public face, and it is very slick, uses all the latest language. Three, their advertisements increased just about the time all this started, a vigorous campaign to sign up new members, stressing the integrity of their systems. Four, there’s that connection with the casino ship and the dead guy from Blue Whale. Five, I haven’t found anybody better, and I’ve been looking real hard.”
“Circumstantial and iffy,” she said.
“Hey, I got another whole hand of fingers here. Six, CyberNation is pushing on other fronts. They have a powerful lobby working in D.C., and in various major countries around the world. Isn’t that what the boss is over on the Hill about today? Problems with the net that CyberNation claims it can cure?”
She shrugged. “So what are seven, eight, nine, and ten?”
“I haven’t filled those in yet,” Jay said, grinning. “But I’m working on it.”
“How are the wedding plans coming?”
His smile faded. “Okay, I guess.”
“Getting cold feet?”
“What? No!”
“Easy. I was just joking.”
He didn’t speak for a moment. Then he said, “Did you? Get cold feet, I mean?”
“Not really. Of course, I was pregnant, and I didn’t want to have the baby by myself.”
“Hmm.”
“Hey, look, it’s only natural to worry about making major changes in your life. I wanted to get married, but I did think about it. Alex was married before—what if I didn’t measure up to his first wife? And he’s got a daughter from that marriage, a great kid, but I had to wonder, was he going to be thinking about her when he looked at our child? It’s not like buying a new pair of shoes, is it?”
“No.”
“You should talk to Julio Fernandez. He got married after a lot of years on his own, he had to make some adjustments.”
“I was thinking that. I mean, I want to be with Saji, no question, it’s just, I dunno, scary sometimes.”
“Welcome to the human race, computer-boy.”
“Thanks.”
John Howard looked at the computer log and stack of hard copy on his desk and shook his head. Forms and clogged e-file boxes were the bane of military officers everywhere. Yes, they had to be attended to for the command to continue working, and mostly, he managed to pass a significant amount of paper shuffling and signing off to senior officers on his staff, but if you missed a few days, your piece of it always grew, it never shrank. He’d been at it for an hour and a half, and hadn’t really made much of a dent.
How important was most of this junk? An invitation to speak at an upscale military school in Mississippi? He knew the school. Enrollment was ninety percent white males, with a few women and minority students sprinkled in to keep things legal. Yes, he was the commanding military officer of Net Force, but they didn’t want him—he’d bet dollars to dimes they didn’t know he was black. It might be amusing to show up just to see the expressions on their faces. Then again, that wasn’t worth a trip to Mississippi, was it?
Another e-mail was a cc notification from the NF Quartermaster from a military supplier in Maine that there was a recall on part number MS-239-45/A, due to possible stress fractures in materials that might lead to failure in critical situations. The Quartermaster would have already addressed the situation, but it still sounded worth knowing about. A man needed to see where his troops might be at risk.
A check of the Net Force parts catalogue, which naturally changed the supplier’s part number to their own designation, NF-P-154387, showed the part in question to be the “flexible containment system locking device for a Model B dorsal-unit personal supply and equipment carrier.” After years of military jargon, that one was easy: They were talking about the plastic buckle on a backpack strap. The B-model had been in service for approximately three years, according to the computer file, and had been superseded by the C-model.
If the buckles on the old packs hadn’t busted by now, then it probably wasn’t going be a problem that would bring the Net Force strike teams to their knees.
And how many man-hours had been lost to this tidbit?
Here was a directive from the U.S. National Guard regarding the directive from the General Accounting Office, regarding the directive from the Department of Defense’s Revised and Updated Guidelines for Officers Regarding Sexual Harassment.
Oh, please. How relevant to anything was a directive about a directive about a directive about guidelines?
His intercom chirped. “Yes?”
“Sir,” his secretary said. “Lieutenant Fernandez to see you.”
Julio had just left a couple hours ago, but anything to get out of this drudgery. “Send him in.”
Julio arrived.
“Yes?”
“Sir. I’d hate to tear you away from all this excitement, but we’ve got a new shipment of goodies and there are a couple of things you might enjoy seeing.”
“I really need to get this done,” he said. He waved at his desk.
“You’re the general, General.” He started to leave.
“Wait a second, I’ll go with you. This can wait.”
Julio grinned. “I thought it might.”
As they walked out, Julio said, “I ran into Jay Gridley out in the hall a few minutes ago. He seems to be a little nervous about his upcoming nuptials.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That being married is worse than death by Chinese water torture, of course. That if I had it to do all over again, I’d jump in front of a speeding train before I said ‘I do.’ ”
“You’re a braver man than I thought, Lieutenant. What if that somehow gets back to Joanna?”
“I’ll deny having said it to my last breath.”
“Which wouldn’t be long in coming if she thought you said such a thing.”
Julio chuckled. “I’m a career military man, sir. Not much she could do would scare me.”
“She could make you watch little Hoo on your poker night.”
“I was only joking. I told Gridley that. I also told him it was natural that he should feel nervous about taking the big step. That everybody does.”
“I never did,” Howard said. “Never crossed my mind.”
“And you were what—twelve when you got married? Never had a room of your own, much less a life before you met Nadine. You didn’t have anything to give up, except your virginity, now did you, sir?”
Howard laughed. “Unlike you, who lived alone so long that you had to relearn how to pick your socks up because you had never had to do that before? No, I knew Nadine was the best thing that was ever going to happen to me. Just like Joanna is the best thing that ever happened to you.”
“Yes, sir. But don’t let that get back to her, either. I’d never hear the end of it if she knew that was true.”
“She knows, Lieutenant, she knows.”
If he had had time, Santos would have taken the train up from Florida to the District of Columbia. The East Coast trains usually ran pretty well, they were clean, and it was relaxing to watch the country roll past your window at a speed where you could see much of it. The trip would have taken most of the day, and he could have gotten up, moved around, stretched out, eaten, drank, enjoyed the drone of wheels on steel.
But time was a luxury he seemed to have too little of, so he caught the jet shuttle, and what would have been a relaxing all-day ride became a two-hour hop. Not counting the forty-five minutes they circled the airport, waiting to land.
He rented a car at the airport. The car was a full-sized sedan, as big as they had, and he took out full insurance coverage on it. The name on the card he used matched the name of his fake driver’s license, both of which had been issued to a man in Georgia a few weeks ago. The card and license had not been used before, and the man whose name was on them had not reported them missing, since he had been dead before they were issued. It was a wonderful way to move around semi-legitimately. Somebody in CyberNation’s computer hutch had figured this out, applying for credit cards and duplicate licenses in the names of the recently departed who already had such things before the family thought to let anybody know. The geeks rented post office boxes, applied under several different names, and had the cards sent there. Once they had been used for a few days, the IDs could be tossed into the nearest trash bin. Very neat, no way to trace them.
He drove to a local hotel. He wore a suit and tie, carried a briefcase, and registered at the hotel, which catered to businessmen, looking as if he was one of them. Just another middle-class white-collar worker earning his living, no one to remember.
The briefcase contained not papers, however, but the gold coins he had gotten at such a bargain rate. While the guards at the metal detectors in the airport had been curious, they hadn’t even bothered to open the case to look. And if they had, they could have done nothing, because there was no law against carrying such things onto a plane. It wasn’t as if he was going to beat somebody to death with them, although technically that was possible. Slip fifteen or twenty of them into a sock, it would make a nice, hefty blackjack.
Once he was checked into the hotel, he took a stroll, ducked into a big drugstore, and bought a cheap disposable cell phone with thirty hours of credit on it. He used this to put in a call to his friend at the Brazilian Embassy. Morgan, who could always used a little extra money, was happy to hear from him, and they arranged to meet for supper at a restaurant not far from the hotel.
Between now and then, Santos had plenty of time to study the information he had about his target. This one would be simple, nothing complex about it at all. As soon as he had the gold transported, he would locate his quarry, and then it was merely a matter of waiting for the proper moment.
Hollywood, California
Two tall and well-muscled black men in different NBA uniforms played one-on-one basketball in a gym bathed in supernal beams of sunshine pouring in from big skylights in the gym’s roof. There was just enough dust in the air so the beams stood out, hard-edged and brilliant.
The men were the hottest small forwards from both teams in last year’s championship finals, all-stars, guys who routinely got triple-doubles when they played—ten or more shots, assists, and rebounds.
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