Night Moves (1999)

by Tom - Net Force 03 Clancy

  The driver laughed. "Man ought to know his tools, right? I drive 'em, I might as well learn a little something about 'em, eh?"

  Fernandez laughed. "Score one for the home team. Which side of the road do they drive on in France?"

  "Who cares?" the airman said. "They're the bloody French, aren't they?"

  Even Howard laughed at that one.

  Tuesday, April 12th

  London, England

  Ruzhyo met Peel at a corner in front of a giant Coke sign that flashed thousands of lights overhead. They were to discuss his assignment, but when he asked about it, Peel shook his head. "Let's leave off on that for a moment," he said. "I've got something else I need you to do."

  Ruzhyo raised one eyebrow. "Yes?"

  Tourists bustled along the sidewalks. A group of schoolchildren in uniforms, holding hands in pairs, snaked past like a blue and white caterpillar.

  Peel looked nervous. He checked his surroundings constantly, if unobtrusively, as if he was being watched. "I need somebody to cover my back," Peel said. "I think maybe I stepped on somebody's toes."

  Ruzhyo nodded. "All right. Do we know whose?"

  "Not for certain. I have an idea, but I'll have to check further."

  "Why me?"

  What he was really asking was more involved than that: Why trust me? We don't know each other that well. Surely you have your own men?

  Peel answered the unasked part of the question: "Because you don't have any reason to want me dead."

  Ruzhyo kept his face deadpan. "Not that you know of."

  Peel smiled, short and tight. "Have you gotten a gun?"

  "Not yet," he lied. He kept his voice bland.

  Peel produced a small, zippered, dark blue nylon pouch from his inside jacket pocket and handed it over. "Beretta, model 21A, .22 caliber, Italian, but this model was American-made. Six in the magazine, one in the chamber, double-action first round if you wish, tip-up barrel."

  "I am familiar with the weapon."

  Peel nodded. "There are two extra magazines, already loaded as well. CCI Minimags, solids. I could have gotten you a bigger gun, but I understand that Spetsnaz ops have a fondness for the smaller calibers."

  "It will do. And it shoots how?"

  Peel nodded, as if he expected the question, but nonetheless pleased to hear it. "I didn't have time to have the armorer smooth it out, so the double-action pull is a bit stiff, probably twelve or fourteen pounds. Single-action is fairly tight, five pounds or so, but with a little creep. Shoots dead on at seven yards, two inches high and slightly right at twenty-five yards."

  "I understand."

  "I would appreciate it if you would keep it handy, then. And if you should happen to see somebody sneak up behind me with a gun or a knife, shoot them for me, would you?"

  Ruzhyo gave him a choppy, military nod, slipped the pouch into his pocket, and unzipped it. He removed the pistol, and thumbed the safety off. Given the stubby barrel, the Beretta would not be as accurate as the umbrella gun, but it was added firepower. And the little weapon would also be the devil that Peel knew about.

  The Russian faded into the background, just another foreign tourist with an umbrella, to keep potential trouble off of Peel's arse. Peel felt a little better, a little safer. Maybe it was all in his mind, a figment of his imagination, being stalked, but he hadn't kept his body and soul together by ignoring his inner alarms. Now and again he was wrong, and nothing amiss ever turned up, but why take the chance?

  Once, he had been on a bivouac with a drop squad doing training in the middle of some woods in NSW, Australia. They had backpacked in more than fifteen miles off the beaten track, into the foothills. They were only a couple thousand feet up, in a dry area where the dust was red and thick on everything, raising in clouds every time they took a step outside the tents. They were camped in a small clearing amid trees and scrub so thick it was like there were solid walls all around them.

  Just before dark, as the men were settling down to cook the evening meal, Peel got spooked. A sudden, overwhelming fear rose in him, so fast and so powerful that he wanted to run, to get away from the area as fast as he could move.

  It was totally irrational. There was nothing threatening around, no other people for miles, as far as they knew. He tried to reason with himself. God, he was a trained officer, a battle-tested lieutenant, young, brave, armed to the teeth, with six veteran men who could chew nails and pee needles, likewise armed, and there wasn't anything in the bloody woods that could seriously bother them. But that didn't matter. His sense of imminent doom was undeniable. Without explaining, and making it seem as if it was some part of their training, he ordered his men to pack up and be ready to move out in five minutes. It took them almost seven, but as soon as they were ready, they force-marched six miles before Peel's sense of danger faded. They reestablished camp, posted a guard, and turned in.

  Early in the morning hours before dawn, the sentry woke Peel and pointed out the orange glow in the sky. A forest fire.

  Later, when he checked, Peel found that the fire had begun just below their original campsite. It had swept up the hills so fast that fleeing deer had been caught in the deadly flames, and had he and his men stayed above, where the fire raged, none of them would have survived.

  His men had been impressed.

  How had he known? Some faint hint of smoke in the air nobody had caught? Some frightened animals in the woods whose fear had been powerful enough so that he could somehow sense it? He had pondered it but never came up with an answer that satisfied him. More important than how was that he had done it. Some intuition had told him Death was near, and he had had enough sense to go with it.

  Similar things had happened in various firefights and patrols since, though nothing quite as dramatic as the Australian event, and when he had felt the cold touch of it on his shoulder, he had harkened to it. More times than not, such actions had saved his life.

  There was no enemy in sight here, but he felt the fear. The only cause he could figure was the scientist. Nobody else knew what he was doing, and the man certainly had something to hide. It didn't make sense, not with Bascomb-Coombs giving him a bloody million and making him a kind of partner in the scheme, but who else could it be? And in truth, he hadn't seen the money stacked up neatly on a table somewhere, had he? It was all electronically vouched for by the Indonesian bank, and normally that would have been enough, but Bascomb-Coombs was owner and operator of the world's nastiest computer, wasn't he? Surely he could fool somebody not computer-savvy enough to know the difference, if that was his wish.

  Why would he wish to do that?

  Peel did not have a clue, but something was lurking out there, and he did not wish to become its victim. Best he take steps to find out, and best to be quick about it, too. And if it was Bascomb-Coombs, well, all his genius wouldn't stand up to a knife between the ribs or a bullet to the back of the skull. When push came to shove, the sword was a much better weapon than the pen, no question.

  Peel walked toward the train station, feeling a bit better now that he was taking action.

  29

  Tuesday, April 12th

  Washington, D.C.

  Sojan Rinpoche was coming to see Jay. He was coming here, to his apartment, in the flesh, and Jay was more than a little nervous.

  The advantage of VR was that you could craft your image into anything you wanted. True, Jay tended to look like himself in a lot of scenarios because it was more trouble than it was worth to create a persona to impress somebody. Well, okay, so he touched himself up at the edges, maybe, he looked a little taller, more muscular, had lines that were a teeny bit sharper, but not so much you couldn't recognize him in RW if you met him. After you had been a player for years, you more or less disregarded what you saw when it came to other players in VR, anyhow. You'd meet them off-line in some RW conference or whatever, and you couldn't quite reconcile the real person with the net persona. A lot of times, they would build an image that looked totally different but not bot
her to change their voice, and hearing them speak from a completely unrecognizable body was weird. Or they'd change the voice but not the face, and that was strange, too.

  Truth was a very subjective thing in virtual reality. The term itself was almost an oxymoron.

  Saji had told Jay on the net that he was going to be in D.C. for a couple of weeks and asked Jay if he wanted to meet in real time. Jay had agreed, though he had a few reservations. Saji had saved his butt, no doubt about that, and he owed him BTDS--big-time-damn-sure--but there was that little gnawing worry that the real Saji might not jibe with the virtual version. Buddhists had dealt with illusion a long time before computers had been invented, and maybe he'd look like Saji and maybe he wouldn't. Sometimes, you hated to meet somebody for whom you had great respect, for fear the reality wouldn't live up to your imagination. Once, when he'd been a kid, Jay had happened across the host of a television show he'd loved. On the air, the guy had been smiling, avuncular, the kind of man kids wanted for a father. He'd been Jay's hero. The show host had spotted Jay, and the first words from his sweet lips had been, "Jesus, who let that little dickhead in here?"

  So much for childhood heroes.

  Jay had killed the tiger, but compared to what he still had to do, that was the easy part. Now he was hunting tyrannosaur, he was stalking a dragon, and he was gonna need a bigger gun. And more nerve. Saji was going to make him spill his guts about it, about how he felt, and that wasn't gonna be fun, either. In some ways, that was scarier than the thunder lizard. Who was it said the unexamined life wasn't worth living? Plato? Aristotle? Yeah, maybe so, but if you spent too much time digging into your own psyche, it got spooky. Maybe the over-examined life wasn't worth living, either.

  In Betty Bacall's throaty, sexy tone, the house computer said, "Jay, you have a visitor."

  Saji was here.

  He was ready for anything. Jay took a deep breath and went to the door. Opened it.

  A petite, short-haired brunette woman in blue jeans, a black T-shirt, and cowboy boots stood there. She looked to be about twenty-five, maybe five feet tall even in the boots, and had big dimples around a beautiful smile. She could have been Tibetan, he supposed, but there didn't seem to be any Oriental cast to her features.

  "Hello, Jay," she said.

  Well ... shit. He realized he wasn't ready for anything after all.

  "Saji," he said. It was not a question. Son of a bitch. Not only was Saji a woman, she was young and beautiful. This was not fair!

  Son of a bitch.

  Tuesday, April 12th

  The Yews, Sussex, England

  "Telephone call for you, sir," Applewhite said. He came into the room carrying the instrument. "A gentleman by the name of ... Pound-Sand, milord. He says you were expecting his call."

  Goswell paused and looked through the tubes of the shotgun he had been cleaning. Pound-Sand? He didn't know anybody named that, did he? Did anyone? Someone was pulling Applewhite's leg, surely? He blew hard through one of the barrels, causing a hollow, hooting sound, and lint from the cotton cleaning patch to float out into the room and drift downward in the rays of the afternoon sun.

  "He says he was told to call by an old gentleman fond of Cuban cigars."

  Ah. That's who it was. He reached for the phone and waved Applewhite out.

  "Hello?"

  "Lord Goswell?"

  "Yes, it is I."

  "A moment, please, sir." The voice seemed cultured enough, some education and decent background in it. There came an electronic tone from the other end of the connection. "Excuse the delay," the man said. "One cannot be too careful, can one?"

  "You just did a voice analysis?"

  "Yes, my lord. And the line is secure, our conversation is quite scrambled. I trust no one is listening in on an extension on your end?"

  Goswell nodded to himself. Good show. He said, "No, we're alone, Mr.--ah, Pound-Sand."

  The man chuckled. "I hope you'll forgive me the little joke, my lord. Sir Harold has indicated that you have something of a delicate problem?"

  "I'm afraid so, yes."

  "Would you like this problem resolved temporarily or permanently?"

  "Permanently, I'm unhappy to say."

  "I shall attend to it immediately."

  "You'll need particulars."

  "Just the name will be sufficient, my lord. I can determine the rest."

  Goswell grinned. Capital!

  He gave the killer Peel's name.

  "Thank you, my lord, I'll take care of it. Good-bye, then."

  Goswell hung up the phone. No discussion of money or tawdry details. How wonderful. He felt better. At least there were still a few good men out there.

  Tuesday, April 12th

  London, England

  Alex Michaels walked along the bank of the Thames near the Jubilee Gardens, watching tourist boats cruise by and wishing he could turn back time. His life had become a fucking soap opera. His investigation was stalled. His ex-wife wanted sole custody of their daughter. He was having a relationship with his second-in-command. Worse, he had damned near slept with someone else, which would have been only the third woman he had been with in a dozen years. How could he tell Toni that? What could he say? Oh, yes, while you were out of town? I came that close to rolling around and breaking furniture all night with the gorgeous British secret agent Angela Cooper. Sorry about that.

  Yeah. Now, he had a monkey riding his back, clawed fingers dug into his neck and shoulders, legs wrapped around his torso like a vise, and it was so heavy he could barely stand. He had never felt so guilty in his life. He had never done anything like this before, ever. How could he have been so stupid? How the hell was he going to make this right?

  Was it even possible to make it right?

  He couldn't stand the idea that he might lose Toni. But if he told her--no, when he told her--that could happen. She could slap his face and stalk out. She could also break his bones and stalk out, though that didn't scare him as much as the hurt he'd see in her face.

  What the hell had he been thinking about?

  Sure, he could try to blame it all on Angela, she had worked pretty hard to get him to her place, had set it up with the massage and all, but he wasn't fooling himself with that rationalization. She hadn't held a gun to his head. It took two to tango. He could have politely declined the offer and gone home.

  You can't spike paper without a paper spike.

  Okay, fine, so you didn't actually spike anything, but like horseshoes and hand grenades, close counts here. Ah, Jesus.

  Some Japanese tourists on a bargelike boat with a brightly colored canopy over it smiled and waved at him. Probably thought he was a local; not much difference between an Englishman and an American to look at, was there?

  The tourists didn't have a clue that the idea of throwing himself into the Thames and diving to the bottom and staying there held a certain morbid appeal just at the moment.

  He waved back. "Eat shit and die," he said, smiling falsely.

  How could men do such things, cheat on their wives or significant others as he had done? Almost done. Once, he'd had drinks with a lawyer he'd met on the job, a tall, handsome, rich guy who was married to a beautiful woman. They had three children, a great home in Virginia, money, dogs, cats, every measure of happiness you could want. They started talking. The lawyer had a couple of drinks, then confided in Michaels. Once, not long ago, the lawyer said, he'd been to a fund-raising breakfast in D.C. Aside from his wife, there were four very attractive women at the table, some married, some not, ranging in age from twenty-two to forty. He had, the lawyer said, slept with all of them during the past year and looked forward to doing it again with each of them. None of them knew about the others. It was a peak moment for him, he'd said.

  Michaels had nearly choked on his drink. The man must be mad. The idea of sitting at table with five women, all of whom he had been to bed with, filled him with terror. In such a situation, he would have dropped dead of fright, no doubt about it. The ten
sion would have been unbearable. He could see his head just ... exploding, like a cherry bomb on New Year's Eve.

  His experience was small, but he believed that women could tell these things somehow. A wrong look or word from Angela, and Toni would know. That was the last thing he wanted to happen, that she find out from somebody other than him.

  The second to last thing he wanted to happen was that she find out from him.

  Oh, man! What was he going to do now? No matter how he looked at it, this was a no-win situation.

  Should have thought about that when you shucked your clothes and rolled over on that massage table, pal. Should have put your brain in gear before you put your hydraulics in motion ...

  Ruzhyo followed Peel, keeping his rented car one or two vehicles back in the traffic. He did not consider himself an expert in surveillance--he had known men who could follow a damned soul through Hell's Main Gate without the Devil knowing it--but it was much easier when the subject knew you were tailing him and wanted you to be there. It was true he had shadowed people before, usually just before he killed them. And it was true he knew the basics of moving surveillance, how to use cover, how to blend into the background, when to back off and let somebody go to keep from burning them. Such skills were part of his trade, and he was adept, if not a master.

  Ruzhyo glanced at a street sign as they drove past. Old Kent Road. And there, off to one side, was something called the South East Gas Works. He made a mental note of these.

  One of the tricks that beginning operatives learning how to tail somebody often missed was to pay attention to where you were. There was a tendency to concentrate on your subject to the exclusion of all else. You might not see his friend, laying and watching for just such as you. Or you could stay with a subject through various twists and turns, sometimes even when he got cute and tried to see if he was being followed, but if you were not paying proper attention when the subject stopped, you looked up and did not have any idea as to where you were. In a familiar city, this was not a problem, perhaps, but in a strange town, it could cause difficulty. If you did not have a good local map or a GPS, finding your way back to your base might be a chore. And there were worse things. There were areas in every city where you simply could not park a vehicle and sit in it for several hours waiting for a subject to return to his vehicle and depart. A residential street in a well-to-do neighborhood was a bad place to stay. Rich people had things they wanted protected, and they also felt that the law and its officers should offer them priority. It might be a public street, and you might have the right to park there legally, but if the local captain of industry glanced out his mansion window and saw you sitting in your automobile in front of his property, he would call the police and they would come and check you out. If the private security patrol didn't get to you first.