by Tom Clancy
“Oh, shit.”
“Oh, shit, yeah. I’m a chemist. Think that’ll, you know, raise any red flags or ring any bells? Illicit drugs and a chemist? There are millions of test tube jockeys in the world, but how many of us working out at the same gym as the dead guy they are investigating up the wazoo? Even the stupidest cop alive could run with that one.
“The feds might not be the fastest mill wheels in the world, but they grind exceedingly fine. They are plodders, but that’s what they do best, and if they get this far, we are fucked. Even if the house is as clean as a wetware assembly room. If they can’t prove anything, they’ll know who I am, and that will throw a big rock into the gears. I won’t be able to go pee from now on without seeing an underwater camera lens in the toilet bowl looking up at me.”
Tad shook his head. “I’m sorry, man.”
Drayne shook his head in response. “I know, Tad, I know. And it’s done. Now, we have to see if we can manage some kind of damage control.”
“How?”
Drayne looked at him. “You know the guy in Texas, down in Austin?”
“The programmer who buys two caps every three or four weeks, for him and his girlfriend.”
“Yeah, him. I read about him in Time. He’s supposed to be a genius, supposed to be able to make a computer sit up and bark like a dog, if he wants. Got his start hacking into secure systems just for the fun of it.”
“So?”
“So, we make him a deal. He does us a favor, we supply him with whatever rings his bell, for free.”
“Dude is richer than Midas, he doesn’t need the money.”
“But I know how geniuses think,” Drayne said. “Especially outlaw geniuses. He’ll do it so we’ll owe him, and in the doing, he can prove he’s still got the chops he started out with. He gets to exercise the old muscles and feel like a badass outlaw again.”
“What is he gonna do that’ll help?”
“He’s going to make us invisible. Get ahold of him.”
“Now?”
“Right now.”
The more he thought about it, the better he liked the idea. It could work. If they moved fast enough, it definitely could work.
24
Baghdad, Iraq
Sweat ran down John Howard’s face.
In the heat of battle, the SIPEsuit’s polypropyl/spidersilk layers didn’t get rid of the perspiration nearly fast enough to keep you dry. The weight of the ceramic plates wasn’t bad, but it didn’t help cool things any. Even during a tepid night, such as it was now, the helmet’s sweatband quickly got soaked, and you had to blink away the moisture that oozed down into your eyes. And you couldn’t raise the clear face shield to let some air in, because the heads-up display wouldn’t work without the shield, and neither would the seventh-gen spookeyes built into the armored plastic.
The good thing was, night was no cover for the bad guys. The latest-release intensifiers in the starlight scopes were powerful enough to let you see with the slightest city glow, and the suit’s computer false-colored the images so they didn’t have that washed-out, pale green look. The blast shield cutouts had been upgraded so that if some yahoo threw a flare or a flashbang, the filters would pop on-line within a hundredth of a second, saving you from a sudden nova-lume that would sear your eyeballs blind in a heartbeat. Though this was something of a mixed blessing.
“You can run, Abdul, but you can’t hide,” Howard said.
From the LOSIR headset, Sergeant Pike’s voice: “Sir?”
“Disregard that,” Howard said. He shifted his grip on the tommy gun. His good-luck piece wore the pistol grip forestock and a fifty round drum, weighed a ton, and it took a little practice to use properly, especially if you were used to the cheek-spot-weld, right-elbow-high, left-hand-under-the-foregrip the Army liked to teach long-arm shooters when Howard had gone through basic all those years ago.
“Sir, I make it nine ceejays coming in through that alley to the left.”
Howard’s own heads-up display verified that. “Copy, Sergeant. That’s two each and one left over. Wake up troops and mind your fields of fire.”
The other three men with Howard did not respond. They knew what they were supposed to do.
Howard clicked the selector onto full auto and raised the finned barrel with its Cutts compensator over the top of the rusty oil drum he had chosen for cover. The old drum was full of what looked like brick and concrete fragments, so it was cover and not just concealment. If the enemy spotted him and directed fire his way, he did have some protection.
The first of the nine soldiers appeared at the mouth of the alleyway. They stopped, and the leader held up his hand, signaling for the others to halt. He looked around, didn’t see Howard or the rest of his quad, then hand-signaled for the rest to advance.
Howard touched a recessed control on his helmet and shut off the spookeyes. The bright-as-noon scene went immediately dim, but there was still enough ambient light to make out the shadowy forms of the enemy troopers. He slitted his eyelids, to make the scene even darker, forcing his pupil to dilate wider.
When the ninth soldier appeared, one of Howard’s quad tossed a five-second photon flare. Bright, actinic white light strobed, casting tall, hard-edged shadows from the startled soldiers.
Howard waited a beat, then opened his eyes wider.
His men let go with their subguns, and the enemy soldiers returned fire, yelling and blasting away.
Howard indexed the two in his assigned field of fire and gave them each a three-round burst.
In the light of the still burning photon flare, the nine went down like pins in a bowling alley. The scene fell quiet. The five-second flare winked out, and it went dark, much darker than before. Even though he had been using hardball.45 auto ammo with low-flash powder, the after-images of his fire decreased his vision. Howard touched the control, and the spookeyes turned night into day again. The heat sigs on the downed soldiers showed no movement. Good. A perfect ambush.
“End sim,” Howard said.
The Baghdad street scene vanished, and John Howard removed the VR headset and leaned back in his office chair. The exercise had been designed to practice with the spookeyes, and it had gone as planned. The ability to see in almost total darkness was a great help, but there were some drawbacks. Because of the automatic filters built into the scopes, any scenario that included random, repeated weapons fire effectively rendered the spookeyes useless, just as it did wolf ear hearing protectors.
With a single bright flash of light, the scopes’ filters would kick on long enough to diminish the light to safe levels, then open back up. This worked great for an explosion. However, with multiple flashes of bright orange muzzle blasts going off all around you, the filters would kick on and off, going from light to dark so fast it was extremely disorienting. The effect was rather like being surrounded by strobe lights all timed differently. Early sims showed the accuracy rate of troopers firing in such a scenario dropped dramatically.
So different tactics had been employed to get around the problem.
At first, the scientific types had tried to rig the scopes to drop filters and leave them down for five or ten seconds. Unfortunately, this made the scene too dark to see anything except much-dimmed muzzle flashes, your own or the enemy’s. Spray and pray was a sucker’s game.
They tried adjusting this, but since firefights sometimes lasted for five seconds, sometimes a lot longer, the results were less than satisfactory.
They also tried raising the gain threshold, so it took more to cause the shields to deploy, but even an amplified kitchen match in the dark would be enough to temporarily blind a soldier.
The scientists and engineers scratched their heads and went back to their CAD programs.
It fell to the men and women in the field to come up with a better way, like it usually did. Using the scopes to find and track an enemy, then reverting to the old-fashioned method seemed to be the best approach. At least it worked in VR scenarios and at the range. Ho
w it would work in the real world remained to be seen, at least for his units.
Howard sighed. He had run dozens of war game scenarios over the past few weeks, and there was only so much of that a man could take. In his time as the commander of Net Force’s military arm, there had been slack periods, but never as slow as it had been these last few weeks. He knew he was supposed to be happy about that, the idea that peace was better than war, and he was, but—
— sitting around and doing nothing but figurative paper clip counting was boring.
Of course, he wasn’t as likely to get shot sitting around and doing nothing, and that had been on his mind lately, too.
Washington, D.C.
Toni tried doing her djurus while sitting on the couch, just using her upper body, as Guru had told her. Yeah, she could do it, and yeah, it was better than nothing, but it was like taking a shower with a raincoat on. You couldn’t really feel the water.
She stood, moved the coffee table out of the way, and did a little stretching, nothing major, just to limber up her back and hips some. The doctor hadn’t said she couldn’t stretch, just nothing heavy-duty, right?
The elastic of her stretch pants cut into her belly as she sat and bent over to touch her toes. Damn, she hated this, being fat!
After five minutes or so of loosening up, she felt better. Okay, so she could do a few djurus with the footwork, the langkas, if she went real slow, right? No sudden moves, no real effort, it wouldn’t be any more stressful than walking if she was careful, right?
For about ten minutes, she practiced, moving slowly, no power, just doing the first eight djurus. She skipped the forms where she had to drop into a squat, number five and number seven, and she felt fine.
Then, of course, she had to go pee, something that happened five times an hour, it seemed.
When she finished and started to leave the bathroom, she looked into the toilet.
The bowl had blood in it, as did the tissue she had just used.
Fear grabbed her in an icy hand.
She ran to call the doctor.
Austin, Texas
Tad drove the rental car, Bobby riding shotgun and giving him directions.
“Okay, stay on I-35 going south until we cross Lake Whatchamacallit, and look for a sign says Texas State School for the Deaf. We have to find Big Stacy Park — as opposed to Little Stacy Park, which is just up the road a piece — then Sunset Lane, then we turn onto — you piece of Chinese shit!”
This last part was accompanied by Bobby slapping the little GPS unit built into the car’s dashboard.
“What?”
“The sucker glitched, the map disappeared!” Bobby hammered the malfunctioning GPS unit again. “Come on!”
“I don’t see why we had to come here in person,” Tad said. “We could have called or done this by e-mail over the web.”
“No, we couldn’t have. The feds can monitor phones and e-mail, even encrypted stuff. They were able to do it for years before the public even realized they could and already were. Besides, this guy wants an insurance policy. He wants to see our faces. He’ll know the name, and he can use that, but we could change our identities.”
“We could change our faces, too.”
Bobby hit the GPS again. “Ah, there it is. I got the map again.” He looked at Tad. “Yeah, we could, and he’ll know that. But the thing is, he wants us to come to him with our hat in our hand and say please. Then he dazzles us with his techno-wizardry, and we owe him big-time and forever. It’s an ego thing. Besides, as long as we’re in business, he’ll have something on us, doesn’t matter what our names are or what we look like. We have the market cornered on Thor’s Hammer, remember? Whoever is selling it is gonna be us, no matter what we call ourselves.”
“Yeah. I have to say, though, this might be out of the frying pan and into the fire, man. Even if it works, we’re trading one problem for another one.”
“I don’t think so,” Bobby said.
Tad said, “There’s the lake, up ahead.”
“Okay, watch for the deaf sign, should be just after we cross over that.”
“I’m watching. Back to this maybe biz. The guy will have something to trade if he ever gets busted. You think he wouldn’t give us up to save his own ass?”
“Don’t think that for a second. I’d give him up, if positions were reversed.”
“Jeez, Bobby—”
“C’mon, Tad, think a little bit past the end of your nose. The clock is running at the cop shop. This computer dick-wad can get into the gym’s computer and the police system and make my name go away. He does that before they get to me, we’re clear.”
“If the cops didn’t just get a hardcopy.”
“They didn’t. Steve told me they downloaded his membership files into their system over the wire. Nobody uses hardcopy for this kind of stuff anymore. I didn’t even fill out a treeware registration form when I signed up; I just logged it all into a keyboard at the gym.
“So the immediate threat, the law, is taken care of. Mr. Computer Geek is a potential problem, but that’s down the line. He isn’t going to run to the cops and turn us in now, not if he wants help from mighty Thor to keep wearing blisters on his wang with his lady friend. You see what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, but—”
Bobby cut him off. “You know about Occam’s Razor?”
“No. You not gonna tell me another fucking story, are you?”
Bobby laughed. “No. It’s a way of looking at problems. A rule that basically says, don’t get complicated when simple will do the job. The simple thing here is, if the cops don’t know about me, they can’t come looking for me.”
“Okay, I can see that. You buy some time, get out from under the immediate threat. But you still got the potential thing later.”
“Well, if you just let it hang out there, yeah. But this computer guy could, you know, have an accident. He could slip in the bathtub and dash his brains out or get hit by a bus crossing the street or maybe an allergic reaction to shellfish, and just up and die. There are certain chemicals that can kill somebody and make it look just like anaphylactic shock. And hey, stuff like that happens all the time, right? Cops would investigate, but if it was an accident, that would be the end of it, right?” Bobby grinned, that all-his-shiny-teeth smile that showed he was really amused.
Tad got it, finally. He nodded. “Oh. Oh, yeah. I see what you mean.”
“There’s hope for you yet, Tad m’boy — there, there’s the sign, pull off at that next exit!”
Tad nodded. Bobby was almost always a step ahead of the game, even when things got creaky. Push him out a window, and he would land on his feet every time. He had it under control. It felt good to know that.
25
Washington, D.C.
Jay sat seiza and tried, like the old joke about the hot dog vendor and the Zen master, to make himself one with everything.
He was having some problems with it. First, the sitting-on-your-heels position was very uncomfortable. They might do it in Japan, where everybody was used to it, but in America, you didn’t normally sit that way, or knotted up in a lotus pose, or even on the floor — not without a cushion or pillow to flop on.
Second, while he was supposed to be concentrating on his breath, just sitting back and watching it come and go without trying to control it or count it or anything, that was almost impossible to pull off. As soon as he became aware of his breathing, he kept trying to slow it and keep it even and all, and that was a no-no. And counting just came naturally for him, it was automatic. So he had to make a conscious effort not to count, and that was a no-no. Don’t count, and don’t think about not counting.
Third, you weren’t supposed to think of anything at all, and if a thought came up, you were supposed to gently move it away and get back to nothing but breathing. Thoughts were products of the monkey brain, Saji had told him, and had to be quieted to achieve peace and harmony with one’s inner self.
Yeah, well, in his case, the
brain was more like a whole troop of howler monkeys all hooting and dancing through the trees, and quieting that jabbering bunch was a tall order.
His knee hurt. That last inhalation turned into a sigh at the end. The thoughts about work, dinner, Saji, and how stupid he felt sitting here just breathing rolled in like a storm tide, as unstoppable as if he stood on the beach waving his arms at the ocean and telling it to hold it right there.
Get a grip, Jay. Millions of people do this every day!
Who knew that meditating would be so difficult? Sitting here and doing nothing was harder than anything Jay had ever done, or in his case, not done.
In the back of his mind, nagging at him, was something about work, some little thing flitting up and around like a moth, something he couldn’t quite pin down. Something about the drug thing, and the DEA and NSA agents Lee and George…
No. Push it away. Get back to that later. For now, just be…
Lee and George. Not much to know about them. Close to the same age, both career men, both lived in the District. Both of them married briefly but divorced, no live-in girlfriends at the moment. A lot alike…
Don’t think, Jay, you’re supposed to be meditating!
