State Of War (2003)

by Tom - Net Force 07 Clancy

  "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.

  "You--you can't do that!" Thumper said. "It--it's not fair!"

  Toni gave him the big-cat-about-to-feed grin again. "Welcome to the real world, Mr. Virtual Reality. The clock is running. If I don't hear what I want to hear starting in the next sixty seconds, I'll have that big, mean, nasty guy with all the guns who arrested you take you for a walk to our basement elevator."

  She let him think about that for a moment, not saying anything.

  Thumper sighed and sagged back in his chair. "What do you want?"

  Toni looked at him. "I want to know why you did this."

  "I was paid! I got hired by a guy to do it. It wasn't my idea!"

  "And his name?"

  "I--I don't know his name."

  Toni stood up and made a point of looking at her watch.

  "No, it's true, I swear! He called me, I met him at an office, we did everything face-to-face. He paid me in cash. I never got his name."

  "Where is this office?"

  "At a mall on Long Island."

  Toni shoved a small flatscreen across the table. "Key in the particulars. Name of the mall, where it is."

  He took the flatscreen.

  "I want a description of the man who hired you. Height, weight, hair, eyes, everything you can remember. And when we're finished I'll send a technician down to work with you on an Identi-kit to come up with a picture of this guy."

  Thumper nodded, already typing.

  "Are you supposed to see him again?"

  "Yes, yes, for another payment, as soon as he sees evidence of the virus's effects."

  "How do you make contact?"

  "I have a secure phone, no visual, signal scrambled coming and going. He calls me."

  "Where is this phone?"

  "Your people took it from me."

  "You use a vox-changer when you talk?"

  "Yes."

  She nodded. "Good. Maybe you won't have to turn into a cave fish after all, Mr. Newman."

  Toni went to the door, already planning the next step. She would have Jay put out a press release that the hacker's next virus was out there doing damage. When the guy paying this clown called, they'd set up a meeting, nail him, and that would be that. This was no sweat, no problem.

  25

  Dallas, Texas

  Dallas was like a whole
bunch of other places in the southern U.S.--hot and humid in the summer, and very uncomfortable if you didn't have air-conditioning. It was ninety-five degrees out there today, with ninety-one percent relative humidity. As bad as back home.

  Well, Junior figured, it didn't matter. He'd be in and out of here in a day or so.

  He'd rented a house for a month via the net, a college area near the U of T, out in Arlington, about halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth, using a legit credit card he had under a phony name and post office box. He'd had to cough up a thousand bucks extra, a guaranteed "cleaning" fee, and he sure wasn't going to get that back. Between the rent, the extra fee, the airplane tickets, and the rental car, this would end up costing him five thousand and change, but that was part of the cost of doing business. You had to spend money to make money, and you had to spend whatever it took to cover yourself.

  As he drove from DFW airport to Arlington--he had to take the International Parkway to I-30, jig west, and then south on State Road 360--he replayed the shoot-out with the security guard in his mind. It had been much better than the cop. The way he figured it, he could have waited for the county mounties to show and killed them all.

  He was invincible.

  Joan wouldn't be that kind of rush. There wasn't going to be any challenge, no real risk. She was a skinny little thing.

  He already knew that he wasn't going to shoot her. There wasn't any need to do that. He'd give her a couple of drinks, maybe find some enjoyable way to tire her out, then, once she was asleep, he would put a pillow over her face and she would just wake up dead. Clean, no blood, and he'd be careful not leave any of his DNA around.

  Once he had everything cleaned up, scrubbing every place he touched, vacuuming, taking the bag with him, he was out of there, and Joan was no longer a problem. It would be a month before the rental agent came around looking for more money. He'd leave the air conditioner going full-blast, maybe even put Joan's body in the tub and dump a few bags of ice over her. She wouldn't start to stink for a while, and God knew college flops didn't smell like rose gardens anyhow. It would be at least a week or two before she got ripe enough so any of the neighbors would likely complain about the smell. All he needed was one day.

  In college towns, Junior knew, people came and went all hours, hopped on a bicycle or scooter or in their cars, and nobody paid any attention to them. Turnover was high in such neighborhoods, kids flunking out or transferring or graduating, so it was hard to keep track of who was living where. He had a cowboy hat and a pair of pointy-toed boots and Levi's cut for them, a big ole silver belt buckle, and aviator shades. He even had a fake moustache. He looked like any other Texan. What they'd see would be the clothes, and if he was a little older than most students, big deal. He wasn't planning on interacting with the neighbors.

  Come tomorrow, he'd be long gone. And when the cops eventually came round and discovered the body of a woman who had a record for prostitution busts in at least four states Junior knew about--Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida--they would hardly call out the Texas Rangers in full battle gear to hunt down her killer. A hooker dead halfway between Dallas, with hundreds of whores to go around, and Fort Worth with almost as many? The cops would figure she'd come in from one of the big cities and had pissed somebody off.

  They'd probably figure it for a professional hit once they got to poking around the real estate rental office and hit walls trying to trace the renter, but even so, figuring out motive and who could have done it was a long way past that.

  The odds were good that they'd just drop it at that point, leaving the case open but not putting any serious effort into closing it. And if they didn't? Well, he'd been careful. There was absolutely nothing linking him to that house, nothing to give them even a hint of a trail to follow.

  He may be invincible, but he was also very, very careful.

  He found the house, made a pass by, and checked out the situation. He wouldn't be back here until well after dark--he was picking Joan up at the airport at seven, they'd stop and get something to eat on the way, grab a bottle of bourbon, she liked to drink Southern Comfort, he knew--so it'd be nine, maybe ten P.M. before they got back.

  It was too bad, 'cause he really liked her. She was useful for his game, and she was great in bed, too, but this was business. Ames was right. There were plenty of other fish in the sea who didn't know squat about Junior. Better to swim with them and make sure this one went belly up and quiet. Dead women tell no tales.

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  "You wanted to see me?" Toni asked, standing in his doorway.

  Alex grinned. "Always," he said.

  Toni smiled back. He loved that, making her smile.

  He could see she was carrying a manila folder under her arm. He nodded toward it. "What's that?" he asked.

  Toni shrugged. "My report on that hacker, Thumper, who released the latest viruses. I've sent a copy to Jay, of course, but I thought you might like to see it, too."

  Alex nodded. "Thanks, hon," he said. "I'll look it over first chance I get. First, though, there's something we need to talk about."

  Toni came over and sat down in a chair on the other side of his desk. "What is it?"

  Alex spun his flatscreen to face her. On the screen was a photo and brief dossier of Corinna Skye.

  "Her," Alex said, nodding toward the screen. "She's a lobbyist for CyberNation, and she's been working me pretty hard."

  He gave her a moment to read through the short file. When she was done, she shifted her eyes to look at him, and he saw there was steel in those eyes.

  "Working you how?" she asked. Her voice was soft, but carried an edge.

  Michaels shrugged. "Nothing specific," he said. "She's come by the office a couple of times to make some points and deliver some information. She even called the house the other day."

  "When you were working out in the garage?"

  He nodded.

  "Guru told me someone called. She didn't say who, though."

  "She called again earlier today," Alex said. "She said she had a meeting with Mitchell Ames and has some interesting information to pass on to me. She wants to meet me at her hotel at seven tonight for a drink."

  Toni's eyes flicked to the flatscreen and then back to him. "And?"

  "And I have a bad feeling about this."

  "What has she done?" Toni asked, her voice still soft and low, but still with that edge of steel.

  "Nothing. Nothing specific, anyway. It's just that she's been a bit too . . . suggestive, I guess. But between her innuendos and the timing with this CyberNation suit, I just have this feeling that I'm being set up. And I don't want to take any chances."

  "So you're not going to meet her?" Toni asked.

  Alex shook his head. "I have to meet her. But I want you to come with me. If Guru won't mind watching Little Alex for a while longer, that is."

  Toni smiled at that. "I'll call her right now," she said. "And I'll be ready to go by six."

  She rose to leave, but paused in the doorway and turned back to face him. "And by the way," she said. "I love you. And thanks."

  And then she was gone.

  Alex just sat there for a moment, enjoying the warm feeling she had left behind, and then he picked up the manila folder holding her report on the hacker.

  In spite of himself, he couldn't help feeling that one more virus-strewing hacker was not Net Force's biggest problem. CyberNation and their lawsuit, their bribing a Supreme Court judge's clerk, their devious ways to get their agenda across, that was a problem. This was nothing. They had caught the guy. End of worry about him.

  He looked at the folder. Best he read it, though, and be ready to tell Toni what a good job she had done.

  It didn't take long. It was good work, both on Jay's and Toni's parts, even though they didn't have quite all of it. According to what she had written, there was still this man behind the scenes, supposedly, but that would be a simple enough sting: Wait until he called, set up a meeting, go and
collect him.

  As Michaels read the description of the suspected kingpin, he thought the man sounded familiar somehow. Like somebody he knew.

  He couldn't pin it down. Ah, well. It would probably come to him in the middle of the night. Besides, a lot of people looked alike. Sometimes when the anchor described a criminal suspect on the evening news, it was all he could do to keep from laughing out loud. "Police describe the suspect as a white male, age twenty-five to thirty-five, five-foot-nine to six-feet-two inches tall, one hundred and sixty to two hundred pounds, with brown hair worn moderately long. He was last seen wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and running shoes."

  That could be any of a million people in any big city on any given day. Maybe one of two million. Who did they hope to collect with such a description?

  Well, he didn't need to worry about it now. He had to talk to the secretarial staff and the ops who were going to be amassing paperwork for that shark Mitchell Ames on behalf of CyberNation.

  Just what he needed.

  Arlington, Texas

  As they came out of the Indian restaurant, Junior said, "I spotted a liquor store down the road a piece. You want to get a fifth of Southern Comfort to take to the house?"

  "Sure, why not?" Joan said.

  She wore a disguise to match Junior's, just like he'd told her to--cowboy boots under a long blue denim skirt, and a shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons under a white cowgirl hat.

  Even so, the clerk in the restaurant had looked at him like he was some kind of pervert, since Joan did look young enough to be Junior's daughter.

  "So tell me more about this gig," she said, after they had collected the bottle and gotten back into the rental car.

  He shrugged. "It's just like the last couple," he said. "This one is a fat, rich Texas oilman who got into politics. You'll be working as a temp secretary in his office, romance will blossom, we'll set up a photo shoot at a motel, the usual."

  "My fee?"

  "Same as last time."

  She was silent for a moment, only the deep drone of the car's AC to break the quiet.