Hidden Agendas (1999)

by Clancy, Tom - Net Force 02

  Alex Michaels leaned back in his chair and wished he was somewhere else. Just about anyplace would do, instead of sitting here listening to one of Senator White's staffers drone on at him over the phone.

  "You understand our problem, don't you, Commander?" Oh, yeah, he understood, all right. He made a sympathetic noise he didn't mean: "Um."

  Congress was still out for the holidays, but the staff people got a lot of work done when the bosses weren't around. Probably more than when they were here, getting in the way. The truth of it was, Washington was run by staff. Without them, most congressmen and senators would not have a clue as to what was really going on. How some of the most influential people in the country ever got elected amazed Michaels. Some of these bozos probably had to be led to the bathroom and shown how to work a zipper.

  "So I can pencil you in for the committee meeting?" Michaels thought about it for a second. What if he said no?

  That would be fun. They'd have to subpoena him. Would Net Force security keep out a federal marshal looking to serve papers if he asked them to? Probably, but Michaels would have to leave the building sooner or later. And the good senator would make mounds of political hay out his refusal to take the hot seat voluntarily. Did the Commander of Net Force have something to hide? An honest man doesn't fear a few questions, does he?

  "I'd be happy to talk to the senator's committee."

  "Thank you, sir. Eight a.m. on Monday the 10th. I'll e-mail you to confirm."

  "This isn't going to be another of those week-long deals, is it, Ron?"

  "No, sir. The senator is going on a junket—uh, a fact-finding mission—to Ethiopia on the 12th, so we'll wrap by Tuesday."

  So, at worst, he'd be on the hot seat for a day or two, assuming nobody else was slotted. And it was unlikely that he'd be the only sacrificial lamb—White's committees always had plenty of victims they wanted to skewer. What an idiot.

  After he hung up, Michaels leaned forward in his chair, feeling tired. He'd like nothing better than to take the day off, go for a nice long ride on his bike, to enjoy the cold, crisp morning while working up a little sweat. Or, as long as he was wishing, why not a week in Tahiti? Lie on the beach, soak up whatever rays the sunblock would let past, drink coconut and tropical fruit and rum. Listen to the waves break. Boy, did that sound good.

  He grinned at himself. There was a pile of work on his desk that he couldn't get done if he worked twenty-four-hour days for a month. The deeper that pile got, the more he felt like dragging his heels. Did everybody feel that way? Or was it a contrary streak in him, just like wanting to spend money the most when you were dead broke?

  Well. You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, right?

  Right.

  Monday, January 3rd, 11:15 a.m. Quantico, Virginia

  John Howard sat on Doc Kyle's couch in the base clinic, watching the older man flip through the hardcopy print out.

  Kyle shook his head. "I don't know what to tell you, John. X-rays, EEG, EKG, sonograms, MRI, MEG, everything is normal. You have the blood pressure of a man half your age, your reflexes are great, there's nothing growing in any dark corners that shouldn't be there. Your don't have AIDS, hepatitis, prostate cancer, or herpes. Your cholesterol is low, your liver enzymes are good, hormones are normal—all your bloodwork is all dead-center normal, except for what might be a little bit of a white cell shift to the left, a few segs, that might be indication of a virus. Might also be lab error, it's that close. You're as healthy a specimen as I've seen all month."

  "So why am I so tired all the time?"

  Kyle, a full bird colonel, was sixty, and a career military man. Howard had been his patient for years. Kyle grinned. "Well, now, none of us is getting any younger. A man your age needs to realize he's not going to be able to run basic with the recruits forever."

  "A man my age? Jesus, I'm not a man my age!"

  Kyle laughed. "Come on, once you hit forty you have to expect to slow down a little. Sure, you can hold the Reaper at bay with diet and exercise, cheat him pretty good, but the time when you could wine, women, and song it up all night long, then grab a full pack and hump it all the next day are behind you. What you did for a light workout as a shavetail is overtraining for a colonel old enough to be that boy's father."

  "You're saying I should slow down."

  "Not ‘should.' You will slow down, that's the nature of the beast. You're in better shape than most twenty-year-olds I see in here, no question. But the fact is, a twenty-year-old in peak condition is going have better legs, faster recovery, and more energy than a forty-year-old in peak condition. I'm not saying you should park your butt in the rocking chair, smack your gums, and wait for senility, but you need to recognize the reality. If you hit the gym four times a week, better cut that to two. If you jog ten miles a day, drop it to five. Warm up more, stretch before and after you sweat hard, give yourself more recovery time. You don't have the reserves you once had, simple as that. You can maintain a vintage aircraft pretty good, but sooner or later the metal fatigues, no matter how many times you rebuild the engine and the hydraulics."

  Howard stared at him. It wasn't as if the doc was giving him a death sentence—

  Well, yes, it was. That was exactly what he was doing. He was reminding him that the grave was still out there—and it was closer than it used to be.

  Just what I needed to hear. Howard blew out a sigh. "All right. Thanks, Doc."

  "Don't take it so hard, kid. You might have a couple more good years left. You want me to write you a prescription for some prunes and Geritol?"

  Outside, the January sky was clear and cold. Howard walked toward his office, thinking about what Kyle had said. So, okay, he'd ease up a little on his workouts, see if that helped. If Doc was right, then he'd feel better.

  Of course, he'd also feel worse, knowing that there wasn't something simple that could be fixed. Nobody had come up with a cure for getting older yet. And this was the first time he'd realized that it was going to happen to him too. Somehow, he'd always felt as if he'd live to be ninety, and except for a few wrinkles he'd look and feel the same then as he had at twenty or thirty.

  Maybe there was something to be said for dying in battle while your brain was still sharp and your eyes unclouded by time. At least it was quick. Maybe it was better to be burned-out ashes than cold, ancient dust.

  Monday, January 3rd, 11:15 a.m. Washington, D.C.

  Tyrone's life was over.

  He stood inside CardioSports, between the wrist-heart-monitor display and a display case of stopwatches, staring through the front window into the mall. From where he stood, with the rack of ski jackets behind him, he'd be hard to see from the tables at the food court, just across the mall's main walkway, but he could easily see Bella where she sat at one of the tables.

  Where she sat, with somebody.

  Where Belladonna Wright sat with Jefferson Benson, facing him across the little round white table, holding his hands with her hands, smiling at him.

  Smiling at him.

  Oh, God!

  He felt sick, as if he was gonna throw up, as if somebody had punched him in the solar plexus hard enough so he couldn't breathe. And he felt a cold and hot blend of sad, aching misery entwined with mindless, killing rage. He wanted to scream, to run to where Bella sat, to smash Jefferson Benson's face in with his fists, to kick him enough times to break every bone in his body. He wanted to do that, and then spit on him.

  But what Tyrone did not want to do was look Belladonna Wright straight in her lying face. Not at that moment.

  He was on afternoon shift at school, like she was, and so he'd asked her if she was going to the mall. They could meet, grab lunch, head for classes?

  No, she'd said. Not today. She had to run some errands, she'd said, so she wasn't going to the mall. She'd see him later at school.

  Fine. That was nopraw.

  And yet, there she was. Sitting there with Benson, holding his fucking hands, smiling at him.

  Tyrone
stood there, pretending to examine the heart monitors, unable to look away. It was like when you saw somebody do something really stupid on a vid, something so stupid it embarrassed you just to be watching it, and you wanted to look away, but you couldn't, you watched it anyhow. He didn't want to be here. He didn't want to know that Bella had lied to him. He didn't want to see her holding hands with Benson. But he couldn't move, couldn't turn his head away. He had to watch. Even though it felt as if there was something alive in his stomach, something with teeth and claws trying to dig its way out of him.

  He never would have known if he hadn't come to the sport store looking for a birthday present for his father. It had never occurred to him that Bella would be at the mall. She'd said she wasn't going, and it had never crossed his mind to believe otherwise. Truly had never occurred to him.

  She'd lied to him.

  As he watched, Bella stood, and so did Benson. They moved around the table, closer to each other. Benson bent over.

  Tyrone wanted to scream, to pound himself on the sides of the head.

  The worst thing he could imagine happened. Benson kissed her.

  No, there was something even worse than that—she kissed Benson back. Tyrone saw their mouths working and knew it was a tongue kiss. Benson put one hand behind her, put it right on her butt. Pulled her closer.

  Bella let his hand stay there.

  It lasted forever. A million years.

  Finally, they finished. Benson turned and went one way, Bella the other.

  Tyrone stood frozen, a worn-out statue of old bronze, unable to even blink. It was like the time on the parachute ride in Florida, that big free-fall drop. His belly fluttered, came all the way up to his throat. He was paralyzed on the outside, even though his guts roiled like a nest of beheaded snakes.

  What should he do? Should he go out and confront her? Tell her he was just passing by? See what she said? Would she lie to him again?

  Did he want to know that?

  Oh, man, oh, man! He wanted to die. Right here, right now. Just go up in a blast of fire and smoke and be dead and gone and not have to know this, not have to think about it, not have to deal with it.

  Bella had betrayed him. That was it, that was it, there was no way around it. She could have explained being in the mall, maybe even explained meeting Benson by accident and having lunch, but no way could she explain the last part. The kiss. The hand on her ass.

  Right now, he hated Jefferson Benson so much that he would have killed him if he could have figured out a way to do it and get away with it. Maybe even if he couldn't get away with it. But Benson wasn't the real problem. Tyrone knew that. Bella was the problem. What really hurt was that Bella had let him kiss her. That Bella had wanted him to kiss her. That she had enjoyed it.

  She wanted somebody else. Instead of Tyrone.

  That was the thing that made Tyrone sickest.

  What was he going to do?

  How could he live with this?

  At that moment, he couldn't see any way. No way at all.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Monday, January 3rd, 12:10 p.m. Quantico, Virginia

  Julio Fernandez stood in the cold at the start of the obstacle course, next to the chinning station. The morning trainees had come and gone, and the afternoon group didn't come on until after lunch. Some civilian feebs ran the course at noon now and then, along with senior troops trying to stay in shape, but right at the moment he was the only one at the chin racks.

  He spent five minutes warming up, rolling his shoulders and stretching his neck. If he didn't do that he would probably strain his traps, and walking around with a sore neck for the next week didn't appeal to him, especially given his already gimpy status.

  There were four sets of three bars there—hardwood dowels, each two and a half feet long, an inch and a half in diameter, mounted in six-by-six pressure-treated lumber posts. Each of the crosspieces was set at a different height. The lowest was about six and a half feet off the sawdust, the middle one was a foot higher, the highest a foot above the middle one. Usually he could easily jump up and catch the highest of the bars, but his leg bothered him a little more than he'd let on. Until the muscle got a little less sore, he wasn't going to be dunking any basketballs. Or springing up to catch the top chin bar. But he could grab the middle one easily enough. He did so, palms forward, using a full grip about eight inches wider than his shoulders. It didn't really matter how tall the bar was because when he did chins he pulled his legs up into an L-sit to work his belly muscles anyway. Kind of like a gymnast, although he wouldn't get many points for form. He didn't point his toes enough.

  He curled his hips up, pointed his legs—he could even feel that in his wounded leg—then chinned himself, going up at a medium speed, coming back down at the same speed, to a full hang. Anything else didn't work the lats enough.

  One.

  He repeated the move, then did it again, getting into the rhythm.

  … two… three… four…

  Doing it in an L-sit made it harder, but that was the point. He wasn't trying to see how many he could do, cheating to a half-hang and then pumping it back up. The idea was to make the muscles work.

  … five… six… seven… eight…

  Some guys used a false grip, with their thumbs hooked over the bar for more lift, instead of under and around the fingers. And some guys used wrist straps, on the theory that their forearm muscles and hands would get tired before they wore their lats out, and chinning was primarily a lat exercise… nine… ten… eleven…

  Fernandez figured that there wasn't much point to his back being so strong that his hands couldn't keep up. It wouldn't do you much good to have lats like Superman if you didn't have the grip strength to use them… twelve…

  He let himself down, lowered his legs, released the bar. He was warmed up pretty good now. He shook his hands and arms out, flexed and extended his fingers, rolled his shoulders a couple of times, then turned his hands around so the palms faced him, and caught the bar in an underhand pull-up grip, this time spaced about shoulder-width. That was the only difference between chins and pull-ups, whether your palms faced away or toward you.

  One… two… three… four…

  The biceps started to burn first, but the forearms were right there too.

  … five… six… seven… eight…

  It was getting tough now. He blew out a hard breath, sucked in a deep lungful of air, gutted it out.

  … nine…

  Come on, Julio, you can make it!

  … ten…

  He dropped, hung on to the bar for a second, then let go.

  "I didn't think you were going to make that last one," a woman said from behind him.

  He turned. Joanna Winthrop.

  He grinned. "Me neither. Course, if I'd known you were watching, I'd have managed a couple more. I wouldn't want you to think I was a wimp."

  She wore running shoes and sweats, dark blue pants, and a matching hooded shirt with the Net Force logo on the front. "I doubt I would think that. Twelve chins and ten pull-ups? On a good day, I might do six of either. Not both."

  "Well, I don't want you to feel bad, so how about I just skip the one-handed sets?"

  She laughed. "Thank you. I appreciate it."

  "So, what brings you out here?"

  "Too much time at the desk. Every so often, I have to get away and clear my head."

  "I hear that."

  "How's the leg?"

  "You want the macho answer? Or the truth?"

  "Oh, both, please."

  "Well, the macho answer is, ‘Ah, no problem. Little old bullet wound like that can't slow a real man down. Hell, I hurt myself worse putting on my socks. I was just about to go run the course. After which I'm probably gonna jog around the compound a couple times, then go find a pickup rugby game somewhere.' "

  "I see. And the truth?"

  "That sucker is sore, stiff, and if I tried to run the course, I'd get maybe halfway to the f
irst hurdle, cursing like a sailor, before I collapsed and fell down hollering in pain."

  She laughed again. He liked that, making her laugh. She relaxed when she did it; she lost some of that tightness in her face that made her look just a little too cool to approach.

  She said, "You're going to give macho men a bad name, Julio, admitting something like that."

  "I'm trusting you to keep it a secret," he said, his face held as grave as he could manage. "If they found out, I'd be labeled a sissy, and drummed right out of the Manly Men Society."

  "My lips are sealed."

  They smiled at each other. "So, you gonna do the course?"

  "That was the idea."

  "How about I hobble along and watch?"

  "I can live with that."

  She started a series of leg stretches, and he moved over to lean against the chin supports. He watched.

  Monday, January 3rd, 12:15 p.m. Quantico, Virginia

  Alex was running a little late, and Toni was already dressed and warmed up, practicing sempok and depok postures, dropping to sit, then springing back to her feet, when he made it to the gym.

  "Sorry," he called, headed for the dressing room. "I got hung up on a call."

  "It's all right."

  He was back out in a minute, dressed in a black T-shirt, black cotton drawstring pants, and a white headband. He also wore wrestling shoes. They didn't like you to work out on the mats with shoes that might leave marks.

  She bowed him in and set him to practicing his djuru. He only knew the first one, but it was obvious he had been practicing away from class. Another month or two and he'd be ready to start the second djuru. Pretty quick. She'd been four months before Guru had given her Djuru Two.

  After about fifteen minutes, she called a stop. He'd worked up a pretty good sweat, his shirt was damp and the headband was soaked. She walked to where her jacket was folded next to the wall, bent, and pulled the kris in its sheath from under the cloth.

  She walked back to Alex and showed him the weapon. "Look at this."