Cybernation (2001)

by Clancy, Tom - Net Force 06

  “It’s from an old limerick, according to Jay.”

  “You don’t need to keep saying, ‘according to Jay.’ I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Um. According to—I mean, you know about haptic mice and input pens and such. The McCleans came out of research for blind computer users. The top-of-the-line units have oral/genital/anal plugs or cavities, depending on the users’, ah, physical configurations and desires. The headsets come with Aromajet’s DigiScents modules that can mimic certain body smells. They call these ‘reekers.’ There is a tongue wafer from Taste-the-Real-Thing-dot-com that is electronically controlled to offer various tastes, and naturally, they call these ‘droolers.’ ”

  “Reekers and droolers,” she said. “Sounds like some kind of medical condition.”

  “Or a law firm,” he said.

  “Um. Anyway, the best units include form-fitting memorymesh that can apply pressure in various ways, heat or cooling along any of the mesh ladders, along with vibrations.”

  Toni disposed of the second carrot, then went to work on a sweet purple onion. She said, “So you plug into a high-tech vibrator, or one into you, depending on your gender, slip into some mesh thingee that is really comfortable, dial up the taste and smell of warm whatever, and join your unseen loved one on a beach in VR somewhere?”

  “That’s what I am given to understand, yes.”

  “And how is it compared to the real thing?”

  “Well, according to Jay—and I am in no way otherwise knowledgeable about this, believe me—it’s not as good as the real thing, but it’s better than being alone. And in some cases, there are sensations available you can’t get with a real partner. The Electric Tongue can actually deliver enough low-amperage-but-high-voltage to make your hair stand up. Then there is the lifelike vibrating anus . . .”

  “Yuck! This sounds totally disgusting!”

  “Well, sure,” he said, “because you have me. You are forever spoiled for other men and machines.”

  That cracked her up, as he knew it would.

  “Say, fellow, is that a banana in your sarong, or are you just happy to see me?”

  “It’s a banana.”

  She laughed, and somehow his sarong fell down again.

  8

  Nicasio, California

  The night was cool, but not too cold, and the winding and hilly road fairly quiet. The target and his bodyguards were on their way back from visiting some movie people who had a place in Lucas Valley. Santos didn’t know a lot about movies, he did not spend much time in theaters, but this place, a ranch hidden from the road, was apparently pretty famous.

  Santos had picked several places along the route where he could make his move, some better than others, but all should be workable if he did what he needed to do.

  The limo passed his position, and he waited until it was a half-mile ahead of him before he started the big motorcycle’s engine and pulled out behind the car. There was no worry that he would lose them, for he knew where they were going.

  They weren’t going to get there, though.

  Thirty minutes later, the limo approached his primary location choice. But there was a car pulled off on the shoulder on the dark stretch of road, a big American sedan, just sitting there. He didn’t see anybody silhouetted in the vehicle, but that did not matter.

  It was a complication, and he let the limo drive past.

  Five minutes past that, the secondary site loomed, but this time, the traffic was heavier than he’d expected.

  The third choice was another six or seven minutes away. If there was a problem there, then he would scrub the mission for tonight and try again tomorrow.

  As the road narrowed and curved, however, Santos saw that they were alone. He checked his speedometer. The bodyguard, who liked to drive fast, was going ten miles an hour faster than the posted limit.

  Perfect.

  A flip of a pair of temporary switches on the handlebar lit the flashing lights and cranked up the siren.

  Ahead of him the limo slowed, and pulled off in exactly the place where he hoped it would. It was dark enough so any passersby wouldn’t see anything except the bike’s flashing lights—that’s what they’d be looking at as they went past. And he wouldn’t need more than a couple minutes to do this.

  The limo stopped, and Santos pulled the motorcycle up behind the car. He killed the siren, left the lights going, dismounted from the bike, and walked to the limo. The driver powered the window down.

  “What’s the problem, Officer?” the driver asked.

  In his best U.S. accent, Santos said, “You were going a little fast there, sir. Could I see your license and registration, please?”

  “Aw, come on, you’re not gonna give me a ticket, are you? Out here in the middle of nowhere, no traffic?” The bodyguard opened his wallet and flashed a badge and ID card. “I’m Russell Rader, King Executive Protection Services. I’m a former LEO-FBI, retired, working a bodyguard assignment for Blue Whale. This is Mr. Ethan Dowling, the vice president.” He nodded at the passenger in back, who smiled. “Cut me a little slack, okay?”

  Santos pretended to think about it for a couple of seconds. He closed the fake ticket book he held. “Retired FBI, huh? Well, I suppose I could let the speeding slide. But did you know your license plate was about to fall off?”

  “What?”

  “Screw must have fallen out, it’s barely hanging on. Have a look.”

  Santos moved back, and the driver alighted. Both men walked around to the back of the car. “Looks all right to me,” Rader said.

  Here was the tricky part. Santos squatted behind the car, put his right index finger on the plate holder. “No, sir, see, right here?”

  As he expected, the bodyguard squatted next to him to get a closer look.

  As soon as the car’s occupants couldn’t see them, Santos used his elbow.

  Normally, a squatting man wouldn’t have particularly good balance or leverage for such a strike. But Capoeira was an art based on movement in odd positions. Santos’s balance was superb.

  He slammed the bodyguard flush on the right temple. The man fell as if somebody had chopped off his lower half.

  Good night, Mr. Rader.

  Santos stood. He walked around to the passenger side of the limo, leaned down.

  The second bodyguard lowered his window.

  “Your friend is trying to fix the license plate, but his knife isn’t going to do the job. Do you have a screwdriver in the car?”

  As the bodyguard opened his mouth to speak, Santos drove his fist into the man’s throat with as much power as he could. He heard the voicebox break. The man clutched at his neck, and Santos fired a second strike, this one with the heel of his hand to the man’s forehead. A punch that hard likely would have broken his knuckles, but the heel of the hand was padded—you hit hard with soft, soft with hard, if you wanted to avoid damaging yourself.

  The man’s head snapped back. Before he could move, Santos jerked the door open and grabbed the stunned guard’s neck with one hand and pinched his carotids shut. Ten seconds was more than enough. The man’s eyes rolled in his sockets, showing white. He was unconscious.

  Santos released his grip. He didn’t want to kill him.

  In the back, Mr. Dowling started sputtering: “What the—! Hey—!”

  Santos could have pulled his pistol out and used it like a magic wand to silence the man, but he didn’t need it. He smiled, a broad, teeth-flashing grin. “This is a kidnapping, Ethan. You be quiet, or I’ll have to kill you.”

  The man was terrified. He shut up.

  Now, all Santos had to do was immobilize the bodyguards. He hauled the second one out of the car and dragged him to the back. He expertly tied both unconscious men, using the soft cloth ties he had tucked away in his pocket. He didn’t want any ligature marks on them. He placed a loop around each neck and to the wrists, so they wouldn’t struggle when they woke up. He opened the trunk and hoisted the tied pair inside, then carefully shut th
e lid. He walked back to the bike, glanced at Dowling as he did to see if he’d make a break for it—try to get into the front seat, get the car started, or maybe just open the door and run.

  Dowling sat, not moving, and Santos smiled. He hadn’t thought the man had it in him. He was a good judge of such things.

  He killed the motorcycle’s flashing lights, unclipped them and the siren and controls from the bike, then pushed the two-wheeler into a clump of bushes nearby, so it wasn’t visible from the road. Now it was just an ordinary motorcycle. By the time somebody found it, this would be all over. And there wouldn’t be any way to connect it to Dowling and his bodyguards anyway—the rest of the night’s business was going to happen thirty miles away on a different highway. The motorcycle wasn’t stolen; it had been bought under a fake name, and there was no reason to link it to the limo. It would be another of life’s little unsolved mysteries.

  Santos walked to the car, opened the driver’s door, and sat behind the wheel. “Just sit there quietly,” he said. “We’ll go for a ride, then we’ll have a chat. Behave yourself, and all it costs you is a little inconvenience.”

  A lie, that. Dowling and his two guards would be dead within an hour, all things going as planned. But no point in upsetting the man, was there?

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  It was the nightmare that had finally pushed Michaels into it. He’d awakened in a sweat, heart pounding, from a dream in which the psychotic doper Bershaw had come to his house and captured Toni. In this one, the would-be killer had Little Alex and was holding him by one ankle, getting ready to smash the baby against the kitchen counter.

  Michaels hadn’t been able to go back to sleep after that horrific image.

  John Howard had told him whenever he was ready to give him a call. As soon as it got late enough, he did just that.

  Now, they were in Michaels’s office.

  “I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time,” Michaels said. “Thanks, John.”

  “No problem. Makes perfect sense to me,” Howard said. “In your place, I’d have done it a long time ago.”

  “I mean, even with all of Toni’s expertise, and the knives and tasers and stuff we have laying around, somebody has twice shown up at my house with murderous intent.”

  “I remember the last incident quite well,” Howard said. “It’s about time you got some more serious hardware.”

  “Yeah. I want to be a little better prepared if it ever happens again.”

  “I expect this will do the trick,” Howard said. “Let me show you what we have.”

  Michaels nodded and looked at the gun case, which seemed to be some kind of brownish-gray canvas or oil-cloth, darkened here and there with splotches of lube.

  He untied a string at the fat end of the cloth case and slid the weapon out.

  “This belonged to my uncle,” he said. “It’s what they call a ‘coach gun,’ being the kind of weapon a lot of the stagecoach drivers used when they rode shotgun guard duty back in the Old West. This one is a European American Armory Bounty Hunter II, actually made in Russia for export. My uncle used to use it in cowboy action shooting.”

  “Cowboy action shooting?”

  “A competitive sport. Men and women get dressed up in pre1900 costumes like those that might have been worn in the Old West, give themselves names like ‘Doc’ or ‘Deadeye’ or ‘The Kid,’ and while in persona, shoot for scores using period weapons—single-action six-shooters, rifles, usually the lever-action kind, and shotguns.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. A grown-up version of cowboys ’n’ Indians. Got Native Americans who wear period stuff and compete, too. Everybody wears hearing protectors and safety glasses and all, but otherwise the look is usually pretty authentic.”

  “Huh.”

  “My uncle used to love it. There were a fair number of black cowboys on the frontier. After slavery was abolished, and before Jim Crow got going, nobody much cared what color you were, long as you could ride, punch cattle okay, and could shoot snakes or rustlers if they showed up. At least that’s the story I heard growing up.”

  “Interesting.”

  “It’s not a particularly expensive gun, basic walnut stocks and case-hardened color. The Russians don’t build ’em pretty, but they are very solid and mechanically well-made. Uses 12-gauge shells, the short ones, two-and-three-quarter inchers only. Just as well—the high-powered three-inchers would have a fierce recoil with a barrel this short.”

  He pivoted a lever in the middle to one side, and opened the breech. “Got twenty-inch-long double barrels, extractors that pull the shells out, but not ejectors, so it doesn’t throw them on the floor. External hammers, they call them ‘rabbit ears,’ see? This one is a modern copy of the old ones, so the hammers don’t actually hit a firing pin, but cock internal strikers. That way, you can use a hammer block as well as a trigger-block safety, here, this button. It’s about as simple as you can get. You open it up, put a pair of shells in, close it, then cock the hammers. Got two triggers, one for each barrel. Slide the safety off, aim it like you would a rifle, or if somebody is in your face, poke them with it like a stick and pull the trigger.”

  “What if I miss? Is this going to go through the wall and kill my neighbor in his bed?”

  “Not if you use birdshot. You don’t need buckshot or slugs for close range stuff. Combat distance, a load of bird- or rabbit-shot works just fine, and the little bbs don’t go far after hitting couple of layers of sheet rock and siding. Even though you could get a permit for a handgun, this packs a lot more punch, it’s safer, and it’s legal to own here in the District, even for civilians.”

  Michaels took the gun, worked the action open and closed, then tried the hammers out. It had a nice, solid feel to it.

  “You should drop by the range and put a few rounds through it. It’ll kick some, but you can hip-shoot easy enough if you don’t want a sore shoulder. Just like pointing your finger.”

  Michaels nodded.

  “And here’s the gun safe.”

  He held up an oblong box big enough to hold the shotgun, with an image of a hand on it.

  “This is titanium, lightweight, but strong enough to resist somebody trying to pry it open with a screwdriver. It’ll hold a couple of long arms. You bolt it to a couple of wall studs in a closet in the bedroom, put your gun and ammo inside it. It’s got a fingerprint reader in the hand-print here that will accept sixty-four different ones, so you can program it to read yours and Toni’s and anybody else you trust. Uses a lithium-ion battery to run the reader, battery is good for five or six years, and when it starts to run low, it flashes a diode, right here, so you know to replace it. It can also be wired into your house alarm system if you want.”

  “Seems, well, safe enough.”

  “If you really want, you can get Gunny at the range to install the electronic safeties we use in our issue guns, get a transmitting ring, and cover it that way, too. That way, if an unauthorized person should manage to get it out of the safe, it won’t shoot for them—but I wouldn’t worry about that.

  “So if somebody starts kicking in your front door in the middle of the night, you can get this out and ready to go in a few seconds. Anybody who sees you standing there with a piece like this is apt to think twice about proceeding in your direction. A lot of guys who would charge a pistol will pull up when they see the muzzle of a shotgun yawning at them.”

  “I can understand that. Looks like a cannon.”

  “Downside is, you only get two shots. A pump would give you five rounds minimum, more with an extended tube.

  “You ought to consider taking the FBI/DEA house-clearing class for shotguns. As head of Net Force, they’d be happy to have you, and it would be worth a Sunday afternoon to learn it.”

  “You think I need something like that?”

  “Yes, sir. For instance, if you see somebody prowling your house with a gun who doesn’t belong there, what would you do?”

  “Tell them
to drop it?”

  “Not according to home defense experts. You should just go ahead and shoot them.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Law enforcement officers are required to try to catch bad guys alive, homeowners aren’t. If somebody is in your house with a weapon, they are ipso facto to be considered a deadly threat. In your case, this has happened a couple of times already. You ordering an armed house-breaker to put his weapon down will just as likely get you shot as not. You hear a clunk! in the night, what you are supposed to do is lock yourself and your family in a secure room, get your gun, com the police, and stay put until the cops arrive. You aren’t supposed to stalk down the hall like Doc Holliday with your shotgun looking for the bad guys. If you do, however, and you see one, and he’s armed, you shoot first and ask questions later.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Not likely He is gonna be breaking into your house. Take the course, sir. There’s all kinds of things you need to know about the use of deadly force that have changed since you were out in the field.”

  Michaels looked at the shotgun. “Yes. I can see that. So, what do I owe you?”

  Howard named a price.

  “That seems awful low.”

  “Well, the gun I don’t shoot, so it might as well have a good home. Box of shells came out of my gun safe at home, been around forever. The only out-of-pocket expense I had was the safe, so that’ll cover it.”

  “Thanks again, John.”

  “Let me know when you want to go shoot. Might be I could give you a couple of pointers.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  After Howard was gone, Michaels contemplated the shotgun. He’d never kept a gun in his house—well, not this house. He had a pistol back in the days when he’d been in the field, but he’d never felt the need for a gun at home once he’d been kicked upstairs. He had the issue taser, and for a long time that had been enough—once. There was nothing like having a couple of killers drop by to make you feel like a gun in the bedside table or closet was maybe not such a bad idea after all. He might never have the need for it again, he hoped not, but he had come to appreciate the NRA slogan: It was better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.