Changing of the Guard

  Now? Now, an accusation based on a single document, without any supporting evidence? That could be laughed off: Me? A Communist spy? My God man, look at me! I’m Samuel Walker Cox, I’m a billionaire! Are you out of your mind?

  Even his enemies would smile at that one—unless there was hefty proof to back it up.

  If there had been a handler willing to testify, and supporting papers from official sources, that would have been weightier, but a file allegedly given to Net Force by our sometimes-friends, sometimes-not-friends, the Turks? Where is their copy backing this? Lost, you say? What about the Russians, surely they had supporting evidence? Oops, can’t find it?

  My, my.

  He was in a better position than before. Still not ideal, but even so, if it got to that, he could afford the best spin docs in the world.

  If it got to that.

  And, unless they came up with something else, Cox was pretty sure it would never get to that. You didn’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blew. All was not lost.

  He sipped the drink, finishing it. He needed to rein Eduard in, he saw. If Net Force had broken the code, as surely they had, or else they wouldn’t have come to have a look at him, then any further attempts against their people would be useless and dangerous. Eduard was loyal, but suppose he was captured or killed? There might be some way to link him to Cox, and that would give them another bit of circumstantial evidence, however tenuous. If they couldn’t come up with anything else, he was safe. Best not to give them a chance at anything else, no matter how remote it might be.

  If your enemy’s fire was burning low, giving him more fuel was unwise.

  He dug into the seat pocket and came up with one of the throwaway phones. He thumbed in Eduard’s number for the day.

  Net Force might be a squall headed his way, but if he sat tight, hunkered down, and waited, it would pass. No point in risking the lightning by standing alone in a field.

  “Yes?”

  “Cancel the current contract,” Cox said. “Clean up everything, neat and tidy, and don’t leave any trash lying about. Nothing.”

  “Yes, sir,” Eduard said.

  And that was that.

  34

  University Park, Maryland

  A week after his meeting with Cox, nothing new had developed on that front. The constant surveillance—which was costing a considerable amount of his budget—had not produced so much as a glimpse of Natadze and Cox together.

  Thorn invited Marissa to dinner. He chose a small but sophisticated place where they could talk. He wanted to get to know her better, but he also wanted her take on some things that were bothering him, and he wanted them both without interruption.

  After they had eaten and were lingering over coffee, he turned the conversation back to the party they’d attended. “You stood and listened to him taunt us,” he said. “We know he is guilty, but we don’t have the proof.”

  “What do we know that he’s guilty of?” she said.

  “He had at least one person we know of killed, albeit that one was a Russian agent and not a great loss to the world. And he had somebody shoot Jay Gridley—though he survived. The only thing that makes sense is that he was afraid of something Jay was working on, and my guess is that he’s listed on that file of Soviet agents—that would explain him having the Russian taken out. It doesn’t make much sense, a rich man spying for the Communists, but nothing else computes. The man was a spy. Maybe he still is.”

  He sighed. “I’m sure he did other things at least that bad along the way, but we don’t have what we need to get him.”

  “That’s how it works sometimes,” Marissa said. She paused. “Let me tell you a story.”

  “Another story? You ought to have your own show on PBS,” he said. “ ‘Marissa the Wise Woman Speaks.’ ”

  “That’s true, I should. Good of you to acknowledge it.”

  He laughed.

  She said, “Where there’s a will, there’s usually a way. We’re tropical creatures, our bodies are designed for warm climates, grasslands, trees. But we’ve come up with clothes that let us walk around at the South Pole, created machines that let us cover great distances at speed, allow us to cross land, the oceans—or to go deep under water, if we want. We’ve even been to the moon, through a cold vacuum where you’d die in seconds unprotected.”

  “Yeah, we’re adaptable. So?”

  “So, we don’t always come up with the ultimate answer, but for every question, we usually come up with something. Consider the mata-you.”

  “What’s a mata-you?”

  “Nothing’s the matter with me. What’s a matter you?”

  He laughed again.

  “One born every minute. Okay, let’s talk about snow runners.”

  He took a sip of his coffee. “Okay, I’ll bite, what is a snow runner? Some kind of extreme sport?”

  “Back in the hot summer days before refrigeration you usually drank your beer warm. If you wanted something to plop into your drink to cool it, you had three choices: Wait for winter; collect and store a whole lot of ice in a cool dark place during the winter, like a cave or an ice house; or go to where there was natural ice and fetch it. In temperate or even tropical countries, you can usually find such places.”

  Thorn considered it for a moment. “Mountains,” he said.

  “Right,” she said. “So while it might be ninety in the shade down in the flats, five or ten thousand feet up the local hills, there could be snow on the ground, frozen ponds, like that.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “The Romans, the Europeans, and even the South Americans had snow runners. Say you were the local king of the Incas down in Peru about the time Pizarro came to call, and you had a fondness for cold chocolate in the hot summer. What you did was, you sent your snow runners up to collect it for you. These were fleet-footed fellows who could run for marathon distances at a goodly clip—at least for the part where they got to the base of the mountain. They had to slow down some on the uphill leg, and coming down, they had these big, watertight baskets lined with leaves and wrapped in some kind of insulation, holding forty or fifty pounds of densely packed snow or ice chipped from a frozen stream, depending on the boss’s tastes. The stuff would start to melt pretty quick once you were below the freezing level, of course, so you had to be fairly swift. By the time you got back to the temple, or wherever the king liked to hang out, much of it would be melted, so you’d be heading back up the mountain soon, and if the king was having a party, well, you’d be hustling.”

  “A busy life.”

  “Kind of like being a mail carrier,” she said. “Lots of exercise outdoors, and the pay was relatively good. The snow runners would have eaten well, they needed to be in shape. But my point, Tommy, is that you might not be able to get at him directly, but it’s like ice in your drink in the summer. You can find a way if you want it bad enough.”

  He sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right. You just need to use that sharp brain of yours to come up with something that will do the job.”

  He nodded. She was right, of course. If only it were as easy as she made it sound.

  35

  Net Force HQ

  Quantico, Virginia

  Another week passed, and Net Force had nothing to show for it regarding Cox.

  Yes, Jay Gridley had come across some information on the net indicating that Natadze had fled the country, but Jay had said it seemed hinky, and after Thorn examined it, he agreed. The data was too perfect—a little work had revealed flights, a name, and dates, but the passenger had never been photographed by any security cams, and the copy of his ID had somehow been garbled so that nothing remained of it but that it was on file as having been checked. Too easy, and both Jay and Thorn thought it was a red herring set to throw them off Natadze’s trail.

  What Thorn had hoped for hadn’t materialized. Keeping teams in the field 24/7 cost a lot, and with nothing to show for it except suspicion,
he couldn’t keep justifying it.

  Worse, he had spoken to an old friend who was working for the Attorney General, and just a few minutes earlier had had a long and hard discussion with the Director of the FBI. Neither set of comments had been encouraging.

  Coming out of the Director’s office had left him feeling stunned. He had thought he knew how politics worked, but she had given him a lesson in just how little he knew.

  Reality was ugly.

  And now, he had to pass that lesson along.

  It wasn’t going over well.

  Jay said, “I’m sorry, I don’t see the problem. This is a bad guy—he’s probably a spy, certainly a murderer, and not to take it personal or anything, but he had his goon shoot me in the head!”

  Kent nodded. “Gridley is right.”

  Fernandez said, “I third that.”

  Thorn sighed. “I don’t disagree at all. Cox is definitely a bad man. But it has been pointed out to me that it’s not that simple.”

  He looked at them, and knew that no matter how he tried, making them understand the total picture was going to be difficult. Especially since he didn’t agree with it himself.

  “Pointed out to you by whom?” Kent asked.

  “A source in the AG’s office. And my boss. Who got it from her boss, who, I shouldn’t need to say, is the President of these United States and at whose pleasure we serve.”

  “Politics. That’s just great,” Kent said. His tone could have etched glass.

  “It’s not just that Cox is richer than Midas,” Thorn said, “though he can afford to throw a brigade of lawyers at the government and probably keep from going to jail until he dies of old age—if we could even get a conviction—but that’s not our worry.”

  “Then what is our worry?” Jay asked. “You’re saying we don’t have enough on him to arrest him.”

  “You know we don’t. We don’t even know for certain why he did it. All we have is conjecture. Even if you cracked the code and found his name in the agent file, that wouldn’t prove he was one.”

  “I’m working on it. I’ll get it. What about his connection to Natadze? How would a hit man have enough on the ball to do all that corporate crap to hide his house? That had to come from Cox.”

  “We know that. But any lawyer with half a brain would get that laughed out of court—Cox didn’t leave any fingerprints, and maybe Natadze read how to do that in a book.”

  “Bull,” Jay said.

  “I’m not arguing with that. Look, the point is, even if we had a mountain of evidence, it still might not go forward.”

  Fernandez, just promoted to captain, said, “Excuse me?”

  Thorn shook his head. “I’ll explain it to you the way it was explained to me. Remember the Enron scandal some ten years or so ago? Big company got caught doing some real creative wheeler-dealing, went bust?”

  “Yes,” Fernandez said. “So?”

  “A lot of people lost their retirements, their jobs, their homes, and even their families, and they had nothing to do with the situation other than that their companies had invested in Enron.”

  Fernandez nodded. “I remember.”

  “Here’s the biggest obstacle: Cox is the head of a multinational corporation worth more than some countries. There are tens of thousands of people directly working for him around the world, and millions of people indirectly connected to his businesses. Stock markets all over the globe trade shares in these companies.”

  “Like the Captain said,” Colonel Kent said, “so what?”

  “International concerns like Cox’s carry a lot of weight. Given the nature of the world’s economy, with everybody linked to everybody else, it’s kind of like a house of cards. Pull the wrong one out and the whole thing collapses.”

  Fernandez picked up on it first: “So, what, we’re supposed to let this guy off because that might be a glitch in the finances of a bunch of rich folks?”

  “It’s not just rich folks. It’s the proverbial widows and orphans who can’t afford what you call a ‘glitch.’ ”

  “Are you saying that arresting Cox will cause a collapse of the entire planet’s economy?” Jay said. “Come on!”

  Thorn shook his head again. “I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t do anything at all. Or maybe having the head honcho revealed as a murdering Soviet spy might so rattle investors’ confidence that they’d dump their stock en masse. Or maybe customers would be alarmed to the extent that they’d look to take their business elsewhere. We don’t know.”

  He sighed. He did understand this himself. He was a part of that community, too. But he hated it, hated the very thought that Cox might be untouchable. “Look,” he said, “once you start digging into the way the man operates—and that will have to be part of it—there’s no telling what we are going to find. A guy who is willing to sell out his country, to have people killed, probably wasn’t too scrupulous in his business dealings. I’d bet once the fed starts turning over rocks there, all kinds of ugly things are going to be revealed. There’s no way to be sure.”

  “I don’t give a flying fiddler’s—” Jay began.

  “Think of it like this,” Thorn said, cutting him off. “Your sixty-four-year-old father is about to retire after working hard for forty years. The Cox empire shatters, the stock market goes into the toilet. The mutual fund where much of your father’s retirement has been invested loses most of its value. That nest egg he’s spent his whole life building just . . . goes away. He’s probably going to have to keep working—assuming he can—and whatever assistance he can get from Social Security is, given how that program is teetering on the brink of a big abyss, going to be minimal.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Now multiply that by, say, a couple million late baby boomers who are going to retire in the next year or two. And it isn’t just them, it’s the shops they frequent, their children, their grandchildren’s college funds. If a whole lot of people go on welfare, lose their homes, get sick, can’t afford medicine or doctors, that ripple runs throughout society. It’s the butterfly wings in Kansas causing a typhoon in China, Jay. It’s not just a few rich folks who might have to skip buying a new yacht for a year.”

  None of the men around the table were stupid. He could see it working through their minds.

  Finally, Jay said, “All right. So we can’t just ride in with the troops and grab Cox. But we can’t just do nothing, either. So what do we do?”

  Thorn rubbed the side of his face. This was going to be the really ugly part. “I have been told that we can have the federal prosecutor work things out with the state and local authorities, and come up with an offer.”

  “An offer?”

  “Yes. Quietly, behind the scenes. We agree not to go after him, and put forth some kind of deal that gets Cox to retire, to give up control of his empire, maybe a big fine.”

  “What?! The man is a killer!” That from Fernandez. “And the government wants to give him a traffic ticket?”

  “Given what we have, proving felonies to a jury would be extremely difficult. He knows we’re watching, and he isn’t going to take a crooked step. There’s nothing else we can find.”

  He paused, then went on, “If we had a confession, and video of him strangling a small child in front of a hundred witnesses, the process itself would still be full of pitfalls. He might be able to get to one of the jurors, offer enough money to buy their own small town if they want one. There are a hundred things that could go wrong in a trial, and we all know that Cox will have the biggest, meanest legal sharks in the world on his side hunting for these things. If he spent ten million, a hundred million dollars on his defense, it would just be pocket change to him. Maybe he gets off, scot-free, and meanwhile, maybe your father and a million other fathers like him wind up living in a shelter or on the street. Would you have that?”

  Nobody said anything.

  “A man like Cox lives for the game,” Thorn said. “If we can take that away from him, that will be some kind of punishment.”
That was lame, and he knew it, but he had no other crumbs to offer, and he hated that.

  “But he’s still a billionaire living high on the hog,” Fernandez said. “How much you figure he’s going to suffer, when it gets right down to it?”

  Thorn didn’t have an answer for that.

  “That’s assuming he goes for the deal,” Jay said. His voice was bitter. “We don’t have enough leverage to do much. He might tell the feds to shove it, and dare them to take him to court.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “This sucks,” Fernandez said. “Big time.”

  Thorn nodded. “Yes. It does. It’s not right. But it’s the way things are. I’m just telling you what I’ve been told. Our job was to catch him. We uncovered him. We’re supposed to shut up and leave it alone from here on in.”

  That pretty much ended the meeting, with nobody happy—especially Thorn. As the men left, Thorn stopped Fernandez. “Julio, can I see you a minute?”

  “Yeah. What’s up?”

  After the others were gone, Thorn told him. It surprised Fernandez, but it didn’t take five seconds for him to nod his agreement. Thorn had been pretty sure he would go along. They thought alike about this particular subject. Thorn’s grandfather had taught him that the law and justice were distant cousins; that when you were forced to make a choice between them, it was better to choose justice, even if it might put you at odds with the law. Laws changed, they shifted according to the whim of those who made them, and people sometimes made mistakes—just look at what the white man had done to the red man or the black man—genocide and slavery, and all of it perfectly legal at the time. There was the letter of the law, and then there was the spirit, his grandfather had taught him—it didn’t take an eagle to see which was the right path.

  So Marissa’s story about the snow runners applied here. Maybe, just maybe, there might be another way.

  36

  Net Force HQ