Point of Impact

“Point is, it’s all gravy, Tad. This morning, I didn’t know the GD existed, so when I came across it, it was like something for nothing. I used it up, I had a big laugh, it didn’t cost me anything. Hell, I didn’t even lose ten bucks. I came home with as much in my pocket as when I left this morning. Except what I paid for the tofu burger for lunch.”

  “You go a long way to make a point, man. And I don’t know how you can eat that tofu shit.”

  “Yeah, well, getting there is half the fun, isn’t it?”

  Tad had to nod. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. But you’re still a crazy motherfucker.”

  “So who’s arguing with that?”

  “Jesus.” A beat, then, “So how is the Zee-ster?”

  “Probably as burned out as you are. He didn’t show. How you holding up?”

  “I’ve been worse.”

  “Want to eat something?”

  “Nah, not yet. Maybe in a day or two. I’ll just pop a few pills.”

  “Keep it up, Tad, pretty soon nothing short of tanna leaves is gonna bring you back.”

  “Karis, the mummy, with Boris Karloff,” Tad said. Like half the people in L.A., Tad was an old-movie buff. He especially loved those old black-and-white Universal monster pictures.

  “Well, at least part of your brain still works. I’m gonna get some champagne. You want some?”

  “And rot my liver? Shee-it.”

  Bobby laughed and said, “I’m gonna miss you, Tad.”

  Tad nodded. “I know. But that was always in the cards, man. Always in the cards.”

  13

  Hemphill, Texas

  Jay Gridley hiked down a country road, not far from the Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Sabine River, just across the state line from Louisiana, a place he had once visited as a child. Long-leaf pine and red dirt and lazily buzzing flies completed the summer scene. When he’d actually been here in real time, he’d been eight or so, walking with a couple of his cousins, Richie and Farah. Richie was his age, Farah was four. They had seen a long reddish snake wiggling on the road, and all excited, he and Richie had run back to tell their parents. Jay hadn’t been able to understand why his mom and Aunt Sally had jumped up in such a panic. “Where is Farah!”

  “Hey, don’t worry, we left her to watch the snake, she won’t let it get away. ”

  He smiled at the memory.

  Just ahead, a white-haired old man in a dirty T-shirt and overalls—no shoes—sat in the shade of a tall pine tree and whittled on a long stick with a Barlow jackknife. Jay liked to get the small details right in his scenario work.

  “Howdy,” Jay said.

  “Howdy, yo’self,” the whittler said. A long wood shaving curled up from the edge of the knife blade.

  In RW, Jay was querying a server for information that would be downloaded into his computer spool; but in VR, it was much more interesting.

  “What’s happenin’?” Jay asked.

  “Not much,” the whittler allowed. “This and that. You heard about them FBI guys got poisoned?”

  “Stoned,” Jay said, “not poisoned.” He smiled. Yep, that had been a funny one. Something to wave at the Bureau boys when he ran into them in the cafeteria. The regular feebs were always ragging on Net Force about one thing or another, so any ammunition Jay could gather to pop off at them in return was good, especially since the L.A. incident hadn’t hurt anybody, only embarrassed ’em.

  “Anybody come through selling snake oil lately?”

  In this case, “snake oil” was a representation of the mysterious purple cap the DEA was all hot to run down. And not just them, so it seemed.

  Along his way, Jay had stopped to chat with several local characters, and so far, he hadn’t turned up anything. But this time, it was different.

  “Well, yes, sir, there was this fellow come through a little while ago had some of that stuff, I do believe.”

  Jay’s laid-back Zen attitude vanished. “What? When? Which way did he go?”

  Whittler spat a stream of something dark and icky and pointed with the knife. “He headed on up the road, over toward Hemphill, I reckon.”

  Jesus! Could it be this easy?

  “Was he walking?”

  “In a horse-drawn wagon.”

  Speed, he needed to get moving if he was going to track and run down the dope dealer. He looked around. He could drop out of this scenario and switch to another, or do it in RT with voxax or a keyboard ... No, wait, he had a toggle he could use, a backup. He did it, and suddenly there was a moped leaning against a tree, just there.

  “Mind if I borrow the bike?”

  “He‘p yo’self.”

  Jay ran to the moped, essentially a heavy bicycle with a motor that you started by pedaling the bike. It wasn’t a Harley, but it was faster than a horse-drawn wagon, and a lot better on a gravel road than a hog would be anyhow, at least the way he rode, even in VR.

  He hopped on the moped and started pedaling.

  This contemplative Buddhist stuff was all well and good, but when things started to break, you needed to be able to move!

  The little two-cycle motor belched, emitted a puff of white smoke via the tailpipe, and started up.

  The boss would be really happy if Jay could wrap this up.

  Washington, D.C.

  Michaels was moving the boxes Guru had sent home with Toni when he came across a small, highly polished wooden one that gleamed, even under the dust. “Very nice,” he said, holding it up.

  Toni glanced over from where she was piling shoes. She already had a molehill of them in the hall, the mound threatening to become a small mountain completely blocking the door to the bedroom. “Oh, I forgot all about those.”

  Toni came over to where Michaels stood and took the box from him, flipped the brass catch up, and opened the lid, then turned it to show him.

  “Wow,” he said.

  She removed a pair of small knives from velvet-lined recesses in the box, then pulled out a shelf to reveal a hidden space under it. There was a thick leather sheath in the bottom section. It looked like somebody had chopped a third or so off the end of a banana and flattened the sides. She took the sheath out and inserted the two curved blades into it so that they rode side by side, separated only by a center strip of leather. They were all metal, the knives, and the pommel end of each consisted of a thick circle with a big hole in the middle. With a quick move, Toni pulled both blades, dropped the sheath onto the carpet, and brought her hands together. When she pulled her hands apart, each one wore a knife, with short and nasty-looking curved blades extending point forward, maybe two inches from the little finger sides of her palms. Her forefingers went through the rings on the end.

  “These are a variation on kerambits, ” she said. “Sometimes called lawi ayam. Indonesian close-quarters knives.”

  She turned her hand over, palms up, to show him.

  He took a closer look. The things were short, maybe five or six inches long, and most of that was the flat handle with the hole in it. The cutting hooks themselves looked like little talons. The steel had an intricate pattern of lines and whorls in it.

  “The traditional ones are usually longer and sharp on both edges. Guru had these made for her by a master knife smith and martial artist in Keenesburg, Colorado, a guy named Steve Rollert. I guess it must be ten, twelve years ago, now. They are forged Damascus, folded and hammered to make hundreds or thousands of layers in the steel. Edge is heat-treated differently than the body, so it’s hard and will stay sharp, while the body has a little more flex to it.

  “See, you put your forefinger through the hole and grip it so. You can also turn it around and use your little finger, with the blade coming out on the thumb side, like this.”

  She demonstrated the move, then moved it back to the first grip.

  “And perfectly legal to carry around, I suppose?”

  She grinned. “Actually, you can in some states if you wear them on your belt, out in the open. Not most places if you conceal them.”

  ?
??Kind of like brass knuckles,” he said. “Or maybe knuckle, singular.”

  “But much better,” she said. “The blades are extremely sharp, and you can hit with the ring end without hurting your finger.”

  “Great.”

  She missed the sarcasm, or more likely, ignored it. “Aren’t they?” She did a little series of moves, whipping the two knives back and forth.

  A slight error and there was gonna be blood everywhere. His or hers. He took half a step back.

  “They aren’t very long,” he said, and even as he spoke, he was glad they weren’t longer.

  “ ’Cause they are slashers rather than stabbers. All the major peripheral arteries are fairly close to the skin’s surface. Carotids, antecubitals, femorals, popliteals. These will reach all of those. Cut a big artery, and you bleed out pretty quick if you don’t do something. Kill you quicker than not breathing will, and blood is lot harder to replace than air.”

  “How nice.”

  “I remember this guy Rollert has a sense of humor, too. These are custom work, but he makes a tool-steel version of these coated with black Teflon. He calls them box cutters, and that’s how he markets them. ‘Why, what’s the problem, Officer? This is a box cutter, see, it says so right there on the handle.’ I’ve got a set of those tucked away somewhere. Of course, those cost about a twentieth of what these did.”

  She waved the knives again, getting into it. It was spooky to watch those things blur as she whipped them around.

  “What’d the cheap ones cost?”

  “About fifty bucks each.”

  “You mean these two little pieces of steel cost a thousand dollars?!”

  “Quality doesn’t come cheap.”

  Michaels shook his head. His darling bride, carrying his unborn son, was a mistress of death and destruction. She talked about such toys the way other women talked about getting their hair done.

  “You can do your djurus holding one of these in each hand, and with only a slight adjustment, do them the same.”

  “Yeah, and slice off my nose if I make a mistake.”

  “Better your nose than some ... other extremity.” She grinned. “Don’t worry. By the time you know all eighteen djurus, you’ll be able to use these or a longer knife or a stick, no problem. Might nick yourself if you get sloppy, but as long as you keep proper form, you won’t. Silat is weapons-based, remember. Only use your hands if nothing better is available.”

  She waved the little knives back and forth, crossing and uncrossing her hands in patterns that looked damned dangerous to him.

  But she was excited, and as upbeat as he’d seen her lately, and he liked seeing that.

  “These were the first knives Guru showed me how to use. Traditionally, they were backup. Women carried them a lot. You could wind one into your hair or tuck it into a sarong. These have a leather sheath, but the old-style ones made in Java usually have wooden scabbards. Supposedly, there were guys in the old country who could grip them between their toes and turn your legs and groin into hamburger while you were still checking their hands for a weapon.”

  “Lovely.”

  She kept twirling and slicing the air as she talked. “They make them longer, but the short ones are best for djurus. Even though djurus are practice and knives are for application, you can do the moves with steel hands. Watch.”

  She stopped moving, and then did djuru three. Her hands didn’t move any slower than they did when she did the form unarmed, at least not that he could tell. “See? You block or punch like usual, only these give the moves more of a sting.”

  “ ‘A sting,’ right. I’d be careful on djuru two,” he said. “Way your boobs are getting big, you come across your chest on that inside block, you’ll shear off a nipple.”

  She laughed, then put the knives back into their little velvet nests. “Thanks. I feel better. Now I can go back and finish sorting my shoes.”

  She handed him the box. “Put these somewhere we won’t forget them, and I’ll show you how to play with them when we get a chance.”

  She went back to her chore, and he looked at the box. Well. He knew what she did for fun when he married her. She had saved his life with the art once, and he had learned enough to use it himself, a little. He had been training seriously for almost a year, and he seldom missed a day of practice, thanks to Toni’s proximity. After nearly being brained once by an assassin using a cane and pretending to be a little old lady, Michaels could hardly bitch about the down-and-dirty side of fighting. Pentjak silat was about as dirty as it came, and when somebody was trying to bash your head in, all bets were off. When you reached into your bag of tricks, this was the stuff you wanted to come up with. A guy charging at you with mayhem in mind might think twice if he saw you whirling these nasty little claws around with a demented grin while you did it. He sure as hell would.

  Rules? In a knife fight? No rules!

  He smiled at the wooden box and went to put it on a shelf in the living room. It would make a great conversation piece at a dinner party. Or a conversation stopper, depending on what you wanted to do.

  It would be very interesting to see what the two of them decided to teach their son when he got old enough to wonder about all those funny dances Mama and Daddy did. For certain, they would show him how to protect himself. Michaels’s father had taught him how to do a little boxing when he’d been about six or seven, and while he’d never been very good at it, at least he had developed a sense of self-confidence in his ability to protect himself.

  Once he’d started learning silat, he realized how much he didn’t know, but since he hadn’t spent a lot of time fighting, it had worked out okay anyhow.

  Funny to think about, teaching your son how to fight, when he wasn’t even born yet. Next thing you knew, he’d be buying him baseball gloves and electric trains.

  14

  Quantico, Virginia

  Michaels had left the director’s office, feeling a nagging sense of unease. Director Allison had ostensibly called him in for a progress report, but the real reason was, he was sure, that she had been given the word to light a fire under his ass. His backside certainly felt warm enough when she was done talking. She wasn’t exactly dumping on him for what the agency had or had not done so far, but she must have used the term “interagency cooperation” ten times during their conversation. As much as he hated politics, Michaels knew what that meant.

  Pee flowed downhill, and the director’s drain was right above his head ...

  Unfortunately, business was slow, and because it was, this was rapidly becoming the case to solve, and quickly. If there had been some major e-terrorism going, some big-time computer frauds, or even more bored hackers, he could beg off, point to those, and wash his hands of this crap fobbed off on them. But his people were good, they were on top of the day-to-day stuff. Even though it was the DEA’s problem, had almost nothing to do with computers, and Net Force was just helping out, if they didn’t do something pretty quick, it could get ugly.

  A couple more millionaires going bonzo, and the powers that be would be looking for a scapegoat to roast, and while it should be the DEA, it could well turn out to be a major barbecue, with Net Force on the spit, too.

  As he got back into the hinterlands and his own office at Net Force HQ, he saw Jay Gridley standing in the door, grinning.

  “Tell me you have good news, Jay.”

  “Oh, yeah. I think I got a solid lead on our dope dealer.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, sir, boss.”

  “How?”

  “The rich man’s daughter. I backtracked her spending spree. Somebody remembered that she used a public computer in one of the shops for some kind of on-line transaction. I sieved the computers she might have operated, found all the e-mail for the time she would have been in the shop, and did some cross-references and keyword hits, in case she used a phony name ... which, by the way, she did.”

  “Go on, impress me.”

  “I had the searchbots looking fo
r a long list of pointers, about forty keys, including Thor, Thor’s Hammer, and all like that. I got a hit on one and followed it up.”

  “And this keyword was ... ?”

  “Purple.”

  “Purple?”

  “As in the color of the caps. Here’s the e-mail I ran down.”

  He handed Michaels a hardcopy print. It said, “Yo, Friday Girl-I’ll have that purple thingee for you when you come by.”

  It was signed, “Wednesday.”

  “No offense, Jay, but this is a reach. A ‘purple thingee’? It could be some kind of plush kid’s toy for all we know. And days of the week as code names? Why would that be our rich woman and her dealer?”

  Jay grinned. “That’s the key, boss. Friday was named for the Norse goddess Frigga. Wednesday comes from Woden, which, as I’m sure you must know, is the way the Norse in the southern countries spelled Odin.”

  “Fascinating. So?”

  “Frigga and Odin were Thor’s mom and pop.”

  Michaels thought about that for a few seconds. “Ah. That would seem to be a bit of a coincidence, wouldn’t it.”

  “Yeah, I’d say so. Doesn’t mean it’s the chemist himself, but I’d bet my next month’s pay against a week-old, road-killed possum this ‘Wednesday’ guy has something to do with this drug.”

  “Good work, Jay.”

  “I didn’t spook the guy, stayed well back, but I can run him down to an addy.”

  “Better still.”

  “Well, the thing is, this is good and bad. If I found it, the NSA people will find it, too, if they haven’t already.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Well, their mission is to monitor communications outside the U.S. for possible terrorist activity, assorted plots, and things it would be good for us to know in general. So they have a whole list of words which, if they come up in a telephone conversation, a com-radio, telegraph signal, or e-mail, stuff like that, it kicks in a recorder. The message is taped and downloaded into one of a shitload of mainframes NSA operates, and rescanned, then routed to a computer program that reads the message and assigns it a priority code on a scale of one to ten. Anything above five gets sent to a human, and the higher a number, the faster it gets there. So if you put the words Suicide mission and bomb into your e-mail heading in any one of a hundred major or twenty minor languages, and NSA happens across it, somebody checks it. Most of the time it’s nothing, guys screwing around or whatever, but sometimes it pans out. A message that says something like ‘Shoot and kill the president and blow up Washington D.C.’ had better be a line from a TV show or an upcoming techno-thriller novel.”