Point of Impact

  They’d borrowed a tactical truck from the local police force, and it went through the heavy steel gate as if it were paper. The cars followed the truck in, five vehicles, and made for their assigned locations. Howard wasn’t sure, but it seemed to him there were more than sixteen agents leaping from cars and hurrying toward the house.

  Brown, Peterson, and Howard alighted and moved to the garage. Brown had an electronic master key she triggered, and the signal worked; the garage doors rolled up, all six of them.

  Peterson moved to stand behind the door from the garage into the house, his handgun pointed up by his ear.

  Brown crouched behind the car closest to the door, a seventies Charger, a muscle car lovingly painted in maybe twenty hand-rubbed coats of metalflake candy-apple red. Be a shame to see that paint chipped by a bullet, Howard thought.

  He looked around. Which car would he take if he was in a real hurry? Probably the Cobra. Nah, better would be the Viper, which was essentially a rocket with wheels. They’d have to use roadblocks; nobody would be catching that sucker from behind.

  He walked over to the Viper and looked into the little convertible. Had to be a real wood dash and steering wheel. Hello? What’s this?

  Lying in plain view on the passenger seat was one of those zippered plastic bags, like for sandwiches.

  Inside the bag were four big purple capsules.

  Howard grinned. Son of a bitch!

  Brown and Peterson were intent on the door. Orders from Lee rattled over the operations channel on the headset. They had crashed the front door, after some effort, and were entering the residence.

  Howard reached down, picked up the bag, opened it, and shook one of the capsules into his palm. He looked at the two DEA agents. He could have been invisible as far as they were concerned.

  He slipped the cap into his coverall pocket, zipped the bag closed, and dropped it back onto the car seat.

  The sounds of fully automatic weapon fire and Lee screaming over the headset came simultaneously: “Return fire, return fire!”

  Well. Looked like the bodyguards were earning their money.

  More full-autos came on-line. The DEA assault team carried MP-5s, and the distinctive sound of those chattered, joining the other guns. All pistol-caliber stuff, Howard thought, nothing loud enough to be rifle. The suspect’s bodyguards must have MAC-10s, Uzis, something like that. Didn’t sound like H&Ks.

  “... all available agents, they’re heading for the kitchen!”

  The kitchen, Howard recalled from the maps, was just up a short hall from the garage.

  Brown and Peterson took this as a sign they should go in. Peterson jerked the door open, Brown stepped in, pistol leading. They didn’t look for Howard but vanished into the house.

  Howard, whose side arm was still in the holster, considered his options. If sixteen DEA agents couldn’t take out a pretty-boy movie star and his bodyguards, he wasn’t going to be able to add much firepower. He’d stay right here, just like he’d been assigned.

  More shots echoed from the house. Somebody screamed, two or three different voices.

  “Shit!”

  “Fuck!”

  “Ow, ow, I’m shot!”

  Ten seconds later, a man emerged from the house into the garage. In one arm gathered to his chest, he held a young woman in a maid’s uniform. From her face, the girl was in mortal terror, and rightly so, since in his other hand, the guy held a short knife pressed against her neck. He was a handsome young man.

  This would be the Zee-ster, Howard guessed.

  He pulled his revolver, brought his other hand up, clasped the weapon in a two-handed grip, and pointed it at the knife man.

  “Hold it right there, Zeigler,” he said.

  The man froze.

  Howard forced his hands to relax a hair. Holding the revolver tightly was necessary for the shot, but clenching the thing in a death grip for any length of time past a second or two would cramp his hands pretty quickly. And he might be here a while, you never could tell.

  Zeigler, with the knife held at the hostage’s throat, tried to make himself smaller, but there was no way a five-foot-tall, hundred-pound woman was going to completely shield a six-foot-tall, two-hundred-pound man. Howard had all kinds of targets, including the only one that meant instant incapacitation, a head shot.

  “Put the gun down! Put it down, or I’ll kill her!”

  He had the shot. Sights square, lined up on the man’s left eye. At fifteen, maybe sixteen feet, he wasn’t going to miss. Unless the guy jerked at the last second and put the hostage where his head had been. Not much risk to the woman, but some. And he’d have to kill the movie star, a head shot would do that, right into the brain.

  Well, maybe not on a movie star ...

  “Listen,” Howard said, “let’s discuss this.”

  “No fucking discussion! Put the gun down, or I’ll cut her throat!”

  The maid whimpered.

  “You don’t want to do that. You kill her, you’re standing there unprotected with a knife in your hand. Think about that. She’s all that’s keeping you alive. She dies, you die, simple as that.”

  “You can’t do that. Do you know who I am?”

  “I’m not a cop, son, I’m a soldier. They trained me to kill, not capture. I see blood on that blade, it’s a done deal. I don’t care who you are. God doesn’t love men who murder innocent women, and I expect He sent me here to teach you this.”

  The man was on the edge of panic. “Let me go, I let her go.”

  “What, do I have the word stupid tattooed on my forehead? Put the knife down, you get to tell your story to a judge. Maybe a good lawyer can even get you off, it happens all the time. You’re a millionaire. Rich and famous men don’t go to the gas chamber. You cut that woman, I guarantee you’ll be dead before she is. Game over.”

  “You might hit her if you shoot!”

  Howard blew out a theatrical sigh. “Let me explain some things to you, son. This weapon I am holding in my hands is a Phillips & Rodgers .357 Model 47 Medusa. It’s about as well-made and accurate a double-action revolver as you can get, and with the hammer back in single-action mode like it is now, it’s extremely accurate. I can hit an apple at twenty-five meters all day long, and you are less than one-third that far away. You understand? You want to think about how much of you I can see that’s not behind your hostage?”

  Zeigler didn’t say anything.

  Howard continued. “There are six one-hundred-and-twenty-five-grain semijacketed hollow point rounds in this handgun. If I shoot and hit you solidly anywhere with only one shot—and I will hit you, son, you can bet the farm on that—the bullet will thump you at around twelve hundred feet per second. That means it gets there before you hear the sound of it going off. That hypersonic bullet will expand to maybe twice its size and it will put a big hole most if not all the way through you. Based on documented shootings with this caliber and particular brand of ammo, you will go to the floor ninety-six point four times out of a hundred, and no longer have any interest in anything but trying to breathe. And probably not that for long.”

  Zeigler swallowed dryly.

  “Now, here’s the deal. I don’t give a rat’s ass if you walk out of here or if the DEA drags your dead body out; it’s all the same to me. But if I have to shoot, this gun is going to make a terrible noise inside this garage, and probably my ears will ring for a couple of days, because I didn’t think to put my plugs in before I came through the door. I’d just as soon not damage my hearing any more than I have to.

  “So if I have to shoot, I am going to be real pissed off. I might as well shoot again. You following me? You put the knife down right now, or I will punch a hole in you, and when you fall, I’ll pump a couple more in you for making my ears hurt. Your movie career might survive an arrest You don’t put that knife down, you won’t. Simple as that. Your choice. Either the knife hits the floor or you do.”

  Somebody was listening on the radio, because Howard heard, “Don’t
shoot him! Don’t shoot him! We’re on the way!”

  Howard tongued the radio’s off switch. He couldn’t turn off his mike, but he silenced the earphones. He didn’t need the distraction.

  He took a deep breath and let part of it out, held the rest, preparing for the shot. You never bluffed in a situation like this. He put his finger inside the guard and onto the trigger. Wouldn’t take much, just under three pounds, a nice, crisp pull, like breaking an icicle.

  “Don’t! Don’t kill me! Please!”

  Ziegler’s left hand came away from the maid, releasing her, and made a pushing motion toward Howard.

  “Come on, we can make a deal here! I’ll... I’ll give you my supplier! That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  The knife moved away from the maid’s neck. Ziegler hadn’t dropped it yet, but he was about to. His knife hand had already relaxed, and he had taken a half step away from his hostage.

  Howard let out another sigh, quieter this time. Thank you, Lord. That would have been all he needed, millions of teenage girls hating his guts for killing their screen idol. He’d dodged a bullet himself when that knife dropped—

  Somebody ran around the comer from outside and into the garage and fired a handgun twice, hitting the suspect square in the chest.

  Zeigler collapsed. The maid screamed and fell to the floor, onto her hands and knees, scrabbled for cover behind the muscle car.

  Instinctively, Howard spun toward the shooter, gun leading.

  It was Brett Lee.

  Lee quickly pointed his gun toward the ceiling, his other hand open and raised. “Easy, easy!”

  Howard said, “Why did you shoot, you fucking moron? He had dropped his weapon!”

  “Sorry. It looked like he was about to hurt the hostage.”

  “I thought you wanted him alive!”

  Lee didn’t say anything else. He put away his weapon.

  Howard shook his head, went to check on Zeigler. One in the heart, one in the upper chest, he’d be dead before the paramedics could get him to the ambulance. Shit!

  Howard stood, holstered his revolver, helped the crying hostage to her feet. “It’s all over, ma’am. You’re safe now.” He glared at Lee. Sweet Jesus.

  He heard the sound of helicopters moving in and swore under his breath. He was gonna take the vest off. No way he wanted the name “Net Force” to show up on the evening news after this fiasco.

  Commander Michaels would surely agree with that idea.

  More DEA agents boiled out of the house, guns waving around. Day late and a dollar short.

  What a snafu.

  Sweet Jesus.

  16

  Net Force HQ, Quantico, Virginia

  “So, the only lead we had to the dealer is cooling on a slab at the morgue in sunny L.A.?”

  “Yes, sir,” John Howard said. “Apparently to the regret of teenage girls everywhere.”

  “Jesus,” Michaels said.

  “My feelings exactly. My guess is, Mr. Lee of the DEA is going to have some tall explaining to do to his superiors.”

  Michaels shook his head. John Howard and Jay Gridley both looked at him as if expecting some wisdom, and he didn’t have any on tap. He said, “Well, at least our information helped the DEA beat the NSA to the target.”

  “Might have been better the other way,” Jay observed. “I kinda liked the Zee-ster’s movies myself. He had a certain style.”

  That the first part of Jay’s observation was a thought Michaels had already had didn’t make it sit any better. And while he’d seen the actor in a couple of movies and hadn’t been that impressed, dead was dead, and shooting somebody with his hands up was bad juju, no two ways about it. Especially a rich and famous somebody.

  He said, “Well, if you give folks a knife and they cut themselves with it, that’s their problem. The director can’t fault us for what DEA screws up. What is the deal with NSA and DEA, anyway? Some kind of ongoing bad blood?”

  Jay said, “Not that I know of. No more than any other interagency rivalry. CIA, FBI kind of thing. You get the ball, you don’t pass it, you shoot, even if we’re all on the same team.”

  “What about personal histories? Agent Lee and Mr. George go to competing schools? Sleep with each other’s girlfriends?”

  Jay looked surprised. “Hmm. Never thought of that.”

  “Maybe it’s not relevant to the situation, but why don’t you poke around a little and see what you can find. From our meetings, it doesn’t seem as if these two have any great love for each other, and I’d just as soon not get Net Force splattered with incidental mud if these two are going to keep throwing it at each other.”

  Jay nodded. “Good idea, boss. I’ll do that.”

  “Even though it’s primarily their problem, we can’t just wash our hands of it. We have to help them keep looking, and right now, all we’ve got is a dead movie star and a dead end.”

  “Not altogether,” Howard said. He grinned, showing bright teeth against his chocolate skin. “There is the matter of the recovered capsules. Unfortunately, they were near the end of their life span; the movie star could afford to buy them and let them go bad if he wanted, and by the time the DEA got the things to their lab, they were so much inert powder internally.”

  “Which doesn’t do us much good, does it?” Michaels said.

  “Well, sir, probably not. But while you’ll notice that the report says there were three of the capsules, that is actually in error.”

  Michaels looked at him, waiting.

  Howard reached out and dropped a purple cap onto his desktop.

  Jay grinned. “General! You swiped one?”

  “Liberated it,” Howard said. “It won’t do us any more good chemically than the ones the DEA’s got, but I figured what they could learn from four, they could learn from three.”

  Michaels picked up the cap and looked at it. “Doesn’t seem like it’s worth all the trouble, this little thing.”

  “Diamonds are small, too, boss, and so are wetware and lightware chips.”

  “Well, as it happens, we have a friend in the FBI lab who would like to get his hands on this,” Michaels said. “That way, at least we’d know as much as the DEA about what’s in it, for whatever that is worth. Maybe some rare herb found only in bouillabaisse served in a certain bad section of Marseilles, France.”

  “Sir?”

  “Sorry, General, it’s from an old spy comedy vid I once saw. But the regular FBI boys have a huge database and long memories, and their lab techs are second to none. Might be they could come up with something. I’ll run this past them and see what they can find. Good work.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And I was very happy not to see you on the news.”

  “I thought you might be,” Howard said.

  After Howard and Jay were gone, Michaels put the capsule into an empty paper clip box and stuck it into his pocket. Chain of evidence was no good, given how they’d come by it, but he was just looking for information. This whole mess was still the DEA’s bastard child, and the sooner he could get Net Force out of helping take care of it, the better. He’d drop by the lab and have a chat with the assistant section head, a man he knew from his field days. They could work something out.

  Malibu, California

  “Don’t take the Hammer,” Bobby said.

  Tad, whose last little hit of heroin was wearing off, frowned through the start of a headache. “Why not?”

  “Because I need you straight.”

  Tad grinned his lopsided grin.

  “Well, okay, relatively straight. We got problems.”

  “We’re rich and good-looking, how bad could it be?”

  Bobby smiled, but it vanished quickly. “The Zee-ster’s dead.”

  “No way! I just saw him. Gave him the caps from that last batch. He looked great. He can’t be dead.”

  “I got a contact in the police who says his body’s in a big drawer at the new county morgue and the doctors are flipping coins to see w
ho gets to slice and dice him. He’s past tense.”

  “Aw, geez, that’s too bad. I liked him. He knew how to party. What’d he do, wrap one of his cars around a tree? He never could drive worth a crap.”

  “He was shot twice in the heart by a DEA agent leading a drug raid on his mansion.”

  “Whoa. You’re shittin’ me.”

  “No. Storm and Drang put up a fight when the narcs kicked in the door. Word is, the Zee-ster’s house walls got more holes in’em now than a colander. Both bodyguards are shot half to pieces, too, but Storm will probably make it. Drang is still in surgery, and they don’t think he’ll survive, or if he does, he’ll be a big hamburger patty ... he took a couple rounds in the head.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah, it’s awful and all, but stop and think about what that means. Why would the feds be going after the Zee-ster? He’s a user, not a dealer.”

  “He spreads it around some,” Tad said. “I mean, he did. Could be they caught somebody he ran with, they gave him up.”

  “Whatever. But this puts us in a kind of bad spot. We ran with him, too. Somebody might remember us.”

  “Remember me, you mean. You look like ten thousand other surfer dudes. Me, I kinda stand out.”

  Bobby waved that off. “The point is, we let ourselves get public with him more than we should have, because he was a movie star and cool and all. If he had the Hammer caps on him when they took him out of the game, they are gonna go over his background with a microscope ... everywhere he went, everybody he saw. A guy like that can’t move in this town anonymously unless he wears a bag over his head, and Zeigler never was one to hide his pretty face. The cops and the feds will burn many shoe soles tracking every move the man made. Somebody will cover all of the trendy places where the Zee-ster liked to party.”

  Tad nodded.

  “All right, here’s what I want you to do. You search your memory and dig up every time you saw Zee in public, anywhere might have had a security cam lit. Get to those places before the feds or the local police do, get the recordings or wipe them or whatever.”

  “Yeah. I can do that.”