Point of Impact

  “You punching your brother’s wife? That’s bad biz, bro. Gonna make Thanksgiving dinners a bitch.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. It just happened, you know. Anyway, they got their shit worked out okay, they’re back together. But my brother, he’s a jealous type, and he suspects that while they were on the outs, his wife maybe did some stuff she shouldn’t have done.”

  “He’s right, too, idn’t he?”

  Tad looked at his boots. “Yeah, and I feel like shit about it, okay? But he only suspects, he doesn’t know, and he sure as hell don’t know about me. The thing is, my brother is big and kinda mean, and he’s with the cops, and if he starts poking around and finds out his wife and I spent any time together, I’m fucked.”

  “I hear that.”

  “So like I said, we were in here a few times, had a few drinks and a few laughs, and if he shows up here somehow and gets his hands on your security tapes, I could be in deep shit.”

  The assistant manager smiled. “Not to worry, my man. You here further back than a week, he won’t find nothing. We record three days at a time. Nobody sticks up the place or starts a fight the police need to see, we start the disk over again. No permanent records.”

  Tad smiled. “Hey, man, I appreciate you tellin’ me this.” He pulled a couple of tightly folded twenties from his pocket and extended his hand. When they shook hands, the twenties pressed into the assistant manager’s palm, and he grinned and nodded. “No problem, bro. You be more careful now, you hear? That pussy will kill you, you not careful.”

  After the Safari, Tad rumbled the big Dodge along surface streets to two other restaurants within a few miles of each other and ran the same story.

  At the Sun’n’ Shore, it played pretty much the same, except for the time. The security cams there recorded over the old stuff after only twenty-four hours. Not to sweat it.

  At the Irish Pub, they had cams, but all they did was feed a couple of show monitors, no tapes or disks.

  Tad was feeling pretty good about this. He had three more places to hit, and he was done. He could take the Hammer cap and get the trip rolling, they were all gonna be this easy.

  But of course, just to fuck up that plan, the Berger Hotel, on the hill overlooking the ocean, was more of a problem. A lot of well-off people with well-known faces came here and got a room to get laid in, and the bar was dark and quiet. And when you had folks with fame and money in your house, you were smart to spend a little more on security to make sure the rich and famous didn’t get ripped off. That was bad for business.

  So at the Berger, they kept their recordings for a year on long-running superdense video diskettes, SDVDs. The system wasn’t full-frame twenty-four-a-second vid, but blink cams that snapped stills every few seconds. You didn’t get full motion stuff that way, but you could store a lot more time on a lot less space, and the cams were set to take snaps often enough so you couldn’t walk across the lobby without being caught. A still picture that showed faces would do the trick.

  Tad ran the sister-in-law number on the assistant manager of the hotel, some kid who looked like he was just out of college with a degree in hotel management, and got sympathy, but that was all.

  The kid, a pale, green-eyed, dishwater blond in a dark suit and tie, said, “I’m sorry, sir, it is against hotel policy to allow anybody to see the security recordings.”

  “Even the cops?”

  “Well, of course, we cooperate with the police in criminal matters.”

  “So if my brother shows up and flashes his badge, he gets the SDVD? And my sister-in-law and I get drummed out of the family? Not to mention by brother kicks the shit out of me, maybe breaks an arm or two?”

  “I... I wish I could help, really.”

  “Look, if I knew the date we were here, couldn’t you get that diskette out and, uh, misfile it? Accidents happen, right? Somebody could have put that into the wrong file drawer or something, couldn’t they? It would have been like a month ago. If anything had happened on that day, the cops would have come looking for it by now, right?”

  The kid was wavering.

  Tad brought out the heavy artillery. “C’mon, man, I made a big mistake, but it’s done. Nobody got hurt, and as long as it never gets out in the open, nobody ever will. I love my brother. What he don’t know won’t hurt him. Or me. Put yourself in my shoes.”

  The kid wanted to help, but he was skittish.

  Tad went for the throat: “Enter it... nobody will ever know. I sure won’t tell, and it’s not like you’d be doing anything criminal. It would be worth a lot to me to keep my brother from finding out. Look, I just sold my car. I got enough for a down payment on a new one, plus about a thousand bucks extra. You get me the diskette, I give you the thousand. Everybody comes out ahead. My brother doesn’t find out I screwed up, he and his wife live happily ever after, and even if anybody ever comes looking for the recording—which they probably won’t—all they’ll think is that it got mislaid. Hell, you could even put a blank one in the slot, and they’d probably just think the cams were out of whack... if anybody ever bothered to look. Cut me some slack here, please.”

  Everything Tad said made a certain kind of sense. And the bottom line was, who would know or ever find out? Not to mention that a thousand bucks tax-free cash was surely more than this kid took home in a week. A week’s pay and then some for a thing nobody would ever miss? How tempting was that?

  The kid licked his lips. “What was the date?” he asked.

  Tad kept his face serious, even though he wanted to smile. One born every minute.

  When Tad got back into the Dodge and cranked it up, he had the SDVD, a little silver disk about the size of a half-dollar coin. He broke it in half, broke those pieces in half, and stuck them in the ashtray. He lit a cigarette with a throwaway Bic, dialed the flame up to high, and torched the diskette pieces. They smoked but didn’t catch fire, just melted into sludge after a minute. The greasy smoke coming off the molten diskette did stink up the car something fierce, so he rolled down the windows to let the smoke escape.

  So much for that.

  Two places left on Bobby’s list, and neither one of them was going to be as tough as the hotel. One was a movie house the Zee-ster rented to show one of his pictures to a hundred of his closest friends at the moment, the other was a gym where Bobby and the Zee-ster had worked out together a couple of times. Probably neither of them even had security cams, but if they did, between his sister-in-law story and a pocket full of cash, he didn’t foresee any problems. People would help you out if the story was good enough, and if they were a little reluctant, a fat wad of green went a long way to moving things along. Everybody had a price; you just had to find it.

  So there was no reason not to pick up the Hammer that Tad could see.

  He swallowed the big purple cap, washed it down with a swig of bottled water, and headed for the movie theater.

  April 1992

  Washington, D.C.

  The ballroom at the hotel was crowded, mostly fairly well-dressed teenagers, with a sprinkling of teachers and employees here and there. Jay walked through the twenty-year-old scenario, looking at the students as they headed for their seats.

  This was the quarter-final round for the debate, whose topic this year was: “Resolved—Imminent Threats to National Security Should Supersede Habeas Corpus.”

  Boy, didn’t that sound exciting?

  Jay had learned in his research that debate teams were given an issue at the beginning of the year, and that this issue would be the same nationwide. The teams-two on a side—had to be able to argue both sides of an issue, and the reason for that was that sometimes they might not know which side they were going to be assigned until the last minute. The topic, which certainly sounded like ends-justify-the-means to him, spoke to the idea of the scope of legal protection, habeas corpus, being a shortened version of the full term habeas corpus ad subjiciendum. Technically, he had just learned, it meant something like, “You can have the body to undergo the
action of the law,” or some such. What it meant was, you couldn’t be thrown into jail without due process of the law. If you were suspected of a crime, then you had to be arrested, charged, given access to legal counsel, arraigned, and eventually brought to trial. The authorities couldn’t just throw you in a jail cell and leave you there without offering a reason. As such, habeas corpus was the cornerstone of British and U.S. law.

  To Jay, such a debate was a yawner, about as exciting as eating a bowl of cold oatmeal while watching paint dry, but the buzz in the room was certainly enthusiastic.

  The reason Jay was here was because the DEA agent Brett Lee and the NSA agent Zachary George had both attended this conference as teenagers. It could have been a coincidence—there were hundreds of students here, one team from the small states, and multiple teams from the bigger ones—but maybe this was where the two had run afoul of each other originally.

  That would make sense, Jay reasoned. Being on opposite sides of a debate would mean that one would lose and the other would win, and maybe arguments had gotten heated to the point of personal anger.

  However, a check of the records once he got to looking revealed that Lee and George had not been on teams that debated each other. In fact, neither of their teams made it to the finals. Georgia got blown out in the first round. Vermont did get to the quarter-finals, and had argued the affirmative position against a team from Nebraska, the result of which was that they had also been eliminated. Georgia and Vermont had not even been staying on the same floor of the hotel.

  Jay’s scenario was based on old news footage, hotel records, and camcorder tapes and photographs taken by students and teachers, as well as the official society recordings that had been compiled and sold commercially. The net was still in its infancy in the early nineties, but there were some old debate web pages in WWW archives, and some BBSs. Jay had set his searchbots and blenders and strained it all, feeding it into a simple WYSIWYG view program. Added a few bells and whistles, of course.

  So there he sat, with the Nebraskans and the Vermontians—the Vermontinese? the Vermin?—about ready to go at it.

  Zachary George was the leader of his duo, and he was the opening speaker for the round.

  He got up, defined terms, and began his introduction to his reasoning.

  George said, “In times of war or national disasters, the country as a whole must come before individuals. While we are a nation based on liberty for all, destruction of the national structure could easily result in liberty for none.

  “If a man has a cancerous finger, is it not wiser to cut off the finger than allow it to spread and destroy him? Is a single finger worth the whole man? No, of course not. Likewise, if the life of the nation is threatened, a single or a few individuals cannot be allowed to cause such destruction. As the great Roman general Iphicrates said two thousand years ago, ‘The needs of the many must outweigh the needs of the few.’ ”

  Huh. Jay thought that quote came from the Vulcan Star Trek character Spock, in one of the old movies from the eighties or nineties.

  George continued in this vein, but Jay was busy looking around, trying to spot Lee. It didn’t take long. The young Brett Lee, looking much as he had in Jay’s earlier scenario at Stonewall Jackson High, watched George from a third-row seat, leaning forward eagerly, hanging on every word.

  Jay got up and moved to get a better look at Lee.

  George droned on: “... and did not Plato say, ‘No human thing is of serious importance’? How then can the temporary suspension of liberty by a man or even a small group of men compare to the liberty of millions?”

  Jay walked to a point where he could see Lee’s face.

  Hmm. Lee’s expression certainly did not seem like that of a young man who scorned what he was hearing. It was more like a believer hearing a sermon by his favorite preacher. Or a young man listening to the words of his beloved. Could these two have been friends who later had a falling out?

  This definitely needed more exploration, Jay decided.

  But scenario could only do so much. As the speech continued, Jay’s attempt to learn more was frustrated by the facts—or lack thereof. Whether in scenario or RW, if it wasn’t there, any speculation about an event was just that, speculation. The program would let Jay make anything he wanted to happen in VR happen, but it would not necessarily be what actually happened.

  Despite Jay’s best efforts, he could not put the two boys together at the debate conference outside the presentation done at the quarter-final competition. Sure, it was likely both Lee and George had been at the semifinals and the final team debate. Both the Vermont and Georgia teams had stayed until the conference was over; the records reflected that. They almost certainly would have been in the audience watching, and it was not inconceivable that they had somehow met before or after that.

  There were a few records after the quarter-finals on both boys, but nothing that put the two of them in any closer proximity than they were in Jay’s scenario.

  Maybe wasn’t the same as for sure.

  Even so, Jay felt as if there was something buried here, something he needed to uncover.

  The problem was, how?

  20

  Washington, D.C.

  When Toni walked into the kitchen, she saw the microscope. It sat on the table, a red bow stuck to it.

  She was stunned. A total surprise.

  “Alex! Where are you?”

  After a moment, he came into the kitchen, grinning.

  “You shouldn’t have done this.” She waved at the scope.

  “Yeah, I should have. I’ve been slack in my husbandly duties lately.”

  “I hadn’t noticed that.”

  “Not those duties. The, uh, expectant father ones.”

  “It’s a beautiful piece of equipment,” she said, touching the scope mount with one hand. “But we can’t afford it.”

  “We can. I had enough left in the car account to get it. You deserve it.”

  “It was a want, not a need,” she said.

  “Nah, you needed it. I could tell.”

  She smiled, and realized she hadn’t been doing enough of that lately. “Thank you, darling.”

  “What, you aren’t going to make me take it back?”

  She laughed, and she knew he’d said it to make her laugh.

  “I got two lenses to do whatever it is it is supposed to do so you can work under it,” he said. “Supposedly you’ll have a foot between the lens and the work object. I hope that’s enough.”

  “It is. My pin vises are only about seven inches long or so.”

  “Yeah, mine, too,” he said, waggling his eyebrows.

  Again, she laughed.

  “I should buy you one of these every day. Well, go set it up and see how it works.”

  “Later,” she said. “I have something else in mind first.”

  “What else could be more important?” Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

  “Come along, and I’ll show you.”

  Now it was his turn to laugh. And even if she was pregnant, they were still newlyweds, right?

  Toni headed for the bedroom, and Alex was right behind her. No farther than seven inches, the way she figured it.

  Jay was deep in cyberspace, working a scenario that involved hunting something big and mean with a pack of dogs, when a disembodied voice said, “Honey, I’m home!”

  He dropped out of VR, blinked, and beheld Saji.

  Saji, stark naked.

  “Whoa!” he said.

  “Sure, now you notice me. I’ve been here for half an hour. If I were a thief, I could have walked off with everything in the place, including you, and you’d have been oblivious.”

  “Uh...”

  “What’s the matter, goat-boy? Cat got your tongue?”

  “I hope,” he said, grinning.

  John Howard and his wife Nadine were about to take a shower together, something they hadn’t been able to do much in the last ten or twelve years with their son running around the
house. But now that he was in Canada, well, it was time to make hay while the sun shone.

  “I’m fat and ugly,” Nadine said. “I don’t know why you want me around.”

  “Well, you’re a pretty good cook,” he allowed.

  She threw her shoe at him, but he was expecting it, so he managed to dodge it.

  “Of course, you also have lousy aim.”

  She reached for her other shoe.

  The phone rang.

  “Let the robot answer it,” he said.

  “This from the master of duty? It could be Tyrone.”

  Nadine picked up the phone. The extension in the bathroom was a faux antique dial phone that didn’t have a caller ID screen. “Hello? Oh, hey, baby!”

  Yep. Tyrone.

  Howard had mixed feelings about the call. Of course he was happy to hear from his son. He’d have been a little happier if the boy’s sense of timing wasn’t so lousy. Half an hour earlier or an hour later, those would have been better. People who didn’t have children didn’t know what happened to their sex lives after the little ones got big enough to pad down the hall and shove the bedroom door open, looking for Mama and Daddy.

  “Yeah, sweetie, he’s right here. I’ll put him on.”

  Howard took the phone. Unfortunately, he stopped paying attention to Nadine as soon as Tyrone said hello. A mistake.

  The second shoe hit him on the butt.

  “Hey, ow!”

  “Dad?”

  “Nothing, son. Your mom is just being cute.”

  Santa Monica, California

  The Hammer was coming on by the time Tad left the movie theater. Like he thought, there hadn’t been any surveillance cams set up in the theater proper. There was one installed in the redi-teller in the lobby, but neither he nor Bobby had used the money machine when the Zee-ster had done his private showing. There wasn’t any need; everything had been on the tab Zeigler ran.

  By the time he got to the gym, the chem was working pretty good in Tad. It had come on faster than usual. Maybe it was because he had tripped such a short time ago and was still wrung out, or maybe it had to do with the other dope he’d been taking to stay ambulatory. Whatever. Thor was on a roll, urging Tad to join him in a night of ass-kicking and taking names, and it was all Tad could do to maintain control.