About now, Tad would be buying the computer whiz a dinner at a great little out-of-the-way Italian restaurant locally famous for its fresh produce, ostensibly to make arrangements to deliver a dozen caps of the Hammer as a first payment of a lifetime drug supply. The computer geek, a health nut, had raved about the place. The salad that came with the meal featured fresh wild greens, mushrooms, and other local herbs, and was terrific, he’d said.
Drayne had smiled, regretting that he had to be back in L.A. and would have to miss that, but hey, Tad loved salad!
The last time Tad had eaten a salad or anything remotely healthy had probably been twenty years past. Anybody who looked at him could see that. But a guy as full of himself as Mr. Computer Wizard would skate right past that obvious fact without blinking. People saw what they wanted to see, not what was really there.
So the guy had chosen his own exit and made it easy for them to hold the door open.
If everything went as planned, just as the computer geek was about to lay into this garden delight, he was going to get a call on his com. Tad had the number programmed into his own com, and a touch of a button would do the trick. While Mr. Wizard was distracted, Tad was going to add a couple of different kinds of sliced mushrooms to the man’s salad that weren’t on the menu. These grew wild in places as hot and damp as Austin still was this time of year, easy to find if you knew where to look, and once they were sliced were virtually identical to any other small, white-fleshed mushrooms.
The first variety of these particular’shrooms contained heavy concentrations of amatoxins and phallotoxins, either of which could be fatal, and both of which would almost certainly destroy liver and kidney functions, leading to death within a week to ten days 80 percent of the time.
The second variety was chock-full of Gyromita toxins, which, while not quite as nasty as the others, also attacked the liver and kidneys, plus the circulatory system, leading to heart failure in extreme cases. Mostly Gyromita poisoning was uncommon in the U.S. because cooking these mushrooms usually mitigated the toxin. Nice, crisp, raw ones in a salad would still pack a nasty punch, however.
Mr. Computer Wizard would enjoy his meal. He and Tad would part company on the best of terms. A day later, maybe two, Mr. Wizard would come down with flulike symptoms: nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, cramps. His doctor would probably miss the diagnosis at first, but even if he didn’t, the only way to keep the victim alive would be a liver and maybe a kidney transplant, and even then, the heart was still at risk.
No guarantee, of course, but eight chances out of ten he would croak weren’t bad odds. And if he made it, he’d be a long time recovering, on immunosuppressive drugs if they could find him a new liver, and unable to screw with his body chemistry if he wanted to stay alive. And if he made it that far? Well, they could always pay him another visit.
If he died, it would be due to mushroom poisoning, a terrible tragedy, a freak accident. Bad for the restaurant’s reputation and insurance carrier, but, hey, that was how life went sometimes. You want an omelette, you gotta break a few eggs.
The flight attendant approached. “Care for champagne, sir?”
“That would be nice. Look, I don’t want you to think I’m hitting on you, but I’m a movie producer. Have you ever considered acting?”
He held up his producer business card and smiled.
She took the card, looked at it, and smiled back. “I’ve thought about it. I was the lead in my high school play.”
Life was very good.
Life is crappy, Toni thought. Nobody had told her what might happen when she got pregnant, nobody had said she’d be reduced to the mobility and muscularity of a slug. She hated this.
Alex had hung around to take care of her, but she had made him leave. He was sweet, but she wasn’t going to be pleasant company, and she didn’t want him thinking of her as a constant bitch. Better he should see her smiling and at least offering some pretense of being happy once in a while.
“You sure?” he’d asked, after three exchanges on the subject.
“I’m positive. Go.”
And he had, and that pissed her off, too. Yes, she had said for him to, she had insisted that he do so, but she hadn’t really wanted him to leave. Why didn’t he know that? How could he just ... take her at her word that way? Why were men so stupid?
Yes, yes, all right, she knew it was illogical, but that was how she felt.
Now that Alex was gone, she was at a loss for what to do with herself. The doctor had made it crystal clear she was on light duty from now on, and since a big part of her had always been physical, this was proving to be intolerable. She couldn’t move, she might as well put down roots and turn into a fucking houseplant. She really hated this.
She didn’t feel like sitting at the scrimshaw project. She didn’t feel like watching television or listening to music or reading. What she felt like doing was going for a five-mile run to clear her mind. Or a half hour of stretching and then silat practice. Or anything requiring sweat and sore muscles.
No point in even bothering to think about such things. It would only make her feel worse, if that was possible.
Other women must have gone through this. She could do it if anybody else could, she kept telling herself. But that didn’t help.
The house was clean. She had spent way too much time doing that lately, wiping counters, sweeping floors, rearranging shelves. You could eat off the floor—if you were allowed to bend over and take the risk.
She wandered into the bedroom. The bed was made. The bathroom was clean. Nothing.
The floor in Alex’s closet by his shoe rack had some clothes piled up to be dry-cleaned. Well, she could do that. Surprise Alex, given as how she didn’t usually fool with his chores.
She picked up a suit, a sports jacket, a couple of good silk shirts, a few ties. The laundry-to-go basket was in the garage, where Alex would usually notice it when it got full, toss the dirty clothes into his car, and drop it off at the Martinizing place run by a family of Koreans on the way to work.
As she started dropping the clothes into the hamper, she automatically went through the pockets. Being raised in a family full of brothers had taught her that when doing the wash. Boys left all kinds of crap in their pockets, and a handful of coins clattering in the washer or dryer would drive you nuts, not to mention chipping the inside of the machines. Ink pens could ruin a load of whites, and it was no fun picking lint from a washed, shredded, and dried paper napkin from a load of dark shirts, either.
In the suit trousers, Toni found a paper clip box, and inside that, the capsule.
She knew what it was from Alex’s description, it being big and purple and all, and it puzzled her as to why it was in his pocket. But maybe it was important. She seemed to recall the stuff had some kind of timing chemical in it, and it would be inert after a day or so. Alex hadn’t worn this suit yesterday, had he?
She reached for the phone on the workbench, looking at the capsule. She put it down next to the scrimshaw piece she’d been working on as Alex’s com bleeped.
“Hey, babe, what’s up? You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I was taking your dry cleaning out to the hamper—”
“You were what?”
“Don’t sound so amazed.”
“Sorry. Go on.”
“Anyway, I found this purple capsule in your pocket.”
“Ah, damn. I keep forgetting about that. I was going to take it by the FBI lab and have somebody look at it. That’s the one John got on the raid I told you about.”
“I can do that for you, run it by the lab.”
“No, you can’t. You aren’t supposed to be driving, remember? Hang on to it for me, I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Fine.”
“Uh, thanks for calling me about it.”
“You at work yet?”
“Almost there.”
“I’ll see you later,” she said.
After she broke the connection, Toni stared into space. She sure
hoped this baby was worth all this crap. He’d better be.
She wandered back into the house. All of a sudden, she was tired. Maybe she would lie down and take a short nap. Might as well. She couldn’t do anything else.
Jay shook his head, feeling stupid. It had been right there in front of him all along, and he had just skipped over it. He had narrowed his focus too much and missed the connection.
Maybe all this navel-gazing was good in the long run, learning how to clear your thoughts, to relax your mind, but the old Jay Gridley wouldn’t have let this slide past unseen.
Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to be too relaxed mentally in his business.
He ran it down. The most important piece took a while, but finally, he got it. Wasn’t proof of anything, of course, but certainly it was a circumstantial lump that would choke an elephant.
Jesus.
He needed to fly it past the boss, to get his hit on it, but he was pretty sure it meant something important. He reached for the com to call, then decided maybe it would be better to avoid using the phone or net. Net Force’s corns, especially the virgils, were scrambled, the signals turned into complex binary ciphers that were supposedly unbreakable by ordinary mortals. That little episode in the U.K. with the quantum computer had cured Jay of his faith in unbreakable binary codes, however. And given the people with whom they were dealing, maybe face-to-face was better.
“I have to go into HQ,” Jay said to Saji on his way to the door.
“This late?” She opened her eyes and stared at him, still seated in her meditation pose.
“It’s important. I love you. See you later.”
“Drive safe,” she said.
He thought about his discovery all the way to Net Force HQ. Boy, wasn’t the boss going to be surprised at this twist!
27
Dallaa-Fort Worth International Airport
Tad sat at the gate, slouched in a chair, waiting for his connecting flight back to LAX. Even full of painkillers, speed, and steroids to the eyeballs, it was all he could do to hold himself up. Every muscle, every joint, every part of him he could feel ached, a bone-deep, grinding throb that resonated through him with every heartbeat. The best dope he could get only dulled the pain, it didn’t come close to stopping it. He was so tired he could hardly see straight, and the way he felt, if he sneezed, his head would fall off. But his fuck-up was fixed, and, yeah, okay, he’d had to ice some poor sucker to wrap it. At least Bobby wasn’t pissed at him anymore. He hated to disappoint Bobby, who put up with a lot of his crap without kicking him out. Only friend he’d ever had, Tad knew, and the only person on earth who had ever given a shit about him. You just didn’t let people like that down.
A goth girl of eighteen or nineteen walked by and slouched into the bank of chairs across from Tad, eyeing him. She wore a torn black T-shirt under a distressed black leather jacket with the sleeves cut off, black sweatpants, and pink tennis shoes. She had short hair dyed purple, a nose ring, lip ring, eyebrow ring, and nine ear studs showing. Tad would be real surprised if she wasn’t wearing more gold and steel in her belly button, nipples, and labia. She gave him a twist of a smile—yep, there was the tongue stud—and he managed a lifted lip in return. Probably saw him as a kindred spirit, and what the hell, probably he was. Some of the kids who dressed the part were wanna-be’s, some of them were nihilists, some of them true anarchists. You could usually tell after thirty seconds of conversation which they were, but right now, he couldn’t summon the energy needed even to wave her over and see. Not that it much mattered if she did come over; he wasn’t in any condition to slip off to the john to snort some coke, smoke a joint, or screw, if any of those were her pleasure. Truth was, he liked Bobby’s kind of woman anyhow, the pneumatic bunnies who pumped dick as well as they did iron. Not that he’d had much interest in that area lately. Well, except for that royal fuck-up in the gym with Wonder Woman.
The announcer came on and garbled something out. Tad didn’t have any idea what she’d said, but people started to get up and shoulder their carry-on bags or tow them behind them on little leashes, like Samsonite dogs who didn’t want to go for a walk and had to be dragged. Tad didn’t have any luggage. If he needed clean clothes, he bought them and threw the old stuff away, shirts, pants, underwear, socks, whatever. It was a trick he’d learned as a street kid in Phoenix a thousand years ago. If you have to travel, better to travel light. If you don’t have nothin’, nobody can steal nothin’ from you. You don’t have to remember anything, and if you have to split, you can do so without looking back. He had his e-ticket printout, a wallet, five hundred or so bucks in it, a couple of credit cards, and his ID. That was his luggage, and it was zipped into a back pocket. Unless somebody came up and did a butt slash and rob, he wasn’t gonna lose that. And if he did? Fuck it. It didn’t really matter, did it? You could get another wallet, more cards, more money. None of that was important.
The goth girl got up and sidled in behind Tad as he moved toward the woman taking tickets. She said, “I got some coke. You wanna do some, head to the bathroom when you see me go there.”
Tad lifted his lip in his half-assed grin. “Cool,” he said.
But he doubted he’d see her when she went. He was in first class, and he’d bet she was in tourist, unless she was slumming, and he didn’t think she was. Besides, he had his own coke, and he knew how pure it was. Street drugs were always risky. Maybe if he felt better in a little while, he’d share that with her. Find out what she could do with that tongue stud.
He planned to crash when he got back to Malibu, and sleep for a week. Maybe by then, he would have recovered enough to pick up the Hammer again. Now that everything was copacetic with Bobby, there was no need to fly to Hawaii or even slow down biz. Life was normal again, such as normal was, and he could get back on the road to Hell as soon as he was able.
Quantico, Virginia
Jay was almost hopping up and down he was so full of whatever it was that he had to say.
Michaels smiled and waved at the seat. Jay headed in that direction, but he didn’t sit.
“Okay, tell me. You caught our dope dealer?”
Jay frowned, as if that thought was the last thing on his mind. “What? Oh, no. If we were doing a movie, that would be the A story. What I did is figure out the B story. Well, at least part of it.”
“You want to run that past me again?”
“Okay, okay, look, I was all over the DEA guy Lee and the NSA agent George. Nothing, no connection. But I expanded the search, and I came up with Lynn Davis Lee and Jackie McNally George.”
“Who are—?”
“The ex-wives. Lee and George met their wives in law school, got hitched, went their separate ways a couple years later. Both are divorced.”
“So am I, Jay. So is roughly fifty percent of everybody who got married in the last twenty years.”
The younger man grinned. “Yeah, but Lynn Davis and Jackie McNally were roommates in law school.”
“Really? That is an odd coincidence”
“It gets better, boss. Lynn Davis—she dropped her married name after the split—is a lawyer and part-time teacher in Atlanta. From what I was able to determine, she ... ah ... prefers the company of women to men.”
“How shocking. So?”
“Same deal with Jackie McNally. She is very low-profile about it, but apparently she is also a lesbian.”
Michaels thought about that a second. “Hmm.”
“Yeah, you see where I’m going here? Doesn’t that seem, well, queer, that two guys married and then divorced college roommates, both of whom are lesbians?”
“Doesn’t speak highly of the boys’ lovemaking skills, but it also doesn’t prove anything, does it?”
“Nope. But what if Ms. Davis and Ms. McNally had the same sexual preferences before they got married? From what I can tell, that was the case.”
Michaels chewed on that for a moment. “Ah,” he said, beginning to understand.
“It makes sense,” Jay
said. “There are a lot of places where—laws notwithstanding—being gay is still a problem. Federal agencies aren’t allowed to discriminate about such things, but you know how it is. Come out as gay, you put a glass ceiling over your own head.”
Michaels nodded. That was true, like it or not, especially in security agencies. The theory was, an openly gay operative wouldn’t be a problem, but somebody in the closet might be a candidate for blackmail, if he or she didn’t want to be outed. And he had a pretty good idea of where Jay was going with the rest of it, but he didn’t say anything, just waved for him to keep rolling.
“So, consider this scenario. Lee and George are ... well, let’s say, men’s men. They know that being that way is likely to top them out at a low level in a lot of agencies. And lesbians have the same problems.”
“So you think we have a case of two gay men marrying two lesbian women to provide each other with solid heterosexual backgrounds?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Jay said. “Having an ex-wife or husband on paper would forestall some tongue-wagging, especially if you were discreet from then on. Only now, Lee and George, who maybe aren’t so close anymore, really don’t like each other. Might explain some things.”
Michaels nodded again. “That could be. You did good, Jay. Thanks.”
After Jay was gone, Michaels thought about it some, then reached for the com. He wanted to talk to John Howard. An ugly idea had just entered his mind, and while he hoped things wouldn’t go down that road, he had to check it out.
Howard nodded at Michaels. He’d been figuratively shuffling paper clips when the commander called, and any excuse to get up and move was good.
“No doubt in your mind?” Michaels said.
“No, sir. Lee flat assassinated the man. Zeigler was clearly about to drop his knife. He had started to step back from his hostage, and when Lee fired, he was no more than twenty-five feet away. Plus, my radio mike was still on. Lee heard Zeigler say he was surrendering. No, sir. This guy was a DEA field agent for years, he went on scores of raids, some of which had gunplay on both sides, I checked his record. When he pulled the trigger, he had to know the situation was under control.”