“We need to do that? Net Force doesn’t do that kind of field work, that’s for the regular FBI.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know how secure that would be now. If Jay’s suspicion is right, we have two guys who are capable of getting information not normally available. NSA has ears everywhere.”
“Come on, you couldn’t figure a way around that? Couldn’t you hand-carry this info to somebody in the shop and have them check into it without exposing it to outside ears?”
Alex continued packing his overnight bag, tucking his bathroom travel kit into the case. “If I knew who to trust, sure. The director is on our case about this. If it goes wonky, even if it’s not our fault, you know who will get the blame. Much easier to shove it off on Net Force than to admit problems in her house. Or worse, making accusations against a brother agency without ironclad proof. You’ve been around long enough to know which way that wind blows.”
“It sounds like rationalization to me,” she said. “An excuse to get out of the office. And. out of here.”
He stopped packing and looked at her.
“I’m fat, hormonal, pale, and pregnant,” she said. “And I’m driving you crazy.”
He came over and caught her shoulders. “No. You are carrying our child, and I love you. You are the most beautiful woman in the world, more so now than ever.”
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”
“Well, yeah,” he said. But he grinned.
She grinned back at him. “You’re a bastard.”
“Take that up with Mom. She never told me, and I’m sure my father would have been surprised to know that.”
“A smart-ass bastard at that.”
But she grinned, too.
“I’m meeting Jay and John Howard at the airport in about three hours. We have time for a shower and a proper good-bye, don’t we?”
“A smart-ass goat-boy bastard.”
He laughed, and she did, too.
The area around Manassas was, like much of northern Virginia, rolling hills, suburbs and mini-malls, and roads that gridlocked during rush hour. Still, there were areas where the pine and oak trees still held their own, and there were a few stone fences and old houses standing against the weather.
Howard had driven for about thirty minutes, until he found an empty, tree-lined rural road narrow enough for his purpose. He drove along until he was a half mile or so ahead of the Neon, then turned right into a narrow tractor path leading to a cattle-guard gate in a barbed wire fence. He shut off the engine. There were no houses nearby, just some brown and white cows grazing in the pasture.
What he planned to do was get out, head through the cow pasture and into the little patch of woods opposite it, and then circle behind the Neon, which he figured would stop and wait to see what he was up to. Once he was behind the shadower, he’d creep up on him with his revolver in hand, and find out exactly who he was and what he wanted. A simple plan, but one that should work.
Behind him, the Neon pulled off the road about four hundred meters away, turned sideways with the passenger side facing Howard, and stopped.
Howard waited a few seconds, then got out of his car.
He was still on the driver’s side closing the door when there came a chink! chink! as the passenger’s and driver’s side windows shattered, followed by the sound of a rifle shot. The bullet, traveling faster than the sound, missed him by maybe two inches.
Shit!
Howard took two steps to the front tire and dropped into a crouch behind it. He pulled his revolver. The engine was the best protection, and the heavy steel wheel would probably deflect a sniper’s bullet aimed lower.
Another shot, another round pierced the car’s doors, through and through, and if he’d been there, it would have gutted him.
This was bad.
There was no other cover nearby. It was fifty meters through an open pasture to the tree line, and trying to cross the road the other way would be equally stupid, he’d be exposed. A decent shooter could nail him. And his handgun, while a fine weapon, was not going to do the job at four hundred meters unless God intervened in his favor.
He risked a quick look.
Another shot echoed over the pasture land, and the round smashed into the car’s side above the front tire but stopped when it hit the engine. Made a terrific clang.
If the guy came toward him, he’d still have the advantage for another three hundred, three hundred fifty meters, and if he circled around, Howard was really in deep shit.
He could call for help, but it would never get here in time. What the hell was he going to do?
Memory was a funny thing. Up until that moment, he had forgotten what he had in the car’s trunk. He felt a sudden surge of hope and possibility flow over him when he remembered.
Howard scooted toward the rear of the car.
Another shot hit the car amidships and must have struck a frame support or something in the door; it didn’t go all the way through to his side.
He reached the back tire. He had his keys, and the trunk release was on the electronic alarm and opener. He took a deep breath, put his revolver over the car’s trunk, pointed it at the Neon, and triggered off three shots as fast as he could.
At the same time, he popped the trunk control, lunged under the still-rising lid, and grabbed the hard-shell case inside. He jerked it out and fell back behind the tire.
The sniper’s next shot was great; it hit the passenger-side tire, lanced through the steel-belted radial, hit the driver’s side tire and penetrated that, then punched a hole in the comer of the hard-shell carrying case, almost jerking it from Howard’s grip.
The car dropped to its rims, and he wasn’t going to be driving it anywhere any time soon.
Howard popped the latches and dumped the parts of the .50 BMG rifle onto the ground. The bullet had missed anything important. He put his handgun down and, with a speed aided by adrenaline, assembled the rifle in what had to be record time. He loaded the magazine with five cartridges of the match-grade ammo, chambered a round, and lit the red-dot attachment on the scope. It was sighted in at three hundred meters, he recalled, so he’d have to adjust his aim a bit. Or maybe not. This thing shot pretty flat for a long way.
Time to make an assumption here. The shooter was probably using a scoped deer or sniper rifle, 30-6, maybe .308, something like that, and if it was, it would likely be a bolt action. So he was going to have to manually chamber a round after each shot, which meant that Howard would have half, maybe three-quarters of a second between shots.
Not much time to get set up. And if it was a semiauto, that would be really bad. But it was what he had.
Howard took a grip on the heavy rifle. He stuck his head up, held it there for an agonizingly long time, maybe half a second, then ducked.
The shot came, hit the trunk, zipped through, but missed by a good six inches.
Then Howard leaped up, dropped the .50’s bipod on the trunk’s lid, slamming it shut, and put the red dot on the middle of the Neon. He squeezed the trigger, a shade too quickly, and the recoil from the weapon knocked him back and almost off his feet. The blast of sound was like a bomb; it deafened him. Even as he fought to regain his position, he chambered another cartridge, the empty extracted and smoking to his right.
That would give the son of a bitch something to think about! Not so much fun when the victim can shoot back, is it?
Howard looked through the scope. On high magnification, he could see the bullet hole where the side of the Neon had buckled in around it; it had blown paint off in a hand-sized crater, but there was no sign of the shooter. If the guy had any brains, now he would be behind the front tire with the engine block protecting him. When the .50 went off, it sounded like the wrath of God, and the assassin would know that the odds had just shifted dramatically into Howard’s favor.
Howard’s ears were ringing and he couldn’t hear anything over that. He looked down, saw the earplugs that came with the rifle, and risked the sec
ond it took to scoop them up. He shoved them into his ears.
No sign of the shooter.
Fine. Let’s see how you like being dinner, asshole.
He put the red dot on the top of the front tire and squeezed a shot off, more careful now.
The bullet hit a few inches high and must have shattered and sprayed the engine compartment. Vapor came out from under the hood, maybe from the radiator, maybe coolant for the AC. He’d bet that car wasn’t going anywhere, either.
Now it was time to get the troops out here. He pulled his virgil and hit the emergency sig control in a rapid sequence.
“Sir?” came a voice.
Howard smiled. Gotcha now, sucker.
“Hold on a second.” Howard shot the Neon again. Hit the front tire this time. The car sagged.
“I want a helicopter with a squad of troops ready to shoot landing twenty meters east of the GPS location of my virgil in fifteen minutes maximum. This is not a drill.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Here is the situation....”
But when the chopper from Quantico arrived and a dozen of Net Force’s finest hit the ground, fanned out, and surrounded the mortally wounded Neon, the shooter was nowhere to be found. The car was much closer to the tree line than Howard’s car was, and somehow, the would-be assassin had managed to slip away without Howard spotting him.
Damn!
33
Washington, D.C.
Jay looked up from his flatscreen at the boss and the general. “The shooter’s car was stolen,” he said.
They were in the airport, in one of the VIP lounges that the boss had access to, waiting for the flight to L.A. If John Howard was rattled about somebody trying to shoot him out in the boondocks where Stonewall Jackson had earned his fighting nickname, you couldn’t tell it by looking at him.
As a licensed federal agent, however, Howard would be carrying a gun with him onto the plane, this at the boss’s insistence. Both Michaels and Jay had their air tasers with them, too, though Jay had only fired his in the required semiannual qualification sessions, and the last of those had been four months past. He didn’t try to kid himself that he was any kind of gunfighter, even with the nonlethal shock ‘em and drop’em tasers most Net Force personnel outside the military arm were issued.
“A stolen car. Not a major surprise there,” Howard said. “It would have been too much to hope for that he’d use his own vehicle. I don’t suppose the lab rats managed to get any fingerprints or DNA for a match?”
“Not yet, sir,” Jay said.
“That isn’t a surprise, either,” Michaels said. “Not if it was who we think it was in that car. How about Lee’s whereabouts?”
“That’s a little trickier,” Jay said. “We couldn’t just have the FBI hunt him down and grab his ass, not without tipping our hand. According to a sub-rosa contact we managed with the DEA, Mr. Lee was today taking some personal time. He was in Maryland, visiting his paternal grandmother, who is in a nursing home just outside Baltimore. Accessible on-line records at the Sisters of Saint Mary’s Home for the Aged indicate that Mr. Lee did sign in about an hour before the attack on General Howard, and he signed out ten minutes after the attack. Nobody has gone in and done a face-to-face with the staff to check that yet, however.”
“How easy would it be to fake the in and out signatures and records?” Howard asked.
“I could do it with both hands tied behind me and a cold so bad the voxax could only pick up every thirteenth word,” Jay said. “While blindfolded and in my sleep.”
“That hard, huh?”
“Shoot, boss, you could do it.”
“All right, so we get an investigator out there to see if Lee actually did go visit his old granny.”
“If he was there, that would make it impossible for him to have been the shooter,” Jay said.
“Let’s just see before we try to cross that bridge.”
“I’d be very surprised if we can find a nurse or ward clerk who remembers seeing Lee there today,” Howard said.
“Anything on other forensics at the scene?” Michaels asked.
“Nothing to write home about,” Jay said. “No empty shells lying on the ground, no blood, no hair, no dropped bar matchbooks or IDs or maps showing how to get to the perp’s house. Shoe prints are a popular brand of cheap sneaker. Fibers from where the shooter kneeled appear to be lightweight gray cotton, probably sweatpants.”
“And the clothes and shoes and no doubt gloves are probably in a trash bin or burned to ash by now,” Michaels said.
“This was a pro,” Howard said. “If I hadn’t had that portable cannon, I think he might well have taken me out.”
“You tell your wife about it?” Michaels asked.
Howard looked at him. “Would you have told yours?”
The boss looked uncomfortable. “Maybe. Toni was a Net Force op, she knows how things go sometimes. Of course, she’s pregnant, and I wouldn’t have wanted to upset her once everything was over with.”
“The local cops weren’t called in, the media doesn’t have it, we’re keeping it in house,” Howard said. “I didn’t want to worry my wife, either. I’ll mention it to her later. After we catch the son of a bitch who did it.”
Jay didn’t say anything. He’d have told Saji, but she was a Buddhist, they were into the real world and all. He looked around. Technically, they weren’t supposed to be doing this, since it wasn’t really part of their mission statement. Plus they weren’t supposed to be flying on the same jet. If the flight went down, it would take out the commander, the military chief, and the head of Computer Operations, which would be bad for Net Force. The director would be royally pissed; then again, Jay wouldn’t much care about that, being dead and all. What the hell.
Jay wasn’t worried about flying, that had never bothered him. A plane went down now and then, that was awful, but it was like being struck by lightning. If it happened, it happened. What were you gonna do, stay home all your life?
He was looking forward to visiting Hollywood. Outside virtual visits, he had only been there once in real time, on a trip when he’d been in high school, part of a computer team entered into a national contest. They’d come in second and should have won, except that one of the twits on his team had flubbed an easy program a third-grader could have managed. As much time as Jay did creating scenario in VR, he felt as if he’d be right at home among the moviemakers. It would be the middle of the night before they got there, and they’d head straight for the hotel, but tomorrow would no doubt be sunny and delightful.
He spun up the flatscreen’s power, hit the wireless air-net key, and logged via an encoded sig into the Net Force mainframe again. He had VR gear in his bag, but he didn’t like to do VR work in a public place, too many people, no telling who might decide to come up and swipe your luggage while you were sensory deprived and deep in scenario. Probably they’d be okay here in the VIP lounge, but no sense in developing bad habits. He’d just have to do it the old-fashioned and boring way, using the vox controls and hand-jives, a pain, but there it was.
Banning, California
Drayne had the air conditioner going full blast in the RV, and Ma and Pa Yeehaw had unshipped the little car they towed behind the RV and gone into town to do a little bar hopping or whatever, while Drayne mixed up a new batch of the Hammer. He’d hold off on adding the final catalyst until he got back to town. Now was a good time to check out the new safe house, and nobody would be looking over his shoulder there while he did the final mix. Once the clock started running, he’d send one of the bodyguards to FedEx with the packages, and that would be that, another forty-five thousand into the secure e-account, and wasn’t life beautiful?
He grinned. I wonder what the poor folks are doing now?
Beverly Hills, California
Mae Jean Kent was an impressive-looking woman, Michaels noted, oozing sexuality, and however powerful her lungs might be, they were certainly augmented with a major pair of headlights, double-D, at
least. Toni had been quick to tell him these weren’t real, but nonetheless ...
She was beautiful, blond, tanned, fit, and wore a halter top and hip-hugger pants and sandals. She also wore big sunglasses. She agreed to meet them at some local restaurant that was apparently the place to meet locally, and she was constantly waving at people who passed the outdoor table at which she, Michaels, Jay, and John had been situated.
“Hi, Muffy! Hey, Brad! I’m sorry, Alex, what was that again?”
“Ms. Kent—”
“Oh, please, call me MJ, everybody does!”
Michaels guessed her age at thirty, judging from her hands, but she was acting more like eighteen. Part of the youth culture out here, where you might be over the hill at twenty-five.
“MJ. So tell me about this beach picture.”
“Oh, it was a terrible shoot! First thing was, Todd—that’s Todd Atchinson, the director?—was having a major crisis and he ran out of Paxil and was a bear to work with. He just kept yelling at everybody. Then Larry—that’s Larry Wright—had a major fight with his boyfriend, he’s gay, such a waste of a perfect bod, you know? Anyway, Larry was so depressed he just moped around like an old hound dog. And George—I was so sorry to hear that he died, so sorry, but he was a major doper, major—kept getting a, you know, a woody every time we shot a scene together, and they had to shoot around it because his bathing suit was, you know, bulging all the time!” She giggled and took a deep breath, showing off the results of what must have been expensive plastic surgery.
Michaels wished Toni were here, so she could see just how vapid and unattractive this woman was, despite her looks and attempt at what she thought passed for sophisticated animation.
Michaels glanced at Howard, who kept a straight face but offered no help. Jay seemed entranced by the rise and fall of MJ’s hooters under the barely-able-to-hold-them halter top.
“Is there anything you can think of that might have a connection to something called Thor’s Hammer?”