Point of Impact

  The man was big, he was stark naked, and he had an erection. He walked through the hotel hallway, got to a window at the end, and stopped. The window was closed, one of those that couldn’t be opened, and from the skyline visible in the distance, it was fairly high up.

  The man put his hands on the window and shoved.

  The window exploded outward. The man backed up a few steps, took a short run, and dived through the shattered window, looking like he was diving off the Acapulco cliffs or maybe pretending to be Superman.

  Melissa Allison said, “Agent Lee?”

  The man who’d been introduced to Michaels as Brett Lee, of the Drug Enforcement Administration, shut off the InFocus projector and his laptop computer, and the image of the broken window faded.

  “This was taken by security cameras in the new Sheraton Hotel in Madrid,” he said. “The man was Richard Aubrey Barnette, age thirty, whose Internet company License-to-Steal.com earned him fourteen million dollars last month. He fell twenty-eight stories onto a cab, killing the driver and causing a traffic accident that killed three others and injured five.”

  Michaels said, “I see. And this is related to the casino owner who trashed his competitor’s place of business before being killed by local police?”

  “Yes.”

  “And to the woman who attacked a gang of construction workers who whistled at her and put seven of them into intensive care?”

  “Yes,” Lee said. “And to others of a similar nature.”

  Michaels looked at his boss, then at Lee. “And I take it that, since you are DEA, you think drugs were somehow involved?”

  Lee frowned, not sure if Michaels was pulling his chain or not. Which, Michaels had to admit to himself, he was, a little. Lee seemed awfully stiff.

  Lee said, “Yes, we are certain of that.”

  Michaels nodded. “Please don’t take offense, Mr. Lee, but this concerns Net Force how?”

  Lee looked at Allison for support and got it. She said, “My counterpart at DEA has asked for our assistance. Naturally, the FBI and any of its subsidiaries are happy to help in any way we can.”

  “Naturally,” Michaels said, knowing full well that interagency cooperation was more often like competing football teams than the least bit collective. Rivalries among the dozen or so agencies that comprised the intelligence community in the U.S.—everybody from CIA to FBI to NSA to DIA to NRO—were old, established, and more often than not, nobody gave up anything without some quid pro quo. Yes, they were all technically on the same team, but practically speaking, an agency was happy to shine its own star any way it could, and if that included using another agency’s shirt to do it, well, that’s how the game was played. Michaels had discovered this early in his career, long before he left the field to take over Net Force. And DEA wasn’t a major player anyhow, given its somewhat limited mission.

  Michaels said, “So how is it that Net Force can do something here DEA can’t?”

  Lee, a short man with a fierce look, flushed. Michaels could almost see him bite his tongue to keep from saying what he really wanted to say, which was undoubtedly rude. Instead, Lee said, “How much do you know about the drug laws, Commander Michaels?”

  “Not much,” he admitted.

  “All right, let me give you a quick and rough overview. Federal drug regulation in the United States comes under the authority of the Controlled Substances Act—that’s CSA—Title II, of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, with various amendments since. Legal—and illegal—drugs are put on one of five schedules, depending on what uses have been established for them and on how much potential for abuse they have. Schedule I is reserved for dangerous drugs without medical applications that have a high potential for abuse, Schedule V is for stuff with low abuse potential.”

  “We’re talking about the difference between, say, heroin and aspirin?” Michaels said.

  “Precisely. The CSA gets pretty specific about these things.”

  “Go ahead, I’m still with you.”

  “In the last few years, there has been a resurgence in so-called designer drugs, that is to say, those that don’t slot neatly into the traditional categories. Variations and combinations of things like MDA and Ecstasy and certain new anabolic steroids, like that. The government realized that certain individuals were trying to circumvent the intent of the law by adding a molecule here or subtracting one there to make a drug that wasn’t technically illegal, so there is a provision for analog drugs not addressed by the code.

  “So, basically, any salt, compound, derivative, optical or geometric isomers, salts of isomers, whatever, based on a drug that is regulated become automatically de facto regulated the moment it is created.”

  Michaels nodded again, wondering where this was going.

  “And in case we have a really clever chemist who comes up with something entirely new and different—which is pretty much unlikely, if not impossible, given the known things that humans abuse—the attorney general can put that on Schedule I on an emergency basis. This is done if the AG determines that there is an imminent hazard to the public safety, there is evidence of abuse, and there is clandestine importation, manufacture, or distribution of said chemical substance.

  “Basically, the AG posts a notice in the Federal Register, and it becomes valid after thirty days for up to a year.”

  Michaels nodded again. He thought Lee was a stuffed shirt, and he decided to give another little tug on his chain. “Very interesting, if you are a DEA agent. Are we getting to a point anytime soon?”

  Lee flushed again, and Michaels was fairly certain that if the director hadn’t been sitting there, the DEA man would have lost his temper and said or maybe even done something rash. But give him credit, he got a handle on it.

  “What it means is, we have some pretty specific tools we can use to get dangerous, illegal drugs off the street. But in this case, we can’t use them.”

  Ah, now that was interesting. “Why not?”

  “Because we haven’t been able to obtain enough of the drug to analyze it properly. We know what it does: It makes you fast, strong, mean, and sexually potent. It might make you smarter, too, but that’s hard to say from our samples, since if they were that smart, they ought not to be dead. We know what it looks like; it comes in a big purple capsule. But we can’t make it illegal if we don’t know what it is in the cap.”

  Michaels grinned slightly. He could hear that conversation: “Yes, sir, this is the vile stuff, all right. Could you put it on the list so we can bust the guys who made it? What’s in it? Uh, well, we don’t exactly know. Can’t you, uh, you know, just make big purple capsules illegal temporarily?”

  Be interesting to hear the AG’s response to that one.

  “And where does Net Force come in?”

  “We have evidence that the makers of the drug—they call it Thor’s Hammer, by the way—are using the Internet to arrange delivery.”

  “If the drug isn’t illegal, then using the net to distribute it isn’t illegal, either,” Michaels said.

  “We know. But if we can find them, we can damn well ask the miscreants making it to give us a sample. So to speak. ”

  Miscreants? Michaels didn’t think he’d ever actually heard that word used in a conversation before. He said, “Ah, pardon me for asking a stupid question, but wouldn’t it be easier just to buy some on the street and analyze it?”

  “Believe it or not, Commander, that thought did occur to us, it being our job and all. It isn’t a common street drug. The cost of it is extremely high, and the sellers are very selective about who they sell it to. So far, none of our agents have been able to make a connection.

  “We did manage to seize one capsule after the death of one of the people that we know took the drug. Unfortunately, the chemist in this case is very clever; there is some kind of enzymatic catalyst in the compound. By the time we got the stuff to our lab and analyzed, the active ingredients had all been somehow rendered ... inert. There is so
me kind of timing mechanism in the drug. If you don’t use it fairly quickly, it turns into a bland, inert powder that doesn’t do anything but sit there.”

  “You can’t tell what the drugs were?”

  “Our chemists can infer what they were, sure. There are residues, certain telltale compounds, but we can’t document for certain what the exact precursor drugs and percentages of each were, because they are essentially gone.”

  “Huh. That must be frustrating.”

  “Sir, you do not know the half of it. The common thread running through all the sudden insanities is money. Every one of the twelve people we feel certain died as a result of having ingested this drug is—or was—rich. Nobody on the list made less than a quarter million a year, and some of them made fifteen or twenty times that much.”

  “Ah.” Michaels understood that. You might lean on a criminal street pusher, threaten him, rough him up a little, to get what you wanted from him, but millionaires tended to come equipped with herds of lawyers, and a man with big bucks in the bank didn’t get hassled by street cops who wanted to keep their jobs. Not unless the cops had enough to go into court and get a conviction, and even then, they tended to walk with more care. Rich people had recreations denied to the common folk.

  “Precisely. So until we can get a sample before the enzyme is added, or get to one fast enough to beat the decomposition, we’re stuck. We need your help.”

  Michaels nodded. Maybe the guy wasn’t that bad. In his place, he could understand how he might feel. And things around Net Force were as slow as he had ever seen them. “All right, Mr. Lee. We’ll see if we can’t run your dope dealers to ground.”

  Lee nodded. “Thank you.”

  5

  Washington, D.C.

  Toni smiled at the UPS man as he left—he was late today—then took the latest packages into the garage. Alex had told her she could have half the workbench, though she only needed maybe a quarter of it, and she had already started putting her stuff there. So far, she had the magnifying lamp set up, the alcohol burner and wax cauldron, a couple tubes of lampblack oil paint, and some rags and cleaning supplies. There wasn’t really much else left she needed. The new packages should have the pin vises, some assorted sewing needles, lens paper, lanolin hand cleaner, and a couple of X-Acto knives and some blades. Plus the jeweler’s special wax and some polishing compound. She already had some fake-ivory slabs, some old piano keys, and some little rectangles of micarta, which looked like real ivory but was much harder. She didn’t need the heavy-duty saws and buffing wheels, Alex had a Dremel tool that would work for polishing small stuff. And while the stereomicroscope like the one her teacher used was really neat, she couldn’t justify spending eight or nine hundred dollars on it—not unless she got to the point where she was selling pieces, which would probably not ever happen—especially given she wasn’t sure she even wanted to try that.

  Toni had never thought of herself as having much artistic talent. She’d done okay in art courses in school, could draw a little, but according to Bob Hergert’s on-line VR class, while being a world-class artist wouldn’t hurt, it wasn’t absolutely necessary. Given the wonders of the modem computer age, there was a lot technique could do to make up for talent. And given what she’d learned so far, you’d be able to fool a lot of people into thinking you knew what you were doing when you didn’t.

  She opened the packages, removed the tools and supplies, and set them out. Being pregnant wasn’t at all like she’d thought it was going to be. Sure, she’d heard about morning sickness and mood swings, but the reality of those things was something else. And it wasn’t as if she were really a whale, not at five months, but she’d always been in shape, her belly flat and tight, her muscles firm, and having to lie around and watch herself balloon up was, well, it was scary. Having something to do that needed concentration and skill, like scrimshaw, might be just the ticket to help her get past this. The morning sickness—which lasted almost all day and any time she was around any food more spicy than dry soda crackers—had finally stopped. Supposedly, the hormone swings got better after the sixth month.

  Supposedly.

  She had some ideas of what she might like to try first, and for that she needed to go back to her computer. There were lots of places to find pictures in the public domain, and if those weren’t good enough, lots of places where you could license an image for personal use for a small fee. Later on, if she got better at it, she could try some freehand drawings of her own, but at first, she wanted to keep it simple.

  Toni looked at her comer of the workbench. The rest of it was covered with Alex’s tools and car parts, all laid out neatly. He was much more orderly than she was about such things. So far, her investment in scrimshaw supplies had run less than what it cost Alex for a good set of wrenches. If it turned out to be a total waste of her time, at least she wouldn’t be out much money.

  She sighed. Before she sat down at the computer and went shopping on-line, she needed to go pee again. And that, she understood, was not going to get better as her pregnancy progressed. She sure hoped having Alex’s son was worth all this aggravation.

  John Howard bent from the waist and tightened the laces on his cross-trainers, finishing with the double-loop runner’s knot that theoretically kept the laces from coming untied. Finished, he straightened, bent backward and stretched his abdominals, then shook his arms back and forth to loosen them.

  Normally, he ran at the base or around the Net Force compound, but today he felt like taking a tour of his own neighborhood. It was warm for early October, and muggy, so he wore running shorts and a tank top, though he did have a fanny pack holding his virgil, his ID, and a small handgun—a little Seecamp .380 double-action auto. The tiny pistol made the Walther PPK look like a giant, it only weighed maybe eleven or twelve ounces and was awfully convenient if you were wearing summer clothes or workout gear. True, the .380 wasn’t exactly an elephant-stopper; the gun didn’t have any sights, liked only one brand of ammo, and it tended to bang your trigger finger pretty good when it recoiled. No way it compared with his primary side arm, the Phillips & Rogers Medusa, but it did fulfill the first rule of a gunfight: Bring a gun. Point it at somebody in your face with a knife or a broken bottle and pull the trigger four or five times, and it certainly would offer them major incentive to back off. With the fanny pack strapped on tightly enough so it wouldn’t bounce around much, it was doable. He used to carry a little can of pepper spray to discourage loose dogs, but realized that if he stopped running and said “Bad dog! Go lie down!” in a loud voice, the dog would stop, frown, and leave. At least they had so far.

  A bit more limber, Howard started to jog up the street.

  The leaves were falling—they’d all be down by Halloween, first good wind that came along any time now would finish ’em—and while the sun was warm, there was that subtle difference between spring and fall, that sense of impending winter.

  He passed old man Carlson working in his yard, using the blower to herd leaves into piles. The old man, eighty if he was a day, smiled and waved. Carlson was a tanned, leathery old bird who was the ultimate Orioles fan. He’d retired after forty years with the Post Office, and there wasn’t a street in the district he couldn’t locate for you.

  Howard reached the corner and turned right, planning to loop in and out of the cul-de-sacs that fed the main road through the neighborhood, staying on the sidewalk and ducking low, overhanging trees.

  Tyrone had called today from his class trip to Canada. He was going to be gone for another ten days, two weeks in all, on a visit for his international relations class, something new at his school. Howard thought it was a good idea, getting to know other cultures. Better than learning it the Army’s way. He smiled, remembering the old slogan his first top kick had posted over his desk when he’d first joined up: “Join the Army and See the World! Travel to exotic, unusual locales! Learn about other cultures! Meet diverse and interesting people—and kill them.”

  He picked his pace
up a little, stretching out, getting into a longer stride and rhythm. Just inside his breath, barely.

  The scars were formed up pretty good where he’d had surgery after the shooting in Alaska. Pretty much nothing hurt most of the time—well, no more than usual after he worked out—but the memories hadn’t faded at all. Being out in the middle of nowhere, exchanging gunfire with some real bad men, giving better than he’d gotten, but almost dying—those kinds of memories didn’t go away in a few months. Every firefight—and he hadn’t had that many—was as clear in his mind as the day or night it had happened. The thought that he might have bled to death in the woods and been eaten by scavengers wasn’t so horrifying in itself. Hell, he was a professional soldier, getting killed went with the territory. But dying and leaving his son, just hitting his teens on his way to manhood, that bothered Howard more than it ever had. All it took was a real possibility he might actually buy the farm. Before, he’d been lucky. Never made it to a real war, and when he finally started seeing some action in Net Force, the bullets had zipped here and there, missing him. Julio had taken a round in the leg during the recovery of the stolen plutonium from the sons-of-whoever. Some of his troops had eaten frags from a mine or bullets from the mad Russian’s hit man, Ruzhyó, the former Spetsnaz killer. Intellectually, he knew it was just chance and maybe a little skill that he’d never gotten hit; emotionally, he’d felt invulnerable, at least to a degree. Like God was watching over him because he was worthy. Yeah. Until that long shot in the darkness had plowed into him. A round from a handgun at rifle distance had killed that feeling of being bulletproof, oh, yes, indeed, it had.

  Even Achilles had his heel, and waking up in a hospital full of tubes did make a guy stop and consider the idea he wasn’t gonna live forever.

  And while he wasn’t afraid to go into battle—at least he didn’t think so—he didn’t want to die and leave his wife and son. They had become more precious to him when he’d realized he might lose them. He believed in the Kingdom of Heaven, and he tried to live his life in a moral and upright manner, but going there wasn’t at the top of his to-do list for this year.