Point of Impact

  He opened up a little more on the run, starting to breathe through his mouth more heavily now, as he looped into the next street over from his and headed for the circle at the end.

  He remembered another joke his father had told him:

  “So the preacher stands up in front of the congregation and says, ‘How many of you want to go to Heaven?’

  “And all the hands in the church except Brother Brown’s go up.

  “And the preacher looks at Brother Brown, who was known to drink a little even of a Sunday morning, and he says, ‘Brother Brown! Don’t you want to go to Heaven when you die?’

  “And Brother Brown says, ‘When I die? Well, sure, Reverend.’

  “And the preacher says, ‘Then, how come you didn’t raise your hand?’

  “And Brother Brown says, ‘Well, I thought you was gettin’ up a busload to go now.’ ”

  He looped around the circle and headed back up toward the main street. A toy poodle in a fenced yard raced back and forth inside, barking wildly at him. Fish bait, his Daddy would call it. A waste of dog space.

  He could, Howard knew, become an armchair general, an REMF who directed operations at a distance. Net Force would prefer it that way, and probably nobody would think less of him for it, not those who had been on ops with him before, anyway. But sending a man somewhere he wasn’t willing to go himself didn’t seem right, never had.

  That left the other option, which was to retire. He could muster out with his current rank of general, draw a fair retirement, and get a job consulting somewhere, teaching, whatever. Probably do better moneywise than he was doing now. And be a lot more certain of being around when his son graduated from high school, from college, got married, and brought home grandchildren. Sure that was ten, fifteen years away, maybe, but he didn’t want to miss it. And he didn’t want to leave Nadine. If something happened to him, he’d always told her to remarry, find a good man, because she was too precious to waste away alone. And he meant it, too, but on a real, deep level, he had to admit to himself that the idea of Nadine laughing and loving another man wasn’t at the top of his list of fun thoughts, either.

  But he was a soldier. A professional warrior. This was what he did, who he was, and he liked it.

  So he had to puzzle this out. It was important. Not easy, maybe, but something he had to do.

  He picked up his pace again, now close to top speed for his run. He tried to get in four miles a session, at least four or five times a week, and while he was past the days when he could run’em in five or even six minutes a mile, he could still manage six and a half or seven minutes.

  That is, if he didn’t get to thinking so hard he forget to keep the speed up.

  Run, John. Think later.

  Malibu, California

  Tad Bershaw drove back to the beach house, poking along, in no hurry now. He had made his deliveries, collected the money, and decided what the hell and taken the purple cap half an hour ago. It would be another few minutes before it started to come on full force, but even now he was getting patterns, geometric overlays of complicated, pulsing grids on everything. That was from the psychedelic components of the drug. It made driving real interesting.

  Bobby was cagey about his chem, he never told anybody exactly what was in it, but Bershaw had sampled enough illegal stuff over the years to have some pragmatic knowledge about such things.

  There was some kind of MDMA/Ecstasy analog in the Hammer’s alloy, with maybe a bit of mescaline; the body rushes got pretty intense an hour or so in, and just breathing was orgasmic when it got to circulating.

  His experiences were not based on any formal knowledge of chemistry, but he knew it when he felt it. Though it didn’t really matter, he had poked at it mentally a few times, what he thought Bobby had created. The psychedelics—entheogens, Bobby called those—for sure. That would be the MDMA, mescaline, or LSD, or maybe even some psilocybin from magic mushrooms. Maybe all four. That gave you that sense of being in contact with your inner self and loving the world and all, entactogenesis and empathogenesis, Bobby called them. Also picked up the sensory input, made everything feel really, really intense.

  It had smart drugs in it, he knew that, because he was quicker, sharper, able to make choices better when the Hammer was at full pound, no question. He didn’t know much about nootropics, stuff like deprynl, adrafinil, pro-vigil, shit like that, but Bobby did, and he knew how to tweak’em for an immediate response.

  For sure it had some kind of speed—cylert, ritalin, dex, maybe; some tranq to balance it so you got the fast mind but not bad jitters. It definitely had painkiller in it, or a way to kick in the body’s own opiates, and Tad guessed some kind of animal tranq and steroid mix, though he didn’t see how those would do much in the short run. And something like Viagra was in it, too, because it gave you a hard-on that wouldn’t quit. The Zee-ster once took six women to bed while tripping, and none of them could walk the next day. Supposedly made women horny, too.

  Past that, Bobby definitely had some secret ingredients about which Tad knew zip. He knew what they did to him, but not why or how.

  The total combination was synergistic—that meant more than the sum of its parts—and the bottom line was, it didn’t really matter how it did what it did, only that it did do it.

  There was a bright flash of orange to Bershaw’s left but, when he glanced over that way, no cause for it. He grinned. Yeah, he was coming on. Hallucinations, real hallucinations you could talk to and have them answer back, he’d never had those while riding the Hammer, but light flashes, visual distortions, little shifts in reality, those were par for the course. Your motor ran at full speed, no governor and no idle.

  He took a deep breath, and chills frosted him all over, despite the still-warm late afternoon Santa Ana wind blowing in through the open window.

  Hoo, what a rush!

  Seventeen times he had swung Thor’s hammer, and not once a bad trip. One in five or so went bonkers, like the guy in the casino. Something in their body chemistry maybe, or the way their brains were hardwired, Bobby didn’t know which, but whatever it was, Tad didn’t have it. Seventeen times he had become more than he was, practically turned into a superhuman. Stronger, faster, smarter, pain-free, fatigue-free, a guy who could walk into the local kung fu school and kick its collective ass.

  And, oh, yeah, there was the sex, though that never seemed to call to him much. Yeah, he got the iron woody and all, but he never seemed to have time to put it into anybody, too much else to do to lie down and be still ... or relatively still.

  Though right at the moment, he felt pretty mellow, the desire to shuck the car and get physical was ahead, he knew. Maybe he’d go for a walk on the beach after it got dark. Or a swim. He was usually a crappy swimmer, but once he’d swum out half a mile or so and back without any problem with the riptide or anything. He’d been looking for a shark; he’d had a kitchen knife in his hand, and he wanted to see if he could take a shark out with it. Hadn’t found one, which was probably good. Away from the Hammer, you knew you had limits. Swinging it, you didn’t. But hell, maybe he could have sliced Jaws up into cat food. Who could say?

  Another rush enveloped him, and he was glad the house wasn’t too far away. It wasn’t that he couldn’t maintain control enough to drive during the early stages of the trip ’cause he could, but it took too much effort, and he didn’t want to waste effort on piddly shit. He would get home, shuck the car, and go outside. After all, outside was only a bigger inside, right?

  He grinned. It was like the time he realized that chocolate wasn’t the opposite of vanilla. They were just two different flavors. That had hit him like the secret of the universe. Shit, for all anybody knew, that was the secret of the universe.

  6

  Washington, D.C.

  Michaels was almost home and wishing he was already there. What he had in mind was a nice, cold beer, his bare feet propped up to watch the news hour, maybe falling asleep on the couch. Might make a sandwich, if he felt up
to it. He was tired. It had been a long day, made longer because it was dull and mostly uninteresting, and just as he was about to leave, they’d had a small crisis over some hacker who was flooding every church web page his autopost-bot could find with obscene pictures taken during an orgy in a Thai whorehouse.

  There was a threat to the republic.

  Graffiti had certainly changed from simple spray-paint tags on the fence next to the local drugstore when it went electronic, but it was still stupid. Who gained anything by such foolishness? Did the idiot posting think people were going to see the pictures and abandon their faith? Run screaming into the streets?

  No, probably he just thought it was funny. Which right off indicated a somewhat retarded sense of humor.

  The church fathers and mothers were not the least amused, of course, and there were plenty of them in high enough government positions to get Net Force’s attention in a hurry, including the president himself, and what was worse, a minor annoyance suddenly became a priority project.

  Find whoever was doing this and stop him. Now.

  Turning the other cheek didn’t apply when the cheek was below the waist, so it seemed.

  The e-tagger called himself The Tasmanian Devil, and as it turned out, that was a major clue. Net Force ops traced the postings to the north coast town of Devonport, Tasmania, overlooking the cool waters of the Bass Strait. The tagger was clever, he’d found some meltware that got him through a lot of firewalls, but he slipped up. His anonymous reposter was six months out of date, and in this business, six months was ancient history. Jay Gridley’s team ran the cable sig to a house, informed the local constabulary, and they went round and knocked on the door. There they found a sixteen-year-old kid running a six-year-old IMac.

  The boy was the son of a local minister, which probably explained a lot.

  It had taken a while, and when it was done, Michaels called several heavyweights and told them they could rest easy, then left the building.

  He was only a mile or so away from home when his virgil came to life.

  He was tempted to ignore it, but it might be Toni, so he pulled the device from his belt and looked at the ID sig.

  It was blank.

  Michaels frowned. FBI com-watchware was supposed to circumvent any commercial ID blocker, so the only people who could reach out and touch him at this number without him knowing who they were would have to be somebody with federal-level blockers. He thumbed the connect button.

  “Yes?”

  “Commander Michaels, this is Zachary George, with the National Security Agency. Good evening. I hope I’m not interrupting your dinner?” The voice was smooth, even, just deep enough to sound authoritative. There was no picture transmission. The tiny screen was blank.

  “Not yet. What can I do for you, Mr. George? Oops, can you hold on a second? I have another call.”

  This was not true, but it gave Michaels a few seconds to key in a trace, which he did. He didn’t like not knowing to whom he was talking.

  “Sorry about that. Go ahead.”

  “Sir, we understand your agency is involved in a joint investigation with the DEA. We’d like to speak to you about this, if we could.”

  “You can set up an appointment with my assistant, Mr. George. Although I’m not sure why NSA would have any interest in such a thing if it was so ... and I wouldn’t confirm it over the com in any event.”

  The incoming diode lit, that would be his trace. He tapped it, and a number scrolled up on the view screen, with an ID: George, Zachary, National Security Agency. Well. At least that much was true.

  “I understand your reluctance, sir, and I will be happy to explain it all to you when I see you. This was just a courtesy call to let you know of our interest.” There was a pause. “Ah. I see you’ve traced the call and confirmed my ID. Excellent. I’ll be contacting your assistant for an appointment at your earliest convenience, sir. Thank you. Discom.”

  He went away. Michaels frowned again. What did NSA want with the drug investigation? And why was their stealthware better than the FBI’s, to know they had been traced? He was going to have to talk to Jay about that. Maybe he could come up with a better program.

  He dropped the virgil onto the seat and shook his head. Two more blocks to go.

  Beer. Couch. Television. Soon ...

  Not that easy, of course. When he walked in, Toni was all aglow over her new hobby, so of course he had go into the garage and admire her toys.

  Well, what the hell, it made her happy, that made him happy. With all the mood swings lately, anytime she was smiling was good, better make the most of it.

  “... and this is the pin vise, see, you put the needle in here and twist it, like so, and it holds it. I glued a fishing weight—this lead ball here—onto the end to give it some heft, so when I stipple, I won’t have to use so much muscle.”

  “Such a clever girl,” he said, smiling.

  She smiled back at him. “And look here, this is the magnifier....”

  He listened with half an ear, not being that interested in the artwork per se. When she ran down, he smiled again. She couldn’t drink, given her pregnancy and all, but maybe she could take some vicarious pleasure out of watching him enjoy a cold one.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “You need to work out first. Do your djurus. ”

  Michaels wanted to say a bad word, but he wisely refrained. Toni wasn’t just his wife, after all, but also his silat teacher, and that was the hat she had just put on. If he tried to beg off, that would be bad.

  “Oh, yeah, sure, that’s what I meant. After I work out.”

  That didn’t fool her for a second, she was way too sharp, but hey, you had to give it a shot. Might catch her dozing.

  She said, “It takes a few thousand repetitions to get the moves down, Alex. Latest scientific research I read says somewhere in the fifty- to one-hundred-hour range.”

  He did the math mentally. “So, for eighteen djurus, I need to practice for nine hundred to eighteen hundred hours before I get them? At thirty minutes a day, that works out to about one hundred and eighty hours a year, so we’re talking about ten years?”

  “Well, to get them really smooth, it’ll take maybe another five years.”

  “I’ll be retired by then.”

  “Good. Give you more time to practice.”

  He laughed. “You are a slave driver.”

  He went to the bedroom, shucked his street clothes, and put on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. He didn’t need any shoes since he was inside. He went back and sat down in the living room and began to do some basic yoga exercises Toni had showed him. Stretching was a luxury you wouldn’t get in a real fight, but for somebody over forty, it was better to do it before working out than not. A street fight might last ten seconds; a workout was gonna run thirty minutes to an hour, depending on how ambitious you were, and the older he got, the longer it took for a strain to heal.

  As he was doing spinal twists, Toni wandered back in from the garage. “So, how was your day?”

  Given that she had been his assistant and knew as much about his work as he did—more in some areas—it was natural for her to ask and just as natural for him to tell her.

  “Dead calm,” he said. “Except for a flurry at the end with a kid hacker posting porno.”

  “Oh, boy. And me here missing it all.”

  “Well, there were a couple of things mildly interesting.” He told her about the drug stuff and about the cryptic call from the NSA guy.

  She watched him, said, “Keep your back straight when you turn.” Then, “So what does Jay say about tracking down the dope dealer?”

  “He said it was going to be a bitch. Apparently, drug sales over the Internet have always been a problem. Back in the early days, a lot of it was technically illegal but not prosecuted. ”

  “How so?”

  “Well, suppose you were seventy years old and living on social security in North Dakota or maybe south Texas. If
you got sick and needed medicine, a prescription might cost, say, fifty bucks a bottle. Suppose you had to take two or three bottles a month for years. That could cut way into your food budget. So you’d hop a bus to Canada or to Mexico, where the same drug might cost sixteen or eighteen dollars. A local doc writes you a scrip based on your existing one from the U.S., and even with twenty bucks for that, you still come out way ahead in the long run.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So with the net and cheap home computers or access through cable TV or whatever, you don’t even have to take the bus ride. You log onto a site, order what you need, maybe answer a couple of questions over the wire to keep things more or less legal in Canada or Mexico, and your prescription shows up in your mailbox in a day or two, assuming you are dealing with a reputable outfit.”

  “All the way down,” she said. “And keep your knees straight.”

  He chuckled. “Being pregnant has made you mean, woman.”

  “Oh, you think so? Just wait. So the DEA didn’t leap all over these folks for importing medicine illegally?”

  “Ha! Think about that for a second. Here’s somebody’s little old granny on a pension who’s got a bad heart after working forty years teaching grammar school kids. Would you want to be the DEA guy in charge of arresting her for buying her nitroglycerin or whatever across the border to save enough money so she doesn’t have to eat dog food? Imagine how many federal prosecutors would want to hop on that career bandwagon. The press would swarm you like a cloud of starving locusts. Can’t you just see the headlines? ‘Grandma Busted for Heart Meds!’ ”

  “It could be a political problem,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah, it could. Then there are the drugs that are legal in other countries but not approved by the FDA, which, according to Jay, is another whole can of worms. Let’s say you want to take Memoril, one of the new smart drugs that improves your short-term memory something like seventy percent. The FDA is still out on that one, but it’s been legal in most of Europe for a couple of years. So, you log onto a web page in Spain, give them your credit card number, and order a hundred tabs. A few days later, you get a package from Scotland that looks like a birthday gift from your Uncle Angus, and inside is your drug, made by a pharmaceutical company in Germany. And all of this is perfectly legal in Spain, Scotland, and Germany, and it’s not their concern about laws in the U.S.