Three miles or so away, he angled back up toward the road, then paralleled it for half a mile until he came to a tiny shopping center. He found a motorcycle chained to a light pole, and it took all of thirty seconds to find a rock big enough to smash the lock. The owner had trusted the lock and chain, and so he’d left a spare ignition key under the seat, tucked in the cushion springs, where Tad and ten other guys he knew always kept their spare bike keys, and the sucker, a midsized Honda, cranked right up.
They’d probably have roadblocks set up on both sides of the hill looking for him, but he could dance that or maybe go off road and around it. Now that it was fully dark, he would have an advantage: He didn’t need to use the headlight; there was enough city glow for him to see the road. Time they spotted him coming, it would be too late.
The double dose of Hammer was something. He had never felt so strong, so fast, or so quick-witted. They didn’t have a chance. If they did stop him? Well, he would just kill them all.
Tad sailed eastward down the hill in the dark, hitting speeds of eighty, ninety miles per hour with the lights off, whipping past startled drivers who heard him but couldn’t see him him until he appeared in their headlights. Must have scared the crap out of them.
If the fed had roadblocks, they must have been closer to the place where the copter had been, which made sense, sort of. They weren’t figuring on a guy who could run three miles in the dark before he got back to the road. They didn’t have the Hammer and he did.
Once he was down and in the flats around Woodland Hills, he flicked the headlight on. He didn’t have far to go now.
He made it to the safe house without incident. Inside, he flipped on the television and tuned it to CNN Headline News. He didn’t feel like eating, but he knew he needed fuel and liquid, so he grabbed a big can of ham slices and a six-pack of Evian water. He peeled ham slices off two at a time and washed them down with water as he watched the news. He needed information as much as he needed fuel.
The info wasn’t long in coming. A local camera crew had gotten to the site of the shooting, and while most of what the reporter had was probably total bullshit, there were a couple of things that stood out: The drug dealer who had been slain had been located through the efforts of the FBI’s computer arm, Net Force; the leader of that organization, Commander Alexander Michaels, had come all the way from Washington, D.C., to be in on the raid. The newscam had footage of Michaels, right out there on the road, looking down at the body of some agent who had been killed by the drug dealers during the raid.
Yeah, well, if one of theirs was dead, the feds had done it themselves. Bobby hadn’t done it, and except for that one shot Tad put into the sky, he hadn’t fired, either. Lying fuckers.
There were interviews with local DEA and FBI agents, as well as some computer geek for Net Force. It had been a coordinated operation among the three agencies, so it seemed, but Net Force got the big pat on the back for coming up with the information that led to the suspected drug dealers. One of said drug dealers had escaped, was still at large, and considered armed and dangerous. They flashed a picture of Tad, along with his name. Driver’s license photo. So they had IDed him, no big deal.
The news moved on, and he shut it off.
When he looked down at the ham can, it was empty. He had eaten two pounds of ham and downed six bottles of water, and he didn’t even feel full. Probably his last meal.
Tad thought about it for a few seconds. Commander Alexander Michaels. Net Force. Washington, D.C. A long way to travel for somebody in his shoes. And nothing he did would bring Bobby back, dead was dead. Why bother?
Yeah, well, fuck it. He’d almost reached the end of his string anyhow.
He went into the bathroom. Bobby had stocked the place with all kinds of shit they might need if they had to run. He found scissors and an electric razor with a trim attachment and cut his already-short black hair into a flat-top. The Hammer made him want to jump up and down, but he held himself steady by force of will so that the do wasn’t too ragged. He used half a bottle of hair coloring on his new cut. He shaved off his lip-hanger goatee. Pulled out his earrings and tossed them.
After the hair color was done, bleached to an ugly yellow, he showered. Got out, and rubbed himself down with bronzing gel, applying it carefully with the little sponge thing.
Okay, so he wasn’t gonna pass for a surfer, but he wasn’t the same fish-belly white beatnik in the picture, he was blond and tanned. He found some slacks, a dress shirt, socks, and running shoes, all in pale gray or white, not his look at all. There was a pair of wire-rimmed glasses with plain glass lenses, and he put them on. He could almost pass for normal.
There was about fifty thousand in cash in frozen food packages in the freezer. He took about ten grand. He didn’t expect he’d need that much, and if he somehow got back here—unlikely—he could get the rest then.
There were some fake photo IDs in a desk drawer, three or four sets each for him and Bobby. Tad picked up a set, looked to see that the driver’s license was from Texas, and that the name was Raymond Selling. Bobby’s little joke: Selling was the winner of last year’s Los Angeles Marathon race. He’d done one for Richard Kimball, too, from the old TV series, The Fugitive. The last one was for Meia Rasgada, which was Portuguese for “torn stocking,” yet another kind of runner.
Bobby was a riot.
Had been a riot.
He needed to move, he really needed to move, but he had one more thing he had to do before he could. He took one of the clean digital phones in the kitchen and punched in a number from memory. His memory at the moment was excellent; he could draw on anything he had ever seen, smelled, tasted, heard, felt, or done if he needed it, and he knew it would be there.
“Yo,” came the deep voice.
“Halley, it’s Tad. I need something.”
“Yeah, me, too. Your money in my pocket. Go.”
“I want an address for Commander Alexander Michaels, M-i-c-h-a-e-l-s. He’s the head of Net Force.”
“I can give you that without having to burn an electron, dude. Net Force HQ is in Quantico, Virginia, part of the new FBI complex next to the Yew-Nite-Ted States Muhrines—”
“No, I want his home address.”
“Ah. That’ll take a little more. They’d keep that buried pretty good.”
“How long?”
“Ah, forty, forty-five minutes.”
“Call me back on this number when you get it.”
“Cost you five hundred.”
“Not a problem.”
“I’m on it, dude.”
Tad took his new self outside. There were two cars in the garage. A year-old tan minivan with a Baby on Board sticker on the back window, and a three- or four-year-old Dodge Dakota. Both had keys in the ignitions. He paused long enough to grab the rear bumper of the truck, to squat and lift the tires clear of the pavement a few times, to burn off some of his excess energy. Then he climbed in and cranked the engine.
He pulled out of the driveway and headed for the airport. On the way, he called and booked a first-class seat on the next nonstop flight to Washington, D.C. The plane wouldn’t leave for three hours. Another five or so hours to fly there, figure on maybe two more to find the place. Call it ten hours all totaled, be there by eight or nine A.M. at the absolute latest. He’d be riding the Hammer for that long, and when he started to come down, he had a whole shitload of caps that would be good until noon, and another twelve hours of Hammer to ride after he took it. Midnight tomorrow, easy.
That should be more than enough time to have a long chat with Commander Alexander Michaels of Net Force, and to teach the fucker what a bad mistake he had made in helping get Bobby Drayne killed.
Plenty of time.
38
Los Angeles, California
Michaels had just finished shaving and was getting dressed when there came a knock on the hotel room’s door.
It was Jay. He said, “FBI got a lead on Bershaw.”
Michaels waved
Jay in as he continued to button his shirt. “Yes?”
Jay held up the flatscreen so Michaels could see the image thereon. A blond-haired man with glasses, dressed in casual sports clothes.
“They sure this is him?”
“Check the side-by-side.”
A magnified image of the blond appeared next to an identical-sized head shot of Tad Bershaw. Overlay grids appeared, numbers scrolled, and yellow highlight outlines pulsed over the features.
“The feeb surveillance matchware doesn’t worry overmuch about hair, eye, and skin coloring, it compares ear size and lobe shape, nose length and nares spacing, eye spacing and brow angle. Plus somatotypes, though those can be altered by shoe lifts and padding. This is him.”
“Where was this taken?”
“LAX, last night. The matchcam sent a sig to FBI HQ, but the priority tag imprint apparently was malfunctioning ; instead of an A-1 stamp, the file was batched with a bunch of routine no-hurry PPOIs ... that’s possible persons of interest. So they should have seen it last night, but nobody got around to scanning the file until a few minutes ago.”
“So much for infallible technology,” Michaels said. He sat on the bed, pulled on his socks. “So where did he go?”
“According to the gatecam at CrossCon Air, he took a nonstop red-eye to Washington, D.C. Plane landed around two A.M. this morning, eastern time. Dulles matchware showed him getting off the jet, but that’s the only image they got. FBI checked the rental agencies, he didn’t get a car, and they are talking to bus and limo drivers and cabbies. No hits yet. From the passenger list, they know he’s using the name Raymond Selling.”
“Like the marathon runner?”
“Who?”
“Selling is the fastest long-distance man in the country, probably the world.”
“I don’t follow the sport. Running for twenty-six miles hurts me just to think about it.”
“Why Washington?”
Jay shrugged. “Why not? Maybe he’s got an old girlfriend there, somebody he used to run with. Easier to disappear in a big city than a small one.”
“Well, maybe we’ll bump into him when we get home.”
“I hope not,” Jay said. “If he’s got any of that dope left, he’s not somebody I want to meet face-to-face.”
Michaels tied his shoes, stood, and reached for his sport coat, which hung on the bathroom door. “What time does our flight leave?”
“Couple hours. Be back in Washington about seven P.M. Five-hour flight, add three for the time zones.”
“Well, let’s go have breakfast and enjoy the L.A. sunshine. It’ll probably be raining when we get back to the East Coast.”
Jay closed the flatscreen, and they started for the door. He still had a worried look.
Michaels said, “Something else?”
“Yeah, a major problem. In-house Security says somebody got past the Net Force firewalls and into the mainframe last night.”
“I thought that wasn’t possible.”
“It’s not, for most people. I could do it. And if I could, some others could. A handful.”
“Was anything damaged or stolen?”
“Fortunately not. The file protection programs make that real hard without the encryption keys. Even I might have trouble wrecking any big part of the system from outside. Security says the probe rode in on a GAO line and managed to get into the personnel files. It didn’t damage them, they are read-only for the GAO auditor, who, by law, we have to let in. Somebody had to know about that to use it.”
“Who would know?”
“Ex-programmer, maybe ex-ops, FBI, GAO. Maybe even Net Force.”
“Really?”
“We’ve had people quit. Fired a few, too. Programmers always leave themselves a back door when they are building secure systems. We vetted ours, and I had our people checking, but the guy who builds it can hide a few things when you are talking millions of lines of code.”
“So what now?”
“We’ll run down all ex-employees with enough skill to pull it off. My hope is that it’ll turn out to be some kid hacker counting coup. But that wouldn’t be the way smart money bets.”
“Mm. Stay on it, Jay. In the meantime, let’s don’t keep General Howard waiting.”
On the way to the elevator, something about what Jay said bothered him. He couldn’t quite nail it down as they stepped into the lift. Jay pushed the button for the lobby; they were on the sixteenth floor.
As the elevator descended, pinging as it passed each floor, Michaels said, “That intrusion last night. Do we know where it came from?”
“Not really,” Jay said. “It bounced off a couple of satellites. We were able to track it as far as the West Coast, that’s it.”
Michaels thought about that for a second. “Why would anybody capable of breaking into a secure system like Net Force’s mainframe want to look at our personnel records?”
“If that’s what they planned to do, boss, rather than just stumbling into those records by accident.”
“Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume they meant to go there.”
Jay shrugged. “Who, where, what, when, why,” he said. “Find out if somebody works there, what they do exactly, how long. Maybe how much somebody gets paid.”
“You skipped one,” Michaels said. “Find out where somebody lives.”
“Yeah, that could be.”
Michaels felt a sudden chill frost him.
Jay said, “I see where you’re going here, but it’s probably just a coincidence.”
“What if it isn’t? What if it’s Bershaw? What if he is looking to even the score for the death of his friend?”
“That’s a reach, boss. Guy who pulled the trigger on Drayne is dead.”
“Bershaw wouldn’t know that. He went over the side of the hill as soon as the shooting started.”
The elevator reached the ground floor and opened. The two men stepped out and walked toward the hotel’s coffee shop.
“He could have heard or watched news reports about it,” Jay offered.
“You were on CNN’s coverage. The FBI and DEA weren’t saying much. Nobody said who shot Drayne, only that he was killed. And who was getting most of the credit for finding the drug dealers?”
“Uh, that’d be us,” Jay said.
“Yes. And there were only three of us there: you, me, and General Howard.”
“Still a reach,” Jay said. “It doesn’t necessarily follow.”
“Bershaw escapes. Somebody on the West Coast gets into Net Force’s personnel files within a few hours. Bershaw disappears, then shows up on a flight to Washington. I don’t like it. If you were him and you were pissed off because somebody had murdered your friend, blasted him while he stood there with his hands up, and you wanted to do something about it, who would you go after?”
Jay didn’t say anything.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought. The man in charge, who was right there on the scene. You could be waiting for him when he got home. Only thing is, Toni is already there.”
He pulled his virgil, hit the voxax, and said, “Call home.”
The virgil made the call.
After five rings, the message recorder came on. “Hello. You’ve reached area code two-oh-two, three-five-seven ...”
“Toni, if you are there, pick up or call me back ASAP.”
Michaels felt a sense of panic threaten to take him as he ended the call. He tapped the resend button and selected five-minute intervals, to repeat until a connection was made or he shut it off.
“She’s not answering.”
“She could be asleep. Outside watering the plants. A dozen things,” Jay said.
John Howard stood in the short line of people waiting to get into the coffee shop. He saw Jay and Michaels approaching, smiled at them. Michaels didn’t feel like smiling back.
Howard caught it. “What’s the matter, Commander?”
Michaels ran through it, feeling more and more nervous as he laid it out.
<
br /> Howard said, “Jay’s probably right, it’s probably nothing. But just to be on the safe side, how about I have a couple of my people drop by and check.”
“I would appreciate that.” Being all the way across the country made him feel helpless. Once he knew Toni was okay, he’d feel a lot better.
Howard looked at Michaels a moment longer. “One more thing, Commander,” he said. “Jay’s the one who got all the attention on TV. It might not be a bad idea for him to get hold of Saji and tell her to get somewhere safe.”
Michaels nodded, but Jay was already pulling out his virgil. A few seconds later, Saji answered, and everyone relaxed a little.
Howard pulled his own virgil and spoke quietly into it, muted the sound so he had to hold it to his ear like a mobile phone to hear the reply. When he was done, he turned to Michaels and said, “Somebody will be there in twenty minutes. They’ll call you back or have Toni call you.”
Michaels nodded. “Thank you. Call home yourself, John, just to be sure, then we might as well go have breakfast.” But until he heard from Toni, he wasn’t the least bit interested in eating.
Washington, D.C.
It was almost noon, and Toni was in the kitchen and about to fix herself some lunch when there came a terrific crash, as if a truck had slammed into the house.
She knew who the intruder was as soon as he came through the side door—a door he opened by kicking it, smashing the lock, and almost tearing it from its hinges. Splinters of shattered wood flew everywhere, and the door slammed against the wall hard enough for the knob to break the spring stop and punch a hole in the Sheetrock.
She didn’t recognize him, but it had to be the drug guy who had escaped. His hair and eyebrows were bleached and his skin color was dark, but it was him.