State Of War (2003) Read online

  "Thanks, sweetie. You be careful."

  "I will be. I love you."

  "I love you, too."

  After he discommed, Toni tucked the phone away and concentrated on her triking. She was glad Alex wasn't taking the shuttle. It had been a while since any bad terrorist stuff had happened on the planes, but after the really nasty events of 2001 and some of the ugly ones since, flying just wasn't the same.

  Sure, everyone did it, and mostly they tried to put it out of their minds. Life was full of risk. You could get run over just crossing the street. Still, she always had a twinge of worry every time Alex flew, even on the company jet. Yes, there were sky marshals on most flights; yes, as a federal agent, Alex could carry his taser; and yes, he finally had some skill in fighting. But as everybody knew, against a suicidal fanatic, all bets were iffy.

  They would have to get to the root of the cause to stop it, and some of the world's grudges went back thousands of years. How do you change the attitude of somebody whose people had grown up hating since the days when they were building pyramids?

  Slowly. Very slowly. Meanwhile, you kept your guard up and if somebody did try something, you flattened them. The price of liberty was vigilance.

  Toni rounded the curve. A pair of mothers were pushing strollers, both women wearing broad-brimmed hats, and both strollers with lids up and blankets draped to keep the babies shaded. Toni smiled, feeling a kinship with these women. She had a child. Mothers were all connected in some way, weren't they?

  She passed the walkers, smiled, and waved. She could turn around up ahead and head back the way she had come. With any luck, that straight stretch would still be empty, and she could cut loose again. And then go home and see her beautiful, brilliant, wonderful son.

  Net Force Shooting Range Quantico, Virginia

  Tyrone had gone to wash his hands and use the toilet, leaving Howard and Julio at Gunny's desk.

  Julio was the first to try to describe what had just happened.

  "Lord, John, I never saw anything like that," he said. "The kid is a natural pistoleer. Give him a month to practice and he'd shoot the pants off Gunny here."

  Howard nodded. It had been quite a surprise to see his teenaged son pick up a pistol and have it become an extension of his hand. No fumbling, no hesitation. He put the first round into the target dead-on and kept putting them there the rest of the session. He did it with Howard's revolver and Julio's semiauto equally well, too. It was as if he had been shooting handguns for years, but Howard knew he hadn't. This had been his very first exposure.

  Stunned and amazed, Howard had asked him if he'd practiced in VR, but Tyrone had said no.

  Gunny nodded. "You want to send him down here to train, sir, I'll put him on the pistol team. We could use the help."

  Howard shook his head. Having his son turn into Wild Bill Hickock had never been part of his vision for the boy. Yes, he wanted him to be able to handle firearms, and yes, he wouldn't be too unhappy if the boy was a little more physical instead of plopped in front of his computer as much as he was. Tyrone had learned how to throw a boomerang, and that got him out into the sunshine more, which was good. And he had a girlfriend, so he was learning those aspects of manhood, too. But a shooter? Howard had never thought about it.

  It was obvious the boy had a talent for it. But was he interested in pursuing it? And if he was, did Howard really want him to pursue it?

  Well, his inner voice said, it'll keep him off the streets, won't it?

  "I'll ask him," he told Gunny.

  "You do that, General, sir. A talent like that, it would be a waste not to encourage it."

  Maybe, Howard thought.

  Maybe.

  3

  Dutch Mall Office Building

  Long Island, New York

  Mitchell Townsend Ames leaned back in his form-chair and listened as the servomotors quietly hummed and adjusted the unit to fit his new position. The chair was a marvel of bioengineering. Top-grain leather and graded biogel padding covered a pneumatic/hydraulic frame of titanium. Driven by six electric motors, and using pressure sensors and fast relays, it matched his every movement, molding itself to his position within a second. When he sat up and leaned forward, it became a straight-backed office chair. When he leaned back a little, it rearranged itself into a lounger. And if he chose to stretch out fully, it turned into a bed.

  Eleven thousand dollars and change, the chair was guaranteed to be the most comfortable thing you ever sat on or your money cheerfully refunded. So far, the company that made the form-chair had sold almost five thousand of the things, and nobody had asked for their money back. It was a great toy.

  Ames owned six of the custom-made form-chairs: one in his medical office, the second in his legal office, the third and fourth in his New York apartment and house in Connecticut, respectively, and the fifth at his mistress's apartment in London. The last one he kept here in his "clean" office, which was the only place he met with people like Junior.

  Almost seventy thousand dollars for half a dozen chairs. A lot of money for a little comfort. If he wanted, though, he could have bought a hundred more form-chairs without his accountant ever raising an eyebrow. After all, he had won half a dozen class-action tort cases--one chair for each successful suit--against major pharmaceutical companies. Each one had netted upward of a hundred million dollars. His percentage had been considerable. He could retire today with an annual income of well over a million dollars from the interest alone. What were a few toys when you had that kind of resource?

  Still, the man seated across from him was in a cheaper and more conventional chair: comfortable, but nothing like a form-chair.

  Marcus "Junior" Boudreaux laughed his raucous, crow-like laugh. "You shoulda seen his face, Doc," he said. "He looked like he swallowed a live water moccasin."

  Ames shook his head. "Overkill," he said.

  Junior looked at him. "Huh?"

  "You didn't need to tell him the girl was fourteen. She could have been eighteen or eighty--in his position, any kind of sexual impropriety can be fatal. You could have even told him she was a whore who had set him up and it wouldn't have mattered. He's married, he's elected, and it's the family vote that keeps him in office. You don't need to use a cannon to swat a fly."

  Junior shook his head. "Better safe than sorry, I figured."

  Ames shrugged. It didn't really matter. He dismissed the senator with a short wave. "What about the new clerk?"

  "No problem there, Doc. The man is happy to take our money. He gets fifty up front. If it comes out of Lassiter's office that the court should hear it, he gets another fifty grand. If the court votes our way, he gets two hundred. He's working for us."

  Ames sighed and nodded. Yes, having a clerk for a Supreme Court justice on your payroll was a valuable thing indeed. Most people had no idea how much weight these young lawyers carried. The judges depended on their clerks for all kinds of input, and what got read or ignored was in large part due to how the clerks presented it.

  As of this moment, Ames had two clerks. Better yet, they were from different sides of the political aisle, one a Democrat, the other a Republican. At least, that's what their judges were. Ames didn't care about the clerks' own politics, as long as they did what they were supposed to do.

  And what they were supposed to do was further Ames's agenda. Or, more precisely, the agenda that he was being very well paid to further, which was the same thing.

  "Very good." Ames unlocked the top right drawer of his desk and pulled it open. Next to a 9mm SIG Neuhausen P-210, the finest production pistol made in that caliber, was a big manila mailer full of crisp thousand-dollar bills. Ames pulled the envelope out and put it on the leather blotter in front of him.

  The gun had cost a couple of thousand at most. It had been tuned, so it was maybe worth another grand. Even so, he'd rather lose the fifty grand in the mailer than the pistol. Money was only money, but a good shooter was a treasure.

  He had quite a collection of han
dguns, and the two most valuable were together worth two and a half million dollars. One, a German Luger made for testing as a possible sidearm for U.S. troops back in the early 1900s before they adopted the Colt slabside 1911, was in .45 caliber. Only four of such had been made. Two of those had been destroyed during testing, one was in the hands of another collector, and the last had been produced without records and kept by the man who'd made it, a supervisor at the gun factory in Germany. His great-grandson had sold it to Ames for a flat million.

  Someday, Ames hoped to convince the other collector to part with his, so he'd have a pair.

  His other prize was a Colt Walker-Dragoon .44 percussion, model 1847. One of the Texas Ranger Company guns, it was in excellent condition. It had been oiled and packed away within a year or two of its manufacture, and stored in a chest in Texas. A massive piece, it weighed more than four and a half pounds and had a nine-inch barrel. Tests had shown that the gun had been fired, but not much, and there was hardly a blemish on it. He had paid one point two million for it at an auction three years ago. He would have paid twice that and considered it a bargain.

  Junior reached out and took the envelope. He raised an eyebrow and looked over at Ames.

  "Fifty thousand," Ames said. "Call me when that runs out."

  Junior nodded. Grinning hugely, he rose and left the office.

  Ames glanced at his watch. It was a simple-looking timepiece, really, nothing fancy. Just a concave-backed rectangular black face with hour, minute, and a sweep second hand, art-deco numbers, and a monthly calendar, on a leather band. If you didn't know watches, you would think it was just like dozens of others of the same general design, but it wasn't. It was one of Hans Graven's handmades.

  Graven produced only four of these a year, every piece hand-tooled. The case was machined out of platinum, and any spot that had to endure friction within was jeweled with rubies. It was waterproof and self-winding. Ames had a little mechanical box at home that would gently rotate the watch every so often, if he couldn't wear it for some reason, to keep it running.

  The watch had a mineral crystal, the band was of select giraffe leather, and the movement was guaranteed to gain or lose no more than thirty seconds a year. It was also guaranteed for a hundred years against anything--breakage, theft, or loss. Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars it had cost, not counting the trip to Switzerland to pick it up. Graven did not ship his watches. If he couldn't put them onto a buyer's wrist himself, they didn't leave the shop.

  Another toy, but it amused him that it cost so much and looked so simple. The nouveau riche could be ostentatious in displaying their wealth, but Townsend Ames had more class than that, even if he didn't come from old money.

  He stood and punched the button on his phone that automatically called the limo. He had to get moving. He had rounds to make at the hospital. None of his patients were about to die, of course. Ames was a family practitioner, after all. When his patients got real sick, he sent them to specialists.

  After his rounds, he would head directly to his law offices. Being a doctor/lawyer did tend to keep a man busy. He could have slowed down, of course, but it was all about winning, and Ames was that: a winner.

  He intended to prove that yet again in that little matter of the lawsuit regarding the Caribbean gambling ship. His associates should have that ready to file this afternoon. Ames needed to go over everything and make sure it was all in order. After that, he had scheduled a meeting with that Washington lobbyist for a drink around five, what was her name? Skye?

  A busy day on the schedule. He glanced down at the gun again and grinned. He wouldn't have it any other way.

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  "Hey, Boss."

  Michaels looked up and saw Jay Gridley leaning against his office doorway. Yesterday's trip to New York was still on his mind. The FBI director had essentially offered Net Force's services to the Home Security folks on some new net-terrorism threat they had uncovered. Michaels wasn't very happy about it. Net Force didn't need another pair of eyes looking over their shoulder. Besides, Home Security wasn't known for its subtlety. Michaels believed that they had a legitimate and vital mission, and he both respected and appreciated the job they had to do. Still, they had stepped over the line a few times in places where even he wouldn't have gone.

  Civil liberties tended to get trampled in times of national emergencies. Michaels knew that you had to err on the side of safety when it came to American lives, of course, but he also knew that the nature of any bureaucracy was to perpetuate itself, and the term "national security" could be stretched to cover an awful lot of activities.

  "Hey, Jay. What's up?"

  "Not much new. I got a little follow-up on that thing I sent you."

  "We are talking about CyberNation, here, aren't we?"

  "I'm pretty sure we are," Jay said, standing up straighter and taking a step inside Alex's office. "They are dancing their usual twisty dance to distract anybody watching, but yeah, I'd bet on it."

  Michaels shook his head. The CyberNation problem had been a nasty one, and in the end had involved a shoot-out on a gambling ship in the Caribbean. Worse, it had put Toni at risk, something he still regretted, even though she hadn't been hurt.

  Unfortunately, Net Force had only gotten a few of the players when all was said and done. Not surprisingly, those arrested had been disavowed by the rest of organization as rogues and traitors. CyberNation itself was still out there, a great, big, ugly can of worms. And it looked as if the organization was about to score a major victory, too.

  What they couldn't do with terrorism, the director had told him only yesterday, they might be able to do with the ballot box. The latest round of bills to recognize the virtual nation, as they liked to call it, were being pushed hard, and actually had a chance of getting passed.

  The idea just wouldn't go away.

  "What have you got?" Alex asked.

  "Well, I'm sure they are funneling money to places where it ought not to be going. I haven't been able to nail it down yet, but I will."

  "Keep on it. Let me know."

  "Sure, Boss."

  "What about the other thing? The virus?"

  "Still running it down. Nothing yet, but it doesn't look like much of a threat."

  The intercom chirped. "Alex, the director is on line one."

  Michaels nodded at Jay and picked up the receiver.

  "Yes, ma'am?" he said.

  Melissa Allison, the first woman director of the FBI, had been a pretty good boss. Mostly, she left Net Force alone, and mostly, she backed them up when they got into deep waters. And since she knew where a lot of political bodies were buried, she had good clout. It could be a lot worse.

  "Alex, I just heard from Legal that a five-hundred-million-dollar wrongful death lawsuit has been filed against Net Force as a whole, as well as General John Howard and you in particular, on the behalf of the families of Richard A. Dunlop, Kyle J. Herrington, and S. Jackson Britton."

  "Who?" Alex asked. "Those names don't ring any bells. And we haven't killed anybody recently that I know of."

  "They were CyberNation employees who died during the assault on the gambling ship Bon Chance last year."

  Alex shook his head. CyberNation again.

  "If I recall correctly, Madam Director, these men were firing weapons at Net Force operatives and only shot in perfectly justifiable self-defense. And the international maritime court that covers such things on the high seas found that to be the case."

  "That doesn't matter in a tort action, Commander. This is civil, not criminal. If you sell somebody a cup of hot coffee and they turn around and spill it on their lap, they can sue you and win millions. People who have broken into houses for the purpose of burglary have sued the homeowners because they tripped on the rug while hauling the television set out. What's more, they have actually won damages. We live in a litigious society."

  Unbelievable. "Swell," he said.

  She ignored his sarcasm. "You'll be g
etting a call from Net Force legal council Thomas Bender, who'll be coordinating the defense with FBI Legal and DOJ. You are, of course, covered under the governmental umbrella, but you might want to consider retaining private counsel just to be on the safe side. And give General Howard a heads-up, as well."

  "Yes, ma'am. Thank you."

  She discommed, and he pressed the button for John Howard.

  A lawsuit. Wonderful. Just what they all needed right now.

  Excalibur Gun Club White Oak, Maryland

  Junior liked to get to the combat range in the middle of the morning on a weekday when he could. Those were the slackest times, and he would usually have the place to himself. The only other people who ever showed up at those times were some of the cleanup guys working at the old closed-up Naval Surface Weapons Center just south of there.

  You'd think they could pop off rounds on the base, though. Clearly there was plenty of room for it. Seven hundred acres, it had been more or less shut down since the mid-nineties, but they still hadn't cleaned up all the contaminants, oil, and PCBs. At least that was what Junior heard from the reclamation contract guys who came by here to shoot. Every time they thought they were done, they'd find some more that needed doing.

  Junior laughed at the thought. His tax dollars at work.

  Today was a good day, though. There was only one local deputy cooking off nines down in bay five. Junior's favorite bay, B1, was open.

  He backed his car into the slot. It was just a cut-out in the side of a hill, probably done with a backhoe and Cat, with dirt and rock walls rising from the ground at the entrance to about twenty feet high at the back.

  He got out, pulled his shooting bag from the trunk, and put it on the old plywood table.

  This bay had a reactive target, a kind of big sawhorse-shaped thing made out of heavy steel extrusion with falling plates mounted above, just below eye level. The frame's crosspiece extrusion was angled so that if bullets hit it, the rounds would be deflected into the ground. The six targets, each of which was made of half-inch-thick tool steel and a little bigger around than a salad plate, were hinged at the bottom. You simply set up the plates, backed off, and shot them. A hit would knock the plate over backward. The thing was, they were set for IPSC minor power factor. That meant you needed at least a warm .38 or a 9mm special to knock 'em over, and major power factor stuff was a lot better--a .357, .40, or .45, like that. With what he was using, he could make 'em ring, but not knock 'em over.