Point of Impact nf-5 Read online

  Point of Impact

  ( Net Force - 5 )

  Tom Clancy

  Steve Pieczenik

  Steve Perry

  From the #1 New York Times bestselling creators of Op-Center comes a different kind of law enforcement. In the year 2010, computers are the new superpowers. Those who control them, control the world. To enforce the Net Laws, Congress creates the ultimate computer security agency within the FBI: the Net Force®.

  * * *

  It’s the rich man’s drug of choice — and it’s being sold on the Internet for a thousand dollars per capsule. A potent mixture of smart drugs, psychedelics, angel dust, and steroids, it can turn a fifty-year-old into a raging beast of aggression and sexual desire. Now, it’s up to the Net Force to find the source of this dangerous designer drug. Before another rape. Before another murder. Before every user self-destructs…

  * * *

  A powerful examination of America’s defense and intelligence systems of the future, Tom Clancy’s Net Force® is the creation of Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik.

  Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, Steve Perry

  Point of Impact

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We would like to acknowledge the assistance of Martin H. Greenberg, Larry Segriff, Denise Little, John Helfers, Robert Youdelman, Esq., and Tom Mallon, Esq.; Mitchell Rubenstein and Laurie Silvers of Hollywood.com, Inc.; and the wonderful people at Penguin Putnam Inc., including Phyllis Grann, David Shanks, and Tom Colgan. As always, I would like to thank Robert Gottlieb, without whom this book would never have been conceived. But most important, it is for you, our readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.

  PROLOGUE

  Saturday, October 1, 2011

  Atlantic City, New Jersey

  “We should go outside and enjoy the sunny weather,” Mary Lou said.

  Bert snickered. “Right. We’z drove alla way from da Bronx to Atlantic City to take the goddamned sun? I can sit onna stoop at home, I want to get hot. No thankyuz, I’m happy right here.”

  Bert fed another dollar into the slot machine and pushed the button. He didn’t like the new electronic machines as much as the old mechanical ones, like those in the back rooms of the New Jersey bars where his father used to sneak off with him when he was a kid. Those had been fun, with the big arm you pulled down and the real wheels going round and round. Cost a quarter, was all. He didn’t quite trust the new ones to pay off — it’d be too easy for some computer geek to rig ’em so they’d keep every damned dime you put in — but it was what it was. Hell, he was up seventy-five bucks, he should complain?

  Around him, the machines flashed colored lights, hummed and whirred and played crappy music, and now and then dropped tokens into a metal tray.

  Mary Lou said, “There’s something you don’t see every day.”

  The slot’s computer screen whirled to stop on a cherry, a bar, and a picture of some dead rock star. Crap. Only seventy-four dollars ahead now.

  Irritated, Bert said, “What?”

  “Over there. Lookit.”

  He glanced in the direction Mary Lou was pointing. He saw right away what she meant. There was a fat, white-haired old guy, maybe sixty-five, walking into the casino. Way he moved, he was like a man with a mission, nothing real unusual there, except the dude was in a tiny red Speedo and nothing else.

  “God, I’m trying to win money here, you wanna make me puke? There ought to be a law against a suit like that if you’re thirty pounds overweight.”

  “Prolly there is. I’m pretty sure the casino rules say no swimsuits without a robe and some kind of sandals or shoes. There you go, see, the security guard is gonna toss him out.”

  A big uniformed guard, six five, two sixty, easy, angled toward the fat guy in the red Speedo. This might be worth watching. You didn’t get to see a guy in a bikini bottom get bounced up by a casino guard real often. In fact, Bert had never seen it before.

  Speedo smiled at the giant guard, grabbed him by the arms just under his shoulders, picked him up, and threw him like the guy was a toy. The guard smashed into a slot machine with a loud, rattling crash.

  “Holy shit!” Bert said.

  He wasn’t the only one to notice Speedo at this point. Two more guards came running, pulling out those expandable steel batons they carried as they ran.

  Speedo didn’t seem concerned. He took a couple of steps to the nearest slot. It was bolted to the floor, so Bert didn’t know what the guy thought he was gonna do with it.

  Still smiling, Speed wrenched the slot from the floor with a sound like a nail being pulled from wet wood, and threw that, too. Made a helluva noise.

  Bert stared, frozen. This wasn’t possible. He hit the gym two or three times a week, kept in shape for a man pushing forty, could bench two fifty for reps, and there was no way this flabby old Q-Tip-haired dude had the muscle to do what he’d just done, no way! Nobody was that strong.

  The second security guard to get there let fly with his expandable night stick, took a good crack at Speedo’s white head. Speedo reached up, almost in slow motion, grabbed the baton as it came down, jerked it from the guard’s grip, and threw it. The thing whistled as it whirled away, so fast Bert couldn’t even track it. Speedo shoved the guard one-handed, and the guy just flew into two by-standers and knocked all three of them down.

  Mary Lou stared at Speedo, frozen like a deer in headlights. Bert understood that. It was like he was hypnotized himself. He couldn’t look away.

  The third guard, seeing what had happened to the other two, dropped his baton and went for his pistol. Bert thought this was a real good idea.

  Speedo took a couple of quick steps — really quick steps — and caught the guard’s wrist before he cleared leather.

  Thirty feet away, Bert heard the sound of the man’s arm bones breaking.

  Oh, man!

  The guard fell to his knees, screaming in pain, and Speedo stepped around him like he was doggy doo on the sidewalk.

  Then things really got going. Speedo waded through the casino like Sherman through Georgia, breaking stuff, throwing it, tearing the place up. He knocked over slots, he upended card tables, he flipped a roulette wheel table completely over. People scrambled to get out of his way.

  He was a human wrecking ball, he was smiling while he did it, and Bert couldn’t begin to understand how he was doing it. He just stood there and watched.

  It seemed like a long time, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute or two before the local cops showed up. Six of them in full battle array.

  The first couple of cops to reach Speedo tried to whack him with their batons and collar him. You’d think, after seeing what the guy had done, they’d have better sense, but they didn’t, and Speedo grabbed one and used him like a club on the second.

  The other four cops were smarter. One of them fast-drew his pepper spray, another pulled an air taser, and both let loose.

  Speedo ran at the cops. Through the pepper fog, and from where he stood, Bert saw the two electric taser needles in the old man’s chest, and if either the fog or the juice bothered him, you couldn’t tell. Either one should have stopped him, had him gagging or jittering like a spider on a hot stove, but he never slowed. Speedo slammed into the next two cops, knocking them sprawling. He went down himself, but he was up in a heartbeat. He looked pissed off now, and he scooped one of the cops from the floor — a big black dude who probably went two hundred pounds — and shot-putted the cop at a thick plate glass partition that separated a cafeteria hall from the casino floor.

  The partition had to be six, eight feet away, easy.

  The partition shattered, shards of glass flew everywhere, an
d the cop who went through it would be lucky if he wasn’t slashed to hamburger.

  “Everybody down!” one of the two remaining cops on his feet screamed. “Down, down, down!”

  People hit the floor, but Speedo wasn’t one of them, and Bert stayed up watching, too.

  The two cops had their pistols out by now — big ole Glocks — pointed at the old man.

  Speedo looked at them and smiled, a kind of sad smile. Like he felt sorry for them. He started walking toward the cops.

  “Stop, asshole!”

  He didn’t.

  Both cops fired, couple, three times each.

  Speedo kept coming, and they kept shooting.

  Bert saw the hits on the old man, saw dark puckers appear in his arms and chest, wounds that oozed blood, but he kept going.

  People screamed bloody murder, but the cops kept blasting away. In some comer of his mind, Bert tried to keep count of the shots, but there were too many of them. How many rounds did those guns hold? Fifteen? Eighteen? They were going to town.

  It was like some monster movie. The old guy in the red bathing suit just kept shambling toward the cops. He was hit at least six or eight times, but he wouldn’t stop.

  “Fuck!” one of the cops yelled. He turned and ran.

  The other cop clicked empty, then, when Speedo was almost on top of him, he threw the Glock at the old man.

  Yeah, right. Guy takes a whole shitload of bullets and a plastic pistol is not gonna bounce off him like a cotton ball? Bert stared at the cop. Whaddayuz, stupid?

  The old man grabbed the cop, managed to get him five or six inches off the floor—

  — then the old man finally ran out of gas. He dropped the cop and fell, landing on the floor facedown.

  It got real quiet in the casino then.

  “Ho-ly shit, ” Bert said softly.

  “Amen, sweet Jesus,” Mary Lou said. “Amen.”

  1

  Sunday, October 2

  Washington, D.C.

  Alex Michaels grunted as the socket slipped off the hex nut and his hand shot forward, scraping his knuckles on the rocker-arm cover.

  “Ow! Crap!”

  At such times, he was wont to blame the nut or the wrench, but since he had put the bolt in himself, and the wrench and socket were both fairly new Craftsman tools, he knew he had nobody else to blame.

  From the kitchen, he heard Toni call out. “You okay?”

  Must have yelled louder than he’d thought. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Stupid piece of crap Chevrolet!”

  Toni drifted into the garage doorway. He was leaning over the fender on the passenger side, under the hood, so he saw her. Five months pregnant, in one of his T-shirts and a pair of drawstring sweatpants, she was, if anything, more beautiful than ever.

  She smiled. “That’s not what you said when you were convincing me you needed to have it. ‘A fifty-five Bel Air convertible,’ you said. ‘A classic.’ ”

  “Yeah, well, that was before I had a chance to spend time with it. Thing is engineered like a tank.”

  “Also a selling point, if I recall.”

  He looked at the nut. It was tight enough, he decided. He put the wrench down, grabbed a red rag and some of the pungent lanolin hand cleaner and started wiping grease off his fingers. Well, it was a classic car. Created by the chief engineer of General Motors in the post World War II years, Edward Coles, with legendary designer Harvey Earl, the ’55 introduced the small block V-8 engine, the 265, later the 283, and then the 327. These engines became the standard against which all others were measured for more than forty years. A convertible in top condition would cost $60,000 to $75,000, easy. Even one in so-so shape like this one wasn’t cheap.

  He smiled back at her. “I thought it was your job to keep me from running off half cocked.”

  “I don’t recall that part of the marriage vow.”

  He walked toward her. “How did your djuru practice go?”

  Her smiled disappeared, and frown lines wrinkled her forehead. “Terrible. I’m all off-balance! I try to do the turnaround, I almost fall down. When I sweep, it’s all I can do to keep from falling over. When I dropped into the squat for djuru five, I farted!”

  He couldn’t help it; he laughed.

  Her face clouded up, tears welling. “It’s not funny, Alex! I feel like a big fat cow!”

  Michaels hurried to her. He hugged her to him. “Hey, it’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not! Nobody told me this was going to happen! If I can’t practice my silat, I’ll go crazy!”

  This was not the time for him to point out that her doctor had told her to avoid exercise because of some bleeding early in the pregnancy. Everything seemed to be all right, but just to be sure, Toni was supposed to take it easy. That theoretically included Toni not doing the short dances of the Indonesian martial art in which she was an expert. No, definitely not the time to bring that up. A wrong word, and she’d start crying, which was so unlike her that it still amazed him every time. It was just hormones, the doctor had said, a normal part of pregnancy, but Michaels still hadn’t gotten used to it. Toni could kick the crap out of most men, even some who were fairly good martial artists themselves — he had seen her do it a few times — and for her to well up and cry at the drop of a hat was, well… it was spooky.

  “Maybe you should just, you know, take a break from djurus. It’s only another four months until the baby is born.”

  “Take a break? I’ve done djurus almost every day since I was thirteen. Even when I had pneumonia, I only missed three days. I can’t just give them up for four months!”

  “Okay, okay, it was just a suggestion.”

  Maybe it was better if he just kept his mouth shut. It had been a long time since he’d been around a pregnant woman. When his first wife Megan had been carrying their daughter, Susie, he had still been working in the field and was gone quite a bit, sometimes for a couple weeks at a time. He’d missed a lot of the experience, and at the time he’d been sorry he had. Now he was the commander of the FBI’s elite subunit Net Force, and maybe he might be spending a little more time at the office until things settled down at home.

  He immediately felt guilty at that thought.

  “I know it’s not your fault,” Toni said. “Well, okay, it is your fault, technically speaking.” She grinned. “But I don’t blame you.”

  He smiled back at her. Her mood swing was instant, zap, just like that, from angry to happy.

  “Go on back and finish installing your carburetor,” she said. “You putting in the four-barrel?”

  “I decided to go with three deuces,” he said. “You know, pep it up a little.”

  She shook her head. “You’ve been watching that old movie American Graffiti again, haven’t you? Boys and their toys. You won’t be able to afford to run it, you know. It’ll get what? Ten miles a gallon? You’ll have to take out a loan to fill the tank.”

  “Well, I really am going to sell it. Eventually.”

  “Uh-huh. Go on, go scrape some more skin off your hands and curse the guys who made that big chunk of Detroit iron. I’m going to sit down and see if I can’t get your son to stop kicking my bladder.”

  “You sure are pretty when you’re pregnant,” he said.

  “Forget it. One baby: That’s my limit.”

  * * *

  Toni went to her computer and slid the VR band down over her eyes, adjusting the earplugs and olfactory bulbs so they were comfortable. The set was wireless and had a pretty good range, so if her ankles started to swell, at least she could go lie down and prop her feet up on a cushion while she was on-line. She put on the tactile gloves and was ready.

  She allowed the system’s default scenario to play, and there was a small moment of disorientation as the virtual reality program took over and constructed a shopping mall in place of the small office that had been the guest bedroom. She found herself in front of a virtual elevator, the door of which opened. She stepped inside, along with other shoppers.

&nb
sp; “Arts and Crafts, please,” she said.

  Somebody tapped a button.

  The sensation was of rising rather than falling. After a moment, a chime sounded and the door opened. Toni alighted from the elevator and looked at the sign a few feet away. YOU ARE HERE pulsed in a pale green light. No, I’m at home in my office with my shoes getting tighter.

  But the suspension of disbelief that was VR was easy enough to accept. She found the place she was looking for listed: Hergert’s Scrimshaw. It was not far away — though it could have been if she wanted a long walk in VR — and she headed toward it.

  When she and Alex had been on their honeymoon in Hawaii, they’d gone to an art gallery in Lahaini, on the island of Maui. There had been some world-class work in the gallery, in all kinds of media and materials — every — thing from pencil drawings to oil paintings to sculptures in wood or bronze or even glass. Seascapes and dolphins and whales were big, but what had impressed her the most was a small display of microscrimshaw. There were pictures engraved on small bits of fossilized ivory, old piano keys and billiard balls, even a couple of sperm whale teeth. Some of the images were smaller than her thumb-nail but, when viewed under magnification, showed a wealth of detail she would not have thought possible. There were sailing ships and whales, portraits, nudes, tigers, and several with fantasy elements. She had been particularly impressed by a tiny black-and-white rendering of a long-haired, naked woman sitting in a lotus position and gazing up at the heavens, but floating two feet above the ground. The image had been done on a pale ivory disk the size of a quarter.

  “How do they do that?” she’d asked Alex.

  He’d shaken his head. “I dunno. Let’s ask.”

  The gallery manager was happy to explain: “There are different ways,” she said, “but in this case, what the artist did was to polish the ivory smooth, then use a very fine-pointed instrument, probably something like a sewing needle, to put thousands of tiny dots into the material, it’s a process called stippling. Then he rubbed the color onto it. This is a Bob Hergert piece, and he prefers oil paint to ink. I believe he uses a shade called lampblack.