Point of Impact nf-5 Read online

  She demonstrated the move, then moved it back to the first grip.

  “And perfectly legal to carry around, I suppose?”

  She grinned. “Actually, you can in some states if you wear them on your belt, out in the open. Not most places if you conceal them.”

  “Kind of like brass knuckles,” he said. “Or maybe knuckle, singular.”

  “But much better,” she said. “The blades are extremely sharp, and you can hit with the ring end without hurting your finger.”

  “Great.”

  She missed the sarcasm, or more likely, ignored it. “Aren’t they?” She did a little series of moves, whipping the two knives back and forth.

  A slight error and there was gonna be blood everywhere. His or hers. He took half a step back.

  “They aren’t very long,” he said, and even as he spoke, he was glad they weren’t longer.

  “ ’Cause they are slashers rather than stabbers. All the major peripheral arteries are fairly close to the skin’s surface. Carotids, antecubitals, femorals, popliteals. These will reach all of those. Cut a big artery, and you bleed out pretty quick if you don’t do something. Kill you quicker than not breathing will, and blood is lot harder to replace than air.”

  “How nice.”

  “I remember this guy Rollert has a sense of humor, too. These are custom work, but he makes a tool-steel version of these coated with black Teflon. He calls them box cutters, and that’s how he markets them. ‘Why, what’s the problem, Officer? This is a box cutter, see, it says so right there on the handle.’ I’ve got a set of those tucked away somewhere. Of course, those cost about a twentieth of what these did.”

  She waved the knives again, getting into it. It was spooky to watch those things blur as she whipped them around.

  “What’d the cheap ones cost?”

  “About fifty bucks each.”

  “You mean these two little pieces of steel cost a thousand dollars?!”

  “Quality doesn’t come cheap.”

  Michaels shook his head. His darling bride, carrying his unborn son, was a mistress of death and destruction. She talked about such toys the way other women talked about getting their hair done.

  “You can do your djurus holding one of these in each hand, and with only a slight adjustment, do them the same.”

  “Yeah, and slice off my nose if I make a mistake.”

  “Better your nose than some… other extremity.” She grinned. “Don’t worry. By the time you know all eighteen djurus, you’ll be able to use these or a longer knife or a stick, no problem. Might nick yourself if you get sloppy, but as long as you keep proper form, you won’t. Silat is weapons-based, remember. Only use your hands if nothing better is available.”

  She waved the little knives back and forth, crossing and uncrossing her hands in patterns that looked damned dangerous to him.

  But she was excited, and as upbeat as he’d seen her lately, and he liked seeing that.

  “These were the first knives Guru showed me how to use. Traditionally, they were backup. Women carried them a lot. You could wind one into your hair or tuck it into a sarong. These have a leather sheath, but the old-style ones made in Java usually have wooden scabbards. Supposedly, there were guys in the old country who could grip them between their toes and turn your legs and groin into hamburger while you were still checking their hands for a weapon.”

  “Lovely.”

  She kept twirling and slicing the air as she talked. “They make them longer, but the short ones are best for djurus. Even though djurus are practice and knives are for application, you can do the moves with steel hands. Watch.”

  She stopped moving, and then did djuru three. Her hands didn’t move any slower than they did when she did the form unarmed, at least not that he could tell. “See? You block or punch like usual, only these give the moves more of a sting.”

  “ ‘A sting,’ right. I’d be careful on djuru two,” he said. “Way your boobs are getting big, you come across your chest on that inside block, you’ll shear off a nipple.”

  She laughed, then put the knives back into their little velvet nests. “Thanks. I feel better. Now I can go back and finish sorting my shoes.”

  She handed him the box. “Put these somewhere we won’t forget them, and I’ll show you how to play with them when we get a chance.”

  She went back to her chore, and he looked at the box. Well. He knew what she did for fun when he married her. She had saved his life with the art once, and he had learned enough to use it himself, a little. He had been training seriously for almost a year, and he seldom missed a day of practice, thanks to Toni’s proximity. After nearly being brained once by an assassin using a cane and pretending to be a little old lady, Michaels could hardly bitch about the down-and-dirty side of fighting. Pentjak silat was about as dirty as it came, and when somebody was trying to bash your head in, all bets were off. When you reached into your bag of tricks, this was the stuff you wanted to come up with. A guy charging at you with mayhem in mind might think twice if he saw you whirling these nasty little claws around with a demented grin while you did it. He sure as hell would.

  Rules? In a knife fight? No rules!

  He smiled at the wooden box and went to put it on a shelf in the living room. It would make a great conversation piece at a dinner party. Or a conversation stopper, depending on what you wanted to do.

  It would be very interesting to see what the two of them decided to teach their son when he got old enough to wonder about all those funny dances Mama and Daddy did. For certain, they would show him how to protect himself. Michaels’s father had taught him how to do a little boxing when he’d been about six or seven, and while he’d never been very good at it, at least he had developed a sense of self-confidence in his ability to protect himself.

  Once he’d started learning silat, he realized how much he didn’t know, but since he hadn’t spent a lot of time fighting, it had worked out okay anyhow.

  Funny to think about, teaching your son how to fight, when he wasn’t even born yet. Next thing you knew, he’d be buying him baseball gloves and electric trains.

  14

  Quantico, Virginia

  Michaels had left the director’s office, feeling a nagging sense of unease. Director Allison had ostensibly called him in for a progress report, but the real reason was, he was sure, that she had been given the word to light a fire under his ass. His backside certainly felt warm enough when she was done talking. She wasn’t exactly dumping on him for what the agency had or had not done so far, but she must have used the term “interagency cooperation” ten times during their conversation. As much as he hated politics, Michaels knew what that meant.

  Pee flowed downhill, and the director’s drain was right above his head…

  Unfortunately, business was slow, and because it was, this was rapidly becoming the case to solve, and quickly. If there had been some major e-terrorism going, some big-time computer frauds, or even more bored hackers, he could beg off, point to those, and wash his hands of this crap fobbed off on them. But his people were good, they were on top of the day-to-day stuff. Even though it was the DEA’s problem, had almost nothing to do with computers, and Net Force was just helping out, if they didn’t do something pretty quick, it could get ugly.

  A couple more millionaires going bonzo, and the powers that be would be looking for a scapegoat to roast, and while it should be the DEA, it could well turn out to be a major barbecue, with Net Force on the spit, too.

  As he got back into the hinterlands and his own office at Net Force HQ, he saw Jay Gridley standing in the door, grinning.

  “Tell me you have good news, Jay.”

  “Oh, yeah. I think I got a solid lead on our dope dealer.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, sir, boss.”

  “How?”

  “The rich man’s daughter. I backtracked her spending spree. Somebody remembered that she used a public computer in one of the shops for some kind of on-line transa
ction. I sieved the computers she might have operated, found all the e-mail for the time she would have been in the shop, and did some cross-references and keyword hits, in case she used a phony name… which, by the way, she did.”

  “Go on, impress me.”

  “I had the searchbots looking for a long list of pointers, about forty keys, including Thor, Thor’s Hammer, and all like that. I got a hit on one and followed it up.”

  “And this keyword was…?”

  “Purple.”

  “Purple?”

  “As in the color of the caps. Here’s the e-mail I ran down.”

  He handed Michaels a hardcopy print. It said, “Yo, Friday Girl-I’ll have that purple thingee for you when you come by.”

  It was signed, “Wednesday.”

  “No offense, Jay, but this is a reach. A ‘purple thingee’? It could be some kind of plush kid’s toy for all we know. And days of the week as code names? Why would that be our rich woman and her dealer?”

  Jay grinned. “That’s the key, boss. Friday was named for the Norse goddess Frigga. Wednesday comes from Woden, which, as I’m sure you must know, is the way the Norse in the southern countries spelled Odin.”

  “Fascinating. So?”

  “Frigga and Odin were Thor’s mom and pop.”

  Michaels thought about that for a few seconds. “Ah. That would seem to be a bit of a coincidence, wouldn’t it.”

  “Yeah, I’d say so. Doesn’t mean it’s the chemist himself, but I’d bet my next month’s pay against a week-old, road-killed possum this ‘Wednesday’ guy has something to do with this drug.”

  “Good work, Jay.”

  “I didn’t spook the guy, stayed well back, but I can run him down to an addy.”

  “Better still.”

  “Well, the thing is, this is good and bad. If I found it, the NSA people will find it, too, if they haven’t already.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Well, their mission is to monitor communications outside the U.S. for possible terrorist activity, assorted plots, and things it would be good for us to know in general. So they have a whole list of words which, if they come up in a telephone conversation, a com-radio, telegraph signal, or e-mail, stuff like that, it kicks in a recorder. The message is taped and downloaded into one of a shitload of mainframes NSA operates, and rescanned, then routed to a computer program that reads the message and assigns it a priority code on a scale of one to ten. Anything above five gets sent to a human, and the higher a number, the faster it gets there. So if you put the words Suicide mission and bomb into your e-mail heading in any one of a hundred major or twenty minor languages, and NSA happens across it, somebody checks it. Most of the time it’s nothing, guys screwing around or whatever, but sometimes it pans out. A message that says something like ‘Shoot and kill the president and blow up Washington D.C.’ had better be a line from a TV show or an upcoming techno-thriller novel.”

  “Nobody could be that stupid.”

  “Oh, yeah they can. Dumb crooks are legion.”

  Michaels said, “All right. I know this, in general, about NSA. So?”

  “So you think NSA confines its eyes and ears to outside our borders? Yeah, home court’s supposed to be FBI territory for such things, but everybody in the biz knows which way that wind blows. NSA has the tools, and how would anybody know they were doing it if they didn’t tell us? Sheeit. If they are as hot to run down these dopers as the DEA, they will have assigned anything having to do with Thor a high priority. If we want to beat’em to this Wednesday, we better get somebody on the street PDQ. The dealer might get taken, and that’d be good, but it’s better for us if we get some credit, right?”

  “Right,” Michaels said. “Let me step into my office and make a call. Thanks, Jay.”

  “Info is in your in-file under the name ‘Rich Girl.’ Remember me when you give out the bonuses.”

  Malibu, California

  When Tad woke up again, he looked at his watch. Not so much for the time as for the date. Sometimes after a Hammer trip, he would be more or less unconscious for three or four days.

  He had been awake a couple times before, to go pee and get some water and pain pills, and he thought he remembered Bobby telling him a story about stoning FBI HQ in L.A. all to hell and gone. Maybe that had been a dream. Make more sense if it was.

  Not too bad, if the watch was right, only a couple days since he’d crashed. If he remembered the day he’d done it right.

  And if it hadn’t been a week and some.

  He hurt all over. It was like he’d been dropped off a tall building and then bounced like a superball for a couple of blocks, slamming a different part of his body against the concrete each time. The slightest movement stabbed him with hot needles, cut at him with cold, dull razors. He managed to roll to a sitting position, then up to his feet. He swayed there for a moment, fought for balance, then headed for the shower. Moving slowly. After he got clean, he’d feel a little better, though a little better wasn’t going to be much compared to how crappy he felt. Still, that was the price you paid. You could bitch after the first time, but after that, you had no excuses; you knew what it was gonna feel like. You couldn’t blame anybody but yourself.

  He managed to achieve the bathroom without falling, though he had to lean against the wall a couple of times along the way. He stripped, then got into the shower and cranked the water up full blast from all the nozzles. Had to; water coming from only one direction would probably knock him down.

  Halfway to using all the hot water in the house — and that was saying something — Bobby stuck his head into the steamed-up bathroom and yelled: “Still alive? Amazing.”

  “Fuck you,” Tad yelled reflexively.

  “You okay enough to work?”

  “I’m up, aren’t I?” He shut off the water and stepped out, grabbed one of the beach towels, and started drying off.

  Bobby watched him, shaking his head. “You look like hammered dog shit.”

  “Why, thank you. So what?”

  “Business is picking up. I’ve got a dozen orders I need to send out today, eight more tomorrow, and four more the day after that.”

  “Got me a cap for the first run?”

  “Jesus, Tad, you do want to die, don’t you?”

  Tad didn’t answer but finished toweling off. He looked at himself in the foggy mirror. Skinny as hell, yes, but in the blurry, soft-focus mirror reflections, he didn’t really look that bad.

  Bobby blew out a theatrical sigh. “Yeah, I got one for you.”

  Tad nodded, managed a grin. He’d never gone riding with Thor twice in a week before, it always took a long time to recover completely, but with enough chemical assistance, he could get past the aches and injuries he collected while tripping. They were still there, of course, but he didn’t feel them. Well, not as much. Thing was, he’d built up a pretty good tolerance to Demerol and morphine over the years. He could take a handful of 50 mg tabs and walk around like it was nothing, a dose that would put much bigger guys on the floor in a dreamy trance for six or eight hours. Morphine was a better painkiller than Demerol, heroin better still, but of course, those had their own problems — he wasn’t a big fan of needles or gas-powered skin-poppers that blasted the drug into you. Getting addicted wasn’t a problem he worried about, and he used morphine or smack sometimes, when it got really bad, but only as a painkiller, not for the high. Some people liked downers, which was what the opiates were. Tad liked uppers. Being able to move, to do things. The months he’d spent in a bed coughing up bloody sputum when he had active TB never left him. He didn’t plan to die in bed. Live fast, die young, and if the corpse was ugly or good-looking, what did that matter? You weren’t gonna be around to hear praise or revulsion, were you?

  Time was running out. Take the trip now, or miss it. You get to be dead a long time, right?

  Even with the Demerol tabs he’d taken last time he was up, and the shower, he felt like Bobby said he looked: like shit. So a little of th
e Mexican white was called for, to dull the edges. Some muscle relaxants, some steroids for the swelling and inflammation, and a little speed to balance things, he’d be able to get around. And once he picked up the Hammer again? Well, then it would all go away.

  Superman don’t need no pain pills.

  “I’m on it,” Tad said. “Give me ten minutes.”

  Bobby nodded. “I’m going to start final mix now.”

  Tad waved him off. His stash was in his car, parked at the sandwich place. He’d have to go get it, come back, and hope he could find a vein he could hit. What a bitch.

  Washington, D.C.

  Toni spent an hour playing with the scrimshaw, then had to quit. Her ankles were swelling, her right thumb and forefinger had gone numb from gripping the pin vise, and she was going blind looking through the magnifying lamp’s lens. That stereoscopic microscope would sure come in handy.

  Yeah. So would some artistic talent and a lot more patience. Putting in a thousand tiny dots, each the size of a flea’s eye, was extremely exacting work. A couple of times, she had lost her concentration and put a dot outside the lines. Those would have to be sanded out and polished, and that was tricky, she’d already found out.

  Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, taking up something this precise. Maybe she was just wasting her time and a lot of effort.

  She went to the bathroom, washed her hands and face in cold water, and went into the living room. She sat on the couch. She could do her djuru hand work sitting down, most of it. The footwork was getting harder and harder to add in, and while Guru’s advice had been not to worry about it, it would all come back after the baby was born, she did worry about it. It had never occurred to her it would be like this.

  The Indonesian martial art had been the core of who she was since she’d been thirteen. She hadn’t gotten into team sports, school clubs, or other extracurricular activities as a young woman in high school and college, not to speak of. No, she had dedicated herself to learning how to move in balance, to being able to deliver a focused attack against an aggressor, no matter if he was bigger, stronger, faster, or even well-trained. Yes, she had school, in which she did well, and yes, she had friends and lovers and a job, but in her own mind, she was a warrior.