Net Force nf-1 Read online

  * * *

  Alexander Michaels was only half asleep when the small monitor on the nightstand next to his bed lit. He felt the pressure of the light against his closed lids, and rolled toward the source and opened his eyes.

  The screen's blue Net Force background came up and the computer's vox said, "Alex? We have a priority-one com."

  Michaels blinked, and frowned at the timesig on the monitor's upper right corner. Just past midnight. He wasn't awake. What—?

  "Alex? We have a priority-one com."

  The computer's voice was throaty, sexy, feminine. No matter what it said, it always sounded as if it were asking you to go to bed with it. The personality module, including the vox program, had been programmed by Jay Gridley, and the voice he'd chosen for it was, Michaels knew, a joke. Jay was a great tech, but a better cook than he was a comedian, and while Michaels found the vox irritating, damned if he would give the kid the satisfaction of asking him to change it.

  The Deputy Commander of Net Force rubbed at his face, combed his short hair back with his fingers, and sat up. The small motion-sensitive cam mounted on the top of the monitor tracked him. The unit was programmed to send visuals unless he told it otherwise. "All right, I'm up. Connect com."

  The voxax — voice-activated — system obeyed his command. The screen flowered, and the somewhat-harried face of Assistant Deputy Commander Antonella Fiorella appeared. She looked more alert than he felt, but then she had the graveyard watch this week, so she was supposed to be alert.

  "Sorry to wake you, Alex."

  "No problem, Toni. What's up?" She wouldn't be calling him if it wasn't vital.

  "Somebody just assassinated Commander Day."

  "What!?"

  "His virgil sent out an alert. D.C. PD rolled on it. Time anybody got there, Day, his bodyguard Boyle and the limo driver, Louis Harvey, were all dead. Bombs and submachine guns, looks like. Maybe twenty minutes ago."

  Michaels said a word he seldom used in mixed company.

  "Yeah," Toni said. "And the horse it rode in on, too."

  "I'm on my way."

  "Virgil's got the address." A short pause. "Alex? Don't forget the assassination protocols."

  She didn't need to remind him of that, but he nodded. In the event of an attack on a senior federal official, all members of that unit had to assume it might not be the only attack planned. "I copy that. Discom."

  His assistant's image vanished, leaving the Net Force blue screen. He slid off the bed and started pulling on his clothes.

  Steve Day was dead? Damn.

  Damn.

  2

  Wednesday, September 8th, 12:47 a.m. Washington, D.C.

  Red and blue lights from the D.C. police patrol cars strobed the street with primary carnival colors, an effect appropriate to the circus of activity now going on. It was pushing one in the morning, but there were dozens of people lining the road, held back by police officers and bright plastic crime-scene tape. More curious onlookers peered down from nearby buildings. There was something to see, too, what with the blasted limo, the litter of shell casings, the three bodies.

  It was a bad neighborhood to die in, Toni Fiorella thought. But then, when you got right down to it, any neighborhood was a bad one to die in when death came from a hard and sudden sleet of submachine-gun fire.

  "Agent Fiorella?"

  Toni blinked away her thoughts on mortality and looked at the police captain, who had, judging by the size and shape of his sleep-wrinkles, been roused from his bed. He was an easy fifty, nearly bald, and certainly, at this moment, a most unhappy man. Dead federal agents in your yard, on your watch, were bad things to wake up to. Real bad.

  "Yes?"

  "My men have come back from their initial canvass."

  Toni nodded. "Let me guess. Nobody saw anything."

  "You should go into law enforcement," the captain said. His voice was sour. "You have an eye for detail."

  "Somebody in this crowd must have outstanding warrants for something," Toni said. She waved one arm in accusatory benediction.

  The captain nodded. He knew the drill. When a cop was killed, it didn't matter if he was local, state or federal, you did what you had to do to find whoever did it. Squeezing some low-life drug dealer or even a citizen with too many parking tickets for information was penny-ante stuff. Whatever it took. You did not let cop-killers slide.

  Toni looked up, and saw the new Chrysler town car glide to a stop just outside the police barricade. Two men, the bodyguard and the driver, got out first and scanned the crowd. The bodyguard nodded at the passenger in back.

  Alex Michaels alighted, saw Toni and headed for her. He held his badge case up, and was waved through by the cops blocking the street.

  Toni felt that mixed rush of emotion she always felt whenever she saw Alex for the first time on any given day. Even in the middle of all this carnage, there was a certain amount of joy, of admiration, even of love.

  Alex's expression was not grim, but as he habitually wore it, neutral. He didn't let himself show that he felt such things, even though she knew it had to be causing him great pain. Steve Day had been his mentor and his friend; his death must be stabbing deep into Alex's heart, though he would never let on, even to her.

  Maybe even especially to her…

  "Toni."

  "Alex."

  They didn't speak as they toured the murder scene. He squatted and examined Steve Day's body. She caught a flash of tightness in his face, a quick flex of jaw muscles as he looked at Day. Nothing more.

  He rose, moved to the limo and looked at the other dead agents and the ruined auto. FBI and local police agents still circled around with light bars and videocams, covering the entire street. Forensic techs drew circles around each of the spent shells on the street and sidewalk, noting the location of each empty hull before they bagged it. Somebody would do the super-glue steam on those shells, the fine mist of cyanoacrylate ester that could, when done properly, find a fingerprint on a sheet of toilet paper; and they would do the biological-activity scan that could find a germ in an ocean. But Toni figured that coming up with useful prints or DNA residues wasn't going to be likely. It was almost never that easy. Especially on something as well planned as this obviously had been.

  After he'd gotten as good a look as he wanted, Alex turned to her. "Okay. Lay it out."

  "As nearly as we can tell so far, it was an assassination, Commander Day the target. A bomb under a manhole cover kicked the limo into a light pole. The door in the rear was blown open — probably a marine limpet of some kind — and the passengers were cut down by several attackers. From the ejected brass patterns, there were three or more shooters. Porter will run the ballistics stuff, but he's pretty sure from what he's already seen they were using 9mm's, at least a couple of submachine guns, and one handgun."

  She kept her voice level, as if talking about sports stats. She came from a family of expressive Bronx Italians who wore their hearts on their sleeves and who laughed hard or cried hard as needed. It was tough to keep the emotion from her words — she'd liked Steve Day and his wife — but it was her job.

  "Boyle and Day both returned fire. Boyle managed to get off twelve rounds, Day three. Porter has come up with a couple of deformed handgun slugs found on the street whose impact shapes indicated they hit something harder than Kevlar and bounced off. He'll have to run the nose prints to be certain, but—"

  Alex cut her off. "The assassins wore armor, probably military-grade ceramic or spider-silk plate. What else?"

  "Over here."

  She led him to a spot behind Day's body. The coroner's people were bagging the corpse, but Alex didn't spare them or his friend a glance; he was all business now. "Day's brass was found there, there, and over there." She pointed at small chalk circles a few meters apart on the street. She moved a couple of steps, and pointed at the street again. "There's a small, congealed blood ooze, right there, and a spray pattern of blood and brain tissue angled that way, behind the blood," she
said. She waited, knowing he would make the connection.

  He made it. "Somebody tagged one of the assassins, despite the armor," Alex said. "Day would have known to shoot for the head. But the killers took the body."

  "D.C. Police have set up roadblocks."

  He waved this off. "This was a professional hit. The shooters won't get caught in a roadblock. What else?"

  She shook her head. "Until we get the lab work, I'm afraid that's about it. No witnesses have come forth. I'm sorry, Alex."

  He nodded. "All right. Steve — Commander Day — ran Organized Crime for a long time. Crank up the system, Toni. I want to know everything about everybody Day ever talked to in his tenure at OC, anybody who had a grudge. And anything current we are working on. This looks like a New Mafia operation, it's their style, but we don't want to overlook anything."

  "I've already got teams on it," she said. "Jay Gridley is running the system stuff."

  "Good."

  He stared at the street, but his eyes were focused on something a million miles past it.

  She wanted to reach out, to put her hand on his arm, to help him carry the sudden load of pain she knew he shouldered, but she held her ground. It would not be appropriate here and now, she knew, and she did not want him to close that door, to turn away from her if she offered comfort. He was a good man, but he kept himself bottled up, never let anybody get too close. If she was ever going to slip past his iron wall, it would have to be with the greatest of care and subtlety. And, she knew on some level, it would be unfair to use the death of his friend to do it.

  "I'll go with Porter to the lab," she said.

  He nodded, but otherwise did not respond.

  * * *

  Michaels stood in the middle of a run-down street in the middle of a run-down night, beset with the stink of burned gunpowder, hot camera lights and death, the sounds of police radios and working investigators, the buzz of onlookers held at bay by bored street cops. In the background in the distance, the whine of a maglev passenger train passing at speed, dopplering its way toward Baltimore.

  Steve Day was dead.

  It hadn't really sunk in yet. He'd seen the body, seen that the light behind Day's eyes was gone, leaving nothing but a shell, a hollow form where nobody lived any longer. Intellectually, he knew it, but emotionally, he was numb. He'd known other people who had died, some of them close to him. The reality of it never became true until days, weeks, months later, when you realized they were never going to call or write or laugh or show up at your door with a bottle of champagne again.

  Dammit, somebody had put out a good man's lights, snuffed him like a blown-out match, and all Alex Michaels was left with at this moment was the heat of his own anger. Whoever had done it was going to pay — he was going to make it happen if it was the last thing he ever did!

  He sighed. There was nothing else to be done here. The killers would be a long way away by now, and all the door-knocking and witness-interviewing wouldn't turn up anything immediately useful. The shooters weren't hiding in one of the run-down buildings, and even with a photographically accurate description of the assassins, it wouldn't do the investigators much good — they wouldn't be locals. The public didn't know it, but professional killers seldom got caught. Nine out of ten icemen who were caught were turned in by the people who'd hired them, and Michaels didn't see that as very likely in a high-profile operation such as this. Those responsible would know the authorities would not be satisfied merely with locking up triggermen. Nobody would be giving up anybody in this kind of deal. If this was a mob job and the bosses got nervous, the shooters would likely disappear into a lime pit two kilometers past the end of the road in Nowhere, Mississippi. And maybe the guys who shot them would go away, too.

  Net Force had access to the highest technological resources on the planet, the fastest computers on the net, a wealth of information beyond measure. The agents on-line and in the field were also the best and brightest, culled from the cream of the FBI, the NSA, the nation's top universities and police and military agencies. And none of it would help if the assassins hadn't made some kind of mistake. If Net Force didn't get some kind of break. Michaels had been in the business too long to try to pretend otherwise.

  Then again, even professional killers weren't perfect.

  Now and then, they did slip up. And if they'd made the slightest slip here, something so small it could only have been seen with an electron microscope, Alex Michaels was going to move the entire solar system if necessary to find it.

  His virgil cheeped.

  "Yes?"

  "Alex? Walt Carver."

  Michaels let another small sigh escape. Walter S. Carver, Director of the FBI. He'd been expecting the call.

  "Yes, sir."

  "I'm sorry about Steve. Anything to report?"

  Michaels gave his boss what they had. When he was done, Carver said, "All right. We've got a meeting with the President and his National Security Team at 0730 at the White House. Put together what we've got. You'll be doing the presentation."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Oh, and as of now, you're Acting Commander of Net Force."

  "Sir, I—"

  Carver cut him off. "I know, I know, but I need somebody in the chair and you're him. I don't mean to sound dismissive of Steve's death, but Net Force is responsible for a whole lot more than one man's fate, no matter who he might be. Everybody will bump up a notch, Toni will take your old job. I'll need the President to sign off on it, but we should be able to get you confirmed as Commander in a few days."

  "Sir—"

  "I need you here, Alex. You aren't going to let me down, are you?"

  Michaels stared at the virgil. He didn't have any choice in this. Shook his head. "No, sir. I won't let you down."

  "Good man. I'll see you in the morning. Try to get some sleep — you don't want to sound like a zombie when you lay this out. Full assassination protocols are in effect, you understand?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Go home, Alex."

  Michaels stared at his car, at the bodyguard and chauffeur who stood watching and waiting. He had a little over six hours to put together a presentation for the President of the United States and his hard-nosed security advisors — not to mention Alex's own boss at the FBI — and supposedly get some rest, too. That last part sure wasn't going to happen.

  He shook his head. About the time you thought you were in control, life sure had a way of setting you straight. Think you're in charge, pal? Here, chew on this: Your immediate superior just got murdered, probably by the Mob, you just got promoted, and tomorrow, a presentation to the most powerful man in the world will probably make or break your career. How does that make you feel?

  "Like shit," Michaels said aloud.

  A traffic cop nearby said, "Excuse me?"

  "Nothing," Michaels said.

  He headed for his car.

  "Home, Commander?" his driver said.

  Commander.

  The driver already knew about the promotion. Well. One thing was certain. Michaels was damn sure going to use that promotion to take care of this business. Steve Day was his friend.

  Wrong. Day had been his friend. Michaels wasn't going home, no matter how tired he was.

  "No. To the office."

  3

  Wednesday, September 8th, 11:19 a.m. Grozny, Chechnya

  Vladimir Plekhanov wiped some of the ever-present dust from the inside of his window and looked down upon the city. Despite the installation of air conditioners and weekly visits from a cleaning woman, there seemed always to be a layer of powder everywhere, fine as talcum, but much darker. Of course, the dust was just dirt now. He remembered a time when much of it had been soot from the crematoriums, the remains of soldiers, civilians and invading Russians. That was a long time ago, almost twenty years, but as he grew older he spent perhaps more time in his room of old memories than he should. Well. Even though he had much to live for yet, and a most rewarding future in mind, he was sixty and should be
allowed a glance backward from time to time, yes?

  From his vantage point in the corner office on the sixth floor of the Computer Wing of the Science Building — formerly, and briefly, the Military Headquarters Building — he had a good view. Here was the new downtown bridge over the Sunzha River; way over there, the massive Makhachkala Pipelines, delivering their ever-more-precious black fluid to the waiting tankers on the Caspian Sea. Just there, the remains of the barracks where Tolstoy had served as a young soldier. And there, in the distance, the Sunzha Range of the mighty Caucasus.

  As cities went, this one was not bad. It was hardly a village — nearly half the population of the entire country lived here — but even so, at less than three quarters of a million people, it was not an overly large city. And in a beautiful country it was.

  Oil was still the lubricant that ran Grozny's economy, though it was running out, bleeding away faster than it could have been replaced by ten thousand dinosaurs dying and instantly rotting each day — a thing even Steven Spielberg and all his movie magic could not provide. The flare stacks at the refinery ran day and night, spewing fire and smoke into the skies, but in the not-too-distant future those fiery towers would go dark. Chechnya needed a new base for its economy. A base that he, Vladimir Plekhanov, was going to provide. For even though he had been born a Russian, he was as much Chechen as any man…

  The sound of his computer's telephonic program interrupted Plekhanov's musings upon his Grand Plan. He turned away from the window, walked to the door of his office and smiled at his secretary, Sasha. He then closed the door quietly but firmly before turning to his state-of-the-art workstation. "Computer, sound dampers on."

  The machine hummed and obeyed the vox command. "Dampers on," it said.

  Plekhanov nodded at the machine, as if it could see and understand his gesture. It could not — but he could have programmed it to do so had he wished.

  "Yes?" he said in English. There was no visual mode on this line, nor would he have wished for one. Of course, the communication was secure — as secure as the best Russian military encryption program could make it. Plekhanov knew this because he himself had written the program under contract to the Russian Army, and there was no one likely to hear this communication remotely capable of breaking it. Perhaps some of the Net Force operatives might, but they would be… otherwise occupied just at the moment. He smiled. Still, he spoke English because Sasha had not two words of that language; nor did anybody likely to be passing by.