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  Michaels said, “By rights, this belongs to the DEA. Even if the director decides to let FBI agents make the arrests, it’s still a hot political potato. The director can risk pissing off a brother agency, we can’t. We can’t even get warrants, so even if we were willing to get fired, the capture wouldn’t be legal. Even an ambulance-chaser lawyer with a lobotomy could get them off. The arrests would be completely illegal.”

  “Yeah, okay, I can see all that,” Jay said. His voice was reluctant.

  Michaels looked at his watch. “We should have agents showing up within thirty or forty minutes, if we’re lucky. We do it by the numbers, get part of the credit, and most importantly, the drug dealer is off the street. The end result is the same, no matter who hauls them off.”

  “For how long is he off the street?” Jay asked.

  “Excuse me?’

  “This guy is carrying around a secret that is worth millions, maybe tens of millions, you said so yourself. Won’t the drug companies be falling all over themselves to be first in line to hire him the best legal team in the world? How high can his bail be?”

  Michaels nodded. He knew what Jay said was true. “Probably. But that’s not our worry. We were supposed to find him. We found him. We did our part. What happens to him after they catch him isn’t our problem, we don’t have any control over that. We’re just a cog in the big machine, Jay. We do our job, we have to hope the rest of the system does its job. Can’t be everywhere.”

  “That sucks,” Jay said.

  “Welcome to the real world, son,” Howard said.

  35

  Drayne gave Tad the minipackets with the Hammer caps, the list of addresses, and pointed him at the door. By now, most of the payments would have already been transferred electronically into the safe accounts. Before Tad stuck a packet into the FedEx clerk’s hands, he’d check again to make sure the payment for it had cleared.

  As the door closed behind Tad, the phone rang. It was the business line.

  “Polymers, Drayne—”

  “If you have a lawyer, call him,” came his father’s voice. “You’ll need him soon.”

  His father hung up without identifying himself, and Drayne felt a rush as cold as liquid nitrogen envelop him.

  “You!” he said, pointing at the nearest bodyguard. “Go get Tad! Don’t let him outside the gate!”

  The bodyguard hurried away.

  Drayne’s fear, cold at first, now flushed into an uncomfortable warmth that suffused his whole body.

  The old man had turned him in!

  No. If his father had done that, he wouldn’t have had any second thoughts. The old man never apologized for anything once he decided it was the right thing to do. And though he hadn’t said anything specific, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to read the volumes between those lines.

  Drayne was about to be busted. The old man had found out about it, and he’d called to warn him.

  Son of a bitch.

  Almost more important than getting arrested was that his father had gone against thirty years of duty to tell his son he was in trouble. Couldn’t bring himself to give it all away, of course, but even this much, knowing how smart Drayne was, and that he would figure it out, was nothing short of a miracle.

  Son of a bitch.

  Drayne went to the security console in the kitchen and looked at the camera focused on the front gate. Nothing there. He touched the controls. The cam was mounted on a gimbal, could look pretty much in any direction. He put the cam into a slow 360-degree pan.

  Across the street at the Blue Gull, a car was backed into a parking slot, and a man sat in the passenger seat, the window down, looking in the direction of Drayne’s house.

  Drayne stopped the pan and focused the cam on the car.

  Okay, that could be somebody waiting for his wife to come out of the bathroom or something.

  He hit the zoom. The glare on the windshield wouldn’t let him see inside, but the security folks knew about glass glare, and a dial let him polarize the lens. The windshield cleared to show a second man in the driver’s seat and a third man in the back.

  Shit! They were already in place!

  Tad came back into the kitchen. “What’s up?”

  “Company,” he said. “Look.”

  Tad looked at the screen. “So? Some guys in a car. Don’t mean nothing.”

  “Yeah, except that my father just called and told me to call my lawyer.”

  “Your father? Oh, shit.”

  “Exactly.” Drayne took a deep breath. He said to Adam, “Go see if anybody is hanging around out back.”

  Adam returned in thirty seconds. “Nope. Couple of girls with their tops off lying facedown on beach towels next door, that’s it.”

  “Okay, they haven’t covered the rear of the house yet. Tad, Adam, we’re going for a walk. The rest of you stay here. If anybody comes to call in the next five minutes, don’t let them in. After that, it doesn’t matter. You don’t know anything. Not who I am, not where I’ve gone. You got that?”

  There was a murmur from the guards. They pulled their pistols out.

  To Adam, Drayne said, “You have an extra one of those?” He pointed at the gun in Adam’s holster.

  “Sure.”

  “Give it to me.”

  Adam did so. The gun was kind of squarish, black, and made out of some sort of polymer. Drayne said, “What do I do?”

  “It’s a Glock .40,” Adam said. “Point it like you would your finger and pull the trigger. It’s ready to go. You have eleven shots.”

  Drayne hefted the black plastic gun, then tucked it into his pants in the back, under the tails of the Hawaiian shirt.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Here comes the cavalry,” Howard said.

  Three unmarked late-model sedans cruised slowly up the highway from the south. The cars turned into their parking lot and pulled to a halt.

  “More behind us,” Jay said.

  Howard looked around and saw three more cars and a van convoy into the lot.

  A tall man in a gray sweatsuit got out of the lead vehicle and walked to the passenger side of their car. “Commander Michaels? I’m Special Agent in Charge Delorme.”

  Michaels waved at Howard and Gridley. “SAC. General John Howard and Jay Gridley.”

  “No offense, sir, but isn’t Net Force supposed to be a computer-based operation?”

  “It is.”

  “With all due respect, sir, once you located the suspects, you should have called the proper agency in right away, not come out here on your own.”

  Gridley leaned forward and said, “Yeah, well, last time we found a suspect, the proper agency rolled in like gang-busters and shot him dead. We were kinda hoping to avoid that this time.”

  Howard grinned a little. He was a mouthy kid, but he did put his finger right on the problem from time to time.

  “Thank you, Jay,” Michaels said. To Delorme, he said, “Don’t worry. We’ll sit right here out of your way while you do your job.”

  “Sir,” Delorme said. He stood and waved his hand in a circle, index finger pointing up at the sky. Three of the cars pulled out of the lot and across the highway, skidding to stops on either side of the target house. Doors opened, and agents in body armor with FBI lettered in big Day-Glo yellow on their backs, armed with assault rifles and wearing goggles and LOSIR headsets, boiled out of the cars. Delorme pulled a headset on, caught a vest somebody tossed at him, and moved toward the highway.

  Other agents alighted from the cars still in the lot and ran across the road.

  Two cars rolled toward places where the beach was accessible from the road, and more agents leaped out and hut-hut-hutted toward the ocean, to circle around behind the house.

  “Not bad deployment,” Howard said, after watching them move into position outside the gate. “A little slow, kind of sloppy, but not bad for civilians.” All the high-tech gear in the world, and when it came right down to it, it was still going be the ground troops who h
ad to gain the territory.

  “Might as well sit back and enjoy the show,” Michaels said. Then he said, “Shit!”

  “What?” Howard and Jay said together.

  Michaels pointed. A big Dodge rolled out of the sandwich shop parking lot and roared away, heading north.

  “Sir?” Howard said.

  “The zombie is driving that car!”

  Howard didn’t hesitate. He started the rental car’s engine and pulled out onto the highway.

  Jay said, “Why don’t you get closer, General? We might lose them!”

  Howard said, “If they see us behind them, we’ll sure as hell lose them. We’re going up a hill here. This gutless piece of crap rental can’t begin to keep up with that hot rod they are in. So far, they are obeying the speed limit, but if they see us and decide to run, we can’t keep up with them.”

  Michaels was on his virgil, trying to call the SAC running the bust.

  The man wasn’t answering.

  “Come on, come on!”

  “He’ll have his com shut off, tactical channels on LOSIR only,” Howard said. “You don’t want to have to answer the phone in middle of a firefight.”

  The boss swore.

  “Try FBI HQ,” Jay offered.

  Michaels shook his head. “Probably half their guys are on this raid already, and it’s gonna take anybody else as long to get here as it did to get to the beach. Maybe longer.”

  “What about the local police?” Howard said.

  “Who are the local police? Where are we? Who has jurisdiction?”

  “Call CHP,” Howard said. “Probably they can get here fastest. Put up a roadblock. Better than nothing.”

  Michaels nodded. He tapped a button on the virgil, waited a few seconds, then started talking. The woman’s voice coming from the virgil was calm enough, but her news was bad:

  “Sorry, sir, but we have a major traffic accident on the Ventura, ten cars and a semi full of hazardous chemical that’s on fire, all available officers are there or on the way there. I can put you through to the county sheriff’s patrol.”

  “Damnit!” Michaels said. He shut the virgil off.

  “We’re okay,” Howard said. “We stay with them, they’ll stop sooner or later. When they do, we’ll get whatever police agency that covers the area to roll.”

  “If we don’t lose them,” Michaels said.

  “If we don’t lose them,” Howard agreed.

  “Close,” Adam said. “FBI assault team, looked like. What did you guys do?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Bobby said from the backseat. “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. They didn’t follow us, right, Tad?”

  Tad looked into the rearview mirror, but anything more than a few feet back was a blur. He hadn’t gotten his stack just right; he was having a little trouble focusing his vision. But nobody was within a block of them, and if the feds were there, they’d have already zoomed up and tried to run them off the road by now, right? Out here on a road over the hill with nobody around, that was the way to do it. There was a curve maybe a quarter mile back, and if he squinted hard, Tad could see that the road was empty at least that far.

  Tad said, “No. Nobody followed us.”

  Adam, in the front, turned around and looked. “Looks clear.” He rolled the window down and stuck his head out, glanced around, then pulled his head back inside. “No helicopters. Where are we going? The safe house?”

  “Yeah. For now. After that, I think maybe we need to take a nice long trip somewhere out of the country.”

  “All of us?”

  “No reason for you to go,” Bobby said. “Nobody knows who you are. We’ll give you a nice bonus, you can get back to your life.”

  Fuzzed as his brain was, Tad didn’t think that was a very good idea, but he didn’t say anything. Bobby knew what he was doing. Bobby always knew what he was doing.

  “Fine by me,” Adam said. He turned around to watch the road in front of them again.

  Bobby said, “Loud noise, Tad.”

  Tad didn’t have time to think about that when two bombs went off-Boom! Boom!—that fast, and the windshield spiderwebbed on the passenger side.

  “Fuck!” Tad screamed. The car slewed onto the shoulder, hit a couple of rocks, and jounced hard. He fought the wheel, managed to get it back on the asphalt.

  Tad looked into the mirror, saw Bobby just leaning back into the seat, that black gun in his hand. He glanced over at Adam. There was a bloody splotch on his chest and more blood oozing from a hole right over his heart. His left eye and part of his nose was also gone, shredded, gore running down his face. He was slack, only the seat-belt keeping him upright.

  It took a second for Tad to get it.

  Bobby had just shot Adam. Twice. In the back and in the back of the head. One of the bullets had gone right through him and through the windshield, which was now whistling with the breeze coming through it—what he could hear with his ears ringing from the noise.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Bobby!”

  “He was a liability,” Bobby said. “He knew where the safe house was. He knew you personally. We have to make a clean break here, no loose ends.”

  Tad nodded. “Yeah, okay. Whatever you say.”

  “What was that?” Jay said. “Sounded like some kind fire-cracker—look at the car!”

  Howard eased up on the gas pedal and the rental car slowed dramatically. The little four-cylinder gas-alkie engine with battery backup was barely able to move them uphill.

  The Dodge ran off the road, hit something and bounced, then scraped and skidded back onto the tarmac.

  “Gunshots,” Howard said. “Two of them. Pistol caliber.”

  “They shooting at us?”

  Michaels said, “No, not us. Somebody in the car.”

  “Why?”

  Michaels looked at Jay over the back of the seat. “Did I get here before you? What can I see that you can’t? I don’t know.”

  The three men stared at the car, which rounded another curve in the wavy road and disappeared.

  Howard shoved the accelerator pedal down. The little car moaned, and not much else. Their speed picked up slowly. He pounded the steering wheel. “Piece of Japanese crap! Go!”

  Michaels reached for the in-dash GPS, thought better of it, and pulled his virgil. Its GPS would be more accurate. Better find out where they were. Maybe they could get a helicopter from somewhere.

  Los Angeles DEA had those, didn’t they? All the drug raids they went out on, they’d have to have air cover.

  Could he risk calling the DEA in?

  Well, why not? Lee wasn’t the guy who shot at Howard, he had witnesses saying he was elsewhere. And he didn’t have to call Lee back in D.C., just the local HQ.

  He didn’t want to do it. But what was more important here? Letting the DEA get the credit? Or maybe losing the drug dealer altogether?

  Crap—

  The decision was interrupted by his virgil beeping. Michaels pulled it from his belt. The ID showed it was the director. He tapped the link-on, and the vid control, held the virgil up so the cam could see his face.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “My SAC tells me that the drug dealer was not in the house they raided, nor was the other man. What is the situation there, Commander?”

  “Three men managed to escape by car just as the raid went down, ma’am. The agents didn’t see them. General Howard, Jay Gridley, and I are in pursuit. We are heading east over the mountains at the moment. We have been unable to contact SAC Delorme’s team.”

  “I’ll have them spot on your GPS signal,” she said.

  “I was thinking we might call in the DEA,” he said. “They’ll have air support.”

  “Already done, Commander. They should have a helicopter in the air by now, and they are also tracking your virgil’s GPS, have been all along.”

  Howard nodded. “I see.”

  “We have to let them in, Commander. There is no choice in the matter, you unders
tand?”

  He understood, all right. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Try to maintain your surveillance. I expect you’ll be seeing the DEA forces show up soon. Call me when you have something to report.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Michaels discommed. Howard glanced over at him.

  “You heard the director. Try to stay with them. DEA is in the air.”

  But that wasn’t quite true, Michaels realized a few seconds later. The DEA had a helicopter, all right, he saw it not more than a block ahead as they rounded the next curve.

  The copter was parked across the middle of the road.

  36

  Drayne saw the helicopter blocking the road a good two seconds before Tad’s drugged reaction time finally kicked in and he slammed on the brakes. The big Dodge’s wheels locked and the car skidded to a rubber-burning stop.

  Adam’s body twisted out of the seat belt’s shoulder strap and he thudded against the dashboard, then slid sideways into the door, smearing blood all over the window and door post.

  “Shit!” Tad said.

  “Turn around, turn around!”

  But as he said it, Drayne looked over his shoulder in time to see a car a hundred feet behind slew to a stop and turn so it blocked the road.

  Tad saw it, too. He hit the brakes again.

  To their left was a rocky slope, the wall of the mountain. To the right, a fairly steep drop down the hillside into a valley of rock, dried brown bushes, and eucalyptus.

  A half-dozen men with guns were crouched around the copter, pointing their weapons at the Dodge. Drayne looked back in time to see three men pile out of the other side of the car behind them. They came up behind the hood and trunk, and pointed weapons, too.

  Well, shit.

  “Fuck! What do we do?”

  Drayne thought fast. There was a dead body in the front seat of their car. Tad had enough drugs to stone a parade, not even counting the scores of Hammer caps. This was bad.

  Drayne leaned forward and gave Tad the pistol he had. “Here, take this.”