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  Plus, the snatch was only one element. A small unit, three or four troops, no more, would handle that. An escape route, preferably by air, would have to be arranged. Something that could fly fast enough to get away quickly, and yet stay under enemy radar while so doing, was necessary.

  But if the operation went south? How many men were necessary for a backup team? Did the Net Force team want to begin a firefight with troops of a supposedly friendly nation? What were the repercussions of that?

  Howard shook his head. It was a lot to chew on, and no matter how well he did it, he knew some bit would be missed. It might be small enough to pass through the system undigested. It might be just large enough to block a windpipe and choke him. There was a pleasant thought.

  The computer chimed. The new op was done. Chance of success, fifty-four percent.

  Might as well flip a coin for that one.

  "Computer, retain previous parameters, change operation begin-time to 2300 hours and run."

  The computer chimed again and began cross-checking the op.

  He paced again. It was probably all going to be moot. He did not have much confidence that Michaels would give the order to use military intervention in this situation. He had too many people to answer to higher up the chain of command, and they were all civilians. It was one thing to go into a foreign country with the locals knowing you were there but pretending you were not there, thus offering a tacit approval of your actions. It was another thing to put troops on foreign soil with the expressed disapproval of the locals. The Chechens had been touchy about such things since the Russians had invaded them years ago; they would not welcome an American StrikeForce team wandering around in their country, no matter how covert. If it hit the fan, there would be major noise. Heads would roll, and likely his would be the first to hit the ground.

  Still, he had his orders. He would carry them out to the best of his ability. He was a soldier. That was what he did.

  Thursday, October 7th, 9:02 p.m. Washington, D.C.

  The Selkie couldn't expect the teams guarding the target to use the same route to his condo twice in a row. However, the closer they got, the fewer options they had. There were only two main approaches to the neighborhood, and if they wanted to drive there, they would have to use one or the other. If they didn't use this one today, they would likely use it tomorrow.

  She got lucky. Today, they picked this route.

  She stood at a public phone kiosk next to a stop-and-rob a mile away from Michaels's place, her new bicycle on its kickstand next to her. She was dressed as a man in boots, baggy jeans, an oversized jacket, with a short and well-trimmed fake beard, and while the bodyguards saw her, she had her back to them as the procession passed, watching them via the small rearview bicycle safety mirror attached to the helmet she wore. They paid little attention to her.

  As she'd expected, they had ramped up the level of protection. There were two close-in outrider cars, one in front, one behind, and the target rode in an armored limo. She hadn't wanted to risk a drive-by look at his condo, but she had to assume the place was covered with a tight net of security. She wasn't going to granny her way down the street, nor be able to slip over a back fence and sneak into his house unseen. And these guys would be quicker on the draw than a mobster's bodyguard. They'd be firing as soon as they spotted her.

  She stayed at the kiosk for another minute, and was rewarded by a second tail vehicle, with two more guards in it. There might have been a fourth, further out in front, too — she hadn't noticed.

  Given the location and logistics of the neighborhood, the Selkie eliminated the target's condo as a place to do the deletion. She might be able to set up to make a rifle shot as he left or entered the limo at home, but that would be risky. Likely the guards had thought of that and had any decent vantage points covered. She wouldn't be able to get outside their coverage and line up — there weren't any tall buildings around, no good angles. And even if she made the shot, getting away afterward would be the bigger problem. Escape was a primary goal, more important than the deletion.

  No, the condo was out.

  She hung up the phone, climbed onto her bike and headed for the motel where she'd rented a room. It was a couple of miles away and she'd used the male identity to register, in case they were looking for any single women checking in.

  Trying for a hit on a convoy was also risky. The only practical way was explosives. A Stinger missile, maybe an antitank rocket or a bomb. To use a rocket or missile, she would have to expose herself to the guards for a line-of-sight shot. If they spotted somebody with a rocket launcher standing on the side of the road or leaning from a window, she would bet heavy they'd shoot first and ask the body questions later. And rockets were iffy. She had heard of cases where missiles had hit ordinary windshield glass at an angle and bounced off without exploding. Bullets did it all the time.

  And as for a bomb? She would also bet that the FBI or Net Force teams in charge of protecting the target sent somebody along the route to check manholes and garbage cans for strange packages, once they were down to one or two routes to the condo. Besides, a remote-controlled bomb might not dispatch somebody inside a well-armored limo. A big enough charge to be sure of a kill would probably be picked up by an electronic sniffer or even a bomb dog. If they knew for certain she was still after the target, they would stick him into a secure facility and he'd camp out for weeks or months. She didn't want to wait for that. Once, she would have been as patient as necessary, but having made the decision to retire, she was ready to finish this and move on. A few days, a week maybe, that was all she had to give it. And given how she had failed before, she wanted to do this up close and personal. The cane was out, but a knife or bare hands had a certain appeal.

  A car honked at her as it swung around to pass the bike. She waved, trying to give the impression she was sorry for blocking the road. The car passed. The driver yelled something at her, the last part of which was " — stupid bastard!" He didn't slow down.

  The Selkie grinned. The driver of the car had no idea how dangerous it would have been to pull over and beat on a small bicyclist who'd slowed him down more than he wanted. She didn't want to have to use the pistol in her fanny pack on some angry motorist, but it was always an option if she couldn't beat his head in with all her training.

  No, the only viable alternative for a deletion now was to do it where the target wouldn't be constantly surrounded by guards, and in such a way that nobody would know he'd been hit until she had plenty of time to get away.

  Given her options, the only place that fit was a place considered secure.

  She'd have to kill him inside Net Force Headquarters.

  36

  Friday, October 8th, 9:05 a.m. Quantico

  Getting yourself — or some illegal object — into a secure area when you weren't supposed to was not as hard as most people would like to believe. Offhand, the Selkie knew of at least four ways to smuggle a firearm onto a plane, even without resorting to a ceramic one, like the little pistol she now had tucked into the waistband of her panty hose. The pistol was a three-shooter with triple-stack-two-inch barrels. The weapon had been illegally made in Brazil, for their foreign service operatives, from the same hard-ceramic the Japanese had developed for those ever-sharp kitchen knives. The caliber was 9mm short, and the ammo was caseless boron-epoxy, no cartridges, fired by a rotating piezoelectric igniter. Propellant was a more stable variation of solid rocket fuel. The thing even had a rudimentary rifling in the trio of snub-nose barrels, though the bullets were light enough so long-range target shooting wasn't an option. The piece had a twenty-meter effective accuracy range; outside that, it was fire and hope you had a patron deity if you wanted to hit anything on purpose.

  At close range, the non-metal gun would kill a man as dead as the biggest steel cowboy six-shooter ever made.

  The gun had been cast in two main pieces, barrels and frame; the pivots, hinges, screws, trigger and firing mechanism were also ceramic. In theory, the wea
pon could be reloaded and used again, but in practice, it was a throw-away. Once it had fired its initial load, the internal ceramics got a little fragile. It made a lot more sense to use a new gun than risk having the old one misfire at a critical moment. The trivalent metalloid boron in the three composite bullets contained less metal than a tooth filling. The piece wouldn't pass a Hard Object scan, but standing on its end it would likely skate by a fluroscanner because it didn't look like a gun from that angle, and it would go through any standard security metal detector on the planet without a blip. Lying on a table, the pistol would look almost as if it had been carved from a bar of Ivory soap.

  Strapped to her right inner thigh, almost to her groin, was a sheath knife, also of ceramic, full-tang, with a plastic handle. The blade was a tanto-style, with the angled point, and was both short and very thick. Ceramic tended to be brittle, and it needed thickness to keep from snapping if it was going to be used for stabbing, and not just throat-cutting.

  The standard security setup at most government buildings, which were, after all, limited in their funding for such things, involved picture or fingerprint identification tags, metal detectors and uniformed guards. If you had business in such a place and were not an employee, the process could be as detailed as the security force was willing to use. A computer check of your ID, a search of your carry-in and your person, somebody from inside assigned to accompany you wherever you went — these were all standard for basic Level Three access. Net Force was a Level Three through Level One building; that meant that getting into the building itself needed only L3 techniques. More private areas would have tighter wards — palm or retinal scanners, knuckle readers, vox codes and such. She wasn't going to slip through those to her target's office and knock on his door, not without a lot more time to prepare. But, then, she didn't really have to.

  Getting to a hard target wasn't necessary — if the target made itself easy and came to you.

  With even the smallest computer knowledge, it was easy enough to find low-level employees — secretaries, receptionists, maintenance people — who had worked for Net Force only a short time. Choosing one who was unmarried and living alone that she could look like, was even easier. The Selkie, after all, could look like almost anybody…

  Thus it was that Christine Wesson, a not-too-ugly brunette with brown eyes, age twenty-nine, came to the end of her short and probably undistinguished life. And now, a woman who looked enough like Wesson to pass for her to anybody who didn't know her very well, wearing her clothes, came to the southwest entrance — the busiest one — of Net Force HQ. It was a thank-God-it's-Friday, and a crush of day-shift employees arriving for work stood in line at the reader, waiting their turns to slide their ID cards through the scanner slot. It went fast. One swipe, a green light, and you were in.

  The Selkie already knew the card was valid, since it had gotten her into the parking lot — in the late Christine Wesson's eight-year-old rattle-infested Ford.

  Christine herself was wrapped in plastic bags in her bathtub, under a hundred or so pounds of melting crushed ice that should keep the neighbors from complaining about the smell — at least for long enough that the Selkie could finish her work and be gone.

  Once inside the facility, there were several places she needed to check out, and several other places the Selkie could stay to avoid hanging around in the halls.

  Two years ago, security people at the interim Pentagon had been found enjoying vids surreptitiously taken of women — and a few men — using the rest-room facilities in the building. Public outcry had been loud and immediate — but the military was long-used to ignoring whatever whim-of-the-moment the uninformed civilian public wanted. However, the idea that somebody might see a four-star general's wee-wee as he took a whiz had bothered the brass no end. And who knew but there weren't similar spy-eyes in Congressional Johns? It was amazing how fast some laws could get written and passed when they were really important. As a result, surveillance gear in federal buildings had been restricted — at least the cameras were supposed to be kept out of bathrooms. The fake Wesson could park herself in a stall with a book and kill a couple of hours. She could dawdle over lunch in the cafeteria. She could go to the outside smoking area for a frowned-upon, but still legal, low-tar-low-nicotine cigarette, a pack of which had been in Wesson's purse. With her ID tag twisted on her blouse, she'd be anonymous. Nobody knew her, and it was a big bureaucracy.

  While the target was safe in the high-security area, he would surely come out to a less-secure area, if she could find the right reason.

  Somehow, she had to figure out the right reason during the next few hours.

  Sooner or later, of course, the office where Wesson worked would probably notice she had not shown up. They might call her apartment, and get the answering machine. No problem, unless, for some reason, those concerned thought to check the building's security computer. If that happened, they would see that Christine Wesson had arrived for work at her normal time — which might cause some raised eyebrows. If she was here, where was she? To stall that, the Selkie had asked more or less politely if Christine would do something for her. She had been more than willing. So, Christine Wesson had called her supervisor in the Office Supply Section in which she worked, and told her she would be a few hours late, that she had an important personal medical errand to run. The supervisor had no problem with that, and a few hours could easily stretch to noon. Then a timed-e-mail would show up at the supervisor's terminal from Wesson, explaining that things had run late. A lot later than anybody but the Selkie knew. At the least, the e-mail would buy the rest of the day. Which should be more than enough.

  Friday, October 8th, 12:18 p.m. Quantico

  Toni went through her djurus, pausing after each one to do the corresponding sambut. She was the only woman working out. There were a few other men in the gym today, but Rusty was not among them. When she'd told him she wasn't going to be sleeping with him anymore, she thought he'd taken it rather well. No obvious anger, no tears, just a kind of surprised acceptance. "Oh?" It had gone much better than she'd hoped or expected.

  Except that she hadn't heard from him since. She'd said she was going to try to be in the gym today and she expected him — he hadn't missed a class before — to show up.

  Surprise. So maybe it hadn't gone as well as she'd thought.

  She came up from the squat in Djuru Three, threw the right-vertical-forearm strike, then punched, continued to rise, alternating the next two punches.

  She hoped Rusty wasn't going to quit class. She had been enjoying having a student, and learning a lot in the process of teaching.

  But of course, it was his choice.

  What was it with men that they could be your friend, then your lover, but they couldn't go back to just being friends if the other didn't work out?

  She finished the series and shook her hands out. She was still tight.

  A brunette in office clothes walked to the water fountain and smiled and nodded at Toni. Toni didn't recognize the woman, but she nodded absently back. Solving the Rusty problem didn't solve the Alex problem. How was she going to get him to notice her?

  The brunette went into the locker room. Toni dismissed her from her thoughts, but a moment later, the brunette came out, all upset.

  "Excuse me, miss," she said. "There's a lady having some trouble in there — she looks like she's having some kind of seizure! I called Medical but, oh, I'm afraid she's going to hurt herself! Can you help?"

  Toni nodded. "Sure."

  She followed the brunette into the locker room.

  Friday, October 8th, 12:18 p.m. Quantico

  Jay Gridley and John Howard had joined Michaels in the small conference room. He knew protocol said he should keep these two meetings apart, the need-to-know business the spooks were always hammering at everybody, but he figured his top people needed to know what each was doing. Besides, if he happened to feel like it, there wasn't much Jay Gridley couldn't find out from a computer system he'd helped design an
d install.

  "Jay?"

  "Okay, Boss, here's the way it lays out." He waved the presentation computer to life. "We've been able to piece together some of Plekhanov's itinerary over the last few months. I can give you the details and show how brilliant we were in making some connections, if you want."

  "I'll stipulate to your brilliance," Michaels said. "Let's hear a bottom line."

  "All right. This is iffy, you understand, but what it looks like is, he's trying to buy himself a government or two."

  Michaels nodded. Lobbyists did that all the time, and as long as they kept within the legally established limits, that was acceptable.

  "Some of the people he connected with are less careful than Plekhanov. We think he's got a good chance of deciding who the President and Prime Ministers for two, maybe three CIS governments are going to be in the next elections, including those in Chechnya, where he lives. We don't have any direct proof, of course. We'd need his files for that."

  Howard said, "What do you suppose our chances are of getting him turned over to us if the head of the government we ask owes Plekhanov big-time?"

  It was a rhetorical question. Michaels said, "I don't much like this, Jay."

  "Well, then, you're really going to hate this next part. Some of those people we were able to put in Plekhanov's vicinity? There are a couple of generals in there."

  Howard looked at Jay. "Great."

  Michaels said, "You think he's planning some kind of coup?"

  Jay shrugged. "No way to be sure. But given the way this guy moves, yeah, I'd have to say it's a possibility."