Cybernation nf-6 Read online

  A lie, that. Dowling and his two guards would be dead within an hour, all things going as planned. But no point in upsetting the man, was there?

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  It was the nightmare that had finally pushed Michaels into it. He’d awakened in a sweat, heart pounding, from a dream in which the psychotic doper Bershaw had come to his house and captured Toni. In this one, the would-be killer had Little Alex and was holding him by one ankle, getting ready to smash the baby against the kitchen counter.

  Michaels hadn’t been able to go back to sleep after that horrific image.

  John Howard had told him whenever he was ready to give him a call. As soon as it got late enough, he did just that.

  Now, they were in Michaels’s office.

  “I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time,” Michaels said. “Thanks, John.”

  “No problem. Makes perfect sense to me,” Howard said. “In your place, I’d have done it a long time ago.”

  “I mean, even with all of Toni’s expertise, and the knives and tasers and stuff we have laying around, somebody has twice shown up at my house with murderous intent.”

  “I remember the last incident quite well,” Howard said. “It’s about time you got some more serious hardware.”

  “Yeah. I want to be a little better prepared if it ever happens again.”

  “I expect this will do the trick,” Howard said. “Let me show you what we have.”

  Michaels nodded and looked at the gun case, which seemed to be some kind of brownish-gray canvas or oil-cloth, darkened here and there with splotches of lube.

  He untied a string at the fat end of the cloth case and slid the weapon out.

  “This belonged to my uncle,” he said. “It’s what they call a ‘coach gun,’ being the kind of weapon a lot of the stagecoach drivers used when they rode shotgun guard duty back in the Old West. This one is a European American Armory Bounty Hunter II, actually made in Russia for export. My uncle used to use it in cowboy action shooting.”

  “Cowboy action shooting?”

  “A competitive sport. Men and women get dressed up in pre1900 costumes like those that might have been worn in the Old West, give themselves names like ‘Doc’ or ‘Deadeye’ or ‘The Kid,’ and while in persona, shoot for scores using period weapons — single-action six-shooters, rifles, usually the lever-action kind, and shotguns.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. A grown-up version of cowboys ’n’ Indians. Got Native Americans who wear period stuff and compete, too. Everybody wears hearing protectors and safety glasses and all, but otherwise the look is usually pretty authentic.”

  “Huh.”

  “My uncle used to love it. There were a fair number of black cowboys on the frontier. After slavery was abolished, and before Jim Crow got going, nobody much cared what color you were, long as you could ride, punch cattle okay, and could shoot snakes or rustlers if they showed up. At least that’s the story I heard growing up.”

  “Interesting.”

  “It’s not a particularly expensive gun, basic walnut stocks and case-hardened color. The Russians don’t build ’em pretty, but they are very solid and mechanically well-made. Uses 12-gauge shells, the short ones, two-and-three-quarter inchers only. Just as well — the high-powered three-inchers would have a fierce recoil with a barrel this short.”

  He pivoted a lever in the middle to one side, and opened the breech. “Got twenty-inch-long double barrels, extractors that pull the shells out, but not ejectors, so it doesn’t throw them on the floor. External hammers, they call them ‘rabbit ears,’ see? This one is a modern copy of the old ones, so the hammers don’t actually hit a firing pin, but cock internal strikers. That way, you can use a hammer block as well as a trigger-block safety, here, this button. It’s about as simple as you can get. You open it up, put a pair of shells in, close it, then cock the hammers. Got two triggers, one for each barrel. Slide the safety off, aim it like you would a rifle, or if somebody is in your face, poke them with it like a stick and pull the trigger.”

  “What if I miss? Is this going to go through the wall and kill my neighbor in his bed?”

  “Not if you use birdshot. You don’t need buckshot or slugs for close range stuff. Combat distance, a load of bird- or rabbit-shot works just fine, and the little bbs don’t go far after hitting couple of layers of sheet rock and siding. Even though you could get a permit for a handgun, this packs a lot more punch, it’s safer, and it’s legal to own here in the District, even for civilians.”

  Michaels took the gun, worked the action open and closed, then tried the hammers out. It had a nice, solid feel to it.

  “You should drop by the range and put a few rounds through it. It’ll kick some, but you can hip-shoot easy enough if you don’t want a sore shoulder. Just like pointing your finger.”

  Michaels nodded.

  “And here’s the gun safe.”

  He held up an oblong box big enough to hold the shotgun, with an image of a hand on it.

  “This is titanium, lightweight, but strong enough to resist somebody trying to pry it open with a screwdriver. It’ll hold a couple of long arms. You bolt it to a couple of wall studs in a closet in the bedroom, put your gun and ammo inside it. It’s got a fingerprint reader in the hand-print here that will accept sixty-four different ones, so you can program it to read yours and Toni’s and anybody else you trust. Uses a lithium-ion battery to run the reader, battery is good for five or six years, and when it starts to run low, it flashes a diode, right here, so you know to replace it. It can also be wired into your house alarm system if you want.”

  “Seems, well, safe enough.”

  “If you really want, you can get Gunny at the range to install the electronic safeties we use in our issue guns, get a transmitting ring, and cover it that way, too. That way, if an unauthorized person should manage to get it out of the safe, it won’t shoot for them — but I wouldn’t worry about that.

  “So if somebody starts kicking in your front door in the middle of the night, you can get this out and ready to go in a few seconds. Anybody who sees you standing there with a piece like this is apt to think twice about proceeding in your direction. A lot of guys who would charge a pistol will pull up when they see the muzzle of a shotgun yawning at them.”

  “I can understand that. Looks like a cannon.”

  “Downside is, you only get two shots. A pump would give you five rounds minimum, more with an extended tube.

  “You ought to consider taking the FBI/DEA house-clearing class for shotguns. As head of Net Force, they’d be happy to have you, and it would be worth a Sunday afternoon to learn it.”

  “You think I need something like that?”

  “Yes, sir. For instance, if you see somebody prowling your house with a gun who doesn’t belong there, what would you do?”

  “Tell them to drop it?”

  “Not according to home defense experts. You should just go ahead and shoot them.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Law enforcement officers are required to try to catch bad guys alive, homeowners aren’t. If somebody is in your house with a weapon, they are ipso facto to be considered a deadly threat. In your case, this has happened a couple of times already. You ordering an armed house-breaker to put his weapon down will just as likely get you shot as not. You hear a clunk! in the night, what you are supposed to do is lock yourself and your family in a secure room, get your gun, com the police, and stay put until the cops arrive. You aren’t supposed to stalk down the hall like Doc Holliday with your shotgun looking for the bad guys. If you do, however, and you see one, and he’s armed, you shoot first and ask questions later.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Not likely He is gonna be breaking into your house. Take the course, sir. There’s all kinds of things you need to know about the use of deadly force that have changed since you were out in the field.”

  Michaels looked at the shotgun. “Yes. I can see that. So, what do I o
we you?”

  Howard named a price.

  “That seems awful low.”

  “Well, the gun I don’t shoot, so it might as well have a good home. Box of shells came out of my gun safe at home, been around forever. The only out-of-pocket expense I had was the safe, so that’ll cover it.”

  “Thanks again, John.”

  “Let me know when you want to go shoot. Might be I could give you a couple of pointers.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  After Howard was gone, Michaels contemplated the shotgun. He’d never kept a gun in his house — well, not this house. He had a pistol back in the days when he’d been in the field, but he’d never felt the need for a gun at home once he’d been kicked upstairs. He had the issue taser, and for a long time that had been enough — once. There was nothing like having a couple of killers drop by to make you feel like a gun in the bedside table or closet was maybe not such a bad idea after all. He might never have the need for it again, he hoped not, but he had come to appreciate the NRA slogan: It was better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

  Be interesting to hear what Toni would say. He hadn’t consulted her about it.

  9

  On the Bon Chance

  “Okay,” the tech said, “here it is.”

  They were in Media, a ballroom-sized place divided into cubicles, thick with computers, printers, duplicators, and other electronic impedimenta.

  Chance looked at the monitor, a 21-inch flatscreen connected to a top-of-the-line Macintosh computer. The Avid software and the computer’s hard drive would allow up to a hundred hours of film storage, and with such a nonlinear editing system, you could do all kinds of things. Wipes, fades, dissolves, blue-screen, holoprojics, whatever. It was a powerful tool, used in a lot of movie and television productions, and with it you could take an ordinary piece of film or CGI and do amazing things.

  To the world, CyberNation must be about amazing things.

  Onscreen was the computer-generated image of a soaring marble and stone cathedral. Dust motes swam in beams of sunlight lancing through low-hanging clouds. The point-of-view camera moved in on a simulated dolly toward the arched building.

  Music began, a Bach fugue with thundering organ chords.

  As the POV shot approached the massive doors to the building, they began to open and dissolve. Doves flew out and scattered. The music began to morph into a classic rock ’n’ roll number with the words seeming to grow right out of the organ notes, something with a heavy, driving beat, all about American dreams and suicide machines. As the music changed, so did the image, from a towering pseudo-Gothic edifice to a futuristic nightclub. The camera continued to dolly in and through the doors, and inside the club dozens of beautiful people danced together, frantically gyrating to the rock beat. Sweat made their thin shirts and blouses stick to perfect bodies. The men obviously all lifted weights, the women didn’t wear bras and didn’t need them.

  Overhead, lasers flickered through clouds of colored smoke, and the slogan CYBERNATION — WE CAN TAKE YOU ANYWHERE YOU WANT TO GO!” appeared superimposed over the dancers, with the sign-up URL under it.

  The scene froze. “That’s the intro. What do you think?” the tech asked.

  “Not bad,” Chance said. “But dial down the volume on the music a hair, and when we get the slogan super, I want a wah-wah sting that echoes the bass line. And see if we can vibrate the words a little. Who is doing the voice-over?”

  “Foghorn Franklin.”

  “Good. He’s perfect. What happens from here?”

  “We’re still working on the wire-frame dinosaur stuff, and the space aliens, but we’ve got the harem sequence and the shopping at Harrods almost done. The wire-frame’ll be ready for texture in a couple of days.”

  Chance nodded and turned away from the Avid. She glanced at her watch. She hadn’t heard from Roberto yet. She wondered how he was doing.

  He was probably doing just fine. She worried too much about the details, she knew that. It was hard to trust people to do what you told them to do, and with good reason. Once upon a time, she had been a corporate manager, on the fast track to the vice presidency of a Fortune Five Hundred company. She’d been making good money, had been well-respected, and had been kicking ass and taking names, but she’d had to quit. People kept screwing up, doing things differently than she’d told them, and it drove her up the wall. The idea of being a decent manager was: You hired good workers and turned them loose, and they didn’t call until the job was done, except if they had problems. The reality of it was: You inherited a lot of deadwood in whatever department you took over, and it was a while until you could figure out who worked and who shuffled papers and pretended to work. Yeah, once you got the lay of the land, you could fire the lazy ones, but then you had to spend time looking for somebody new, and that was always the devil-you-knew-versus-the-devil-you-didn’t. You’d read this great resume, the guy would show up and give a good interview, and as soon as he got the job, he’d turn into a brain-dead lame donkey you couldn’t move with a flaming two-by-four shoved up his butt. Half the time you couldn’t lop off the deadwood in the first place because they’d sue for one kind of discrimination or another — gender, age, race, whatever. You could catch somebody stealing the petty cash, flashing old ladies in the subway, or snorting cocaine in the lunchroom and it wasn’t enough to get rid of them if they had the right leverage.

  And office politics? Stupid bosses who’d Peter Principled out? Backstabbing coworkers?

  Don’t even hike those trails…

  Chance smiled at the memory. Being in charge of most places was no picnic in the park. The reason she had taken this job was that they let her start from scratch, hire anybody she wanted, and she could get rid of anybody who worked for her with two words: You’re gone! There was no appeal. She didn’t have to answer to anybody except the Board, and as long as she met the goals of the business plan — which she herself produced — nobody cared how she got it done. She couldn’t imagine a better job.

  Roberto was good, and she should trust him to do what was needed, but she was still too hands-on. She still worried every time her neck was essentially in somebody else’s hands. She’d have to work on that. She needed to relax—’Berto was the best she’d ever found at his kind of work.

  But if he didn’t call in the next hour or two, she was going to be bent out of shape.

  San Rafael, California

  Killing the three was the easy part. After he had gotten everything from Dowling he wanted, and a whole lot he hadn’t cared about, he very carefully choked the man out, using the special hold he’d learned from a Vale Tudo jujitsu fighter in Brazil. Enough so the guy was unconscious, but not so he’d die. Then he had retrieved the bodyguards one at a time, choked them out, and put everybody into the limo. He’d driven to the spot, only half a mile away, choked them all again to make certain they were out. Then he accelerated toward the guardrail overlooking an eight-hundred-foot drop-off, and locked the car’s brakes in a hard skid that stopped right at the edge of the pavement.

  He backed it up a few yards. Then he repositioned one of the unconscious guards in the driver’s seat and strapped him in with the seat belt. He jammed the guy’s shoe into the side of the accelerator, and the engine roared. He shut the door, reached in through the window, and shifted the automatic transmission lever into drive.

  The car lurched forward and gathered speed. It hit the rail with plenty of momentum, punched through, and rolled out over the long drop-off.

  It made a lot of noise going down, tumbled and flipped several times. Santos was able to follow the car’s fall most of the way, until the car’s lights went out, probably because the battery had been knocked loose.

  Adios, amigos.

  It was not totally foolproof, but nobody would have any reason to look past the obvious: The driver for a corporate vice president, on the way home in the dark on a mountain road, had seen a deer or coyote or some other animal, slammed on h
is brakes, and too bad, had skidded right off the cliff. Yes, a trained accident investigator might notice that the safety railing was perhaps not damaged as much as a high-speed impact would warrant. But a California Highway Patrol officer would see skid marks that matched the limo’s tires, indicating that he had tried to stop. The men would have died from injuries sustained in the wreck, and there would be no sign of drugs or other injuries that could not have come from the impact, Santos had made certain of that.

  Accidents happened. A real CHP officer with any time on the job would likely have seen a dozen incidents just like this, and if that was what you were looking for, then that was what you would see. There would be no reason to think anything else.

  Maybe the insurance company would send an expert out to check on things. Even so, such an investigation would take time, measurements had to be made, tests run, reports written, and even then, a conclusion would not be certain.

  So, Mr. Acidente Experto, why is it you think this was not an accident?

  Well, the guardrail did not show damage consistent with a high-speed impact.

  Perhaps the metal in this rail came from a particularly strong batch?

  Not according to my tests.

  Yes, but — how do you know how fast the car was going when it struck the guardrail, eh?

  The length of the skid marks is indicative of substantial velocity.

  Ah, but putting on the brakes slowed the automobile down, no? Perhaps enough so that the impact was considerably lessened? Is this not possible?

  Yes, it is possible…

  As he hiked back toward where he had a hidden car waiting — one with license plates he had swapped with a car in the long-term parking lot of the aeroporto in San Francisco — Santos smiled to himself. If, a week or a month from now, the authorities did somehow become convinced that the limo’s destruction had not been an accident, that would not matter. By then, the information he had been sent to collect would have been used. How? He didn’t really know or care, that was not his problem. He had been sent to get it, he had gotten it, end of story. There was no way to tie him to the incident in any case. He had bought the car under a false name. Nobody knew him here, and nobody who might have seen him would know who he was or where he had gone. He was just another black man, and they all looked alike to whites, no?