The Archimedes Effect Read online

  “No problem,” the clerk said.

  Once she was in the hall behind the shop and the clerk had closed the door behind her, Lewis stripped off the dress. Under it, she wore shorts and a T-shirt. She pulled a pair of sandals from her bag, then left the dress, sensible shoes, and bag in the nearest garbage can. She headed for the parking lot and her rental car. With any luck, she’d be on a plane back to D.C. before Abdul and Sayed back there realized they had lost her.

  There were, of course, other potential buyers. And she would contact them if Aziz didn’t work out. The next time they met, she would have Carruth and a couple of his troops backing her. You couldn’t trust a fanatic, and once Aziz realized that she could deliver, he would certainly try to avoid paying for it if he could. That was expected.

  Lewis had reasons to hate the Army, but she didn’t hate her country. There was no way she would put an atomic weapon into the hands of a zealot who would kill hundreds of thousands without blinking, in the name of some warped sense of reality. He had to believe that she would, he had to know that she could give him what he wanted, so she had to demonstrate it, but it wasn’t going to happen. Not to mention that the target such a man would select might well be the town in which Lewis herself happened to be. Sure, she’d sell him the key—but there would be a nasty surprise waiting for Mr. Aziz when he tried to open that door. And the Army would give her a medal for it. How ironic was that?

  8

  Fine Point Salle d’Armes

  Washington, D.C.

  Thorn was sweating, and he hadn’t expected that.

  He was fencing Jamal, just the two of them, in the small, threadbare salle he’d opened up a little while earlier.

  This was his dream—or at least it was one of his dreams.

  Thorn himself had come up the hard way, from a hardscrabble existence on the reservation, and fencing had been an escape for him. He wanted to help make it an escape for others, too.

  So a few years ago he’d quietly bought this tiny gym in D.C., refurbished it slightly, and reopened as a salle. Then he’d put the word out on the street that he was open and looking for people who were interested in fencing.

  Jamal was one of the few who’d responded.

  Thorn toyed with the idea of putting in more time here, really putting forth the effort to grow this place into something big. Something like what had happened in New York City a few years back. He could hire a coach, reach out to the community, and put together something that could really make a difference in people’s lives.

  But not now. A coach alone wouldn’t be enough. It would take a tremendous effort by someone with vision, with commitment to the dream. And since it was his vision, his dream, it pretty much had to be him pushing it. But he couldn’t. Not now. Not as long as Net Force demanded so much of him. But maybe, someday . . .

  Jamal came in fast. Thorn threw a quick high-line parry and riposted to the open wrist, but the wrist wasn’t there. It had been a feint.

  Jamal’s point dropped, circling beneath Thorn’s bell guard, then pressed lightly on the outside of Thorn’s blade, guiding it further inside and then leaping off for a quick strike to Thorn’s shoulder.

  Thorn smiled and leaned back, letting Jamal’s point fall short. That had been a good try.

  As he leaned back, he allowed his guard to drop further, then brought his own point up sharply, striking behind Jamal’s bell and landing solidly on the heel of his palm.

  “Hey!” Jamal said. “How’d you do that? I should have had your shoulder!”

  Thorn grinned. He was aware of Marissa seated on a bleacher off to the side, but he wasn’t fencing any harder just because she was watching.

  Well, maybe he was fencing a little harder. . . .

  “Nice try,” he said. “You set it up beautifully. The thing is, you can’t think too much. If I’d been paying attention to what you were doing, trying to anticipate your next move, you’d have had me.”

  Even through the mesh mask, Thorn could see his young opponent frown. “What, then?”

  “It’s like I’ve said, Jamal, anticipation will get you killed—as it would have cost me a touch just now. No, there’s a different approach I want you think about. When you fence, what do you focus on? With your eyes, I mean? Where do you look?”

  Jamal shrugged. “I don’t really focus on anything. You taught me that. I keep my eyes pointed pretty much straight ahead, but by not focusing I allow my peripheral vision to see more.”

  Thorn nodded. “Exactly. Look at nothing, see everything.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s the same thing with your mind. Don’t focus. Be. Don’t react to the blade. Be the blade. Be the parry. Be the touch.”

  Jamal shook his head. “You’ve said this before, but I still don’t get it.”

  “You will. I’ve brought some books I think you’re ready for.” Thorn gestured over to where Marissa sat on the bleacher. There was a backpack on the floor next to her. Inside was a small selection of books he’d chosen specifically for Jamal. Heugel’s Zen and the Art of Archery. Musashi’s A Book of Five Rings. Smullyan’s The Tao Is Silent. A few others.

  What he didn’t say was that he’d been bringing those same books now for six months, waiting for Jamal to reach the point where they would do him the most good.

  Thorn also had two other stacks of books set aside, ready for the next steps in Jamal’s growth.

  “Don’t think, huh?” Jamal asked.

  “That’s right. Don’t think. Be.”

  “Got it. All right, let’s try it again.”

  And the dance was on once again.

  Washington, D.C.

  Carruth didn’t see it coming, there was no way he could have. Once there, he had no real choice.

  He’d driven to a new rave club in Southeast, the Cairo Mirage. Carruth wasn’t a fan of such things, buncha idiots taking drugs and dancing until they fell over, but he’d met a drop-dead gorgeous redhead who ran some kind of program for troubled kids in Anacostia. She liked to party down at clubs, and she had told him she was gonna be there, so if he wanted to get next to her—and he did—he had to go where the action was.

  A woman who looked that good was worth a little noise and effort.

  Southeast wasn’t exactly the best section of town, but he wasn’t worried about street trash bothering him. He was big, strong, trained, armed, and could pass for a cop. The wolves usually had better sense than to bother a lion when there were so many sheep around.

  The car was a rental, so if somebody boosted it while he was inside making nice with Ms. Red, it was no skin off his nose. He found an empty spot—a no-parking curb, but if he got a ticket, so what?—and wheeled the car into it. He got out, adjusted the heavy revolver on his hip under his sport coat, and cheeped the car’s alarm. The club was a block east, and it was still early, not yet 2100; ought not to have any problems at nine o’clock on a weeknight.

  He was halfway there when an MPDC cruiser angled to the curb in front of him and the cop inside tapped the siren.

  Carruth stopped and stared at the car. It was white, with the stylized American flag on the side. The door opened, and a pair of cops got out. They weren’t unsnapping holsters or anything, but they were definitely coming to talk to him.

  “Evening, Officers,” he said. He smiled. What was this?

  The nearer cop, a beefy guy almost as big as Carruth, probably about thirty, finished slipping his side-handle baton into his belt loop, watching Carruth all the time. “Need to ask you a couple of questions, buddy.”

  Carruth kept smiling. “Sure, no problem.” But he was worried.

  He was dressed in a nice jacket and slacks; he ought to look like a citizen. No reason to brace him. And no “Good evening, sir.” MPDC cops were usually polite to citizens. Not a good sign.

  The second cop, shorter and thinner than the other one, and with a thin moustache, said, “Did you know there was a robbery a couple blocks back a few minutes ago? Somebody hit a convenience
store.”

  “I didn’t see anybody,” Carruth said. “I’m parked about half a block back, on my way to meet a lady at a club.”

  The two cops approached a bit closer, but stayed well apart from each other. “Well, thing is, the robber was a big white guy in a sport coat.”

  Jesus Christ, they had to be kidding—they thought he’d knocked over a 7-Eleven and he was just strolling down the fucking street like he owned it?

  Carruth laughed. “Wasn’t me. I’m not a robber, I’m just on my way to meet this woman.”

  “Yeah, you said that,” Beefy said. “Mind if we see some ID?”

  “No problem. My wallet is in my back pocket.”

  “How about if I get that for you?” Moustache said, still smiling.

  “Excuse me?”

  Beefy put his hand on his Glock’s gun butt.

  Nine-millimeter Glocks were dangerous guns—no safety, save for the split trigger, they often went off in the hands of a nervous cop when they weren’t supposed to go off. A lot of lawsuits had been settled by big cities where badly trained police accidentally cooked citizens with those Tupperware side arms, even with the heavier New York trigger. Carruth had no use for Glocks.

  “You’re making a mistake,” Carruth said.

  “Turn around, put your hands on the wall, walk your feet back, and spread ’em,” Beefy said. “We’ll apologize if we’re wrong.”

  Oh, shit! If they found his revolver, he was gonna be in a world of trouble. Illegally concealed weapons were a big no-no in D.C., and at the very least, they could confiscate his BMF and put him in the local slammer until a lawyer could bust him loose.

  That would not do. Lewis would have a conniption. And he didn’t want to lose his gun, no way.

  “Okay, okay, no problem, take it easy.” Carruth started to turn to his right. When his hand was covered by his body, he snapped it down and grabbed for his revolver—

  The two cops started yelling, clawing for their own side arms, but Carruth had the jump on them. He cleared leather, cocked the hammer as he drew, shoved the big revolver toward Beefy, who was all of two meters away, and pulled the trigger—

  Even knowing how loud it was, the sound and vibration almost paralyzed Carruth. It was a big bomb going off in your face; the shock of it blasted your skin like a hot wind, and shooting one-handed, the recoil damned near jerked the gun out of his hand.

  The protective Kevlar vest didn’t do the man any good. It was a center-punch shot, and even if it didn’t penetrate, it would be like being hit in the chest with a cannonball—the impact would break his sternum and ribs and concuss the heart like a sledgehammer.

  Moustache cursed and brought his Glock up, but it went off while it was still pointed at the sidewalk. The jacketed slug ricocheted off the concrete and spanged into the wall behind Carruth as he dragged his revolver down from where it pointed at the sky. He grabbed it with his other hand, moving like a turtle, slow, oh, so slowly. . . .

  Moustache’s Glock fired again, this time almost lined up, but the bullet went wide, to Carruth’s left, and he got his muzzle pointed and fired the second chamber—

  Moustache collapsed, another center-of-mass hit the vest wouldn’t protect against, to join Beefy supine on the sidewalk.

  Holy shit!

  It was like the wrath of God. Two up, two down. He had most likely just killed a pair of Metro cops.

  It was way past time to leave.

  He looked around. Nobody else on the street close enough to ID him, not that he could see. But this place would be thick with police in five minutes and he needed to be gone!

  Carruth holstered his weapon. He bent down, pulled a pair of surgical gloves from Beefy’s back pocket, put them on as he ran to the cruiser’s front door, and climbed into the vehicle. He hit the siren and light-bar controls and screeched away from the curb.

  He had to get as far away as fast as he could.

  This was bad. Very bad.

  9

  Washington, D.C.

  Lewis was on her way home, driving the politically correct Japanese hybrid car she’d picked up second-hand a year past. At this stage of the game, she didn’t want to do anything that might call attention to her, and the little automobile, which she privately thought of as a “Priapus,” was as innocuous as they came. Even so, it still used a certain amount of gasoline to augment the electric motors, and the tank was nearly empty. She pulled over to a self-serve station a couple miles away from her house, got out, pushed her credit card into the reader, and started to pump fuel into the little car. A year or two from now, she’d be able to send her butler to buy her gas, if she felt like it. . . .

  An ambulance pulled into the lot and parked next to the mini-market. The EMT riding shotgun alighted and went inside.

  Of a moment, Lewis found herself riding a quick surge of memory. Like the best VR, it was almost reality—sights, smells, the feel of the air. . . .

  The night her father died, Lewis had been in the hospital with her father’s mother. Granny had, after Grampa passed away, slipped slowly and quietly into senility. One day, she seemed fine; the next, she was talking about men coming out of the walls of her house to chase her around the bedroom. It was sad—Granny had been a strong, smart woman who had raised two sons and a daughter, while working as an accountant, and run her household like a drill sergeant, which Grampa had been, but had given up when he’d retired.

  Her doctor wanted to do tests to confirm what everybody already knew, that she had Alzheimer’s and she had been successfully hiding it from her family. Nobody was happy about it.

  The room had been unbearably hot. It had been August, in Richmond, the summer days almost tropical and the nights cloyingly warm and muggy, but even so, Granny had been cold, and they had cranked the heat up so that it was eighty-five degrees in the private room. The family had been taking turns going to sit with her—her mother, Rachel, two of her cousins—and on that night, it had been Rachel’s turn.

  The room was hot. Granny was in and out of reality. One moment, able to talk about what she’d read in the newspaper and comment on it intelligently, the next moment, wondering how a cat had gotten into the room and onto her bed.

  Lewis, just turned eighteen, was herself something of a wreck. Her father’s court-martial had gone as expected—he was guilty, never any question of whether he had taken his side arm and shot Private Benjamin Thomas Little in the head with it, killing him instantly. Her father was waiting for his sentence, and everybody knew it was going to be life or something just short of it, depending on how much the judges sympathized with Sergeant Lewis because two of them also had daughters.

  Benny, the bastard. He had been her boyfriend, from the base, doing his first tour, a private. Tall, handsome, funny, and she had thought she loved him. Two, three more dates, she would have given him what he wanted.

  But he couldn’t wait. He had refused to take no for an answer when they’d been kissing in the backseat of his car, and had held her down and forced himself into her.

  When she’d gotten home, her shirt torn and her face streaked with tears, her father had taken one look, grabbed his gun, driven to the barracks, and shot Benny dead.

  So there she was, cooking in a hospital room with the heat turned up in the middle of a hot August night, listening to her poor old grandmother ramble on about a cat that wasn’t there, and feeling like shit because it was her fault that her father was going to spend the rest of his life in a federal prison. Things didn’t seem as if they could get any worse.

  Until her mother showed up at Granny’s room with the news.

  Rachel’s father had just killed himself. A different pistol, but the same results as Benny . . .

  The hurried slamming of the ambulance door brought Lewis back to the present. The driver lit the lights and the vehicle squealed out of the mini-mart’s parking lot, the siren kicking in as it reached the street.

  Lewis topped off the tank of her car, feeling disconnected from the act. S
he had blamed herself for her father’s death for a long time, but as the years went by, she had shifted much of that blame to the Army. Benny had been a soldier—why hadn’t he been taught that forcing himself on a woman was wrong? Why hadn’t the Army looked at what her father had done as something any father would have done? Made allowances for a man who was only dealing justice to a criminal? Had she gone to the MPs, they would have thrown Benny into the stockade, and in a just world, it would have been Benny who went to prison young and came out an old man.

  Yes, she had gone into the Army—her father’s suicide note had specified that she still should, as they had always planned—but eventually, she had realized that the Army needed to pay for what had happened to her father. And since they weren’t going to do that voluntarily, she would make them pay.

  She climbed into her car, dropped the gas receipt on the seat, and started the machine’s anemic little engine. It had taken years to get into a position where she had enough power to hit the Army hard enough to cause it pain. It would never be as bad as what she had felt, the Army was too big to deal that kind of blow, but it would sting. It would be embarrassing, it would cost them in time and effort and money, and they would never know who had done it, or why. Maybe she would leave a time capsule somewhere, to be opened after she died, explaining it all. Or maybe she wouldn’t.

  She pulled out onto the street. It had taken a long time to set it up, but it was coming to pass, just as she had planned. If vengeance was a dish best served cold, then hers was certainly that. But she expected that it would taste perfect when it was done.

  The Fretboard

  Washington, D.C.

  Jennifer Hart said, “How are your fingertips?”

  It was nearly nine P.M. Given his job, it was hard for Kent to take off in the middle of the day for guitar lessons, but Jen was willing to meet him here at eight. The shop was closed, but she had a key, and they didn’t seem to mind her teaching whenever she wanted.