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  Just for grins, he lit his computer and read over the information on HAARP the boss had given him, including the hiddencam vid of the interview with the scientist, Morrison.

  Very interesting stuff. Mind control? That would be worth stealing, but that also didn’t seem likely. People had been playing with low-frequency stuff for a long time without much in the way of results. Still. it was intriguing.

  Jay logged off his computer. He’d been here for a couple of hours. Time to head home. Soji didn’t have to be on-line all the time…

  But as he started for the door to leave, his com chirped, and the sexy, throaty female vox he’d programmed into his computer said, “Jay! Priority One com, Jay! Heads up! Answer the phone, you hunk of burning love!”

  Friday, June 10th

  Longhua, China

  When he had been a member of the Chinese Army twenty years before, Jing Lu Han had apparently at some point collected a Russian Makarov pistol, and kept it hidden away for two decades afterward. No one had ever seen him with it — at least no one alive who could testify to that. There seemed no other way he could have come by such a thing, there not having been any Russians in or about Longhua in anybody’s memory, and Jing having lived there all his life, save for his time in the army.

  However he came by it, it was with this pistol that Jing proceeded to shoot seventeen members of his home village in the wee hours of Friday morning. He walked calmly through the town, plinking at anybody who came out to see what the noise was about, and he did not discriminate as to sex, age, or familial relationships. By dawn, he had shot men, women, children, friends, and relatives. He had two dozen rounds of ammunition remaining for the pistol after he shot number seventeen — his butt-ugly and ignorant cousin Low Tang — but it was moot as to how many more he might have wounded or killed, given that he was overwhelmed at that point by half a dozen villagers and hacked to pieces by their sickles and scythes. The bloody tatters remaining of Jing were pounded into the hard ground under their sandals — before the six took their weapons to each other.

  The only apparent survivor of this melee had a short-lived triumph, as he was murdered shortly thereafter by a middle-aged schoolteacher wielding a pair of hedge-trimming shears, with which she deftly snipped his left carotid artery. He bled out in less than a minute, judging from the blood trail.

  The teacher then used the shears on herself, plunging them into her belly more than ten times before shock and loss of blood overcame her.

  A block away, four women were killed by a fifth when she drove a forty-eight-year-old Ford tractor into, and then back and forth over, the four until the tractor ran out of gasoline an hour later. She fell asleep sitting there.

  In the town’s only decent food market, nineteen people who had fled there to avoid the carnage were trapped inside when a teenaged girl set the place on fire. They were all cooked. The girl in turn was killed by an elderly woman who sneaked up behind her and smashed her skull with a shovel, and she in turn was slain by a very large naked man who grabbed and fell on her, suffocating her under his bulk as he lay there giggling.

  In a period of six hours, ninety-seven residents were killed, twenty-one others were wounded seriously enough so that they would later die from their injuries, and a hundred more were injured badly enough that they needed hospitalization. Nobody knew about this immediately, because the landline communication wires out of town had been cut and then burned by a man who used part of the wire to hang himself.

  The town of Longhua had seen better days.

  Thursday

  Quantico, Virginia

  Michaels looked up from his laptop and the hardcopy reports, photographs, and vids, at Jay. “How did we get this? It’s so detailed.”

  Jay said, “Some of the pictures and vids are retro-spysat and computer augs, some came from the Chinese investigating team, some from a bashed up and bloody camera found on the scene. The reports we got from my friend in the CIA, who got it like the CIA usually gets such things — they bought it from one of their Chinese computer spies set up to find such things. It’s all fresh stuff, really fresh.”

  Michaels looked back at the hardcopy picture of the women who had been murdered by tractor. They were mostly mush, and hardly recognizable as humans.

  “What do we know? And why do we at Net Force need to know it?”

  Jay said, “Longhua, China, a mountain town, a hundred and fifty kilometers or so north and east of Beijing, approaching old Mongolia. Nothing much happens in Longhua — or at least it didn’t use to.

  “According to my CIA mole, there’s another village, called, ah”—he looked at the laptop on the table in front of him—“Daru, which is a couple thousand kilometers south of Longhua, on the coast across from Formosa. Same thing happened there a few days ago. The Chinese, of course, are sweating buckets trying to keep the lid on, but our sources say it was another verse of this song. Group insanity coupled with murderous violence. Survivors in both towns tell the same tale. All of a sudden, everybody went bugfuck and started attacking everybody else, no reason. This includes those who lived to be interviewed. They were minding their own business and blap! they were enveloped in a killing rage that overwhelmed them. None of them can explain it. It just suddenly seemed like a good idea to fold, spindle, or mutilate their family and neighbors to death.”

  “What do the Chinese investigators think?”

  “They don’t have a clue. They’ve checked for drugs, poison, psychedelics in the water, diseases, the weather, earthquake activity, even bad feng shui, and they haven’t found anything. Whatever caused it came and went, and it didn’t leave any traces.”

  “And what does the CIA think?”

  “The CIA doesn’t think, Boss, it just collects data and passes it along. I have a standing order with my pal for anything weird, it comes in as a Priority One Call, which is why we got it.”

  “I’m sure your friend would be happy to hear you have such a high opinion of him. What do you think?”

  “Well, what this looks like to me is some kind of deliberate test.”

  Michaels stared into space. “And you think it is the Chinese doing it to their own people?”

  “Can’t say for sure, but why not? Take out a few, who’s gonna miss ’em? They got more than a billion more where those came from.”

  “Jay—”

  “Sorry, bad taste, I apologize.”

  “But the Chinese investigators seem surprised from these reports. Wouldn’t they know?”

  “Left hand not telling the right what it’s doing? Happens all the time, all over. State doesn’t tell the CIA. The spooks don’t tell the Army. We’re part of the FBI, and the feebs don’t tell us a whole lot of things. Why would things be any better in China? That’s assuming the investigators aren’t part of the cover-up.”

  “And why it is our problem, Jay? How does this end up floating in our punch bowl?”

  “When you asked me to poke around in that HAARP thing, this came in almost immediately. It rang a bell. You remember the guy you told me about who came by while I was camping. The scientist from HAARP?”

  “Morrison, right.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, he mentioned something about mind control and low-frequency radio waves.”

  “He said it wasn’t feasible.”

  “Maybe not. Or maybe it is. Maybe the Chinese were the ones poking around in the HAARP computers and maybe they swiped it. It just seemed awfully coincidental, given that this was exactly the kind of thing somebody would want to do if they could do it.”

  “The Chinese?”

  “Possible. They have some people who are pretty good hackers. Maybe the HAARP guys found some piece of the puzzle and the Chinese knew where to use it. Nothing for certain, and it’s kind of a stretch, but I’d check it out.”

  Michaels nodded. “I hope you are wrong. I hope nobody else makes the connection and thinks it is our problem to solve. All right. Find out what you can. If this thing in China is connected to it, I don’t wa
nt us to be caught flatfooted. At the very least, we need to be able to say we’re investigating it if somebody should ask.”

  “Gotcha, Boss. I’m on the case.”

  After Jay left, Michaels took several deep breaths. Let it be some virus they couldn’t find and not something they swiped from a U.S. computer. Please. I really don’t need this right now. Or ever…

  12

  Thursday, June 9th

  Washington, D.C.

  It was well after dark when Toni’s plane landed at Dulles. She’d had to switch from the jumbo jet to a smaller craft in New York, and she knew she’d catch hell if her mother found out she had been at JFK and hadn’t called the Bronx to at least say hello, but she couldn’t deal with that yet. Her mother would want to know all about it, what had happened with Alex, and even Guru would need more details than Toni was ready to provide. She’d thought the story was over, but maybe it wasn’t, and until she had a better sense of things, she didn’t want to start downloading it into sympathetic ears. She needed a girlfriend for that, anyhow, somebody who could listen to the gory details — not her mother or her elderly teacher. Mama Fiorella had raised a houseful of children, mostly sons, and with six kids, she certainly knew about sex, but knowing it and talking about it were two different things. Toni remembered a discussion she’d had with one of her older brothers when she’d been about nineteen. He’d been asking about women, when their mother had wandered into the room. Mama heard the words “female orgasm” and disappeared faster than Houdini stoked on methamphetamines.

  No, the conversation about Alex and sex and love would have to wait until she could pay a visit to one of her college buds, Dirisha Mae, or Mary Louise, women she’d kept in touch with since school. Women who had been there and done it themselves, and had come back to cry on her shoulder about it. The Man War, they had dubbed it in the dorm when they’d lived there. Some battles you won, some you lost, but the war itself never ended.

  The cab ride through the sticky summer night to Alex’s was incredibly fast, as of course it would be, since she was suddenly not in a real hurry to get there. Back in London, thousands of miles away, this had seemed urgent and absolutely necessary. The closer she got, the less brilliant the idea seemed. Just showing up on Alex’s doorstep, no call, no warning? What if he wasn’t home? What if he didn’t want to talk to her?

  What if he wasn’t alone?

  That had just come to her for the first time. What if he had a woman in his bed and they were giggling and playing games under the sheets?

  The grinning, green-eyed monster popped up like magic in her mind and chortled its nasty laugh. This jealousy crap was really hard to take. It wasn’t like somebody coming straight at her she could elbow or throw, it was this sneaky, insidious beast that popped up unexpectedly, stabbed her with a long trident when she wasn’t expecting it, then ran like hell before she could gather herself to react. She hated the feeling, and she really hated not being able to prevent it. Toni wasn’t altogether dense about this kind of thing. You don’t spend more than half your life learning a martial art that would allow you to kick serious butt without recognizing that you have some… control issues. She didn’t really think Alex would have found somebody else, given his track record — he hadn’t dated anybody to speak of for years after he and his ex-wife split — but you never knew. Having jumped back into the pool finally, maybe he would have found a new partner for synchronized swimming. And certainly that would screw things up, wouldn’t it?

  Toni shook her head at her thought. Okay, fine. Whatever. She wasn’t going there for some kind of tearful movie reconciliation, she was going there for some answers. Answers that Alex, by God, owed her.

  And thinking of there, all of a sudden, here they were.

  Alex’s condo was on a fairly quiet street in a solid upper-middle-class neighborhood filled with condos and houses much like his. Rich people wouldn’t stoop to live here, poor couldn’t afford to, but the residences were comfortable and in keeping with the kind of job Alex had. Nice place, nice neighborhood, and until that horrible moment in London, nice guy.

  She had to know what had happened to change that. It didn’t make any sense.

  Toni paid the cabbie, towed her single suitcase on its built-in wheels to the front door, and stood there.

  And stood there. And stood there some more.

  There were lights on inside, and it wasn’t that late. All she had to do was push the doorbell.

  She realized that she was breathing too fast, and that her hands were damp. It was a warm, humid night, but that wasn’t what was causing her to sweat. She was, she realized, afraid. And coming from a solid base of being able to protect herself, that was really scary.

  She took a deep breath, let half of it out, and gathered her resolve. She pushed the doorbell. She heard it ring. There was a space of time, how long she couldn’t say, but subjectively, about ten or fifteen thousand years.

  “Yes?”

  His voice over the intercom was the first time she’d heard him speak since he’d left London seven weeks ago. It was a sound she hadn’t realized how much she had missed until she heard it, and the simple question stunned her, so that all she could say was “Hi.”

  “Toni!? Don’t move, I’ll be right there!”

  And despite whatever she had felt, it warmed her to hear the joy in his voice.

  Gakona, Alaska

  Ventura made the rounds of his surveillance stations. He was running a basic six-person team, not counting himself, and that was not really enough, considering what his client was into, but as much as he was likely to get away with up here in the middle of nowhere. Disguised as a birdwatching club out looking for owls, it gave his people a reason to be out with binoculars and starlight scopes and cameras, but it was still something of a stretch to have them wandering around in the woods. The locals would surely notice his people, and while they had all the proper gear and had done enough quick research to fake it, they wouldn’t fool any real birders they might run into.

  Fortunately, there wasn’t much in the way of law enforcement up here, so even if somebody thought the birders were a bit odd, they weren’t likely to call the cops, and even if they did, it probably wouldn’t be the top priority for an overextended Alaskan police force. Weird-looking birdwatchers? Isn’t that redundant? What are they doing? Walking around in the woods looking through their binoculars? Oh, wow. How sinister! What, you think they’ve come to steal the trees? Smuggle Kodiak bears down into tlae lower forty-eight? C’mon!

  Ventura had installed them at the Two Moose Lodge, a relatively new fifteen-unit motel a few miles from the HAARP site, a place that looked like a bunch of log cabin condominiums. Aside from five ops tromping around outside where they could watch the comings and goings around the last room on the west end of the building where Ventura had put the client, there was an op in the room, a young woman. Armed with a short-barreled shotgun, a snub-nosed revolver, and a couple of knives, Missey White would surely be a big surprise for an unsuspecting assassin who assumed from her bubble butt and perky breasts, all of which were barely hidden under a miniskirt and halter top, that she was a piece of fluff and harmless. If the locals knew Morrison was married, they’d likely assume Missey was a girlfriend he’d brought up here into the woods for fun, where his wife wouldn’t be the wiser.

  And the wife wasn’t apt to drop by unannounced, because a pair of Ventura’s ops were parked in a rented house in Port Townsend on the Morrisons’ street, keeping an eye on Mrs. Morrison. You had to assume that if somebody came after the client, they’d probably consider a pass at his wife worthwhile, and while she wasn’t the primary client, it was just good business to watch her when she and the client were apart.

  It hadn’t taken the ops — another male and female team — but a few hours to figure out that Shannon Morrison, nee Shannon Bell, wasn’t the world’s most faithful spouse. Since they’d begun the surveillance on Monday, Mrs. Morrison had visited a young and well-built leatherworke
r, one Ray Duncan, and stayed in his shop behind a locked door three times, for more than an hour each visit. It was the opinion of Ventura’s ops that judging from the flushed face and big smile when she left, Mrs. Morrison was not being custom-fitted for moccasins — unless she was doing that with both feet in the air while lying on Duncan’s couch.

  Ventura saw no reason to mention this to his client. Ray Duncan, twenty-seven, had been a resident of the town for more than ten years, long before the Morrisons had moved there, and a background check of the man showed nothing more illegal than a couple of traffic tickets and a dismissed bust for a single marijuana joint in Seattle when he’d been eighteen.

  Mrs. Morrison’s extramarital activities weren’t relevant to protecting the client. Yet, anyway.

  “Situation?” Ventura asked.

  The man to whom he was speaking looked to be about sixty, gray and grizzled, wearing a fisherman’s vest and floppy-brimmed canvas hat, overalls, and boots, and a pair of binoculars and a digital cam dangling from around his neck. A battered copy of Peterson’s Guide to Birds of North America stuck out of a vest pocket next to a small flashlight.

  The older man laughed. “Well, let me see. About thirty minutes ago, something that looked like a big rat ran behind the garbage bin over there. Maybe it was a nutria or a possum — zoology is not my strong suit. And fifteen minutes ago, a light went on in the bathroom of unit number five, stayed on for two minutes, then went out. What else? Oh, yeah, a couple of real big mosquitoes buzzed me. That’s as good as it’s gotten.”

  Ventura gave him a tight professional grin in return. “You rather be shooting it out with the Mexican drug dealers again?”

  “No, but if they were all as exciting as this one, I’d have to start taking Viagra just to keep my attention up. This is going to be a cakewalk.”

  “You said that about the Mexicans at first.”

  The older man looked at him. “You expect things to warm?”