Point of Impact (24 page)

"But the recording is gone--" Tad began.

Drayne cut him off, but his voice was quiet. "So it is. But the people who work there aren't. I know Steve, the owner, and he might remember that a couple of times when Zeigler was there, he and I came or went together. And if Steve or Tom or Dick or Harry or anybody else in the place remembers that, then my name is gonna come up in a conversation with the feds or cops. And even if Steve
doesn't
remember, the cops
will
get a list of members and go looking for a connection. This is a cop lesson I learned at my daddy's knee: When you don't have anything, you check
everything
. And sooner or later, they are gonna send somebody out to talk to folks on the list, just routine, and there will be a knock on our door. And I have a nice made-up job that fortunately I didn't mention on my application at the gym, one that's all nice and electronically vouched for, so maybe they can poke at it a little and it might even hold up, but ...
What is the fucking job, Tad?"

"Oh, shit."

"Oh, shit, yeah. I'm a
chemist.
Think that'll, you know, raise any red flags or ring any bells? Illicit drugs and a chemist? There are millions of test tube jockeys in the world, but how many of us working out at the same gym as the dead guy they are investigating up the wazoo? Even the stupidest cop alive could run with that one.

"The feds might not be the fastest mill wheels in the world, but they grind exceedingly fine. They are plodders, but that's what they do best, and if they get this far, we are fucked. Even if the house is as clean as a wetware assembly room. If they can't
prove
anything, they'll know who I am, and that will throw a big rock into the gears. I won't be able to go pee from now on without seeing an underwater camera lens in the toilet bowl looking up at me."

Tad shook his head. "I'm sorry, man."

Drayne shook his head in response. "I know, Tad, I know. And it's done. Now, we have to see if we can manage some kind of damage control."

"How?"

Drayne looked at him. "You know the guy in Texas, down in Austin?"

"The programmer who buys two caps every three or four weeks, for him and his girlfriend."

"Yeah, him. I read about him in
Time.
He's supposed to be a genius, supposed to be able to make a computer sit up and bark like a dog, if he wants. Got his start hacking into secure systems just for the fun of it."

"So?"

"So, we make him a deal. He does us a favor, we supply him with whatever rings his bell, for free."

"Dude is richer than Midas, he doesn't need the money."

"But I know how geniuses think," Drayne said. "Especially outlaw geniuses. He'll do it so we'll owe him, and in the doing, he can prove he's still got the chops he started out with. He gets to exercise the old muscles and feel like a badass outlaw again."

"What is he gonna do that'll help?"

"He's going to make us invisible. Get ahold of him."

"Now?"

"Right now."

The more he thought about it, the better he liked the idea. It could work. If they moved fast enough, it definitely could work.

Chapter
24.

Baghdad, Iraq

Sweat ran down John Howard's face.

In the heat of battle, the SIPEsuit's polypropyl/spidersilk layers didn't get rid of the perspiration nearly fast enough to keep you dry. The weight of the ceramic plates wasn't bad, but it didn't help cool things any. Even during a tepid night, such as it was now, the helmet's sweatband quickly got soaked, and you had to blink away the moisture that oozed down into your eyes. And you couldn't raise the clear face shield to let some air in, because the heads-up display wouldn't work without the shield, and neither would the seventh-gen spookeyes built into the armored plastic.

The good thing was, night was no cover for the bad guys. The latest-release intensifiers in the starlight scopes were powerful enough to let you see with the slightest city glow, and the suit's computer false-colored the images so they didn't have that washed-out, pale green look. The blast shield cutouts had been upgraded so that if some yahoo threw a flare or a flashbang, the filters would pop on-line within a hundredth of a second, saving you from a sudden nova-lume that would sear your eyeballs blind in a heartbeat. Though this was something of a mixed blessing.

"You can run, Abdul, but you can't hide," Howard said.

From the LOSIR headset, Sergeant Pike's voice: "Sir?"

"Disregard that," Howard said. He shifted his grip on the tommy gun. His good-luck piece wore the pistol grip forestock and a fifty round drum, weighed a ton, and it took a little practice to use properly, especially if you were used to the cheek-spot-weld, right-elbow-high, left-hand-under-the-foregrip the Army liked to teach long-arm shooters when Howard had gone through basic all those years ago.

"Sir, I make it nine ceejays coming in through that alley to the left."

Howard's own heads-up display verified that. "Copy, Sergeant. That's two each and one left over. Wake up troops and mind your fields of fire."

The other three men with Howard did not respond. They knew what they were supposed to do.

Howard clicked the selector onto full auto and raised the finned barrel with its Cutts compensator over the top of the rusty oil drum he had chosen for cover. The old drum was full of what looked like brick and concrete fragments, so it was cover and not just concealment. If the enemy spotted him and directed fire his way, he did have some protection.

The first of the nine soldiers appeared at the mouth of the alleyway. They stopped, and the leader held up his hand, signaling for the others to halt. He looked around, didn't see Howard or the rest of his quad, then hand-signaled for the rest to advance.

Howard touched a recessed control on his helmet and shut off the spookeyes. The bright-as-noon scene went immediately dim, but there was still enough ambient light to make out the shadowy forms of the enemy troopers. He slitted his eyelids, to make the scene even darker, forcing his pupil to dilate wider.

When the ninth soldier appeared, one of Howard's quad tossed a five-second photon flare. Bright, actinic white light strobed, casting tall, hard-edged shadows from the startled soldiers.

Howard waited a beat, then opened his eyes wider.

His men let go with their subguns, and the enemy soldiers returned fire, yelling and blasting away.

Howard indexed the two in his assigned field of fire and gave them each a three-round burst.

In the light of the still burning photon flare, the nine went down like pins in a bowling alley. The scene fell quiet. The five-second flare winked out, and it went dark, much darker than before. Even though he had been using hardball .45 auto ammo with low-flash powder, the after-images of his fire decreased his vision. Howard touched the control, and the spookeyes turned night into day again. The heat sigs on the downed soldiers showed no movement. Good. A perfect ambush.

"End sim," Howard said.

The Baghdad street scene vanished, and John Howard removed the VR headset and leaned back in his office chair. The exercise had been designed to practice with the spookeyes, and it had gone as planned. The ability to see in almost total darkness was a great help, but there were some drawbacks. Because of the automatic filters built into the scopes, any scenario that included random, repeated weapons fire effectively rendered the spookeyes useless, just as it did wolf ear hearing protectors.

With a single bright flash of light, the scopes' filters would kick on long enough to diminish the light to safe levels, then open back up. This worked great for an explosion. However, with multiple flashes of bright orange muzzle blasts going off all around you, the filters would kick on and off, going from light to dark so fast it was extremely disorienting. The effect was rather like being surrounded by strobe lights all timed differently. Early sims showed the accuracy rate of troopers firing in such a scenario dropped dramatically.

So different tactics had been employed to get around the problem.

At first, the scientific types had tried to rig the scopes to drop filters and leave them down for five or ten seconds. Unfortunately, this made the scene too dark to see anything except much-dimmed muzzle flashes, your own or the enemy's. Spray and pray was a sucker's game.

They tried adjusting this, but since firefights sometimes lasted for five seconds, sometimes a lot longer, the results were less than satisfactory.

They also tried raising the gain threshold, so it took more to cause the shields to deploy, but even an amplified kitchen match in the dark would be enough to temporarily blind a soldier.

The scientists and engineers scratched their heads and went back to their CAD programs.

It fell to the men and women in the field to come up with a better way, like it usually did. Using the scopes to find and track an enemy, then reverting to the old-fashioned method seemed to be the best approach. At least it worked in VR scenarios and at the range. How it would work in the real world remained to be seen, at least for his units.

Howard sighed. He had run dozens of war game scenarios over the past few weeks, and there was only so much of that a man could take. In his time as the commander of Net Force's military arm, there had been slack periods, but never as slow as it had been these last few weeks. He knew he was supposed to be happy about that, the idea that peace was better than war, and he was, but--

--sitting around and doing nothing but figurative paper clip counting was boring.

Of course, he wasn't as likely to get shot sitting around and doing nothing, and that had been on his mind lately, too.

Washington, D.C.

Toni tried doing her
djurus
while sitting on the couch, just using her upper body, as Guru had told her. Yeah, she could do it, and yeah, it was better than nothing, but it was like taking a shower with a raincoat on. You couldn't really feel the water.

She stood, moved the coffee table out of the way, and did a little stretching, nothing major, just to limber up her back and hips some. The doctor hadn't said she couldn't stretch, just nothing heavy-duty, right?

The elastic of her stretch pants cut into her belly as she sat and bent over to touch her toes. Damn, she hated this, being fat!

After five minutes or so of loosening up, she felt better. Okay, so she could do a few
djurus
with the footwork, the
langkas,
if she went real slow, right? No sudden moves, no real effort, it wouldn't be any more stressful than walking if she was careful, right?

For about ten minutes, she practiced, moving slowly, no power, just doing the first eight
djurus.
She skipped the forms where she had to drop into a squat, number five and number seven, and she felt fine.

Then, of course, she had to go pee, something that happened five times an hour, it seemed.

When she finished and started to leave the bathroom, she looked into the toilet.

The bowl had blood in it, as did the tissue she had just used.

Fear grabbed her in an icy hand.

She ran to call the doctor.

Austin, Texas

Tad drove the rental car, Bobby riding shotgun and giving him directions.

"Okay, stay on I-35 going south until we cross Lake Whatchamacallit, and look for a sign says Texas State School for the Deaf. We have to find Big Stacy Park--as opposed to Little Stacy Park, which is just up the road a piece--then Sunset Lane, then we turn onto--you piece of Chinese shit!"

This last part was accompanied by Bobby slapping the little GPS unit built into the car's dashboard.

"What?"

"The sucker glitched, the map disappeared!" Bobby hammered the malfunctioning GPS unit again. "Come on!"

"I don't see why we had to come here in person," Tad said. "We could have called or done this by e-mail over the web."

"No, we couldn't have. The feds can monitor phones and e-mail, even encrypted stuff. They were able to do it for years before the public even realized they could and already were. Besides, this guy wants an insurance policy. He wants to see our faces. He'll know the name, and he can use that, but we could change our identities."

"We could change our faces, too."

Bobby hit the GPS again. "Ah, there it is. I got the map again." He looked at Tad. "Yeah, we could, and he'll know that. But the thing is, he wants us to come to him with our hat in our hand and say please. Then he dazzles us with his techno-wizardry, and we owe him big-time and forever. It's an ego thing. Besides, as long as we're in business, he'll have something on us, doesn't matter what our names are or what we look like. We have the market cornered on Thor's Hammer, remember? Whoever is selling it is gonna be us, no matter what we call ourselves."

"Yeah. I have to say, though, this might be out of the frying pan and into the fire, man. Even if it works, we're trading one problem for another one."

"I don't think so," Bobby said.

Tad said, "There's the lake, up ahead."