27
Tuesday, June 14th
Quantico, Virginia
Quantico, Virginia
On the phone, Michaels realized he was all knotted
up as he sat hunched forward in his office chair. He tried to
relax. Probably an oxymoron, that, trying to relax. Nonetheless, he
took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and allowed his shoulders
to slump with his exhalation. It helped a little. He said, “So
what’s your take on it, John?”
Howard didn’t sound as if he had been shot and
almost killed only hours ago. He said, “Morrison is our boy. No
reason for him to resist the marshals otherwise, and damned sure no
reason for him to have shooters on hand to resist with. If
we can keep him away from HAARP or any of the other transmitters
like it, we can stop the attacks.”
Michaels asked the question that had been bothering
him. “Why would he do this? Drive people to a killing
madness?”
There was a pause. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s crazy
himself.”
Michaels sighed. The man hadn’t seemed crazy when
he’d been sitting right here in this office, talking about this
stuff. In retrospect, it was obvious that Morrison had been
covering his ass, trying to misdirect Net Force, and except for
Jay’s talking to a security guard, he’d done a good job of it. So
he wasn’t that crazy. He’d known they might come looking for
him, known it and thought to head it off in advance. Didn’t sound
crazy.
Why had he done it? To see if he could? Once
would have proven that, twice made it certain. Three times was
overkill. If he had planned on extortion, he’d screwed up—they knew
who he was, and had an idea of what it was he had done, if not
actually how he’d pulled it off, so any threat he had in mind was
dead—especially since he no longer had the tools to do it at his
disposal. This wasn’t something you could cobble together with a
kit from RadioShack.
So far, Jay hadn’t been able to find anything else
that directly connected Morrison to the events in China or
Portland. Hell, if he hadn’t come in, Net Force wouldn’t have had a
clue about any of this. Maybe the guy was too smart for his own
good. What he’d overlooked had been so simple, so basic, that it
seemed incredibly stupid on the face of it. Like that mission to
Mars a dozen years or so ago where the scientists had mixed up
English measures with metric and plowed the little vessel right
into the surface of the planet at speed because the calculations
had been so basic nobody had even thought about them. Overlooking
something as simple as a security guard’s log was the kind of thing
a scientist just might do because it would never occur to him. A
mistake so basic he never even thought about it.
If Jay was right about the technology and the
possibility of using it in such a manner, then Morrison had had the
means and opportunity, but what had the motive been?
“Any leads on where he went?” Howard asked.
“Not yet. The mainline ops are on the case, and
we’ve got bulletins out to every state police agency in the U.S.,
as well as to the Canadian authorities. Flight plans in Alaska and
the Pacific Northwest are all being checked.”
“I’m going to be out of here in a day or so,”
Howard said. “I’ll get to the office—”
“You will go home, General. We will run this guy
down doing the things we know how to do. What we haven’t done
enough of lately—computer detection.”
“I’ll be okay to work.”
“Not according to your wife you won’t. We’ll keep
you posted as to progress.”
Howard wasn’t happy with that, but there wasn’t
much he could do about it. They said their good-byes.
Michaels headed to Jay’s office. He tapped on the
door and stuck his head into the room. Gridley was off-line. “Hey,
Boss.”
“I just got off the com with John Howard. He is
going to be okay, so the doctors tell him.”
Jay relaxed a little. “Good to hear it.”
“I trust you are well on the way to catching the
man responsible for shooting our teammate?”
Jay smiled. “Oh, sure. Well on the way.”
“Which means?”
“We’ve got all his personal records. We know where
he’s been and what he’s done that required use of his credit cards,
or his driver’s license. We have his work records, too, but there
are some gaps. He took out a second mortgage on his house and
cleaned out his bank accounts, so he has a big chunk of cash, and
not everybody requires ID for every transaction. He could have
bought a cheap car, rented a private plane, maybe even gotten
himself some phony ID for whatever.
“We have a description of the guy who was with
Morrison from the guards at HAARP, but ‘your average-looking
science geek’ isn’t a lot of help. No surveillance cameras managed
to catch an image of ‘Dick Grayson,’ and it was ole Dick who must
have done the shooting—unless Morrison has a stash of guns we don’t
know about and also practiced his fast draw without anybody we
talked to knowing about it.”
Jay smiled. “Hey, you know who Dick Grayson
is?”
“Robin, the boy wonder,” Michaels said.
Jay looked disappointed, but he continued: “FBI
field agents have questioned Morrison’s wife, and she doesn’t know
anything. Really. According to the reports I just read, she isn’t
exactly the brightest bulb on the string—she doesn’t know what her
husband does for a living, and it is the opinion of the
interviewing agents that she wouldn’t know HAARP from a
harpoon.”
“What else?”
“Nothing else. We have a respected scientist who
apparently figured out how to drive people crazy using a giant
walkie-talkie, then up and did it. We know when, and we think we
sort of know generally how, but not why.”
“Conjecture?”
“I dunno, Boss. Doesn’t make any sense to me.
Revenge, power, money—those are the big motivating factors that
come to mind.”
Michaels said, “Anybody ever screw him over so bad
he’d want this kind of revenge?”
“Not that I’ve seen. His ex-wife lives in Boston.
If he wanted to get her, he missed by three thousand miles. No
alimony, no kids, and the new trophy wife is a lot prettier,
anyhow. He lost his funding on a research project, but got a higher
paying job right after. ”
“Power?”
“Never had an ambition to run things, far as I can
tell.”
“Money, then?”
“How does zapping a couple of Chinese villages and
then downtown Portland get him rich? Extortion, maybe? But that
wouldn’t be too bright, ’cause he’d have to know the authorities
would be on his tail forever for multiple murder. He’d never be
able to relax, it’s too high-profile. Too late for that now,
anyhow, we have the gun. Ammunition is no good without it, and he
can’t walk into another of these radio palaces and ask pretty
please to use the transmitter, can he?”
No, it didn’t make a lot of sense.
Michaels had a sudden thought. “Suppose you wanted
to buy a new computer system, something experimental, way ahead of
what everybody else had?”
“Yeah?”
“How would you go about buying it if you weren’t
sure what it would do?”
“Sit down and put it through its paces,” Jay said.
“Crank it up to high and let it fly, find out what it would
do—ah.”
Michaels saw that Jay was going down the same path.
“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe that’s what Morrison was doing. Maybe he
was showing it to a potential customer. How much you figure such a
thing might be worth, to the right customer? The power to drive
your enemies bonkers?”
“Damn,” Jay said.
“Yeah. I think we just might have found ourselves
an even uglier can of worms. As long as it is Morrison, we get him
eventually. But what if he passes it along to somebody else?
Somebody we can’t get so easily?”
“That could be a problem.”
“It already is a problem. Ours. As of now, this is
your reason for living. Hit the net. Get all the help you can get.
Find this guy, Jay. And find him fast.”
“Yeah.”
Michaels looked around. “You seen Toni? I kind of
lost track of her around lunchtime.”
“Uh, no. I haven’t, uh, seen her.” He looked back
at his computer.
Michaels said, “I’m hoping to get her to come back
to work. I think she’s considering it seriously.”
“Really. That’s, uh, good, Boss.” Something on
Jay’s desk suddenly seemed fascinating to him. And something in his
tone of voice didn’t sound quite right.
“What?” Michaels said.
“What, ‘what’?” Jay responded, still not looking
up.
Michaels realized he was maybe not the most
perceptive man in the world when it came to reading people, but Jay
Gridley wasn’t one of the world’s great adepts when it came to
hiding his feelings, either.
“You aren’t telling me something I need to
hear.”
“Boss, I—”
“I have a lot on my mind right now, Jay. How about
you don’t add worrying the unknown to it?”
Jay blew out a sigh. “All right. Last time I was in
the feeb mainframe, I left myself a couple of doors, you know, just
in case we had problems like when the Russian got into the
government systems?”
“Skip the rationalizations, you’re a hacker to the
bone. It’s what we pay you for, remember.”
“Yeah, well, I kind of left myself a door in the
director’s office subsystem.”
“And you found something I need to know but that
you don’t want to tell me. What—am I going to get fired?”
“No, no, nothing like that. It’s just that, well,
Toni had a meeting with the director today. At one.”
Michaels’s immediate urge was to cover and say,
Oh, sure, I knew about that. But since he hadn’t known, and
since there seemed to be more, he didn’t say that. Instead, he
said, “And now you can drop the other shoe.”
“You really ought to hear it from her, Boss.”
“Maybe so, but I’m going to hear it from
you.”
Jay shook his head. “The director just put in the
e-forms for a new staff job in her office. Special assistant. She
was offering the job to Toni.”
Michaels blinked. “And she took the job?”
“Not that I can tell.”
Michaels felt an absurd sense of relief. A job
offer, fine, that was no big deal. Sure, she should have told him
about it, but, hey, things were busy, and maybe she’d planned to
brush the director off before she mentioned it. That would be like
her. Nothing to worry about.
Yeah? Then why is your stomach suddenly all
twisted and cold?
Anchorage, Alaska
When he used his phone to check his e-mail, Tyrone
Howard saw a priority call from Jay Gridley. Huh. What was that
about?
It took forever to scroll the message on the tiny
screen, but it was pretty straightforward. Jay had put out a call
to all his contacts on the web. He was looking for some
information, and he was asking for help.
Tyrone stared at the phone. What seemed like a
thousand years ago, he had helped Jay chase down a bad guy in VR.
He and Jay knew each other from way back, ever since Tyrone’s dad
had been at Net Force. Of course, that time he’d helped Jay had
been when he was spending six or seven hours a day jacked in to his
computer, something he hadn’t done in a while. These days, he was
on-line two hours a day, tops, almost nothing, just enough time to
read his mail, run through a few VR rooms, and maybe a few minutes
of an on-line game. But if Jay was asking, Tyrone bet it had
something to do with his dad getting shot, and he was ready to sit
down, plug in, and get the data flowin’ fine and fast for that.
This was the guy who had pack-pronged Portland, killed people, and
ruined the championships, too. A dragfoot juicesucker who needed to
be shorted out, no feek. He had his laptop with him, in his pack in
his dad’s room. He’d get it and get on-line.
Nadine could help him. She didn’t know a whole lot
about computers, but he could take her along and show her as they
went. He was not as sharp as he’d been, but he could still lubefoot
the net okay. He’d help Jay and they would catch the sucker who had
shot his dad.