27
Tuesday, June 14th
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.