29
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Thorn sat at the head of the conference table, with Jay Gridley and Abe Kent sitting across from each other to his left and right. Thorn said, “All right, Jay, if you’ll update us, please?”
Jay nodded. “Not a whole lot new. Most of what I’ve been chasing has run to dead ends. I haven’t been able to chase the game-maker down.”
He paused, taking a moment to make eye contact with General Kent as well. “There are two lines of inquiry that I can see might still pay off, though there is a possibility they lead to the same place. First, there’s the gun that killed the Army guy and the Metro cops. I’ve narrowed down the possibilities to one good one, but I haven’t been able to pin it to the wall yet. The gun was bought under a phony name and ID and I’m working on that.”
Thorn nodded. “Go on.”
“Second, there’s the dead terrorist found in the burning truck down in Kentucky. We have an ID on him, including his name and CV. He was a Special Forces guy, an Army Ranger, by the name of Dallas R. Stark. He was doing soldier-of-fortune and security work in the Middle East two years ago when State lost track of him. I am running down his old military unit, guys he worked with in the Middle East, family and childhood friends, all the usual stuff. Since we know he was using a phony passport, otherwise he couldn’t have gotten back into the U.S., it could be that he was the guy who bought the gun and shot people with it. That wouldn’t be real helpful. If I can pin the Alien Cowboy—sorry, that’s a characterization from my search-scenario—I should be able to figure it out. If he matches Stark, then that line ends. If he doesn’t, we have another player. Stark has been somewhere for the last two years, and since he wasn’t alone when the terrorists hit Braverman, if we can link him to anybody in that group, that’ll be good.”
Thorn nodded again. “Anything else?”
“Not really. I’ve been working with Captain Lewis at the Pentagon, but most of what we’ve done has been eliminating stuff, not coming up with any arrows pointing in the right direction. She’s pretty sharp, though. She spotted some things before I did.”
“General?”
Kent smiled. “I don’t know enough to ask intelligent questions. General Ellis has indicated that General Hadden is about to blow a gasket and I’m supposed to hurry things up, but since Jay is already going as fast as anybody can go, me saying, ‘Go faster!’ ain’t gonna help.” He nodded at Jay, then added, “Although, when you do catch these guys, it would be to my benefit and General Ellis’s if you allowed in a report somewhere as how our urging somehow expedited the process, even though we all know it didn’t.”
Jay grinned at that. “I can do that.”
“Thanks, Jay,” Kent said.
Thorn looked around at the small meeting. “Okay, gentlemen,” he said, “I think that’s it for now.”
Kent and Jay left.
Thorn leaned back in his chair. Working for the military had one big advantage—you weren’t running around all over the place trying to stomp out little fires. This was their priority, and it wasn’t going to be diluted by having to attend to other things until it got resolved. Nobody at Net Force was going to be hunting down Internet scam artists or porno-sellers, or people breaking into banks—those were somebody else’s problems now. On the one hand, that was good. But on the other hand . . .
Eventually, the organization of Net Force would have to change. How necessary was the staff they had if their workload was dramatically decreased? What was the need of a military unit of what was now Marines for domestic problems? As National Guard, Net Force’s military had been at least semilegal; as Marines, that got a bit more iffy, even under the relaxed antiterrorism statutes of Homeland Security. A unit of Marines charging across a mall parking lot to kick in a door? That wasn’t going to play well on the evening news—the idea of a strong military operating at home hadn’t been high on the Founding Fathers’ list of things that were good for the country. The Marines were supposed to go to foreign shores to clear the roads for the Army to follow, and, if need be, help defend the U.S. from invaders, but when was the last time the U.S. had been invaded? 1812? Or did the Alamo count, even though Texas wasn’t a state for another eight or nine years?
What Thorn foresaw was a dismantling of Net Force as a separate unit, with the pieces being mainstreamed into other commands. Some of his people would stick around, some would not. In his case, probably not. There wasn’t a lot for him to do with all the generals around him. The DoD ground slow, but fine, and how much longer would there be a Net Force as such?
Not long, Thorn figured. He’d have to quit or be fired, and while it didn’t really make any difference on one level, he’d rather leave the party before they kicked him out. . . .
Well, he had taken on the job, and done it as best he could. He had served his country, given something back, but he didn’t need the work. Maybe it was time for him to smile and walk away. Marry Marissa, go and play for a while. Travel, see the world, get to know the woman he loved.
There were certainly worse ways to spend your time.
The Fretboardμ
Washington, D.C.
As Kent started to uncase his guitar, flipping latches open, he glanced at Jen. “What’s the problem?” he said.
Jen looked up at him. “How do you know I have a problem?”
“Nothing specific. It’s like there’s a . . . darkness around you.” He shrugged.
She played a series of arpeggios up the neck of the guitar, and they sounded somehow sad to him. “Minor chords,” she said. “For when your mood is low.”
Kent didn’t say anything. One thing he had learned from being married was that there were times to speak and times to keep his mouth shut. If she was going to tell him what was bothering her, she would—pushing it wouldn’t help.
She stopped playing. “An old enemy of mine died recently,” she said.
He kept silent. Enemy? Jen? That didn’t seem likely.
“When I was a girl, in junior high, I was a geek—already learning how to play classical guitar, no interest in pop music. Probably a good reason for that—this was the late seventies, when disco was still hot—‘Stayin’ Alive,’ ‘Saturday Night Fever,’ like that. The only pop song I learned was Randy Newman’s ‘Short People,’ and that’s because my best friend at the time was just pushing five feet tall.”
Kent smiled.
“People would see me sitting in a empty classroom practicing, and they’d ask me to play ‘Dust in the Wind,’ or ‘How Deep Is Your Love,’ and I had no interest in any of that. ‘Romanza’? Sure. I’d even try ‘Canon in D,’ though technically you can’t do it on one guitar by yourself. And anything by Bach I could manage. But if you wanted Barry Gibb, I was not your girl, thank you very much.”
Her hand moved lightly on the strings but didn’t make a sound. “It was kind of lonely, not being part of any of the cliques, but that’s where I was. Then I met another classical music fan one day, a girl my age, and since we were the only two people we knew at the school who even liked the stuff, much less played it—she was a cellist—there wasn’t any way we weren’t gonna be friends.”
He waited.
She looked at him. “Elizabeth Ann Braun. She wore braces, her hair in pigtails, and was a short, skinny little thing who never got any taller. We hung out, we played music, we discussed boys, with whom we had almost no experience. We did our homework together. Her mother was divorced, she’d never known her father, and she was half again as geeky as I was. Beth liked poetry—she had memorized ‘The Raven’ and used to go down the halls at school reciting it aloud, giving everybody who looked at her the evil eye.”
He smiled.
She smiled, too. “Those were good days. We gloried in our dweebness—we felt superior to all the mundane jocks and big-hair girls all trying to look like Farrah Fawcett. We thought they were all wasted space. Fourteen-year-old girls with superiority complexes, and we were our own clique, just the two of us, we lived in each other’s pockets, finished each other’s sentences, even had our periods together. Friends to our cores.”
Kent nodded but stayed silent. She was on a roll and he didn’t need to oil the machine.
“We stayed that way through junior high, high school, and the first few months of college. Then she got into a yelling match with a music professor who wouldn’t let her take an advanced class she wanted to take without a required course. Pissed her off so bad she quit school. She had a full-ride music scholarship—it was a state school—but she just . . . left. And to complete shooting herself in the foot, she joined the Army. Didn’t tell me until after she had done it.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, that military is the lowest job on the totem pole, all right. Below the guy who cleans out Porta Potties.”
Jen laughed. “No offense. It just wasn’t for Beth.”
“No offense taken. What happened?”
“She hated it. Really hated it. Discipline was not her thing. So she just . . . left. The Army doesn’t much care for that, once you sign on, apparently.”
“No. They don’t.”
“She came home, hid out in my apartment, sneaked back and forth to her mother’s. Eventually, the FBI came looking for her. Apparently, desertion is a federal offense.”
“Yep.”>
“Scared the hell out of me when the FBI agents showed up on my doorstep one day. They rattled me good—threatened me with dire things if they found out I knew where Beth was, or was helping her. Really scared me because, at that moment, she was hiding in my bathroom, not twenty feet away.”
“The weed of crime bears bitter fruit,” he said.
“What?”
“Sorry. That’s what the Shadow used to say on the radio.”
“Yeah, well, it was bitter enough I didn’t like the taste of it. I told Beth she needed to get this straightened out, that I certainly wasn’t planning on spending any quality time in a federal pen for helping her.”
“Prudent.”
“I thought so. Beth saw it as a kind of betrayal. We were friends, I should be willing to put myself on the line for her, even though she had done something stupid to get herself in trouble in the first place. We had words.”
“Ah.”>
Jen nodded to herself, lost in the memory. “Yeah. The thing was, I had blossomed a bit by the time I got to college. Filled out a little, found there were other music geeks, some of them boys, a whole department full of them. I had acquired a boyfriend. My first love.”
“I’m jealous.”
“Harold was tall, reedy, very talented as a pianist, and, I thought, in love with me. We had discussed engagement, marriage, blending our music careers together, the whole nine yards.”
“But it didn’t work out,” he said.
“No. Beth was really upset with me for not being more supportive. She had also ripened some, and while she never got taller, she had developed some curves and learned how to use them.”
Kent could see where this was going, but he said nothing, letting her tell it in her own way.
“So my best friend seduced my boyfriend and convinced him to run away with her. He left me a note:
“ ‘Jenny, I’m sorry, but Beth and I are leaving together. She needs our support and since she can’t get it here, we think it best that we go. Love, Harold.’ ”
“Ow.”
“Oh, yeah, big-time ‘ow.’ I’d never had a boyfriend before and had never been dumped, much less for my best girlfriend. I fell apart. Had no clue how to handle things. Dropped out of school, went home to Mama, and spent a month locked in my room crying. I lost twenty pounds. Never even touched my guitar the whole time.”
Her hand moved again, still silent on the strings. “Eventually the tears dried up, I started playing again, and picked back up at school, but it was a pretty miserable time for me.”
“I can understand that.” He could see she was upset by the memory, even now.
“Beth used Harold to support her just long enough to find a better ride. She dumped Harold, and married a well-to-do lawyer.
“Harold eventually got a music degree and went to teach somewhere out west—Colorado or Wyoming, like that. He called me a couple times. I hung up on him.” She smiled, but it was a sad, twisted thing. “Beth’s husband was apparently a pretty good attorney. He worked a deal with the Army, and she was discharged dishonorably, but didn’t have to serve any time. A few months later, she called me. She was living a hundred miles or so away. Said she was sorry about what she had done, wanted to make amends, patch things up, get back to being friends.”
Kent shook his head.
“Yeah, that’s what I felt. But I was sweet. Butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth. ‘Sure, okay. Give me your number and address. I’ll call you.’ ”
“But . . . ?”
“The Devil would have been ice-skating in Hell before I ever called her. She tried again a few times, eventually gave it up.”
“You never forgave her.”
“Some crimes earn you a life sentence,” she said. “But I kind of got past the bitterness. We weren’t going to be friends, but eventually I was able to get up in the morning without wishing she’d be hit by a train. I kept a loose kind of track, through mutual family and acquaintances. She had a hard life. Divorced and married three times, four kids, two of whom got into drugs and wound up in jail. Her last husband was a long-haul truck driver. She gave up the cello, drank too much, smoked too much, and got fat.” She paused, her eyes far away.
“One day last month, Beth apparently went out to collect the newspaper, and she had a heart attack and fell over dead in her driveway. Same age as I am.”
Nothing for him to say to that.
“It’s kind of hard to believe,” she said. “She’d been dead three weeks before I heard. I somehow thought I’d sense it if that happened, though I didn’t expect it to happen for a long time. She was my best friend, then my worst enemy, and then just . . . not much of anything to me. She was a huge part of my growing up. My best memories of that age include her; also my worst memories. I still can’t quite wrap my mind around the idea that she’s dead. I mean, we never wiped the slate clean, and on some level I always hoped she would realize how badly she had behaved, and would have come and fallen on her knees and admitted it and begged forgiveness.”
“Would you have forgiven her?”
“I don’t know. I would have liked to have the choice, though.”
He nodded again. He understood.
She sighed. “You know why I told you this story?”
He shook his head.
“So you’ll know I’m not an altogether nice person before we get too far down the road. I held that grudge for a long time. I wasn’t a cosmic, realized being who could look at my friend’s youthful mistakes and just let it go. Eighteen-year-olds aren’t that mature, I wouldn’t want to be judged at that age, but I was angry and I stayed angry, and even now I can get pissed off all over again if I think about it too long.”
He smiled. “What—you’re human like the rest of us? For shame.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I know you had me up on this goddess pedestal and all.”
He took his guitar out of the case and looked at her. “Remind me to tell you the story about my brother’s daughter some time. She married a guy who was a Christian Scientist, she converted, and she later died of breast cancer. At her funeral, I heard him say that it was Susie’s own fault she died—her faith wasn’t strong enough. If he hadn’t been the father of their five-year-old child, I think I might have killed him.”
She shook her head. “Couple of fine old retreads, aren’t we?”
“Take it slow and you can drive a long way on retreads,” he said.