Net Force

anything they couldn't handle on their own. The in-house medic sutured the cut on Toni's arm — it took eighteen stitches inside and out — sprayed it with clear statskin, gave her a tetanus shot, and told her to have the sutures removed in five days. X-rays of Michaels's leg showed that his bullet wound was a through-and-through. It had hit him slightly to the outside of the right thigh, glanced off the femur without breaking it and exited just under the outer edge of his buttock, all without doing any major damage — except for a couple of holes the size of his little finger's tip. The doctor cleaned and bandaged the wounds, but didn't sew them up; gave him a tetanus shot and a pair of crutches, and advised Michaels to avoid playing soccer for the next couple of weeks. He had his nurse give them samples of pain tablets, and told them they would hurt more tomorrow than they did right now. If they wanted to go and spend a couple of hours in the local ER to get a second opinion, that was up to them.

Both Toni and Michaels declined the ER trip.

Instead, they were back in Michaels's office. He sat on the couch, resting on his good hip. Toni stood by the door.

'Something bothering you, Alex?'

'Other than getting shot?'

'Yes.'

He said, 'I didn't feel particularly heroic in that locker room.'

'Excuse me?'

'I should have done more.'

'You came to help me. You charged a killer with a gun and you were unarmed. You managed to shoot her after you were wounded. How heroic do you think you need to be? You planning on leaping tall buildings in a single bound?'

He gave her a small smile. 'Yeah. Well. Still, it kinda felt like Larry and Curly catch a killer,' Michaels said.

She looked blank.

'Two of the Three Stooges,' he said. 'Hey, Larry! Hey, Moe! Woowoowoowoo!'

'Oh, yeah. My brothers used to watch those old vids. They must be a male thing. I never thought they were funny. Too violent.' She smiled at the irony.

'I'm really sorry about your friend, the FBI trainee.'

'Yeah.'

There was a long pause. Then: 'You believe her?' he said. 'About Steve Day?'

Toni shrugged. 'I don't know. She confessed to Genaloni and ‘some others.' Why would she lie about Day?'

'Maybe to screw with our heads,' Michaels said.

'We have to consider that. Did you believe her?'

He nodded. 'Yeah, I did. I didn't think Day's murder was her style before, and this confirmed it for me.'

'At least she won't be coming after you again.'

'No. But what that means is, somebody else is responsible for Day.'

'Somebody who apparently wanted us to think the mob did it,' Toni said.

He nodded. 'Remember that business about Genaloni's lieutenant up and disappearing? That they thought the FBI had taken him?'

'Yes.'

'I bet whoever swiped his enforcer did it to piss Genaloni off. And whoever it was knew to point the finger at us when he did it.'

'Looks like it worked,' she said. 'If Genaloni thought Net Force was gunning for him, he might have hired somebody to hit back. In his world, any problem can be solved with money or violence.'

He shifted his weight slightly. His leg was beginning to throb pretty good. He considered taking one of the pain pills, then decided against it. He needed his mind to be clear more than he needed to be doped up and pain- free.

'So, we're back to square one on Day's killing,' she added.

'No. I know who did it.'

She looked at him. 'Who?'

'The Russian. Plekhanov.'

She thought about it for a second. 'How did you come to that?'

He said, 'It was part of his plan all along, to give Net Force something else to look at while he pulled off his power grab. The attacks on Day, our listening posts, all the rascals he threw in our paths all over the world. He wanted us busy, so we wouldn't notice what he was doing. It all makes a kind of warped sense.'

'I don't know, Alex. It's possible, but—'

'It's him. I know it. He was willing to crash systems that caused deaths. It's not that big a leap to hiring a shooter. We were looking in the wrong direction — right where Plekhanov wanted us to look. He's smart.'

Toni looked at him. 'Assume you're right. How do we prove it? If his computer skills are as good as Jay says they are, we can't get into his files. Without some record, all we have is some very circumstantial evidence, and not much of that.'

'Plekhanov could open the files for us. He has the key.'

'He has no reason to do that — even if we had him, which we don't.'

'We'll have to figure out the right way to ask. After we collect him.'

She shook her head again. 'Uplevels won't go for it, Alex. Walt Carver is too much a political animal to risk it. And even if he wanted to, he couldn't convince the Foreign Covert Operations Committee or the CIA to go along. FCOC has been burned too many times with this kind of thing. They haven't greenlighted anything military in two years that doesn't have the locals willing to go along, or at least look the other way — like the operation in Ukraine.'

'This man had Steve Day murdered. And is responsible for the deaths of others. He's about to rig an election that will make him legally untouchable. And we can't get him because of some bureaucratic crap?'

'I know how you feel, but we'll be wasting our time to even ask,' she said.

'Fine. So we won't ask,' he said.

She stared at him. 'Alex…'

'There is a difference between the law and justice. The only way this guy skates is over my dead body. We never had this conversation, Toni. You don't know anything about this.'

She shook her head. 'Oh, no, you don't. You don't get rid of me that easy. You want to do something stupid, I'm going to make sure you do it right. I'm in.'

'You don't have to do this.'

'Steve Day was my boss, too. I want his killer to pay for it.'

Neither of them spoke for what seemed like a long time. Then Michaels said, 'We'd better get John Howard in here.'

'You think he'll go along?'

'We won't tell him, either. He works for me. If anything happens, it's my head that will roll. What he doesn't know won't hurt him.'

'You think that's fair?'

'It protects him. He gets what he thinks is a legitimate order, he's covered.'

'Your decision.'

'Yes. About time I made a couple of decisions that do something.'

Saturday, October 9th, 5:00 a.m. In the air over Hudson Bay

'All right, Sergeant Know-It-All, let's hear it.'

Howard knew the plan — he had devised it — but it never hurt to burn it into long-term memory. Another pass to spot any errors.

Julio Fernandez grinned and affected his recruit-to-drillmaster voice: 'Sir, Colonel Howard, sir!' More quietly, he said, 'Chechnya is landlocked, bounded by Ingushetia on the west, Russia on the north, Dagestan on the east and Georgia on the south. The western border of the country is about three hundred kilometers east of the Black Sea, give or take. The capital and largest city is Grozny, of which the colonel will see detailed CIA maps of the