Hidden Agendas

Alexander Michaels, Commander of the FBI's elite Net Force unit, fell on the floor, smack onto his butt. He hit harder than he expected; it knocked the wind out of him. Fortunately, the cheek that took most of the impact was the left one, and not the right where, two months ago, a bullet had exited after he'd been shot in the thigh. The wound was pretty much healed; it only twinged now and then.

The woman who had just slammed him to the floor was his chief deputy, Assistant Commander Antonella 'Toni' Fiorella — all five feet five inches, one hundred and maybe ten pounds of her.

Before he could even try to recover his breath, Toni dropped to one knee next to him and threw a short right elbow at his face, slapping it with her left hand for emphasis — and to move her left hand into position for a follow-up wipe, did she deem it necessary.

It wasn't going to be necessary. Michaels had no plans to punch her. He could barely breathe. Smiling took everything he had.

Toni offered Michaels a hand, and he took it. She stood and helped him do the same.

'You okay?'

He managed to suck in enough air to say, 'Yeah, fine.' Holding the smile was one of the hardest things he'd done in a while, but he held it.

'Good. You see what I did?'

'I think so.'

Generally, they practiced such takedowns on the nice, padded mat thoughtfully provided here by the FBI in the smaller of the two gyms in Net Force HQ. Now and again, however, they stepped off the mats onto the floor. Toni, who had been practicing this esoteric martial art since she was twelve, had explained why such training was necessary.

'If you practice on the mats all the time, you get used to that cushion. If you fall on the street or a sidewalk, it won't be quite so easy. And since a lot of fights end up on the ground, you need to know how it feels.'

Yeah. Right.

He could understand it, though he wasn't sure he was going to ever learn the stuff so well he could hit the concrete and bounce like a rubber ball. But after a month of training five days a week, at least Michaels could finally get the name of the system right: Pukulan Pentjak Silat. Or silat, for short. It was, Toni had told him, a slimmed-down and simplified version of a more complex art that had come out of the Indonesian jungles less than a century ago. She had learned it from an old Dutch-Indonesian woman who'd lived across the street from the Fiorellas in the Bronx, after she had witnessed the old woman use the art against four gangbangers who had tried to run the granny off her door stoop. A big mistake, that.

Michaels had been impressed with what he'd seen Toni do. If this was the simple and easier stuff, he could wait on the really nasty moves.

'Okay, you try,' she said.

'You gonna punch left or right?' he asked.

'Doesn't matter,' she said. 'If you control the center like you're supposed to, it'll work either way.'

'In theory,' he said.

She smiled at him. 'In theory.'

He nodded, then tried to relax and assume a neutral stance. That was supposed to be part of it too, Toni had said. It ought to work from whichever position you happened to be in if an attacker jumped you; otherwise — what was the point? You wouldn't have time to bow and get into your ready stance if the street thug decided to eat your lunch. It wasn't real likely a guy in an alley coming at you with a knife was going to allow you to run home to take off your shoes and put on your gi while he stood there waiting, maybe cleaning his nails with his blade. If a move wasn't practical, the Indonesian fighters didn't much like to pass it along. This wasn't a do, a spiritual 'way.' It was the distilled essence of anything-goes street-fighting. It was not an art of flashy, fancy moves, but an art of war. In silat, you didn't merely defeat an enemy, you destroyed him, and you used whatever you had at hand to do it: fists, feet, elbows, knives, clubs, guns—

Toni leaped at him.

You were supposed to block first, then step, and this defense was supposed to be a move to the outside of the attacker. Instead, Michaels, rattled, blocked and stepped to the inside of Toni's leading foot. In theory, as she'd said, it didn't matter, since anything that worked was the point.

His right thigh slid between Toni's legs and pressed against her pubis. His concentration on protecting himself just kind of… evaporated. He'd blocked the punch, but now he just stood there. He didn't follow up. He was very much aware of the warmth of her crotch astraddle his thigh, even through two sets of sweatpants.

Damn!

'Alex?'

'Sorry, I drew a blank.'

Quickly, Michaels stepped back. He'd nearly been killed by that assassin a couple of months ago; if it hadn't been for Toni, the killer would have gotten him, and it had seemed a good idea to learn more about how to protect himself, but right now this intimate martial contact with Toni might be bringing up more problems than it solved. It certainly was bringing up one problem in particular he could do without—

'Hey, Boss?'

Michaels shook off the erotic thoughts. Jay Gridley stood near the gym's entrance, looking at the two of them. The younger man was grinning.

'Jay. What's up?'

'You said you wanted to hear about that Louisiana thing as soon as it came in. I just downloaded the packet from the field team in Baton Rouge, got vid and reports. It's flagged in your incoming files.'

Michaels nodded. 'Thanks, Jay.' He looked at Toni. 'I need to check that out.'

'We can pick up where we left off Monday,' she said. 'Unless you're working tomorrow?'

'I wish. I was hoping to work on the car, but I've got to bone up on financial stuff. I'm supposed to appear before Senator White's committee on Tuesday.'

'You get all the fun,' Toni said.

'Don't I just?'

They bowed to each other, the intricate silat beginning and ending salute, and Michaels headed for the dressing room.

* * *

Sheldon Gaynel Worsham was sixteen years old, a student at New Istrouma High School. He looked about twelve, was thin, and had black, oily hair sucked down all over, save for a wavy lock that dangled greasily over his left eye. He wore blue parachute pants and a black T-shirt with a putrid-green pulse-paint logo. The logo was a stylized badge with the word 'GeeterBeeter' in jagged letters across it. Whatever that meant. The kid slouched in a cheap chair next to a heavy castplast table that was scratched and battered by years of abuse. Somebody had carved a heart with initials inside it on one corner, something of a surprise, since this was obviously a room where knives or other sharp objects were generally forbidden.

The man seated across the table from Worsham was heavy-set, florid-faced, in a cheap, dark business suit, and he might as well have had 'cop' flashing in neon over his head.

'So tell me about this bomb,' the cop said.

Worsham nodded. 'Yeah, okay, okay. So we're not talking Semtex or C4 or crap like that, we're talking RQX- 71, a top-secret chemical used in conventional missile warheads. It's an analog of some old stuff called PBX-9501. You want to know about anisotropic elastics or isotropic polymerics? Expansion rates or like that?'

'Why don't we just skip over that for now,' the cop said. 'Where did you get it, this explosive?'

The kid grinned. 'I made it in the chem lab. Swiped a key card from the janitor's desk and duped it, got the alarm codes, snuck in at night. Only took a week. Got a little tricky at one point, I thought I was gonna blow myself up, but it worked out okay.'

'You made it. And took down a brand-new, three-story, steel-framed addition to the capital with it.'

The kid grinned wider. 'Yeah. Something, huh?' Worsham sat up straighter in the plastic chair.

'And that blast killed a woman guard working her way through college.'

'Yeah, well, I'm sorry about that part, but it's not really my fault. The coozers shouldn't have fired my dad,