Hidden Agendas

used to.

A shower of nuts bounced off the truck's roof and hood.

'Now that's how to roast cashews,' Fernandez said. 'That ought to give ‘em something to worry about. AMF, we're outta here! Roll!'

The driver cranked the truck and wheeled it out onto the road. They passed a wailing fire engine a mile away, and Fernandez waved at the firemen.

'Good luck putting that one out, boys.'

1:30 a.m.

The warehouse flashed brightly, followed in a couple of seconds by the sound of the explosion. Lights went on in the main building, and guards rushed out, weapons held ready, excited voices jabbering away.

'Move in!' Howard commanded.

The two point men, Hamer and Tsongas, scuttled toward the half-dozen guards who were waving their assault rifles and looking puzzled. The point men wore backpack foggers, high-pressure tanks filled with military- grade pepper spray. They were within twenty feet of the nearest guards before they were noticed, and by then it was too late. As the guards turned to bring their weapons to bear on the threat, Hamer and Tsongas cut loose.

The pepper fog boiled out in a long white cloud that enveloped the unfortunate guards. Unlike Mace or even commercial five-percent pepper spray, whose effects a man might shrug off, pepper fog was impossible to ignore. It got into your breathing passages and eyes, and you couldn't stop your body's reaction. Your eyes swelled shut and you dropped to the ground, trying to find air you could breathe. For the next fifteen or twenty minutes, you weren't going to be doing much of anything except wishing you'd never been born.

Howard had gone through the training, he'd eaten the fog, and he knew how those guards felt.

The military stuff was designed to spew hard and settle out fast, but you wanted to wait a few seconds before you ran through the area you'd just fogged, and you wanted your goggles or spookeyes down when you did it.

'Go, go!'

The point men moved in to disarm the squirming guards, while two more troopers offered cover.

Howard and Winthrop headed for the door with the other six team members. He remembered to hold his breath. Two of Beta peeled off to cover their flanks, while two more ran into the building through the open front door, Howard and Winthrop right behind them, handguns drawn.

Nobody in the hall to stop them, Howard saw. The main staircase was just ahead. 'Third floor! Go, go!'

With Winthrop next to him, Howard ran for the stairs.

1:31 a.m.

Platt was in the kitchen, scraping what smelled and looked like fermented mayonnaise off his arm, when things went wonky. He saw a bright light strobe the window next to the back door, and heard an explosion in the distance that rattled the hanging pots and pans.

What the hell was that!

He didn't have time to worry about it, though. A guard ran into the kitchen, spotted Platt, and raised his assault rifle to pot him.

Platt already had the Browning nine in his hand. He indexed the guard and shot him twice—pop! pop! — right in the center of mass. Wasn't too loud—

The guard stopped, looked down at his chest as if he was annoyed, then went back to swinging his AK around at Platt.

Man! Platt put the next two into the guard's face. The guy dropped like a boneless chicken. That ended that.

Goddamn pansy nine-millimeter! You couldn't get a decent.45 or.357 in these foreign countries — they restricted you to small-caliber if you were a civilian!

Platt scooted across the kitchen and opened the door to the electric dumbwaiter. The tiny elevator was going to be a tight fit. He hit the button for the third floor, then squeezed himself into the little box and let the door shut. The dumbwaiter groaned, not having been designed for this much weight, but it rose. He heard somebody else make it into the kitchen and start yelling in oogaboog as the dumbwaiter lifted, but by then they didn't know where he was.

1:33 a.m.

Apparently the residents knew enough to stay in their rooms. Nobody tried to stop them as the went down the hall on the third floor.

Winthrop was glad. The H&K pistol in her hand didn't offer the comfort she thought it would. It felt like an alien device, despite her training, too barrel-heavy because of the silencer, the grip sweaty. She didn't particularly want to shoot anybody, though she thought she could if she had to.

'Third door on the left,' the colonel said.

The two Beta Team troopers split, one going past the door, the other stopping on the near side. They turned so they were facing away from each other, covering both ends of the hall.

Howard reached the door and tried the knob. Locked. He nodded at her, pointed at the room. 'I'll get the door, you go in.'

She nodded in return, said, 'Okay,' through dry lips.

Howard raised his foot and kicked the door open. Winthrop dived in and rolled, just as she had done in VR so many times, and came up on one knee, the pistol pointed in front of her.

Thomas Hughes, dressed in white silk pajamas, sat up in bed, where he had obviously been sleeping until that moment.

'Who the hell are you? What do you want?'

The colonel stepped in behind Winthrop. 'Mr. Hughes,' he said. He smiled. 'Commander Alexander Michaels at Net Force would like to have a word with you.'

'I don't think so,' somebody said.

Winthrop snapped her gaze to the glass door leading out to the balcony. A tall, dark, and muscular man stood there, holding an odd-looking device in one hand. She swung her pistol around to cover him.

'I wouldn't do that, darlin',' the man said.

Winthrop recognized him now that she heard the corn pone in his voice.

'Platt!'

'You look much better in person than you do in VR, honey. How about you put those guns down?'

'How about I just shoot you instead?' Winthrop said.

'Bad idea. Ask your jig friend there why.'

She glanced at the colonel.

'He's holding some kind of a grenade,' Howard said.

'Yep, a gen-u-wine World War Two po-tato masher. Shoot me and I drop it, and even if your armor stops most of it, you still probably get stung pretty good. Maybe a piece gets through and punches a hole in an artery and you bleed out. And old Tommy boy here, well, he surely gets turned into hamburger.'

'I don't think so,' Howard said. 'I think if I shoot you, both you and that grenade will fall off that balcony behind you.'

'Ah,' Platt said. 'But then I would die, and you don't want that, now, do you?'

'Why not?'

Damn, Winthrop thought. She knew Platt was right. And so did Colonel Howard. She'd heard Commander Michaels telling him all about the dead-man switches. But she also knew that the colonel didn't necessarily want Platt to know they knew… or that, even now, Jay Gridley was working furiously to defuse the things.

God dammit, Gridley, she thought. Hurry up.

'I'm surprised you haven't found my little surprises yet, boy,' Platt said, 'but then maybe you Net Force folks aren't as good as ole Tommy-boy here thought. Let's just say that if I don't make it back to my ride out of here — and the little ole computer with its satellite uplink — by a certain time, well, things will happen that will make those last assaults on the net look like kid's stuff.'

'What do you want?' Howard said.