Point of Impact

Well, what the hell, it made her happy, that made him happy. With all the mood swings lately, anytime she was smiling was good, better make the most of it.

“… and this is the pin vise, see, you put the needle in here and twist it, like so, and it holds it. I glued a fishing weight — this lead ball here — onto the end to give it some heft, so when I stipple, I won’t have to use so much muscle.”

“Such a clever girl,” he said, smiling.

She smiled back at him. “And look here, this is the magnifier….”

He listened with half an ear, not being that interested in the artwork per se. When she ran down, he smiled again. She couldn’t drink, given her pregnancy and all, but maybe she could take some vicarious pleasure out of watching him enjoy a cold one.

“Not yet,” she said.

“Huh?”

“You need to work out first. Do your djurus. ”

Michaels wanted to say a bad word, but he wisely refrained. Toni wasn’t just his wife, after all, but also his silat teacher, and that was the hat she had just put on. If he tried to beg off, that would be bad.

“Oh, yeah, sure, that’s what I meant. After I work out.”

That didn’t fool her for a second, she was way too sharp, but hey, you had to give it a shot. Might catch her dozing.

She said, “It takes a few thousand repetitions to get the moves down, Alex. Latest scientific research I read says somewhere in the fifty- to one-hundred-hour range.”

He did the math mentally. “So, for eighteen djurus, I need to practice for nine hundred to eighteen hundred hours before I get them? At thirty minutes a day, that works out to about one hundred and eighty hours a year, so we’re talking about ten years?”

“Well, to get them really smooth, it’ll take maybe another five years.”

“I’ll be retired by then.”

“Good. Give you more time to practice.”

He laughed. “You are a slave driver.”

He went to the bedroom, shucked his street clothes, and put on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. He didn’t need any shoes since he was inside. He went back and sat down in the living room and began to do some basic yoga exercises Toni had showed him. Stretching was a luxury you wouldn’t get in a real fight, but for somebody over forty, it was better to do it before working out than not. A street fight might last ten seconds; a workout was gonna run thirty minutes to an hour, depending on how ambitious you were, and the older he got, the longer it took for a strain to heal.

As he was doing spinal twists, Toni wandered back in from the garage. “So, how was your day?”

Given that she had been his assistant and knew as much about his work as he did — more in some areas — it was natural for her to ask and just as natural for him to tell her.

“Dead calm,” he said. “Except for a flurry at the end with a kid hacker posting porno.”

“Oh, boy. And me here missing it all.”

“Well, there were a couple of things mildly interesting.” He told her about the drug stuff and about the cryptic call from the NSA guy.

She watched him, said, “Keep your back straight when you turn.” Then, “So what does Jay say about tracking down the dope dealer?”

“He said it was going to be a bitch. Apparently, drug sales over the Internet have always been a problem. Back in the early days, a lot of it was technically illegal but not prosecuted. ”

“How so?”

“Well, suppose you were seventy years old and living on social security in North Dakota or maybe south Texas. If you got sick and needed medicine, a prescription might cost, say, fifty bucks a bottle. Suppose you had to take two or three bottles a month for years. That could cut way into your food budget. So you’d hop a bus to Canada or to Mexico, where the same drug might cost sixteen or eighteen dollars. A local doc writes you a scrip based on your existing one from the U.S., and even with twenty bucks for that, you still come out way ahead in the long run.”

“Yeah?”

“So with the net and cheap home computers or access through cable TV or whatever, you don’t even have to take the bus ride. You log onto a site, order what you need, maybe answer a couple of questions over the wire to keep things more or less legal in Canada or Mexico, and your prescription shows up in your mailbox in a day or two, assuming you are dealing with a reputable outfit.”

“All the way down,” she said. “And keep your knees straight.”

He chuckled. “Being pregnant has made you mean, woman.”

“Oh, you think so? Just wait. So the DEA didn’t leap all over these folks for importing medicine illegally?”

“Ha! Think about that for a second. Here’s somebody’s little old granny on a pension who’s got a bad heart after working forty years teaching grammar school kids. Would you want to be the DEA guy in charge of arresting her for buying her nitroglycerin or whatever across the border to save enough money so she doesn’t have to eat dog food? Imagine how many federal prosecutors would want to hop on that career bandwagon. The press would swarm you like a cloud of starving locusts. Can’t you just see the headlines? ‘Grandma Busted for Heart Meds!’ ”

“It could be a political problem,” she said.

“Oh, yeah, it could. Then there are the drugs that are legal in other countries but not approved by the FDA, which, according to Jay, is another whole can of worms. Let’s say you want to take Memoril, one of the new smart drugs that improves your short-term memory something like seventy percent. The FDA is still out on that one, but it’s been legal in most of Europe for a couple of years. So, you log onto a web page in Spain, give them your credit card number, and order a hundred tabs. A few days later, you get a package from Scotland that looks like a birthday gift from your Uncle Angus, and inside is your drug, made by a pharmaceutical company in Germany. And all of this is perfectly legal in Spain, Scotland, and Germany, and it’s not their concern about laws in the U.S.

“If Customs happens to guess what’s in the package, they’ll confiscate it, because technically it is illegal, but it’s a gray area. If you went to Spain and got the stuff from a doctor there, you could bring it home for your own personal use. What’s the difference if it comes by mail or you carried it home in your pocket? It’s malum prohibitum—bad because it’s illegal — not malum in se— bad in itself.”

“When did you start speaking Latin?”

“Since I asked our lawyers about all this.”

“Watch your shoulder.”

“And then we get to the illegal stuff, which is easier to prosecute, assuming you know what it is and know for sure that it is illegal, which is the problem here. Big purple caps aren’t illegal in themselves.”

“Ipso facto,” she said.

“Talk to me about Latin,” he said. “So, there you have it. It’s really the FDA’s problem, only the boss made it mine. She probably owes somebody over there a favor, and this is it. And the NSA listens to everything on the air or over the wire, so I can understand how they know about it, but I don’t see why it should interest them. Fortunately, I have plenty of time to think about it, things being slow. I wish you were still working there. It would be more interesting. We all miss you at the office. Me most of all.”

“You’re loose enough. Up. Do your djurus. You’ll feel better after you work out.”

He came to his feet. That was true. He almost always did feel better afterward. It was the damned inertia that was so hard to overcome sometimes. Good that he had Toni here to prod him. Among her many other virtues.

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