Michaels smiled. He had done that himself more than a few times, and everybody here knew it.
“I suppose I can wait until the man gets here and ask him, but I somehow doubt he’ll be entirely forthcoming. Anybody have any thoughts I might pursue?”
“Overspent their budget and need a little extra cash?” Jay said. “Wouldn’t be the first time an agency sold drugs to make up a shortfall.”
“I thought Buddhists weren’t supposed to be cynical.”
“Nope, not according to Saji. You can be pretty much anything and still be a Buddhist. Cynical works.”
“Except, apparently, a flesh-eater,” Fernandez said.
“Well, actually, that, too. Some parts of the world, like Tibet, where food is scarce, meat is okay. As long as you do it with the right attitude.”
Fernandez laughed. “Yeah, I can see you praying over a Whopper, chanting and all. Bet they’d love that at BK.”
“You obviously have never been to a D.C. Burger King,” Jay said. “You could do a Hawaiian fire dance over your fries there and nobody would look twice.”
Fernandez laughed. He looked at Michaels and said, “Maybe one of their people is into drugs. Could be they are looking at some kind of internal security.”
Howard blew out a small sigh. “There’s another possibility that springs immediately to mind. Military applications.”
Michaels looked at him.
Howard continued. “If you have a compound that makes a man think he’s faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive, when you put a weapon in his hands and point him at an enemy, you could have something of military value, assuming there are controls in place.”
“Didn’t the Nazis try that kind of thing?”
“Yes, sir, and other armies have tried it since, from speed to steroids. Nobody has come up with something cheap and dependable enough yet, but if they did, it would certainly have useful applications.”
“Would you use such a thing, General?”
“If it was safe, if it was legal, and if it would give my people an advantage over an enemy? Bring more of them back alive? Yes, sir, in a heartbeat.”
“From what the DEA has given us, this stuff is neither safe nor legal.”
“But it might be made both. Legal is the easy part, if it’s useful enough. Safe might be harder, but it might be possible to make it so, and a lot of services would be willing to explore the possibility. And there are some armies with fewer scruples about testing things on their own people than we have.”
Jay said, “When did the U.S. military develop scruples, General? Remember
“That was a long time ago,” Howard said.
“Yeah? What about Agent Orange in Vietnam, or the vaccines against nerve gas and biowarfare in Desert Storm? Or the new, improved, supposedly safe defoliants in Colombia?”
Before Howard could respond, Michaels said, “Give it a rest, Jay. We didn’t come to argue about the military’s checkered history. And whatever happened, we can hardly blame General Howard, can we?”
Jay shut up, having expressed his standing liberal attitude.
“All right. If there’s nothing further, I’ve got a ton of files to review.”
Forty-five minutes later, as Michaels sat developing eyestrain scanning computer files using his new sharp- goggles, supposedly designed to keep the letters so clear you wouldn’t get eyestrain, there was a tap at his door.
“Jay.”
“Boss. I uploaded what I could find on this George guy. I didn’t know if you’d get to it before he showed up.”
“Thanks, Jay, I appreciate it.”
After Jay left, Michaels found the file and read through it. Not much. There was a brief bio on Zachary George, place and date of birth, education, family, and shorter work history. Seemed Mr. George had been with the NSA since leaving college fifteen years ago, and the only references to his status there was a GS number only a grade below Michaels’s own before he was booted upstairs.
“Sir?” came the voice of his secretary over the com. “Your nine o’clock is here.”
Mr. George wasn’t particularly impressive upon first look. Average height, average weight, brown hair cut short but not too short, fair skin, and clothes that were standard midlevel bureaucrat: a gray suit expensive enough to look decent, not so expensive as to stand out in your memory. Black leather shoes. Put him in a room with four other people, and he’d be invisible. The guy in the comer who looked totally average? No, no, not him, the guy
Michaels stood and extended his hand. “Mr. George.”
“Commander. Good of you to see me.”
“Well, we like to keep relations good with our fellow agencies. Spirit of cooperation and all.”
“With all due respect, sir, bullshit. Almost anybody at my agency would cut the throats of everybody at yours if they thought it would gain them two brownie points at review time. And that’s pretty much my experience with all the security agencies I’ve dealt with.”
Michaels had to smile at that. “Don’t sugarcoat it that way, tell me what you really think.”
George returned the smile, and whatever he was up to, he was interesting.
“Have a seat.”
The NSA man sat, leaned back, crossed his ankle over his knee. “You figured out what it is I’m up to yet?”
“I have some thoughts. Why don’t you just tell me?”
George smiled again. It started on the right side and worked its way across his face. “Well, sir, I don’t want to make it too easy for you.”
“Much as I’d like to fence with you, I do have a couple of other things on my plate. Twenty questions isn’t high on the list. Talk or walk.”
George nodded, as if that was what he expected to hear. “Sir. You may be aware that there are qualities connected to this drug we spoke of that might be of use to certain of our military organizations.”
“That thought has crossed my mind.”
“As it happens, my agency has a… research facility engaged in studying certain pharmaceutical aids for possible use in… field operations.”
“Really?”
“More information is need-to-know, I’m sorry. Suffice it to say, we would be very interested in speaking with the chemist who has come up with this compound when you find him.”
“Why aren’t you talking to the DEA?”
George smiled. “We have. Frankly, we don’t think the DEA has much of a chance of catching the guy.”
“It is their area of expertise, isn’t it?”
“Then why did they come to you for help?”
That was a good point, but Michaels didn’t speak to it. Instead, he said, “And why didn’t you just go after the dealer on your own? NSA has a finger in just about every pie there is, don’t they?”
“True. And as a result, we are stretched somewhat thin. Net Force has had some excellent results in its short history, and continuing to speak frankly, your computer operatives are better than anybody else’s. Including ours. You probably know we’ve tried to, ah… recruit some of them.”
Michaels smiled. He knew. “No luck?”
“Oh, yes, plenty of luck… all bad. Your organization seems to engender a very high degree of loyalty.”
“We try to treat our people right.”
“So it seems. But the bottom line is, we think you’ll uncover this dealer before either the DEA or our own ops will, and we’d like you to keep us in mind when you do.”
