Point of Impact

“Bastard. You’re a dead man.”

“Not by your hand, pal. You’re an accessory to murder and attempted murder, probably seven kinds of conspiracy, and God knows what else. You’re going away for a long, long time.”

“Maybe not. Maybe I have something to trade.”

“Better be damned good, whatever it is,” Howard said. “And between you and me and my colleagues here, if I see you on the street anywhere close to me or mine, I’ll drop you and worry about the consequences later.”

“You threatening me, General Howard?”

Michaels said, “You must be mistaken, Mr. Lee. I didn’t hear any threats. Jay?”

“Nope, I didn’t hear anything at all.”

Howard nodded at Michaels and Jay.

Jay smiled. Well, what the hell, they were a team, right?

* * *

On the drive down the hill, Michaels called Toni.

“Hey,” she said. “How’s the glamour there in Tinsel-town?”

“Great, if you like chase scenes and shoot-outs.”

“What?”

“We tracked down the dope dealer. He’s no longer with us, however.”

“What happened?”

Michaels filled her in on the operation.

When he was done, she said, “That’s good work, Alex. Nobody got hurt except the bad guy, and Net Force gets the credit. How are they going to play it with the media?”

“Straight, I hope,” he said. “But I wouldn’t bet on that. Camera teams were all over us ten minutes after it happened, news choppers circling like mechanical vultures. I let Jay talk for us and he kept it vague, but I don’t know what the DEA and FBI guys had to say. Rogue operatives are never a good spin for any agency. You can say, ‘Yeah, we had a problem but we cleaned it out,’ but the first question from the reporters will be, ‘How’d you get a problem like that in the first place?’ It’s a no-win situation.”

“Not for Net Force.”

He grinned at the small image of her on the virgil. “Well, yes, that’s true. We get off smelling like roses.”

“So, when are you coming home?”

“Probably tomorrow morning. We need to file reports with the local FBI and DEA offices, talk to their supervisors, like that.”

“Couldn’t you file those reports on-line from here?”

“You know how that is, they want to see us when we tell it. Won’t take long, but by the time we get done, it’ll be late, and we’re flying into a three-hour time difference. Might as well wait until the morning.”

“At least it’s all wrapped up.”

“Not completely. The zombie — that’s Thaddeus Bershaw, we got that from his car registration — got away.”

“That’s not major, is it?’

“Not that we can tell. We don’t know for sure what his part was in things, but he wasn’t the brightest bulb on the string. Jay dug up his background, and he was an uneducated street kid. Probably no more than an errand boy. The dealer was Robert Drayne; he had a degree in chemistry. Also had a father who was with the Bureau for thirty years, retired to Arizona.”

“Interesting.”

“DEA and FBI put out an APB net and street on Bershaw. They’ll find him eventually. Anyway, he’s not our problem anymore.”

“I miss you,” she said.

“Yeah, I miss you, too. See you tomorrow. I’m thinking maybe I’ll take a couple personal days and we can do something.”

“I’d like that.”

Michaels discommed and leaned back in the seat. It had been a long day, and he wasn’t looking forward to the double debriefing. It would be nice if they could do it once, with ops from both the DEA and FBI listening together, but that wasn’t how it was going to go, of course. That way would make too much sense.

* * *

They were way too slow coming down the hill to find him. By the time he heard them yelling at each other, Tad was six hundred yards away, and the double-hit of magic purple was coming on strong. Ten minutes after that, he was feeling good enough to jog, and ten minutes after that, he was able to run like the wind, hopping over rocks and bushes in his path, covering ground much faster than any normal man would be able to do on foot in the gathering darkness. He could run faster, see better, and make quicker decisions, and no way were they going to catch him from behind, if they even had a clue which way he had gone. Probably still looking for his body under the bushes back there.

Three miles or so away, he angled back up toward the road, then paralleled it for half a mile until he came to a tiny shopping center. He found a motorcycle chained to a light pole, and it took all of thirty seconds to find a rock big enough to smash the lock. The owner had trusted the lock and chain, and so he’d left a spare ignition key under the seat, tucked in the cushion springs, where Tad and ten other guys he knew always kept their spare bike keys, and the sucker, a midsized Honda, cranked right up.

They’d probably have roadblocks set up on both sides of the hill looking for him, but he could dance that or maybe go off road and around it. Now that it was fully dark, he would have an advantage: He didn’t need to use the headlight; there was enough city glow for him to see the road. Time they spotted him coming, it would be too late.

The double dose of Hammer was something. He had never felt so strong, so fast, or so quick-witted. They didn’t have a chance. If they did stop him? Well, he would just kill them all.

Tad sailed eastward down the hill in the dark, hitting speeds of eighty, ninety miles per hour with the lights off, whipping past startled drivers who heard him but couldn’t see him him until he appeared in their headlights. Must have scared the crap out of them.

If the fed had roadblocks, they must have been closer to the place where the copter had been, which made sense, sort of. They weren’t figuring on a guy who could run three miles in the dark before he got back to the road. They didn’t have the Hammer and he did.

Once he was down and in the flats around Woodland Hills, he flicked the headlight on. He didn’t have far to go now.

He made it to the safe house without incident. Inside, he flipped on the television and tuned it to CNN Headline News. He didn’t feel like eating, but he knew he needed fuel and liquid, so he grabbed a big can of ham slices and a six-pack of Evian water. He peeled ham slices off two at a time and washed them down with water as he watched the news. He needed information as much as he needed fuel.

The info wasn’t long in coming. A local camera crew had gotten to the site of the shooting, and while most of what the reporter had was probably total bullshit, there were a couple of things that stood out: The drug dealer who had been slain had been located through the efforts of the FBI’s computer arm, Net Force; the leader of that organization, Commander Alexander Michaels, had come all the way from Washington, D.C., to be in on the raid. The newscam had footage of Michaels, right out there on the road, looking down at the body of some agent who had been killed by the drug dealers during the raid.

Yeah, well, if one of theirs was dead, the feds had done it themselves. Bobby hadn’t done it, and except for that one shot Tad put into the sky, he hadn’t fired, either. Lying fuckers.

There were interviews with local DEA and FBI agents, as well as some computer geek for Net Force. It had been a coordinated operation among the three agencies, so it seemed, but Net Force got the big pat on the back for coming up with the information that led to the suspected drug dealers. One of said drug dealers had escaped, was still at large, and considered armed and dangerous. They flashed a picture of Tad, along with his name. Driver’s license photo. So they had IDed him, no big deal.

The news moved on, and he shut it off.

When he looked down at the ham can, it was empty. He had eaten two pounds of ham and downed six bottles of water, and he didn’t even feel full. Probably his last meal.