“It’s not a particularly expensive gun, basic walnut stocks and case-hardened color. The Russians don’t build ’em pretty, but they are very solid and mechanically well-made. Uses 12-gauge shells, the short ones, two-and- three-quarter inchers only. Just as well — the high-powered three-inchers would have a fierce recoil with a barrel this short.”
He pivoted a lever in the middle to one side, and opened the breech. “Got twenty-inch-long double barrels, extractors that pull the shells out, but not ejectors, so it doesn’t throw them on the floor. External hammers, they call them ‘rabbit ears,’ see? This one is a modern copy of the old ones, so the hammers don’t actually hit a firing pin, but cock internal strikers. That way, you can use a hammer block as well as a trigger-block safety, here, this button. It’s about as simple as you can get. You open it up, put a pair of shells in, close it, then cock the hammers. Got two triggers, one for each barrel. Slide the safety off, aim it like you would a rifle, or if somebody is in your face, poke them with it like a stick and pull the trigger.”
“What if I miss? Is this going to go through the wall and kill my neighbor in his bed?”
“Not if you use birdshot. You don’t need buckshot or slugs for close range stuff. Combat distance, a load of bird- or rabbit-shot works just fine, and the little bbs don’t go far after hitting couple of layers of sheet rock and siding. Even though you could get a permit for a handgun, this packs a lot more punch, it’s safer, and it’s legal to own here in the District, even for civilians.”
Michaels took the gun, worked the action open and closed, then tried the hammers out. It had a nice, solid feel to it.
“You should drop by the range and put a few rounds through it. It’ll kick some, but you can hip-shoot easy enough if you don’t want a sore shoulder. Just like pointing your finger.”
Michaels nodded.
“And here’s the gun safe.”
He held up an oblong box big enough to hold the shotgun, with an image of a hand on it.
“This is titanium, lightweight, but strong enough to resist somebody trying to pry it open with a screwdriver. It’ll hold a couple of long arms. You bolt it to a couple of wall studs in a closet in the bedroom, put your gun and ammo inside it. It’s got a fingerprint reader in the hand-print here that will accept sixty-four different ones, so you can program it to read yours and Toni’s and anybody else you trust. Uses a lithium-ion battery to run the reader, battery is good for five or six years, and when it starts to run low, it flashes a diode, right here, so you know to replace it. It can also be wired into your house alarm system if you want.”
“Seems, well,
“If you really want, you can get Gunny at the range to install the electronic safeties we use in our issue guns, get a transmitting ring, and cover it that way, too. That way, if an unauthorized person should manage to get it out of the safe, it won’t shoot for them — but I wouldn’t worry about that.
“So if somebody starts kicking in your front door in the middle of the night, you can get this out and ready to go in a few seconds. Anybody who sees you standing there with a piece like this is apt to think twice about proceeding in your direction. A lot of guys who would charge a pistol will pull up when they see the muzzle of a shotgun yawning at them.”
“I can understand that. Looks like a cannon.”
“Downside is, you only get two shots. A pump would give you five rounds minimum, more with an extended tube.
“You ought to consider taking the FBI/DEA house-clearing class for shotguns. As head of Net Force, they’d be happy to have you, and it would be worth a Sunday afternoon to learn it.”
“You think I need something like that?”
“Yes, sir. For instance, if you see somebody prowling your house with a gun who doesn’t belong there, what would you do?”
“Tell them to drop it?”
“Not according to home defense experts. You should just go ahead and shoot them.”
“Excuse me?”
“Law enforcement officers are required to try to catch bad guys alive, homeowners aren’t. If somebody is in your house with a weapon, they are ipso facto to be considered a deadly threat. In your case, this has happened a couple of times already. You ordering an armed house-breaker to put his weapon down will just as likely get you shot as not. You hear a
“Jesus.”
“Not likely He is gonna be breaking into your house. Take the course, sir. There’s all kinds of things you need to know about the use of deadly force that have changed since you were out in the field.”
Michaels looked at the shotgun. “Yes. I can see that. So, what do I owe you?”
Howard named a price.
“That seems awful low.”
“Well, the gun I don’t shoot, so it might as well have a good home. Box of shells came out of my gun safe at home, been around forever. The only out-of-pocket expense I had was the safe, so that’ll cover it.”
“Thanks again, John.”
“Let me know when you want to go shoot. Might be I could give you a couple of pointers.”
“I’ll do that.”
After Howard was gone, Michaels contemplated the shotgun. He’d never kept a gun in his house — well, not this house. He had a pistol back in the days when he’d been in the field, but he’d never felt the need for a gun at home once he’d been kicked upstairs. He had the issue taser, and for a long time that had been enough — once. There was nothing like having a couple of killers drop by to make you feel like a gun in the bedside table or closet was maybe not such a bad idea after all. He might never have the need for it again, he hoped not, but he had come to appreciate the NRA slogan: It was better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
Be interesting to hear what Toni would say. He hadn’t consulted her about it.
9
“Okay,” the tech said, “here it is.”
They were in Media, a ballroom-sized place divided into cubicles, thick with computers, printers, duplicators, and other electronic impedimenta.
Chance looked at the monitor, a 21-inch flatscreen connected to a top-of-the-line Macintosh computer. The Avid software and the computer’s hard drive would allow up to a hundred hours of film storage, and with such a nonlinear editing system, you could do all kinds of things. Wipes, fades, dissolves, blue-screen, holoprojics, whatever. It was a powerful tool, used in a lot of movie and television productions, and with it you could take an ordinary piece of film or CGI and do amazing things.
To the world, CyberNation must be about amazing things.
Onscreen was the computer-generated image of a soaring marble and stone cathedral. Dust motes swam in beams of sunlight lancing through low-hanging clouds. The point-of-view camera moved in on a simulated dolly toward the arched building.
Music began, a Bach fugue with thundering organ chords.
As the POV shot approached the massive doors to the building, they began to open and dissolve. Doves flew out and scattered. The music began to morph into a classic rock ’n’ roll number with the words seeming to grow right out of the organ notes, something with a heavy, driving beat, all about American dreams and suicide machines. As the music changed, so did the image, from a towering pseudo-Gothic edifice to a futuristic nightclub. The camera continued to dolly in and through the doors, and inside the club dozens of beautiful people danced together, frantically gyrating to the rock beat. Sweat made their thin shirts and blouses stick to perfect bodies. The men obviously all lifted weights, the women didn’t wear bras and didn’t need them.
