State of War

nasty events of 2001 and some of the ugly ones since, flying just wasn’t the same.

Sure, everyone did it, and mostly they tried to put it out of their minds. Life was full of risk. You could get run over just crossing the street. Still, she always had a twinge of worry every time Alex flew, even on the company jet. Yes, there were sky marshals on most flights; yes, as a federal agent, Alex could carry his taser; and yes, he finally had some skill in fighting. But as everybody knew, against a suicidal fanatic, all bets were iffy.

They would have to get to the root of the cause to stop it, and some of the world’s grudges went back thousands of years. How do you change the attitude of somebody whose people had grown up hating since the days when they were building pyramids?

Slowly. Very slowly. Meanwhile, you kept your guard up and if somebody did try something, you flattened them. The price of liberty was vigilance.

Toni rounded the curve. A pair of mothers were pushing strollers, both women wearing broad-brimmed hats, and both strollers with lids up and blankets draped to keep the babies shaded. Toni smiled, feeling a kinship with these women. She had a child. Mothers were all connected in some way, weren’t they?

She passed the walkers, smiled, and waved. She could turn around up ahead and head back the way she had come. With any luck, that straight stretch would still be empty, and she could cut loose again. And then go home and see her beautiful, brilliant, wonderful son.

Net Force Shooting Range Quantico, Virginia

Tyrone had gone to wash his hands and use the toilet, leaving Howard and Julio at Gunny’s desk.

Julio was the first to try to describe what had just happened.

“Lord, John, I never saw anything like that,” he said. “The kid is a natural pistoleer. Give him a month to practice and he’d shoot the pants off Gunny here.”

Howard nodded. It had been quite a surprise to see his teenaged son pick up a pistol and have it become an extension of his hand. No fumbling, no hesitation. He put the first round into the target dead-on and kept putting them there the rest of the session. He did it with Howard’s revolver and Julio’s semiauto equally well, too. It was as if he had been shooting handguns for years, but Howard knew he hadn’t. This had been his very first exposure.

Stunned and amazed, Howard had asked him if he’d practiced in VR, but Tyrone had said no.

Gunny nodded. “You want to send him down here to train, sir, I’ll put him on the pistol team. We could use the help.”

Howard shook his head. Having his son turn into Wild Bill Hickock had never been part of his vision for the boy. Yes, he wanted him to be able to handle firearms, and yes, he wouldn’t be too unhappy if the boy was a little more physical instead of plopped in front of his computer as much as he was. Tyrone had learned how to throw a boomerang, and that got him out into the sunshine more, which was good. And he had a girlfriend, so he was learning those aspects of manhood, too. But a shooter? Howard had never thought about it.

It was obvious the boy had a talent for it. But was he interested in pursuing it? And if he was, did Howard really want him to pursue it?

Well, his inner voice said, it’ll keep him off the streets, won’t it?

“I’ll ask him,” he told Gunny.

“You do that, General, sir. A talent like that, it would be a waste not to encourage it.”

Maybe, Howard thought.

Maybe.

3

Dutch Mall Office Building

Long Island, New York

Mitchell Townsend Ames leaned back in his form-chair and listened as the servomotors quietly hummed and adjusted the unit to fit his new position. The chair was a marvel of bioengineering. Top-grain leather and graded biogel padding covered a pneumatic/hydraulic frame of titanium. Driven by six electric motors, and using pressure sensors and fast relays, it matched his every movement, molding itself to his position within a second. When he sat up and leaned forward, it became a straight-backed office chair. When he leaned back a little, it rearranged itself into a lounger. And if he chose to stretch out fully, it turned into a bed.

Eleven thousand dollars and change, the chair was guaranteed to be the most comfortable thing you ever sat on or your money cheerfully refunded. So far, the company that made the form-chair had sold almost five thousand of the things, and nobody had asked for their money back. It was a great toy.

Ames owned six of the custom-made form-chairs: one in his medical office, the second in his legal office, the third and fourth in his New York apartment and house in Connecticut, respectively, and the fifth at his mistress’s apartment in London. The last one he kept here in his “clean” office, which was the only place he met with people like Junior.

Almost seventy thousand dollars for half a dozen chairs. A lot of money for a little comfort. If he wanted, though, he could have bought a hundred more form-chairs without his accountant ever raising an eyebrow. After all, he had won half a dozen class-action tort cases — one chair for each successful suit — against major pharmaceutical companies. Each one had netted upward of a hundred million dollars. His percentage had been considerable. He could retire today with an annual income of well over a million dollars from the interest alone. What were a few toys when you had that kind of resource?

Still, the man seated across from him was in a cheaper and more conventional chair: comfortable, but nothing like a form-chair.

Marcus “Junior” Boudreaux laughed his raucous, crow-like laugh. “You shoulda seen his face, Doc,” he said. “He looked like he swallowed a live water moccasin.”

Ames shook his head. “Overkill,” he said.

Junior looked at him. “Huh?”

“You didn’t need to tell him the girl was fourteen. She could have been eighteen or eighty — in his position, any kind of sexual impropriety can be fatal. You could have even told him she was a whore who had set him up and it wouldn’t have mattered. He’s married, he’s elected, and it’s the family vote that keeps him in office. You don’t need to use a cannon to swat a fly.”

Junior shook his head. “Better safe than sorry, I figured.”

Ames shrugged. It didn’t really matter. He dismissed the senator with a short wave. “What about the new clerk?”

“No problem there, Doc. The man is happy to take our money. He gets fifty up front. If it comes out of Lassiter’s office that the court should hear it, he gets another fifty grand. If the court votes our way, he gets two hundred. He’s working for us.”

Ames sighed and nodded. Yes, having a clerk for a Supreme Court justice on your payroll was a valuable thing indeed. Most people had no idea how much weight these young lawyers carried. The judges depended on their clerks for all kinds of input, and what got read or ignored was in large part due to how the clerks presented it.

As of this moment, Ames had two clerks. Better yet, they were from different sides of the political aisle, one a Democrat, the other a Republican. At least, that’s what their judges were. Ames didn’t care about the clerks’ own politics, as long as they did what they were supposed to do.

And what they were supposed to do was further Ames’s agenda. Or, more precisely, the agenda that he was being very well paid to further, which was the same thing.

“Very good.” Ames unlocked the top right drawer of his desk and pulled it open. Next to a 9mm SIG Neuhausen P-210, the finest production pistol made in that caliber, was a big manila mailer full of crisp thousand- dollar bills. Ames pulled the envelope out and put it on the leather blotter in front of him.

The gun had cost a couple of thousand at most. It had been tuned, so it was maybe worth another grand. Even so, he’d rather lose the fifty grand in the mailer than the pistol. Money was only money, but a good shooter was a treasure.

He had quite a collection of handguns, and the two most valuable were together worth two and a half million dollars. One, a German Luger made for testing as a possible sidearm for U.S. troops back in the early 1900s before