“You think I need something like that?”
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^”Yes, sir. For instance, if you see somebody prowling house with a gun who doesn’t belong there, what uld you do?” I “Tell them to drop it?” H”Not according to home defense experts. You should
: go ahead and shoot them.” s”Excuse me?”
|; “Law enforcement officers are required to try to catch guys alive, homeowners aren’t. If somebody is in house with a weapon, they are ipso facto to be con. a deadly threat. In your case, this has happened a pie of times already. You ordering an armed house to put his weapon down will just as likely get you : as not. You hear a dunk\ in the night, what you are to do is lock yourself and your family in a se- room, get your gun, com the police, and stay put the cops arrive. You aren’t supposed to stalk down I hall like Doc Holliday with your shotgun looking for bad guys. If you do, however, and you see one, and js’s armed, you shoot first and ask questions later.” “Jesus.”
| “Not likely He is gonna be breaking into your house. s the course, sir. There’s all kinds of things you need i know about the use of deadly force that have changed
: you were out in the field.” Michaels looked at the shotgun. “Yes. I can see that, a, 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 I good home. Box of shells came out of my gun safe at been around forever. The only out-of-pocket ex- ise 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 uld give you a couple of pointers.” “I’ll do that.” After Howard was gone, Michaels contemplated the
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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 laser, 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 die 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
t the Bon Chance
ay,” the tech said, “here it is.” They were in Media, a ballroom-sized place divided i cubicles, thick with computers, printers, duplicators, t other electronic impedimenta. Chance looked at the monitor, a 21-inch flatscreen con1 to a top-of-the-line Macintosh computer. The Avid vare and the computer’s hard drive would allow up | a hundred hours of film storage, and with such a non- editing system, you could do all kinds of things. s, fades, dissolves, blue-screen, holoprojics, what- r. It was a powerful tool, used in a lot of movie and evision productions, and with it you could take an or piece of film or CGI and do amazing things, the world, CyberNation must be about amazing ngs.
iscreen was the computer-generated image of a soar- marble and stone cathedral. Dust motes swam in of sunlight lancing through low-hanging clouds.
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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.
Overhead, lasers flickered through clouds of colored smoke, and the slogan cybernation-we can take you anywhere you want to go!” appeared superimposed over the dancers, with the sign-up URL under it.
The scene froze. “That’s the intro. What do you think?” the tech asked.
“Not bad,” Chance said. “But dial down the volume on the music a hair, and when we get the slogan super, I want a wah-wah sting that echoes the bass line. And see if we can vibrate the words a little. Who is doing the voiceover?”
“Foghorn Franklin.”
“Good. He’s perfect. What happens from here?”
“We’re still working on the wire-frame dinosaur stuff, and the space aliens, but we’ve got the harem sequence and the shopping at Harrods almost done. The wire- frame’ll be ready for texture in a couple of days.”
Chance nodded and turned away from the Avid. She glanced at her watch. She hadn’t heard from Roberta yet. She wondered how he was doing.
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; was probably doing just fine. She worried too much t the details, she knew that. It was hard to trust people what you told them to do, and with good reason. ; upon a time, she had been a corporate manager, on ast track to the vice presidency of a Fortune Five 1 company. She’d been making good money, had i well-respected, and had been kicking ass and taking but she’d had to quit. People kept screwing up, ; things differently than she’d told them, and it drove i the wall. The idea of being a decent manager .was: t hired good workers and turned them loose, and they i’t call until the job was done, except if they had prob- The reality of it was: You inherited a lot of dead- in whatever department you took over, and it was : until you could figure out who worked and who papers and pretended to work. Yeah, once you .the lay of the land, you could fire the lazy ones, but you had to spend time looking for somebody new, : was always the devil-youknewversusthe-devil- n’t. You’d read this great resume, the guy would up and give a good interview, and as soon as he le job, he’d turn into a brain-dead lame donkey you n’t move with a flaming two-by-four shoved up his Half the time you couldn’t lop off the deadwood in : place because they’d sue for one kind of discrim- or another-gender, age, race, whatever. You > catch somebody stealing the petty cash, flashing old > in the subway, or snorting cocaine in the lunchroom it wasn’t enough to get rid of them if they had the lit leverage.
office politics? Stupid bosses who’d Peter Princi- : out? Backstabbing coworkers?
I’t even hike those trails … ‘Chance smiled at the memory. Being in charge of most i was no picnic in the park. The reason she had taken oh was that they let her start from scratch, hire any- she wanted, and she could get rid of anybody who for her with two words: You’re gone! There was
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no appeal. She didn’t have to answer to anybody except the Board, and as long as she met the goals of the business plan-which she herself produced-nobody cared how she got it done. She couldn’t imagine a better job.
Roberto was good, and she should trust him to do what was needed, but she was still too hands-on. She still worried every time her neck was essentially in somebody else’s hands. She’d have to work on that. She needed to relax-‘Berto was the best she’d ever found at his kind of work.
But if he didn’t call in the next hour or two, she was going to be bent out of shape.
San Rafael, California
Killing the three was the easy part. After he had gotten everything from Dowling he wanted, and a whole lot he hadn’t cared about, he very carefully choked the man out, using the special hold he’d learned from a Vale Tudo jujitsu fighter in Brazil. Enough so the guy was unconscious, but not so he’d die. Then he had retrieved the bodyguards one at a time, choked them out, and put everybody into the limo. He’d driven to the spot, only half a mile away, choked them all again to make certain they were out. Then he accelerated toward the guardrail overlooking an eight-hundred-foot drop-off, and locked the car’s brakes in a hard skid that stopped right at the edge of the pavement.