Net Force 2: Hidden Agendas
“The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” –Louis Brandeis
“Nothing is secret that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.” Luke, 8:17
PART01. A Little Knowledge
PROLOGUE.
Wednesday, December 15th, 2010, 2:44 a.m. Baton Rouge, Louisiana A cold and damp winter wind played around the windows of the building, a breeze not strong enough to rattle the still pristine thermopane glass, but potent enough to tweak an occasional whistle from an art-deco protrusion, whistles that now and then came low enough to sound almost like moans.
Alone inside, the night watchman–watchwoman in this case–pored over the laptop on the guard station’s desk, adding a few personal notes to the text of Professor Jenkins’s long and incredibly boring lecture on the strata of rock formations in southern New Zealand. The lecture was from his auditorium-sized class Introduction to Geology, her final science requirement, and she’d put it off as long as she could, but graduation was fast approaching and there was no way around it. She would have taken Astronomy, supposedly a walk, but the classes had been filled before she’d ever logged on to registration. Too bad. Stars were much more inter esting than rocks.
Kathryn Brant sighed, leaned back in the creaky chair, and rubbed at her eyes. Geology.
Bleh.
She leaned toward the desk again and got another nail wrenched-from-wet-wood noise. Lord.
Brand-new, and already the chair squeaked as if it had been left out in the Louisiana rain for a couple years. But that was what happened when you bought everything from the lowest bidder–a bid that had probably been the low one because the company had bribed somebody in the Contracts office. Bribery was a normal way of doing business around here. Kat had taken two semesters of political science at LSU, where she was, thankfully, a senior. Studying politics was almost a necessity in Louisiana, where people still spoke fondly of Huey Long, the govemortumed-senator who’d been assassinated in the main part of the capitol building, just up the hall there, more than seventy-five years past.
Huey had been one in a long list of rogues who had run the state, and with the public’s blessing. After all, the big oil companies had paid for everything for decades, there hadn’t been any income tax–no property tax to speak of–and if you were going to elect somebody, why not elect somebody colorful, especially if it didn’t cost you anything? Her political science professor had once told the class that when he’d been a teenager, he and his friends would catch a bus to the capitol and sit in the gallery, watching the House in action. More inter esting than going to a movie, he’d said. People came from all over the country to study Louisiana politics, and rightly so.
She grinned as the wind howled at the glass doors that opened out onto the capitol grounds.
Huey was out there, in spirit and in bronze, just around the bend, the spotlight from the top of the tall and pointed building–once the tallest in the entire South, and still pretty much the tallest in the state-again shining down upon the populist martyour’s huge statue.
Every now and then, the state tightened its purse strings and decided to turn the spotlight off to save a few dollars, but they always turned it back on again. Tourists still came to see old Huey out there, pigeons and all.
Working your way through school as a guard at the state capitol wasn’t the best job in the world, but it left plenty of time to study, that was the main thing-Her comm buzzed. She grinned again and pulled the tiny unit from her belt. She knew who it was.
Nobody else would be calling at this hour.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey, Kat,” her husband said.
“How come you’re still awake?” Kat asked.
“You’ll never make Lard Ass’s class.” “Piss on him. I miss you. All alone here in this big, old bed. Naked under the covers. Full of lust for my new wife.” Kat laughed.
“You all talk, goat-boy. If I came home right now, you’d whine about how you had to get some sleep.” “No, ma’am. You come home and I’ll show you.
I have a big surprise for you.” “Not so big as all that, honey chile. I’d say it was just an… average surprise.” “How would you know? Come on home and see. I’ve been lifting weights.” She laughed.
“I am tempted–” she began.
She never finished the sentence. The compression shock wave blasted her so hard that if the investigators hadn’t known who she was, they would never have been able to identify her, not even using dental records.
When the various agencies finished combing the rubble– city and state police, fire department, ATF, FBI–THEY found in the bloody mush that had been Kat Brant only eight of her teeth still intact, none of which had ever been touched by a dentist’s laser.
The only blessing was that she did not suffer. She never knew what hit her.
1 Friday, December 17th, 12:05 p.m.
Quantico, Virginia Alexander Michaels, Commander of the FBI’S elite Net Force unit, fell on the floor, smack onto his butt. He hit harder than he expected; it knocked the wind out of him.
Fortunately, the cheek that took most of the impact was the left one, and not the right where, two months ago, a bullet had exited after he’d been shot in the thigh. The wound was pretty much healed; it only twinged now and then.
The woman who had just slammed him to the floor was his chief deputy. Assistant Commander Antonella “Toni” Piorella–all five feet five inches, one hundred and maybe ten pounds of her.
Before he could even try to recover his breath, Toni dropped to one knee next to him and threw a short right elbow at his face, slapping it with her left hand for emphasis–and to move her left hand into position for a follow-up wipe, did she deem it necessary.
It wasn’t going to be necessary. Michaels had no plans to punch her. He could barely breathe.
Smiling took everything he had.
Toni offered Michaels a hand, and he took it.
She stood and helped him do the same.
“You okay?” He managed to suck in enough air to say, “Yeah, fine.” Holding the smile was one of the hardest things he’d done in a while, but he held it.
“Good. You see what I did?” “I think so.” Generally, they practiced such take downs on the nice, padded mat thoughtfully provided here by the FBI in the smaller of the two gyms in Net Force HQ. Now and again, however, they stepped off the mats onto the floor. Toni, who had been practicing this esoteric martial art since she was twelve, had explained why such training was necessary.
“If you practice on the mats all the time, you get used to that cushion. If you fall on the street or a sidewalk, it won’t be quite so easy. And since a lot of fights end up on the ground, you need to know how it feels.” Yeah. Right.
He could understand it, though he wasn’t sure he was going to ever learn the stuff so well he could hit the concrete and bounce like a rubber ball. But after a month of training five days a week, at least Michaels could finally get the name of the system right: Pukulan Pentjak Silat. Or silat, for short. It was, Toni had told him, a slimmed-down and simplified version of a more complex art that had come out of the Indonesian jungles less than a century ago. She had learned it from an old Dutch-Indonesian woman who’d lived across the street from the Fiorellas in the Bronx, after she had witnessed the old woman use the art against four gang bangers who had tried to run the granny off her door stoop. A big mistake, that.
Michaels had been impressed with what he’d seen Toni do.
If this was the simple and easier stuff, he could wait on the really nasty moves.
“Okay, you try,” she said.
“You gonna punch left or right?” he asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said.
“If you control the center like you’re supposed to, it’ll work either way.” “In theory,” he said.
She smiled at him.
“In theory.” He nodded, then tried to relax and assume a neutral stance.
That was supposed to be part of it too, Toni had said. It ought to work from whichever position you happened to be in if an attacker jumped you; otherwise– what was the point? You wouldn’t have time to bow and get into your ready stance if the street thug decided to eat your lunch. It wasn’t real likely a guy in an alley coming at you with a knife was going to allow you to run home to take off your shoes and put on your gi while he stood there waiting, maybe cleaning his nails with his blade. If a move wasn’t practical, the Indonesian fighters didn’t much like to pass it along. This wasn’t a do, a spiritual “way.” It was the distilled essence of anything-goes street fighting. It was not an art of flashy, fancy moves, but an art of war. In silat, you didn’t merely defeat an enemy, you destroyed him, and you used whatever you had at hand to do it: fists, feet, elbows, knives, clubs, guns– Toni leaped at him.