“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 clunk! in the night, what you are supposed to do is lock yourself and your family in a secure room, get your gun, com the police, and stay put until the cops arrive. You aren’t supposed to stalk down the hall like Doc Holliday with your shotgun looking for the bad guys. If you do, however, and you see one, and he’s armed, you shoot first and ask questions later.”
“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.
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 voice-over?”
“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 Roberto yet. She wondered how he was doing.
He was probably doing just fine. She worried too much about the details, she knew that. It was hard to trust people to do what you told them to do, and with good reason. Once upon a time, she had been a corporate manager, on the fast track to the vice presidency of a Fortune Five Hundred company. She’d been making good money, had been well-respected, and had been kicking ass and taking names, but she’d had to quit. People kept screwing up, doing things differently than she’d told them, and it drove her up the wall. The idea of being a decent manager was: You hired good workers and turned them loose, and they didn’t call until the job was done, except if they had problems. The reality of it was: You inherited a lot of deadwood in whatever department you took over, and it was a while until you could figure out who worked and who shuffled papers and pretended to work. Yeah, once you got the lay of the land, you could fire the lazy ones, but then you had to spend time looking for somebody new, and that was always the devil-you-knew-versus-the-devil-you-didn’t. You’d read this great resume, the guy would show up and give a good interview, and as soon as he got the job, he’d turn into a brain-dead lame donkey you couldn’t move with a flaming two-by-four shoved up his butt. Half the time you couldn’t lop off the deadwood in the first place because they’d sue for one kind of discrimination or another — gender, age, race, whatever. You could catch somebody stealing the petty cash, flashing old ladies in the subway, or snorting cocaine in the lunchroom and it wasn’t enough to get rid of them if they had the right leverage.
And office politics? Stupid bosses who’d Peter Principled out? Backstabbing coworkers?
Don’t even hike those trails…
Chance smiled at the memory. Being in charge of most places was no picnic in the park. The reason she had taken this job was that they let her start from scratch, hire anybody she wanted, and she could get rid of anybody who worked for her with two words: You’re gone! There was 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.