Michaels came back, clipping the virgil onto his belt, next to his taser.
Howard raised his eyebrows.
"It's ours, Colonel."
Howard grinned, real big.
Michaels shook his head and sighed. "I already had occasion today to remember the old saying ‘Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.' Colonel. You just got what you wanted. Merry Christmas. I hope it doesn't blow up in our faces."
Chapter Sixteen
Hughes had just walked into the safe house apartment and noticed that Platt wasn't there yet when his virgil buzzed. He looked at the ID. Senator White. He felt a stab of worry, even though he knew there was no way White could know where he was and what he was doing there.
"Hello, Bob. Merry Christmas."
"Tom. What's all this I've been hearing about some kind of nuclear material getting stolen?"
"Nothing that concerns us directly. Well, except that the word I hear is that this was another one of those deliberate leaks into the aethernet."
"Jesus Lord."
"Oh, worse than that. My sources tell me the leak came from Net Force Headquarters, right smack dab in the middle of the FBI compound itself."
"I'll have Michaels's head on a platter if that's true! And Walt Carver's ass for desert!"
Now there was an image.
"It'll keep until after the holidays, Bob. The terrorists fell down, only one of the attacks was even partially successful, and I am given to understand that that one is about to be rectified by our military and other federal agencies. No great harm was done. Enjoy the season. We can nail all this down when you get back to town, before the session gets rolling. I'm keeping tabs on things from this end. Don't worry."
"All right, if you say so."
Platt swaggered in, circled his hand to his forehead, lips, and heart, and added a couple of circles, then held it out to Hughes in a bastardized salaam. Hughes waved him off.
"Give my love to June and the girls and the grandkids," Hughes said to White.
"I will. Merry Christmas, Tom."
After he switched off the virgil, Platt laughed. "So, our little game ruffled your boss's feathers, hey?"
"Don't worry about him. I've got it covered."
Platt walked to the refrigerator, opened it, and took out a plastic bottle of apple juice. He opened the bottle and drank half the juice in three big swallows. "Seems like such a waste, though. Telling the Sons of Whoever about all the shipments, then telling the feds on ‘em."
"Right. I was really going to give those fruitcakes the material to build a working atomic bomb. If they put the thing together, assuming they could, what do you think would be the target city?"
"Couldn't happen to a nicer town," Platt said. "Full of stuck-up assholes who think they're better than the rest of the country." He burped. Took another swig of juice. Said, "Ahh, that's good stuff."
Hughes shook his head. Platt was definitely a loose cannon. Sooner or later, he was going to shoot the wrong way or blow himself and everything around him into bloody pieces. "You need a sense of history," Hughes said. "Washington is our nation's capital. I don't want to destroy it."
"It's just about money, huh?"
"No, it's also about power. But that doesn't mean I have to be a homicidal maniac to get what I want."
"What about the guys guarding the u-rain-e-yum? You don't feel like they're dead because of you? Was your fruitcakes that hosed ‘em."
"I didn't pull any triggers. I didn't tell anybody else to either. If I give you a bread knife and you cut somebody's throat instead of using it to slice bread, that's your fault, not mine."
"Unless you knew I wasn't gonna use it for bread when you sold it to me. And this wasn't exactly no bread knife, was it? More like a headsman's hatchet."
"I didn't ask the Sons, they didn't tell."
"Oh, yeah. The information we fed ‘em was for study purposes only."
"No, it was to get things rolling in the direction I wanted them to roll in."
Hughes didn't really think he could explain it to Platt, but for a moment he felt the need to try. "Do you know anything about how the Japanese traditionally made their samurai swords?"
"I have a sheath knife with a Damascus blade," Platt said. "It's kind of like how they make them in Damascus. The Japs fold and sandwich the steel over and over and hammer it out, then temper the edge harder than the blade."
"Right. But do you know how a master swordsmith would get started? How he would actually light the fire for his forge?"
"I dunno, a Zippo?"
Hughes ignored the wisecrack. "The smith would hammer on a piece of iron bar until it began to glow red. Then he'd put the iron into a bed of cypress shavings soaked in sulfur."
"No shit? That must have taken a while, to get the iron that hot just by whacking it with a hammer."
"Exactly. Making the finest swords the world has ever seen is not like ordering a Whopper and fries at the local BK. It takes skill, precision, patience. Which is what we need too. Our goal here is not to blow things up. Let's not forget that."
"I hear you."
"Good. I think it's time the subversive group responsible for all these problems on the net steps up to claim credit. Let's show them the manifesto."
Platt grinned. "Hot damn. I've been waitin' to do this."
"Don't embellish it, Platt. Just like I wrote it."
"Nopraw, hoss. It's bad enough without me fiddlin' with it. The wogs and sand nigrahs are gonna love this!"
A loose cannon with a short fuse. If Hughes didn't deactivate him soon, Platt was going to screw the whole thing up. A couple more weeks, a month, they'd be over the hump, and Platt was going to have a fatal accident. Maybe just… disappear.
Toni sat on the left side of the commuter jet, staring into the dark over the ocean in the distance. She couldn't see the water, but she could see where the lights on the land ended, as if sliced off by a knife.
She smiled to herself when she had that thought. There had been some problem when she wanted to take the kris onto the plane. They didn't have any trouble with her taser — most of the airlines would allow federal law-enforcement officers to carry tasers or even guns on their planes — but long and wavy-bladed daggers were apparently something else altogether.
No way was Toni going to check the kris. Whatever its monetary value, it was irreplaceable, and according to Murphy's Law, if one item got lost in the baggage roulette on this flight, it would be the kris.
Airline officials weren't going to allow her to carry the knife, despite the illogic of that versus a taser or a gun. Toni didn't tell them that she could kill somebody with her hands almost as easily as she could do so with a knife. That probably wouldn't have been helpful. In the end, after she threatened to call the FBI and have the plane held on the ground for security reasons, the officials relented. She could take the knife, if she let the flight crew have charge of it until they landed. That was good enough. The kris would be in the plane with her, and it was doubtful they could lose it with the doors closed.
The copilot said he'd watch the cardboard box very carefully.
Jay Gridley's call had come as a surprise, but it wasn't such a great loss that she had to leave the annual gathering a little early. She'd gotten a chance to see her family and Guru DeBeers, they'd all exchanged presents, and had eaten a huge Italian Christmas dinner. Mama and Poppa had gone to evening mass with as many of the relatives as they could bully into going with them. The fun part of of the gathering was mostly done, and the inevitable too-close-together friction would be warming up about now. She loved her family, but after a couple of days cooped up in the apartments with them, things could get a little contentious. She'd left them trying to convince her father he shouldn't be getting behind the wheel of his car anymore, and she knew that was a war the family was going to lose.