Michaels said, “I see. And this is related to the casino owner who trashed his competitor’s place of business before being killed by local police?”
“Yes.”
“And to the woman who attacked a gang of construction workers who whistled at her and put seven of them into intensive care?”
“Yes,” Lee said. “And to others of a similar nature.”
Michaels looked at his boss, then at Lee. “And I take it that, since you are DEA, you think drugs were somehow involved?”
Lee frowned, not sure if Michaels was pulling his chain or not. Which, Michaels had to admit to himself, he was, a little. Lee seemed awfully stiff.
Lee said, “Yes, we are certain of that.”
Michaels nodded. “Please don’t take offense, Mr. Lee, but this concerns Net Force how?”
Lee looked at Allison for support and got it. She said, “My counterpart at DEA has asked for our assistance. Naturally, the FBI and any of its subsidiaries are happy to help in any way we can.”
“Naturally,” Michaels said, knowing full well that interagency cooperation was more often like competing football teams than the least bit collective. Rivalries among the dozen or so agencies that comprised the intelligence community in the U.S. — everybody from CIA to FBI to NSA to DIA to NRO — were old, established, and more often than not, nobody gave up anything without some quid pro quo. Yes, they were all technically on the same team, but practically speaking, an agency was happy to shine its own star any way it could, and if that included using another agency’s shirt to do it, well, that’s how the game was played. Michaels had discovered this early in his career, long before he left the field to take over Net Force. And DEA wasn’t a major player anyhow, given its somewhat limited mission.
Michaels said, “So how is it that Net Force can do something here DEA can’t?”
Lee, a short man with a fierce look, flushed. Michaels could almost see him bite his tongue to keep from saying what he really wanted to say, which was undoubtedly rude. Instead, Lee said, “How much do you know about the drug laws, Commander Michaels?”
“Not much,” he admitted.
“All right, let me give you a quick and rough overview. Federal drug regulation in the United States comes under the authority of the Controlled Substances Act — that’s CSA — Title II, of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, with various amendments since. Legal — and illegal — drugs are put on one of five schedules, depending on what uses have been established for them and on how much potential for abuse they have. Schedule I is reserved for dangerous drugs without medical applications that have a high potential for abuse, Schedule V is for stuff with low abuse potential.”
“We’re talking about the difference between, say, heroin and aspirin?” Michaels said.
“Precisely. The CSA gets pretty specific about these things.”
“Go ahead, I’m still with you.”
“In the last few years, there has been a resurgence in so-called designer drugs, that is to say, those that don’t slot neatly into the traditional categories. Variations and combinations of things like MDA and Ecstasy and certain new anabolic steroids, like that. The government realized that certain individuals were trying to circumvent the intent of the law by adding a molecule here or subtracting one there to make a drug that wasn’t technically illegal, so there is a provision for analog drugs not addressed by the code.
“So, basically, any salt, compound, derivative, optical or geometric isomers, salts of isomers, whatever, based on a drug that is regulated become automatically de facto regulated the moment it is created.”
Michaels nodded again, wondering where this was going.
“And in case we have a really clever chemist who comes up with something entirely new and different — which is pretty much unlikely, if not impossible, given the known things that humans abuse — the attorney general can put that on Schedule I on an emergency basis. This is done if the AG determines that there is an imminent hazard to the public safety, there is evidence of abuse, and there is clandestine importation, manufacture, or distribution of said chemical substance.
“Basically, the AG posts a notice in the Federal Register, and it becomes valid after thirty days for up to a year.”
Michaels nodded again. He thought Lee was a stuffed shirt, and he decided to give another little tug on his chain. “Very interesting, if you are a DEA agent. Are we getting to a point anytime soon?”
Lee flushed again, and Michaels was fairly certain that if the director hadn’t been sitting there, the DEA man would have lost his temper and said or maybe even done something rash. But give him credit, he got a handle on it.
“What it means is, we have some pretty specific tools we can use to get dangerous, illegal drugs off the street. But in this case, we can’t use them.”
Ah, now that was interesting. “Why not?”
“Because we haven’t been able to obtain enough of the drug to analyze it properly. We know what it does: It makes you fast, strong, mean, and sexually potent. It might make you smarter, too, but that’s hard to say from our samples, since if they were that smart, they ought not to be dead. We know what it looks like; it comes in a big purple capsule. But we can’t make it illegal if we don’t know what it is in the cap.”
Michaels grinned slightly. He could hear that conversation: “Yes, sir, this is the vile stuff, all right. Could you put it on the list so we can bust the guys who made it? What’s in it? Uh, well, we don’t exactly know. Can’t you, uh, you know, just make big purple capsules illegal temporarily?”
Be interesting to hear the AG’s response to that one.
“And where does Net Force come in?”
“We have evidence that the makers of the drug — they call it Thor’s Hammer, by the way — are using the Internet to arrange delivery.”
“If the drug isn’t illegal, then using the net to distribute it isn’t illegal, either,” Michaels said.
“We know. But if we can find them, we can damn well ask the miscreants making it to give us a sample. So to speak. ”
Miscreants? Michaels didn’t think he’d ever actually heard that word used in a conversation before. He said, “Ah, pardon me for asking a stupid question, but wouldn’t it be easier just to buy some on the street and analyze it?”
“Believe it or not, Commander, that thought did occur to us, it being our job and all. It isn’t a common street drug. The cost of it is extremely high, and the sellers are very selective about who they sell it to. So far, none of our agents have been able to make a connection.
“We did manage to seize one capsule after the death of one of the people that we know took the drug. Unfortunately, the chemist in this case is very clever; there is some kind of enzymatic catalyst in the compound. By the time we got the stuff to our lab and analyzed, the active ingredients had all been somehow rendered… inert. There is some kind of timing mechanism in the drug. If you don’t use it fairly quickly, it turns into a bland, inert powder that doesn’t do anything but sit there.”
“You can’t tell what the drugs were?”
“Our chemists can infer what they were, sure. There are residues, certain telltale compounds, but we can’t document for certain what the exact precursor drugs and percentages of each were, because they are essentially gone.”
“Huh. That must be frustrating.”
“Sir, you do not know the half of it. The common thread running through all the sudden insanities is money. Every one of the twelve people we feel certain died as a result of having ingested this drug is — or was — rich. Nobody on the list made less than a quarter million a year, and some of them made fifteen or twenty times that much.”