Hidden Agendas.

Net Force.

Tom Clancy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

We'd like to thank Steve Perry for his creative ideas and his invaluable contributions to the preparations of the ma.n.u.script. We would also like to acknowledge the a.s.sistance of Martin H. Greenberg, Larry Segriff, Denise Little, John Heifers, Robert Youdelman, Esq., Richard h.e.l.ler, Esq., and Tom Mallon, Esq.; Mitch.e.l.l Rubenstein and Laurie Silvers at BIG Entertainment; the wonderful people at Penguin Putnam Inc., including Phyllis Grann, David Shanks, and Tom Colgan; our producers on the ABC mini-series, Gil Caies and Dennis Doty; the brilliant screenwriter and director Rob Licbcrman; and all the good people at ABC As always, we would like to thank Robert Gottlieb of the William Morris Agency, our agent and friend, without whom this book would never have been conceived, as well as Jerry Katzman, Vice Chairman of the William Morris Agency, and his television colleagues. But most important, it is for you, our readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.

"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:

PART ONE.

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 gla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses had been filled before she'd ever logged on to registration. Too bad. Stars were much more interesting than rocks. 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses had been filled before she'd ever logged on to registration. Too bad. Stars were much more interesting 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 governor-turned-senator who'd been a.s.sa.s.sinated 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 cla.s.s 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 interesting 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 gla.s.s 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 martyr'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 capital wasn't the best job in the world, but it left plenty of time to study, that was the main thing- Her com buzzed. She grinned again and pulled the tiny unit from her belt. She knew who it was. n.o.body 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 a.s.s's cla.s.s."

"p.i.s.s on him. I miss you. All alone here in this big, old bed. Naked under the covers. Full of l.u.s.t 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 average surprise." surprise."

"How would you you know? Come on home and see. I've been lifting weights." know? Come on home and see. I've been lifting weights."

She laughed. "I am am tempted-" she began. 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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.

Chapter One.

Friday, December 17th, 12:55 p.m. Quantico, Virginia Alexander Michaels, Commander of the FBI's elite Net Force unit, fell on the floor, smack onto his b.u.t.t. 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, a.s.sistant Commander Antonella "Toni" Fiorella-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 takedowns 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 Pukulan Pentjak Silat. Or silat 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 g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers 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 a.s.sume 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 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 pa.s.s it along. This wasn't a 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 pa.s.s it along. This wasn't a do 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 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.

You were supposed to block first, then step, and this defense was supposed to be a move to the outside of the attacker. Instead, Michaels, rattled, blocked and stepped to the inside of Toni's leading foot. In theory, as she'd said, it didn't matter, since anything that worked was the point.

His right thigh slid between Toni's legs and pressed against her pubis. His concentration on protecting himself just kind of... evaporated. He'd blocked the punch, but now he just stood there. He didn't follow up. He was very much aware of the warmth of her crotch astraddle his thigh, even through two sets of sweatpants.

d.a.m.n!

"Alex?"

"Sorry, I drew a blank."

Quickly, Michaels stepped back. He'd nearly been killed by that a.s.sa.s.sin a couple of months ago; if it hadn't been for Toni, the killer would have gotten him, and it had seemed a good idea to learn more about how to protect himself, but right now this intimate martial contact with Toni might be bringing up more problems than it solved. It certainly was bringing up one problem in particular he could do without- "Hey, Boss?"

Michaels shook off the erotic thoughts. Jay Gridley stood near the gym's entrance, looking at the two of them. The younger man was grinning.

"Jay. What's up?"

"You said you wanted to hear about that Louisiana thing as soon as it came in. I just downloaded the packet from the field team in Baton Rouge, got vid and reports. It's flagged in your incoming files."

Michaels nodded. "Thanks, Jay." He looked at Toni. "I need to check that out."

"We can pick up where we left off Monday," she said. "Unless you're working tomorrow?"

"I wish. I was hoping to work on the car, but I've got to bone up on financial stuff. I'm supposed to appear before Senator White's committee on Tuesday."

"You get all the fun," Toni said.

"Don't I just?"

They bowed to each other, the intricate silat silat beginning and ending salute, and Michaels headed for the dressing room. beginning and ending salute, and Michaels headed for the dressing room.

Sheldon Gaynel Worsham was sixteen years old, a student at New Istrouma High School. He looked about twelve, was thin, and had black, oily hair sucked down all over, save for a wavy lock that dangled greasily over his left eye. He wore blue parachute pants and a black T-shirt with a putrid-green pulse-paint logo. The logo was a stylized badge with the word "GeeterBeeter" in jagged letters across it. Whatever that meant. The kid slouched in a cheap chair next to a heavy castplast table that was scratched and battered by years of abuse. Somebody had carved a heart with initials inside it on one corner, something of a surprise, since this was obviously a room where knives or other sharp objects were generally forbidden.

The man seated across the table from Worsham was heavy-set, florid-faced, in a cheap, dark business suit, and he might as well have had "cop" flashing in neon over his head.

"So tell me about this bomb," the cop said.

Worsham nodded. "Yeah, okay, okay. So we're not talking Semtex or C4 or c.r.a.p like that, we're talking RQX-71, a top-secret chemical used in conventional missile warheads. It's an a.n.a.log of some old stuff called PBX-9501. You want to know about anisotropic elastics or isotropic polymerics? Expansion rates or like that?"

"Why don't we just skip over that for now," the cop said. "Where did you get it, this explosive?"

The kid grinned. "I made it in the chem lab. Swiped a key card from the janitor's desk and duped it, got the alarm codes, snuck in at night. Only took a week. Got a little tricky at one point, I thought I was gonna blow myself up, but it worked out okay."

"You made it. And took down a brand-new, three-story, steel-framed addition to the capital with it."

The kid grinned wider. "Yeah. Something, huh?" Worsham sat up straighter in the plastic chair.

"And that blast killed a woman guard working her way through college."

"Yeah, well, I'm sorry about that part, but it's not really my fault. The coozers shouldn't have fired my dad, you pross?"

"Your father worked on the construction of the building."

"Until the stupid coozers fired him, yeah. I wanted to make a point, you pross?"

The cop nodded. "I guess you did that." He shifted in his chair. The thin plastic squeaked in protest. "And how did you happen to come up with the top-secret formula for this-RAQ?"

"RQX-71." Now the kid favored the cop with his biggest grin yet. "That was the easy part. I scarfed it off the net."

Michaels leaned back in the conference room chair and glanced at Toni and Jay Gridley. Gridley touched a control and the holoproj of the interrogation faded.

"Full of remorse about killing that young woman, isn't he?" Michaels said.

"Kids don't relate to death," Jay said. "Too much entcom, too many vids, too much VR slaughter-rooming."

Toni said, "And the formula?"

"Just like the little b.a.s.t.a.r.d said," Jay said. "Right in the middle of a public net room. We pulled it as soon as we found it, but it was posted anonymously. We're trying to backwalk it, but it looks like it came from a recaster somewhere."

"Who would do such a thing? Why?" Toni said.

"And how did they get get the formula to do it?" Michaels added. the formula to do it?" Michaels added.

Jay shrugged. He tapped at the portable and the image of the destroyed building shimmered and came up on the holoproj. It basically looked like a pile of concrete and metal rubble, beams sticking out, shards of gla.s.s glittering under the searchlights, and smoke still coming from sections of it.

"Jesus," Toni said.