"Nothing's the matter with me. What's a matter you?"

He laughed again.

"One born every minute. Okay, let's talk about snow runners."

He took a sip of his coffee. "Okay, I'll bite, what is a snow runner? Some kind of extreme sport?"

"Back in the hot summer days before refrigeration you usually drank your beer warm. If you wanted something to plop into your drink to cool it, you had three choices: Wait for winter; collect and store a whole lot of ice in a cool dark place during the winter, like a cave or an ice house; or go to where there was natural ice and fetch it. In temperate or even tropical countries, you can usually find such places."

Thorn considered it for a moment. "Mountains," he said.

"Right," she said. "So while it might be ninety in the shade down in the flats, five or ten thousand feet up the local hills, there could be snow on the ground, frozen ponds, like that."

"Uh huh."

"The Romans, the Europeans, and even the South Americans had snow runners. Say you were the local king of the Incas down in Peru about the time Pizarro came to call, and you had a fondness for cold chocolate in the hot summer. What you did was, you sent your snow runners up to collect it for you. These were fleet-footed fellows who could run for marathon distances at a goodly clip-at least for the part where they got to the base of the mountain. They had to slow down some on the uphill leg, and coming down, they had these big, watertight baskets lined with leaves and wrapped in some kind of insulation, holding forty or fifty pounds of densely packed snow or ice chipped from a frozen stream, depending on the boss's tastes. The stuff would start to melt pretty quick once you were below the freezing level, of course, so you had to be fairly swift. By the time you got back to the temple, or wherever the king liked to hang out, much of it would be melted, so you'd be heading back up the mountain soon, and if the king was having a party, well, you'd be hustling."

"A busy life."

"Kind of like being a mail carrier," she said. "Lots of exercise outdoors, and the pay was relatively good. The snow runners would have eaten well, they needed to be in shape. But my point, Tommy, is that you might not be able to get at him directly, but it's like ice in your drink in the summer. You can find a way if you want it bad enough."

He sighed. "I suppose you're right."

"Of course I'm right. You just need to use that sharp brain of yours to come up with something that will do the job."

He nodded. She was right, of course. If only it were as easy as she made it sound.

35.

Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia Another week pa.s.sed, and Net Force had nothing to show for it regarding c.o.x.

Yes, Jay Gridley had come across some information on the net indicating that Natadze had fled the country, but Jay had said it seemed hinky, and after Thorn examined it, he agreed. The data was too perfect-a little work had revealed flights, a name, and dates, but the pa.s.senger had never been photographed by any security cams, and the copy of his ID had somehow been garbled so that nothing remained of it but that it was on file as having been checked. Too easy, and both Jay and Thorn thought it was a red herring set to throw them off Natadze's trail.

What Thorn had hoped for hadn't materialized. Keeping teams in the field 24/7 cost a lot, and with nothing to show for it except suspicion, he couldn't keep justifying it.

Worse, he had spoken to an old friend who was working for the Attorney General, and just a few minutes earlier had had a long and hard discussion with the Director of the FBI. Neither set of comments had been encouraging.

Coming out of the Director's office had left him feeling stunned. He had thought he knew how politics worked, but she had given him a lesson in just how little he knew.

Reality was ugly.

And now, he had to pa.s.s that lesson along.

It wasn't going over well.

Jay said, "I'm sorry, I don't see the problem. This is a bad guy-he's probably a spy, certainly a murderer, and not to take it personal or anything, but he had his goon shoot me in the head! shoot me in the head!"

Kent nodded. "Gridley is right."

Fernandez said, "I third that."

Thorn sighed. "I don't disagree at all. c.o.x is definitely a bad man. But it has been pointed out to me that it's not that simple."

He looked at them, and knew that no matter how he tried, making them understand the total picture was going to be difficult. Especially since he didn't agree with it himself.

"Pointed out to you by whom?" Kent asked.

"A source in the AG's office. And my boss. Who got it from her boss, who, I shouldn't need to say, is the President of these United States and at whose pleasure we serve."

"Politics. That's just great," Kent said. His tone could have etched gla.s.s.

"It's not just that c.o.x is richer than Midas," Thorn said, "though he can afford to throw a brigade of lawyers at the government and probably keep from going to jail until he dies of old age-if we could even get a conviction-but that's not our worry." we could even get a conviction-but that's not our worry."

"Then what is our worry?" Jay asked. "You're saying we don't have enough on him to arrest him."

"You know we don't. We don't even know for certain why why he did it. All we have is conjecture. Even if you cracked the code and found his name in the agent file, that wouldn't prove he he did it. All we have is conjecture. Even if you cracked the code and found his name in the agent file, that wouldn't prove he was was one." one."

"I'm working on it. I'll get it. What about his connection to Natadze? How would a hit man have enough on the ball to do all that corporate c.r.a.p to hide his house? That had to come from c.o.x."

"We know that. But any lawyer with half a brain would get that laughed out of court-c.o.x didn't leave any fingerprints, and maybe Natadze read how to do that in a book." know that. But any lawyer with half a brain would get that laughed out of court-c.o.x didn't leave any fingerprints, and maybe Natadze read how to do that in a book."

"Bull," Jay said.

"I'm not arguing with that. Look, the point is, even if we had a mountain of evidence, it still might not go forward."

Fernandez, just promoted to captain, said, "Excuse me?"

Thorn shook his head. "I'll explain it to you the way it was explained to me. Remember the Enron scandal some ten years or so ago? Big company got caught doing some real creative wheeler-dealing, went bust?"

"Yes," Fernandez said. "So?"

"A lot of people lost their retirements, their jobs, their homes, and even their families, and they had nothing to do with the situation other than that their companies had invested in Enron."

Fernandez nodded. "I remember."

"Here's the biggest obstacle: c.o.x is the head of a multinational corporation worth more than some countries. There are tens of thousands of people directly working for him around the world, and millions of people indirectly connected to his businesses. Stock markets all over the globe trade shares in these companies."

"Like the Captain said," Colonel Kent said, "so what?"

"International concerns like c.o.x's carry a lot of weight. Given the nature of the world's economy, with everybody linked to everybody else, it's kind of like a house of cards. Pull the wrong one out and the whole thing collapses."

Fernandez picked up on it first: "So, what, we're supposed to let this guy off because that might might be a glitch in the finances of a bunch of rich folks?" be a glitch in the finances of a bunch of rich folks?"

"It's not just rich folks. It's the proverbial widows and orphans who can't afford what you call a 'glitch.' "

"Are you saying that arresting c.o.x will cause a collapse of the entire planet's economy?" Jay said. "Come on!"

Thorn shook his head again. "I don't know. Maybe it wouldn't do anything at all. Or maybe having the head honcho revealed as a murdering Soviet spy might so rattle investors' confidence that they'd dump their stock en ma.s.se. Or maybe customers would be alarmed to the extent that they'd look to take their business elsewhere. We don't know."

He sighed. He did understand this himself. He was a part of that community, too. But he hated it, hated the very thought that c.o.x might be untouchable. "Look," he said, "once you start digging into the way the man operates-and that will have to be part of it-there's no telling what we are going to find. A guy who is willing to sell out his country, to have people killed, probably wasn't too scrupulous in his business dealings. I'd bet once the fed starts turning over rocks there, all kinds of ugly things are going to be revealed. There's no way to be sure."

"I don't give a flying fiddler's-" Jay began.

"Think of it like this," Thorn said, cutting him off. "Your sixty-four-year-old father is about to retire after working hard for forty years. The c.o.x empire shatters, the stock market goes into the toilet. The mutual fund where much of your father's retirement has been invested loses most of its value. That nest egg he's spent his whole life building just . . . goes away. He's probably going to have to keep working-a.s.suming he can-and whatever a.s.sistance he can get from Social Security is, given how that program is teetering on the brink of a big abyss, going to be minimal."

"Yes, but-"

"Now multiply that by, say, a couple million late baby boomers who are going to retire in the next year or two. And it isn't just them, it's the shops they frequent, their children, their grandchildren's college funds. If a whole lot of people go on welfare, lose their homes, get sick, can't afford medicine or doctors, that ripple runs throughout society. It's the b.u.t.terfly wings in Kansas causing a typhoon in China, Jay. It's not just a few rich folks who might have to skip buying a new yacht for a year."

None of the men around the table were stupid. He could see it working through their minds.

Finally, Jay said, "All right. So we can't just ride in with the troops and grab c.o.x. But we can't just do nothing, either. So what do do we do?" we do?"

Thorn rubbed the side of his face. This was going to be the really ugly part. "I have been told that we can have the federal prosecutor work things out with the state and local authorities, and come up with an offer."

"An offer?"

"Yes. Quietly, behind the scenes. We agree not to go after him, and put forth some kind of deal that gets c.o.x to retire, to give up control of his empire, maybe a big fine."

"What?! The man is a killer!" That from Fernandez. "And the government wants to give him a traffic traffic ticket?" ticket?"

"Given what we have, proving felonies to a jury would be extremely difficult. He knows we're watching, and he isn't going to take a crooked step. There's nothing else we can find."

He paused, then went on, "If we had a confession, and video of him strangling a small child in front of a hundred witnesses, the process itself would still be full of pitfalls. He might be able to get to one of the jurors, offer enough money to buy their own small town if they want one. There are a hundred things that could go wrong in a trial, and we all know that c.o.x will have the biggest, meanest legal sharks in the world on his side hunting for these things. If he spent ten million, a hundred million dollars on his defense, it would just be pocket change to him. Maybe he gets off, scot-free, and meanwhile, maybe your father and a million other fathers like him wind up living in a shelter or on the street. Would you have that?"

n.o.body said anything.

"A man like c.o.x lives for the game," Thorn said. "If we can take that away from him, that will be some kind of punishment." That was lame, and he knew it, but he had no other crumbs to offer, and he hated that.

"But he's still a billionaire living high on the hog," Fernandez said. "How much you figure he's going to suffer, when it gets right down to it?"

Thorn didn't have an answer for that.

"That's a.s.suming he goes for the deal," Jay said. His voice was bitter. "We don't have enough leverage to do much. He might tell the feds to shove it, and dare them to take him to court."

"That's possible."

"This sucks," Fernandez said. "Big time."

Thorn nodded. "Yes. It does. It's not right. But it's the way things are. I'm just telling you what I've been told. Our job was to catch him. We uncovered him. We're supposed to shut up and leave it alone from here on in."

That pretty much ended the meeting, with n.o.body happy-especially Thorn. As the men left, Thorn stopped Fernandez. "Julio, can I see you a minute?"

"Yeah. What's up?"

After the others were gone, Thorn told him. It surprised Fernandez, but it didn't take five seconds for him to nod his agreement. Thorn had been pretty sure he would go along. They thought alike about this particular subject. Thorn's grandfather had taught him that the law and justice were distant cousins; that when you were forced to make a choice between them, it was better to choose justice, even if it might put you at odds with the law. Laws changed, they shifted according to the whim of those who made them, and people sometimes made mistakes-just look at what the white man had done to the red man or the black man-genocide and slavery, and all of it perfectly legal at the time. There was the letter of the law, and then there was the spirit, his grandfather had taught him-it didn't take an eagle to see which was the right path.

So Marissa's story about the snow runners applied here. Maybe, just maybe, there might be another way.

36.

Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia Howard was cleaning out his temporary desk. The situation with c.o.x was effectively over, as far as Net Force was concerned. Jay was still doggedly trying to decode the file, and searching high and low for anything else that might swing the decision to back off in the other direction, but Howard knew a done deal when he heard one.

Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost. That was how it went. Losing this one, however-not only his last one with Net Force, but one with such a personal element, too-was going to be hard.

He looked up and saw Abe standing in the doorway.

"They are covering their tracks," Abe said.

Howard said, "Yeah?"

"Natadze's house just blew up. Pretty much leveled the sucker."

"Really?"

"Our surveillance people have been long gone, but the local police are investigating it. First reports say it was probably natural gas, but I wouldn't bet on it being an accident. Soon as the arson boys check it, I'm betting they find evidence of a trigger, even if it was a gas leak."

Howard shook his head. "I don't suppose Natadze was in the place when it went up?"

"No signs of a body. I'll keep you posted, if you want."

"I'd appreciate it, Abe."

"You looking forward to the new job?"

"Yes and no. It'll pay better. My wife will sleep easier. But it probably won't be as much fun."

"Anytime you want to come back and do a ride-along, let me know. You'll always be welcome"

"Thanks. I appreciate it."

Abe left, and Howard finished his packing. He was going to miss this, no question. But better-paid and safer had their appeal.