Ian Slater: Payback

“What’s the holdup?” demanded the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, strolling over from his warm Humvee.

“I don’t know,” said Dr. Klein apologetically. “The instructions for assembling the dummy are so simple, I don’t know what the problem is.”

“Then maybe you’d better go and have a look,” said the chairman. “We’ve got ten million bucks invested in this and somebody doesn’t know how to put up the damn dummy?”

“I’ll take a look,” said Freeman nearby, taking his gloves off and making his way down toward the pines, at which point DARPA’s Klein strode after him, passing him as Freeman stopped for a moment to chat with a couple of the military policemen who’d been called on to escort Item A-10437-B/215 from the DARPA aircraft that had delivered it a few hours before to the SeaTac — Seattle-Tacoma — Airport.

When Dr. Klein, trying to find one of the bolts that held the dummy together, looked up and saw Freeman walking toward him with the Heckler & Koch sidearm the general had borrowed from one of the military police, he asked bluntly, “What the hell are you doing with that, General? You going to shoot me because we’re running late?”

“The thought had occurred to me,” said Freeman, grinning. “No, I thought we could test the son of a bitch right here.”

“Well, if you don’t mind,” said Klein, “we’re going to need a few minutes before we get the dummy set up. I don’t know what these guys have been doing, but there’s supposed to be an assembly diagram here and I don’t know where the hell—”

“Murphy’s Law,” said Freeman good-naturedly. “Right, guys?” he asked, looking at the four harried Army privates who had been searching in vain for some kind of diagram that was supposed to be in the item’s box. Freeman stuck the 9mm in his waistband and told one of the privates, “Hand me the vest, will you? It’s time we got this show on the road.” Freeman took off the Russian greatcoat, strapped on the vest, and walked back to General Lesand, handing him the 9mm. “I think you’d like to shoot me, General. Go ahead.”

Lesand looked about. No one said anything. They were struck dumb by Freeman’s braggadocio.

“Go on!” Freeman urged Lesand. “Pull the trigger.”

Lesand licked his lips nervously. “No way.”

“Anyone?” asked Freeman, looking at the others. “I’ll take full responsibility.”

“Don’t be foolish,” Dr. Klein warned him.

“Oh, hell,” said Freeman impatiently, “you’re just a bunch of ninnies.” With that, he took the gun from Lesand, reversed it, and, using his thumb as a trigger finger, fired at his chest. Point-blank range. Three times.

“Jesus—,” began Lesand, abruptly stepping back, almost tripping. “What the hell—”

“It works,” said Freeman casually.

Every one of the VIPs was agape. As Freeman took off the vest and returned the 9mm to an equally astonished MP, he thanked the man and, buttoning up his Russian greatcoat, the steam of his breath looking momentarily like the fiery nostril exhaust of some tall, hitherto unspecified Matrix hero, he paused by the VIPs and pulled the coat’s high collar up around his ears. “So, now we know that the fibers in hagfish slime have, as I suggested in my initial report, a molecular structure that gives it a tensile strength and toughness better than the old Kevlar. Now we’ve got to face the problem of globalization. Once this hagfish-slime composite starts being produced, the thing you’ve got to watch out for will be offshore, substandard knockoffs, which some son of a bitch’ll try to sell to our DoD — if DoD isn’t awake.” He was pulling his gloves back on, flexing his fingers. “So, gentlemen, quality control is the name of the game. Any sublicensing contract is going to have random slime tests written into it, otherwise some cheap bastard somewhere will try to use slime from any kind of fish or other slime-producing creature, like a politician.” Freeman glanced at his watch. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to do my ten-mile run, then catch a plane at SeaTac. I’m supposed to be in Monterey for dinner.”

As the Great Russian Coat and legend walked off, Michael Lesand finally found his voice and demanded, “How in the hell does he know all that stuff? Hagfish slime, Durham boats, all that crap?”

“Well,” answered the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, “he reads and he’s done a lot of things, knows a lot of people, inside and outside the service. He keeps current. And—” The chairman paused, looking directly at Lesand. “—I think that’s the second time this morning he’s made a goat out of you, Michael.”

Michael Lesand muttered an obscenity to the effect that he wasn’t going to forget it, but his words were lost in the sound of the VIPs’ Humvees and other vehicles’ engines coughing to life. Dr. Klein was still looking at the vest that Freeman had thrust at him as he passed. The results were even better than he’d expected. The 9mm slugs were so flattened, they looked as if they’d run into — well, a wall of solidified composite of hagfish slime, not penetrating even a quarter of the inch-thick vest.

Young Michael O’Shea, like so many of the other two hundred students from all over America who were aboard the new state-of-the-art American Airlines Stretch Dreamliner, was literally on the edge of his seat with excitement. Most of the children, like Michael, had never been near an airplane, and although the bus trip through Manhattan’s canyons en route to JFK was a tremendous thrill, now, buckling up for the President’s annual sponsored trip for pupils from low-income families, the children were in a dream coming true. Each of the lucky ten- to thirteen-year-olds had been selected from all fifty states for the best oral or written presentation on “Why I’d like to go to London.”

Of the other fifty passengers aboard, twenty were teachers in coach with the children, eighteen were in business class, eight, including the Secretary of Education, her secretary, and her public relations handler, were in first class, and four sky marshals had been stationed throughout the plane. Everyone, including the Secretary of Education and her staff, had been closely vetted by Homeland Security, especially anyone of Mid-Eastern descent. Suicide bombers, America had learned on 9/11 and in Iraq, came in all sizes and ages. Seventy-two virgins apparently awaited twelve- and fourteen-year-olds as well as the grown-up martyrs of al Qaeda and its ilk, whose rationale for detonating their dynamite-belted bodies directly on their targets was not simply to terrorize Israelis and Americans but to force countries, almost exclusively democracies, to push Israel to yield land, as it had in Lebanon, land that the terrorists believed was rightfully theirs.

Students and teachers alike had photo IDs around their necks. One of the Secret Service sky marshals, Angela Medved, who had immigrated to the U.S. as a child in her teens, had suggested that four sky marshals might be a little excessive, given that everyone aboard had already been thoroughly “backgrounded” by Homeland Security.

“Hey,” Angela had been told, “this is the President’s trip, with a high-level Cabinet member on board. So we have more than the usual marshal allocation. Nothing goes wrong. Understood?”

“Understood.”

Angela and her fiancé, Rick Morgan, a fellow sky marshal who, because of Secret Service rules, was never assigned the same flight as Angela, had met during small-arms training down in Quantico, Virginia, and had decided that when they were married they’d want kids, but not right away. She had seen too many of her girlfriends exhausted by the time they were in their mid-twenties, bags under their eyes from not enough sleep, and marriages under permanent strain from trying to be the all-American supermom. They were worn out, racing from day care to midnight, balancing careers and motherhood with car payments, a mortgage hovering over them like the sword of Damocles, and what investments they’d managed to put away for the kids always on the brink of a precipitous economy in a world that since 9/11 had become increasingly uncertain.