Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

Slowly rising off his chair, Harris went to carry his cup over to the sink. Sometimes, he found himself wishing they still got along the way they had before his injury. Though in the long run, that wouldn’t have worked out. Being friends with his ex was more trouble than he needed. All it did was stir up memories in him. And it all hurt. Too much.

Better to keep things strictly business.

The New York/East Coast headquarters of Net Force was in a fortresslike, nineteenth-century building in the area between Eighth Avenue and the Hudson River known as Hell’s Kitchen. Originally the city’s largest commercial warehouse, the Terminal was all red bricks and iron lintels and tall casement windows, with a huge central tunnel through which freight trains once arrived along a rail spur linking it to the busy West Side shipyards. In more recent times, it had served as a regional field office for Homeland Security, but some strenuous political arm-twisting by President Annemarie Fucillo led to Homeland grudgingly moving its offices to a location about a mile downtown. In POTUS’s view, Net Force had needed the space for its expanding operations, recruitment drive, and training program.

Twenty-five minutes after Leo Harris pulled his charcoal-gray Jeep Compass from its slot outside his Jersey City condo, he bumped over the old train tracks outside the Terminal and drove up to the motor-vehicle security checkpoint, his oxygen machine charging off the engine beside him. It looked fairly inconspicuous in a black shoulder bag, but he’d covered the unit with an open copy of The New York Times to assure the guards wouldn’t notice it.

“Happy New Year, sir!” The man in the booth smiled at him. “How are you doing?”

Harris shrugged and displayed his ID, looking straight ahead. This was just his third trip to the new offices since their opening two months before, his last having been in late October, before the holidays. Now the jack-o’-lanterns were compost and the Christmas trees were out on the sidewalks. How the hell did the guy think he was doing?

He drove through the tunnel arch to the garage and parked. As director he got a prime spot near the elevator, and good thing, too. It would have taken him ten minutes to walk across two relatively narrow aisles in the underground lot. Like he had to labor just to get from his bedroom to his living room. Like it took him an hour to take a shower while sitting on a plastic bench.

Now he lifted the newspaper off his carry bag and set it carefully aside. The battery readout showed his machine was fully charged. Leo knew the charge would last all day. He could have used the POC in his sleep.

He pulled the charger out of the accessory socket and stuffed it into one of the bag’s outer flap pouches. He took the nasal cannula from a different pouch and attached it to the outflow nozzle. Then he fitted the prongs into his nostrils and turned on the machine.

Canned breath. Oxygen on the go.

He inhaled through his nose. A long, deep breath to inflate his lungs with purified air. The salesman at the medical-supply store had guaranteed his unit was the smallest and quietest on the market. Top of the line, at three times the cost of an average machine. The salesman had showed him a chart comparing its thirty-seven-decibel operating noise to the noise levels of bird calls and soft whispers and rain and rustling leaves. The salesman had seemed like he knew his stuff. But maybe he was just looking for a fat commission. Maybe he didn’t know anything.

Harris didn’t think the machine sounded like rain. Unless it was rain slamming down on a tin roof. And it sure as hell didn’t sound like birds or whispers or rustling. To him its rhythmic racket sounded more like some obnoxious beatboxer on a sleepy subway platform.

Leo sat there for about five minutes, turned off the machine, and removed the cannula. Folding it into a pouch, he sat there behind the wheel a little longer and did his breathing exercises. He combed his hair, smoothed down his overcoat, slung the POC over his shoulder, and exited the vehicle, leaving his cane behind under the front seat. He would be okay without the damn thing for a while. He would have to be. He didn’t want anyone to see him using it.

A wave of his palm in front of a bioscanner, and the elevator doors opened to admit him. He rode it up to the third floor Fusion Center, where cavernous, industrial-age storage rooms had been scooped out and smoothed over and transformed into an equally cavernous but brighter modern space about the size of two basketball courts set end to end. It was filled with computer workstations and large flat-screen displays.

Harris saw fifteen or twenty men and women scattered around the room, wearing the uniforms or badges of various law-enforcement and investigative agencies. There was a low hum of activity, mingled voices, chairs shifting, fingers tapping at keyboards. Later in the day, it might have three or four times as many people working cases together. NYPD, FBI, CIA, Homeland, Net Force...

It had been Leo’s idea to borrow the concept of an interagency information-and resource-sharing pool from the Agency. Three decades at 26 Fed across town, you didn’t leave without some takeaways.

He went up a wide aisle to an office on the far side of the room. It felt like the people who recognized him were trying not to look at the oxygen machine strapped over his shoulder. It was a long, slow hike.

The office door did not have a nameplate. Which made sense because it wasn’t really anyone’s office. Though reserved for high-ranking personnel, it was, along with everything else on the floor, for shared use.

Harris took a couple of deep breaths and flashed his biometric key. The door unlocked with a click, and he walked in.

The office was clean and rectangular and unadorned. No clocks, no pictures on the wall, no photos on the desk. Its only real furnishing was an institutional-gray metal desk with a computer terminal on top. There was a manila file folder next to the keyboard. An empty chair on either side of the desk, and a few more against the walls. The high casement window gave a broad but unspectacular view of Tenth Avenue three stories below.

Carol Morse stood there looking out with her back to the door. She was wearing an open pinstriped blazer over a tan sweater. Her coat was hung neatly on a hook rack. She turned to him, a Starbucks coffee cup in her hand.

“Hello, Leo,” she said.

“Carol.”

“You’re looking better.”

Leo shrugged. He noticed that she’d darkened her hair a shade. He could tell she was spending a lot of time in the gym. Her perfume smelled like flowers.

“Where’s Zolcu?” he said.

She looked at him a second.

“Is this how it’s going to be?” she said. “War all the time?”

Silence. She expelled a breath.

“I’ll bring you over in a minute,” she said. “But we should talk first.”

Harris shrugged again, took the breathing machine off his shoulder, and put it on an empty chair against the wall. He unbuttoned his coat but kept it on, waiting for her to sit down behind the desk. Then he settled into the chair opposite her.

She opened the file folder on the desk between them.

“I brought two copies of his dossier from Washington,” she said. “I know you’ve seen it. But I thought we should do a quick review together.”

Harris reached into the inside pocket of his coat and brought out an e-reader.

“I’ve got it all here,” he said. “Digitized.”

She looked at him. “You? An e-reader?”

“Right,” he said. “You figure I read cave paintings?”

Morse didn’t respond. The Leo she knew was the world’s worst technophobe. Maybe there really was hope all things could change.