Jerome Preisler: Net Force--Attack Protocol

Zolcu stared across at him in silence. Leo figured he needed a proper introduction, took a deep breath, walked around the table, and gave the side of his chair a hard, rattling kick.

Zolcu jolted up straight.

“I’m Harris,” he said, standing over him. “When I ask a question, doesn’t matter what it is, you answer. Got me?”

Zolcu sat there for a long moment. “I don’t have to answer anything,” he said. “I am an honest nightclub owner. I was attacked by American terrorists. I’ve been abducted from my country and am being detained illegally. Do not talk to me about my rights.”

Harris took a breath, nodded to indicate Zolcu’s prison uniform.

“You enjoy wearing that onesie?” he said.

Zolcu looked at him and said nothing.

“I hear you like fancy clothes,” Harris said. “So happens, I do, too. But you can’t pick your getups in custody. No rings and things. No buttons and bows. One guy’s the same as the next. You’re like Florida oranges packed into a fucking crate.”

Zolcu stared at him. Harris returned to his side of the table, pulled out the chair, and sat down.

“Here’s why I’m telling you all this,” he said. “You’ve been in this country—what, three days? Before that you were in Europe. Romania, Italy...it took over a month to get you extradited and onto an overseas flight. And I bet all those weeks, close to home, you figured you’d be right back at your club in no time. Prancing around in a sailor suit, a cowboy hat and shorts. Or whatever the fuck you wear on the dance floor. Catch me?”

“No.”

Harris grinned.

“I think maybe you do,” he said. “You’re so used to living the dream, it’s hard to wake up and see it’s over.” He spread his hands. “You still think this shit’s temporary. A little break in the action. But you better get used to it.”

Zolcu shook his head.

“I don’t belong here. I’m a businessman. I own a nightclub.”

“You own a sleazy freak show with some of the lowest scum on earth on its guest list,” he said. “Drajan Petrovik, for instance.”

Zolcu said nothing. Harris studied him closely. He shifted in his chair but showed no other reaction. Harris decided to let that thread hang.

“How about we talk about your real line of work?” he said. “We can skip the pimping and drugs and go straight to forging the bank cards that spread the Hekate bug. That was some fucking hit. Thousands of innocent people died. Right here in this city.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You didn’t print up those cards? Microchips and all? Because that part was slick. Manufacturing the chip, I mean. Putting the bug on them so it would spread...”

“I had nothing to do with that.”

“Which part? The cards or the chips?”

Zolcu crossed his arms.

“Neither.”

“You sure?”

“Of course.”

Harris shrugged. “The reason I ask—I like to put all my reasons up front—is that we’re talking apples and oranges, so to speak. Apples being run-of-the-mill ATM card forgery. But the chip...that’s what puts you in with the oranges. For a long, long time.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Harris meshed his hands on the table and leaned forward.

“My feeling is you didn’t make the chips,” he said. “That’s more what I’d expect from Petrovik. Or his Russian pals.”

“I don’t know anyone named Petrovik.”

“How about the Wolf?”

“Excuse me?”

“The Wolf,” Harris repeated, looking directly into his eyes. “His nickname.”

A few seconds passed. Zolcu’s arms remained crossed.

“Wolves are dangerous,” he said. “I have nothing to do with them.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Even though you were living in Petrovik’s castle.”

Zolcu shrugged.

“I told you, I don’t know him,” he said. “I rented the place through a broker.”

Harris grinned. “A broker.”

“Correct. A real-estate broker. I never inquired about its owner.”

“And what was the broker’s name?”

Zolcu said nothing.

“The name of the real-estate broker,” Harris repeated. “Let’s hear it.”

Zolcu said nothing. Harris waited. They looked at each other.

“I don’t remember,” Zolcu said finally. “It was a woman.”

“The same woman you were with the night we grabbed you?”

Zolcu looked at him.

“No,” he said. “She was not the broker.”

“But you were with a woman that night?”

“Yes. I met her at a club in Cluj-Napoca.”

“Cluj being some little shithole Romanian town near the castle?”

“I prefer it to this big shithole American town,” Zolcu said.

Harris grinned again. He stood regarding Zolcu for a long minute.

“Funny,” he said. “I like funny.”

Zolcu stared at him.

“So, funny man...what were you doing in Cluj?”

“I was there on business.”

“What kind of business?”

“I want to open a new club.”

“Oh?”

“In the area,” Zolcu said. “I rented the castle to have a place to stay. While scouting locations.”

“In Cluj.”

“Yes.”

Harris looked at him. “Wasn’t the place a little far from there?”

“It didn’t seem far to me.”

“Forty, fifty miles, right?”

“I would need to check.”

“Don’t bother, funny man,” Harris said. “I already did.”

Zolcu was silent a moment.

“I scouted multiple locations. In Cluj, Rosalvea, and Satu Mare,” he said. “The castle was centrally located.”

Harris looked at him.

“That woman you picked up,” he said. “Let’s hear some more about her.”

“What is there to say? We met, we danced, we drank, and we went back to the castle together. When your people broke in, I left her in my bed.”

“You’re some fucking champion.”

Zolcu shrugged again.

“Say what you will, I don’t even remember the girl’s name,” he said. “Is a one-night stand now an international crime?”

“No,” Harris said. “The fake-card scam is. Cyberterrorism is. An innocent woman’s murder...that’s just what pushes a jury to vote for a death sentence.”

Zolcu opened his mouth. Closed it.

“If something happened to her,” he said, “I had no hand in it.”

“No?”

Zolcu shook his head. “How do you know your people weren’t responsible?”

Harris sat there looking at him in silence. Ten seconds passed. Twenty. A full minute. He knew what he would have liked to have done. If he could breathe normally, if he could go more than ten steps without the machine, he would have stood up and gone back around the table and gotten right in his face, thrown some fear into him, established his control. But he couldn’t, not in his physical condition, and instead he just leaned forward over the table.

“I’ve got one rule in this room,” he said. “And it’s that I ask the questions, and you give the answers. All right?”

Zolcu looked at him. After a moment, he nodded.

“Repeat it,” Harris said. “My rule.”

“You ask the questions.”

Leo nodded.

“And the second part?”

Zolcu suddenly smiled at him.

“There is none, you fat, wheezing old bastard,” he said. “Ask all the questions you want. I won’t answer any more of—”

The sentence died unfinished on his lips as the door to the room suddenly burst open, swinging back against the wall with a loud bang. Startled, Zolcu shot a look past Harris toward the entryway and saw a tall, broad-chested man dressed entirely in black burst through the entry and cross the room with a few giant strides, heading straight toward the table, coming around it, coming toward him ...