The Clan Corporate

Mike blew on his coffee cautiously, then took a sip. "I'm not sure they're wrong," he admitted.

"Not sure-hmm?"

"Not sure they're right, either." Mike shrugged. "I just know we're not tackling this effectively. It's the old story: if the only tool you've got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Matt's former associates are a problem, okay? Only we can't get at them, can we? Which leaves policing techniques to get them the hell out of our home turf. So why the emphasis on the military stuff? I half suspect some guys who know a lot more than us figure that this is a situation which merits military force. It sure doesn't look like something we can do more than a holding action against from here, at any rate."

"I don't agree. We've got to track down those safe houses they're still using. What Matt said about them being short of couriers-it's got to start hurting them sooner or later! If we can capture enough of them, we can stop them."

Mike shook his head. "If we do that, it just starts up all over again a generation later," he said slowly. "Unless we can get at their home turf. Which is a military, not a policing, solution. It may look like magic, but there's got to be some kind of way to do whatever they do, hmm? Bet you that's what the Los Alamos guys are into us for. Although whether they get anywhere…"

"Could be." Pete sat back and sca

"Oh, you know." Mike got the message, put his plate down. "The cat thinks I'm a stranger, there's a layer of dust thick enough to ski on in the rec room, and my neighbors phoned the cops last time I went home because they thought I was a burglar. How 'bout you?"

"Huh. You need to get a girlfriend." Pete cracked a smile.

"Not really." Pete stirred his coffee. "The job tends to put the good ones off."

"Like, what was she called? That journalist you were seeing last year, or whenever it was."

"Drop it, Pete."

Pete stared at him. "Getting you down, huh?"

"I said, drop it." Mike looked up. "Do you have life? Or is it just me?"

"Wherever I hang my hat, there's my home. That's what Nikki tells me, anyway: mostly I use the hook on the back of the office door. If I was earning overtime…"

"I'm saving up my vacation days." Mike finished his coffee. "When we get this under control I'm going to-I don't know. Get a life, I guess. Nine years and I could do the early retirement thing, head south and get a boat and go fishing forever. Except at this rate there won't be enough of me left to do any of that."

"You've got to stop putting everything into the job," Pete advised. "At least, take a couple of evenings a week to have a life. You about finished?"

"Nearly." Pete drained his coffee and pulled a face. "Let's take a hike. I could do with some fresh air before I go back."

They were half a block away before Pete said it. "Loose lips, Mike. I know"-he waved off Mike's answer before it began-"it's just not office politics as usual, is it?"

"No, it is not." Mike chose his next words with care. "Your data-mining hunt. Do you think they're giving you the runaround deliberately?"

"No, I-" Pete paused. "No, it's not deliberate. I think what it is is, they've got you riding herd on Greensleeves and they had to find something to keep me out of trouble as I was in on that first debrief. But they don't expect to tackle this as a civil law enforcement problem, so they're not giving me any backup. You, they can use. Intelligence, in a word." He shrugged. "It makes me mad," he added quietly.

"If they're not looking at it as a civil law enforcement problem, how do you think they're going to deal with it?"

"I don't know. And that gives me a very bad feeling."

If the altitude doesn't give you a nosebleed, the interagency catfights will do it every time, Mike reflected mordantly as he waited at the elevator bank in the Boston office. He sniffed, mildly a

The twenty-first floor had once been mahogany row, back when these offices had belonged to a dot-bomb. FTO had leased them cheap, from the sixth floor up. Everything below ten was a red zone-at risk of enemy incursion. Mike's destination was the office meeting room. It bore a red security seal, but there was no combination lock-it was a meeting room, not a High Security Portal leading to an NSA-style Vault Type Room. FTO didn't have enough secrets yet to fill a bucket of warm spit, much less a multimillion-dollar bank vault in the penthouse of an office block. It was a sign, in Mike's opinion, of how badly the whole business was going. Or of how starved they were for intelligence.

Mike hit the buzzer outside the door, next to the small CCTV lens. "Mike Fleming, as requested. You wanted to see me?"

"Come in, Mike." Smith normally tried to be friendly but sounded unusually reserved today. Taking his cue, Mike straightened up as the door opened.

Despite not being a full VTR, the meeting room was about as friendly as Dracula's crypt-no windows, air-conditioning ducts and ceiling and floor tiles made out of transparent Lexan so you could check them visually for bugs, white-noise generators glommed against every flat resonant surface to confound any bugging devices. It hummed and whistled like an asthmatic air conditioner, mumbling to itself incessantly to drown out any secrets the conferees might let slip. Meetings in the crypt always sounded like a conference of deaf folks: Eh, what? Would you repeat that?

Mike waited for Smith to unlock the door. Smith was in shirtsleeves, his collar undone and his tie loose. Air conditioner must be acting up again, Mike thought before he registered the other man sitting at the transparent table.

"What can I do for you, sir?" He glanced at the stranger, appraisingly. Red badge, purple stripe. In the arcane color-coded NSA hierarchy Smith had imported, that meant a visitor, but the kind of visitor who was allowed to ask pointed questions. "Good morning," Mike added, cautiously.

"Have a seat." Smith dropped back into his own chair so Mike took his cue, settled at the other side of the table. The visitor was thin-faced, in his thirties or forties, and had a receding hairline, like Hugo Weaving in The Matrix, Mike realized. Right down to the tie clip. That had to be deliberate. An asshole, but a high-clearance asshole, he thought irritably.

"Mike, this is Dr. Andrew James, from Yale by way of the Agency and the Heritage Foundation. Andrew, this is senior agent Mike Fleming, DEA, on secondment to FTO. So you know where you stand, Mike, Dr. James is our new Deputy Director of Operational Intelligence, which is to say, he's going to be ru

"I'm very pleased to meet you, sir," Mike said politely, trying to keep his face impassive. Shit, another spook. "Spook" spelled "cowboy," as far as Mike was concerned. They tended to know nothing about law enforcement, and cared less. Which said something unpleasant about the direction in which this meeting was going to go.