Net Force Read Free Page A

three bodies.
        It was a bad neighborhood to die in, Toni Fiorella thought. But then, when you got right down to it, any neighborhood was a bad one to die in when death came from a hard and sudden sleet of submachine-gun fire.
        “Agent Fiorella?”
        Toni blinked away her thoughts on mortality and looked at the police captain, who had, judging by the size and shape of his sleep-wrinkles, been roused from his bed. He was an easy fifty, nearly bald, and certainly, at this moment, a most unhappy man. Dead federal agents in your yard, on your watch, were bad things to wake up to. Real bad.
        “Yes?”
        “My men have come back from their initial canvass.”
        Toni nodded. “Let me guess. Nobody saw anything.”
        “You should go into law enforcement,” the captain said. His voice was sour. “You have an eye for detail.”
        “Somebody in this crowd must have outstanding warrants for something,” Toni said. She waved one arm in accusatory benediction.
        The captain nodded. He knew the drill. When a cop was killed, it didn’t matter if he was local, state or federal, you did what you had to do to find whoever did it. Squeezing some low-life drug dealer or even a citizen with too many parking tickets for information was penny-ante stuff. Whatever it took. You did not let cop-killers slide.
        Toni looked up, and saw the new Chrysler town car glide to a stop just outside the police barricade. Two men, the bodyguard and the driver, got out first and scanned the crowd. The bodyguard nodded at the passenger in back.
        Alex Michaels alighted, saw Toni and headed for her. He held his badge case up, and was waved through by the cops blocking the street.
        Toni felt that mixed rush of emotion she always felt whenever she saw Alex for the first time on any given day. Even in the middle of all this carnage, there was a certain amount of joy, of admiration, even of love.
        Alex’s expression was not grim, but as he habitually wore it, neutral. He didn’t let himself show that he felt such things, even though she knew it had to be causing him great pain. Steve Day had been his mentor and his friend; his death must be stabbing deep into Alex’s heart, though he would never let on, even to her.
        Maybe even especially to her…
        “Toni.”
        “Alex.”
        They didn’t speak as they toured the murder scene. He squatted and examined Steve Day’s body. She caught a flash of tightness in his face, a quick flex of jaw muscles as he looked at Day. Nothing more.
        He rose, moved to the limo and looked at the other dead agents and the ruined auto. FBI and local police agents still circled around with light bars and videocams, covering the entire street. Forensic techs drew circles around each of the spent shells on the street and sidewalk, noting the location of each empty hull before they bagged it. Somebody would do the super-glue steam on those shells, the fine mist of cyanoacrylate ester that could, when done properly, find a fingerprint on a sheet of toilet paper; and they would do the biological-activity scan that could find a germ in an ocean. But Toni figured that coming up with useful prints or DNA residues wasn’t going to be likely. It was almost never that easy. Especially on something as well planned as this obviously had been.
        After he’d gotten as good a look as he wanted, Alex turned to her. “Okay. Lay it out.”
        “As nearly as we can tell so far, it was an assassination, Commander Day the target. A bomb under a manhole cover kicked the limo into a light pole. The door in the rear was blown open-probably a marine limpet of some kind-and the passengers were cut down by several attackers. From the ejected brass patterns, there were three or more shooters. Porter will run the ballistics stuff, but he’s pretty sure from what he’s already seen they were using 9mm’s, at least a couple of submachine guns, and