Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 by Tom Clancy

quiet, or I’ll have to kill you.”
    The man was terrified. He shut up.
    Now, all Santos had to do was immobilize the bodyguards. He hauled the second one out of the car and dragged him to the back. He expertly tied both unconscious men, using the soft cloth ties he had tucked away in his pocket. He didn’t want any ligature marks on them. He placed a loop around each neck and to the wrists, so they wouldn’t struggle when they woke up. He opened the trunk and hoisted the tied pair inside, then carefully shut the lid. He walked back to the bike, glanced at Dowling as he did to see if he’d make a break for it—try to get into the front seat, get the car started, or maybe just open the door and run.
    Dowling sat, not moving, and Santos smiled. He hadn’t thought the man had it in him. He was a good judge of such things.
    He killed the motorcycle’s flashing lights, unclipped them and the siren and controls from the bike, then pushed the two-wheeler into a clump of bushes nearby, so it wasn’t visible from the road. Now it was just an ordinary motorcycle. By the time somebody found it, this would be all over. And there wouldn’t be any way to connect it to Dowling and his bodyguards anyway—the rest of the night’s business was going to happen thirty miles away on a different highway. The motorcycle wasn’t stolen; it had been bought under a fake name, and there was no reason to link it to the limo. It would be another of life’s little unsolved mysteries.
    Santos walked to the car, opened the driver’s door, and sat behind the wheel. “Just sit there quietly,” he said. “We’ll go for a ride, then we’ll have a chat. Behave yourself, and all it costs you is a little inconvenience.”
    A lie, that. Dowling and his two guards would be dead within an hour, all things going as planned. But no point in upsetting the man, was there?

    Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

    It was the nightmare that had finally pushed Michaels into it. He’d awakened in a sweat, heart pounding, from a dream in which the psychotic doper Bershaw had come to his house and captured Toni. In this one, the would-be killer had Little Alex and was holding him by one ankle, getting ready to smash the baby against the kitchen counter.
    Michaels hadn’t been able to go back to sleep after that horrific image.
    John Howard had told him whenever he was ready to give him a call. As soon as it got late enough, he did just that.
    Now, they were in Michaels’s office.
    “I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time,” Michaels said. “Thanks, John.”
    “No problem. Makes perfect sense to me,” Howard said. “In your place, I’d have done it a long time ago.”
    “I mean, even with all of Toni’s expertise, and the knives and tasers and stuff we have laying around, somebody has twice shown up at my house with murderous intent.”
    “I remember the last incident quite well,” Howard said. “It’s about time you got some more serious hardware.”
    “Yeah. I want to be a little better prepared if it ever happens again.”
    “I expect this will do the trick,” Howard said. “Let me show you what we have.”
    Michaels nodded and looked at the gun case, which seemed to be some kind of brownish-gray canvas or oil-cloth, darkened here and there with splotches of lube.
    He untied a string at the fat end of the cloth case and slid the weapon out.
    “This belonged to my uncle,” he said. “It’s what they call a ‘coach gun,’ being the kind of weapon a lot of the stagecoach drivers used when they rode shotgun guard duty back in the Old West. This one is a European American Armory Bounty Hunter II, actually made in Russia for export. My uncle used to use it in cowboy action shooting.”
    “Cowboy action shooting?”
    “A competitive sport. Men and women get dressed up in pre1900 costumes like those that might have been worn in the Old West, give themselves names like ‘Doc’ or ‘Deadeye’ or ‘The Kid,’ and while in persona,