F Paul Wilson - Novel 04 (5 page)

And he seemed to be demanding that
same kind of loyalty now. But John couldn’t quite bring himself to slip
into the passenger seat on this trip.

“Why, Tom?” John said.
“It’s not only bad policy, it’s bad politics. Even your own party—”

“Will eventually come
around.” He ground a fist into his palm. “The ones that really irk
me are the budget cutters. They wail about federal spending? Well, I’m
giving them something real to cut: sixty billion a year. Every year. For what?
Drugs are more available on the street now than they’ve ever been. Sixty
billion, Johnny. The truth is, I want that money. I’ve got better places
to spend it.”

“But the social
cost…”

“How can the social cost be
higher than what we’re paying now? You mentioned buying heroin at the
corner drugstore. You can do that now, John—on the corner outside the
drugstore. Legalization is not going to change availability—drugs are
everywhere now! And you talk about social cost? What about every sociopath in
the world fighting for a piece of the profits?”

“My point exactly,”
John said. “Why become the enemy?”

“Aw, Johnny,” he said.
“Don’t look at it that way. There’s so damn much money in
drugs that the cartels have been able to corrupt entire police forces, buy
entire town governments… towns with airports. It’s mind boggling
and stomach turning. And the worst of it is, they can make those kinds of
profits for one reason and one reason alone: We’ve declared their
commodity illegal. If we legalized it, we could even start taxing the profits
on the legal sale of those same drugs. I see a net gain of seventy or eighty
billion dollars.”

“All of it dirty
money,” John said.

“No dirtier than taxes we
take from tobacco and alcohol. It’s money we can put toward educating
people to stay away from drugs, and rehabbing those who are already
hooked.”

“Come on, Tom. Do you really
want to collect taxes on crack? I mean, don’t we have enough crack heads
and crack babies already?”

“Crack wouldn’t even
exist if cocaine were legal. It’s just like the hundred-ninety-proof
industrial-grade alcohol of the Roaring Twenties. People bought it to spike
their drinks. It had a huge market—which disappeared overnight when
Scotch, beer, and wine became legal again. The same will happen to crack when
you can buy cocaine powder, cocaine drinks—where do you think the
‘Coca’ in Coca-Cola came from?—even cocaine chewing gum.”

“Cocaine chewing
gum—Christ!”

“So I’ll give in on
crack. But what I—” The phone rang. Tom picked it up, listened for
a few seconds, said, “Thanks,” then hung up. He started for the
door, motioning John after him. “In here.” He followed Tom into the
presidential living quarters where a giant rear projection TV was already on.
John had been here two or three times for drinks and dinner.

Tom grabbed the remote and switched
to Today. An elderly, balding man with thick, horn-rimmed glasses was speaking
to the camera. The screen tag read MILTON FRIEDMAN.

“Friedman?” John said. “The
economist? Wasn’t he—?” The screen answered his question by
adding FORMER ADVISOR TO PRESIDENT REAGAN.

Bryant Gumbel asked him what sort
of
America
he
envisioned after the decriminalization of drugs, and the professor said he saw
an
America
with
half the number of prisons, half the number of prisoners, ten thousand fewer
homicides a year, inner cities in which there was a chance for poor people to
live without being afraid for their lives…

Professor Friedman fielded several
more questions, each answer stressing the propriety—for economic as well
as philosophical reasons—of legalizing drugs.

As the station cut to a commercial,
Tom hit the mute and turned to him.

“That’s why I’m
going to win. My staff has been talking to the mass media for weeks. The networks,
the major magazines, and newspaper chains are ready to support me on this.”

“They sure didn’t sound
that way as I was driving down here.”

“Oh? You’ll notice that
they all carried my address in toto. They’ll start off with subtle
support. Like Milton Friedman there. He’s opposed antidrug laws from the
gitgo. When he was with Reagan, he pushed for it. But the millions who saw him
just now don’t know that. They heard him say drugs should be legalized
and they saw ‘Former Advisor to President Reagan.” He mimicked a
viewer: “ ’Reagan? Really? Hmmm… ‘ Believe me, none of
that was accidental. You’ll see a lot of Friedman in the coming months.
William F. Buckley will be out there too. And—”

“Buckley?” John
couldn’t believe it. “You and William F . Buckley on the same side?”

“He’s favored
decriminalization for years, and hasn’t been shy about saying so.
We’ll have senior judges from all over the country who are refusing to
hear drug cases because they think the laws are unfair…”

“If you think that’s
going to make any difference…”

“Every night, every day,
every random act of violence, every drive-by shooting, every overdose, every
single crime that can be blamed on the huge, unconscionable profits from
illegal drugs—and believe me, those points will be punched home—will
be dragged before the viewing public. So will all the statistics that certify
the War on Drugs as unwinnable. The facts are on my side, John.”

“But the people
aren’t.”

“They will be. They’ll
see that there’ll always be a sizable segmen of humanity that wants drugs
and will find ways to get them. We have millions of them in this
country—twelve million occasional marijuana users alone. They’re
here and they’re not going away. Passing laws won’t change them.
And we sure as hell can’t lock up all of them.”

“I can’t see the
average American citizen surrendering to the druggies.”

“Changing tactics is not
surrender. Look, we have millions of Americans who want to dose themselves with
various chemicals. Mostly they’re only hurting themselves, and if they
happen to hurt somebody else while under the influence, we already have laws on
the books for people who do damage while intoxicated. Let’s deal with
them as people with a hang-up, not criminals.” Tom radiated sincerity and
conviction. He was a mesmerizing speaker and a master of mass media. And he
truly believed.

“You know,” John said
slowly, “you just might bring this off.”

“I am going to bring this
off. I may not get complete legalization, but I know I can get marijuana
decriminalized. That’s a foot in the door. And once that door is open,
it’s just a matter of time.” John was beginning to believe him.

And then the phone was ringing
again. Tom answered, listened, then turned to John.

“I need to get back down to
the offices. Heather’s getting ready to leave for the talk-show circuit
and I have to speak to her. Want to hang around?”

John shook his head.
“I’ve got to head over to my own office. I’m sure HHS will be
neck deep in this before the day is out. But I want to come back and check your
pressure again before you head for the drug summit.”

“Good idea. But you still
haven’t answered me: Are you with me on this?”

“Publicly, I’ll stand
with you, of course. But privately I’m not there yet, Tom.”

“You will be,” Tom said
with that crooked smile. “I know I can count on you.” John
didn’t argue. He was nowhere near as sure as Tom.

Snake hovered over his keyboard,
staring at the monitor as he wove through the now familiar memory banks of the
C&P Telephone mainframes.

He’d been inside every day
this week, smoothing the way to the switching programs, finding the path of
least resistance, the one that left the fewest traces. And that was rarely the
most direct path.

He’d spent the last two weeks
probing the system until it felt like home. Like old times, reminding him of
his high school days as a phreaker when he’d pull all-nighters with his
Apple II+, hacking into phone companies, banks, and universities all over the
country, free in cyberspace, hunting the electronic grail of system mastery,
suffused with the sheer joy of the doing. He’d never stolen, never
destroyed data. Never even left taunting electronic graffiti like some of his
jerkier brother hackers. He wasn’t looking for attention; he was looking
to see how far he could go, how many barriers he could overcome, how deep he
could get. The idea was to conquer the hacked system, defeat all its security,
open all its doors, declare victory, and move on.

Snake felt an echo of that old
thrill even now. He smiled. Mikey MacLaglen had been such an idealist. Such a
nerdy purist. Such an asshole. So awed with the novelty and grandeur and
immensity of cyberspace that he’d missed out on endless opportunities to
exploit his power.

Truth was, he hadn’t even
realized he had power. Just as well. If he had he wouldn’t have been able
to resist exploiting it, probably would have been caught, and would even now be
on the FBI’s hacker list. No thanks.

He could have been nabbed in
college too. He’d been heading for an engineering degree at MIT when he
started hacking cable boxes for his classmates who wanted free HBO and
Showtime. Somehow a video pirate named Mitchell Fuller—hacker handle:
“Brushman”—caught a blip about Mike MacLaglen’s skills
and offered him a job hacking video boards for satellite dishes. The six
figures he offered was four times the entry-level salary his engineering degree
would net him after graduation—if he could even find a job—and all
tax free. Things were great until Fuller ripped off Mac’s elegant and
excruciatingly difficult hack of the latest Videocipher board. When Mac
complained, Fuller laughed in his face and said, “Whatta you gonna
do—sue me?” Something snapped in Mac then. He’d always had a
bad temper but that was the first time he completely lost it. A red haze seemed
to envelop him and suddenly he had a tire iron in his hand and was beating
Fuller over the head. Before he could stop himself. Fuller was unconscious.

Shocked, Mac stared down at the
battered, bleeding s.o.b. and wondered what to do. He still wanted to kill him,
but he was thinking now… and he had a better idea.

He dumped him in the trunk of his
car, then called Fuller’s wife. He told her she wouldn’t see her
dear Mitchell alive again unless she delivered $100,000 in cash.

Now. When Fuller came to, Mac let
him talk to his wife, to tell her how to get the cash together. The way Fuller
looked at him when Mac made him get back into the trunk, the fear in his eyes,
wondering if he’d ever see daylight again… it somehow opened a door
within Mac, and stirred something on the other side.

Fuller’s wife delivered the
money within hours. She never called the cops or the FBI. Couldn’t.
They’d want to know how her husband earned his money. It all went down so
smooth and fast, Mac wished he’d asked for more. But a deal was a deal
and, after all, he was netting a hundred large for less than a day’s work.
He let Fuller go. And he got out of the video-hacking business. He’d
found a better line of work.

Snake was born.

Simply amazing how many people were
out there making tons of money illegally, or in legit cash businesses but not
declaring it.

They became Snake’s prey.
They weren’t fighters. The sight of a pistol, a hint of casual brutality
with a promise of more to come—letting them know they were no longer a
person; they were a commodity, a package— usually bought instant
cooperation. Snake liked calling their buyers—their families or business
cronies—threatening all sorts of injury if they didn’t pay up
quickly and quietly. Even if they hated the guy, they were stuck.

Snake remembered one time when a
package’s partner told him to go ahead and kill the fucker… and do
it slow. Snake hadn’t been prepared for that, but he’d come up with
the solution. He told the partner he would indeed kill the guy slowly, and
during the process extract the full details of their gun-running
operation… which he’d record and send to the ATF.

Snake had the ransom within hours.

Yeah, like Fuller’s wife, the
last thing any of these clowns wanted was the attention of a federal agency.

Trouble was. Snake couldn’t
do it alone. He needed someone to baby-sit the packages. Paulie Dicastro had
fit the bill. Not the brightest bulb in the box, but no dummy either. And his
rep was dependable: A guy who showed up when he was told to, did what he was
supposed to—mostly he made deliveries—then went home and kept his
mouth shut.

Snake had used Paulie for his first
couple of jobs, and things went swimmingly. But on the third job, Paulie had
brought his new girlfriend along. Poppy. Paulie swore she was all right, and
that this would be better. This way they could take shifts watching the
package. One would be on duty while the other slept. Snake hadn’t liked
the idea— this Poppy was a wild card—but it’d been too late
to call off the snatch. He had held his breath through that whole gig, but
things turned out okay.

This job, though, was a little
different. Snake usually made the snatch himself. He could say he was better at
it, more experienced, that he was the only one he could trust not to screw
things up, but truth was, he liked doing the snatch. He liked to see that look
in the package’s eyes when he realized what was happening to him.

Snake had never known anything else
that even approached the rush he got when it dawned on the package that
he’d become property—stolen property. That his life was no longer
his own. Someone had taken control of his world.

Someone who called himself Snake.

Even now Snake could feel the first
faint stirrings in his groin. But this would be different. This would be a kid,
and kids weren’t in control, anyway. So he’d found it easier to let
go of the actual physical snatch.