Net Force - Tom Clancy [22]
Her fathers early lessons with a gun or knife or bomb had certainly paid off. Of course, he probably wouldnt be pleased at some of the people shed worked for since hed died, but his cause was not hers. Once the British decided to leave Ireland to its own sorrows, that whole long-running mess had ceased to have any meaning, even though the players refused to just quit and leave it at that. Something that established just didnt go away, even if its reason for being did.
Her mother, bless her, had been a hardheaded Scot, and had taught her children, all seven of them, to value a shilling.
Sullivan smiled again. That was where she had come up with her nom de morte, from her mother. The old stories her mother had told her children late at night, when the telly was on the blink and the radio unable to pick up anything, were full of changelings and curses and magic. The Selkies were the seal-folk, full of the were, able to shape-shift from men to seals and back again. She had always liked that image, of appearing to be one thing while really being another.
Nobody knew who she was. She had never met a client face-to-face, save once, and that client was no longer among the living. She was a faceless assassin, one that most people thought a man, and the best there was at it, too.
Of that her father would have been proud, she was sure.
And, it seemed, she was about to go out on the hunt again.
7
Thursday, September 16th, 6:15 a.m. Washington, D.C.
One of the reasons Alex Michaels liked the condo in which he lived was the size of the attached garage. It was a two-car unit, and there was plenty of room for his hobby, which had been, for the last month, a thirteen-year-old Plymouth Prowler. It had replaced a 77 MG Midget that hed spent a year and half rebuilding. Hed enjoyed that, gotten a nice profit for it, but the little English car couldnt hold a candle to the Prowler for looks.
Designed by the legendary Tom Gale for Chrysler as a concept car in the early nineties, the Prowler finally saw production four years later. It was essentially a slicked-up hot rod, a rear-wheel-drive, two-seat convertible roadster, painted a brilliant deep rich color known as Prowler purple. Since it wasnt old enough to be a classic, it had all the bells and whistles of a street car-air bags, power disc brakes, power steering and even a power rear window-but what it really was was a big kids toy. It also had a manual transmission, smaller tires on the front than on the rear, exposed front wheels with just hints of fenders and a tachometer mounted on the steering column.
Hed been too young for the glory days of hot-rodding in the late forties and early fifties, days portrayed in rebel movies old before he was born in 1970. But his grandfather had told him stories. Told him tales about the Eisenhower years when hed owned a primer-gray 32 Ford hed souped up and taken to drag-race a quarter mile Sunday mornings in the summers on the cracked concrete runways of a shutdown airport. Hed filled Michaels minds eye with chopped and channeled Chevys and Mercurys and Dodges that sometimes wore twenty hand-rubbed coats of candy-apple-red metalflake paint, with hubcaps called spinners or moons or fake wires. Showed him the stacks of old hot-rod magazines that had gone dry and yellow with time, but whose fading pictures still revealed the cars. He had smiled happily as hed told a young Alex Michaels about impromptu races in the middle of town at every stoplight on any given Friday night, and of drive-in malt shops and rock and roll music blasting from AM radios, when gasoline had cost twenty cents a gallon for ethyl and nobody who was anybody walked anywhere when they could drive.
Some kids grew up wanting to be cowboys in the Old West of the 1870s. Michaels had wanted to be James Dean in the post-World War II 1950s
He smiled as he rubbed creamy-gray degreaser into his palms, then over the rest of his hands. The stuff had that sharp, perfumed