Niceville

the base.
    The Kavanaugh woman?
    There walked the woman he
really
wanted to nail, another Effin Cee he was going to totally fuck with, the bitch who was going to pay for messing with Tony Bock. Bock didn’t know much about her—her husband, Nick, was some kind of plainclothes cop with a reputation for being a hard-ass.
    Thinking about her, he got onto Google and typed in her name, Kate Kavanaugh, born a Walker, found a bunch of links to sites like Court News and Niceville Who’s Who, along with a whack of citations in law journals and law clerk for appeals court cases. A busy little beaver, this chick.
    A link to her father, Dillon Walker, a big-shot professor up at VMI,and then a whole lot of irritating crap about how the Walkers went way back in the history of the state, all the way back to what these redneck crackers around here still called the War Between the States—slave-trading cotton-dealing slime-balls—more crap about the Founding Four, the Cottons, the Teagues, the Haggards, and the Walkers—nothing he could really mine for deep shit to shovel on her head. But nobody was innocent, not in this tight-ass town.
    Hell, even the name was a lie.
    Niceville
.
    How about the guy who was laying pipe to her?
    Her husband, the cop, Nick Kavanaugh.
    Bock googled him, got links to some newspaper articles about his service in Special Forces—Silver Star, Bronzes with a Vee, whatever that was, couple of Purples. Interesting that he was out of the Army so soon, after all that glory … guy was only thirty-two … lots of war left for a glory-sucker like this asshole … wonder why he’s out …
    Bock tried a link into Army Records, found it firewalled, tried a few tricks, and managed to get into a level seven infolink maintained by an antiwar website called WikiLeaks.
    It was called www.fukthawarpigs.org, and now it got more interesting.
    In the middle of all the sixties rhetoric and anti-American raving, there was a mention of an incident in Yemen, filed by somebody from Doctors Without Borders, involving a Fifth Special Forces unit, headed up by a guy named Cavanah—
Cavanah?
First name initial only, an
N
. These guys were deployed around a place called Wadi Doan—several women had been killed because … because why?
    Hard to figure it out.
    Something to do with suicide bombers dressing up in full-body burkas and getting too close to coalition soldiers … there was some kind of video file attached to the site. Bock hit it and watched forty-seven seconds of a grainy digital mpeg of three women in black walking single file down a narrow alley in between low mud-brown walls, a Humvee at the far end of the alley, five U.S. Army soldiers standing around it, watching them come on, the troopers as taut as Dobermans in a junkyard.
    There was no sound, just the fixed images of these Arab broads in head-to-toe black, walking like zombies—some sort of action at the farend, by the Humvee, the military figures spreading out, one man coming forward, hand raised, the women keep coming, the soldier is clearly shouting at them—he lifts a weapon of some sort—the film jumps a bit, as if the guy taking the video is startled by something—when he gets back on the alley the three women are down and the soldiers are coming up on them …
    No.
    Fuck it.
    The site was too crazy.
    Whole thing looked like a setup, otherwise who would be taking the video in the first place?
    Bad provenance, bad spelling, bunch of wing nuts. Lousy video. No source cited.
    Better set the Nick and Kate thing aside for now, at least until his skills improved. Make a mistake with that guy, from what Bock had heard about him, it was going to end in tears.
    Start out small.
    Stay away from the obvious targets, the fucking lawyers, that sanctimonious prick of a judge, the Effin Cee and her bastard bitch, while he figured out how to manage this.
    His theory was that everybody had a crime or a sin or something shameful and disgusting buried in his past, something that could shame or even ruin him.
    Or her.
    It was an interesting proposition, and proving it could be a lot of fun.
    But he had to be … subtle.
    Start with someone totally unconnected.
    He had to pick a name out of a hat, totally at random, then do the homework, find out all there was to know, circle around like a tiger, stay in the long grass and work it all out. Find out how to ruin a life by remote control.
    He already had some possibles, people whose dirty secrets he had