All Necessary Force Read Online Free PDF

stammered. He drew his hand back again, causing her to throw up her arms and shout, “Don’t!”
    The bearded man smiled at her reaction and said, “Tell me.”
    Jennifer dropped her head to her chest and began to cry. In between the sobs racking her body, she said, “It’s underneath the front passenger seat.”
    The man turned away without another word, bringing a phone to his ear.
    “It’s Radford. She’s done. I’ve got the package.”
    He listened for a second, then said, “No, it didn’t end well. She’s sitting here crying like a baby. Or like a woman. I told you this whole experiment was stupid. No way is any girl going to be able to do operator shit. I’ll be back in ten minutes. Send someone out for her. The car’s pretty fucked up and I don’t think she can drive.”
    Still making sobbing noises, Jennifer watched him circle around to the passenger side, tracking his movement like a predator. She waited until he bent over and disappeared from view before trotting lightlyaround the car. When she reached the door, she saw him facedown in the footwell, craning his neck to see beneath the seat, his right arm down in the well but his left arm holding on to the seat itself. Right in front of her. As if it were day one of combatives all over again and her instructor was giving her an easy gift.

4
     
    K

eshawn Jackson pulled next to the white coupé in the small parking area for substation 117. He stared at the vehicle for a second,making up his mind. The car was not supposed to be there. The substation was supposed to be deserted. For what he needed to do, it
had
to be deserted. On the other hand, he couldn’t come back here a second time. The Baltimore Gas and Electric Company truck he drove had a built-in GPS to facilitate recovery operations after a storm or other disaster. It would register him being here. Once could be explained away, but twice would invite scrutiny.
    As an ex-con, he was a low-level worker. A cable dog. Someone who did the manual labor of getting power back on, supporting the more experienced linemen, not someone who had any reason to be at substation 117.
    It dawned on him that he was about to break the law for the first time in over five years. He felt no shame. Before his job at BGE, he had been a gang member and a career petty criminal, in and out of jail for everything from drugs to assault with a deadly weapon. His last stint had been at the infamous Attica prison in New York, where he had found religion. As for many inmates before, God had saved his soul. He had identified what had been wrong with his previous life and found a reason to belong. And a reason to blame. Since then, he’d been on the straight and narrow, a model citizen, waiting to give back something for what his newfound faith had given to him. There were three others from his prison prayer group just like him, working in electrical companies in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
    Making up his mind, he decided to go inside the small concrete-block house. He was in his BGE uniform, so he wouldn’t be completely out of place. If he saw someone, he’d throw out an excuse and leave. If not, he’d get to work.
    He dialed the combination on the chain-link gate and passed through, walking underneath the lines heading in and out and ignoring the myriad of transformers. What he wanted was inside the building. Substation 117 was one of a handful that had a server inside that allowed access into the BGE network. They were sprinkled throughout the service area to allow monitoring of the grid without having to travel to a central control node.
    He scanned the facility inside the fence line, but didn’t see a soul.
Maybe the guy just parked here and went somewhere else
, he thought, although the chances of that were unlikely, since the substation was out in the boonies, in a rural area west of Baltimore, Maryland. Not a whole lot of places to go from here.
    He punched in the combination on the metal door and