Point of Impact Read Online Free PDF Page B

this was going.
    "And in case we have a really clever chemist who comes up with something entirely new and different--which is pretty much unlikely, if not impossible, given the known things that humans abuse--the attorney general can put that on Schedule I on an emergency basis. This is done if the AG determines that there is an imminent hazard to the public safety, there is evidence of abuse, and there is clandestine importation, manufacture, or distribution of said chemical substance.
    "Basically, the AG posts a notice in the Federal Register, and it becomes valid after thirty days for up to a year."
    Michaels nodded again. He thought Lee was a stuffed shirt, and he decided to give another little tug on his chain. "Very interesting, if you are a DEA agent. Are we getting to a point anytime soon?"
    Lee flushed again, and Michaels was fairly certain that if the director hadn't been sitting there, the DEA man would have lost his temper and said or maybe even done something rash. But give him credit, he got a handle on it.
    "What it means is, we have some pretty specific tools we can use to get dangerous, illegal drugs off the street. But in this case, we can't use them."
    Ah, now that was interesting. "Why not?"
    "Because we haven't been able to obtain enough of the drug to analyze it properly. We know what it does: It makes you fast, strong, mean, and sexually potent. It might make you smarter, too, but that's hard to say from our samples, since if they were that smart, they ought not to be dead. We know what it looks like; it comes in a big purple capsule. But we can't make it illegal if we don't know what it is in the cap."
    Michaels grinned slightly. He could hear that conversation: "Yes, sir, this is the vile stuff, all right. Could you put it on the list so we can bust the guys who made it? What's in it? Uh, well, we don't exactly know. Can't you, uh, you know, just make big purple capsules illegal temporarily?"
    Be interesting to hear the AG's response to that one.
    "And where does Net Force come in?"
    "We have evidence that the makers of the drug--they call it Thor's Hammer, by the way--are using the Internet to arrange delivery."
    "If the drug isn't illegal, then using the net to distribute it isn't illegal, either," Michaels said.
    "We know. But if we can find them, we can damn well ask the miscreants making it to give us a sample. So to speak. "
    Miscreants? Michaels didn't think he'd ever actually heard that word used in a conversation before. He said, "Ah, pardon me for asking a stupid question, but wouldn't it be easier just to buy some on the street and analyze it?"
    "Believe it or not, Commander, that thought did occur to us, it being our job and all. It isn't a common street drug. The cost of it is extremely high, and the sellers are very selective about who they sell it to. So far, none of our agents have been able to make a connection.
    "We did manage to seize one capsule after the death of one of the people that we know took the drug. Unfortunately, the chemist in this case is very clever; there is some kind of enzymatic catalyst in the compound. By the time we got the stuff to our lab and analyzed, the active ingredients had all been somehow rendered ... inert. There is some kind of timing mechanism in the drug. If you don't use it fairly quickly, it turns into a bland, inert powder that doesn't do anything but sit there."
    "You can't tell what the drugs were?"
    "Our chemists can infer what they were, sure. There are residues, certain telltale compounds, but we can't document for certain what the exact precursor drugs and percentages of each were, because they are essentially gone."
    "Huh. That must be frustrating."
    "Sir, you do not know the half of it. The common thread running through all the sudden insanities is money. Every one of the twelve people we feel certain died as a result of having ingested this drug is--or was--rich. Nobody on the list made less than a quarter million a year, and some of