Breaking Point

by Dana Haynes

  Barry certainly had seen that one coming. “No problem.”

  “And you don’t sell to any other country unless I give you a green light. That’s I, as in me, personally.”

  Barry nodded.

  Agent Scott jutted out her lower lip and let out a puff of air. She held out her hand, palm up.

  Barry Tichnor gave her the details of Andrew Malatesta’s flight.

  VIRGINIA

  Calendar sat in a modest hotel room just off the 66 near Falls Church. The room was sterile and devoid of originality, but he’d swept it for bugs.

  He’d bought a mint tea at a Starbucks earlier. Now he stripped to his boxers and ran through five hundred crunches and five hundred push-ups, the last fifty one-handed. Sweating but feeling loose, he sipped his cooled tea, sitting at the cheap-ass writing table and booting up his custom-built laptop. He used a sixteen-bit encryption code to get to his Web site. He’d put together a solid enough team for the device’s beta test in Nova Scotia. He trusted the men. But staging a mission on American soil, in a little under forty-eight hours, would require a whole different level of teamwork. He’d need men he’d worked with before, the best of the best. Calendar contacted five top-of-the-line independent agents and queried them to see if they were free. One was former British SAS and expensive but quite good. One was an ex-Green Beret. One was ex-Mukhabarat—Syrian intelligence—who’d seen the light of capitalism and had put up his own shingle. One was a former SEAL. The fifth was an ex-Israeli spy currently working for the U.S. ATF in Mexico.

  He left them all a coded message: Looking to hire. Two days from now. U.S. soil. Collateral damage unfortunately guaranteed. Top dollar.

  He posted the message, then opened another window. He contacted the Nova Scotia team and told them they had a red light: the mission was off.

  His cell phone vibrated. He unfolded it but didn’t speak. The mechanical tones told him the antimonitoring software was powering up.

  When the noise stopped, Barry Tichnor’s badly distorted, mechanical voice said, “You’ve been sent a download.”

  Calendar turned back to his laptop. Sure enough, a pdf file appeared on the desktop.

  “Confirmed.”

  “This is the site. It has to happen here.”

  “Understood.”

  He folded the phone, set it down, then double-clicked on the pdf file.

  A map of Montana popped open.

  Calendar sipped his room-temperature tea. Montana. Close to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

  It would be an ideal time to visit home.

  SOCORRO, TEXAS

  Daria Gibron poured Fortaleza Tequila Blanco into a chipped coffee cup and took her BlackBerry out to the balcón of the hotel. She’d showered and slipped into a red sheath dress that tied behind her neck. She was barefoot and sat on the railing.

  J. T. Laney, enjoying the cool breeze on the balcony, three rooms down, saw her. He sipped from a can of Coors and smiled. “Nice night,” he called out.

  Daria looked up from the BlackBerry. She raised her coffee cup in his direction, nodded. She was showing five inches of tanned thigh. She’d been pinged by a Web cloud frequented by mercenaries. She typed in the thirty-two-key password as J. T. moseyed her way. The breeze was soft, the bougainvillea fragrant. “Can’t sleep?” he asked.

  She shrugged, eyes on her screen. “Not after a job. Keyed up, you Americans say?”

  J. T. sipped his beer. “Yeah. Me, too. “ She was looking down, so he took the opportunity to study her breasts. They were worth studying. “Things went good this week. We got the War Dog where we want him.”

  It was bullshit, obviously. The entire mission was blown and all they had to show were three high-level soldiers and a cadaver. But Daria kept her opinion to herself and her eyes on the smart phone.

  Two days, she noted. Collateral damage. She recognized the coded ID as the man she’d run into twice before. The last time in Helsinki. She’d been Shin Bet at the time. He’d been U.S. Military Intelligence. Genus and family unknown, but allies nonetheless, and the Powers That Be in Tel Aviv and Washington had needed an arms merchant dead. The man had seven bodyguards. Getting to the arms dealer meant going through his men. No other way to play it.

  The American worked under the name Calendar. Daria was not tempted to take his offer today. He was decidedly good but a bit mental. She saw it in his lack of emotions in the heat of battle. And when taking a life.

  J. T. had walked over and now stood next to her. He ran the backs of two fingers along her bare, muscled shoulder. “One surefire way to blow off steam…” He smiled.

  “Agent Laney?” She began erasing the message.

  “It’s J. T., darlin’.”

  She reached for the coffee cup she’d set on the railing, took a sip. She smiled up at him. “Remove your hand.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Moon-filled night. You, me, hours to kill. Keyed up. We could make this memorable.”

  He grinned.

  Daria did, too.

  “Remove your hand,” she said. “Or I will. And when I say remove…”

  9

  ONE DAY TO GO

  Susan Tanaka slid her Prada sunglasses up into her straight, black hair and stared at the Michelin Motoring Atlas. She pursed her lips. “It doesn’t look like two hours.”

  Her husband, Kirk Tanaka, stood on the other side of the rented Nissan SUV. “MapQuest says Varenna is a two-hour drive.”

  Susan studied her map. “I can get us there in an hour. Hour-fifteen.” She turned to him. “Can you handle that?”

  “Standing on my head,” he said and winked.

  She wasn’t fooled.

  Kirk Tanaka hadn’t sat still for ninety minutes straight since he’d undergone low-back surgery to repair a ruptured disc. It was the kind of injury, and the kind of surgery, that could have ended his career as a lead pilot for United. But the surgeons told him there was a high likelihood of a full recovery. Given time.

  Meanwhile, Kirk couldn’t sit for ninety minutes. He couldn’t stand for ninety minutes. He couldn’t lie down for ninety minutes without the help of codeine. He was in more or less constant pain.

  The trip had been Susan’s idea and she’d mapped it out with her usual methodical eye for detail. Train from Virginia to Miami, so Kirk could stand and sit at intervals. A cruise-line ship from Miami to Rome, where, blessedly, Kirk could walk. Walking didn’t hurt.

  They left the cruise ship in Lido di Ostia and took trains north and west to Milan. The next hop would be in a car. This part couldn’t be helped.

  “I’m good,” he said, popping a Vicodin with a slug of bottled water. Susan still looked worried.

  Kirk winced and lowered himself into the passenger seat of the SUV, glancing at the piles of luggage in the rear. A very, very small proportion of it was his. He said, “Get in, woman! And have my dinner on the table by six!”

  Susan laughed and tossed her leather Louis Vuitton satchel into the pile of bags. “Bite me, flyboy. Hour-fifteen, tops.”

  10

  THE DAY

  Tommy Tomzak opened his cup and blew on the surface. As he did, a curved hank of black hair fell across his left eyebrow. Kiki Duvall brushed it back.

  “It’s a Claremont VLE, twin turboprop.” Kiki checked her watch. It was a bit past 5:00 P.M. on Thursday. “Seats sixty-five with four crew. State-of-the-art avionics courtesy of Leveque Aéronautique, Limited, out of Quebec. Twin Bembenek engines. Came off the line fifteen months ago and is due for a checkup in five cycles.”

  They heard an appreciative, two-tone whistle from a man in the familiar brown-and-gold uniform of Polestar Airlines. “Even I didn’t know all that, and I’m the copilot. You an aircraft lover, ma’am?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Pilot’s flirting with you,” Tommy said for her ears only.

  “That’s because I’m so hot.”

  ANNAPOLIS

  Renee Malatesta had every intention of going into the office that afterno
on, after announcing via e-mail that she would be working from home in the morning. She did a half hour on the elliptical, showered, and had a banana and a yogurt. Her left knee—she’d twisted it badly playing tennis a year earlier—was acting up so she palmed three ibuprofen tablets. She eyed them for several moments, then cupped them back into the amber bottle. She dug under the bathroom sink and found the Vicodin she’d been given after the fall on the tennis court. She dry swallowed one, donned her Armani armor and low sling-backs.

  She had a five o’clock meeting with two of the company’s engineers.

  Renee sat in her Prius for twenty minutes, adjusting mirrors, fiddling with the satellite radio, checking and rechecking her wavy, neck-length hair. She tapped a strange little tattoo on the steering wheel with her fingernail. She checked e-mail on her iPhone.

  She climbed out of the car and paced in the living room. She went to the bathroom cabinet, found the vial of Prozac, which she used sparingly. She took two, drinking a full tumbler of water, refilling it and draining it again. She tried to pee.

  She shot an e-mail to two of the engineers, Antal Borsa and Terri Loew, to tell them she was caught up in a conference call and would have to reschedule their meeting.

  She poured a fingerful of fifteen-year-old El Dorado rum from Guyana and downed it in a gulp.

  VIRGINIA

  Barry Tichnor used a secure phone. “Any communication?”

  The surveillance unit parked a half block from the Malatesta home was using parabolic mics as well as the surveillance suite inside the house. “No, sir. She hasn’t called his number. And if she does, we’re preset to block the call.”

  REAGAN NATIONAL

  Andrew Malatesta couldn’t help but notice the tall, languid redhead with the freckles across her nose, curled up in one of the thermoformed chairs in the terminal. She was casual in a sweater, jeans. and canvas mocs, but you could still tell she had a killer body.

  She was spoken for, too: the guy with the cowboy boots and black hair going salt-and-pepper around his ears, sitting to her left, shoulder-to-shoulder, smiling.

  The redhead and the guy in cowboy boots looked like they were in love. Andrew, an unrepentant romantic, liked that. The guy in the scuffed boots said something and the redhead belted out a most unladylike laugh.

  When was the last time he and Renee had been together, laughing? Andrew couldn’t remember. It had been … some time. He missed her. He missed the notion of us.

  Andrew reached into his ever-present saddlebag-shaped pack and pulled out a leather portfolio. It contained a legal pad with the speech he was still spiffing up—a speech he was going to deliver tomorrow at the Northwest Tech Expo in Seattle.

  He sat with two of the Starting Five: Vejay Mehta to his right, doing Sudoku, Christian Dean across from him, devouring an enormous sweet roll and flipping through the Annals of Biomedical Engineering the way other travelers were flipping through Us Weekly.

  Andrew had told these guys—with whom he had toiled for a decade and a half—that he didn’t want to make weapons. Christian had sighed with relief. “Dude. Me, either.” Vejay, ever the pragmatist, mentally watched his profit sharing drop, but shrugged and said, “It’s your call.”

  The other two chief engineers—Terri Loew and Antal Borsa—had been angry. They had embraced Renee’s idea of turning the company into a Pentagon subcontractor. In the end, they, too, acknowledged that Malatesta, Inc., was merely an extension of Andrew Malatesta’s genius. As he went, so went the company.

  And in about thirty hours, the rest of the microelectronics world would find out at the Northwest’s largest high-tech trade show.

  Upon landing, Andrew planned to call his college roommate and old friend, Amy Dreyfus, and get her take on how best to burn Barry Tichnor and Halcyon/Detweiler for screwing, illegally, with his weapons designs.

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  Barry used his swipe card and an eight-digit alphanumeric code to enter the computer room buried deep within CIA headquarters. That he even owned such a swipe card would give heartburn to most of the Agency brass.

  The room was empty save for a bank of computers, a communications array, and Agent Jenna Scott.

  The tall blonde removed her narrow, red-framed reading glasses, looked up from the piles of official reports she had been scanning. Barry noted the pencil marks in the margins. She wore a padded headset, but removed it when she saw him.

  “Hi. Thanks for coming over.”

  He pulled up a chair, adjusted his limp, brown necktie. “Do we have the plane?”

  The agent nodded. “I handled the hacking myself. I’ve owned the booking computer for a couple of days. Anyone buying a ticket before that, I can’t control. I did manage to alert TSA about a possible drug-runner on board. It means all of the luggage will be removed, checked, and reloaded. If I’ve calculated right, some of the passengers will opt to take another, quicker flight to Seattle. I can’t keep everyone off, but I should reduce the body count quite a bit.” She shrugged.

  “Very good. Thank you. You wanted to tell me something, but before you do, I need to make sure you are fully aware of the situation.”

  Jenna had been cheating, sitting forty-five degrees away from him. But she swiveled her chair fully now and nodded.

  “Some Americans are going to die.”

  She nodded again. “We understand that.”

  “If we thought there was any other way to stop this self-centered bastard, we would have.”

  “Of course. Still, this does give you your beta test.”

  “Exactly. Thank you. I knew you’d understand.” Barry cleaned his thick lenses. “Now, what’s on your mind?”

  Jenna smiled. “I’m running Calendar.”

  Barry stared owlishly at her, glasses frozen in the wide end of the tie that he’d wrapped around the lens. Calendar? How does she even know his name?

  She kept smiling but her forehead knotted, just a touch. She was one of those beautiful women whose age is difficult to guess. In her thirties or forties, he thought.

  “Barry? I’ve been running Calendar since before you met him. When you had him sabotage the McDonnell Douglas drone tests? I green-lit that. Two years ago, when it was necessary to have Senator McMenwick’s wife killed? We made the sign of the cross.”

  Barry stared at her. His eyes, usually hidden, bulged normally. Jenna Scott touched his knee with one manicured fingernail. “You didn’t know we knew about those incidents. Of course we do. Frankly, there aren’t that many men who do this sort of freelance work.”

  With the door closed and security activated, Barry thought it would be easy enough to grab one of the headset cords in the room and whip it around her throat. He could crush her windpipe before she could even struggle.

  Jenna smiled a languid smile and leaned forward, now resting her hand on Barry’s knee. “This is not now, nor will it ever be, an Agency mission. You understand that. If things go south—”

  He opened his mouth and she squeezed his knee, just a little.

  “Shh. Barry? If things go south, you are not going to be able to blame the Agency. You’ll find that the communication protocols you have with Calendar have been terminated. If you communicate with him, at all, it will be through me. That’s the way it works. Do you understand me?”

  Now, Barry thought. The windpipe is so easily crushed.

  “Well, of course,” he told Jenna Scott, and smiled.

  REAGAN NATIONAL

  The pilot turned to the eight-year-old boy. “Okay, that means you have to fly the plane.”

  “Nuh-uh!” the kid reeled back.

  “Just having a catch, boss.” The copilot grinned, then turned to the boy’s parents. “But your son can come look at the flight deck before we take off, if that’s all right with you.”

  The copilot spoke louder. “Folks, if we could get you to stand on line and punch your tickets, we’ll get everybody on board. No need to wait for your row to be called. We’ve got a light load today. Sorry ab
out the delay.”

  There had been something about the luggage. TSA had allowed the ground crews to load the bags, then had unloaded them and let drug-sniffing dogs do their thing. Eventually it had ended and the baggage was reloaded. The Polestar crew never did find out what that was all about. A United flight to Seattle departed first, and about a dozen passengers opted to take that flight instead, as the others cooled their heels in the terminal, the NTSB crashers among them.

  * * *

  Flight attendants Andi Garner and Jolene Solomon studied the computer screen behind the counter as the last of the Flight 78 passengers trudged down the gangway toward the fore entry point.

  “When was the last time you saw a half-empty plane?” Andi asked.

  “Pre-nine/eleven,” Jolene replied. “Pre-Travelocity and the other sites. This is weird.”

  * * *

  As Andrew and his engineers stood to board the plane, he remembered to turn off his cell phone.

  “This’ll be an interesting expo,” Christian said.

  Andrew and Vejay nodded.

  11

  THE FLIGHT FROM REAGAN National to Sea-Tac takes eight hours, less if there’s a tailwind.

  It was going on ten o’clock mountain time as Pilot-in-Charge Miguel Cervantes stepped out of the flight deck and into the head. Flight Attendant Andi Garner was making a new batch of coffee as he stepped out and flirted with her. She flirted right back. They’d flown together many times over the years and shared an easy camaraderie.

  She watched him rap on the flight-deck door with the knuckle of his middle finger: tap, tap … tap.

  They were forty-three minutes out of Helena.

  * * *

  Sitting in an aisle seat on Polestar Flight 78, Tommy was using his new e-reader to study his notes for the Tech Expo lecture. He glanced to his left. Kiki slept in the window seat, wearing the earbuds of her iPod. She’d kicked off her Top-Siders and stretched her long legs and bare feet under Tommy’s legs.

  Isaiah Grey slept across both seats on the starboard side, back against a window, knees up, feet on the aisle seat. He’d fallen asleep. That wouldn’t last long: attendants had just started making their way down the aisle, waking people up and urging them to push their seat backs to their upright position.