Breaking Point

by Dana Haynes

  Daria smiled a languid smile and shrugged.

  Ray, still staring at her, said, “Hey.”

  She rolled chocolate eyes in his direction. “Hallo, Ray.”

  “Thank you.”

  She nodded.

  Beth Mancini studied the newcomer, decked out in a cropped tank, jeans, and dusty boots, a holster belt snugged around her slim hips, twin, saddle-brown holsters tied with leather thongs to both thighs. Beth could not remember ever meeting a woman more solidly muscled than this one with her spiky, boyish haircut.

  Beth said, “Everyone? They are going to evac this town any minute now. I—”

  She was drowned out by another air tanker, maybe eighty feet off the ground.

  Tommy dry-swallowed two more Tylenol, handed the bottle to Kiki.

  “Sorry. They are going to evac any minute. I recommend we debrief each other. Quickly, while we still can. Agent Calabrese, why don’t you start.”

  Peter nodded his approval and turned to Hector, who held the still-working cell phone from the luggage compartment.

  Jack Goodspeed stepped into the office’s break room and returned with a twelve-pack of bottled water, handed them out, starting with the newcomers.

  Ray said, “Okay, this is Daria Gibron. She’s attached to ATF and … I didn’t realize you’d followed me.”

  “Calendar,” she said, and only three other people in the room knew what she meant.

  “Right. Tommy said you took out two hitters…?”

  “Not him.” She sipped water. “But he’s still here.”

  Peter cleared his throat. “Could we try this in English?”

  Ray nodded. “The silver-haired guy that Tommy and Kiki saw at the crash site is an assassin. He works under the name of Calendar. He freelances for American military and intelligence agencies.”

  Reuben Chaykin shrugged. “This is for real?”

  “Yes.” Kiki swept hair off her forehead with an open palm. “This is really, really for real.”

  Ray said, “Second, I just got off the phone with the U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia.”

  Beth frowned. “Me, too.”

  “He told me that the agent who signed for the black boxes died of cancer three weeks ago.”

  Beth felt the blood rush to her cheeks. “No. The marshal’s name is Tyson Beck. I talked to him, too. The deputy marshal, um…”

  Ray said, “Robert Sonntag.”

  “Yes. Beck spoke to Sonntag while I was on hold. He confirmed the story.”

  “No,” Ray said softly. “He didn’t.”

  “Excuse me.” Lakshmi Jain held up one hand, as if still a schoolgirl. “I met a deputy marshal yesterday at the morgue. He identified himself as Robert Sonntag.”

  Tommy said, “Describe him.”

  “Ah, fifty, perhaps. Large, not fat. One hundred eighty centimeters—”

  Tommy throwing in, “Six feet.”

  “Yes. Ah, broad-shouldered, short, silver hair…” She froze.

  Hector Villareal made the sign of the cross. “Holy Mary, mother of God.”

  Beth touched Peter Kim’s arm. “Teresa!”

  Peter blanched. “Oh. No…”

  To Kiki’s and Tommy’s confused looks, Gene said, “We lost us a team member. Teresa Santiago. She’s been off her comms all day.”

  Ray Calabrese pinched his nose, willed himself to calm down. “Ah, God. Kim? You and I aren’t friends. But please take this in: your comms are compromised. Your team member is dead. Don’t believe me, use my cell, call the Marshal Service back, confirm—”

  “No.” Peter’s voice barely rose above a whisper. “You’re right. I know.”

  He cleared his throat, eyed the tiled floor, hands on his hips, buying himself a little time. “Ah, everyone? Jack, collect everyone’s comms, please. They’re compromised.”

  After a stunned beat, the crashers reached for their belt units and ear jacks. Jack used a discarded Krispy Kreme box to gather the electronic gadgets.

  Kiki said, “Peter, we are so sorry.”

  30

  “IT’S AMY. HI. YEAH, get me Big-Time, please.”

  Amy Dreyfus was typing on her Compaq, phone tucked against her ear. On the other side of the office, Terri Loew and Antal Borsa were huddled together.

  “Big-Time? Hey. I have a story. I have two sources. It’s huge.… No, boss, seriously. We need to post it online now. I’ll transmit it to your Hotmail account in, I don’t know, five minutes. Chief? The editorial meeting is in twenty minutes. Go fight for the front page. Above the fold … I kid you not.”

  TWIN PINES

  Peter Kim pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, bit his lips. He gathered himself. “Okay. The conspiracy’s real. The assassins are real. The black boxes are fakes. That still leaves us asking: what brought down Flight Seven-Eight? And why?”

  “All power died. Like that.” Tommy snapped his fingers.

  Peter shook his head. “One cell phone. That’s all it would take to disprove your electromagnetic-pulse theory. Hector?”

  Wiping his cheeks, Hector Villareal produced the cell phone and the gold-painted, chain-metal clutch purse from the luggage bay. He set them both down on a desk. The purse was small but heavy, and clanked as it hit the desk. He hit Power and the cell phone sang a little mechanical ditty.

  “From the Claremont,” he said, his voice husky with tears. “We found it in this.”

  He pointed to the clutch fashioned from intermeshed metal links.

  Tommy couldn’t believe his eyes. The one theory that made sense was crushed to dust. “But … I was sure—”

  Peter Kim said, “What the fuck?”

  Everyone paused. They’d expected him to sound triumphant. But Peter looked like he’d seen a ghost. He pointed to the little purse. “What the hell is that?”

  Lakshmi shrugged. “It’s a purse.”

  Beth said, “A clutch. A purse without a handle or shoulder strap. Women carry them—”

  “Holy crap!” Peter spun to Jack, then to Hector. “The phone was in that?”

  They nodded.

  Beth was lost. “Peter, it’s a clutch. What—”

  “It’s a fucking Faraday cage!”

  Reuben, an engineer, got it right away. “Wow!”

  Jack was next. “Oh, man…”

  Tommy said, “You’re over my head, fellas.”

  Peter, livid with rage at himself, crossed to a wipe board on the wall of the office and grabbed a marker. He started drawing with vicious stabs at the board. He drew a sphere, made of connected hexagonal links around a box marked with an X.

  He turned to Jack. “How many other electrical devices did you guys check?”

  “Dozens,” Jack said. “Phones, gaming devices, shavers, whatever. None of them worked.”

  “Dammit!” Peter continued to draw. He turned and stabbed one finger toward the chain-link purse. “This purse, this clutch, acted as a goddamn Faraday cage! Look, an electromagnetic pulse shuts down all electrical circuits. Right? The only known way to block an EMP is to build an enclosure of conducting metal, or a mesh of such metal.” He pointed again to the metal-mesh purse.

  “An external static-electrical field should have short-circuited that phone. Like it did everything else on Flight Seven-Eight. But inside the chain-metal clutch? Inside a damn Faraday cage? The static field caused the electrical charges naturally in the cage to redistribute themselves. It cancels the external field, protecting the device within the purse!”

  Tommy’s eyes went from the crude drawing to the purse on the desk. “Goddamn!”

  “A Faraday cage.” Peter capped the marker and hurled it overhanded, harmlessly, against the office’s front window. “Proof positive, Tomzak: you were right and … I was wrong.”

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  An aide to Admiral Gaelen Parks, director of Halcyon’s Military Liaison Division, caught the Washington Post’s online story about the Malatestas.

  “Dammit!” he muttered, then d
ashed from his cubicle, down the corridor, to the office of the admiral.

  Gaelen Parks’s secretary said, “Hi, Captain,” then frowned. “Hey, he’s got someone in—”

  The aide ignored her, stalked into the admiral’s office. Gaelen Parks sat on the big, green leather love seat, across a low coffee table from two high-ranking Pentagon officers.

  A lowly captain could expect to get reamed out for interrupting the brass like this, but Parks had relied on this man for years. He stood. “Gentlemen, I think this may be something I need to take care of. Can you give me a minute?”

  The two officers rose and stepped out without questions. Parks turned to his aide.

  “Barry Tichnor, sir. Two of the senior engineers at Malatesta, Inc., just outed him to the Washington Post. They know about the Bruges Accord and the prototype.”

  Gaelen Parks was not a man who panicked. “That was always a threat. Okay. Start severing every conceivable tie between that prick Tichnor’s R-and-D Division and this office. If we can isolate the crisis to his division, we might be able to keep the rest of the firm off the hook.”

  He picked up his phone and called Liz Proctor.

  TWIN PINES

  Tommy’s headache appeared to be Tylenol–proof. “Look, Petey. Don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled to have you say I was right and you were wrong. Thing is: I wasn’t right. Ray talked to two experts. There ain’t no such thing as a pulse weapon.”

  Ray took up the narrative. “I got a CIA analyst who specializes in weapons of mass destruction. He says the Bruges Accord outlaws even researching pulse weapons. Another guy—and, I admit, he’s a piece of work—says some engineer’s been working in secret on a theoretical model for a pulse weapon. But it’s vaporware. It’s—”

  Peter had had it with ambiguity. Every time he’d lacked a specific bit of information, it had come back to bite him in the ass. “Which engineer? What’s the name?”

  Ray consulted his notebook, flipping pages. “Ah … Malatesta. Andrew Malatesta.”

  “Shit!” Gene Whitney scrambled for a three-ring binder he’d brought from Helena. He found a page his finger descending a list. “Malatesta. Andrew Malatesta. He was on Flight Seven-Eight, Reagan to Sea-Tac. Seat Seven-A.”

  Kiki tried to reassemble the jigsaw puzzle of facts in her head. “Wait, wait. A guy on the plane was researching a weapon that, had it been real, could have brought down the plane? That … that makes no earthly sense.”

  Tommy turned to Lakshmi. “How did this Malatesta guy die?”

  She said, “I believe he’s part of my anomaly. Let me check.” Before Tommy could ask what anomaly?, she dug the coroner’s telephone number out of her NTSB jacket pocket, along with a cell phone that was not part of the crashers’ comm units. She stepped into the break room for some quiet and made a call.

  Peter Kim said, “Tomzak, at the crash site, how is it this Calendar guy didn’t kill you? I’ve only worked with you once and I already want to kill you.”

  “He asked us what happened to the plane. I was concussed and all, and didn’t feel like conversing. Kiki’d been asleep and really didn’t know.”

  Peter nodded. “So you couldn’t contradict the faked black boxes. Isaiah … he must have told him the power went out. So he killed him.”

  Lakshmi stepped back in. “I was right. I have been running statistical analyses through every M-and-M database I could find.”

  Jack looked askance. “Eminem?”

  “Morbidity and Mortality studies. In a crash of this magnitude, theoretically we would have seen two throat injuries. Here, we have six. Andrew Malatesta was one. His postmortem happened yesterday. He died of a crushed larynx. And yes, before you ask, the wound was almost exactly like that of Isaiah Grey. Plus one of Dr. Malatesta’s research associates.”

  Tommy ground his teeth, which made his jaw ache all the more. “Odds of the death are up three hundred percent and half of them are connected with this investigation. Motherfucker’s mode of killing. All it proves is, their throats got hit by somethin’ moving fast. In an airliner crash, it’s the perfect murder.”

  All of a sudden, Jack Goodspeed’s brain almost literally went ping!

  “Jeez. Oh, man. Oh, God.”

  Every eye turned to him.

  “I think I know why the plane was sabotaged. And who’s behind it. Me and Hector, we found a speech this Malatesta guy was going to give at the Tech Expo. The speech says one thing, but just now, like a minute ago, I heard his wife on TV. She was saying the exact opposite.”

  “You know this Malatesta?” Peter cut in.

  “I heard him speak at a thing, this one time. So I was curious, read his speech. He was outing Halcyon/Detweiler for producing illegal weapons. He had a whole bunch of pages with Halcyon letterhead in his bag, too. He was going to tell everyone at that tech conference in Seattle.”

  Ray Calabrese turned to him. “Where is it now, this speech?”

  Jack glanced at his watch. It was a quarter past five. “I put it back where I found it. In a food-services cart, back on board the Claremont. That thing could be airborne at any minute. We’re evacing it with the airship again.”

  Tommy said, “How?”

  Peter said, “We’re flying it out.”

  Tommy’s eyebrows rose. “I’m sorry. You’re flying out the plane Kiki and I climbed out of on Thursday? The one without wings? That’s the damnedest thing I ever—”

  Ray said, “There’s a—”

  “Dead deer, yeah, yeah.” Tommy waved him off.

  * * *

  In a white panel truck two blocks away, Jenna Scott played back the last few seconds of the audio captured by the array of bugs she’d planted in the real estate office. Things were much worse than she previously believed. It was the worst-case scenario.

  She reached for her headset and called Tichnor.

  Once the encryption kicked in on both sides, she said, “Target A and target B are still alive. And they also know about the asset.” That would be Renee Malatesta. “Listen to me: they have our man’s name!”

  She waited. The line hissed.

  “Confirm transmi—”

  “I’m here.” Barry sounded calm. “This is still fixable. There is a way out. Please hold your position.”

  “If you see a way out of this, that makes one of us.”

  “Just … Please hold.”

  L’ENFANT PLAZA

  “Spokane International Airport, this is Fallon.”

  “Eileen? It’s Susan Tanaka. Kirk’s wife.”

  The woman on the other line said, “Hi! How are you? Are you in Spokane?”

  A third voice rode over her question. “Hey, Eileen?”

  “Kirk?”

  “Eileen, I’m calling from the Lake Country in Italy. Susan is in D.C. It’s a conference call.”

  “Italy? What in the world?”

  Kirk said, “We’re calling to ask a huge, huge favor of you.”

  He and Eileen Fallon had flown together when they were both with United and had become close friends. He had served as best man at her wedding.

  “Name it.”

  “No, no. I mean, it’s a big favor.”

  Just a little of the glee left her voice. But her response was, “Bring it.”

  He said, “Susan?”

  Susan took over the narrative. “There’s an NTSB Go-Team in Helena, working that—”

  “Polestar crash, sure.”

  “Eileen, I have really, awfully, seriously good reason to know their comms have been compromised. Their computers, too. They’re being monitored by someone who doesn’t want this investigation to succeed.”

  She waited. After a few beats, Eileen said, “Go on.”

  “We keep a supply of NTSB communication gear in about fifty airports around the nation. Spokane is one of them. I need you to get someone, anyone, to fly new comm gear to Helena, as quickly as possible. But here’s the thing: I don’t want my supervisors in D.C. to know. Our headquarters has been compromised
, too. The Go-Team is being screwed with. I need to get them back on their feet before we go global with this.”

  Susan waited. A couple of thousand miles eastward, Kirk Tanaka did the same.

  Eileen said, “We can have your gear there in a half hour.”

  TWIN PINES

  Chief of Police Paul McKinney addressed a crowd of about twenty townsfolk. “Fellas? Everyone? We haven’t called for a mandatory evacuation yet but my money says the governor’s office is gonna make that call, and soon. If I were you, I’d pack up and get out of town now. These air tankers might turn things around; we’ll see. If I’m wrong, you can always come on back home. But what I’m saying is: better safe than sorry.”

  Everyone flinched as yet another Ilyushin air tanker roared overhead, shrieking toward the wall of fire. The crowd, looking frightened, headed back to their homes or their businesses. The smell of woodsmoke was stronger now, the white haze only about thirty feet over their heads.

  * * *

  Calendar knelt in the hard-packed soil and studied the misshapen bag of flesh that was his soldier, Cates. None of his long bones had survived after the car hit him. Both knees and one elbow were shattered. Calendar’s phone vibrated and he flipped it open, kneeling and reaching for the cheap, mass-produced St. Christopher medallion Cates always wore as a good-luck token.

  He heard Barry Tichnor’s distorted voice: “They have it. The crash investigators. All of it. There’s only one play left.”

  Calendar stood and crossed to the upside-down, daisy-yellow tractor-dozer atop the rented car. He peered into gaps between the metal, circling the ruined vehicles until he spied the severed arm of Dyson, his other soldier.

  “Go ahead,” Calendar said into the phone.

  Dyson’s good-luck piece was a shiny, flat river rock, about the size of a quarter, he had picked up in Tikrit years earlier. Calendar would very much have liked to find that little rock and bring it, with the St. Christopher, back to his home in Thailand. He had collected a few such tokens over the years in honor of good soldiers who had fallen.

  Barry said, “We have someone, right now, falsifying a suicide note for Renee Malatesta. She’ll take all the blame. Surveillance tells us she’s still in Helena. Our contact will meet you in the lobby of her hotel, get you the note. Go make it look good.”