Breaking Point

by Dana Haynes

  “You expect me to carry a gun?”

  Ray snorted. “Not you. Her.” He nodded to Kiki. “Go.”

  “’Kay.” Tommy hoisted himself up, squeezed Ray’s shoulder. “Hang tight, New York. We’ll try to find Daria. She’ll—”

  They heard the report of a deep, distant gunshot.

  Without moving his jaw, Ray said, “Dat’s her.”

  33

  THE ASSOCIATED PRESS QUICKLY picked up the Post’s story on Andrew Malatesta and had it out on its wire service before 6:00 P.M. mountain time. The New York Times had it next at 6:05. CNN and MSNBC picked it up next and quoted directly from the story carrying Amy Dreyfus’s byline.

  Amy’s cell phone chirped. It was a producer for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

  HALCYON/DETWEILER HEADQUARTERS

  Admiral Gaelen Parks of the Military Liaison Division shredded files in his fifth-floor office.

  Two stories below him, in the Aircraft Division’s inner offices, Liz Proctor’s people used degaussing magnets to obliterate data on hard drives.

  HALCYON/DETWEILER RESEARCH DIVISION, VIRGINIA

  Barry Tichnor was packing his cheap, Naugahyde briefcase with the evidence that would back up Parks’s and Proctor’s involvement in the Infrastructure Subcommittee on Deferred Maintenance, as well as the field test of the Malatesta device.

  TWIN PINES

  Daria dropped her backpack at the front door of the thrift shop and realized she had the place to herself. She sprinted left, boot soles wet and squeaking; nothing she could do about that. The building had been a grocery store in another life and was one giant room, the far wall wired for refrigerated cases, a meat case at the western wall with glass fronts canted forty-five degrees off horizontal. Most of the room was filled with eight-foot-high metal shelves that ran the length of the room. The shelves were categorized by the items for sale there: women’s clothes, men’s clothes, children’s clothes, baby clothing; home appliances, toys, lawn and garden equipment.

  The front window had shattered when the belly of Hotel Juliet 114 exploded, releasing its deadly cargo. Daria dashed down an aisle nearest the front of the store and fell to her knees, hydroplaning on the water for the last six feet, spinning a little, as she heard Calendar descend the stairs. He might not have abandoned whatever rocket-propelled weapon he’d used against the four airplanes, she realized. The Brownings are massive handguns but she was underarmed for a firefight against rockets.

  “You’re in here!” Calendar’s voice echoed off the cinder-block walls. “You were using the call sign Argent, that time in Amsterdam.”

  She knelt behind a tall rack of used, nicked exercise equipment, ranging from free weights to complicated contraptions with wires and pulleys. “This isn’t like you,” she yelled. “Killing Americans.”

  “I killed as few as possible. There’s a war on, Argent. Americans have forgotten what it means to sacrifice. That’s what I like about you Israelis. You’ve lived in wartime for decades. You understand sacrifice.”

  Daria holstered her weapons. She put her hands on the wet floor and lowered her head until her ear felt the water. She peered under her row of shelves, looking for his boots.

  She didn’t see them but saw a puddle of water ripple. She stood quickly, ignored the cold water that drizzled down the back of her tank top. She drew one of the Browning hand-cannons, guessed where he was, aimed at the rack of exercise gloves and sweatbands, and fired.

  The entire rack, twenty-five feet long, wobbled under the impact. The bullet tore a gouge through the thin sheet metal, ripped through the next aisle over, and the next after that.

  Calendar neither grunted nor dropped his weapon, so she assumed she hadn’t hit him. She turned and ran full speed to the end of the aisle. She fell to her haunches and risked a quick glance around the end.

  Calendar had had a fifty-fifty chance of guessing which end she’d run to and he’d guessed right. But he was aiming his HK .45 five and a half feet up. By the time he lowered his aim, Daria had scrambled back, rising to her feet. His .45 slug caromed off the floor, throwing up a dust storm of tile and plaster and the underlying wooden slats.

  Good, she thought. No rockets.

  She danced backward, gun aimed the way she’d come. Calendar never peeked around the corner.

  “Who’s paying you?” Calendar barked. “Why did you kill my men?”

  Daria laughed. “You should not have tried to kill my friends.”

  “Is that what this is about? You’re fighting over friendship?” She couldn’t tell where he was but he sounded incredulous. It bothered her that he knew where she was.

  “Love and hate are the only acceptable reasons to kill.”

  She heard him grunt and, a second later, the tall row of metal shelves wobbled badly as if from a terrific impact. The entire thing threatened to topple over onto her. Exercise equipment tumbled to the floor. Shirts and sweats and yoga mats fell on her head. A ten-pound dumbbell dinged off her knee and, as her leg gave out in pain, jump ropes entwined themselves around her ankles.

  If she had been Calendar, she would have gone back to the hole she had first blown in the shelves, about halfway to either end, to peer through to catch a glimpse of the opponent. Down on one knee, Daria glanced around, located that bullet hole again and shot at the same place.

  This time she definitely heard him stutter-step away. Again, she doubted she’d hit him.

  She rose, left leg numb, and tried the same trick. She fired blindly into the metal shelf, hoping she could keep him moving, keep him on the defensive.

  She heard a splash, thought maybe he’d fallen. It had come from her right; she limped to her left. The leg felt bad but only because the dumbbell had clipped the small, protruding bone on the outside of her knee. Nothing felt broken. Still, her mobility was a new problem.

  “Is that a Browning?” He sounded farther away, but his voice echoed madly off the walls. “I’ve never used one.”

  “Would you like to try one?”

  “That’s very collegial of you. Aren’t they heavy?”

  Daria sank to her good knee. “Only if you’re weak.” She’d initially glanced under the shelf to find Calendar’s boots. Now she set the Browning on the floor, muzzle facing the shelf, held it firmly, and fired. She turned it five degrees and fired again. Again. Again, like a lawn sprinkler, covering a prescribed arc. She heard clanging on the other side, sensed movement. She was keeping him on defense.

  A new voice sounded, seemingly coming from the broken window. “You! Hey, stop!”

  Daria recognized the voice: Kiki Duvall.

  Calendar’s .45 barked and a bullet pinged off the wall, over by Kiki. Daria heard a man spit out, “Shit!” Then new gunfire; someone shooting at Calendar.

  Daria aimed the Browning at the rack of exercise equipment, three feet off the floor, and blasted another hole in it. The Browning was empty. Ambidextrous, she holstered the first weapon and drew the second simultaneously, firing off two more shots through the thin metal cabinet.

  She recognized the next sound: a boot hitting a door, the door ricocheting off a brick wall. All coming from the back of the store. Calendar, she thought, knew the weakness of a crossfire position. He had retreated.

  Daria stood, untangling herself from the jump ropes. “Kiki? Don’t fire. Is me.”

  Kiki and Tommy entered the thrift store, Tommy calling out, “Dee! You okay?”

  She limped over to them. Kiki said, “I saw him. Silver-Hair! I think he—”

  Daria scooped up her backpack. “He’s gone. “ She drew her first gun, depressed the release. She shoved a new magazine into the handle before the first magazine hit the floor. Her almond eyes narrowed as she noted Kiki’s Glock. The long-legged redhead with the funny-looking pigtails held it firmly in both hands, her boots shoulder-width apart, and she looked professional as hell. Daria had not realized Kiki had military training, but it appeared that she had. “Is that Ray’s?”

 
“Yes. He’s banged up and lost some blood but he’s going to be fine. The police have their hands full with the fires and the floods. We’re trying to stop Calendar.”

  “You two?” Now it was Daria who sounded incredulous.

  Tommy nodded. “Why not? Kiki’s armed and I’m good-looking. You’re limping?”

  Daria flexed her knee and felt it twinge, but not much. “I’m fine.”

  Kiki peered out through the broken window at the sodden, shattered storefronts. “This makes no sense. The man’s an assassin. He must have specific targets. Why drown an entire town?”

  Daria rooted through her backpack, mentally noting her weapons and supplies. “No, you understand him well. He would have a specific target. In this case: me.”

  The other two glanced at each other. When Daria looked up, she seemed neither angry nor fearful. Just patient.

  “Someone in this town killed his two men. Calendar is the psychopath, yes? But also the good solder. And officer. His men were killed in such a way that their bodies weren’t just wounded, they were slaughtered. Plus, they were on a bloodletting mission on American soil, so none of his old contacts, his old cohorts, can do a thing to help. He wanted revenge and he didn’t know upon whom. He punished Twin Pines.”

  After a chilling beat, Tommy said, “That there’s a pretty spooky world you live in.”

  Daria smiled, and the smile was somewhere between charming and predatory. “I find it easier if you categorize it into Good Guys and Bad Guys.”

  Tommy said, “And you are…?”

  “Today?”

  He nodded.

  “Good Guy.”

  Kiki wasn’t all that sure she agreed. “Okay. Now Calendar knows you killed his men?”

  “He does.”

  “So you’re his primary target?”

  Daria perched on the edge of a product-display table and rubbed her bruised knee. “That’s the line between madman and good soldier. He’s not so crazy that he let himself stay in a pincer between our guns. He still possesses self-preservation instincts. Also, he and I work in a very small world. If he wants me dead, he can track me down in six months or a year. No, I think he … how do you say, slides back. Chutes and Snakes, yes?”

  Tommy said, “Chutes and Ladders, and I follow you, but I got a better metaphor. In video games, you get boxed down or killed, you hit Reset. He went full-on nut-job after finding his guys killed. He needs to find out whodunit. That accomplished, he goes back to the plan.”

  Kiki said, “The speech. The saddlebag. He’s going back to the auto-parts store?”

  “No. Petey ordered the guys on the structure team to load everything back on board the Claremont fuselage and to get it outta harm’s way. Again. And we saw the fuselage floating to never-never land after the flood. We find the Claremont, we find the speech. We find the speech, maybe we find the silver-haired prick.”

  Kiki turned to Daria. “If we find a car that’s right-side up, can you hot-wire it?”

  “I could do that at age five.” She laughed and limped out into the street.

  The three of them sloshed out onto the soggy streets, looking for a car that was right-side up. Before they could, Kiki pointed to the southwest. “The airship!”

  It hung, unmoving, maybe five blocks from their position. At least it seemed unmoving. As they watched, the rear end of the blimp swung in their direction, paused, then swung back.

  “The fuselage,” Tommy said. “It’s stuck on something. C’mon.”

  Daria slung her backpack. “There are fires between us and the aircraft.”

  “Yeah, but the airship’s engines are still working. If it works the Claremont free, this chase’ll get a lot more complicated.”

  Daria spotted an overturned white van and deftly scrambled up on its side. She scanned the battle-scarred street in both directions, then the columns of oily black smoke. Three of the Ilyushins had crashed on the west end of the town, with a fourth to the east, closer to the forest fire. From her perspective, every direction looked perilous.

  “We head south, toward the edge of town. That should keep us well away from the fires.”

  Kiki said, “Will Calendar pick the same route?”

  “No. He’s less sane than I. He’ll move between those two fires.” She pointed to two of the three raging hot spots that demarcated the western portion of the town.

  Tommy said, “How much less sane?”

  Daria turned and gave him a sloe-gin smile. Then she seemed to spot something at her feet. She frowned.

  “You okay?” Tommy called up.

  “Microwave transceiver. This is a surveillance truck.”

  As she climbed down, Tommy tried the back door and it fell open. Sure enough, it was crammed with surveillance equipment. Plus a little blood.

  “It wasn’t empty when it fell over,” Tommy said, and glanced around the soggy street, looking for a survivor. Kiki ducked into the van. Daria hopped down onto the street.

  “Tommy?” She picked up a flash drive, one of several stuffed into USB ports. MANCINI was written on the side. She grabbed another: KITCHEN.

  Tommy picked up a sodden sweater. It belonged to a woman.

  “Shit. Looks like Calendar had more backup than them two guys Daria capped. This is how they kept ahead of Peter’s crashers. He didn’t just have their comms, he musta had their headquarters, too. Sumbitch.”

  Daria eyed the smoke columns again. “Come,” she said, and started south. The crashers exited the van and followed her.

  * * *

  Half a block away, Jenna Scott watched the three who had discovered her surveillance van. She used one hand to unbutton her overshirt and shrugged out of it. When the van toppled, one of the surveillance racks had gouged a nasty-looking tear in her left shoulder. She used her sleeve to wipe blood away and realized it was a flesh wound, the muscle beneath unscathed.

  She used a pocketknife to rip the shirtsleeve and turn it into a fair-to-passing bandage, using her right hand and teeth. She adjusted her camisole, checked to make sure her Sten submachine pistol was fully loaded. She’d jammed a second magazine into the back pocket of her jeans. She stepped out into the now-deserted street and looked around at the carnage.

  She spotted the hovering airship. That would be Calendar’s target. No question. Same for the crash investigators.

  Jenna couldn’t believe that the psychotic mercenary had actually used the EMP device on four firefighting planes. No one could have predicted he would act so insanely. Oh, sure. The Agency more or less understood that sweaty dynamite lined the inside of his brainpan. The Agency rolled the dice that Calendar could keep his psychosis in check. After all, he’d been a reliable freelancer for close to a decade.

  Clearly, things had changed.

  That left Jenna a couple of missions. First and foremost, make sure Calendar was good and dead, and could never tell anyone who he freelanced for. And second, find Andrew Malatesta’s saddlebag.

  CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA

  Barry Tichnor had backed up files of his communications with the Infrastructure Committee on Deferred Maintenance on a server at the headquarters of the National Reconnaissance Office—the folks responsible for the nation’s spy satellites. If he were to go down, it would not be alone.

  He stepped out of the elevator into the third-floor lobby and saw that three staffers had gathered around a flat-screen TV tuned to CNN. Barry peered through his thick glasses and saw an aerial view of a town. Somewhere flat. He could see smoke in the air and what looked to be a flood in process.

  He stepped closer and the caption came into view: TWIN PINES, MONTANA.

  Barry cleared his throat. The receptionist turned and blushed. “Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t realize you were—”

  “What happened?” Barry nodded toward the TV.

  One of the young analysts in a white shirt and tie, sleeves bunched up, answered without taking his eyes off the screen, “A bunch of air tankers just crashed in some small town in Montana. Weirdes
t thing. CNN says there were, like, three or four of them on the ground.”

  Three or four airplanes had crashed. Simultaneously. In the town where Calendar was operating.

  Another analyst said, “You know why the CNN crews were on the scene so fast? This is only a couple miles from that Polestar crash last week.”

  The receptionist crossed to her desk and bent at the waist, reaching for the receiver and hitting one of the buttons. She paused. “Mr. Gelfer? You have an appointment with Mr. Tichnor?”

  She turned, smiled brightly. Her smile guttered. “Hey. Where’d that guy go?”

  The two analysts glued to CNN shrugged their shoulders.

  TWIN PINES

  One could not say that Captain Maryssa Loveless was inexperienced. She had been commissioned through the Montana State University Army ROTC and held a bachelor’s degree in political science. Upon completion of the Field Artillery Basic Course at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, she had been assigned to the second battalion, 175th Artillery at Camp Hovey in South Korea. After that had come Iraq. A lot of Iraq. Including an IED that had shredded her Stryker and cost her the use of her left hamstring for almost nine months. Despite her experience, when her Chinook dropped down on Main Street, landing as quick and hard as a sucker punch, she looked around at the buildings on fire, the flooding, the oncoming forest fire, and said, honestly, “What the almighty fuck?”

  The rotors created perfect, concentric waves in the ankle-deep water. The captain’s boots splashed down and she raced over to a cluster of men who seemed to be in charge. One of them, a civilian, was tall and put together, with a bandage on one cheek and an empty holster on his hip. She picked him. “Sir? Captain Loveless, Montana National Guard. What is your situation, sir?”

  Without moving his mouth much, he said, “Shit storm. You guys didn’t waste any time getting here.”

  “Yessir. A woman named Susan Tanaka told us to get airborne ASAP. Guess she knew what she was talking about.”

  * * *

  The jet-fuel-fed fire at the auto-parts store looked like it would burn for hours. Eleven of Jack’s airframe team had been outside with the fuselage and survived with nothing worse than a couple of broken arms. Four other guys inside had died with Reuben Chaykin.