Breaking Point

  There was the possibility of a transfer. Alex had never put her resignation into the system. She’d quit, but he hadn’t told anybody higher up. She was officially on personal leave, not drawing a salary, but still considered employed. Net Force was more or less freestanding as an operation, but it was still technically part of the FBI. There were people on the other side of the fence at Quantico who would be pleased to have her working in their offices—she had heard from a couple of them, too. Thing was, while that meant she’d be in the same general vicinity as Alex, it also meant she’d be viewed as something of a traitor in Net Force. Just as the CIA and the FBI always had a de facto competition going, and there was little love lost between them, Net Force ops tended to think of regular feebs as dweebs—to be tolerated, but avoided as much as possible.

  Alex probably wouldn’t like it very much if she jumped into the Bureau mainline.

  Then again, it wasn’t really his choice, was it? She had to do something to earn her living, and she was already in the system—a transfer to another building would be the easiest thing all around, at least insofar as keeping her apartment, getting to work, and not having to learn new systems. And she could still see Alex for lunch or work-outs in the gym every day.

  Her phone’s attention-beck came on—an odd little piece of music that came from a movie more than fifty years old, a comedy about a super-secret agent named Flint. The little tune was the same as the ring of the special phone belonging to a fictional U.S. security agency, reserved for incoming calls from the President of the United States: Dah dah dah, dah dah dah, dah DAH, dah dah dah, dah dah daaah. This little sting was courtesy of Jay Gridley, of course, who loved such esoterica, and who also loved to program personal hardware when the owner wasn’t looking.

  She looked at the screen but the caller’s ID was blocked. If she’d been carrying a virgil, it wouldn’t have been.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Toni. How are you?”

  Some bored god must be reading her mind and taking an interest in her life: It was Melissa Allison herself, Director of the FBI. On a Sunday, no less.

  “Fine, and you?”

  “Surviving. Listen, I understand you are interested in transferring from Net Force into Mainline, is that correct?”

  The director, who had gotten her job by knowing where a soccer stadium’s worth of political bodies were buried, was not one to mince words.

  Indeed, Toni had been considering it only seconds before, but she hadn’t made the decision yet. That’s not what the director wanted to hear. She wanted a yes or no answer. Here’s the spot, Toni, and like it or not, you’ve just been put on it. Choose.

  Toni glanced at Alex, who was busy watching a young couple with two small children trying to corral the little critters. The boy, about three, was running around in circles, singing a clock song—“One o‘clock, bang, bang, bang/ Two o’clock, bang, bang, bang!” The little girl, maybe a year and half, was running away from her mother at full speed across the lawn in that lurching toddle small children had, laughing as she went. Alex was smiling at the show.

  “Toni?”

  Toni pulled her attention back to the phone. “Yes, ma’am, I have been considering it.”

  “Wise,” the director said, and Toni knew from that one word that the woman knew about her and Alex. “I have an opening in my schedule tomorrow around one. Come and see me and we’ll discuss it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  With that, the director was gone. Toni hooked the phone back into the belt of her jeans.

  Alex turned away from the children and looked at her, lifting his eyebrows in question: Who was that?

  Maybe it was selfish of her, but Toni didn’t want to kill the rest of the afternoon. If she told Alex it was the director, she’d have to explain the rest, he’d want to talk about it, and she just wasn’t up to that. She’d only been back with Alex for a couple of days, it didn’t feel as secure as once it had, and if he knew she was thinking about going over to the feeb shop, she was sure he would be upset. He might not say anything, he would cover up his feelings—he was good at that, covering up his feelings—and she just wasn’t ready to go down that road.

  She slipped her hand around his arm. “Nothing important,” she said. “Come on, I want to see the Smith’s new Ancient Wheels exhibit.”

  He smiled at her. “Sure.”

  All right. It wasn’t a lie, if maybe not strictly true, but if anything came of it, she would tell him. Why bring it up and ruin the mood now, since it might not amount to anything anyhow? A conversation with the director was all it was.

  As they passed the young parents and children, Alex grinned at the little girl, who had finally gotten tired and plopped upon the neatly clipped grass, where she sat quietly cooing.

  “Ever think about having children?” Alex said.

  Toni was caught flatfooted. She stopped, as if she had forgotten how to walk. She stared at him. Children? With Alex? Of course she had thought about it. Dreamed about it, even. But before she could gather herself enough to say anything, he shrugged.

  “Just an idle thought,” he said.

  20

  Sunday, June 12th

  Gakona, Alaska

  No Chinese assassins materialized to try and intercept them as they drove from the old pipeline airstrip just north of Paxon toward Gakona. Ventura said it wasn’t likely, and he had ten of his people checking possible ambush sites along the route, plus cars in front and behind of theirs. The older man, Walker, drove again, with Morrison in the front and Ventura sitting in the back. “If anybody shows up, they’ll probably think I’m you, since the VIP usually rides in the back,” Ventura had explained.

  “You think they’ll be here?”

  “Oh, they are here, somewhere. I’m not sure they’ll try for you yet; they may be waiting for the test, to be certain you can do as you say before they get really serious.”

  “You think once we’re inside the facility we’ll be safe?”

  “No. I have a roster of the guards, and if any new faces show up, we’ll deal with that, but that fence and a few half-trained guys on patrol won’t stop somebody really determined to get inside. I’ll have my people watching the roads and the air, so if they show up in force we’ll know about it in time to haul ass. I’ve worked out a few escape routes from the facility.”

  Again, Morrison was surprised at the man’s thoroughness. Everything he did seemed thought out to the last detail.

  The trip was uneventful, however—if you didn’t count a small elk herd crossing the road—and within an hour they were inside the auxiliary trailer, warming up the system. As Morrison worked, Ventura prowled around like some kind of big cat—alert, watching, listening.

  “About ready,” Morrison said. He picked up a dogeared phonebook-sized tome of locations by latitude and longitude and thumbed through it until he found the ones he wanted. There it was ... 45 degrees, 28 minutes, 24 seconds North; 122 degrees, 38 minutes, 39 seconds West ... Not the center of the city, but it would take in all of downtown on both sides of the river ...

  Ventura nodded. “Okay.”

  “It’ll have to run for a couple of hours to get the optimal effect. Not as long as it did in China, since the target is closer, and we lose less energy for the beam.”

  “Fine.”

  He looked at the control. Flip the cover up, push the button, and it was done. He could go eat or take a nap while it worked. “I feel kind of, I don’t know, awkward about this.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, the target being in the United States and all.”

  “A pang of nationalism?”

  “Maybe a little. I somehow didn’t think it was going to go like this.”

  “That’s always the way. ‘No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.’ You know why it’s a deal breaker if you don’t do this, don’t you?”

  “No, why?”

  “Because if this works, and if as a result of it a few dozen people di
e, then you haven’t just killed some faceless people nobody cares about a million miles away, you’re a multiple-murderer in your own country. And the city you were given as a target? It is in a state with the death penalty, did you know that?”

  Morrison felt the taste of bile threaten to rise in his throat. “No. I didn’t think about that.”

  Ventura shrugged. “You can only ride the needle once—that’s how they do it there, strapped to a gurney by lethal injection. What the Chinese want is more assurance you won’t change your mind and go running to the authorities once the deal is done. Once this deal is complete, they don’t have to find you and kill you—all they have to do is tell the feds who you are, sit back, and let them do the work. The Chinese wouldn’t want a trial, of course, having all this come out, but neither do you. And once you get arrested? Well, then they’d know exactly where to find you. It’s very difficult to stop an assassin who is willing to die to get the job done.”

  Morrison felt the ugly truth of this flood into him like liquid oxygen, chilling him to his core. “I—I see.”

  “Not quite yet, you don’t. Before you push that button, let me lay out a few more things you have to know.

  “Once you get your money, Patrick Morrison has to disappear. You have to vanish so completely that the best agents in China and maybe the United States and half a dozen other countries can’t find you, because eventually they all might be looking. If you had visions of yourself being on the board of directors of some university and benevolently awarding grants to starving scientists or some such, you might as well erase those ideas now. The only way you are going to survive to spend that money is to become somebody completely different from the man you are. You will have to sever all links to your past—and unless your wife is willing to go along for the ride, which’ll get a little bumpy up front—that will include giving up contact with her, too. You’ll be a new man, in a new country, with a made-up background and history. You won’t even be able to read the same magazines you used to read, or practice any of your hobbies, because you can bank on it, somebody will try to track you from something as innocuous as those, and probably be able to do it. Say you subscribe to a small scholarly journal that thirty or forty thousand people get. You better read somebody else’s copy, because while it might take years to physically look at everybody on the subscription list, the Chinese are nothing if not patient. You only have to make one mistake, Doctor, and you lose the game. Patrick Morrison will have to die figuratively, or he will surely die literally.”

  Morrison stared at him. He hadn’t thought it through to this end. But as he heard Ventura speak, he knew what the man said was so. For a moment, it took his breath away. How could he have been so shortsighted?

  “That’s how it will have to be if you want to survive. I can help you do it, point you in the right direction, tell you the steps you have to take, but once you’re set, I can’t have any more contact with you, either. They might want to convince me to tell them, and better for you if I don’t know your new name and face.”

  “I didn’t even think about the risk to you,” Morrison admitted.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ve had people looking for me for a long time, and I’ve managed to stay alive against the best. I came into this with my eyes open, and I’ve been living on borrowed time for years. But this is what you are facing. So the question you have to ask yourself is, Does four hundred million dollars justify you becoming an entirely new man? With that kind of money, there are places in the world where you can live like a king, have luxury, sex, the power of life and death—as long as you don’t stick your head up too high and get noticed. There are men who have done this before, men of wealth and power who had to go away for whatever reason, and they survived twenty, thirty, fifty years, some of them. Some of the ones who are very careful are likely still out there. The careless are for sure dead.”

  Morrison stared at the button, and a realization solidified in his belly like a lump of cold steel. He said, “It’s already too late to turn back, isn’t it?”

  Ventura gave him a thin smile. “Truth? Yes.”

  Morrison took a deep breath. “Fuck it, then.”

  He reached out and pushed the button.

  PART TWO

  All Problems are Personal

  21

  Sunday, June 12th

  Washington, D.C.

  At home, Jay came out of VR, took a deep breath, and removed his headset and gloves. It had been a milk run, a visit to a library, and no matter how skilled you were in creating scenarios, sooner or later, reading a pile of material came down to reading a pile of material.

  He had all he could find on Dr. Patrick Morrison, and while he had skimmed it as it was being copied, he hadn’t begun to take it all in. From what he’d gleaned so far, the guy was legit enough. Degrees, work experience, marriages, the usual living-life stuff. No trouble with the law, no beefs at work, pretty much Mr. Dull N. Boring right down the line.

  The only blot on an otherwise white-bread career was at the job he’d had before going to work for HAARP. He’d been doing some kind of behavioral modification experiments on chimps, working with extremely low-frequency radiation, a post-doc research project at Johns Hopkins, and it had apparently petered out. He failed to get the results for which he had been looking. His grant, as the report mildly and politely put it, had not been renewed, and he’d been out of a job.

  A small red flag went up in Jay’s mind, but when he thought about it, it wasn’t that big a deal. Yeah, the guy was into ELF stuff, but that’s what a lot of HAARP was about. If you were looking for a plumber, you didn’t hire a cabdriver, now did you?

  “All work and no play make Jay a dull boy,” Soji said.

  He smiled up at her. She stood there in a bathrobe. “Look who’s talking. You’ve been so deep into the web I haven’t been able to see anything but your back for days.”

  “Want to see something else?” She undid the bathrobe and held it open.

  “Oh, mama! Come here!”

  Before she could move, however, the phone played the opening strains of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Unfortunately, his phone was programmed so it played that particular tune only if the call was IDed as coming from Net Force HQ or Alex Michaels’s virgil.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Soji closed her robe and belted it shut. “He who hesitates stays horny,” she said.

  “Hey, Boss,” Jay said.

  “Better get to the office, Jay,” Michaels said. “There’s been another case of collective madness.”

  “In China?”

  “No,” Michaels said. His voice was grim. “Closer than that.”

  Sunday, June 12th

  Portland, Oregon

  John Howard watched as his son came up to make his throw. The boy stopped, rubbed his fingers back and forth, and allowed some glittery dust to fall to check wind direction. He held a stopwatch in one hand and his boomerang in the other. The judges waved Tyrone into the circle.

  Howard felt more tense than he’d thought he would. It was a big deal to Tyrone, of course, but it was just a game, after all. No reason to be digging his fingernails into his palms.

  Off to one side and behind Tyrone, Little Nadine stood, waiting for her turn to compete. She was three contestants behind Tyrone, so she’d know what time she had to beat. So far, the times hadn’t been very good, according to Tyrone, and both kids had done better in practice.

  The judge nearest the circle held up his hand in a halt sign, then called another judge over for some kind of consultation.

  “Come on, come on!” Howard said. “Let the boy throw before his arm gets cold!”

  Next to him, his wife said, “Asshole.”

  He looked at her. “You talkin’ to me?”

  “Not particularly, I was referring to the judge, but if the shoe fits ...”

  That pissed him off. What was she on the rag about now? He hadn’t done anything. He glared at her. She glared right back.
r />   Tyrone stood there for another few seconds, then walked to where the judges were. Howard couldn’t hear what his boy had to say, but apparently the judges really didn’t like it.

  The head judge reached out and slapped Tyrone upside the head.

  “Fuck!” Howard yelled. “You see that? He hit our son!” Even as he spoke, Howard ran toward Tyrone and the judges.

  The second judge must have figured the slap was rude, because he hauled off and punched the head judge square in the mouth, knocking the man down. Certainly this was justice, but that irritated Howard even more.

  “Leave him!” Howard yelled as he ran. “That bastard is mine!”

  Tyrone stepped in and delivered a solid kick to the fallen judge’s ribs. It sounded like somebody dropping a watermelon, thoo-wock!

  Even as he drew near to the trio, Howard was aware of noises coming up the hill: horns honked, metal crashed into metal. He slid to a stop as the second judge spun to face him.

  “Get off the circle!” the man screamed. “You can’t be here!”

  “Oh, yeah?” Howard said. “Hey, pal, I’m already here! What are you gonna do about it?”

  Tyrone gave the fallen judge another kick. Not as good as the first one; it had a flatter sound. Weak, son, weak.

  The second judge threw a haymaker at Howard, who ducked it, came up, launched a fast left hook to the face, then a right cross to the chin, bap-bap! That straightened the sucker out like popping a shoe shine cloth. The guy sailed backward and to the ground. Get off that, asshole!

  The judge Tyrone was kicking got to his feet and lurched at the boy, but before Howard could get there, both Nadines arrived. His wife kneed the guy in the crotch as Little Nadine latched onto his arm and sank her teeth into his shoulder.