Breaking Point

  “Huh,” Michaels said.

  “Oh, you can do better than that, Commander. You are supposed to be playing with computers. You are supposed to be finding and busting pirate ships in the Gulf peddling Viagra and steroids and diet pills over the internet without prescriptions, or hunting down teenaged hackers who post porno in church web pages. You went outside your authority, and I don’t know what it is you stepped into, but whatever it is, it is on your shoes and it is your responsibility now. I want to know just what the hell is going on—”

  His virgil, which he had forgotten to turn off, bleated the opening notes from the old rock and roll song, “Bad to the Bone.”

  Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dump!

  The director frowned.

  “Sorry,” he said. He reached for the virgil to shut it off, but saw Jay’s face on the tiny screen. If Gridley knew he was here, he wouldn’t have bothered him if it wasn’t important. “Jay?”

  “Looks like John Howard is gonna make it, Boss.”

  “Thank God!”

  “Already sent a few prayers in His direction.”

  “I appreciate the call, Jay,” Michaels said. He discommed, then looked at the director. “Howard is going to pull through.”

  “That’s good news, at least. Why don’t you see if you can’t add to it?”

  26

  Tuesday, June 14th

  Anchorage, Alaska

  When John Howard awoke, the first face he saw belonged to Sergeant Julio Fernandez. With consciousness came the awareness that he was in a bed, in a hospital room, and that his right side and belly hurt like hell. He also had a headache, his mouth was dry, and his arm had an IV tube running into it. His last memory was of passing out in the woods, and of all the hoopla before that—he knew what had happened. He had been shot.

  “He’s awake,” Fernandez said.

  “How bad?” Howard asked.

  “John!” That was Nadine.

  He turned his head slightly—that was a good sign, he could do that. “Hey, babe. Julio?”

  “You’re shy a loop of small intestine, but you won’t have to poop into a bag for the rest of your life or anything. Won’t even have a bullet scar in the front, they took that out when they went in to fix your plumbing, but you will have one in the back—round went right through, didn’t hit anything else worth mentioning. Missed a kidney by a cun—uh, by a hair.”

  Howard nodded. “Thanks.”

  Nadine was there then, and there were tears and hugging. After which she called him a few names, the least of which was “stupid.”

  Man, he was glad to see her.

  “Dad?”

  “Hey, son.”

  Fernandez cranked the bed so Howard could sit up. Tyrone came over and smiled at him.

  Howard said, “Where’s your little friend?”

  Tyrone frowned, then saw Howard grin and realized it was a joke. “She’s in the waiting room. I’ll go tell her you’re okay. They wouldn’t let anybody but family in.”

  Howard looked at Fernandez. He shrugged. “I told them I was your brother. They decided it wasn’t worth arguing about.”

  A nurse came in, asked a couple of questions, then looked at the beeping machine to which he was wired. “The doctor will be in to see you in just a minute.”

  “Uh-huh. Sure. I’ve heard that one before.”

  She shook her head and left.

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Not long,” Fernandez said. “Been about six hours since you got here.”

  “Where is here?”

  “Anchorage. That’s in Alaska.”

  “Thank you for that information, Sergeant. How did you get here so fast?”

  “I have a friend in the Air Force who owed me a big favor. You haven’t lived until you’ve done a supersonic barrel roll. Yee-haw.”

  Nadine said, “Are you okay, John?”

  “I’ve felt better, but yeah, I’m okay.”

  “Good. I have to go to the bathroom. Stay right here.”

  He laughed. “Don’t do that. It hurts to laugh.”

  She headed for the bathroom. Howard grinned as he watched her walk away, then looked at Fernandez again. “You want to tell me about it?”

  “Why don’t you go first? I’ll fill in what we know that you don’t.”

  Howard nodded. He laid it out, the whole thing; it was vividly clear in his mind.

  When he was done, Fernandez nodded in return. “Ninety yards, huh? Hell of a shot.”

  “That’s what I thought. I wouldn’t want to meet this guy one-on-one in the daylight.”

  “Your tactics could have been better.”

  “I lie corrected, Sergeant. Your turn.”

  “Well, you actually did better than he did. The marshals had one wounded, but they collected two corpses, one by the fence, one in the SUV. One in the car was in the passenger seat when they found him, but holes in the windshield and spatter pattern says he got it while driving. How many rounds did you fire at the driver?

  “Three.”

  “All in the glass, four-inch group. And they counted five holes in the back.”

  “I shot six.”

  “You missed one. You need more practice.”

  “Five out of six at ninety yards, in the dark, car going away? I don’t think so. I do think I’m gonna keep that Medusa,” he said. “I feel a certain bond with it. Go ahead.”

  “No ID on the dead men, nothing useful in their pockets or clothes, which makes them pros. Feebs are running prints, nothing yet, but I’d guess we’re talking some kind of mercenaries. Our boy Morrison must know he has reason to rent serious muscle. Everybody and his kid sister is looking for him. Some kind of plane took off from an old field not far away, no ID on it yet, but it must have hugged the ground for a ways. Nobody’s radar spotted it.”

  Howard’s wife came back from the bathroom, and within a few seconds the doctor came in. He was maybe sixty, iron-gray hair cut short, in a white shirt and slacks and a lab coat. “Good afternoon. I’m Dr. Clements. How are you feeling, General?”

  “I’m ready to run a marathon. Right after breakfast.”

  “Yeah, I bet. Let me poke and prod a little here. Folks, if you’ll step outside?”

  “Nothing he’s got we haven’t seen,” Fernandez said.

  “Humor me,” Clements said.

  “You heard the man,” Howard said. “Maybe I don’t want you to see my new tattoo.”

  Fernandez grinned. “I got a few calls to make, anyhow. I don’t know why, but there are people who care if you croak.”

  As he started to walk away, Howard said, “Thanks for stopping by, Sergeant.”

  “Hey, no problem. It was a slow day at the office anyway.”

  Nadine said, “You stupid, stupid, stupid men! Would it break your faces to say you care?”

  Fernandez looked at her deadpan: “No, ma’am, but I’m pretty certain our balls would fall off.”

  You really shouldn’t laugh after being shot in the gut, you really shouldn’t.

  Quantico, Virginia

  Toni stood outside HQ and stared into the cloudy blue sky. Going to rain, she guessed.

  Yeah, and maybe if you’re real lucky, lightning will strike you.

  She sighed. How did she get into situations like this? She had just come from her meeting with Director Allison, and the good news was that she had been offered a job. The bad news was ... that she had been offered a job. And what a job—a newly created position, special assistant to the director, and liaison to Net Force.

  She would be working with Alex, but not for him. And she would be responsible for conveying the wishes of the director to Net Force in such a way as to make certain that the “interface” between the bureau and Net Force would be more “cleanly meshed.”

  Translation: She would be looking over Alex’s shoulder, making sure he didn’t screw up.

  She didn’t have to take it, of course. She could walk away, and she would have, except that it was the p
erfect job. She’d be in fairly close contact with Alex, she could cover him if he did stub his toe now and then, and she’d still be working for the government. With a grade and pay raise, to boot. Essentially, she would be Alex’s equal at work.

  The thing was—how was she going to tell him? He might not see it for what it was, and knowing Alex, he might feel, well, upset.

  She didn’t want to upset him. Then again, it wouldn’t really hurt him, would it? And in the long run, it could be better for their relationship.

  Ah, said her inner voice, rationalization rears its ugly head!

  “Shut up,” she told her inner voice.

  A Marine lieutenant walking past glanced at her, but apparently decided she wasn’t talking to him.

  She didn’t have to take the job. She told the director she’d have to think it over, that she’d get back to her. But she had made up her mind.

  Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

  Morrison never thought he would be glad to see the gates of a racist militia compound, but as soon as they closed behind the car, he felt a lot better.

  General Bull Smith was waiting at the main compound, and as soon as Ventura had alighted, he made straight for the man.

  “Everything go okay, Colonel?”

  “More or less, sir. We had some problems. I don’t want you to get blindsided by this, so I’ll just tell you up front—we are going to get some heat because of a few things that went down.”

  Smith smiled. “Heat doesn’t bother us at all. Idaho summers’ll give Hell a run for the money sometimes.”

  “Some of this could be from our own side.”

  Morrison watched Smith take this in. “That a fact?”

  3”You’ll hear about it on the news soon enough. I lost two men. A couple of federal marshals went down, too.”

  “No shit?”

  “I don’t think they know who we are. And they can’t know where we went.”

  Smith nodded. “Well. Revolution might be starting sooner than expected. We’re ready, if it comes to that.”

  “I don’t believe it will, General, but I had to bring you up to speed.”

  “I appreciate it, Colonel. Why don’t y’all come on in and have a beer? Got barbecued pork cooking.”

  “That sounds great,” Ventura said.

  After Smith was out of earshot, Morrison, mindful of listening devices, said, “Good that you updated the general.” What he meant was “Why the hell did you tell him?”

  Ventura’s answer also carried a hidden meaning: He said, “I expect the general’s own intel sources would have gotten it in short order anyhow.” And what Morrison heard was “He needed to hear it from us, just in case he ever got a clue.”

  “What now?” Morrison asked.

  “We wait for our friends to get in touch with us as to the transfers on both sides of the negotiation. Since nobody trusts anybody—nor should they—certain safeguards must be put into effect. We’ll have to work those out.”

  “They won’t come here?”

  “Wishful thinking, Doctor. No, they’ll want a place of their choosing. They’ll settle for one of our choosing, but it’ll have to be a lot more neutral than an armed camp where the shape of their eyes and sallow skin color might get them shot, just for the fun of it. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You suppose correctly. This is where it really gets tricky.”

  Morrison stared at him.

  Ventura chuckled. “We’re in the tiger’s cage, and he’s not made of paper. Any mistakes now, and he eats us. Speaking of which, shall we try some of that barbecue? I’m starving.”

  Morrison shook his head. The last thing he felt like doing was eating.

  27

  Tuesday, June 14th

  Quantico, Virginia

  On the phone, Michaels realized he was all knotted up as he sat hunched forward in his office chair. He tried to relax. Probably an oxymoron, that, trying to relax. Nonetheless, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and allowed his shoulders to slump with his exhalation. It helped a little. He said, “So what’s your take on it, John?”

  Howard didn’t sound as if he had been shot and almost killed only hours ago. He said, “Morrison is our boy. No reason for him to resist the marshals otherwise, and damned sure no reason for him to have shooters on hand to resist with. If we can keep him away from HAARP or any of the other transmitters like it, we can stop the attacks.”

  Michaels asked the question that had been bothering him. “Why would he do this? Drive people to a killing madness?”

  There was a pause. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s crazy himself.”

  Michaels sighed. The man hadn’t seemed crazy when he’d been sitting right here in this office, talking about this stuff. In retrospect, it was obvious that Morrison had been covering his ass, trying to misdirect Net Force, and except for Jay’s talking to a security guard, he’d done a good job of it. So he wasn’t that crazy. He’d known they might come looking for him, known it and thought to head it off in advance. Didn’t sound crazy.

  Why had he done it? To see if he could? Once would have proven that, twice made it certain. Three times was overkill. If he had planned on extortion, he’d screwed up—they knew who he was, and had an idea of what it was he had done, if not actually how he’d pulled it off, so any threat he had in mind was dead—especially since he no longer had the tools to do it at his disposal. This wasn’t something you could cobble together with a kit from RadioShack.

  So far, Jay hadn’t been able to find anything else that directly connected Morrison to the events in China or Portland. Hell, if he hadn’t come in, Net Force wouldn’t have had a clue about any of this. Maybe the guy was too smart for his own good. What he’d overlooked had been so simple, so basic, that it seemed incredibly stupid on the face of it. Like that mission to Mars a dozen years or so ago where the scientists had mixed up English measures with metric and plowed the little vessel right into the surface of the planet at speed because the calculations had been so basic nobody had even thought about them. Overlooking something as simple as a security guard’s log was the kind of thing a scientist just might do because it would never occur to him. A mistake so basic he never even thought about it.

  If Jay was right about the technology and the possibility of using it in such a manner, then Morrison had had the means and opportunity, but what had the motive been?

  “Any leads on where he went?” Howard asked.

  “Not yet. The mainline ops are on the case, and we’ve got bulletins out to every state police agency in the U.S., as well as to the Canadian authorities. Flight plans in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest are all being checked.”

  “I’m going to be out of here in a day or so,” Howard said. “I’ll get to the office—”

  “You will go home, General. We will run this guy down doing the things we know how to do. What we haven’t done enough of lately—computer detection.”

  “I’ll be okay to work.”

  “Not according to your wife you won’t. We’ll keep you posted as to progress.”

  Howard wasn’t happy with that, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. They said their good-byes.

  Michaels headed to Jay’s office. He tapped on the door and stuck his head into the room. Gridley was off-line. “Hey, Boss.”

  “I just got off the com with John Howard. He is going to be okay, so the doctors tell him.”

  Jay relaxed a little. “Good to hear it.”

  “I trust you are well on the way to catching the man responsible for shooting our teammate?”

  Jay smiled. “Oh, sure. Well on the way.”

  “Which means?”

  “We’ve got all his personal records. We know where he’s been and what he’s done that required use of his credit cards, or his driver’s license. We have his work records, too, but there are some gaps. He took out a second mortgage on his house and cleaned out his bank accounts, so he has a big chunk of cash, and not everybody
requires ID for every transaction. He could have bought a cheap car, rented a private plane, maybe even gotten himself some phony ID for whatever.

  “We have a description of the guy who was with Morrison from the guards at HAARP, but ‘your average-looking science geek’ isn’t a lot of help. No surveillance cameras managed to catch an image of ‘Dick Grayson,’ and it was ole Dick who must have done the shooting—unless Morrison has a stash of guns we don’t know about and also practiced his fast draw without anybody we talked to knowing about it.”

  Jay smiled. “Hey, you know who Dick Grayson is?”

  “Robin, the boy wonder,” Michaels said.

  Jay looked disappointed, but he continued: “FBI field agents have questioned Morrison’s wife, and she doesn’t know anything. Really. According to the reports I just read, she isn’t exactly the brightest bulb on the string—she doesn’t know what her husband does for a living, and it is the opinion of the interviewing agents that she wouldn’t know HAARP from a harpoon.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing else. We have a respected scientist who apparently figured out how to drive people crazy using a giant walkie-talkie, then up and did it. We know when, and we think we sort of know generally how, but not why.”

  “Conjecture?”

  “I dunno, Boss. Doesn’t make any sense to me. Revenge, power, money—those are the big motivating factors that come to mind.”

  Michaels said, “Anybody ever screw him over so bad he’d want this kind of revenge?”

  “Not that I’ve seen. His ex-wife lives in Boston. If he wanted to get her, he missed by three thousand miles. No alimony, no kids, and the new trophy wife is a lot prettier, anyhow. He lost his funding on a research project, but got a higher paying job right after. ”

  “Power?”

  “Never had an ambition to run things, far as I can tell.”

  “Money, then?”

  “How does zapping a couple of Chinese villages and then downtown Portland get him rich? Extortion, maybe? But that wouldn’t be too bright, ’cause he’d have to know the authorities would be on his tail forever for multiple murder. He’d never be able to relax, it’s too high-profile. Too late for that now, anyhow, we have the gun. Ammunition is no good without it, and he can’t walk into another of these radio palaces and ask pretty please to use the transmitter, can he?”