Breaking Point

  No, it didn’t make a lot of sense.

  Michaels had a sudden thought. “Suppose you wanted to buy a new computer system, something experimental, way ahead of what everybody else had?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How would you go about buying it if you weren’t sure what it would do?”

  “Sit down and put it through its paces,” Jay said. “Crank it up to high and let it fly, find out what it would do—ah.”

  Michaels saw that Jay was going down the same path. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe that’s what Morrison was doing. Maybe he was showing it to a potential customer. How much you figure such a thing might be worth, to the right customer? The power to drive your enemies bonkers?”

  “Damn,” Jay said.

  “Yeah. I think we just might have found ourselves an even uglier can of worms. As long as it is Morrison, we get him eventually. But what if he passes it along to somebody else? Somebody we can’t get so easily?”

  “That could be a problem.”

  “It already is a problem. Ours. As of now, this is your reason for living. Hit the net. Get all the help you can get. Find this guy, Jay. And find him fast.”

  “Yeah.”

  Michaels looked around. “You seen Toni? I kind of lost track of her around lunchtime.”

  “Uh, no. I haven’t, uh, seen her.” He looked back at his computer.

  Michaels said, “I’m hoping to get her to come back to work. I think she’s considering it seriously.”

  “Really. That’s, uh, good, Boss.” Something on Jay’s desk suddenly seemed fascinating to him. And something in his tone of voice didn’t sound quite right.

  “What?” Michaels said.

  “What, ‘what’?” Jay responded, still not looking up.

  Michaels realized he was maybe not the most perceptive man in the world when it came to reading people, but Jay Gridley wasn’t one of the world’s great adepts when it came to hiding his feelings, either.

  “You aren’t telling me something I need to hear.”

  “Boss, I—”

  “I have a lot on my mind right now, Jay. How about you don’t add worrying the unknown to it?”

  Jay blew out a sigh. “All right. Last time I was in the feeb mainframe, I left myself a couple of doors, you know, just in case we had problems like when the Russian got into the government systems?”

  “Skip the rationalizations, you’re a hacker to the bone. It’s what we pay you for, remember.”

  “Yeah, well, I kind of left myself a door in the director’s office subsystem.”

  “And you found something I need to know but that you don’t want to tell me. What—am I going to get fired?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. It’s just that, well, Toni had a meeting with the director today. At one.”

  Michaels’s immediate urge was to cover and say, Oh, sure, I knew about that. But since he hadn’t known, and since there seemed to be more, he didn’t say that. Instead, he said, “And now you can drop the other shoe.”

  “You really ought to hear it from her, Boss.”

  “Maybe so, but I’m going to hear it from you.”

  Jay shook his head. “The director just put in the e-forms for a new staff job in her office. Special assistant. She was offering the job to Toni.”

  Michaels blinked. “And she took the job?”

  “Not that I can tell.”

  Michaels felt an absurd sense of relief. A job offer, fine, that was no big deal. Sure, she should have told him about it, but, hey, things were busy, and maybe she’d planned to brush the director off before she mentioned it. That would be like her. Nothing to worry about.

  Yeah? Then why is your stomach suddenly all twisted and cold?

  Anchorage, Alaska

  When he used his phone to check his e-mail, Tyrone Howard saw a priority call from Jay Gridley. Huh. What was that about?

  It took forever to scroll the message on the tiny screen, but it was pretty straightforward. Jay had put out a call to all his contacts on the web. He was looking for some information, and he was asking for help.

  Tyrone stared at the phone. What seemed like a thousand years ago, he had helped Jay chase down a bad guy in VR. He and Jay knew each other from way back, ever since Tyrone’s dad had been at Net Force. Of course, that time he’d helped Jay had been when he was spending six or seven hours a day jacked in to his computer, something he hadn’t done in a while. These days, he was on-line two hours a day, tops, almost nothing, just enough time to read his mail, run through a few VR rooms, and maybe a few minutes of an on-line game. But if Jay was asking, Tyrone bet it had something to do with his dad getting shot, and he was ready to sit down, plug in, and get the data flowin’ fine and fast for that. This was the guy who had pack-pronged Portland, killed people, and ruined the championships, too. A dragfoot juicesucker who needed to be shorted out, no feek. He had his laptop with him, in his pack in his dad’s room. He’d get it and get on-line.

  Nadine could help him. She didn’t know a whole lot about computers, but he could take her along and show her as they went. He was not as sharp as he’d been, but he could still lubefoot the net okay. He’d help Jay and they would catch the sucker who had shot his dad.

  28

  Tuesday, June 14th

  Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

  Inside the car, even with the motor running and the air conditioner going on high, it was warm. It was just the two of them, Morrison in the back, Ventura driving. They passed the odd militiaman on the dusty gravel road as they crept along at just over walking speed.

  Over the phone, Wu’s voice was silky, relaxed, lulling. He said, “Of course we trust you. It’s just that some of your ... ah ... associates seem to have a bias against people of our ... persuasion. No point in tempting fate, now, is there?”

  Morrison nodded at the unseen speaker. Both phones had their picture transmission off, so neither man could view the other. Not that it would have helped Morrison much to see Wu. He wasn’t particularly good at reading expressions on Western faces; as far as he was concerned, the Chinese were inscrutable. Besides, it didn’t matter. Ventura had coached him, and so far, everything the bodyguard had said was right on the button. In theory, their conversation was scrambled, encoded so that it couldn’t be understood even if somebody was able to intercept and record it.

  “Perhaps the Chinese embassy might be more to your liking?”

  Wu had the grace to laugh. “Well, of course, we could arrange that, but somehow I don’t think Luther would feel very comfortable under such circumstances. In his place, I would not.”

  “Let’s cut to the chase,” Morrison said. “I’ll name a place, and we’ll meet there.”

  Ventura had told him they wouldn’t like that, getting right to the point. The culture from which Wu came was more patient than America’s, by and large, and the Chinese were willing to engage in as much ceremonial talk as necessary to please all the speakers. They viewed Americans’ lack of formality and impatience as signs of youth and poor breeding.

  “Let them think what they want,” Ventura had told him. “The lower an opinion they have of us, the better.”

  “Perhaps,” Wu said. “Where?”

  Morrison glanced ahead at Ventura, who saw him in the rearview mirror. He nodded.

  “There’s a theater in Woodland Hills, California. That’s just outside Los Angeles.”

  “I know where Woodland Hills is, Doctor.” His voice was dry, and no overt anger came through, but Morrison smiled. Ventura had told him that would irritate Wu, too.

  Morrison continued: “The theater is fairly new, an IMAX. It’s on the edge of a big shopping center—”

  “Ah, yes, on Mulholland, just north of Oxnard,” Wu broke in. “I saw the latest James Bond picture there a few months ago. You take the Ventura Freeway.”

  Again Morrison smiled. “He’ll one-up you,” Ventura had said. “But it’ll be subtle.”

  “Good, that’ll save me having to give directions. To
morrow at noon.”

  “Any particular reason for this meeting place?”

  “I haven’t seen the picture they’re showing.”

  “I see. All right. But there are a few details to which we must attend.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, you can hardly expect us to show up hauling a suitcase with four hundred million dollars in small bills, now can you? It would take a truck to carry that much.”

  “I have a secure account in an island bank,” Morrison said. “Electronic transfer will do. Bring a laptop with a secure wireless modem.”

  “Ah, but there is the rub. You expect us to deliver that much money to you, and then you will give us the information, is that correct?”

  “I’m the only one who can. It isn’t written down anywhere.” His meaning here was clear enough: If something happens to me before you get what you want, you won’t get it. The truth was something else: He did have a copy of it—but only one. Any other references to the sequence had been erased, and he’d done that using a deletion program that made all those files unrecoverable. The remaining file was well hidden, too. Nobody would ever find it. He could not imagine forgetting the sequence, but if for some reason he did, he wouldn’t lose it.

  That’s what you thought about the feds connecting you to all this, too, remember?

  He tried to ignore the thought. He still couldn’t figure out how they had done that. He had been so careful.

  “How do we know you will deliver?”

  “You know I have the information. I’ve demonstrated it to your satisfaction, haven’t I? Once I have the money, why wouldn’t I? It doesn’t make any sense not to, does it?”

  “Having it and giving it to us are not exactly the same though, are they?”

  “I’ll be sitting right there next to you. You transfer the money. I transfer the information. I assume you will have scientists standing by who can verify the information. I can give you the names of some of yours who have the ability to confirm it—Dr. Jang Ji, or George Chen, or Li Hun—”

  “That won’t be necessary. We know who our scientists are. But can they verify it immediately?”

  “If they have a test subject and access to ECG equipment and a couple of basic transmitters, they can be ready to run the experiment as soon as they get the code sequence. They’ll be able to confirm it before the movie is over. Only on a small scale, of course, but in this case, size doesn’t matter. It will work as well in the field as it does in the tab—you’ve seen that.”

  There was a short pause as Wu apparently digested this information.

  “That’s the deal, Mr. Wu. Take it or leave it.”

  “All right. I’ll see you at noon tomorrow. Have a pleasant trip.”

  Wu disconnected, and Morrison blew out a big sigh of relief. This had all gone a lot more crossways than he had ever anticipated. A large part of him wished he could turn back the clock and reconsider this whole idea.

  “He went for it,” Ventura said. Not a question.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. We’re in business.”

  Morrison was worried. “This sounds very risky to me. A public movie theater? It will be too easy for him to bring men with guns in and hide them among the audience. He could have fifteen or twenty of them and we wouldn’t know it.”

  Ventura smiled into the rearview mirror. “Do I tell you how to program your signals? Offer advice on frequencies?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll know who they are. The theater will be having a special screening tomorrow at noon, for screenwriters, members of the WGA. They’ll have to show a card to get in the showing. Everybody else will either be one of ours or belong to the Chinese. We’ll let their people in, because we will have the advantage. The employees, from the booth to the concession stand to the guy who tears your ticket in half, will be our people. For every one they get inside, we’ll have one in a nearby seat covering them. Everybody our men don’t know will be a potential target. If click comes to bang, they will know who to shoot. And if they miss? Well, nobody will notice if there are a few less screenwriters anyhow. Everybody in L.A. is working on a script.”

  “How can you do this? You know the guy who owns the place?”

  “I am the guy who owns the place. Over the years, I’ve done pretty well for my retirement, Doctor. I own that theater, a bar, part interest in a health club, and a couple of high-profile restaurants. Plus the blue chip stocks and bonds, of course. I’m not in the same class as you are about to be, but I could live fairly comfortably off the investments and interest without ever touching my principal. If your money isn’t working for you, it’s just gathering dust.” He smiled.

  Morrison shook his head. This was incredible. Why would a man of wealth and property risk his life to work as a bodyguard?

  Ventura must have read his mind. “ ‘Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.’ A man likes to keep busy doing work he enjoys.”

  Morrison looked away from Ventura.

  This was getting stranger—and more frightening—all the time.

  Washington, D.C.

  Michaels sat at his kitchen table, holding a cup of coffee. It was early, just about dawn, and Toni was still asleep. He drank and stared at the wall, his gaze going through the paneling and Sheetrock and wood and focusing on nothing a thousand miles away.

  And how is your life, Mr. Michaels?

  Why, just fine, thank you very much. My ex-wife is getting remarried to some Idaho dork and taking my child away from me—unless I want to get into an ugly child custody case that will probably scar my daughter for life, something she doesn’t deserve and I won’t do.

  I personally spoke to the man who almost certainly killed scores of Chinese by using some kind of radio beam to drive them crazy, and if I had been on the fucking ball, I would have stopped him before he did it again to scores of Americans. He walked into my office and I smiled and let him walk out.

  The head of my military arm was shot and seriously wounded because I wanted him to go along and keep the federal marshals company, and the guy I sent them all after plugged a marshal while he was at it, got away, and is still on the loose.

  My boss is ready to nail my ass to the nearest wall for not keeping her in the loop.

  What else? Oh, right. My woman is back and sleeping in my bed, but she’s considering taking a job where she’ll be looking over my shoulder at my work and then telling my boss all about it. And she didn’t think it was worth mentioning.

  He had come home late, Toni had already been asleep, and he’d stewed about this particular problem until he conked out. And he woke up thinking about it.

  That it?

  Yeah, I think that just about covers it. My life is just swell.

  He sipped at the coffee. It was cold. He considered getting up to warm it, but it wasn’t worth the effort. Sitting and staring at the wall was ever so much more important.

  Sure, sitting and whining about how hard your life is, that’s the way to go, all right.

  “Up yours!”

  “Hey. What did I do?”

  Michaels looked up. He hadn’t realized he’d said it aloud until he heard Toni. She stood there, wearing one of his dress shirts and nothing else, and she looked absolutely gorgeous, even though her face was sleep-wrinkled and her hair was a tangled rat’s nest. That didn’t help, that she was beautiful and he loved her. He’d thought things were okay when she came back, he’d thought all was right with the world.

  Well, think again, pal.

  “Nothing, I was just talking to myself.”

  She took a mug from the dishwasher and poured coffee into it. She inhaled the vapor, blew it out, then drank. She turned and leaned against the counter, looked at him. “You want to talk about it?”

  Did he want to talk about it? Goddamned right he wanted to talk about it. They could start with How come you didn’t tell me you’d been to see the director to discuss going to work for her? Slip your m
ind? Not important enough to even mention? Don’t want to let me in on little details in your life, like where you are going to work?

  But he didn’t say that. Instead, he said, “Not really.”

  She took another sip of the brew. “Okay.”

  Fine. Fine. If she wasn’t going to bring it up, he would rot in hell for all eternity before he brought it up!

  He said, “I need to go in early. I’m having a meeting with the mainline SAC to coordinate our investigation to find Morrison.”

  “Want me to ride along?”

  “Suit yourself.” That came out a little snippier than he wanted, but what the hell, it was how he felt.

  She blew out a sigh, then put the coffee mug down on the counter and crossed her arms. “All right. What’s eating you? You’re so pissed off you’re about to spit. Did I do something wrong?”

  “Wrong? No, you didn’t do anything wrong.” He could feel the acid drip from his voice, feel the rage just barely buried under his words.

  “So why are you taking my head off?”

  He was not going to say it, he was not going to say it! “No reason. I was just wondering, since you are always hammering at me for keeping to myself, not telling you what is going on inside my head, I was just wondering why you didn’t tell me you were considering going to work for Melissa Allison, that’s all.”

  Well. So much for his burn-in-hell resolve not to mention it.

  She unfolded her arms, put one hand to her mouth, and she had, by God, the grace to at least look guilty. She said, “I ... I’m sorry. I was going to tell you.”

  “When? When I saw them painting your name on your new parking space?”

  “Alex—”