Breaking Point

  Hah! Life was good—and it was about to get better.

  Washington, D.C.

  “We’re going to Oregon,” Tyrone Howard said. He grinned.

  Nadine Harris, who at thirteen was the same age as Tyrone, returned his smile in a larger, white-against-chocolate version. “Exemplary, Tyrone. Congratulations!”

  They were at the soccer field at their school, where they had gone to practice throwing boomerangs.

  “No,” he said, “we are going to Oregon. My dad, my mom, me, and you.”

  She blinked at him. “What?”

  “I asked if you could go. My parents said it was okay. We can both enter the tourney. I might even let you win.”

  She laughed. “Let me win? In your dreams, funny boy. Last I looked, my best hang time was seventeen seconds better than your best. Your ’rang comes down, you’re packed up and halfway home before mine even apexes.”

  “That was then, honey chile, this is now.” He waved his backpack.

  “It came?” She knew right away what he was talking about. That was one of the things he liked about her. She wasn’t the most beautiful girl in the world, but she was athletic, and she was very quick.

  He nodded. “Yep. In this morning’s mail.”

  “Lemme see, lemme see!” She reached for his backpack, and he quickly jerked it back.

  “Hey, easy! I don’t want you to damage it.”

  “I’ll damage your head if you don’t give it up right now!”

  He laughed. From inside the backpack, he produced the object in question—a new boomerang.

  And not just any boomerang, but a Larry Takahashi KinuHa—a Silk Leaf—a paxolin MTA L-Hook identical to the one that Jerry Prince had used to win maximum time aloft at the Internationals last year. It had cost him sixty-five dollars, plus insured shipping, and it came pre-tuned and ready to throw. Prince had spiraled his up at the Internationals in Sydney last summer and hung it for five minutes and sixteen seconds—with a thirty-klick-per-hour wind blowing. On a calm day, word was he could keep it in the air a whole lot longer, in practice anyway.

  The boomerang was lightweight, thin, and flexible, made from layers of linen and glue, and colored a psychedelic electric blue with a black leaf stenciled on the long arm. The blue made it easier to spot if you missed a catch and it augered into the grass.

  “Wow,” Nadine said.

  “So, are you going to come with us?”

  She looked up from the ’rang. “I dunno. My mom planned to have me doing yard work this summer. Mowing the lawn, helping the old lady across the street with her garden, like that.”

  “It’s not the whole summer, it’s only three weeks. My mom said she’d talk to yours. C’mon, Nadine, how often are you going to get a chance to enter the Junior Nationals, if they aren’t here in town?”

  “Oh, I’ll ask, ’cause I’d love to go. Oregon.” She pronounced it “Ory-gone.”

  “My dad is borrowing an RV from somebody he knows,” he said. “It’ll be cheaper than staying in motels and eating out. It’ll sleep like eight, and there’s only four of us. Dad says we’ll take five or six days to drive out, spend a week there, then a leisurely drive home. We’ll get there like two days before the JN, have time to practice.”

  “It sounds great. Doesn’t it rain all the time out there, though?”

  “Nope. My dad goes out there in the winter sometimes for survival training. It’s desert and snow and all on the eastern side of the state in the winter, but pretty green and sunny in Portland in the summer.”

  “They still have Indians out there, don’t they?”

  “Yeah, they own casinos. And the cowboys herd cattle in helicopters or riding on ATVs. It’s the northwest, dummy, not Bali.”

  “You talk too much. Show me what you got.” She waved at the new ’rang.

  “No, you get to throw it first,” he said.

  “Really? No, I couldn’t.”

  “Yeah, you can. Then I can beat you and make you feel bad.”

  “Hah. Gimme it.”

  He smiled as she took the new boomerang and headed out to where they had chalked a throwing circle. He sure did like her. She wasn’t gorgeous like Belladonna Wright, and Nadine didn’t make his heart race as Bella had done with a touch or a look, but he enjoyed being around her. She was somebody he could hang with, not exactly like a sister, but not somebody who stirred up his hormones too much, either. Outside of his pal Jimmy-Joe Hatfield, he didn’t have any other close friends. And boy, she could throw.

  He watched her limber up her arm and shoulder, drop some pixie dust to check the wind direction, then set herself for the throw.

  The new boomerang whirled from her hand and soared, climbed steeply, twirling into the morning sunshine. Man. Look at it go.

  4

  Friday, June 3rd

  Quantico, Virginia

  As he usually did when things got dicey in his personal life, Alex Michaels buried himself in work. Which was why he was at the office at nine P.M. on a Friday night, keeping busy. He scanned computer files, logged into reports annotated by his staff, and tried not to think about anything else.

  Somebody was scamming old people by selling phantom retirement property from a website that appeared to be located in some kind of moving vehicle in south Florida.

  Another third world country had joined the net, peddling drugs you couldn’t buy without a prescription in the U.S., and for a third the cost.

  Some hacker had broken into the Sears mainframe and was threatening to wipe all the memory clean if they didn’t pay him half a million dollars.

  It was the usual kind of thing that Net Force handled, and there seemed to be more and more of it coming their way every day.

  It had been a long day. He noticed he was getting very stiff in his chair, hunched over the keyboard. He could operate his computer with his voice, of course, and voxax was as fast as he could do it manually—faster, even—but he’d never quite gotten used to dictating reports. He’d speak, the words would appear on the screen, and he could do it leaning back and comfortable, but it somehow didn’t feel the same. Maybe they used different parts of the brain, keyboarding and speaking.

  Or maybe he was just getting old and the future was passing him by ...

  He thought about going down the hall to the gym and doing his djurus. Toni had been teaching him pentjak silat for six months, since after he’d almost been assassinated, and he officially knew four of the short forms. She’d started him with the simple ones from Bukti, but after he’d gotten two of those, she decided to skip over the rest and go right into the more complex Serak system. Bukti was pretty much a filter, she’d said, a perfectly good system of self-defense, but used to strain out casual students from the really serious ones. After you learned the eight Bukti Negara forms, then you were allowed to proceed—if you were lucky—into the parent art, Serak. Toni had decided he was serious enough, apparently. So he had already learned the first two from the mother art and had bagged practicing the others. This was pretty quick, she’d told him. Some teachers only showed students two or three djurus a year, and he had twice that in six months.

  And Michaels already knew the third one, pretty much. He’d watched Toni enough to pick up the moves, though he didn’t tell her that. So he was way ahead of the learning curve here.

  Probably helped if you were working out every day. Not to mention sleeping with the teacher, Michaels thought.

  Though that wasn’t happening anymore.

  Shit. Let’s not even go down this road again, okay? Either work out or get back to the computer, but don’t sit here whining!

  Yeah. I hear that. The computer. He could practice his silat later.

  He looked around. Most of his regular crew was gone, only the night shift was on. Gridley and Howard were on vacation, and Toni was in England.

  Very quiet around here.

  Saturday, June 4th

  London

  “Why all the secrecy?” Toni asked.

&nb
sp; Carl smiled. “Come on, everybody likes pleasant surprises, don’t they?”

  “Well, not really. I know some people who wouldn’t answer the door if somebody showed up on their porch with a check for a million dollars—not unless they had called first.”

  They were in a section of London that Toni didn’t recognize, a fairly well-to-do neighborhood. They had passed Elephant’s Castle, and she thought they were heading north and west, but she had gotten turned around during Carl’s tour of interesting places.

  He laughed as he downshifted the Morgan’s manual transmission. He’d told her that the car, a classic from the fifties, spent most of its time in the shop, but that when it was running properly, he much enjoyed driving it. The problem with old British cars was that they only worked if they liked you. If you accidentally insulted one, it would pout, he said, and simply refuse to go until you had suffered enough.

  They passed a big building off to the left. “Imperial War Museum,” Carl said. “We’re not far now.”

  She had to admit, she had been enjoying her time with the silat instructor. Enough so that she considered getting to know him better than just as a teacher and friend. But despite having quit her job, and the breakup with Alex, she wasn’t ready to get into another relationship just yet. The wounds were still too raw.

  “Here we go, then.”

  He pulled the two-seater to the curb.

  “This is a no-parking zone,” she said.

  “Right. And the meter maid who usually works this stretch is one of my students. Orinda? Short, built like a fireplug? Be hell to pay in class if she had my motorcar towed.” He smiled.

  The building they parked in front of was another of those sixteenth- or seventeenth-century things with columns and dormered windows and all, not particularly large or imposing, but stately enough.

  They walked up to the front. A uniformed, but unarmed, guard saw them, tipped his hat, and said, “Morning, Mr. Stewart.”

  “Hello, Bryce. Lovely day.”

  Toni looked at him. “Come here a lot, do you?”

  “Now and then.”

  There was a brass plate on the wall next to a pair of tall wooden doors, and Toni saw that they were about to enter the London Museum of Indonesian Art.

  Ah.

  She happened to notice a list of the board of directors for the museum posted just inside the door, and prominent on the list was the name “Carl Stewart.”

  She looked at her companion. “You’re on the board of directors here?”

  He shrugged. “My family contributes to various foundations and such. Give enough money, they put your name up somewhere. It’s nothing, really.”

  “Place seems to be empty except for us,” she said.

  “Well, that is one of the perks of having your name on the wall. They’ll open a bit early for you.”

  When she’d first met Stewart, just after going to his silat school in a bad section of town, she’d used her access to the local computer nets to check him out. His family was more than well-off, a thing he had not mentioned. The rich were different, and not just because they had more money.

  “This way.”

  She followed him down a corridor with shadow puppets mounted on the walls, and into a room at the end.

  “Wow,” she said.

  All around here, in freestanding glass cases, or in clear-fronted cabinets against the walls, were scores—hundreds—of krises. Some were in wooden sheathes, some out, revealing a multitude of shapes and patterns of whorled steel in the blades.

  “Wow,” she said again.

  “Impressive, isn’t it? The largest collection of such daggers outside of Indonesia.”

  Toni nodded absently, looking at a seven-waved black steel blade with inlaid lines of gold outlining the body of a dragon whose tail undulated all the way up to the weapon’s point. The dragon’s head was at the base of the blade, opposite the longer side of the asymmetrical hilt.

  “Raja naga,” Carl said. “Royal dragon. It was made for a Javanese sultan around 1700. Both of those sheathes there belong to it—that one is the formal ladrang, the one shaped like a ship, the other one, with the rounded ends, that’s the gayaman, for informal wear.”

  The sheathes were made of carved wood, with embossed metal sleeves over the long shaft in which the dagger rode.

  “What’s the pamor?” Toni asked.

  He looked away from the exquisite blade to her. “You know about these things?”

  “Not really,” she said. “My guru presented me with one a few months back. I know just enough to ask questions.”

  “Ah. Well, the pamor on this one is bulu ayam, cock feather. I don’t know enough about them to be sure about the dapur.”

  Toni nodded. Pamor was an Indonesian word that described the pattern found in the steel. Genuine krises—sometimes spelled k-e-r-i-s—were generally made of hammered, welded steel mixed with nickel. When the final grinding and staining was done to finish the weapon, the iron in it would turn black, but the nickel would tend to stay shiny, thus creating designs in the metal. According to her guru, the staining process usually involved soaking the metal in a mixture of lime juice and arsenic, which probably accounted for the kris’s reputation as a poisoned blade.

  Dapur was the overall shape, the proportions and esthetics of the blade combined with the handle and guard. Krises could be straight or curved, the latter ranging from a few undulations to more than thirty, but always, she had been told, an odd number of waves.

  For hundreds of years, especially on the larger islands, no Indonesian boy could officially become a man until an elder, usually his father or uncle, presented him with a kris. More than a few were given to young women, too. They were not only weapons, but imbued with magic as part of their construction. The size, shape, pattern, time it was made, and desires of the potential owner were all taken into account by the smith, called an empu, who forged the weapon. Some krises were reputed to draw fire away from a house, protect the owner against black magic, or to rattle in the sheath to warn of approaching danger.

  Toni’s heirloom, a gift from her silat teacher, was in a safety-deposit box back in New York City. Her guru had given it to her so that its magic might help her get Alex. It had apparently worked.

  Too bad it hadn’t worked to keep him.

  Carl led her around, pointing out the various configurations of the daggers. They were beautiful, if you could take the time to look at them properly.

  “This is my favorite, right here,” he said. He opened the glass case, which was not locked. The British were a lot more trusting about such things, Toni had noticed. In some of the Royal museums, you could literally touch priceless works of art with your nose, if you were that stupid. They just hung unprotected on the walls.

  Carl took the kris and its sheath out. He gave it a quick nod, a kind of military bow, then held it up so she could see the designs in the steel. “This is a five-wave dwi warna—a two-colored, or double-pamor—blade. By the guard, it’s beras wutah, rice grains. From here to the point, it’s buntel mayit—the twisted pattern called death shroud. A very powerful pamor, this latter, particularly suitable for a warrior.

  “It’s a Balinese blade, they are generally longer and heavier than the Javanese make, though it has been stained and dressed in the Javanese style. Solo seven-plane ukiran handle, of kemuning wood. Look how intricate the carved cecekan is on the inside, here and here.”

  He pointed at the tiny stylized faces, said to represent kala, or protective spirits.

  “According to the history, this probably belonged to a mercenary who moved to the area of Solo, Java, from Bali, sometime in the mid-1800s. As a mercenary, he would likely have been employed by the local ruler.”

  He handed her the blade, and she took it and touched it to her forehead, a gesture of respect her guru had taught her. She noticed him nod in approval at her gesture.

  The sheath was an informal one, the comers rounded, the wood a light color with a couple of darker s
plotches, and the shaft was covered with a plain tube of reddish copper.

  “This is your favorite? Out of all these? Why?”

  He nodded, as if expecting the question. “Because it’s a working weapon. It was never worn in the sash of a maharaja, but belonged to a professional warrior. It probably saw duty on the field of battle, and as such, it is full of fighting spirit. Might just be my imagination, but I can feel its power every time I touch it.”

  “Too bad it’s in the museum’s collection,” she said. He glanced away from her. “Actually, it’s on loan to them.” He grinned.

  She shook her head and returned his smile. Of course.

  It did have the feel of a fighting instrument in her hand. Krises were stabbing weapons, with a pistol-shaped grip, this one angled slightly inward, pointed where a thrust, if it hit a torso, would drive it into the body’s center, where it would likely find a major organ. The waves would gouge a wider cut as it went in, and allow more blood to flow when it came back out. They were ceremonial weapons and cultural artifacts these days, but you could skewer an enemy just as well with one now as you could two hundred years ago, human anatomy not having changed much in the past couple million years.

  Her own weapon had been used at least once that way that she knew of—she had seen John Howard take down a gunman who would have killed him, had she not thrown him the kris in time.

  Remembering John reminded her of her days at Net Force, though, and she did not want to travel that path right now.

  “I have trained with knives, but not the kris proper,” she said.

  “I know some of the methods,” he said. “I’ll show you, if you want.”

  “Yes. I’d like that.”

  “Over here, look at these, a matched pair ...”

  She went along to see. She was enjoying herself here, despite all that had happened. Yes, sooner or later, she was going to have to go home. But, like Scarlett O’Hara, she could worry about that another day ...