Breaking Point

  Either way, her money would be depleted by the time her visa ran out, and she’d have to leave the country by the end of the summer.

  She was sitting at the small table in the kitchen—a kitchenette, really—when the doorbell chimed. Who could that be? Save for Carl and her landlord, nobody knew she lived here. A salesman? Somebody come to the wrong address?

  When she opened the door, the last person she expected to see stood there:

  MI-6 agent Angela Cooper.

  Toni was stunned. The bitch! How dare she come here?

  Toni clamped a lid on the rush of anger that threatened to boil forth. Polite might be too much to ask for, but she kept her voice even: “What do you want?”

  Cooper flashed a weak smile. She was a beautiful woman, no doubt of that. Toni could see the attraction. “I need to speak to you. May I come inside?”

  “Why? We don’t have anything to talk about.”

  “I think we do. Please.”

  Toni offered as bored a shrug as she could. “Sure. Come in.”

  Once inside, Cooper looked nervous. She sure as hell should be, Toni thought. She might be a trained secret agent, but Toni’s martial abilities were a lot sharper than what the Royal secret service would be passing on to its operatives. If push came to shove, she could take Cooper—even if she had James Fucking Bond backing her up. And she would enjoy whacking Cooper. A lot.

  “What?”

  “I won’t be here but a moment or two. Listen, I’ve wrestled with this and I can’t come up with any clever way to say it, so here it is, flat out: I didn’t sleep with Alex Michaels.”

  “No, I expect you didn’t get much sleeping done.”

  Cooper shook her head. “You have it wrong. We did not have sex—is that clearer? Not in any way, shape, or form, not even by Clinton definition. I wanted to, but he turned me down.”

  It caught Toni flat-footed. “What?”

  “Yes, I know I made it seem as if we had, but—it didn’t happen. I wanted to, believe it, and I tried my best, but he wouldn’t go for it.”

  Toni waved at the table. This was astounding. “You want to sit down?” As it always did when she got flustered, her Bronx accent came back: Ya wanna siddown?

  Was she telling the truth? Had Alex put her up to this?

  Cooper read her mind: “In case you are wondering, no, Alex didn’t tell me to talk to you; I haven’t spoken to him since he left the country. I heard what happened between you two. I was going to let it pass. When he wouldn’t do me, I was, well, a bit put out, so I decided to sting you a little by letting on that he had. I suppose I wanted you to take him to task, make him squirm a bit. But despite his rejection, I did like Alex, and it isn’t really fair to make him suffer because he was doing right by you.”

  “Alex didn’t deny it when I brought it up,” Toni said.

  “I don’t understand why not. It had been a long day. We had supper in a pub. He had one beer too many, and I offered to give him a massage. But that was as far as it got. He was half-asleep facedown on the massage table when I stripped and tried to get him to have it off with me. I was ready—and it was obvious he was ready, too—but instead of his willie, he waved you in my face.”

  She paused, took a deep breath, and went on. “I was furious. And I resented you for having him, so that’s why I did what I did. I’m sorry. That’s it.”

  She turned and started for the door.

  Toni had trouble finding her voice, barely made it before the woman got the door open. “Angela?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you for telling me. It couldn’t have been easy.”

  Cooper smiled, more genuine this time. “I’d rather be having a bloody root canal. You’re lucky to have a man like that interested in you. Maybe you can patch things up.”

  When she was gone, Toni sat at the table, staring at the wall. Why hadn’t he just told her? He knew she thought he’d slept with Cooper; all he had to do was deny it, she would have believed him. At least she thought she would have believed him. Why hadn’t he spoken up?

  She replayed their last meeting, trying to remember exactly how it had gone. Had he ever actually said he’d been with Cooper?

  No...

  Well, shit! What the hell was wrong with him! Why had he let her think he’d done it!

  Abruptly, Toni felt the emotions well, and tears spill. Dammit, Alex!

  She was angry all over again, but this time for an entirely different reason. What on Earth could he have been thinking ?

  8

  Wednesday, June 8th

  Gakona, Alaska

  “Is that where we’re going?” Ventura had to raise his voice for Morrison to hear him. Normally, a plane like the Cessna Stationair was not that noisy while cruising, but this one had a slightly warped door edge on the passenger side that added a loud almost-whistle.

  “That’s the place,” Morrison said.

  Ventura looked down from what he guessed was about eight thousand feet. Most of what he saw looked like virgin evergreen forest. In the distance was a snowcapped mountain range with a few very tall peaks. The HAARP site itself was cut out of the forest—it was as if somebody had cleared a large area in woods in the rough shape of a skeleton key. Several buildings and a parking lot in a ragged circular area were connected by a straight road to the array itself—which looked as if somebody had planted seeds that grew up to be giant 1950s-style television antennas. Beyond that was a second rectangular array, as large as the first. Behind the control buildings and just coming into view was a long, straight paved strip a couple of thousand feet long.

  The pilot banked the plane slightly, then throttled back as he straightened the Cessna out.

  “We’ve got our own landing strip now,” Morrison said. “Better security. It wasn’t a problem when they built the place—anybody could just walk up to the front gate, they even had open house every now and then—but there was some ugly vandalism by eco-terrorists, so now there’s a big chainlink fence and armed military guards. The nearest town, such that it is, Gakona, is over that way. There’s a post office, a gas station, a motel and a couple of bed-and-breakfast places, a restaurant, a bar, like that. They get a lot of tourists, hunters, and fishermen up here. If you want, you can get a dogsled custom-made for you here, too, but if you are looking for nightlife, this isn’t the place. Forty-nine permanent residents.”

  Ventura nodded. He had been in backcountry towns so small and isolated that a big topic of conversation on a Sunday morning was the size of a particularly large icicle hanging from a bar awning. “Gets a little chilly for street dancing,” Ventura said.

  It was not a question, though Morrison treated it as such. “Yes, it drops to forty or fifty below in the dark of winter, and usually there are a couple feet of white fluffy powder on the flats, piled higher against the buildings. Sometimes the wind blows hard enough to scour the ground clean in places, though. Plays hell with the runners on your snow machine when you hit one of those.”

  Ventura smiled politely. He had done some background research before they’d flown into Anchorage. He probably knew more about the terrain and local country than Morrison did, but he didn’t let on. In almost every situation, knowledge was power, and because you worked for a man didn’t mean that you trusted him.

  From what he had learned, the HAARP site was a hundred and some odd miles northeast of Anchorage, almost to the Wrangell Mountains, the high range that divided Alaska from the Canadian Yukon.

  He already knew that the nearest town was Gakona, and that it was about fifteen miles north and west of the town of Glennallen, which wasn’t exactly a major metropolis itself. Up here, people gave directions differently than in a city—the Sourdough Motel, for instance, was at Milepost 147.5—you didn’t need to say which road, there weren’t so many you’d get confused. Gakona was on the Glenn Highway, though the locals called it the Tok CutOff, a couple of miles from the Richardson Highway intersection. The town, what there was of it, was near the conflu
ence of the Copper and Gakona rivers. The original inhabitants were Ahtna Indians, though few of them lived here now. Few of anybody lived here now. During the busy season, there were more people working at the HAARP site than lived in town. People who chose to be up here enjoyed the great outdoors, and they were either hardy or they didn’t stay.

  The landing strip at the site was new, and according to his research, there wasn’t a commercial airport closer than Gulkana, a few miles south of Gakona. No railroad, and the roads called highways were more like state roads.

  A hundred years ago, somebody had built a roadhouse, the Gakona Lodge, and it was still there, now a restaurant.

  If you didn’t work for HAARP—or against it, and there were some who did that, work against it—you came up here to hunt, fish, hike, canoe, kayak, ski, or snowboard. There were a couple of paramedics with the volunteer fire department, but no hospitals, clinics, or doctors around, so if you chainsawed your foot off, you were shit out of luck.

  The pilot, who was a grizzled man of maybe fifty, lined up on the narrow runway and dropped his airspeed. A lot of these bush pilots were experts, and this one was better than most at flying this little bird, because after he’d left the Navy, where he’d flown jets off and onto an aircraft carrier, he had flown crop dusters for a living down in central California. Ventura had checked him out, too. When you took on a client, you didn’t take any chances—you examined everybody who got within rifle range of your charge if you could pull it off. It was easier up here in the middle of nowhere, at least insofar as the numbers went. And it wasn’t that hard to do, much easier than a lot of people realized.

  Ventura subscribed to a computer investigative service. You logged onto the site, gave them your password and the name of whoever or whatever you wanted to know about, and within a few minutes, usually, they came back with as extensive a report as was available. The service had access, however legally, to social security, state motor vehicle departments, credit bureaus, police computer nets, and a bunch of others they wouldn’t talk about. It was an expensive service, but they were pretty good. Not perfect—all they had on Ventura himself was what he allowed anybody to have on him—but as good as you were going to find outside of a serious spook shop. Good enough to track and define most honest people. Spotting the others was his job—if it took one to know one, he certainly ought to know a shooter.

  The pilot brought the plane in smoothly, didn’t even hop once when he touched down, and taxied toward a wind sock on a steel post next to a corrugated metal shed with a very steeply angled roof.

  Once they were out with their bags, the pilot headed from the apron back to the runway, never even killing his engine.

  It was warm—high seventies or low eighties, Ventura figured.

  Morrison said, “Didn’t think it would be so warm, eh?”

  “Actually, I was wondering where the mosquitoes were. They’re usually pretty bad this time of year in the lake valleys.”

  Morrison blinked, apparently surprised that Ventura wasn’t surprised by the temperature. “Um. Well, the DOD has a guy who comes out and fogs the site every now and then. The mosquitoes are worse away from here. So, you’ve been to Alaska before? Why didn’t you say so?”

  “It never came up,” Ventura said. He smiled.

  “Um. Come on, I’ll show you the setup. There’s a fuel-cell cart in the shed; it’s a mile or so to the front gate from here. We’ll ride.”

  Ventura nodded. He adjusted the pistol in his belt holster. It had been there since they’d left Seattle. There were half a dozen ways he knew of to avoid having to pack your weapon in your luggage. People who thought you couldn’t carry a gun onto a commercial jet were only fooling themselves.

  Fooling himself was not Ventura’s game.

  I-80, just northwest of Laramie, Wyoming

  “Wow, look how big they are!”

  Tyrone glanced away from the small herd of buffalo penned next to the truck stop, and at Nadine. “Yeah. I’ve seen vids, but you don’t get the reality of it. They stink, too.” In the heat of the early afternoon, the dry air carried the musky, dusty odor of the animals. It was kind of hard to say exactly what it smelled like, but it wasn’t something you smelled on a street in Washington, D.C. This was a fairly level spot, but they were into the northern Rocky Mountains now, and it was a lot slower going in the big RV than it had been on the flatlands of Kansas.

  He and Nadine stood next to the tall wooden rail fence bounded by a single wire plastered with warnings that it was electrified, and not to touch it, not more than twenty or thirty feet away from the nearest buffalo as it chewed on hay or something. As they watched, the creature let loose a big dump, clumps of brown and yellowish stuff plopping onto the ground under its tail. It never even lifted its head from its grazing. Poot and eat at the same time. Yuk.

  “Puuwee!” Nadine said.

  Before it had smelled kind of rank, but now it really stunk.

  “Yeah, well, I’m impressed. No wonder they wiped them out. Come on, let’s get upwind,” he said.

  Behind them, the thirty-foot-long RV Tyrone’s dad had borrowed from an admiral he knew was parked at the gas pumps, sucking up fuel. The thing would hold like fifty or sixty gallons in the tank, and it needed it, because it got only eight or ten miles to the gallon. On a round trip that was probably going to run almost six thousand miles, the RV was going to drink a lot of gasoline. Even with the new clean-burn technology and the solar-assist panels, the RV was a big old tank, big as a bus, and it lumbered along like a dinosaur. Of course, it was huge on the inside. There was a bedroom in the back with a queen-sized bed, where his mom and dad slept. A bathroom with a shower and toilet and sink, lots of closet space, and even a tiny bedroom up front that pulled out from one side of the main body like a drawer when they were stopped. Nadine slept in that little room behind one of those plastic accordion doors. Plus there was a dining area with a table, a kitchen with a stove, fridge, sink, microwave oven, and a pretty good-sized TV set and computer, with an automatic track-and-lock sat dish on the roof that caught narrowcast audio-vid, and telecom signals. You could sit there and eat a bowl of Häagen-Dazs pineapple-coconut ice cream and watch entcom stuff, or log onto the net, all while your dad was driving down the interstate at sixty. Pretty amazing. A lot more fun than being cooped up in the back of the family Dodge. Although being cooped up hip-to-hip with Nadine wouldn’t be so bad. She wasn’t gorgeous, but she was smart, athletic, and definitely female.

  There was a couch behind the passenger seat that pulled out into a bed, and that was where Tyrone slept. He’d gotten used to it after the days on the road, and it was almost as comfortable as his bed at home. His dad had said it ought to be, since the RV had cost the admiral as much as they’d paid for their house.

  He saw his mom and dad coming back from the direction of the truck stop. They had a couple of big paper bags and a cardboard carrier of soft drinks. This was a treat, since Mom usually cooked in the RV.

  “There’s a place to park around the side of the buffalo pen,” his dad said. “We can eat and watch the buffalo roam.” He rattled the bags.

  “Flawless,” Tyrone said. “As long as it’s not downwind.”

  The fries were good, the onion rings really good, and the burgers had a kind of smoky, odd flavor. Not bad, but different. Tyrone swallowed a bite of the burger and said, “They cook burgers kinda differently out here.”

  His father smiled. “It’s not how they cook them, it’s what they make them out of.”

  Tyrone looked at him. “Huh?”

  His father pointed out the window over the table and grinned real big.

  Tyrone looked at the buffalo. He looked at his burger.

  Ah...

  Both Nadines laughed.

  All of a sudden Tyrone wasn’t that hungry. Then again, he was going to eat this burger, and he would do it if it killed him. No way was he going to let his dad get this one, no ... way.

  He smiled, took a big bite, and smile
d again, mouth full. “Good. I love it.”

  9

  Wednesday, June 8th

  Washington, D.C.

  Michaels felt as if he were a thousand years old and mostly turned to dust as he held the phone’s receiver in a death grip that threatened to break his hand or the instrument. He kept his voice as light as he could.

  “... really great, Dadster, and all the kids in my class love him.”

  His daughter was talking about Byron Baumgardner, a teacher at her school in Boise—and his ex-wife Megan’s boyfriend.

  No, not boyfriend—fiancé. They were getting married at the end of the month. And they wanted to have Byron the bearded wonder adopt his daughter, move in and take over as her father, and deny Michaels visitation—if he allowed it.

  Needless to say, Michaels had not been invited to the wedding.

  His initial inclination had been to fight it to the death—preferably Megan and Byron’s death. He didn’t like either of them right now, and at their first meeting had put the bearded wonder on his ass when the man had grabbed him. Megan had been doing her usual slash-and-burn number on him, and when he’d said something back in an angry retort, dear young Byron had taken it upon himself to defend her honor. Without thinking about it, Michaels had decked the man, thus proving that the silat he’d been learning actually worked.

  In retrospect, that had been a mistake, but boy, it sure felt good at the time.

  Well, Byron the bearded wonder would find out about how much honor his new love had the first time he crossed her—Megan fought dirty, always had. Michaels had overlooked that for a long time, blaming himself for a lot of their troubles, but eventually he realized it wasn’t all his fault. Yeah, he had spent too much time at the office, and yeah, he could withdraw into his own head and not engage even when he was home, but he had been a good father, and when Megan started throwing the lousy-dad crap in his face, it was hard to smile and shrug it off.