Breaking Point nf-4 Read online

  “Satisfied?” He started to pull his hand away.

  Howard grabbed the revolver and turned it over. When he did, he noticed the little bulge at the top of the other grip panel. At the same time, he felt the small button on the inside of the grip, under his middle finger. “And just what is this?” He pointed the gun downrange and squeezed the grips.

  A hundred meters away, a bright red spot appeared all the way out on the back wall.

  There was a laser built into the grips.

  “You cheating bastard. You set me up.”

  Julio laughed. “Gunny showed it to me before you got here. It’s from somebody called Crimson Trace — cool, ain’t it? You adjust it with a tiny little Allen wrench, right there, and up there, and it fits inside a regular holster. Doesn’t add any appreciable mass or weight, and unlike a dot scope, you don’t even have to bring the weapon up to eye level, you can hip-shoot. Gets a couple thousand rounds per set of batteries, and you can carry a spare set in the other grip panel. They make ’em for K-frames, too, so you could get them for the Medusa or the Smith.”

  “You work for these people, too, Julio?”

  Julio laughed again and pointed at the dancing dot. “Old guys like us, we need some advantages. You can see that sucker a couple hundred meters away in the dark and, according to Gunny, it shows up okay at handgun combat range even in daylight. Wherever the red spot is, that’s where the bullet hits. If it’s foggy or you’re worried about giving away your position, you can use the regular sights, ’cause the laser don’t get in the way. Gunny says they make these for a whole bunch of guns, including my Beretta. I’m gonna get one before Joanna has our kid and we have to start putting away every penny for his college education.”

  “God hates a cheater more than he does a sore loser.”

  “No second-place winner in a gunfight, John. You know that. What do you think about the Medusa?”

  It wouldn’t do to admit to Julio how much he liked it, so he said, “I can force myself to use it until Gunny gets the Smith back on-line.”

  Julio gave him a knowing grin. “Ah. I see.”

  They’d been serving together too long for Howard to get much past his old friend. He grinned. “Okay, so it’s a great piece, you happy?”

  “You working for these people, John? Getting a commission on sales?”

  It was Howard’s turn to laugh, and he did.

  3

  Seattle, Washington

  Sitting in his Dodge Caravan, Patrick Morrison rode the ferry from Seattle toward Bainbridge Island. This was the first leg of a journey that would involve driving north after the boat ride, another ferry, then another short stint in the car, to finally arrive back at Port Townsend. The picturesque little town on the little peninsula where the Straits of Juan de Fuca turned south into Puget Sound was only about forty miles away from downtown Seattle as the crow flew, but a two-hour trip by car and boat, if you were lucky enough to make the ferry connections just right.

  Morrison owned a house on the hill in Port Townsend, where Shannon, his bride of four months, was doubtless still in bed asleep at this hour. She was twenty-five, gorgeous, a trophy wife half his age. Shannon was his second marriage, the first one having gone bad after almost twenty years. Marian had also been beautiful when he’d met her, and brilliant, which he’d always thought was the bigger attraction. But she’d let herself go, had gotten fat and lazy, and, it turned out, had been too smart — especially with her mouth. He liked intelligent women, but he found that he liked them at a distance. Too close, and they were like fire, you got burned by their brilliance. Marian had turned that heat onto him too many times, and she knew all the spots where it would hurt him the most.

  Shannon, on the other hand, was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. She wasn’t really stupid, probably about average intelligence; she thought he was a genius, being a scientist and all. Actually, he just missed the cut for genius by an IQ point or two, but he was pretty sure she would never throw that in his face. Nor would she stab him with the pointed question that, if he was so smart, why hadn’t he won a Nobel?

  Besides, Shannon knew tricks with her hands and her body that Morrison had never dreamed of doing in nineteen years of marriage to Marian. Her mouth was smart — but in an entirely different way…

  He shifted a bit, suddenly excited by the idea of being home and in bed with Shannon. Easy, big fella, he told himself. It’s a ways yet.

  The big ferry blasted its warning horn at a sailboat that ventured too near. Sail craft generally had the right of way over powerboats, all things being equal, but a ferry hauling scores of cars and hundreds of passengers was more equal than a thirty-foot sailboat foolish enough to tack in front of it. A sailor and a retired airline pilot that Morrison knew liked to say, “If you fly your plane into a mountain, you don’t get to blame the mountain.” Nobody had any sympathy for a day sailor who cut in front of a ferry — or plowed into one, which also happened from time to time.

  Morrison opened the Dodge’s door and stepped out. The van was six years old, but a Dodge, so it was good for years if he took care of it. Not that he intended to keep it that long. Pretty soon, he’d be able to buy a new car. A fleet of new cars, if he wanted, with a ship upon which to transport the fleet, and a navy to escort it, if he so wished.

  He smiled at the thought.

  The air had that salty, seaweed tang to it, and even though it was early and there was the passage wind blowing, the day was already warm, and promised to be hot before it was done.

  He worked his way across the hard rubber gratings toward the railing — he was parked forward and on the deck under the sky, outside of the superstructure enclosure where all the foot passengers rode.

  Gulls flew past. It was a great morning.

  Of course it was a great morning. The test had gone so well he couldn’t believe it. The Chinese had clamped down on it fast, squelching the incident into official silence deeper than that in a tomb, so there hadn’t been any reports in the media, even in China. Maybe especially in China.

  Morrison had his sources, though, and he found out quickly enough. The test had replicated the experiments with animals even better than anticipated. Well within the cutoff that separated “chronic” from “acute.” It might not work on a battlefield with shifting troops, but the device would definitely work on a permanent settlement.

  He’d known that it would. Well, to be absolutely honest, he had been almost certain. There was always the worry about field testing versus the lab. One never got over that. It took only a few failures to keep that anxiety alive forever, rather like Frankenstein’s monster, shambling around in the dark looking for a friend.

  Failure, unfortunately, had no friends. Which was how Dr. Patrick Reilly Morrison, with his Ph.D. in physics from MIT, had come to be involved with the project in the first place. He’d had a spectacular failure in his extremely low frequency experiments involving chimpanzees, and he’d lost his grant and funding big-time and damned fast. It was as if he had developed a sudden case of pneumonic plague — the first sneeze, and every professional contact he knew scattered as if they were parts of a bomb—ka-blamm! — leaving him stinking of smoke and failure and very much alone. No rat leaving a sinking ship had ever moved as fast as his grad students and research assistants had bailed on him, bastards and bitches, each and every one of them…

  He smiled at his own bitterness. Well, it really was an ill wind that blew no good, wasn’t it? If the ELF simian protocols hadn’t gone south on him, he’d never have gotten the job in Alaska, would he? And look where that had taken him. He could hardly be positioned better, could he?

  Well, yes, he supposed, academically he could be. And certainly in pure scientific circles, with major universities begging him to come and present papers? Well, he was not at the top of that list. Ah, but if somebody just up and gave you five or six hundred million dollars, maybe more, to fund whatever research your heart desired, no strings, no oversight? Well, that would go a lon
g, long way to assuage one’s wounded ego, wouldn’t it? People would kill for that kind of funding, and rightly so.

  Money would get you through times of no Nobel better than a Nobel would get you through times of no money, that was the cold truth.

  With half a billion in his pocket, he could thumb his nose at the journals, take his time to do whatever he damned well pleased, and when he was ready, then they’d come begging, by God! Because his theories did work after all, didn’t they?

  True, he didn’t want to take the credit for it just now, given the mode and manner in which he had finally proved himself correct, but someday it would be his to claim. Perhaps he would hire the Goodyear blimp and have it fly back and forth across the country with lights flashing and blazing it out for all to see:

  “I told you so!”

  He looked at his watch. He would go home, spend the day with Shannon, then catch a plane back to SeaTac for the flight to Washington, D.C. After the second and third tests, the events would surely be public, and it was of primary importance that he be prepared for that. He was one of the sharper knives in the drawer, and he knew that it was not enough to be smart, you had to be clever as well. Smart, clever, a beautiful young wife who thought the sun rose and set in his shadow, and rich — he had it all but the last, and that was coming, a mere matter of a few weeks or months. When you got right down to it, how important was academic recognition compared to those? He could fund research if he wanted! Be a foundation unto himself!

  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 fr
om 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.

  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.