Breaking Point Read online

  5

  Saturday, June 4th

  Seattle, Washington

  Luther Ventura sat in the Koffee Me! store in the mall near the new entrance to Underground Seattle, holding a triple espresso. The textured cardboard sleeve around the paper cup allowed just enough heat to warm his hands slightly as he inhaled the fragrant vapor wafting up from the fluid. The brew smelled bitter, and it was as dark as a pedophile’s sins.

  He inhaled the scent, connecting to it as a wine expert might enjoy the aroma of a great vintage.

  When he was ready, Ventura sipped the espresso, let the hot liquid swirl around his mouth a bit, then swallowed it.

  Ah.

  When he drank or ate, that was what he did. He didn’t read the paper, he didn’t watch television, he didn’t split his attention—well, save for the basic Condition Orange he always maintained in public, but he had been doing that for so long it was almost a reflex. After twenty-five years of practice, you didn’t have to think about that consciously. You automatically sat with your back to the wall. You checked the entrances and exits of any building into which you went. You knew what kind of construction the building was, which walls you could smash through, which ones would likely stop a bullet. You were always aware of what was going on around you, tuned into the currents of who came and who left, alert for any small sign that danger might be casting a glare in your direction. You expanded your consciousness, relied on all your senses, including your hunches, tuned out nothing, but allowed yourself enough quiet that you could experience the total reality of the place where you were. Zanshin, the swordplayers called it. The Zen of being in the moment, no matter where you were and what you were doing, of being and not merely doing. To Ventura’s mind, this was all unthinking and basic, absolutely necessary to a man who wanted to stay alive in the business he’d been in.

  Once upon a time, Luther Ventura had been an assassin. And, once upon a time, he had been the best in the business. He had worked for governments, he had worked for corporations, and he had worked freelance. Twenty-three years he had done it. Seventy-six major assignments, ninety-one people taken down in the doing of them, and he had never failed to complete a job.

  Not any longer. He hadn’t assassinated anybody in a while, and if you didn’t sharpen your edge regularly, you got dull. Oh, he could still run with most of the elite; his skills had been considerable and they had not deserted him completely—but his time had passed. Somewhere out there was a man for whom hunting and taking human prey was a total focus. A man who was faster, stronger, younger, whose entire being was wrapped around what he did, and that made him better than Ventura. His ego didn’t want to hear that, but he wasn’t going to lie to himself. Experience could balance many things, but no fighter stayed champion forever. Those who tried to hang on too long always lost. Always.

  He could still do twenty chins, he could run five miles in half an hour, and he could hit any target his weapon was capable of hitting, but he was pushing fifty, and his reflexes weren’t what they had once been. He wore glasses to read and, these days, he missed some of the high notes he knew were there when he listened to a Mozart concerto or a Bach fugue.

  He could have tried to fool himself into thinking he still had all the moves, but that was the road to hell, sure enough.

  Three years ago, he had taken out a Brazilian drug dealer protected by a hundred troops and a dozen skilled bodyguards. The tap had been extremely difficult and it had been perfect in every way.

  Perfect.

  Even if your talents never wavered, you couldn’t improve on perfection. The best you could ever do was match it, and there was no joy in that. It was not worth the risk. He was on the downhill slope, and the lean and hungry days were long gone. There weren’t any old assassins, not at the level he’d played on. So he’d folded his cards and walked away from the game a winner.

  Sure, he had killed people recently, but those didn’t count, those had been defensive, more or less. Once, he had gone forth and stalked. Now he made his money protectiny people from other assassins. It was, in many ways, more difficult. There were still challenges to be met. That was his focus, and while it did not have the same level of excitement, it had some advantages. It was legal. It was less risky. And although he didn’t need the money, it was lucrative.

  He put the espresso down, finished. All he needed was the first sip. He didn’t need the caffeine, didn’t want the artificial mind-set that came with it. One sip was enough. It was the essence of the experience, no more was necessary.

  Finished with the coffee, he looked at his watch. It was one minute past eight A.M. He had a new client, though he was not to start officially working for the man for several days. But as soon as Ventura took on a job, it occupied his attention, and he did what it took to get into the proper mind-set.

  Although he was out of town for a few days, at around seven-thirty A.M. on Saturdays his client usually arrived in Seattle via ferry and came to this coffee shop, where he had a cup of triple espresso. For the next several days, Ventura would walk in his client’s shoes, go where he went and do what he did, as much as possible. He would get to know the man’s routine, just as he had gotten to know the routines of those he had sought out and killed. And when he knew what he needed to know, then he would notice anything that did not belong.

  He pulled a small phone from the pocket of his gray silk sport coat. He pressed a button on it, waited for a moment, then said, “All right. Let’s move.”

  The rest of his primary team—two men and two women—were in the coffee shop or covering the street outside. He watched the man and woman pretending to be a married couple stand and walk arm in arm toward the door. Both kept their gun hands clear—the woman was dexter, the man a sinister, so the man walked on the left, the woman the right.

  Ventura tucked the phone away and surreptitiously adjusted the hidden pistol on his hip as he stood. The leather was a custom pancake holster from Ted Blocker, the gun a Coonan Cadet, a stainless .357 Magnum. The pistol had been attended to by Ventura himself, the feed ramp throated and polished, the action slicked, custom springs installed, with the magazines hand-tuned so there would be no failures to feed..357s and .40s had the best record of one-shot stops in street shootings. A one-shot stop meant that one round to the body put a man out of the play. The Coonan held seven cartridges, six in the magazine and one in the chamber, and he carried it in condition one—cocked and locked. All he had to do was draw, wipe the safety, and fire. Using handloads he built himself, Ventura’s one-shot stops should be right at 97 percent. Practically speaking, you couldn’t get any better than that with a handgun. A subgun was better, a shotgun more so, and a good rifle best of all, but such things were hard to carry around in public settings, so one made do with what was available.

  He had three other pistols identical to it. If he had to shoot somebody, the gun had to go away, and since he liked the design and action, he had bought several, through a dummy dealer. Three years ago, he’d had eight of the pistols. They were good hardware.

  Of course, the mark of a good bodyguard was not having to use the hardware. He allowed himself a small smile as he headed for the exit. Like a perfect crime, the best bodyguard was one you never knew about.

  He might not be the best yet, but there was still time for improvement.

  Quantico, Virginia

  “Sir? Somebody to see you. A Dr. Morrison, from Washington State?”

  Michaels looked up from his computer, blinking away the reading trance he’d been in. Morrison, Morrison ... ? Ah, yes, he remembered. Morrison had called yesterday, said he was in town, and needed to speak to somebody at Net Force about a problem with something called HAARP. Michaels had done a fast scan of the archives to find out that this was short for High Altitude Auroral Research Project, a joint endeavor that involved the Air Force, Navy, and several universities. Something to do with microwaves or some such. Sounded like a snorer to him.

  “Show him in.”

  The man
who followed Michaels’s secretary into the office was tall, thin, nearly bald, and looked to be about fifty. He wore a plain black business suit and a dark tie, and carried a battered aluminum briefcase. He could have passed for a professor just about anywhere.

  “Dr. Morrison. I’m Alex Michaels.”

  “Commander. I didn’t expect to be meeting with the head of the organization.”

  Michaels considered telling him that his assistant had quit and that his best computer guy was tromping around in the woods somewhere with his new girlfriend, but decided it wasn’t any of the man’s business, and he probably wouldn’t care anyhow.

  He smiled. “Have a seat. What can I do for you, sir?” Morrison sat, awkward in his movement. Not a jock, this one.

  “As you may recall, I am one of the project managers on the HAARP project.”

  “You’re a long way from Gakona, Alaska,” Michaels said.

  Morrison raised an eyebrow. “You know about the project?”

  “Only where it is located, and that it has to do with the ionosphere.”

  Morrison seemed to relax a little. He opened his briefcase and produced a mini-DVD disc. “Here is a rundown on HAARP-I know you have a higher security clearance than do I, but this is all pretty much public background material.”

  Michaels took the disc.

  “HAARP went on-line in the early nineties, has been operating on and off since. We are in summer hiatus just now, for repairs to equipment. Essentially, HAARP is the world’s most powerful shortwave transmitter. It was designed to beam high-energy radio waves into the ionosphere, and thereby to perform various experiments to learn about space weather—for our purposes, that’s basically the flow of particles from the sun and other sources into the Earth’s atmosphere. These things affect communications, satellites, like that.”

  Michaels nodded. Yep. A snorer. He tried to look interested.

  “The array, called the FIRI, consists of one hundred eighty antenna towers on a grid of fifteen columns and twelve rows, on a gravel pad of some thirty-three acres. Each tower consists of a pair of dipole antennas that run either in the 2.8-to-7 MHz, or the 7-to-10 MHz range. Each transmitter can generate some ten thousand watts of radio-frequency power, and the combined raw output of the three hundred and sixty transmitters is thus three point six million watts. When focused on a single spot in the sky, this is effectively multiplied a thousandfold, to three point six billion watts.”

  “Better than the old pirate Mexican radio stations,” Michaels said, smiling.

  “By a factor of about seventy thousand,” Morrison said, returning the smile.

  “So it’s a very powerful system. And ... ?”

  “And there are several things we’ve learned along the way. Research has been primarily in four areas: communications, such as with extremely low frequency waves, or ELF, for such things as contacting submarines in the depths; tomography—the ability to see great distances underground—and even the possibility of some rudimentary weather control. There have also been some experiments with pulse generation, EMP, to knock out enemy missile guidance systems, that sort of thing.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yes, it is. And as a by-product of the ELF research, the possibility of affecting and altering biorhythms of plant and animal life has been ... explored.”

  Michaels frowned. “You want to clarify that last part for me?”

  “We’ve known for a long time that long-term radiowave exposure can affect people. Increased rates of cancer under power lines and the like. Civilized people live in a virtual bath of non-ionizing low-frequency waves— everything electrical produces them. At HAARP, certain areas of research involving the 0.5-to-40Hz frequencies, the same ones that the human brain uses, have been experimented with.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that the Navy and Air Force are very interested in the possibility that HAARP could give them a nondestructive weapon technology.”

  Michaels leaned back in his chair. “What, are we talking about mind control?”

  “It is a possibility, though not yet feasible.”

  This really was interesting. “It’s been a while since my last physics class, Dr. Morrison, but the difference between hertz radio waves and megahertz is considerable, isn’t it? How is it that a transmitter that produces frequencies in the—what was it? 2.8-to-10 MHz range—will do anything in the 0.5-to-40 Hz range?”

  Morrison gave him a smile as might a professor discovering a bright student who has picked up something the rest of the class missed. “Ah, very good, Commander. You are correct. A hertz is one cycle per second, a megahertz is a million cycles per second. So in order for such high-frequency broadcast energy to be, ah, stepped down by this magnitude requires a considerable change in the length of the broadcasting antenna. Generally speaking, an antenna must be as long as the wavelength it transmits. So 30 MHz waves would require a ten-meter antenna, and 30 Hz waves would need about a thousand-kilometer antenna.”

  “I wouldn’t think there are a lot of thousand-kilometer antennas lying around,” Michaels said. He kept his voice dry.

  “You’d be surprised. An antenna needn’t be made of steel girders—you can make one out of coils of wire, or transmitters linked electronically, or several other ways. For our purposes, we use the sky itself.

  “The Earth is essentially a giant magnet, surrounded by incoming cosmic and solar radiation. A certain number of these solar winds spiral in and down at the magnetic poles, in what is known as the electrojet. This is what causes the aurora—the northern and southern lights. With HAARP, we can, in effect, turn the length of the electrojet into a kind of antenna, and by certain electronic manipulations, make it as long as we want, within limits, of course.”

  “I see. And this means you can generate frequencies that might affect human mental processes with a lot of broadcast power behind them, over a long distance.”

  “It does.”

  “Are you here as a whistle-blower, Dr. Morrison? I’m the wrong guy, you want to be talking to the DOD—”

  “No, no, nothing like that. There’s nothing wrong with the military seeking out new weaponry; that’s part of their job, isn’t it? The Russians have been playing with this stuff for years, and it would be foolish for our government to ignore the potential. It would be much better to be able to tell an enemy to lay down his weapon and have him do it than have to shoot him, wouldn’t it?

  “No, I’m here because I am certain somebody has been sneaking into our computers and stealing the information about our experiments.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes. And because I don’t know who might be doing it, I came to you rather than my superiors.”

  Michaels nodded. Now it made sense. “And how is it you came to believe somebody has been stealing information?”

  Morrison smiled and took another DVD disc from his briefcase. “They left footprints.”

  6

  Vermillion. River, Lafayette, Louisiana

  Michaels sat in the stern of a twelve-foot aluminum bateau, his hand on the control arm of the little electric trolling motor. The sluggish waters of the bayou flowed past, the motor just strong enough to hold the boat’s backward movement to a slow drift. The boat had been dark green once, but was rain- and sun-faded to a chalky, lighter shade. It was hot here, probably in the low nineties, even on the water, and the humidity of the air wasn’t much drier than the bayou itself. On the shores to either side, huge live oaks loomed, gray Spanish moss hanging down like ragged, organic curtains. A three-foot-long alligator gar broke the surface half a body length, fell back, and splashed the murky water next to a bobbing incandescent lightbulb somebody had thrown in somewhere upstream.

  Michaels pulled on the rubber handle of the Mercury outboard motor’s starter. The starter rope was nylon, and had once been white, but was now soaked with enough two-cycle oil and grease so it was nearly black. The fifteen-horsepower motor caught, burbled, and rumbled. He shut off the electric, geared
the Mercury, and twisted the throttle. The smell of gasoline and lubricant enveloped him.

  The bateau surged against the slow flow. He angled toward the east bank to avoid a half-submerged log floating toward him. Or was that a gator?

  On the shore, a big snapping turtle sunned itself on a rock. The approaching boat made it nervous, and the turtle slid from the rock and vanished into the dark water.

  Michaels smiled. Jay had done a terrific job on this scenario. It felt so real.

  Ahead, the virtual reality construct that represented the HAARP facility’s computer system stood on the east bank of the bayou, the image of a backwoods bar, a juke joint. The building was wooden, painted white with a slanting, corrugated metal roof, and the exterior walls were hung with metal beer and soft-drink signs whose paint was flaking and peeling: Falstaff, Jax, Royal Crown Cola, Dr Pepper. A small mountain of rusting steel cans avalanched toward the riverbank to the side of the ramshackle building. Michaels was close enough to see that the empty cans had pairs of triangular-shaped holes punched into the tops—opened with what his father used to call a church key, long before pull- or pop-tops were invented.

  He guided the boat toward the shore.

  Virtual reality hadn’t turned out quite the way the early computer geeks had imagined. With the power and input devices available, virtual reality could be, well, virtually anything—it was up to the person who designed the scenario. The constructs were analogies, of course, but configured so that people could relate to them intuitively. Normal people didn’t want to push buttons or click on icons, no matter how cute these things were. What they really wanted was to be surrounded by a setting in which they could behave like people. Instead of tapping at a keyboard, they could hike a mountain trail, ride a horse through the Old West, or—like Michaels—take a small boat down a dark and slow-flowing bayou. There were no limits to what you could do in VR, save those of imagination. You could buy off-the-shelf software, have it custom designed by somebody who knew about such things, or do it yourself. Michaels was the head of Net Force, so he had to at least have a passing familiarity with doing it himself, and he did, but it was much easier to let Jay Gridley or one of the other hotshot ops build them. These guys were detail oriented, and they really got into it.