Breaking Point Read online

  Everything was damp here, lots of moss and mold, fed by the constant spray off the falls.

  Howard reached for the virgil—the virtual global interface link—hooked to his belt. This was a great toy, not much bigger than a standard pager or small cell phone, and it not only had a com, it was a working GPS, clock. radio, TV, modem, credit card, camera, scanner, and even a tiny fax that produced weavewire hardcopy. There were civilian models, but the military units were better—at least for now. Sharper Image was gaining, or so he had heard.

  Sergeant Julio Fernandez appeared on the virgil’s tiny screen, smiling.

  “Congratulations. General. I didn’t think you’d make it this long. I guess one of the others will win the pool.”

  “I am merely calling to check in, Sergeant.”

  “The country is getting along fine without you, sir. No wars, no terrorists taking over at Quantico—well, if you don’t count the new feeb recruits—and the Republic endures.”

  “I just wanted to let you know where I was.”

  “John, your GPS sends us a homing signal as long as it’s got power, remember? We know where you are. You want me to give you your longitude and latitude?”

  “Nobody likes a smart-ass NCO, Julio.”

  “C’mon, you’re on vacation. Relax. Enjoy yourself. I’ll call if the Swiss or the French decide to invade the country, I promise.”

  Howard made a suggestion that was anatomically impossible and unlikely for a heterosexual even if it had been possible.

  Fernandez laughed. “That’s a discom, General. Adios.”

  Howard smiled as he rehooked the virgil to his belt. Well, yes, he did sometimes think things would go to hell if he left town. So he was a worrier, what could he say?

  Nadine and the children were hot to climb up to the little bridge closer to the falls, and Howard went along. It was all part of the ambience, to get wet, wasn’t it?

  As they hiked up the damp macadam path, he recalled the first time he’d ever been to this part of the country. Back in ’99 or ’00, in the late fall or early winter. A friend of his from the army, Willie Kohler, had scored some two hundred buck tickets to a boxing match out on the coast. Not the best seats, but pretty good, only about fifty or sixty feet from the ring. It was in one of those Indian casinos that the local tribes had put up. Chinook something? Chinook Winds, that was it. In Lincoln City.

  He remembered the event better now that he thought about it. They had given it some silly name, like the Rumble in the Jungle or the Thrill in Mantilla, it was ... ah, yes, Commotion at the Ocean. He and Willie had gotten some funny mileage out of that one.

  He wasn’t the world’s biggest boxing fan, but he’d done a little in the service when he’d been younger, fighting camp matches as a light-heavyweight and giving about as good as he got. No future there for him, getting bashed in the face, but he didn’t mind watching somebody with real skill demonstrate it. As he remembered, there had been six or eight matches at the casino, all fairly low weight classes, and a couple of them were championship bouts. The most interesting fights had been on the under card. Some black kid from Washington, D.C., with sweet moves had put his man down in the second round. And there had been a couple of female fighters, one a little girl in red, a featherweight, all of a hundred and twenty-two or -three pounds, who had great hands—and great legs, too. Only her third pro fight, but she had real boxing skills. Of course, this was back when boxing wasn’t considered a brutal crime against humanity, and women were just getting into it. And when it still wasn’t too politically incorrect to admire a woman’s legs ...

  What he remembered most of all was that they played bad rap music—if that wasn’t redundant—between each fight, and it was way, way too loud. Earmuffs should have been mandatory; it was noisier than a shooting range, and probably less musical. After the second or third fight, he and Willie were ready to go and kick out the damned speakers to kill the noise. But like at gun shows, you needed to be polite at a big boxing match—you never knew but that guy you just sloshed your beer on might have been the number one contender for the cruiserweight title a few years back, and no matter what self-defense system you knew, a good pro boxer was going to get at least a couple of shots in if he smited—and then threw the first punch.

  Howard smiled as they climbed into the waterfall mist. There was a lot of green on the hillside now—moss, ferns, all kinds of water-loving plants.

  Julio was right, he needed to relax and enjoy his vacation. His son was growing up, and pretty soon he’d be a lot more interested in girls and cars than boomerangs and family trips. Might as well enjoy it while he could. He was out in the Wild West, nothing of any major military importance was apt to happen here, certainly nothing he needed to worry about.

  Nadine looked back at him and smiled. “Isn’t this fun?”

  “Yep,” he said, “it is.”

  11

  Thursday, June 9th

  Quantico, Virginia

  Jay Gridley wasn’t exactly thrilled about having to go back to work. Yeah, sure, it was what he did, and yeah, sure, he loved it, but rolling around with Soji, even in a drafty tent in the rainy woods? Well, that had work beat all hollow.

  He never thought he’d hear himself think that, but there it was.

  Truth was, even though he was dropping by the Net Force compound late Thursday afternoon, he didn’t really have to be back until Monday. But Soji had clients she had to counsel, and she refused to take a laptop or net-phone with her into the woods, so they had packed up the camping gear and came back to civilization. In her net persona of the old Tibetan priest Sojan Rinpoche, Soji taught basic Buddhism and also offered a kind of psycho-spiritual first aid to people who had suffered various forms of brain damage, usually secondary to drugs or stroke. That was how they’d met, on-line, when Jay had been zapped while chasing the guy with the quantum computer.

  Soji had an apartment in Los Angeles, but she was going to be working out of Jay’s place, at least for now. And he hoped he could convince her to make it permanent, though he hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to ask her to move in, much less to marry him. But he was gonna. Eventually.

  Commander Michaels was in his office when Jay got there. He waved at the receptionist. “He busy?”

  “No, go ahead in.”

  Jay tapped at the door, then opened it. “Hey, Boss.”

  “Jay? What you doing here? You’re not supposed to be back until Monday. How did it go?”

  “The mosquitoes got so bad we had to come back for a transfusion. Other than that, it went great. How’s business ?”

  “Slow. Nothing major. Usual net scams, viruses, illegal porno stuff. Nobody trying to topple the world that we’ve noticed, thank God.”

  Jay wanted to ask if Michaels had heard from Toni Fiorella—her quitting had hit the Net Force group hard—but he didn’t bring it up. Toni had called Jay from London and he had heard that she’d called a couple of other people in Net Force, too, but he still didn’t know what exactly had gone down between her and the boss. It must have been bad, though. Michaels had been pretty miserable about it, even if he tried to pretend otherwise.

  “Nothing interesting at all?”

  “Nope. Well, one little thing. You know about something called HAARP?”

  “Sure, the atmosphere burner up in Alaska. The guys in aluminum-foil hats love that one. What happen, it melt down?”

  “According to one of the scientists working on the thing, somebody sneaked in and stole something from their computer.”

  “Who would bother? The technology is moldy, goes back to Tesla, more than a hundred years ago.”

  Michaels shrugged. “Got me. I did a little web walking in VR, and it does look as if somebody got into their computer.”

  “Kid hacker, maybe,” Jay said.

  “Could be. You want to check it out, be my guest.”

  “Soji is gonna be busy for the next couple days. I’ll take a look at it, get a jump on work.”

&nbs
p; “Background and what I saw is in the work file under ‘HAARP.’ ”

  “Copy, Boss. See you Monday morning.”

  “My best to Soji,” he said.

  Jay went to his office and looked around, but there wasn’t much new to see. Some hardcopy reports was all. He had checked his e-mail and phone messages using a virgil he’d checked out and taken with him, so he was pretty much up to date.

  Just for grins, he lit his computer and read over the information on HAARP the boss had given him, including the hiddencam vid of the interview with the scientist, Morrison.

  Very interesting stuff. Mind control? That would be worth stealing, but that also didn’t seem likely. People had been playing with low-frequency stuff for a long time without much in the way of results. Still. it was intriguing.

  Jay logged off his computer. He’d been here for a couple of hours. Time to head home. Soji didn’t have to be on-line all the time ...

  But as he started for the door to leave, his com chirped, and the sexy, throaty female vox he’d programmed into his computer said, “Jay! Priority One com, Jay! Heads up! Answer the phone, you hunk of burning love!”

  Friday, June 10th

  Longhua, China

  When he had been a member of the Chinese Army twenty years before, Jing Lu Han had apparently at some point collected a Russian Makarov pistol, and kept it hidden away for two decades afterward. No one had ever seen him with it—at least no one alive who could testify to that. There seemed no other way he could have come by such a thing, there not having been any Russians in or about Longhua in anybody’s memory, and Jing having lived there all his life, save for his time in the army.

  However he came by it, it was with this pistol that Jing proceeded to shoot seventeen members of his home village in the wee hours of Friday morning. He walked calmly through the town, plinking at anybody who came out to see what the noise was about, and he did not discriminate as to sex, age, or familial relationships. By dawn, he had shot men, women, children, friends, and relatives. He had two dozen rounds of ammunition remaining for the pistol after he shot number seventeen—his butt-ugly and ignorant cousin Low Tang—but it was moot as to how many more he might have wounded or killed, given that he was overwhelmed at that point by half a dozen villagers and hacked to pieces by their sickles and scythes. The bloody tatters remaining of Jing were pounded into the hard ground under their sandals—before the six took their weapons to each other.

  The only apparent survivor of this melee had a short-lived triumph, as he was murdered shortly thereafter by a middle-aged schoolteacher wielding a pair of hedge-trimming shears, with which she deftly snipped his left carotid artery. He bled out in less than a minute, judging from the blood trail.

  The teacher then used the shears on herself, plunging them into her belly more than ten times before shock and loss of blood overcame her.

  A block away, four women were killed by a fifth when she drove a forty-eight-year-old Ford tractor into, and then back and forth over, the four until the tractor ran out of gasoline an hour later. She fell asleep sitting there.

  In the town’s only decent food market, nineteen people who had fled there to avoid the carnage were trapped inside when a teenaged girl set the place on fire. They were all cooked. The girl in turn was killed by an elderly woman who sneaked up behind her and smashed her skull with a shovel, and she in turn was slain by a very large naked man who grabbed and fell on her, suffocating her under his bulk as he lay there giggling.

  In a period of six hours, ninety-seven residents were killed, twenty-one others were wounded seriously enough so that they would later die from their injuries, and a hundred more were injured badly enough that they needed hospitalization. Nobody knew about this immediately, because the landline communication wires out of town had been cut and then burned by a man who used part of the wire to hang himself.

  The town of Longhua had seen better days.

  Thursday

  Quantico, Virginia

  Michaels looked up from his laptop and the hardcopy reports, photographs, and vids, at Jay. “How did we get this? It’s so detailed.”

  Jay said, “Some of the pictures and vids are retro-spysat and computer augs, some came from the Chinese investigating team, some from a bashed up and bloody camera found on the scene. The reports we got from my friend in the CIA, who got it like the CIA usually gets such things—they bought it from one of their Chinese computer spies set up to find such things. It’s all fresh stuff, really fresh.”

  Michaels looked back at the hardcopy picture of the women who had been murdered by tractor. They were mostly mush, and hardly recognizable as humans.

  “What do we know? And why do we at Net Force need to know it?”

  Jay said, “Longhua, China, a mountain town, a hundred and fifty kilometers or so north and east of Beijing, approaching old Mongolia. Nothing much happens in Longhua—or at least it didn’t use to.

  “According to my CIA mole, there’s another village, called, ah”—he looked at the laptop on the table in front of him—“Daru, which is a couple thousand kilometers south of Longhua, on the coast across from Formosa. Same thing happened there a few days ago. The Chinese, of course, are sweating buckets trying to keep the lid on, but our sources say it was another verse of this song. Group insanity coupled with murderous violence. Survivors in both towns tell the same tale. All of a sudden, everybody went bugfuck and started attacking everybody else, no reason. This includes those who lived to be interviewed. They were minding their own business and blap! they were enveloped in a killing rage that overwhelmed them. None of them can explain it. It just suddenly seemed like a good idea to fold, spindle, or mutilate their family and neighbors to death.”

  “What do the Chinese investigators think?”

  “They don’t have a clue. They’ve checked for drugs, poison, psychedelics in the water, diseases, the weather, earthquake activity, even bad feng shui, and they haven’t found anything. Whatever caused it came and went, and it didn’t leave any traces.”

  “And what does the CIA think?”

  “The CIA doesn’t think, Boss, it just collects data and passes it along. I have a standing order with my pal for anything weird, it comes in as a Priority One Call, which is why we got it.”

  “I’m sure your friend would be happy to hear you have such a high opinion of him. What do you think?”

  “Well, what this looks like to me is some kind of deliberate test.”

  Michaels stared into space. “And you think it is the Chinese doing it to their own people?”

  “Can’t say for sure, but why not? Take out a few, who’s gonna miss ’em? They got more than a billion more where those came from.”

  “Jay—”

  “Sorry, bad taste, I apologize.”

  “But the Chinese investigators seem surprised from these reports. Wouldn’t they know?”

  “Left hand not telling the right what it’s doing? Happens all the time, all over. State doesn’t tell the CIA. The spooks don’t tell the Army. We’re part of the FBI, and the feebs don’t tell us a whole lot of things. Why would things be any better in China? That’s assuming the investigators aren’t part of the cover-up.”

  “And why it is our problem, Jay? How does this end up floating in our punch bowl?”

  “When you asked me to poke around in that HAARP thing, this came in almost immediately. It rang a bell. You remember the guy you told me about who came by while I was camping. The scientist from HAARP?”

  “Morrison, right.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, he mentioned something about mind control and low-frequency radio waves.”

  “He said it wasn’t feasible.”

  “Maybe not. Or maybe it is. Maybe the Chinese were the ones poking around in the HAARP computers and maybe they swiped it. It just seemed awfully coincidental, given that this was exactly the kind of thing somebody would want to do if they could do it.”

  “The Chinese?”

  “Possible. They have so
me people who are pretty good hackers. Maybe the HAARP guys found some piece of the puzzle and the Chinese knew where to use it. Nothing for certain, and it’s kind of a stretch, but I’d check it out.”

  Michaels nodded. “I hope you are wrong. I hope nobody else makes the connection and thinks it is our problem to solve. All right. Find out what you can. If this thing in China is connected to it, I don’t want us to be caught flatfooted. At the very least, we need to be able to say we’re investigating it if somebody should ask.”

  “Gotcha, Boss. I’m on the case.”

  After Jay left, Michaels took several deep breaths. Let it be some virus they couldn’t find and not something they swiped from a U.S. computer. Please. I really don’t need this right now. Or ever ...

  12

  Thursday, June 9th

  Washington, D.C.

  It was well after dark when Toni’s plane landed at Dulles. She’d had to switch from the jumbo jet to a smaller craft in New York, and she knew she’d catch hell if her mother found out she had been at JFK and hadn’t called the Bronx to at least say hello, but she couldn’t deal with that yet. Her mother would want to know all about it, what had happened with Alex, and even Guru would need more details than Toni was ready to provide. She’d thought the story was over, but maybe it wasn’t, and until she had a better sense of things, she didn’t want to start downloading it into sympathetic ears. She needed a girlfriend for that, anyhow, somebody who could listen to the gory details—not her mother or her elderly teacher. Mama Fiorella had raised a houseful of children, mostly sons, and with six kids, she certainly knew about sex, but knowing it and talking about it were two different things. Toni remembered a discussion she’d had with one of her older brothers when she’d been about nineteen. He’d been asking about women, when their mother had wandered into the room. Mama heard the words “female orgasm” and disappeared faster than Houdini stoked on methamphetamines.