Breaking Point (33 page)

Still in his car, on his cell, Ray said, “Everything you can find, yeah.”

Henry Deits, director of the FBI's Los Angeles field office, said, “His name's Calendar?”

“No, that's a DBA.”

“And he specializes in freelancing for U.S. intelligence agencies?”

“So my source says.”

“Good source?”

Henry had specifically warned Ray to steer clear of Daria and the rogue ATF operation in Mexico. “It's a source I trust.”

“Okay. So are we assuming command of the investigation?”

“Not yet, I think. I don't have the conclusive evidence. Trust me on this: the current Investigator in Charge is going to want the Is dotted and Ts crossed. This isn't like Oregon, where Tommy was IIC and was willing to bend the rules a little.”

Henry Deits didn't seem mollified. “Cryin' out loud, Ray. If there's an assassin involved…”

“I don't have any reason to believe he's lurking around. Likely he did his job and moved on.” That wasn't precisely what Daria had told him, but Ray thought it sounded reasonable.

“Okay. You got the boots on the ground. I trust your judgment.”

“Thanks, boss. I'm at this guy Katz's place. Call when I'm done.”

*   *   *

Stanley Katz was a small-boned man, five-three, with a hunched back and spindly arms and legs. He used a walker to get around. From the name, Ray had anticipated a Jewish man. Stanley Katz was African American; Ray thinking,
Well, they're not mutually exclusive.

Stanley led the agent through the demonically cluttered one-story house, past the precarious stacks of newspapers and periodicals as high as Ray's thighs. Ray noted that Scotch tape adhered wires to the windows, the wires linked to an oscilloscope.

Stanley saw Ray's glance. “Noticed that? They beam lasers off my windows, try and catch audio, a couple times a year. Faggots. Who gave you my name?”

“A big fan.”

“Nah-nah nah-nah, man. Keep your secrets. FBI man comes to my door, keeping secrets, means he's not lying to me. That's a start, Agent Calabrese. If that is your real name.”

“You got ice water or something? It's, like, eight hundred degrees out there.”

Stanley Katz, in a wife-beater and frayed chinos, looked all sinew and bone. Ray put his age anywhere from thirty-five to sixty-five. He wore an Afro and a jazz patch. He said, “I got home-brewed iced tea.”

“That'd work.”

Stanley filled two tumblers with ice up to the brim, then poured from a pitcher in the fridge. One glass was adorned with Boris Badenov, the other with Snidely Whiplash. Ray eyed the yellowed Commodore computer on the kitchen table, the stacks of
Omni
magazine back issues.

Stanley saw him looking. “Nobody hacks a Commodore. Nobody writes virus for that, for sure. Here.”

Ray sipped. It was delicious. “What's this I'm tasting? Vanilla?”

“Yeah, yeah. Vanilla bean from a farmers market in Encino. What am I doing you for, Mr. FBI?”

“That airline crash on Thursday in Montana?”

“An airliner?”

“You heard about this, right?”

“The news is mostly faked, Mr. FBI.”

Ray's hopes for the interview tumbled. “Okay, well, a midsized airliner crashed in Montana last week. I've got witnesses saying all the electricity stopped. Engines, hand-held gadgets, watches. Boom: gone.”

“Nobody cooked off a nuke in Big Sky Country, right? I mean, you woulda led with that.”

“Right.”

“Bruges protocols say: no pulse weps.”

“I'm told.”

“An' you're wondering, how's that? Huh?”

Ray waited, sipped tea. He tried to keep a poker face but, damn, this was good tea.

Stanley Katz waved his fingers in the air to make a circle, filled by a diagonal slash through it: the international symbol for
no
. “No pulse weapons, man. It's not just good sense, it's the motherfuckin' law.”

“So nobody has a weapon that could do that?”

“I di'nt say that, did I? Did you hear me say that?” Stanley, grinning now.

“I did not.” Ray, playing along.

“They's this cat, he got mad weapons. Designs only. Vaporware. They say this guy's got a design for an EMP weapon. Fired from a shoulder-mounted launch tube. Laser-guided. It's clay, two containers of chemicals inside. Hit a target, a tank, a helo, what you got, it sticks to it. The binary chemicals blend together: wham. Electro-goddamn-magnetic pulse. And the lights go off all over the fucking world.”

Stanley winked, grinning.

“Is this weapon for real?”

The hunched man shrugged. “Nah. Paper only. In the man's brainpan. But what I hear? This cat's the da Vinci of new weapons. Gonna revolutionize war. He's Bill and Melinda Gates from the mirror universe. Spock with a Vandyke, yeah? He's
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
but with less chitty, more bang.”

Stanley laughing now, cutting up.

“This guy got a name?”

“Malatesta. Andrew Malatesta. And you make of this what you want, Mr. FBI, but in Eye-talian, that translates to
bad head
.”

Ray wrote down the name. “Mr. Katz, this is the best goddamn iced tea I have ever had.”

Stanley nodded. “You like that, you should try my house-brewed gin.”

Ray checked his watch. “Hit me.”

TWIN PINES

Jack Goodspeed sat on a food service cart, drinking from a bottle of seltzer that hadn't broken in the crash. It was, strictly speaking, evidence, so drinking it was breaking protocol. Jack didn't particularly care. It was hot.

He said, “You are one tenacious dude.”

Hector Villareal flashed him a shy smile. Only three suitcases were left and Hector was determined to check every one of them. “Got to be sure.”

“Hector, we're sure. It's going on one o'clock! We've been here for four hours! We've tried, what? Forty electronic devices? Fifty? Not one, man. Not. One. I've got an engineering degree. You've got an engineering degree. What are the odds that every contraption with a circuit board for a heart would go belly-up on this flight? Hm? The plane landed on its side. The cargo bay was largely undamaged. Some of these suitcases don't even look scuffed up. And nothing works? C'mon.”

Hector retrieved an MP3 player. He tried it. Zip.

Jack had found the oddest thing: an old, scratched saddlebag stuffed into a bin that usually held pretzels. He pulled it out. Inside was a portfolio. He eyed it, bored now, then started scanning the printed document with the pencil scribbles in the margins. “Tenacious. That's what we're going to start calling you from now on. Tenacious H. That's…”

Hector looked up. “Jack?”

“Hey. I know who this guy is.”

Hector found a penlight. He clicked it. Nope. “What guy?”

“I found a speech by a guy named Andrew Malatesta. I heard him speak at a Chautauqua at Harvard last year. World-class brainiac. Some really out-of-the-box stuff. He's got the patent on some amazing, holographic heads-up-display avionics.”

Jack turned back to the speech. “I think this guy was going to Northwest Tech. He was going to denounce Halcyon/Detweiler. Which, I'm just saying, I got stock in. Says here—”

Beeeeep.

At the sound, Jack glanced up from the portfolio and aged saddlebag. A few feet away knelt a suddenly grinning Hector Villareal, holding a woman's clutch purse in one hand, a cell phone in the other.

And the LED face on the phone was lit up. It showed three bars of reception.

Jack jumped off the cart. “No way!”

Hector nodded.

Jack immediately lost interest in the speech from the saddlebag. He stuffed his findings back into the pretzel bin, for lack of anywhere better to put them. He adjusted his ear jack and hit buttons on his belt-mounted comm unit.

“This is Kim.”

*   *   *

Police Chief Paul McKinney and Mac Pritchert, the state-assigned fire-crew chief, stepped out onto the roof of the Pure-Pride Tool and Dye Building. Both carried binoculars and Pritchert had a walkie-talkie.

He toggled the Send switch. “Jillian, what do you got? Over.”

McKinney jogged to the eastern end of the tarmac roof and raised the lenses to his eyes.

The radio squealed. The voice on the other end shouted over the din of helicopter rotors and an engine, “Mac? The fire has reached the crash site. It's definitely moving faster today. Over.”

Pritchert hit the switch again. “Copy that. Jonah, it's Mac. Is the firebreak gonna hold? Over.”

A different voice this time. “Ah, that's a negative, base. Winds really picking up and the fire is crown-jumping.” It wasn't just surviving on ground cover anymore, but had climbed into the trees. “On the western face of the fire, we do not—repeat,
do not
—have containment. Over.”

Chief McKinney lowered his glasses. “It's your call, but I think we
encourage
an evacuation. For now. Wait an hour, see if it needs to be mandatory.”

Pritchert looked into his binoculars. “Yeah. Make the call.”

TWIN PINES

Peter Kim was ebullient. “A meeting, today. All team leaders.”

Beth Mancini perched on the edge of desk in the former real estate office and started to jot notes. “Agenda?”

“Putting Tomzak in his place. Invite him, Duvall, Agent Calabrese. We're going to put an end to this insanity once and for all.”

“When and where?”

“Four. Here.”

She reeled back. “They're evacuating the town! We've got to get—”

“It's a voluntary evacuation. We're not leaving the fuselage or the remaining bodies. But get going on the meeting, please. Top priority.”

Beth set down her pen and pad. “About the bodies. The police chief called and told me you'd been in a shouting match. I talked him out of kicking us out of our morgue, but it wasn't easy. Peter, you've got to let me do my job and run interference for you. It's—”

“You're right.”

Beth hadn't seen that coming.

“No, absolutely. I blew that badly. Thank you for calming the chief down.”

“I … You're welcome,” she said, thinking,
What have you done to the real Peter Kim?

“Sure. Now, please set up the meeting. Slapping Tomzak down is priority number one.”

*   *   *

Kiki and Tommy went down to the hotel dining room for coffee. It was going on 2:00
P.M.

“Ray's flying back today,” Tommy said, fiddling with a miniature white porcelain pitcher of half-and-half. “Here's hoping he brings good news.”

Kiki's comm unit buzzed. Beth had left her one in their hotel room, without informing Peter. She activated it. “Hello?… Hi.”

She listened for a minute, frowning. “We'll be there. Thank you.”

She disconnected. “That was Beth. Peter's called a team meeting for four at the real estate office in Twin Pines. We're invited. Ray, too, if he's back in time.”

“And he ain't worried about, you know, the damn town burning down?”

“Peter is anything but impetuous. It must be okay. Anyway, Beth says it's about the power loss on board the Claremont.”

“You think we actually got through to Petey?” Tommy sounded incredulous.

“Well … maybe?”

Neither Kiki nor Tommy noticed the driver in the baseball cap and sunglasses, in the Ford Escort, parked outside their hotel and watching them through military-surplus binoculars.

TWIN PINES

Jenna Scott listened in on Beth Mancini's call to Kiki.

They were going to discuss the Malatesta prototype. So far, only the two crash victims, Duvall and Tomzak, plus their FBI liaison, had lent any validity to the power-loss scenario. That looked likely to change.

She immediately called Calendar. “It's Vintner. The team is meeting in Twin Pines, in two hours. Tomzak and Duvall will be there. It is imperative that they be intercepted before that meeting.”

Calendar just replied, “Copy.” And the line went dead.

*   *   *

Mac Pritchert, the fire chief, was using the Twin Pines Police Station as his rally point. He made the call to bring in the air tankers once he realized his crew could not put a firebreak between the flames and Twin Pines.

He had called for “any birds” and was hoping to get Tanker 910s, converted McDonnell Douglas DC-10s that are among the largest air tankers in the world for this sort of work. But he was stunned when the Canadians called to up Ilyushin II-76-Ps.

“Tell me you're joking!” he said into the telephone.

“Nope,” the voice came back. “Ilyushin II-76-Ps. We got four of them, and they're yours if you need them.”

“Hot dog! We'll take them and we're grateful for the offer! What kinda runways do those beasts need?”

The Canadian said, “They can land on only about five hundred meters but, full up, they need a good nine hundred for takeoff.”

Pritchert dug a pen out of his shirt pocket and did the math. They needed close to three thousand feet for takeoff. Helena Regional had that to spare.

“Send them bad boys on down! And again: thank you!”

Chief McKinney walked up with two coffee cups, one held backward, the handle extended. Pritchert took it, grinning.

“Good news?”

Pritchert's smile blossomed. “We're getting Ilyushins!”

Paul McKinney misheard the word. “Ah … okay. Of…?”

*   *   *

Ginger LeFrance's phone chirped and she flipped it open. “Hello?”

“Ginger? It's Jack Goodspeed. From the NTSB crash team.”

“Hey.” The big, good-looking guy. This was a surprise. She was pretty sure he was gay.

“We might have to move the fuselage again. Can Casper come out and play?”