Breaking Point (37 page)

The two officers rose and stepped out without questions. Parks turned to his aide.

“Barry Tichnor, sir. Two of the senior engineers at Malatesta, Inc., just outed him to the
Washington Post.
They know about the Bruges Accord and the prototype.”

Gaelen Parks was not a man who panicked. “That was always a threat. Okay. Start severing every conceivable tie between that prick Tichnor's R-and-D Division and this office. If we can isolate the crisis to his division, we might be able to keep the rest of the firm off the hook.”

He picked up his phone and called Liz Proctor.

TWIN PINES

Tommy's headache appeared to be Tylenol–proof. “Look, Petey. Don't get me wrong. I'm thrilled to have you say I was right and you were wrong. Thing is: I wasn't right. Ray talked to two experts. There ain't no such thing as a pulse weapon.”

Ray took up the narrative. “I got a CIA analyst who specializes in weapons of mass destruction. He says the Bruges Accord outlaws even researching pulse weapons. Another guy—and, I admit, he's a piece of work—says some engineer's been working in secret on a theoretical model for a pulse weapon. But it's vaporware. It's—”

Peter had had it with ambiguity. Every time he'd lacked a specific bit of information, it had come back to bite him in the ass. “Which engineer? What's the name?”

Ray consulted his notebook, flipping pages. “Ah … Malatesta. Andrew Malatesta.”

“Shit!” Gene Whitney scrambled for a three-ring binder he'd brought from Helena. He found a page his finger descending a list. “Malatesta. Andrew Malatesta. He was on Flight Seven-Eight, Reagan to Sea-Tac. Seat Seven-A.”

Kiki tried to reassemble the jigsaw puzzle of facts in her head. “Wait, wait. A guy on the plane was researching a weapon that, had it been real, could have brought down the plane? That … that makes no earthly sense.”

Tommy turned to Lakshmi. “How did this Malatesta guy die?”

She said, “I believe he's part of my anomaly. Let me check.” Before Tommy could ask
what anomaly?
, she dug the coroner's telephone number out of her NTSB jacket pocket, along with a cell phone that was not part of the crashers' comm units. She stepped into the break room for some quiet and made a call.

Peter Kim said, “Tomzak, at the crash site, how is it this Calendar guy didn't kill you? I've only worked with you once and I already want to kill you.”

“He asked us what happened to the plane. I was concussed and all, and didn't feel like conversing. Kiki'd been asleep and really didn't know.”

Peter nodded. “So you couldn't contradict the faked black boxes. Isaiah … he must have told him the power went out. So he killed him.”

Lakshmi stepped back in. “I was right. I have been running statistical analyses through every M-and-M database I could find.”

Jack looked askance. “Eminem?”

“Morbidity and Mortality studies. In a crash of this magnitude, theoretically we would have seen two throat injuries. Here, we have six. Andrew Malatesta was one. His postmortem happened yesterday. He died of a crushed larynx. And yes, before you ask, the wound was almost exactly like that of Isaiah Grey. Plus one of Dr. Malatesta's research associates.”

Tommy ground his teeth, which made his jaw ache all the more. “Odds of the death are up three hundred percent and half of them are connected with this investigation. Motherfucker's mode of killing. All it proves is, their throats got hit by somethin' moving fast. In an airliner crash, it's the perfect murder.”

All of a sudden, Jack Goodspeed's brain almost literally went
ping!

“Jeez. Oh, man. Oh, God.”

Every eye turned to him.

“I think I know why the plane was sabotaged. And who's behind it. Me and Hector, we found a speech this Malatesta guy was going to give at the Tech Expo. The speech says one thing, but just now, like a minute ago, I heard his wife on TV. She was saying the exact opposite.”

“You know this Malatesta?” Peter cut in.

“I heard him speak at a thing, this one time. So I was curious, read his speech. He was outing Halcyon/Detweiler for producing illegal weapons. He had a whole bunch of pages with Halcyon letterhead in his bag, too. He was going to tell everyone at that tech conference in Seattle.”

Ray Calabrese turned to him. “Where is it now, this speech?”

Jack glanced at his watch. It was a quarter past five. “I put it back where I found it. In a food-services cart, back on board the Claremont. That thing could be airborne at any minute. We're evacing it with the airship again.”

Tommy said, “How?”

Peter said, “We're flying it out.”

Tommy's eyebrows rose. “I'm sorry. You're flying out the plane Kiki and I climbed out of on Thursday? The one without wings? That's the damnedest thing I ever—”

Ray said,
“There's a—”

“Dead deer, yeah, yeah.” Tommy waved him off.

*   *   *

In a white panel truck two blocks away, Jenna Scott played back the last few seconds of the audio captured by the array of bugs she'd planted in the real estate office. Things were much worse than she previously believed. It was the worst-case scenario.

She reached for her headset and called Tichnor.

Once the encryption kicked in on both sides, she said, “Target A and target B are still alive. And they also know about the asset.” That would be Renee Malatesta. “Listen to me: they have our man's name!”

She waited. The line hissed.

“Confirm transmi—”

“I'm here.” Barry sounded calm. “This is still fixable. There is a way out. Please hold your position.”

“If you see a way out of this, that makes one of us.”

“Just … Please hold.”

L'ENFANT PLAZA

“Spokane International Airport, this is Fallon.”

“Eileen? It's Susan Tanaka. Kirk's wife.”

The woman on the other line said, “Hi! How are you? Are you in Spokane?”

A third voice rode over her question. “Hey, Eileen?”

“Kirk?”

“Eileen, I'm calling from the Lake Country in Italy. Susan is in D.C. It's a conference call.”

“Italy? What in the world?”

Kirk said, “We're calling to ask a huge, huge favor of you.”

He and Eileen Fallon had flown together when they were both with United and had become close friends. He had served as best man at her wedding.

“Name it.”

“No, no. I mean, it's a
big
favor.”

Just a little of the glee left her voice. But her response was, “Bring it.”

He said, “Susan?”

Susan took over the narrative. “There's an NTSB Go-Team in Helena, working that—”

“Polestar crash, sure.”

“Eileen, I have really, awfully, seriously good reason to know their comms have been compromised. Their computers, too. They're being monitored by someone who doesn't want this investigation to succeed.”

She waited. After a few beats, Eileen said, “Go on.”

“We keep a supply of NTSB communication gear in about fifty airports around the nation. Spokane is one of them. I need you to get someone, anyone, to fly new comm gear to Helena, as quickly as possible. But here's the thing: I don't want my supervisors in D.C. to know. Our headquarters has been compromised, too. The Go-Team is being screwed with. I need to get them back on their feet before we go global with this.”

Susan waited. A couple of thousand miles eastward, Kirk Tanaka did the same.

Eileen said, “We can have your gear there in a half hour.”

TWIN PINES

Chief of Police Paul McKinney addressed a crowd of about twenty townsfolk. “Fellas? Everyone? We haven't called for a mandatory evacuation yet but my money says the governor's office is gonna make that call, and soon. If I were you, I'd pack up and get out of town now. These air tankers might turn things around; we'll see. If I'm wrong, you can always come on back home. But what I'm saying is: better safe than sorry.”

Everyone flinched as yet another Ilyushin air tanker roared overhead, shrieking toward the wall of fire. The crowd, looking frightened, headed back to their homes or their businesses. The smell of woodsmoke was stronger now, the white haze only about thirty feet over their heads.

*   *   *

Calendar knelt in the hard-packed soil and studied the misshapen bag of flesh that was his soldier, Cates. None of his long bones had survived after the car hit him. Both knees and one elbow were shattered. Calendar's phone vibrated and he flipped it open, kneeling and reaching for the cheap, mass-produced St. Christopher medallion Cates always wore as a good-luck token.

He heard Barry Tichnor's distorted voice: “They have it. The crash investigators. All of it. There's only one play left.”

Calendar stood and crossed to the upside-down, daisy-yellow tractor-dozer atop the rented car. He peered into gaps between the metal, circling the ruined vehicles until he spied the severed arm of Dyson, his other soldier.

“Go ahead,” Calendar said into the phone.

Dyson's good-luck piece was a shiny, flat river rock, about the size of a quarter, he had picked up in Tikrit years earlier. Calendar would very much have liked to find that little rock and bring it, with the St. Christopher, back to his home in Thailand. He had collected a few such tokens over the years in honor of good soldiers who had fallen.

Barry said, “We have someone, right now, falsifying a suicide note for Renee Malatesta. She'll take all the blame. Surveillance tells us she's still in Helena. Our contact will meet you in the lobby of her hotel, get you the note. Go make it look good.”

Calendar's vision was hazy with a red glow that came not from the nearby fire but from synapses popping discordantly inside his head. “No,” he said.

After a beat, Barry said, “Say again?”

“No. I've got to finish some business here, first.”

Barry Tichnor said, “No! Get to it now. We—”

Calendar broke his cell phone in two, tossed the parts into the wreckage, and turned away.

He knew that Cates, from Alabama, had served with honor as a U.S. Army Ranger and had been awarded three Purple Hearts. He knew that Dyson, a Pennsylvanian, had been a SEAL and left behind a kid sister who waited tables and attended Penn State. He knew that both soldiers had expected to someday die with their boots on. He knew for a fact that Cates and Dyson had been Christians. It's why he'd picked them.

From Calendar's point of view, Barry Tichnor's mission was part and parcel of the war on terrorism. Anything that made America stronger made the terrorists weaker. Anyone who stood in the way of that stood with the terrorists. It was as cut-and-dried as that.

What he did not know was who in this godforsaken town had killed these two good men. He could think of only one way to make sure the right person was punished.

31

J
ACK GOODSPEED CALLED ONE
of his crew at the auto-parts store. Within a minute, Jack had his phone on Speaker and the crew member was reading them the Andrew Malatesta speech.

Ray said, “Deal like that? Could be worth hundreds of millions. That's a motive.”

Peter Kim said, “Yes, but we're in the fortunate position of not caring.”

When others looked at him oddly, he said, “We're crash investigators! We don't care about
why.
We care about
how.
That's all we care about. And right now, we have a potential
how.
That's a win, people.”

He turned to the sturdy FBI agent, noting that Ray rarely moved when he didn't need to. “Calabrese. You got yourself proof of a crime. The crash is yours.”

Ray looked around the real estate office, sized up the situation. Other members of the Go-Team studied him as well, waiting to see how their lives were about to change.

“Nah.” Ray waved it off. “Your crashers don't know me. You keep the baton, let the suits in D.C. decide who's in charge later.”

Peter nodded, thinking not how gallant Ray's gesture had been but how surprised he was at the agent's use of logic. “Okay. Lakshmi, arrange to get the rest of the bodies out. Beth?”

“The number of bodies left unautopsied has been whittled down enough so that the county morgue can now handle the remains. I called them. They're expecting us.”

“Right. Agent Calabrese, coordinate with the chief of police, please. His name's Paul McKinney. He needs to know about this Calendar and that we suspect Teresa has been murdered. Tell him about the bodies of the hit men. Jack, Reu—”

An air tanker attacked their eardrums yet again. Peter shouting, “What are those?”

Gene said, “Ilyushin Seven-Six. Damn things can carry forty-four tons of water. And they're flying gas cans. Stays in the air for about four thousand miles, even fully loaded. And the reason they're so loud is, they're so low. Taking on water at Helena Regional, I'm guessing, then cruising at eighty, a hundred feet over this town before hitting the fire lines.”

Peter blinked at him. “When I said, ‘what are those,' I was being rhetorical. Jack, Reuben, Hector: go secure the Claremont. Get it airborne before the fire gets here. Get everything back on board the fuselage.”

Peter turned to Beth. “You and Lakshmi supervise moving out the last few bodies. At this stage, preserving all evidence is our number-one task. Everyone good with that?”

Gene Whitney hacked a wet cough. “Anybody know where the babe with the guns went?”

Ray turned. The others, too. Daria had been standing by the door. Now she wasn't.

Peter Kim turned to Tommy. “You go with Calabrese. The police station is crammed with firefighters and emergency-med techs. Have someone check your head.”

“Nothing wrong with my head, Petey.”