Breaking Point (44 page)

“You're a consummate pro.” Calendar kept his voice low. “You of all people should guard your comms better. Malatesta's dead. Witnesses are dead. Can't do shit about the speech. Can't save my two guys. But when you said
no more targets
…? I owe you for the good men you slaughtered. For the fact they can't even have open-casket funerals.”

Daria coughed, trying to rise and failing.

“You got friends outside so let's do this quietlike.”

He deftly spun the combat knife from the forefinger-up position to pointing downward. The police baton hovered only inches from her skull, should she try some ninja-shit move.

Through clenched teeth, Daria whispered, “C-Combs.”

Calendar had begun the downstroke, heading straight for her throat. He froze.

“Combs,” she wheezed.

“What?”

“Your name. It's … important. I know your name.” Blood pulsed from her shoulder and tears of pain blurred her vision. “Combs.”

Calendar smiled. “Gosh. You are the good little spy. So what?”

Daria panted, wincing in pain. “Your father. Ar … Arlen Combs.”

Calendar blanched. “What about him?”

“When…” Daria spit floodwater from her mouth. She looked up through sopping wet hair, made eye contact with Calendar. “When this is done, I'll do him, too. Just for spite.”

Calendar felt the blood-tide return. His vision narrowed and the overhead lights on the police station turned crimson. A hollow ringing filled his ears. He recognized the symptoms. He was about to go into one of his killing-fugue states.

He didn't care.

He drew back the long knife.

“Okay! Whoa! Hold up!”

Calendar turned. He recognized the pathologist, hand held awkwardly against his chest, face gunmetal gray, shirt turning crusty brown from dried blood. The tall redhead to the doc's right had shot at him earlier. She was one of them. One of the enemy.

Tommy said, “Stop, man! Just … be cool!”

Calendar willed himself to stay in the here and now, not to slip totally into the fugue state of total destruction. That he would have to kill all three of them was obvious, but he wanted to be aware of it as it happened.

He heard his own voice, but as if through a far-off AM radio station, tinny and hollow. “I only want the bitch who killed my men. You two are free to go,” he lied. “Deal?”

Kiki said, “No,” and pulled a handgun out of a limp, wet sweater in her hands.

It was a tiny thing. A girl's gun. Calendar figured it for a .22. He was a lifelong soldier. Probably the smallest-caliber weapon ever aimed at him had been a 9-millimeter. The largest had been a rocket-propelled grenade. Calendar thought a .22 was a
gun
to the same degree that a Segway was a
car.

Tommy was a poker player of some note. He worked really hard not to show two emotions:
A: I'm about to pass out, and B: that peashooter ain't loaded.

Kiki dropped the sweater and assumed a two-handed grip on Renee Malatesta's little gun, boots shoulder-width apart, barrel aimed at Calendar's heart.

“She'll do it, hoss,” Tommy bluffed, his voice cracking. “You got a knife. She's got a gun. Do the fuckin' math.”

Daria keened in pain at Calendar's feet. She worked her right knee up under her, shifted her left arm under her chest.

“Oh … okay.” Calendar said, barely holding on to his slim, sliding edge of sanity. The lights in the room shifted from crimson to Chianti red. He felt his heartbeat slow down. “Fine. You win. I give—”

Calendar let go of the combat knife. It began to fall toward the watery floor. Handle-heavy, the blade tilted upward as it fell.

Calendar wore a Blackhawk carbon fiber holster over his right kidney. His hand whipped around, snagged his massive .45 Heckler & Koch. The Blackhawk holster eschews the traditional thumb-break release for a faster draw.

Kiki forgot she was bluffing and pulled the trigger on Renee's pocketbook gun.
Snap.
Nothing.

Daria rose to one knee, pushing up off the floor with her good left arm.

Calendar brought his .45 around in an arc, thumbing off the safety.

In her right hand, Daria caught the combat knife in midair and grunted, rising up on her knees. In one fluid motion, she buried Calendar's own blade into his groin, driving it fully to the hilt, slicing deep into his femoral artery. His blood began gushing down her arm, joining the blood pulsing from her shoulder wound to form a single red sleeve.

The shock hit Calendar's central nervous system, his long muscles locking rigidly.

Daria twisted the knife forty-five degrees and Calendar spasmed as if hit by an electrical current.

His arm rose and his .45 flew from his grip.

His spine jolted. He landed on his back, head ricocheting off the linoleum, floodwater splashing, back arched with only his head, shoulders, and heels on the floor.

Tears of pain poured down her cheeks as Daria yanked out the knife and blood gushed from Calendar's wound. Its pink slick quickly spread in the half inch of water, washing against Daria's jeans.

She crawled forward on her good left arm and one knee, caught her breath, deftly spun the knife in her fist, and slit Calendar's throat.

Tommy and Kiki stood, arms locked, stunned. They watched as Calendar twitched and spasmed, and bled out.

Kneeling, panting, bleeding, soaking wet, Daria turned to them. The knife and her hand and forearm dripped blood. From behind sodden strands of hair, her eyes blazed.

*   *   *

The rest was a bit more chaos in a day generally ruled by a biblical level of chaos. Ray Calabrese and Captain Loveless helped the last two survivors of Twin Pines onto the Chinook heavy-lift. Peter Kim secured the catatonic Renee Malatesta in the back of the helicopter. He patted her down for more weapons but didn't find any. Kiki returned with Tommy, his hand properly bandaged. He'd dry-swallowed three Vicodin as well. The forest fire had become a brush fire and had reached the edge of town. It had met up with the fire at the auto-parts warehouse. It seemed eager to join up with the rest of its jet-fuel-fed brethren on the west end of the town.

Ray's eyes watered as he peered through the growing smoke. “Daria?”

Tommy laid his left hand on his shoulder. “Get on board, New York. We're outta here.”

“Bullshit. Where's Daria?”

Kiki kissed Tommy gently. “Hop up. We'll be right back.”

She led Ray back to the police station. Fully a third of the water-soaked floor was pink with Calendar's blood. He lay spread-eagled. His skin was the color of parchment.

Ray tried to study the scene clinically, as a trained criminologist. His brain vapor-locked.

“He had a backpack,” Kiki said, holding Ray's upper arm. “She said it was important. She said to take off. She'd find her own way out.”

“No.”

“Ray. She's gone.”

“No.”

She rested her cheek on his shoulder for a second. “Okay. I'll be at the helicopter. We'll wait for you.”

Ray searched the municipal building. Every room. He went out back, checked the alley. He sloshed through the street.

As he rounded the building, the fire chief, Mac Pritchert, grabbed him by the forearm as the Chinook's Textron engine spooled up and its twin sets of massive blades began fanning. The Best-Aid store, a block away, exploded in flames. Ray could feel the searing heat three blocks away.

“The fire's here!” Pritchert shouted. “We gotta go! Now!”

*   *   *

Under the baton of Captain Loveless, the last Chinook lifted off the pavement of Main Street. “We're it!” she shouted over the rotors. “Last flight out of Saigon!”

As the Chinook hit thirty feet, Tommy held Kiki and watched as the town of Twin Pines went up in flames.

EPILOGUE

D
ARIA GIBRON BOUGHT AN
ice cream. Two flavors: lemon and vanilla.

She used to favor French vanilla until reading an article in an in-flight magazine that said the difference between vanilla and French vanilla is a raw egg. That sounded dangerous and Daria was averse to taking risks.

She licked the ice cream as the sun set over the Oudezijds Achterburgwal, past the Erotich Museum, in the heart of Amsterdam's red-light district. One of the things she loved about Amsterdam was that the people had spent tax money to build a museum to honor eroticism, and they had placed it in the prostitution zone. If you grew tired of paying for sex, you could pay money to study the history of sex.

Daria enjoyed irony as much as the next person, but still …

She entered the Hotel Frisian and waggled her fingers at the young man behind the night desk, with his biology textbook and iPod. The clerk blushed and nodded, trying not to be obvious about studying her body.

Daria went up to room 406, let herself in using the swipe card, and tossed out the remains of the ice cream. She checked the fresh bandage on her right shoulder. It looked clean. She pulled her laptop out of her tote bag, set it on the bed pillows, slipped off her stilettos, lay down on her stomach, propped up by her elbows, and surfed online news channels.

CNN was reporting the denouement of last week's biggest story—the annihilation of a small town in Montana by flood and fire.

The body of an NTSB investigator, Teresa Santiago, had been found in a gulley. Based on an examination of the wound, she had been stabbed through the heart with a combat knife.

A brand-new Go-Team from the NTSB was on the scene, investigating the downing of four air tankers. The new Investigator in Charge, Walter Mulroney, informed the media that an illegal EMP weapon might have been deployed to cause the crashes. The FBI and Interpol had been called in to investigate.

In the picture, standing next to Mulroney was a petite Asian woman in a tamale-red Dolce & Gabbana suit and red-soled Louboutin heels. Was that the famous Susan Tanaka? Daria wondered. They had never met.

Daria went to Haartez.com, scanned the Israeli news site. She moved on to
The New York Times.
She tried the
Washington Post
and found a story featuring an Amy Dreyfus byline. Congressional hearings had been called and two high-ranking officials with Halcyon/Detweiler, the massive Pentagon contractor, had been subpoenaed. Admiral Gaelen Parks and Liz Proctor were testifying and, according to unnamed sources, both faced criminal charges. Prosecutors were being cagey but made reference to a laptop and documents found in a backpack, which had been left in the lobby of the FBI headquarters in Washington. The contents of the backpack had been damning, apparently, but so far the evidence suggested that Parks and Proctor had been working without the knowledge of their superiors or the company at large. It looked like Halcyon/Detweiler might escape further scrutiny. The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended a tick up on that news.

A man named Barry Tichnor—and it was unclear exactly who he was and for whom he worked—had been named in documents in the backpack. He was found in a hotel room in Bethesda, in a bathtub of lukewarm water. Both wrists had been slashed with what appeared to be a long, sharp blade. Possibly a combat knife.

Renee Malatesta, widow of Andrew Malatesta, had suffered a complete nervous breakdown. She was tabula rasa. It was doubtful she would ever recover.

Daria switched to CNN's Web site and read a profile on Dr. Leonard “Tommy” Tomzak, of Austin, who had declined to be interviewed for the article. It seemed that Tomzak had suffered life-changing injuries during the investigation of the Montana air crashes, his right hand badly damaged, and it was unlikely that he would ever hold a scalpel again.

She checked the
Los Angeles Times
and found that investigators in Twin Pines had discovered the body of a tall blond woman, both legs smashed to bits. Again, the mysterious backpack left at FBI headquarters was mentioned in passing. The CIA was not responding to initial reports that she had been an agent. So far, her presence in Montana had not been explained.

The body of a tall, silver-haired man had been autopsied. Cause of death was complete exsanguination. He remained unidentified.

Someone knocked on the door to room 406.

“Kom in de,”
Daria sang out. She had left the latch open.

A smallish, tightly packed man entered and smiled broadly at seeing the girl in the miniskirt, barefoot, lying on her stomach and surfing the Internet.

He closed the door. “Chica,” he said.

Daria closed the laptop and turned over on one elbow, smiling enticingly at the man.

His smile faltered, eyes narrowing.

Daria drew the MAC-SOG combat knife from beneath a pillow.

She batted her eyelashes.

“Carlos the War Dog,” Daria purred. “We have unfinished business.”

Also by Dana Haynes

Crashers

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

BREAKING POINT
. Copyright © 2011 by Dana Haynes. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Haynes, Dana.

Breaking point / Dana Haynes.—1st ed.

p. cm.

e-ISBN 9781429972796

  1.  United States. National Transportation Safety Board—Fiction.   2.  Aircraft accidents—Investigation—Fiction.   3.  Government Investigators—Fiction.   I.  Title.

PS3558.A84875B74 2011

813'.54—dc23

2011026222

First Edition: November 2011