Breaking Point (5 page)

The true objective of the sting operation, Carlos the War Dog Ramos, walked away.

In the dusty street outside the saloon, locals emerged from hiding—some underground telegraph alerting them the gun fighting was over. At least for now.

J. T. Laney spoke on his cell phone with the unit's headquarters in Tucson. He paced, his men and Ray Calabrese watching him, the men darting acid glances at the FBI agent who had donned sunglasses and leaned against the ATF pickup. After a mumbled conversation, J. T. hung up and turned to the FBI agent.

“You screwed the pooch, you dumb son of a bitch! We worked this case—”

He was cut off as Daria Gibron emerged fast from the saloon, stepped into the throng of federal agents, and stepped up to the young agent who had pretended to play pool.

“That was amateur!” she spit. “You could have gotten me killed!”

The young agent gave her a cocky grin. “Don't get your panties knotted, babe. You weren't—”

Daria pivoted and delivered a roundhouse kick, boot heel as high as her head. It was not a ladylike strike in a miniskirt. Her heel connected with the now-stunned agent. The blow lifted his cowboy boots off the sidewalk. He was unconscious before he landed.

Daria rode the spin until she faced J. T. “Ray didn't blow anything! That idiot did!”

She broke into thirty uninterrupted seconds of obscenities, standing right in J. T.'s face. The insults were primarily in Hebrew but everyone got the gist. She eventually stopped to gulp air.

J. T. blinked at the five-foot-six human tornado standing toe-to-toe with him.

The agent who played bartender raised one hand, as if he were in a classroom. “Um, boss? Yeah. FBI dude didn't fuck up. Perkins there, did. Thugs woulda killed him for sure and Daria, too, wasn't for this guy.” He jacked a thumb in Ray's direction. Ray seemed to be studying his dusty loafers.

J. T.'s face turned red. The young ATF agent lying on his back moaned, one leg twitching.

“You're saying it was Perkins's fault?”

Ray stepped away from the GM pickup with the dead coyote bungeed to the hood. “No, it was your fault.”

J. T. shot the taller man a combative grin. “Really, Boy Scout? 'Cause the way I see it—”

“You're Laney. I've been doing some research on you. You've gotten three undercover agents killed in a little over seven months.”

“This is a dangerous job we—”

Ray plowed through him. “Lovely operation here. Real pro. You've got two agents in a beat-up truck out front of the bar, but the truck's got four brand-new, expensive four-ply treads. Perfect for chasing someone across the desert. If that didn't look suspicious enough, you've got two guys inside. Only thing is, you've got one behind the cash register and one at the pool table. Which puts Daria in a perfect crossfire position. And all of that would be bad enough, Agent Laney, but to make matters worse, your pupils are so dilated I can hardly see them. You're working stoned.”

J. T.'s face went from red to purple. He drew his Glock 9 from his belt holster. As his hand cleared his hip, Ray Calabrese's fist darted out, and somehow he ended up holding the Glock. His eyes never left those of J. T. Laney. Ray ratcheted the slide and quickly, expertly, dismantled the auto, dropping its component parts contemptuously at J. T.'s feet.

The other agents glanced at one another. None of them actually saw Ray take the gun. It had happened too fast.

The unit leader tried to regain his cool. “Daria's here because she wants to be here, asshole! She chose the job. She's fucking outstanding at it. You got no rights, you got no say in it!”

“Justice Department might have a different take on it. Let's you and me—”

But Daria touched Ray's arm. He stopped, turned to her.

“Go home, Ray.”

He looked down at her. She kept her hand on his forearm, very dark eyes locked on his.

“You don't have to be doing this.”

“I know,” she said. “I'm choosing to do this.”

“This asshole is going to get you killed!”

Daria offered Ray a sad little half smile. Her Israeli accent was back now. “It wouldn't be a war if that weren't one of the outcomes. Thank you, Ray. Now go home.”

He studied her. She looked up into his eyes, unflinching.

And after a while, Ray walked to his rental, pulled out, and left a dust trail in his wake.

J. T. spit on the sidewalk. “What a fuck—”

Daria's voice dropped an octave. “Don't,” she warned, eyes on Ray's car. “Not ever.”

5

R
ENEE MALATESTA KITTED UP
and did her run around the walled city of Segovia, her anger thrumming like a guitar string. Andrew had returned to the States.

Malatesta, Inc., was a small firm. Andrew and four other designers were the engineering heart and soul. Renee was the chief financial officer. They had four employees, all clerical.

The company had started with the first circuit boards Andrew had designed in a U-Store-It facility they'd turned into a makeshift lab. There had been times, at the beginning, when he'd had to stop designing and tend bar to help pay for Renee's law school. They had started as two people in love, with doctoral degrees and debt. They'd survived a bankruptcy. They'd survived a miscarriage. When they were in their late twenties, Andrew's first patent was bought up by Apple for eight hundred dollars and they'd gotten mad drunk on tequila and made love until dawn.

Andrew made the cover of
Wired
magazine at thirty and Renee gave up a partner-track position at a law firm to serve as general counsel and CFO. Their first million-dollar contract was followed ninety days later by a seven-million-dollar contract.

The more successful they were, the less time they spent in the same room. Neither of them noticed at first.

Renee moved the company to Maryland, lured by a lush state-tax incentive. They had become a company swirling around a nucleus of Andrew and his uncanny ability to design
the next big thing
.

She jogged around the massive Alcázar de Segovia, the strangely Disneyesque stone castle built on a Roman foundation. The day was gorgeous and the sun glinted off the sea. Keeping up a grueling pace, she passed into a dodgier neighborhood outside the walled city.

Last year she and Andrew had met Barry Tichnor, a managing partner at the nation's largest defense contractor, Halcyon/Detweiler. Barry oversaw the research-and-development arm of the multinational. He'd taken the couple out to dinner at a two-story French restaurant on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. Over hors d'oeuvres, he'd told them that Halcyon/Detweiler, with $317 billion in profits that fiscal year, was looking to subcontract some research-and-design work for the Pentagon. The name Malatesta had come up in more than one board meeting.

“Our plants are designed to gin up jet fighters and battle tanks,” Barry told them over a savory tourtière. “The … devices we're talking about are a bit smaller.” The money would be more than their firm had made since its inception. And since it would be classified defense work, there would be almost no congressional oversight.

Andrew had wanted no part of it at first. But Renee knew this was their big break. This was the brass ring. It took three months to persuade her husband. In the end, it had been the challenge, not the profits, that brought him around.

She returned to the older section of Segovia and the massive Roman aqueduct looming over everything. She bought a bottled water and stood on one leg, stretching the other, her cross-trainer up against her bum, then stretched the other leg. She watched the well-to-do of Europe, Asia, and America joking, taking photos, consuming conspicuously. She lived in Segovia sixty days a year, more or less, and had learned fluent Spanish, which meant that, like every other ex-tourist, she had come to loathe tourists.

After the initial meetings with Tichnor, Andrew had been in The Zone. She hadn't seen him for days at a time. He'd set up a kind of apartment in the basement of their leased building and slept there more nights than not, near his computers and drafting board and three-dimensional, holographic-design computers.

She remembered the day she had arranged the lunch with Barry Tichnor and Andrew and herself. Andrew had brought his vade mecum, a nicked and scratched saddlebag he'd found in an antique shop in Santa Monica, the same year he and Renee met, and which he'd carried with him everywhere ever since. Between courses of dim sum, Andrew dragged out his sketch pad and showed it to Barry.

Barry removed his eyeglasses and peered at the sketches. “Is that…” He flipped a page. “My lord…”

Andrew had actually blushed and had taken his book back, shoving it into the saddlebag with its hokey leather fringe. “Ah, it's just a couple of ideas. Things we might try.”

“No, no.” Barry slipped the glasses back on. “Those ideas are revolutionary. I've never … I mean, I've worked in this field my whole adult life. I've never seen designs like that.”

Andrew had just smiled the Andrew smile, the one that served as a siege wall; the one nobody got through. Renee might not have been sleeping with him on a regular basis, but she was his wife. She could tell that he was in.

Malatesta, Inc., signed a contract worth $128 million with the mighty Halcyon/Detweiler, Inc., and nobody in the outside world knew about it. The contract was backed by the Pentagon and was classified. Renee arranged for new headquarters, purchased the land not far from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Bethesda, near Potomac Palisades Park. The crew broke ground at the end of summer. A month later, Andrew rented a condo two blocks from their old headquarters and moved most of his clothes there. He and Renee never talked about it, as such. They never went to a marriage counselor and they never spoke of divorce.

*   *   *

One of the worst days of her life came on a Tuesday in July, when Barry Tichnor met the Malatestas at a bar in Glen Echo. Andrew ordered a glass of Evian for himself and a straight Barbancourt Haitian rum for her, without asking. It was her favorite. Barry had a glass of cheap, lethargic Chablis.

“I've been monitoring Bruges,” Barry began, removing his glasses to clean them, only to realize that he just had.

Andrew wore a frayed sweater and jeans, his black hair tousled. Renee wore Chanel and wore it well. Andrew said, “The city in Belgium?”

“The weapons summit,” Barry said, blinking in surprise. “You don't know about this?”

Andrew just shrugged.

“An international weapons summit is being held there. They, ah, have been discussing a ban on research and development of devices such as yours.”

Renee drained the rum in a gulp, did not feel the burn going down.

Barry said, “It's by far your most promising endeavor. We might have to … ah, add a level of security to your work, Andrew. Keep it on the hush-hush for a while.”

Andrew smiled his Andrew smile and said, “No.”

“Excuse me?”

He turned to his wife, not to Barry Tichnor. “We've seen this coming for months. The device is too dangerous, too destabilizing. If I had a vote in the Bruges Accord, I'd vote to ban it, too.”

“Honey, let's not get ahead of ourselves,” she counseled. “Barry's not saying they have been banned, only that there are talks under way. We don't—”

“We've talked about it. Me and the others.” The
others
being the rest of the Starting Five, his longtime engineering partners: Terri Loew, Antal Borsa, Vejay Mehta, and Christian Dean. Andrew was the fifth. “The whole direction we're going. The device. It's destabilizing. No, Barry, I'd have brought this up if you hadn't mentioned it first. It's a game-changer. It's too much.”

He'd stood and peeled a twenty-dollar bill, left it on the table and walked out.

“That did not,” Barry Tichnor said, adjusting his untouched glass of Chablis, “go as well as I'd hoped.”

“This isn't over,” Renee told him. “Not by a long shot.”

6

THREE DAYS EARLIER

Early Monday morning, Renee Malatesta came back home to the States and took a cab directly home. She walked in to find Andrew baking.

Andrew enjoyed the precision of baking, and he was good at it. He just hadn't done much of it, in their home, for a long time.

Renee kicked off her heels, studied the ingredients. Andrew wore a chest-to-knee apron and efficiently whisked batter in the largest of their clear glass nesting bowls. “What are you making?”

He turned and smiled his Andrew smile. The state-of-the-art coffeepot burbled by the wooden chopping board. “Hi. Madeleines.”

“Yum.”

Renee changed into jeans and a cranberry cashmere sweater. She removed her jewelry and washed off her makeup. Barefoot, she stepped back into the kitchen. “I saw on the calendar that you're going to Seattle?”

Andrew stirred the pale batter. Facing the stove, his back was to her. “Yeah.”

“Northwest Tech?” Renee stood on the far side of the granite-topped island.

“Yeah. Coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

He got down two mismatched cups and poured. He turned, hair tousled more than usual, handed her a cup. He had a little flour on his left cheek but she didn't say anything.

“You hate tech expos.” The preheated oven dinged.

Andrew returned to stirring. “You remember the device? Barry Tichnor's dream project?”

“Of course.”

Andrew measured butter on a plate, slid it into the microwave to soften it. “I modified the device, couple days ago.”

She sipped the strong, black coffee. “I thought you were through with that thing.”

“I designed a Mark II version on our mainframe. Same as the first, but I added a circuit board made by Hammerschmidt Systems.”

“Colin's company?” Colin Hammerschmidt had been a classmate of theirs at Stanford.