Breaking Point (6 page)

“Yeah. The circuit board is called a Jabulani. I noted that it would improve the throughput of the device by twenty percent.”

Renee sipped her coffee, hackles rising.

“Colin called this morning from Fresno. The high-and-mighty Halcyon/Detweiler Company contacted him, asked about buying the patent for the Jabulani circuit board.”

Renee knew where the story was going but kept a straight face. “Can I help? With the Madeleines?”

“I could use some lemon zest.”

She placed a box grater on a strip of paper towel and retrieved a lemon from the refrigerator. “This Jabu—”

“Jabulani.”

“It doesn't exist, I assume.”

“Very good, love.
Jabulani
is a kind of soccer ball. I warned Colin he might get the call and to stall them.”

Renee and Andrew stood back-to-back, he at the stove, she at the island. She began gliding the lemon over the grater, careful to avoid her knuckles. “They're still inside our mainframe.”

“You missed the point, Counselor. Barry didn't call and ask for a fictional circuit board. He asked to buy the patent for it. He's not just looking to make a prototype, he's looking to go into mass production.”

She concentrated on grating, turning the lemon a few degrees, grating, turning it again. “What are you going to do?”

Andrew added a little more sugar to the slurry. “Burn Barry's house down.”

“Andrew—”

“I'm going to cancel all contracts with Halcyon/Detweiler. I'm going to out them. The whole nasty story.”

Renee braced herself with both hands on the granite, her knees almost buckling. They stood back-to-back, like some sort of Victorian dance set on Pause.

“Andrew. Don't.”

“I took it to a vote of the engineers. It was three-to-two.”

“You can't.”

“I have. The zest?”

“Then my vote makes it three-to-three!”

The microwave sounded. Andrew retrieved the soft butter. He remained facing away from her. “You let them into the mainframe. On this topic, you no longer have a vote.”

*   *   *

Barry Tichnor called a noon meeting of Halcyon/Detweiler's Infrastructure Subcommittee on Deferred Maintenance. “We have a ploughshare problem.”

Barry's actual government affiliation was somewhat difficult to pin down. When he'd been brought on at Halcyon as a partner, it was understood that he had long served as an unofficial adviser to the CIA and NATO. But no specific agency laid claim to him. He was on no agency's payroll. He had served for a dozen years as a sort of ex-officio cabinet adviser to specific members of leadership in the Pentagon, and also as an off-staff adjunct to the NSA. He knew, thanks to the suite of surveillance equipment at Malatesta, Inc., that Andrew Malatesta referred to him as “that damn spook.” Barry actually liked the nickname.

The Infrastructure Subcommittee on Deferred Maintenance had been given its name under the theory that no congressional investigator or crusading journalist would think twice about such an excruciatingly dull, corporate work group. The members included Barry, whose personal org chart was a bramble bush of dotted lines and deniable culpability, along with Liz Proctor, director of the Aircraft Division (with oversight of both jet fighters and gunships) and Admiral Gaelen Parks, retired, formerly of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and now director of Halcyon's Military Liaison Division. They met in an office in a building owned by Halcyon but leased out to the Department of the Interior, an office that was swept for passive and aggressive surveillance daily.

When Barry said they had a “ploughshare” problem, Gaelen Parks growled, “Malatesta.”

Barry cleaned his glasses, nodded.

Liz Proctor, a willowy blonde in her fifties, said, “We all saw this coming. He's been the weak link from the start.”

“Of course.” Barry nodded, slid his glasses back on, and the lenses picked up glare from the overhead lights. “But his designs are revolutionary. We didn't have all that many choices, and the wife has been gung-ho from the start.”

“Typical for an immigrant who makes it big,” Liz said. “They tend to be überpatriots.” She started to light up a cigarette, then remembered they were in a federal office. She turned to Barry. “The prototype?”

“Up and running. We really need to talk about field tests.”

The admiral grimaced. He carried the same squat, square build that made him a tackle at Annapolis thirty years earlier. “We start testing the damn thing, we're going to get caught. I'm speaking for the Pentagon here. I'm saying, if we get caught, we get no cover from the military. They cannot be seen making the commander in chief a liar, just days after he signed the accord.”

Coward,
Barry thought and smiled. “Sure. Understood. Liz: any word on China?”

She crossed her knees and smoothed her linen skirt. Her linen looked crisp while Barry's no-ironing-needed polyester sport coat was badly creased. “My sources at the NSA say they're almost certainly testing a similar weapon. Pakistan, too,” she said.

Gaelen Parks looked sour. “China gets it, it means North Korea gets it. Pakistan gets it, it ups the chances of al Qaeda getting its hands on it. Then we're in the shit storm.”

Barry said, “Hence the field tests. We'll schedule a batch of them on the hush-hush. We'll—”

His phone vibrated and he pulled it out of the pocket of his ill-fitting suit. “Speak of the devil. Renee Malatesta just sent me a text. She wants to meet.”

Liz said, “Is this good news or bad?”

Barry smiled behind his thick lenses. “I suppose we'll see.”

*   *   *

“Washington Post. Dreyfus.”

“Amelia Earhart's living in my mom's basement.”

Just past noon on a Monday, Amy Dreyfus had a Sprite in one hand and a fuchsia stress ball in the other. She sat at her desk with her butt barely in her chair, legs up on her desk and crossed at the ankles. A business reporter for the
Washington Post,
she'd been scanning the wire services—AP,
New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post,
and Reuters—to see what was going on in the world.

She grinned. “Andrew? Hey. Loan me some money.”

She heard him laugh. “How do I know you won't just blow it on food and shelter?”

She used a headset for her phone so she could talk and type two-handed. Or, in this case, squeeze a stress ball and sip a soda. At only five feet, she sat with an upturned box in front of her chair so that her feet didn't dangle. Her curly red hair constantly threatened to abandon whatever hairdo Amy attempted each morning. She sat up straight, feeling herself smile. “What's up?”

“Do you ever go to the Northwest Tech Expo?”

“Couple of times. Last year, in fact. It rained like … I don't know, Old Testament rain.”

“I'm going this year.”

“'Cause you invented the Next Big Thing? Again?”

“No. Because there will be a big audience. And media. Hey, ah, Amy? I need your advice.”

She leaned forward. There was something odd in his voice. He sounded as if he were smiling, but Andrew
always
sounded as if he were smiling. Amy was his de facto big sister. They had lived with three other undergraduates for a couple of years at Stanford and Amy had introduced him to Renee, who frankly, everyone agreed, was way, way out of his league.

Where others would have heard just the smile, Amy caught tension. “The only time Mister I Got My First Patent in Junior High needed my advice, it involved girls. Are you and Renee okay?”

He laughed. “We're … not. But it's bigger than that. It's about the media. I need your help with a thing.”

“Sounds serious.”

“Life-and-death serious. I need to let the world know about this thing.”

Amy said, “A press release?”

He chuckled. “A little bigger than that. Look, come to the expo on Thursday. Let me buy you a beer. I want to do something and do it right. And I want you to have first crack at it. Okay?”

She set down the soft drink and the squeeze ball. “Andrew, it's Ezra's birthday. I can't.”

She waited.

“Sure,” he said. “Hey, say hi for me. Look, I'll call you when I get to Seattle. I still need your advice.”

“Sure, of course. But what is so important you—”

And he abruptly hung up.

The dayside city editor looked over from his adjacent desk. “Trouble?”

“Huh? Oh. No. I mean, maybe. It's my little brother acting all cryptic.”

He said, “Since when did you have a little brother?”

“Since Stanford.” She went back to scanning the wires, only now working the stress ball just a little harder.

*   *   *

A junior member of Halcyon/Detweiler's security division tagged the call from Andrew Malatesta's cell phone, downloaded the digital recording to a flash drive, and called out to the room, “Has anyone seen Mr. Tichnor?”

RESTON, VIRGINIA

Monday around 1:00
P.M.
, Renee asked Barry Tichnor to meet her in a D.C. bar just off K Street. Neither of them lived or worked nearby.

The place was dark and almost empty. They had plenty of privacy, sitting under photos of baseball teams from the 1920s and '30s.

She ordered Barbancourt rum and Barry ordered a Bud Lite. She turned her glass in small circles, never lifting it off the table. “Andrew knows you're still in the backup servers.”

Barry sighed. “Our hackers assured me otherwise.”

“He also wants out of the Pentagon contract, in toto. He's converted two of the Starting Five. They're going to the Northwest Tech Expo on Thursday, in Seattle.”

Barry sipped his beer, light glinting on his oversized lenses.

Renee played with her glass, never lifting it.

“Andrew loves the coup de theatre. The big, grandiose display. He intends to out himself as a Pentagon subcontractor at the Tech Expo. And to denounce the Halcyon contract, the Bruges Accord, and … I don't know. Maybe more.”

Barry thought,
Shit! Shit! Shit!
and let the opening of the bottle's neck touch his lips, not letting any beer enter his mouth. He nodded occasionally. He didn't push her. He waited for her to get there.

“Andrew is going to out the device. And you.”

Barry set down his beer and patted his lips with the bar napkin. He spoke softly, overhead lights glistening off his wide, round glasses. “We have a … strong need for this to go the other way. We've made certain agreements with the Pentagon. China and Pakistan are testing similar weapons.”

She said, “Pakistan is an ally,” but her voice trembled, as if she were pleading.

“In that part of the world? The word has no meaning. Pakistan means the Taliban. Pakistan means al Qaeda. Al Qaeda with the device means dead Americans.”

Renee leaned forward, her shoulders hunched, head down. Her wavy black hair obscured her face. She stayed like that for almost two minutes. Barry tipped his beer, not drinking, said nothing. He let it stew.

“He had a Trojan horse virus hidden in the device's specs. He's inside Halcyon's computer. He knows about you contacting Hammerschmidt Systems. That was a ruse, by the way. There is no Mark II version of the device. This isn't about him suspecting anything, anymore. It's about him having solid proof.”

Barry Tichnor had fleeting thoughts about smashing his beer bottle into her skull again and again until she lost consciousness but, instead, he just nodded. “About thirty minutes ago, your husband called a journalist. He's asked her advice regarding going to the media.”

She squinted, peered at him. “You're monitoring our phones?”

“Of course we're monitoring your phones. It's part of our security protocols. But then, you suspected as much. If he goes to the media, not only do we lose the race against China and Pakistan, but he could set back other highly secret weapons projects. Renee? At this stage, a threat to Halcyon/Detweiler is a threat to the Pentagon. A threat to America.”

She wiped tears off both cheeks with the back of her hand, sat up ramrod straight.

“I grew up in Haiti.” She whispered still, but fiercely.

Barry sat quietly.

“My father didn't make it past the fourth grade. He died of cholera when I was thirteen. I came to America and America took me in. Because of America, I have a law degree and a thriving company. I am a patriot, Barry!”

“Yes,” he said. “I wouldn't have approached you if I hadn't known that.”

She drained the rum in one shot. She stared into the glossy, reflective lenses that hid his eyes.

She stood up and snarled, sotto voce, “Fuck you to hell, Barry Tichnor. Fuck you and your company.”

Barry took off those glasses, let her see his eyes. He stared directly into hers. When she neither flinched nor turned away, he nodded.

He said, “Okay then.”

He slid the glasses back on.

7

E
ARLIER ON MONDAY, AN
engineer at Halcyon/Detweiler had typed in the word
Jabulani,
which she assumed was a type of circuit board.

The word had another, hidden purpose. At 11:55
A.M.
exactly, the Halcyon/Detweiler mainframe holding the Malatesta prototype information had spooled up. Perfect backup files were created for everything on the mainframe. The backup files then were chopped up into moderate-size chunks of data and distributed throughout the corporation's less-secure computer servers.

At just a little past noon, the Information Technology Department started getting calls about slow-downs on the mainframe. The engineers answering the calls said they'd look into it, but they already knew the answer.

At noon, close to a fourth of the Halcyon/Detweiler staff began logging on to Facebook, or ESPN, or YouTube, or Netflix, or Amazon, or eBay. Or porn. This happened almost every day at noon. Everyone in IT knew it. They ignored the calls, knowing their bandwidth would be restored by 12:30 or so.