Breaking Point (15 page)

Calendar ditched the stolen Durango into a creek outside Clancy and walked a quarter mile to the motel he'd rented under a false name, paying cash. He let himself into the room, tossed the titanium case on the bed. He stripped off his clothes, took a two-minute shower, very hot. He scrubbed himself thoroughly. He disliked killing civilians.

He toweled dry. Naked, he brought the locked attaché case to the bathroom, studied it under the lights. The lock was a ten-key pad. Unpickable. He grabbed the case, turned it over, wedged it between the toilet and the bathroom wall with the hinges facing upward. It was a tight fit.

He padded into the main room, knelt, reached under the cratered bed with the threadbare cover, pulled out another locked case, dialed the combo, and withdrew an HK45, matte black and solid, with an Advanced Armament silencer. He screwed them together, returned to the bathroom, and put two bullets through the hinges,
phut phut,
barely audible if you'd had your ear against the motel-room door. A fine dust of steel filings, bullet fragments, and titanium littered the none-too-clean linoleum floor.

Calendar lifted the case away from the toilet, set it up on the cabinet, and opened it.

It was empty.

AIRBORNE

En route back to Helena via helicopter, Peter Kim called his intergovernmental liaison via their comm link. “Beth? We're leaving some of the Go-Team in place. Pathology and avionics/powerplant. The rest of us are heading back now. Where are we staying?”

“Um, I'm having a little trouble booking rooms. I hope to have it sorted out by the time you get back.” She paused. “Are you sure it's wise to leave some of our people that close to a forest fire?”

“Time's arrow only points one direction,” he responded, and checked his diver's watch. It was a little after 8:30
A.M.

“Del Wildman's Rule Number One is pretty clear,” Beth said. “First, take no risks.”

“Noted,” Peter said. “Out.”

In fact, Beth Mancini had booked only four rooms so far. She would need upward of eighty within a day or two. She hadn't anticipated the popularity of Helena during hunting season.

CRASH SITE

Lakshmi edged her way into the downed Claremont, a Maglite held up by her shoulder. She moved toward the flight deck. She didn't enter: it was crowded with Jack Goodspeed, Reuben Chaykin, one intact dead pilot, the remains of another dead pilot, and, completely unexpectedly, a deer.

She said, “My.”

Jack turned and saw her eyeing the deer carcass. “Yeah, I know. Weird. I think the plane hit once, shredded this wall,” he stamped his boot on the rough sod beneath him, “bounced, caught this poor guy,” he nodded to the deer, “and scooped him up.”

It was growing lighter outside but very little sunlight crept into the flight deck. Jack and Reuben crouched together up front. Reuben's right arm stretched almost completely behind the avionics panel, reaching back for something. Lakshmi said, “Can you get the equipment out of here?”

“Think … so…” Reuben stretched his arm farther, wincing in discomfort.

Lakshmi stepped over the threshold. She went down on one knee, moved a portion of the severely crumpled right-hand seat. She saw part of the torso of one pilot.

She shifted to the other pilot, played her flash along the gold nameplate over his left-hand pocket. Pilot-in-Charge Miguel Cervantes. He lay on the forest floor, his upper torso leaning on a portion of the flight deck that—in a normally oriented Claremont—would have been the ceiling. From the way his head lolled, she guessed a broken spine. She played the light on his neck, manipulated his skull. Yes. A C4 break.

She studied the rest of the body. Very bad bleeder in his right arm, with a trail of blood that ran forward to where Jack and Reuben were laboring. Lakshmi frowned. She also pulled back his shirt collar to discover a broken clavicle. Common enough injury in airline crashes: the safety harness.

But not with a C4 break.

She looked at the men kneeling up front. Lakshmi did not enjoy physically touching people until she knew them well, a process that could take years.

Steeling herself, she said, “May I?” and wedged herself in closer to the men. Her jeans-clad calf rubbed against Reuben's left arm. There wouldn't have been enough room for a third man up in front but Lakshmi was willow thin and flexible enough to fit, if uncomfortably. She stood, studying the pilot's chair. Yes, there was the telltale blood of the arm bleeder, the smear of blood on the safety harness from the clavicle break. And she studied the buckle of the safety harness. One perfectly fine, bloody thumbprint.

She turned back, shone the light on the pilot. Turned and shone it on the seat.

Reuben said, “Can you give us a little light here?”

She turned the Maglite on the avionics monitors.

“What are you trying to salvage?”

Jack nodded to the monitor nearest his head. “EFIS.”

“Which is…?”

“Sorry. Electronic Flight Instrumentation System. Five high-res liquid crystal displays. Some of these Claremonts are retrofitted with heads-up holographic guidance systems, too, but I'm not seeing one here.”

“Me, neither.” Reuben grunted, still trying to reach some hidden connector in back.

Jack said, “We get this, maybe the TCAS unit. That's got global positioning, traffic alert, and collision avoidance systems, rolled into one. That could tell us if we had a near miss or a missile.”

Lakshmi said, “Missile,” as if Jack had said
eight tiny reindeer.

Kneeling, Jack shrugged. “Assume nothing.”

And a minute later, three of the avionics monitors fell free.

HELENA

The ambulances carrying Tommy, Kiki, and the six other survivors of Polestar Flight 78 arrived at Big Sky Community Hospital at 8:45
A.M.
The Claremont had been on the ground nine hours.

16

M
OST OF THE MEMBERS
of the Go-Team were ferried back to Helena Regional and found that Beth Mancini and her assistants had rummaged up only a few hotel rooms in different hotels. Beth apologized profusely. Peter Kim recommended that people use their own credit cards to find rooms. They'd get reimbursed later.

It was a bad way to start their first full day on the ground, everyone thought, as they headed their own way to find hotel rooms.

*   *   *

Gene Whitney loved airports. You could almost always get booze. And nobody knew that you hadn't just flown in from Hong Kong, wherever, and it was really happy hour to you. He returned to Helena Regional and found a chain restaurant serving a full menu of drinks. Plenty of time to find a hotel room later.

He hoisted his 250-pound form up onto a stool at the nicked bar. It was wood but no discernible type of wood. Just wood. He ordered a Coors and got a bowl of pretzels without asking.

He didn't get into a fight with the locals for a good hour. It was almost a personal best.

LIMA, MONTANA

Almost due south of the crash on Highway 15, Calendar's man, Cates, stood outside in a motel's parking lot, sipping coffee from a Thermos lid as the sun rose. He leaned against a Ford Escape SUV. Five minutes later, an identical Escape pulled in, facing the other direction, and parked next to it.

The new driver—another of Calendar's soldiers for hire, Dyson, also with the look and bearing of a military man—got out without a word. The men opened the truck doors, looked around to see if they were being observed, then transferred the original black boxes of Flight 78 into the newcomer's truck. Two perfectly identical but fake black boxes went into the first truck.

The drivers nodded to each other, climbed into their respective cabs, and drove away in opposite directions.

Cates opened up a cell phone, hit Redial, and said, “I have the packages.” He disconnected the line, hit the power window, and threw the phone into a field.

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

“I have the packages.”
Click.

In her subbasement listening post, Jenna Scott heard the mercenary's four words and the
click
of his disconnect. She punched in a new number. She sent Barry a text: “Alternative packages en route.”

SOUTH OF CRASH SITE

Calendar stood in the bathroom, still naked, and blinked at Andrew Malatesta's empty case. He felt a red haze behind his eyes, tasted coppery adrenaline at the back of his tongue.

Finally, the sound of gurgling water caught his attention. He frowned, glanced around. The bathroom mirror had been shattered. How? He turned to the case again. It still rested between the wall and the toilet, but the toilet had been ruined, the lid on the floor, the reservoir smashed, water flowing out onto the floor, over his bare feet.

He raised his right hand, stared at the HK. He touched the silencer. It was hot. He'd apparently emptied the chamber, although he couldn't remember having done so.

He rotated his wrist. Blood trickled down his forearm from a piece of glass the size of a poker chip embedded in the heel of his hand. Huh. He pulled it out, dropped it to the floor.

He inhaled deeply, held it, let it out through his mouth. Again.

He tilted his head to the left, heard his neck pop. Tilted to the right. Pop-pop. He rotated his shoulders, worked out the kinks.

Calendar ripped a towel and bandaged his hand. He picked up all the shell casings, threw them into his luggage. He got dressed, took the ruined attaché case and his luggage to his stolen Chevy Tahoe. He returned to the motel room with a military-grade flare and kerosene. The flares burned so hot, they would leave no forensic trace of themselves behind. He checked the room carefully, looked in the closet and under the bed, found nothing connected to him. He poured the kerosene on the bathroom floor, walked to the door, lit the flare, tossed it into the bathroom, and was pulling out of the parking lot before the first fire alarm sounded.

HELENA

Gene Whitney was supposed to catch a late-morning flight from Helena back to Washington, D.C. One of his principal tasks was to interview the ground crew at Reagan. But that was before the fistfight with the two drunks in the airport bar.

He'd managed to snag a dirt-cheap room in a down-on-its-luck motel near the airport.

Gene woke around 10:00
A.M.
, found himself lying in his street clothes on top of the thin bedspread, only two hours after crawling into bed, still drunk, still sore from getting popped in the mouth. He had absolutely no idea what the fight had been about. He'd said something or they'd said something, and one side or the other had taken exception to it. Someone had said, “You wanna step outside, dipshit?” and thinking back, blinking up at the popcorn ceiling, Gene was fairly certain he'd been the one to say that. Anyway, he and two locals who were three and three-quarters sheets to the wind already had stepped out by the Dumpster and gone all testosterone on one another. Gene Whitney was a big man. Fat, for sure, but once upon a time that had been muscle and he still knew how to use it. After the two local dipshits had slunk off, Gene returned to the bar and drank until noon.

He rolled over now, feeling his age, and tasted blood on his teeth. One of the locals had gotten in a punch. Just the one, though.

He staggered to the bathroom, pissed, and squinted at himself in the mirror. He'd missed his wakeup call and his flight to Reagan to interview the ground crew.

“Fuck…” he muttered to his reflection, shirt collar up, shirt untucked, bruising around his limp mouth.

He limped back to bed and closed his eyes.

ANNAPOLIS

Renee Malatesta had taken two sleeping pills, which managed only to hold her in an insensate fog of consciousness and limp lassitude that stretched on into the night, minute after minute after agonizing minute.

She must have dozed off in her living room, waking up at 2:00
P.M.
with that wonderful, luscious half second of amnesia before she remembered it was likely that Andrew was dead.

She lay on her back, listening to the frogs in the city park, staring at the ceiling. It was a concern to her that she hadn't cried yet. Crying was natural. Right? She loved her husband. Alas, she didn't particularly
like
him.

They hadn't been living together, but they hadn't divorced, either. She had had affairs, yes. Brief, cathartic flings. Never with anyone Andrew knew or who traveled in his circles. God knew, when he was in The Zone, she was essentially a widow for weeks. When he was inventing some contraption, some new micro-whatever, he locked himself away for fourteen, sixteen hours at a time, emerging only to eat, use the bathroom, and play soccer. Andrew had solved many intractable problems by mindlessly kicking a soccer ball against a wall, over and over again, his brain a trillion miles away.

All of which was beside the point. Renee loved her husband. And within the next few hours, she likely would receive a phone call announcing his death.

And she hadn't cried.

Her eyes played about the luxuriously comfortable room, her thoughts, as they often did, turning to the stunning poverty of her youth in Haiti and marveling at where the world had taken her. The bedroom walls were painted a shade of daisy yellow she and Andrew had first seen in the Loire Valley. They had repainted it a half-dozen times to get the color exactly right. The framed photo opposite the headboard showed the two of them, arm in arm, in a winding alley in Toledo, Spain, which reminded her so much of Venice except with steep hills instead of canals.

She squeezed a fistful of the soft, pale-yellow bedsheets, so soft, a thousand-thread count. She turned to look at Andrew's pillow and recoiled in shock, gasping and rising to her feet, eyes wide, hands squeezed into fists and bunched in front of her throat.

The Colt Pocket Model .25 pistol Andrew had bought her lay on the pillow.