Breaking Point (43 page)

Which had grown quiet.

*   *   *

The .40-caliber bullet hadn't made much of an entrance wound in Jenna Scott's right thigh but the exit wound removed a chunk of muscle the size of a game hen. It also shattered her femur, leaving behind radial trails of fine cracks from hip to knee.

From there, the bullet had entered her left leg, shattering her knee in too many pieces to count, before changing angles by thirty degrees and flying off into the deserted neighborhood.

Jenna's body jolted as if electrified; arms, torso, neck, and legs jerking in spasm. Her brain went into immediate shock.

Daria used her boot to nudge aside the wheelbarrow, gun trained on the downed opponent. She wasn't surprised to find it was a woman; Daria was from Israel, the land of equal opportunity warriors.

She turned and saw the bedraggled Kiki and Tommy, each looking worse than the other, stagger around the corner of the first house. Tommy's back hit the wall and he slid to his ass in the waxy grass, right arm against his chest. Daria turned to the blond woman bleeding out in the dirt. She wondered, if only for a moment, who she was.

Daria took the Sten gun and the extra clip. She walked over to Kiki and Tommy, shouldering the subautomatic weapon, and saw blood staining his cotton shirt. Both of them were gasping as if they had run a marathon.

Kiki crouched by Tommy, glancing back at the fuselage as the airship flew away.

“Who was shooting at us?” she asked.

Daria shrugged. “Who cares?” She turned her attention to Tommy. “Looks bad.”

Kiki looked back and, only then, realized how badly Tommy's right hand was spurting blood.

“Oh my god oh my god oh my god…!”

“Damn … prick…” Tommy spoke through clenched teeth.

Behind them, more sparks coruscated from the substation.

Daria drew one of her Brownings and turned toward the escaping fuselage.

“Leave him,” Tommy said. “We got the saddlebag. Everyone's read the speech. He's done.”

Daria stood and studied the war-weary couple sitting at her feet. Her dark eyes turned to the white airship and the fuselage, which were slowly sailing away. She knelt, dug around in her backpack, and pulled out an olive-drab cloth used for cleaning her guns. “Wrap it around your hand. We need to get you a hospital.”

*   *   *

The body of Police Chief Paul McKinney was finally located under an Impala.

Mayor Tibbett's corpse was next, folded in half and slumped against a long-closed Best Aid store.

Inside the half of the municipal building dedicated to the police station, Ray Calabrese organized an ad hoc committee on What Do We Do Next, including Montana Guard Captain Maryssa Loveless, Mac Pritchert of the state fire team, and Peter Kim. They also had Susan Tanaka, two time zones away, on their headsets. “I've informed Del Wildman and the NTSB,” she said into their ears. “Ray, I've contacted the FBI. Teams are on their way.”

Pritchert smoothed his handlebar mustache forlornly. “Bottom line: the air tankers were taking water to the forest fire. They didn't get there. This dang fire is still advancing, and we gotta evac anyone still left in town. Now.”

“This is a crime scene.” Ray spoke without moving his jaw too much. “Is there any way, any way at all, to stop the fire, save the town?”

Pritchert shook his head. “The Illyushins were the biggest guns in our holster. Without them, and without a decent firebreak, the forest fire will morph into a brush fire. It'll pick up speed—no trees to block the wind on the prairie. It'll be here in a half hour, tops. Plus…” He gestured around to the buildings already on fire, thanks to jet fuel from the air tankers.

Captain Loveless turned to Ray. Nobody had voted that the FBI was in charge of the scene; Ray Calabrese just had that effect on people. “So we airlift everyone out, sir?”

“With one Chinook?”

“Negative. We have three more birds inbound.”

Ray said, “Do it,” through clenched teeth.

In their ears, Susan Tanaka said, “Captain? I've contacted every trauma hospital in a three-state region. A man named Dmitri Zhirkov is patching me into your pilots' comms now. They'll have coordinates for which hospitals are expecting them in ninety seconds. Out.”

Captain Loveless turned to Ray. “Who the hell is this Susan Tanaka chick?”

Ray didn't hesitate. “Right hand of God.”

Her walkie chirped. “Captain? We're full up.”

Loveless hit Send. “Copy. There in a minute.”

As she spoke, a beautiful if bedraggled woman with dark hair and skin entered the police station. Her stylish jeans were wet to her knees, as was the long hem of her sweater. Her hands were jammed into the sweater pockets. “Pardon me?”

They turned to her. Peter Kim said, “If you're injured, they've set up a temporary hospital just down the block. You see that big helicopter out there? More of them are en route. When they tell you to—”

“I caused this.”

Ray and Peter froze. Ray said, “Pardon?”

“My name is Renee Malatesta. My husband was Andrew. People crashed that airplane, caused the fire, to shut him up. And … I told them it would be okay.”

No emotion. No flickering of her eyelids. Renee swayed just a little, slightly uneven on her feet.

Peter Kim turned to Ray and said, “Huh.”

*   *   *

Kiki toggled her comms, got Ray Calabrese.

“Tommy has the speech, the notepad, but he's been shot.”

“I ain't shot!” Tommy shouted loud enough to be heard over Kiki's gear. He'd lost his on board the fuselage. “I got nicked!”

Ray's voice came back to her. “The fire's still coming. The National Guard is evac'ing the town. Is Daria there? Put her on.”

Kiki handed over her comms.

Ray's voice sounded four feet away. “What's your threat assessment on Calendar?”

Daria squinted, gave herself a few seconds to ponder the question. “Let us say I am Calendar. First job is to kill the engineer.”

Ray said, “Malatesta.”

“Yes. Job two is to kill witnesses on the airplane. Job three is to steal some sort of speech, which is in a leather bag. Make sure no one sees it, yes? Finally, I have a team of mercenaries. As leader, my final job is to get my team to safety.”

Ray said, “Okay. So what's his game plan now?”

“Malatesta is dead. The witnesses are dead. The speech is out and everybody has read it. And all three team members are dead.”

Ray cut in. “Hang on: three? You got another one of his goons?”

Daria frowned. She turned to Tommy and Kiki, and covered the voice wand with her palm. “Is
goons
like three men in black-and-white movies, hit each other? The poking in the eyes…?”

Despite shock setting in, Tommy actually managed to snort a laugh. “Stooges, Dee. Those are stooges.”

“And stooges are not goons?”

Kiki shrugged. “They can be. The words—”

Tommy leaned forward. “Ladies? Hand … bleeding … out!”

“Sorry.” Daria readjusted her ear jack for Ray's attention. “Yes, I killed his stooges. Which means Calendar has no more mission here.”

Ray said, “Okay, listen. We have the wife of the original target, Malatesta. She's here, she's involved, and she's naming names. But the names are corporation fat cats. She doesn't seem to know Silver-Hair or anything about him.”

“Then Calendar is the ghost,” Daria said. “No one to kill, nothing to steal, no team members left to save. He is crazy, not stupid. This area: police, search-and-rescue, National Guard, FBI … this town just became a fortress. Plus, there is the fire.”

Ray absorbed that. “Okay. How's Tomzak?”

“Losing blood.”

“Okay, we have a field hospital. Get him and that saddlebag here. After the medics get a look at him, the Guard can airlift him to a hospital.”

Daria handed the communications device back to Kiki. She made a hand gesture that, on any battlefield, means
we are pulling out.

Tommy let out a weak laugh. “Honey, guess what. We're walking back toward the forest fire.”

Kiki kissed him on the cheek. “That sounds about right for us.”

*   *   *

In the floating fuselage, Calendar listened to the exchange using Tommy's comm unit.

Malatesta dead. Witnesses dead. Speech forfeit. Saddlebag heading to the freaking equivalent of Camp Lejeune. Calendar's people dead (he hadn't known about Vintner but she wasn't his people, anyway). The Malatesta bitch was in Twin Pines. Naming names but so what? Calendar's wouldn't be among them.

The mission was a wash. There were no more wins to be had. None from the original mission, at least.

And yet, there is something to be said about seeing a job well done.

35

I
T TOOK THREE OF
them almost twenty minutes to make it back to Ray and the base camp. As they approached, three twin-rotor heavy-lifts touched down on Main Street, one-two-three, like Balanchine-trained dancers, a block from the police station.

Ray Calabrese was on his comm unit talking to Susan Tanaka. “Barry Tichnor … yeah, Halcyon/Detweiler. My boss in L.A. has put in a call to the D.C. field office. They got a BOLO out on this guy. They'll find him … Hey, Tommy and Kiki are here.… Okay, bye.”

Ray—long of arm and Italian of heritage—hugged all three of them in a massive if overenthused demonstration. Both Tommy and Kiki winced.

Kiki said, “Um, I think I dropped your gun back there. It's empty anyway, but…”

“It'll be molten by morning.” He turned to Daria. “Didn't figure everyone would make it. Thank you. Again.”

She nodded, quiet.

Tommy let the saddlebag strap drop off his left shoulder. He grabbed the strap, handed it to Ray. “The
why.
”

“Malatesta? The weapons designs?”

“Yeah. This is the wife?”

Peter Kim was holding a woman by her upper arm. Peter's right pant leg was cut off at the knee, a pressure bandage around his calf. Rene Malatesta seemed out of it, swaying, eyes staring into the vague distance. She had a soot smudge on her cheek and her long white sweater was sooty and soaked to the waist with floodwater.

Kiki balled her sleeve into her fist, stooped to get the cloth wet, and wiped soot from the woman's cheek. “Hi. I'm Kiki. You're…?”

Rene blinked, made eye contact with her, and shivered. “I had my husband killed.”

“I know. Here.” Kiki removed the dazed woman's sodden sweater—Susan Tanaka would have recognized it as a Missoni and expensive; Kiki just thought it felt heavy and off-kilter. Rene stood like a mannequin.

Renee stumbled a little and Peter Kim caught her elbow. Ray took a look at Tommy's hand. With the town all but empty, the National Guard had dismantled most of its MASH unit. “There's a decent med kit in the cop shop.”

Daria said, “I'll get it.” She threw one strap of her backpack over her left shoulder and set out at an easy jog. She had an ulterior motive: it was a police station and she was running low on ammunition. Combat instinct told her to see what she could scrounge.

As she moved away, Kiki and Ray exchanged looks. “You know she saved our lives. Again.”

*   *   *

Daria swung into the police station and rounded the corner toward the desks as Calendar hit her square in the stomach with a police baton he'd borrowed from one of the dead. He swung it like a baseball bat but one-handed, and she folded around it.

Daria grunted and fell, her momentum making her slide forward across the half-inch-deep water that covered the linoleum floor. Her back slammed into a desk. The big man deftly hooked the toe of his boot through her backpack strap and kicked it the length of her arm, skidding it across the floor. Daria came to rest curled in the fetal position, vision blurring.

*   *   *

Two of the massive helicopters lifted off, spraying floodwater in every direction. They both banked west, away from the fire.

The last helicopter hadn't revved up its twin rotors yet, conserving fuel. Kiki—the Sonar Witch—turned abruptly toward the municipal building.

Tommy said, “What?” He'd come to read her like no one else.

“Who else is in there?”

Ray shook his head and coughed over the smoke. “We're it.”

Kiki bunched Rene Malatesta's long sweater in her hands, wringing water out of it, the tension obvious in her knuckles. “I thought I…”

She paused, frowned.

“Hon?”

From the pocket, Kiki withdrew a small, nickel-plated .22.

“She was armed.”

“Is it loaded?” Tommy asked, his eyes now raking over the all-but-catatonic Renee Malatesta.

Kiki checked. “No. No bullets in her pockets, either. Still…”

“Yeah.”

Captain Loveless hacked a smoky cough. “Agent Calabrese?”

He turned and she pointed. Two blocks away, a couple of civilians limped their way. They had their arms over each other's shoulders and, at a quick look, Ray judged them both to have leg wounds.

“I'll get them,” Loveless said.

“Captain? This is your command, but can I ask a favor?”

She nodded.

“This helo is the last ferry out. You're armed. You guard the bird. I'll get the civilians.”

She didn't hesitate. “Yessir.”

Ray turned. “Kiki, go get Daria and the med kit. Oh, and hey: ask her not to steal too much weaponry, okay? She didn't go in there to make sure Texas here ever plays the piano again.”

Ray began jogging toward the limping civilians as Kiki and Tommy headed toward the municipal building.

*   *   *

Calendar shrugged out of his own backpack and set it down on a police officer's desk. He withdrew his beloved MAC-SOG army knife and, with one stroke, sliced an inch-deep gash through Daria's right shoulder. The finely honed blade shredded skin and muscle as if they were soft cheese. Daria didn't even try for a defensive move, lying on her side, no air in her lungs, her dominant arm bleeding. She hissed in agony.