Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,33
ask her to move in, much less to marry him. But he was gonna. Eventually.
Commander Michaels was in his office when Jay got there. He waved at the receptionist. “He busy?”
“No, go ahead in.”
Jay tapped at the door, then opened it. “Hey, Boss.”
“Jay? What you doing here? You’re not supposed to be back until Monday. How did it go?”
“The mosquitoes got so bad we had to come back for a transfusion. Other than that, it went great. How’s business ?”
“Slow. Nothing major. Usual net scams, viruses, illegal porno stuff. Nobody trying to topple the world that we’ve noticed, thank God.”
Jay wanted to ask if Michaels had heard from Toni Fiorella—her quitting had hit the Net Force group hard—but he didn’t bring it up. Toni had called Jay from London and he had heard that she’d called a couple of other people in Net Force, too, but he still didn’t know what exactly had gone down between her and the boss. It must have been bad, though. Michaels had been pretty miserable about it, even if he tried to pretend otherwise.
“Nothing interesting at all?”
“Nope. Well, one little thing. You know about something called HAARP?”
“Sure, the atmosphere burner up in Alaska. The guys in aluminum-foil hats love that one. What happen, it melt down?”
“According to one of the scientists working on the thing, somebody sneaked in and stole something from their computer.”
“Who would bother? The technology is moldy, goes back to Tesla, more than a hundred years ago.”
Michaels shrugged. “Got me. I did a little web walking in VR, and it does look as if somebody got into their computer.”
“Kid hacker, maybe,” Jay said.
“Could be. You want to check it out, be my guest.”
“Soji is gonna be busy for the next couple days. I’ll take a look at it, get a jump on work.”
“Background and what I saw is in the work file under ‘HAARP.’ ”
“Copy, Boss. See you Monday morning.”
“My best to Soji,” he said.
Jay went to his office and looked around, but there wasn’t much new to see. Some hardcopy reports was all. He had checked his e-mail and phone messages using a virgil he’d checked out and taken with him, so he was pretty much up to date.
Just for grins, he lit his computer and read over the information on HAARP the boss had given him, including the hiddencam vid of the interview with the scientist, Morrison.
Very interesting stuff. Mind control? That would be worth stealing, but that also didn’t seem likely. People had been playing with low-frequency stuff for a long time without much in the way of results. Still. it was intriguing.
Jay logged off his computer. He’d been here for a couple of hours. Time to head home. Soji didn’t have to be on-line all the time ...
But as he started for the door to leave, his com chirped, and the sexy, throaty female vox he’d programmed into his computer said, “Jay! Priority One com, Jay! Heads up! Answer the phone, you hunk of burning love!”
Friday, June 10th
Longhua, China
When he had been a member of the Chinese Army twenty years before, Jing Lu Han had apparently at some point collected a Russian Makarov pistol, and kept it hidden away for two decades afterward. No one had ever seen him with it—at least no one alive who could testify to that. There seemed no other way he could have come by such a thing, there not having been any Russians in or about Longhua in anybody’s memory, and Jing having lived there all his life, save for his time in the army.
However he came by it, it was with this pistol that Jing proceeded to shoot seventeen members of his home village in the wee hours of Friday morning. He walked calmly through the town, plinking at anybody who came out to see what the noise was about, and he did not discriminate as to sex, age, or familial relationships. By dawn, he had shot men, women, children, friends, and relatives. He had two dozen rounds of ammunition remaining for the pistol after he shot number seventeen—his butt-ugly and ignorant cousin Low Tang—but it was moot as to how many more he might have wounded or killed, given that he was overwhelmed at that point by half a dozen villagers and hacked to pieces by their sickles and scythes. The bloody tatters remaining of Jing were pounded into the hard ground under their sandals—before the six took their weapons to each other.