Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,35

the right what it’s doing? Happens all the time, all over. State doesn’t tell the CIA. The spooks don’t tell the Army. We’re part of the FBI, and the feebs don’t tell us a whole lot of things. Why would things be any better in China? That’s assuming the investigators aren’t part of the cover-up.”

“And why it is our problem, Jay? How does this end up floating in our punch bowl?”

“When you asked me to poke around in that HAARP thing, this came in almost immediately. It rang a bell. You remember the guy you told me about who came by while I was camping. The scientist from HAARP?”

“Morrison, right.”

“Uh-huh. Well, he mentioned something about mind control and low-frequency radio waves.”

“He said it wasn’t feasible.”

“Maybe not. Or maybe it is. Maybe the Chinese were the ones poking around in the HAARP computers and maybe they swiped it. It just seemed awfully coincidental, given that this was exactly the kind of thing somebody would want to do if they could do it.”

“The Chinese?”

“Possible. They have some people who are pretty good hackers. Maybe the HAARP guys found some piece of the puzzle and the Chinese knew where to use it. Nothing for certain, and it’s kind of a stretch, but I’d check it out.”

Michaels nodded. “I hope you are wrong. I hope nobody else makes the connection and thinks it is our problem to solve. All right. Find out what you can. If this thing in China is connected to it, I don’t want us to be caught flatfooted. At the very least, we need to be able to say we’re investigating it if somebody should ask.”

“Gotcha, Boss. I’m on the case.”

After Jay left, Michaels took several deep breaths. Let it be some virus they couldn’t find and not something they swiped from a U.S. computer. Please. I really don’t need this right now. Or ever ...

12

Thursday, June 9th

Washington, D.C.

It was well after dark when Toni’s plane landed at Dulles. She’d had to switch from the jumbo jet to a smaller craft in New York, and she knew she’d catch hell if her mother found out she had been at JFK and hadn’t called the Bronx to at least say hello, but she couldn’t deal with that yet. Her mother would want to know all about it, what had happened with Alex, and even Guru would need more details than Toni was ready to provide. She’d thought the story was over, but maybe it wasn’t, and until she had a better sense of things, she didn’t want to start downloading it into sympathetic ears. She needed a girlfriend for that, anyhow, somebody who could listen to the gory details—not her mother or her elderly teacher. Mama Fiorella had raised a houseful of children, mostly sons, and with six kids, she certainly knew about sex, but knowing it and talking about it were two different things. Toni remembered a discussion she’d had with one of her older brothers when she’d been about nineteen. He’d been asking about women, when their mother had wandered into the room. Mama heard the words “female orgasm” and disappeared faster than Houdini stoked on methamphetamines.

No, the conversation about Alex and sex and love would have to wait until she could pay a visit to one of her college buds, Dirisha Mae, or Mary Louise, women she’d kept in touch with since school. Women who had been there and done it themselves, and had come back to cry on her shoulder about it. The Man War, they had dubbed it in the dorm when they’d lived there. Some battles you won, some you lost, but the war itself never ended.

The cab ride through the sticky summer night to Alex’s was incredibly fast, as of course it would be, since she was suddenly not in a real hurry to get there. Back in London, thousands of miles away, this had seemed urgent and absolutely necessary. The closer she got, the less brilliant the idea seemed. Just showing up on Alex’s doorstep, no call, no warning? What if he wasn’t home? What if he didn’t want to talk to her?

What if he wasn’t alone?

That had just come to her for the first time. What if he had a woman in his bed and they were giggling and playing games under the sheets?

The grinning, green-eyed monster popped up like magic in her mind and chortled its nasty laugh. This jealousy crap was really hard to take. It wasn’t like somebody coming