Breakpoint (13 page)

After he toweled dry with the coarse, brown paper towels, he walked into the toilet stall and withdrew the Sig from under his biker jacket. It had no safety. He cocked it to put a round into the chamber and then thumbed the decocking lever. As he reentered the poolroom, Jimmy noticed a young man standing at the bar with two poured glasses of beer. He matched the description of TTeeLer. “Hey, didn't you use to hang out at the Dugout?” Jimmy said as he walked up to the bar.

“Long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away. Or at least until they kicked me out,” TTeeLer shot back, turning to view the room behind him. He did not offer to shake hands.

Jimmy nodded to the bartender. “Bag of pretzels.” Then he pointed to a table in the corner, away from the door. “Let's sit down.”

Opening the pretzel bag onto the table, Jimmy did his ingratiating teenager look over at the bartender. As he did, he said softly to TTeeLer, “My name is Jimmy. I am an armed police officer here on federal business. I can get you out of here safely, but we'll want to talk with you once we get somewhere secure.”

“We can talk here if you're not recording this. But if you're wearing a wire, forget it. I am not incriminating myself,” TTeeLer insisted.

“Calm down. Talk quieter. No, I am not wearing a wire. I am here to get you out, safely.”

TTeeLer shook his head, “Not tonight. In the morning. I have to spend the night with Naomi. She's this single mother in the apartment next to mine. I want her and the kid to follow me out of this shithole town. And I have a lot to explain to her tonight.”

Jimmy watched two off-duty Marines playing pool. “It's not safe to go back there if someone has made you while you have been out of the building. This is a small town.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” TTeeLer said, hanging his head down. “But I think the goons probably stopped looking for me in town. Last thing they think I'd do is stay here.”

“Okay, so let's talk. Who are they?” Jimmy asked.

“I don't know who the big guys are. I just see the local staff. Mainly Americans. Goons for security and some cyber-savvy crooks, who get instructions and ideas from some off-planet being, L.A., Moscow, I don't know where. A higher intelligence than them, anyway.” TTeeLer was very stressed out and twitchy. His dark blond hair was stringy. Jimmy took him to be about twenty-two, maybe a few years older.

Jimmy put his head in his left hand, obscuring his mouth to anyone looking at him. With his right, he felt for the Sig on his waist and he kept an eye on the door. “So let's start with the money. What did they have you do to raise money?”

“Usual, at first. Phishing messages for bank accounts and credit cards. Then we forgot about the banks and hacked into the credit-card clearing companies, pick up a couple of hundred thousand names, card numbers, socials. Big bucks. Then we started dropping this app, Ethercap, onto cable TV and DSL systems in wealthy neighborhoods. Remotely, of course. Cable or DSL, they're nothing more than a local area ethernet. Then we'd pick up every e-mail, every web page anybody on the street saw or sent. Some kinky stuff, but also big online stock-trading accounts. Easy to pick off their passwords with a keystroke logger. Open a bank account in the Caribbean. Sell the stock, bank transfer the money out. Easy pickings.”

Jimmy kept smiling.

“Then we hit on this sweet deal with the music sharing systems, peer-to-peer. Turns out in every company, some idiot has downloaded music sharing software. You just go online and instead of searching for ‘Beatles Greatest Hits,' you type in ‘Merger Plans' or ‘New Product Plans' or ‘Personnel Files' and you get the company's secrets right through their firewall.” At that thought, TTeeLer smiled.

“All of which you then sell on the Net,” Jimmy mumbled. “Soxster said something about infrastructure? What's that all about?”

“That's where it all started to get all weird. They were having us hack into the power company and shit. Map the network. Leave a trapdoor to get back in easy. SCADA systems. Railroads, pipeline companies, Army bases. I couldn't see the money in it, but hey, they still paid me the big bucks, some in cash and some in direct deposit. Deposits came from a bank in Kuwait.”

Jimmy sipped slowly at the beer, not wanting to have to go back to the bar or ask the bartender to come to the table. “But that's not why you left, went AWOL.”

“Not AWOL, I quit. I just didn't tell them I quit, because my guess is that it's the Hotel California, you can never leave.” More off-duty Marines came into the room and got cue sticks and beers. “No, I left when I heard them talking about needing to hack in somewhere to change the formula on something. He said, ‘It'll kill 'em all, hundreds, maybe thousands.' Listen, whatever your real name is, Jimmy, I will steal from you in cyberspace if you are stupid enough to let me, but I am no killer. Nobody's giving me the needle in some state pen. So I waited for the next cash disbursement and left the reservation a week later.”

A Marine had started to hit on the bartender and was now getting yelled at by about three others, confirming Foley's suspicion that her husband was in the Corps. Things looked like they would settle down peacefully. “Where is the reservation?”

“Near town, not far, but outside. I got out by hopping in the back of a delivery van. Hopped out at his next stop about twenty minutes later and I was in town. They never let us go into town since the day we showed up out here. But the reservation is big. Lots of buildings, satellite dishes, runway. Shit, man, they even had little UAVs, RPVs, you know, planes without pilots. And a lotta guns.”

Jimmy was using his detective training in interrogation. Just let the subject talk. Do not make a big deal out of what you want to know, pick it up in pieces, come back to it. “So the formula they're going to change so that a bunch of people die. Any idea—”

TTeeLer hit the table with his fist. “Man, I have racked my brain. I mean, the whole reason I hung around for a week after I got my cash was just to see if I could find out what shit they're planning, but I got nothing. And I think some of them were getting suspicious of me askin' about things.”

“Ever see any Chinese? Russians? Arabs?” Jimmy queried.

“Russians, yeah, but only a few at our place. But I'm sure there are other places, doing other shit. We were just here because they were really interested in what was going on at the base, but they wouldn't let me in on that shit. Enough for tonight, man. I'll tell you more when I get the written deal, the no prosecution deal. Tomorrow.”

Jimmy tried to think if he had offered him that. “Sure. Tomorrow. When and where?”

TTeeLer looked around the pool hall. “There's a 7-Eleven near Amboy and Adobe. Ten o'clock tomorrow morning. There'll be three of us, including a kid who's four. And bring some help, buddy, just in case.” Jimmy Foley watched for any reactions in the room as TTeeLer walked toward the back of the hall, then ducked through the kitchen door. At least, Jimmy thought, the kid was smart enough not to walk out the front door, but not smart enough to stay out of trouble.

Almost a half hour later, Jimmy looked up from his PDA to see Dr. Mark Rathstein coming toward him. “Foley, sorry I'm late.” He was trim, in a blue polo shirt and khakis, with graying hair and glasses. “Good to see you. Long time. You look great. Welcome to Twentynine stumps.”

“Dr. Rathstein, didn't expect you would want to meet in a pool hall,” Jimmy said, thrusting a hand out. Mark Rathstein, he knew from his Marine days, was a Navy doctor who also had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering.

“I come here to work when I want to get away from the office,” the doctor said, and then yelled to the bartender, “Two Coors Lights.”

“When I saw you were coming, I checked that it was you, then got myself assigned as your host,” Rathstein said. “You left NYPD?”

“No, Doc, just got assigned down in D.C. to work with the spooks for a year, to learn how Feds think. Think of it as field research. Supposed to increase my chance for promotion. Great to see you, too, and thanks for volunteering to show me around. So, what is this place out here in the middle of nowhere?”

The doctor waited while the waitress deposited two cold mugs of Coors and a bowl of popcorn. “How's your dad doing? Great guy. Did he retire yet, or is he still doing law at seventy-plus?”

Jimmy winced. “Thanks for asking. Yeah, Dad retired. Had to. Fast-onset Alzheimer's. They can't do anything for him. He's in a home near my brother's on Long Island.”

“Sorry, Jim. My mother went that way,” Rathstein whispered. He took a small sip of froth and beer. “So you asked to see the base here? Marine desert training base. Amazing you never got stuck here before going to Iraq. What we're doing at the hospital is an extension of what we did a few years ago in Bethesda. Back then we were giving Marines from Iraq new arms and legs, lightweight, electronic, tied directly to the brain. Now we're giving them new arms and legs before they've lost the ones they were born with, so they don't get shot up in the first place.”

Jimmy leaned across the table. “Doc, listen, as a jarhead, we all owe you guys a world of thanks. The body armor in Iraq saved lives by protecting our trunks, but not our limbs. We had more guys lose limbs and live than in any war before. Thousands. What you guys at Bethesda did with your gizmos was make those lives worth living.” Jimmy toasted him, clinking his mug against the doctor's. “How's this new stuff work?”

Dr. Rathstein beamed, excited to share the story of his work. “Think spacesuit. Not just Kevlar plates here and there, but the entire body is inside a suit that is heated and air conditioned. The suit monitors body functions and reports problems, fixes some of them by itself with medication patches and injections. There's liquid nutrition supplied. And, of course, the whole thing is bullet-and flame-resistant and Netcentric, connected with an internet address.”

“Bullet resistant ain't bulletproof,” Jimmy said while dripping yellow mustard on a pretzel. “Sounds like a heavy load to be luggin' 'round on top of all the weapons and shit they have to carry.”

“That's the whole point!” Rathstein chuckled. “All of their limbs are server motor–assisted. They can run faster than a sprinter, throw a ball farther than the best quarterback, jump higher than a track-and-field star. The exoskeleton suit lets them carry over a hundred and twenty pounds of additional equipment on outside hooks with little or no effect on speed or motion. A few battalions of them could beat any army in the world.”

Foley put down his beer mug and stared at the doctor. “Shit. We're talking Imperial storm troopers, like in
Star Wars,
with the helmets and all?”

“Sort of. The suits come in green or desert camouflage, not bright white like in the movies. Yes, they have helmets, with air filtration and built-in radios, intranet connectivity that you can see using a visor that also does night vision and telescopic. The listening system has ‘dog ear' parabolics. And you literally have eyes in the back of your head, because there's a camera in the rear of the helmet that allows you to see what's behind you.” This time Rathstein took a gulp of beer. “Don't you want to ask if you can take a leak?”

Jimmy laughed. “I assumed you could do that. You probably recycle it into Gatorade so the gyrenes don't short circuit your spacesuits. What I was puzzling out was how you could take a dump.”

“That is still a problem, I admit,” the doctor said in a more subdued manner. “But with liquid nutrition and certain medications, the intervals when that becomes necessary can be extended to seventy-two hours or so, for now.”

Jimmy almost choked on his mouthful of beer. “That's great, Doc, now the Army guys will be right when they say us jarheads are all full of shit.”

“No, no. The Army has a similar suit under test at Fort Irwin over by Barstow. Ours is better,” Rathstein said, his finger jabbing at the air. “And we have two companies here wearing them in field conditions. They have only one company. We've been in full suit for weeklong operations, with several changes of batteries, of course. They've only gone three days at a time in the suit. Tonight we're going to prove ours is better in a head on test. We're playing them in baseball. And you have a seat on the first-base line.”

1750 PST
U.S. Marine Desert Training Facility
Twentynine Palms, California

They drove onto the base in Dr. Rathstein's hydrogen-cell Chevy Suburban. He had a visitor's pass ready for Foley. A few minutes inside the sprawling base, they came to a halt before a sand dune and got out. The sun had just set and there was still pale orange light in the west, reflecting off the few clouds on the horizon. In the east the sky was already black and the stars were brightening. Jimmy remembered now how cold it could get in the desert on a winter's night. And how quiet it could be.

“What's here?” Jimmy asked as they walked toward the dune.

“The baseball game,” Rathstein said, as though it were obvious. “The Marine Superskels against the Army Spacetroopers.” He continued to walk up the dune.

At the top of the dune, Foley looked down into the shadows. He made out a few tables on the left with people sitting at them, and a single bench with four people on the right. They appeared to be watching something, but there was nothing to see. He blinked and stared out as far as possible. In the dusk, in the distance, he made out what might be a man standing in the sand. Then he heard a sharp ping, the sound of a ball hitting a metal baseball bat.