Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, Steve Perry
Breaking Point
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We’d like to acknowledge the assistance of Martin H. Greenberg, Larry Segriff, Denise Little, John Helfers, Robert Youdelman, Esq., and Tom Mallon, Esq.; Mitchell Rubenstein and Laurie Silvers at Hollywood.com, Inc.; the wonderful people at Penguin Putnam Inc., including Phyllis Grann, David Shanks, and Tom Colgan. As always, we would like to thank Robert Gottlieb of the William Morris Agency, our agent and friend, without whom this book would never have been conceived, as well as Jerry Katzman, Vice Chairman of the William Morris Agency, and his television colleagues. But most important, it is for you, our readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.
EPIGRAPH
“And who wrote the tune, you dare to ask? You know who wrote it— it’s the Devil’s own music, hot and sweet, and surely damned will be the man who turns his ear toward it. ”
PART ONE
All Politics Are Local
PROLOGUE
The sun rose from the gray sea and cast a fitful light upon the wrinkled features of Old Zang where he sat on the weathered bench outside the house, leaning forward slightly on his cane. He was often up with the sun these days to enjoy the dawn, knowing he would not have so many more he could afford to waste them. But instead of making him sad, the thought made him angry.
This day seemed somehow sharper than normal. His clouded sight was clearer, his hearing keener, and even the wan rays upon his skin felt somehow more intense than usual.
Old Zang had but recently moved to the village of Daru. A mere dozen years or so ago, a blink of an eye for a man his age, he had been forced to leave his real home, which was flooded by the monstrous dam project that forever altered the face of China’s rivers. At ninety-four, he had outlived his wife, several of his children, and even a few of his grandchildren, and he did not like it here, staying with one of the grandchildren he had not outlived. Oh, his room was comfortable enough, the bed soft — not an inconsequential thing when one’s bones were as old as his — but the village was a mud hole of a place and not where one wished to depart from the Earth to join one’s ancestors.
On the mainland across the stormy Formosa Strait from Taiwan, on the coast just north of Quanzhou, Daru was peopled with many elderly residents, some victims of the cursed dam, such as himself, some who had actually lived and grown old here. Save for a few younger souls, fishermen mostly, it was a place of old men and women waiting to die.
Thinking about his forced relocation brought Zang to anger again, and this time, the rage seemed to fill him with a hot glow, from his feet to his face, staining red even his thoughts. How dare they do such a thing? The foolish communists who saw everything in terms of their immoral philosophy had ruined the country in but half a lifetime. He had hoped to live long enough to see the children of Mao plowed under, but he was beginning to realize it was not to be. And this angered him even more. He was old, old! He had worked hard all his long life, and what was his reward? To be shunted to a half-wit grandson’s home in a mud hole village unfit for pigs? It was not right.
Zang gripped the heavy cane tightly, and the veins in his hands stood out to join the tendons and gnarled arthritic joints under paper-thin and brown-spotted skin. His rage enveloped him like a silkworm’s cocoon, warming his chilly flesh. No, it was not right!
His sow of a granddaughter, only thirty-four and already so fat she could hardly waddle, lumbered up the graveled path to stand in front of him, her doughy hands on her massive hips, blocking the sun. She said, “Why are you out here again, Grandfather Zang? You will catch pneumonia! I would be happy if you did and died, but Ming-Yang would be distressed, and I will not have it! Get up and come inside, right now!”
The sow seemed fairly angry herself, which was unlike her. Usually she was merely torpid. Dense as a post and twice as stupid, Zang reflected, and the best his idiot grandson Ming could do for himself. A shame.
“You are blocking the sun,” Zang said. “Stand aside.”
“Are you grown deaf as well as stupid, you ancient fart-maker? I said, ‘Get up!’ ” And with that, she reached out, as if to grab him and physically drag him into the house.
This was a mistake. With a speed and strength that surprised him, Zang snapped the cane up and jabbed it into the sow’s belly.
“Oof!” she said, as she leaned forward, grabbing at her stomach.
Zang stood, pulled the cane back as if it were an axe, and delivered a mighty blow to the side of her head. The bone made a wet, but satisfying crack! and the sow went down in a heap.
Ha-ha!
Zang leaned over and smashed the cane into the sow’s body with all the strength he possessed. Ah, this was good. He hit her again. Better. And again. Better still!
He was not the man he had been, but there were still a few moves left in him, and the sense of rage he felt continued to burn as he beat upon the prostrate and unresponsive sow. Block his sun, would she? He would show her!
He grew tired after a while, and decided to rest before resuming his chore. As he stood there contemplating the sow, he chanced to look up, and thus saw his idiot grandson charging toward him, a three-tined pitchfork in hand.
Amazing, since his grandson was the meekest of men, who would step around a beetle to avoid crushing it, who let others prepare his chum for him because he could not stand to hurt the bait fish, and who had never in Zang’s memory uttered even a harsh word in anger at another human being.
“Old fool! I will kill you!” Ming-Yang screamed.
Old Zang smiled wolfishly. “Yes? Come and try, wiper of asses!” He raised his cane to meet the charge.
Zang was paying attention to how he planned to dance around the fork’s tines to strike Ming, but even so, with his heightened senses, he was aware of his great-grandson Cheng, aged thirteen, rushing up behind his father, a gleaming fish gaff lifted over his head.
Now, who was Cheng planning to skewer?
Well. It did not matter, did it? Zang would deal with him in due course, just as he would deal with every other person in this mud hole of a village.
He would kill them all.
Finally, a happy thought. He laughed aloud.
1
Alex Michaels pedaled his recumbent trike along the wide bike path between Net Force HQ and the Chinese restaurant where he sometimes had lunch, pumping hard. The day was hot and muggy, despite a cloudy overcast, and sweat had already drenched his T-shirt and spandex shorts. He shifted up another gear as he zipped past a trio of Marine officers from the base, jogging along at a pretty good clip themselves. Ordinarily, he enjoyed riding the trike, feeling the burn in his legs and lungs, knowing he was working his muscles and cooking off that half carton of Häagen-Dazs he’d eaten the night before. Ordinarily, the commander of Net Force enjoyed a lot of things, but like his feet toe-clipped into the pedals, a lot of what he had been doing lately had been no more than going through the motions.
Work was pretty good. Aside from the ten thousand usual small fish Net Force had to school and round up, there weren’t any major problems in the world of computer crime just at the moment. Nothing like the mad Russian who’d wanted to take over the planet, or the senator’s aide who wanted to buy up the world bit by bit, or even the dotty English lord who’d wanted to bring back the glory days of the Empire. Congress hadn’t cut him off at the knees lately, and his boss, the new FBI director, was sometimes hardheaded, but basically not too bad, and she mostly left him alone.