Breakpoint by Richard A. Clarke

Author:Richard A. Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

0630 PST

Marine Desert Training Facility

Twentynine Palms, California

Jimmy Foley had risen early at the visiting officer’s quarters, donned his running gear, and set out to do five miles in the cold morning desert. He needed the exercise, but he also wanted a chance to think. As he stretched outside the VOQ, he realized that it was now four years since he had run the New York Marathon. He had finished in three hours and nine minutes. Not bad; it had qualified him for the Boston Marathon, which he had never gotten around to running. Now, four years on, he wondered if he could do it in under three-thirty. He headed out, thinking again about the idea that the rich would soon be able to buy spin-off technology from the Pentagon, exoskeleton suits, giving them great strength and tying their bodies into cyberspace for diagnostics. He laughed out loud as he ran, thinking about what his new friend Soxster could do with that.

He had woken up twice during the night, anxious about the meet with TTeeLer this morning. The FBI’s L.A. field office had taken charge of the planning after Jimmy had reported in to the Intelligence Analysis Center and they had passed word to FBI headquarters. Already FBI personnel were working behind the counter at the 7-Eleven, the dry cleaners next door, the used-car lot across the street. He wondered whether the Feebs would get anything more out of TTeeLer than he had. Chances were he would just clam up until a U.S. Attorney gave him immunity in writing. The running was coming easier; he was moving smoothly down the road. The anxieties of the night were giving way to the rising endorphins from the run, but he realized that he was going to have to find his own way to geo-locate the ranch where TTeeLer had worked. Or maybe Soxster could do it.

As he turned a corner by a barracks, Jimmy saw a company of Marines jogging toward him, returning from their morning five-mile run. Despite the cold, they were in tan shorts and T-shirts, not spacesuits. As he approached them, he yelled out, “Hoo-rah!” Some gave a weaker “Hoo-rah” in return. He missed the camaraderie, the certainty of being a Marine. He did not miss Iraq. If he had had an exoskeleton suit in Iraq, he thought, he might never have been injured, might never have lost that year in hospitals in Haditha, in Ramstein, in Bethesda. He might still be in the Marines, be a major by now.

But he had found a good place in the NYPD. And he had found Janice. Never thought he’d marry an investment banker, but he had and it was working. She wasn’t clingy or possessive. She gave him his space. They had their separate careers; some people thought they had their separate lives, but they were wrong. How many married couples could still have videophone sex like they had had last night? When they were actually together in the same place, it was even better, perfect.

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