Free Point and Shoot by Duane Swierczynski Page A

was this ocean, and out of it sprang all life as we know it. Long after Charlie Hardie was gone, as well as the rest of life on earth, there would be this ocean. Charlie Hardie didn’t matter at all. If he were to slip under the surface the ocean would not give a damn.
    Thoughts like these did not help Hardie’s situation. He started to feel faint. He couldn’t tell if his chest was pounding from sheer exhaustion or from the onset of a heart attack. Rational, sane worry gave way to trapped animal panic. This was not good. He shouldn’t have left the vessel. At least he could have drowned in familiar surroundings, and somebody would maybe find his fish-cleaned skeleton someday thousands of feet below the surface …
    And then his weak, fatigued, oxygen-starved muscles finally gave out, and he slipped under.

12
    Hey, Rowlf—we’re getting the old gang back together
.
    —Kermit the Frog,
The Muppets
    T HE CABAL NOTICED the problem with their spacecraft immediately. You don’t spend billions on a project only to forget about it.
    But notification wasn’t instantaneous.
    The whole point of this manned satellite was to render it unreachable by traditional wireless means, keeping the prize within safe and secure. But of course you had to be able to track the thing. An ordinary citizen with a telescope, a pen, and a piece of paper could track it. Which is who they employed—an amateur yet highly talented satellite tracker who would do this for fun. They even paid him a modest salary. The tracker saw the anomaly and immediately phoned it in. That call was forwarded to Abrams’s office. The tracker was told to continue tracing the satellite’s errant path, which he did dutifully, right up until the moment it fell out of the sky.
    Which pissed Abrams off.
    This entire operation was supposed to be a no-brainer, a simple way to contain two highly volatile elements far, far out of the hands of enemy forces during these challenging days.
    Now this whole thing was going to become a highly annoying task, on top of the other annoying tasks she found herself facing every day. She could just
feel
it.
    All of this was Doyle’s fault—that stubborn savant cocksucker. He was the gadget-and-gears freak, and Abrams had the nagging suspicion that it was going to end in disaster for them all.
    If Abrams’d had her way, Charlie Hardie’s lifeless body would have been fed through a wood chipper and used to fertilize at least a dozen different states. “Unkillable Chuck” my ass—the man had caused too many problems as it was, and cost their movement untold billions. And Doyle wanted to throw
another
billion after him?
    “You sure this isn’t about revenge?”
    She’d asked Doyle this as he was still recovering in a private hospital back east after his last encounter with Hardie. Doyle had been beaten senseless and hooked up to life support in the trunk of a car as Hardie drove down the Pacific Coast Highway. The only respite from the relentless nausea were stops so that Hardie could open the trunk, interrogate him, then beat him some more.
Doyle, buddy, we’re going to Hollywood
.
    “No,” Doyle had said, clearly lying. “He’s a resource. We don’t squander resources, remember?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    Doyle had sighed. “Fine. Perhaps there is a small, insignificant element of revenge. The man
did
leave me to die in the trunk of a car.”
    In the blazing sun of a long-term car lot at a California airport, no less.
    But instead of destroying their enemies, which was more or less Cabal m.o. going back decades, Doyle had talked Abrams into sparing Hardie’s life temporarily, squeezing some use out of him. Doyle had been talking about his fantasy of an “unbreakable vault” for many years now, to the point where Abrams realized she probably signed off on the venture just so he’d shut up about it already. For Doyle, the idea of an “unkillable” man inside his “unbreakable vault” became an obsession, an idée fixe, and it