Free Breaking Point by Dana Haynes Page A

She was casual in a sweater, jeans. and canvas mocs, but you could still tell she had a killer body.
    She was spoken for, too: the guy with the cowboy boots and black hair going salt-and-pepper around his ears, sitting to her left, shoulder-to-shoulder, smiling.
    The redhead and the guy in cowboy boots looked like they were in love. Andrew, an unrepentant romantic, liked that. The guy in the scuffed boots said something and the redhead belted out a most unladylike laugh.
    When was the last time he and Renee had been together, laughing? Andrew couldn’t remember. It had been … some time. He missed her. He missed the notion of us.
    Andrew reached into his ever-present saddlebag-shaped pack and pulled out a leather portfolio. It contained a legal pad with the speech he was still spiffing up—a speech he was going to deliver tomorrow at the Northwest Tech Expo in Seattle.
    He sat with two of the Starting Five: Vejay Mehta to his right, doing Sudoku, Christian Dean across from him, devouring an enormous sweet roll and flipping through the Annals of Biomedical Engineering the way other travelers were flipping through Us Weekly .
    Andrew had told these guys—with whom he had toiled for a decade and a half—that he didn’t want to make weapons. Christian had sighed with relief. “Dude. Me, either.” Vejay, ever the pragmatist, mentally watched his profit sharing drop, but shrugged and said, “It’s your call.”
    The other two chief engineers—Terri Loew and Antal Borsa—had been angry. They had embraced Renee’s idea of turning the company into a Pentagon subcontractor. In the end, they, too, acknowledged that Malatesta, Inc., was merely an extension of Andrew Malatesta’s genius. As he went, so went the company.
    And in about thirty hours, the rest of the microelectronics world would find out at the Northwest’s largest high-tech trade show.
    Upon landing, Andrew planned to call his college roommate and old friend, Amy Dreyfus, and get her take on how best to burn Barry Tichnor and Halcyon/Detweiler for screwing, illegally, with his weapons designs.
    LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
    Barry used his swipe card and an eight-digit alphanumeric code to enter the computer room buried deep within CIA headquarters. That he even owned such a swipe card would give heartburn to most of the Agency brass.
    The room was empty save for a bank of computers, a communications array, and Agent Jenna Scott.
    The tall blonde removed her narrow, red-framed reading glasses, looked up from the piles of official reports she had been scanning. Barry noted the pencil marks in the margins. She wore a padded headset, but removed it when she saw him.
    â€œHi. Thanks for coming over.”
    He pulled up a chair, adjusted his limp, brown necktie. “Do we have the plane?”
    The agent nodded. “I handled the hacking myself. I’ve owned the booking computer for a couple of days. Anyone buying a ticket before that, I can’t control. I did manage to alert TSA about a possible drug-runner on board. It means all of the luggage will be removed, checked, and reloaded. If I’ve calculated right, some of the passengers will opt to take another, quicker flight to Seattle. I can’t keep everyone off, but I should reduce the body count quite a bit.” She shrugged.
    â€œVery good. Thank you. You wanted to tell me something, but before you do, I need to make sure you are fully aware of the situation.”
    Jenna had been cheating, sitting forty-five degrees away from him. But she swiveled her chair fully now and nodded.
    â€œSome Americans are going to die.”
    She nodded again. “We understand that.”
    â€œIf we thought there was any other way to stop this self-centered bastard, we would have.”
    â€œOf course. Still, this does give you your beta test.”
    â€œExactly. Thank you. I knew you’d understand.” Barry cleaned his thick lenses. “Now,