Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,2

fight it. His lawyer said he had a pretty good chance of winning in court, and Michaels’s knee-jerk reaction at first had been to do just that, fight it until his last breath, if need be. But he loved his daughter, and she was at a tender age, still years away from being a teenager. What would a nasty court battle do to her? The last thing he wanted to do was traumatize his only child.

Would it be better for her to have a mother and father— even a stepfather—there with her all the time? Washington, D.C., was a long way from Boise, and Michaels didn’t see his daughter as much as he wished. Had shuffling out to see him in the summers done some kind of irreparable harm to Susie? Would it make her life worse in the long run?

The big banked curve on the bike trail was just ahead, and rather than slow down, Michaels decided he was going to power his way through it. He upshifted and pumped even harder. But as he started into the curve, he saw a group of walkers ahead, residents of a local nursing home. They were spread almost all the way across the path. He didn’t have a warning horn on the trike, and he had a sudden fear that if he yelled for them to get out of the way, one of the old folks might well keel over from a heart attack.

He stopped pedaling and squeezed the handbrakes. The heavy-duty disk brakes on all three wheels squeaked from the sudden pressure, and there came the smell of burning circuit boards as the trike slowed dramatically. On a two-wheeler, he’d probably be going sideways now, but the trike just wobbled the rear end back and forth a little as it came almost to a stop.

None of the geriatric crowd, most of whom looked to be in their eighties, even noticed him until he crept around them at walking speed.

That would have been all he needed, to plow into Grandma and Granddaddy on his trike at full tilt. One more brick on the load.

And, of course, there was the big problem in his life: Toni.

She was still in England, practicing pentjak silat, the Indonesian martial art in which she was an adept, studying with that Carl somebody. There hadn’t been anything personal between Carl and Toni when Michaels had left the U.K., but—who knew about now? It had been more than a month. A lot could happen in a month.

Toni Fiorella was smart, beautiful, and could kill you with her hands if she felt so inclined. She’d been his deputy commander until she’d quit. And she’d been his lover—until she’d found out about his indiscretion with the blond MI-6 agent Angela Cooper.

Near indiscretion, Alex, his little voice said. We didn’t actually do anything, remember?

Yeah, we did. It never should have gotten to the point where I even thought about it.

We were tired, half-drunk, and Cooper was working at it—the massage and all—

No excuse.

It was an argument he’d had with himself a thousand times in the last six weeks. With a thousand variations. If only Toni hadn’t gone under the channel to France. If only he hadn’t agreed to a beer and fish and chips with Angela. If only he hadn’t agreed to go to her place to let her massage his back. If, if, if.

It was all pointless speculation now. And he couldn’t lie to himself about it, no matter how much he wished it.

He thought about bringing the trike back up to speed, but it suddenly didn’t seem worth the effort. The Chinese place was not that far away. It wasn’t as if he was in any kind of hurry now, was it? Or was hungry. Or gave a rat’s ass about getting back to work on time.

Even the thought of getting a new project car hadn’t given him any great joy. He’d done a Plymouth Prowler and a Mazda MX-5, a Miata, but the garage at his condo sat empty now. The Miata had been the car in which he’d first kissed Toni. He couldn’t keep it after she’d quit on him and stayed in England.

He blew out a sigh.

You sure are a sorry, self-pitying bastard, aren’t you? Snap out of it! Suck it up! Be a man!

“Fuck you,” he told his inner voice. But that part of him was right. He wasn’t a sensitive New Age kinda guy who got all weepy in sad movies. In his world,