Breaking Point

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 Haagen-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.

Work was fine.  It was his personal life that was an absolute wreck.

He guided the trike to the right, to make sure the two bicyclers coming

from the other direction side-by-side had plenty of room to get by. The

couple, an older man and woman, waved as he went by.  He gave them a

quick lift of his hand in return.

His ex-wife, Megan, had gotten engaged, and was petitioning the courts

in Idaho for sole custody of their daughter, Susie.  Her new love

wanted to adopt the girl.  Susie liked her mom's new friend, which was

more than Michaels could say.  That he had decked the man at a family

Christmas gathering had not helped the situation any--even though it

had felt pretty good at the time.

Michaels could 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 hand brakes  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 I 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