Breaking Point nf-4 Read online

  “Highly likely, though probably not for a while yet. I’ll keep you apprised.”

  Ventura drifted away, a man out for a late night stroll, meandering toward the next station, a couple hundred yards away.

  As he walked, he considered the client and the situation again. He had no problems with what the client was doing, that was his business and not Ventura’s, save how it affected the job. Ventura didn’t think much about morality. He had his own ethical system, and it didn’t match that of most citizens when it came to what they did, or why they did it. From his viewpoint, he was mostly, well… amoral about most things — when you had killed as many people as he had, the rules just didn’t seem to apply to you in quite the same way as they did to normal people. He knew what sociopaths were, and he wasn’t one. He had loved, had hated, had felt the usual emotions. He had been engaged once, but she had broken it off because she wasn’t ready to settle down. He had fathered a child in South America, and though it had been twenty years ago, he still sent support to the woman and his daughter, whom he had seen several times secretly, but never officially met. There were a couple of people he had deleted that he’d felt sorry for, and wished he hadn’t had to do them. So he wasn’t mentally disturbed or unstable, he had just gotten into a line of work that involved terminal violence, and had happened to be very good at it.

  Of course, he had been in business long enough to realize that most governments operated with the same kind of amorality he did in many — if not most — areas. Certainly in those areas where public scrutiny wasn’t likely. He had known federal prosecutors who had let multiple murderers go free so that they could make a case against major drug dealers. He had known intelligence officers who had looked the other way and allowed whole villages of innocent civilians to be killed because to do otherwise would have jeopardized some covert operation. He had known boy-soldiers who had cranked up their assault rifles and hosed grandmothers and babies into bloody pulp — for no other reason than because they had been having a real bad day. All of these people had convinced themselves they had been working for a greater good, that the end justified the means. That what they had done was, in fact, moral.

  Ventura did not try to fool himself that way.

  Protecting a man who had created some kind of mind-control device he wanted to sell to a foreign power for a lot of money was not much in the grand cosmic scheme of things. Ventura wasn’t going to get any piece of the man’s action, nor did he want it. He was hired to do a job, and he would do that. Money was not even a way to keep score, it didn’t mean anything, especially if you had enough of it tucked away to live the rest of your life without ever lifting a finger. No, it was the personal challenge, the achievement of goals you set for yourself, that mattered. When he was hired to kill somebody, he killed them. When he was hired to keep somebody alive, he kept them alive. Simple.

  Up here in the woods where he could command the lines of fire around his client, keeping him alive would be fairly easy. If another birdwatching group showed up, Ventura wouldn’t make any assumptions, but he certainly would consider them a potential threat.

  Outright assassination wasn’t likely, not yet, anyway. No, the worry would be kidnapping, torture, then execution. And it would be a lot harder to protect the man once they went back to civilization.

  Well. Worry about that later. A man with his mind too far into tomorrow was more likely to get blindsided by somebody today. You had to consider the future, of course, but you didn’t live there. Be in the moment, that was the way of it.

  Always.

  The second man in the surveillance unit watched Ventura approach him across the parking lot, lit by the yellow bug lights mounted on tall wooden posts. Some of the bugs were apparently too stupid to realize they couldn’t see the yellow light, for dozens of them swarmed the lamps, flitting around in ragged orbits, banging against the glass that covered the bulbs.

  The op disguised as a birder kept one hand under the untucked tails of an unbuttoned, oversized, short-sleeved shirt until he was sure it was Ventura heading toward him. Good. You never let your guard down when you were working. Never.

  13

  Thursday, June 9th

  Washington, D.C.

  Michaels could hardly believe it. “Toni! I’m glad to see you.”

  She nodded. “Can I come in?”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah, come in, come in.” He reached for her bag.

  “I got it,” she said.

  Inside, there was an awkward silence.

  “You want something to drink? Eat?” God, she looked great. It was all he could do to keep the baboonlike grin from taking over his face.

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  His stomach twisted and churned, but he said, “Yes.”

  “Why did you lie to me?”

  “I… I…”

  “You said you slept with her!”

  “Toni—”

  “She says you didn’t! Which is it, Alex?!”

  She was facing him squarely now, and her anger was a tangible thing in the room. “Did you have sex with Angela Cooper or not?”

  “No,” he said, his voice quiet.

  “Jesus Christ, Alex! What is the matter with you?!”

  He raised his hands palms up, then dropped them. “I–It’s hard to explain.”

  “Well, you are gonna explain it, right here and right now!”

  He nodded, and started to tell it.

  When he got to the end, she was shaking her head. “Why didn’t you tell me that was what happened?”

  He had had a lot of time to think about that, too much time. “Because I was ashamed.”

  “You turned down a gorgeous woman who wanted to jump your bones and you were ashamed?”

  “I shouldn’t have gone to supper with her, I shouldn’t have had the beer, and I sure as hell shouldn’t have gone to her apartment, shucked my clothes, and let her rub my back.” “All true. Why did you?”

  He’d had time to think about that one, too. “You and I were having some problems. I was rattled about the whole British situation, I wasn’t in control of work, of what was going on with us, there was all that crap about Megan and Susie and that private eye. Angela is an attractive, competent woman and she was interested in me. I was flattered. I know none of it excuses what I did, but just so you know.”

  “You’re an idiot,” she said.

  “I know. It never should have come up,” he said.

  “So to speak,” she said. She gave him a small grin, and a great weight left him, as if he had suddenly shrugged off a coat made of lead. “But that’s not what I meant. You’re an idiot for not telling me.”

  “When I saw you in the hotel lobby that morning, I didn’t think you would believe me. You were certain I had done it, and you didn’t want to talk about it, remember? You said you didn’t want to hear another word.”

  She frowned, as if trying to remember. “Did I say that?”

  “It doesn’t matter. The truth was, I was lying naked on a table with a naked woman straddling me and the desire was there.”

  “But you didn’t act on it.”

  “The thought is as bad as the deed.”

  She smiled again, shook her head. “Not on my planet, it isn’t. You felt guilty because in the moment you thought about it? You really are an idiot. If they could hang us for thinking, we’d all be pushing up daisies. You can’t always control what you think, only what you do. You could have saved us both a lot of grief if you had just told me, Alex, even if I told you not to.”

  “Yeah, well, I can see that now.”

  She reached for his hands, took them in hers. “Come here.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  And just like that, Michaels’s life was very, very good again.

  Friday, June 10th

  Anchorage, Alaska

  They were in the airport waiting for the Alaska Airlines flight to SeaTac to board when Morrison’s new phone cheeped. He froze for an instant. It was them! He look
ed at Ventura, then slipped the wireless headset on and adjusted the straw-microphone. “Yes?”

  A crisp, accentless voice said, “Good morning. I understand you have a used car for sale?”

  Morrison’s neck prickled with gooseflesh and he had a sudden urge to visit the nearest toilet. This was the phrase he had told them to use, and outside of the anonymous note he had posted into a security page run by the Chinese, nobody had been given the number of this particular phone, which he’d paid for in cash and registered under a phony name.

  He put his thumb over the mike. “It’s the Chinese,” he said to Ventura.

  Ventura looked at his watch. “Thirty seconds,” he said, pointing at the phone. “No more. Follow me.”

  Morrison nodded and stood. He moved his thumb from the mike as Ventura pulled his own com from his pocket and started talking into it quietly.

  “Yes, I have a car for sale.”

  “I would like to see it,” the man said. “When can we get together?”

  “Is your call number blocked?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  “I’ll look forward to it.”

  Morrison thumbed the discom button on the belt phone.

  Ventura said, “My people have scanned the incoming number, we have it. Go in there and put the phone in the trash.” He pointed at the men’s room.

  “Should I turn it off?”

  “Leave it on. They probably already know where you are, but it’ll give them something to look for.”

  Morrison headed for the bathroom. Ventura waved, and a pair of college-aged men dressed in shorts and T-shirts and backpacks went into the men’s room ahead of him. Ventura stayed out in the corridor.

  Making sure nobody was watching him, Morrison shoved the phone into the bin under the paper towel dispenser. Then he went and used the nearest urinal.

  When he exited, Ventura said, “There’s a car waiting in front of the airport for us. Let’s go.”

  “You think they can get here that fast?”

  “They can trace the phone from the carrier sig alone if you don’t bounce it — major national intelligence services have access to some very sophisticated equipment. They’ll probably send somebody. It won’t be a trio of longfingernailed Chinese dressed in colorful Mandarin silks and sporting Fu Manchu mustaches smiling and bowing and looking like the incarnation of the Yellow Peril. More likely it’ll be a busty Norwegian blond nurse helping a little old man with a cane hobble along — the last people you’d look at and think ‘Chinese intelligence.’ Certainly they have local agents within a few minutes of most major cities. Fortunately, Anchorage isn’t that big a town. If you used a decent remailer, they won’t backtrack your e-mail for a while, though probably they’ll get that soon. I’d expect them to know who you are within a day or two at most, even if you don’t call them back.”

  Morrison swallowed dryly. “The service I used guaranteed confidentiality.”

  Ventura smiled, looking at that moment like a human shark. “Sure, if somebody calls them on the phone and asks, they won’t say anything. But confidentiality goes right out the window when somebody puts the point of a sharp knife into your remailer’s back, over his kidney, and asks.”

  “They would do that?”

  “Sure. I would.” He flashed the smile again, and Morrison was in that moment as afraid of Ventura as he was the Chinese. Thank God the man was on his side.

  “They’ll know you’re at the airport, but since the phone isn’t in your name, they don’t know who you are, so they’ll look for the phone. When they find that, they’ll look for single men traveling alone. You’re under a pseudonym, ticketed as part of a group of three passengers, including two women, so they won’t get that immediately. With enough computing power, they can strain out all the flights leaving here today, and check on every passenger. Our phony IDs will hold up under a cursory scan, but if they can dig deep enough, they’ll figure out they are fake eventually, though that won’t really help them except to tell them we were going to Seattle, and that we weren’t on the plane.

  “We could probably get to your house in Washington before they get who you are. You are dealing with some serious people here, and it’s never been a matter of ‘if,’ but of ‘when.’ ”

  “My wife—”

  “—is being watched by my people, and I’ve just sent more ops to back them up. She’ll be safe. And we aren’t going there.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To a place where I can control access for the meeting.”

  “We’re going to drive there?”

  “No, we’re going to drive to a private airstrip and rent a plane. We want to be in the air as soon as we can.”

  Now that he had been put on alert, Morrison regarded the other people in the airport hallway with a newfound suspicion. Those young men with snowboards, that middle-aged gay couple laughing over a laptop, the tall man in a gray business suit carrying a briefcase. Any of them could be armed and out to collect him.

  “Frankly, I don’t think they will scramble the A-team to grab you, yet,” Ventura said, as if reading his mind. “They know about the tests you did in their country, what the effect was on their villages, and they know you know about it, but they don’t know for certain that you caused it. They’ll have to check you out. Once they believe you, that’s when we’ll have to be extremely careful.”

  Morrison’s mouth suddenly felt very dry indeed. He’d known this was coming, but it hadn’t seemed so… real before. The pit of his stomach felt like it did on a roller coaster. Well. There was nothing for it now. He was committed.

  “This isn’t quite what I expected,” Morrison said.

  “It never is,” Ventura said.

  14

  Friday, June 10th

  Portland, Oregon

  The boomerang championships were being held in Washington Park, which Tyrone thought was funny. They’d driven a couple thousand miles from Washington, D.C., to wind up in an Oregon park with the same name. It wasn’t like any park in his neighborhood, though. The place was a giant sprawl that contained a lot of hills, tall evergreen trees, the Portland Zoo, plus a forestry center and some other stuff. Up and away from the zoo parking, they had carved a flat field out of one of the meadows, big enough for three or four soccer teams to play at the same time. The field was covered with what Tyrone thought of as winter grass, trimmed short, like something you might find on a golf course, instead of the coarser Saint Augustine grass you found on a lot of lawns back home.

  “What a great venue,” Nadine said.

  “Yeah.”

  The contest didn’t start officially until tomorrow, and their event wasn’t until Sunday, but there were twenty or so throwers out on the green practicing. The warm summer air was full of colorful twirling ’rangs, blues and reds and oranges and greens, bright blurs looping back and forth.

  Tyrone turned to his father. “Okay?”

  His dad looked around, then nodded. “Looks safe enough. Mom and I will be back in a couple of hours.”

  Tyrone nodded back, already thinking about practice. His dad had rented a car and left the RV parked back at the hotel, a place called the Greenwood Inn. His parents wanted to go check out downtown Portland, but they didn’t want to leave Tyrone and Nadine alone until they had checked out the park. Given the numbers of families with small children, the lack of gang colors, or guys throwing beer bottles at each other, Dad had decided that Tyrone and Nadine were probably safe enough here in the middle of the afternoon.

  “You have your credit card?”

  “Yep.”

  “You got your phone?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “It’s on?”

  Tyrone rolled his gaze toward the heavens. He pulled the little phone from his belt and held it up so his father could see the display. “Yes, Dad.”

  What, did they think he was still a baby? This was Portland, not Baltimore. He almost said so, but realized that mi
ght not be the smartest thing, so he kept his mouth shut. He was learning that sometimes, that was the best strategy. If you don’t say it, they can’t nail you for it.

  Nadine started unpacking her ’rangs.

  “Go already, parental units, we’re fine here.”

  His mom smiled.

  Once they were gone, Tyrone and Nadine looked for a place to get started. There were circles drawn on the grass, but most of these were already taken. That didn’t matter — they had wash-away chalk; they could make their own circle.

  “Over there,” Nadine said. “Wind is from the south, but it’s almost calm, we’ll have plenty of room for hang.”

  “Hey, scope it. Isn’t that Jerry Prince?” He pointed.

  She looked. “I think so.”

  Best MTA guy in the world, the Internationals winner last year, and the world record holder. Word was, he threw eight minutes in practice on slackwind days, and had a witnessed-but-unofficial fourteen-minute flight.

  “Let’s watch him. Maybe we’ll learn something.”

  She laughed. “You will, for sure. I got style already.”

  “You got mouth, is what you got. I’m gonna be pushing three minutes here.” He waved his stopwatch at her.

  “You’re pushing a Dumpster full of horse pucky is what you are pushing. You are probably gonna trip and fall into it.”

  He laughed. She was funny.

  There were several events at most boomerang competitions — accuracy, distance, trick and fast catch, doubling, team throws. Like Tyrone, Nadine’s event was MTA — maximum time aloft — and the idea was to put a lightweight boomerang into the air and keep it there for as long as possible. There was no problem with judging this one — you put a stopwatch on them, and the longest time up won. They had dicked around with the rules for a while, trying different things in different competitions — you got two throws but one didn’t count, or you got three and you could pick the best — but now it was different. You got a practice throw once you were in the circle, but after that, it was one throw, period. You had to catch it when it came back, and you had to be inside the official circle for the catch, or the throw didn’t count. The record for somebody in Tyrone’s age group was just over three and a half minutes, but unofficially there were guys who had thrown into freakish wind conditions and kept a bird twirling for a lot longer. The longest unofficial time by anybody was more than eighteen minutes, though that kind of time came out of the professional adult ranks. It was hard to even imagine eighteen minutes aloft.