Breaking Point Page 14

  Well, that was not his problem at the moment.

  Jay found the lockbox under the bar that the boss’s report had mentioned. He removed a pair of latex gloves from his satchel, slipped them on, and bent to examine the box. He saw the scratches showing that the padlock had been tampered with. Humming to himself, Jay removed a small aerosol container from the satchel, aimed it at the lock, then sprayed it with a fine mist of dry powder. He blew the excess dust off, then used a second aerosol can on the lock, this one a kind of liquid glue.

  Yeah, okay, so he brought maybe a little more attention to detail to his constructs than was necessary. A man had to have some standards.

  Several fingerprints appeared as the chemical reaction from the two sprays took place. Jay pulled a clear strip of transfer tape from a roll in his handy satchel, carefully pressed it against the lock, peeled it off, and stuck it onto a white plastic card.

  Just for fun, he took his pick gun and a torsion tool and opened the padlock. Took all of about six seconds, a piece of cake.

  The lockbox had stacks of papers, money, some coins—all virtual representations of various kinds of electronic files. Jay picked up a couple of papers and scanned them, but he wasn’t as interested in what they had to say as he was in who had broken in before him. He closed the box, relocked the padlock, and headed for the back door.

  He would take the prints back to the office and check them. Of course, what he would really be doing was back-tracking e-codes and running down servers and all, looking to see who had left traces of their visit. If the thief had been stupid enough to do it barehanded, Jay would have him. Probably he hadn’t been that stupid, but you never knew. Generally speaking, if crooks were smart enough so they wouldn’t get caught, they were smart enough to make more money honestly than they could by thievery. Not always. Some were smart, but lazy. Some liked the adrenaline rush of doing something illegal. Jay remembered one case where the head of a large computer software corporation got his thrills hacking into private computer systems and copying crap, like employee addresses or financial records, stuff he could have legally gotten elsewhere. He didn’t even use the material, just stashed it in a booty file. The thief never did any damage, and never took anything of value—it was the electronic equivalent of petty shoplifting, and if he’d wanted, he could have bought most of the companies he plundered. When Jay had run him down, the corporate prez had laughed, paid the fine, and was probably back at it the next day. A thrill junkie.

  Jay ran into guys like that all the time, hackers who thought they were faster or smarter or better, and who wanted to test themselves. He could understand that—if he hadn’t gotten into Net Force, he’d probably be doing it himself. But now it was his job to nail ’em.

  Jay had gone up against the best, and while he hadn’t always beaten them easily or fast, in the end, he had beaten them. Well. At least the ones he knew about. There might be crooks out there who were so good they could commit the perfect crime, that being one that nobody ever realized had happened. But truth be told, Jay didn’t believe there were many, if any, who were that good. And he didn’t think whoever had broken into HAARP’s computer was one of the best, or they wouldn’t have left scratches on the lock. This would be a walk in the park.

  Now he had to go and find out about Dr. Morrison. If anything, that ought to be even easier.

  Saturday

  Portland, Oregon

  Tyrone and Nadine had spent the morning watching contestants in the various events, concentrating on checking out the MTA seniors. Nobody was coming close to Gorski’s unbelievable record, but there were some pretty good hang times.

  They decided to practice after lunch, and went to the field set up for that, a little farther up the hill.

  Tyrone looked at the sunny meadow with others practicing, then at Nadine. She wasn’t a looka’me like Bella, but in this light, here in this green field, she was a lot more attractive in ways that Bella was not. She was a person, somebody who liked being with him, somebody who he liked being with for reasons that went past a pretty face.

  “What are you grinning at, fool? Your chances of beating me tomorrow?”

  Tyrone shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.

  “Well, come on, let me give you another lesson in how to throw.”

  “Your ass.”

  “Yeah, you are my ass, aren’t you?”

  They both grinned. At that moment, Tyrone didn’t see how life could get much better than this. Well. Maybe after he won the championship it could.

  Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

  “Have you ever fired a handgun, Dr. Morrison?”

  They were on one of several shooting ranges at the militia compound. Though it was late, nearly nine, it was still light enough to see the targets, squared-off human torso silhouettes made of cardboard, mounted on wooden stands. There were a dozen of these at various distances from where they stood behind a chalk line drawn on the dirt, next to a beat-up table made of weathered two-by-fours and plywood.

  Morrison shook his head. “No. Rifles and shotguns when I was a boy, not pistols. My parents didn’t believe in them.”

  Ventura said, “The principle is the same. You use a sighting device to line the weapon up on the target, press the trigger, the gun goes bang. The main differences are that a shorter barrel is harder to aim well, and most handguns have considerably less punch than a rifle or a shotgun. You trade stopping power for portability and being able to conceal the weapon.”

  Ventura pointed to the tabletop, where several pistols lay. “What we are going to do is let you try several of these, to see which one you can shoot the best. There isn’t time for you to gain real expertise, and this is for a last-ditch, enemy-in-your-face situation. If you have to resort to it, then my people and I will likely be dead, and frankly, your chances of surviving will be slim and none. But they probably won’t expect you to be armed at all, so you might surprise them.”

  Morrison nodded again, feeling a cold rush in his lower belly. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. The idea of being kidnapped or killed had been more intellectual than real. Looking at a table full of guns made it all too real.

  “Ideally, you would carry the biggest handgun you could—the larger and faster the bullet, the more rounds, the better. That’s a Glock .40 semiauto, the black plastic one. Next to it, that’s a Taurus .357 revolver. These two have the most oomph. If you hit somebody solidly in the torso with one round of either, they’ll go down and be out of the fight better than nine times out of ten.”

  Ventura shook his head. “I have to apologize, Doctor. This isn’t how you’d learn to shoot if I had time to teach you properly, but we don’t have time. We’ll start with those.”

  Morrison put on the headphones Ventura handed him.

  “The hearing protectors are electronic,” Ventura said. “You’ll be able to hear fine until the gun goes off, but they’ll cut out the noise. These two pistols are particularly loud devices. If you shoot one inside a car without protection, you can blow out an eardrum.

  “Hold it like so, both hands. Stand like this, arms out, in an isoceles triangle. Grip is important, hold it tight. The sight picture should look like this.” Ventura drew a picture on the table with a felt-tipped pen. “Line the post up inside the notch, put the target right on top. If you need to shoot, you probably won’t have time for a clean sight picture, your attacker will be right in your face, so what you’ll do instead is point it like you would your finger, and index the whole gun. Here.”

  He handed Morrison the black plastic pistol. “If you can see the back of the gun against the man’s chest, that’s good enough for close range.”

  “How close?”

  “Inside twenty feet. In your case, probably more like six or eight feet.”

  “Okay.”

  “Glock operates like this. Magazine in here, pull back the slide like this to chamber a round, pull the trigger. No external safety. Point, press. Don’t jerk it. Try it, that target right in front of
us. Shoot it twice. It will kick some.”

  The cardboard human torso and head was maybe a dozen feet away.

  Morrison took a deep breath, pointed the Glock at the target, and pulled the trigger. The damned gun almost jumped out of his hands, and the second shot went off before he was ready, so it was probably a little high ...

  He lowered the weapon and looked.

  There were no holes in the target.

  How could he have missed? It was right in front of him!

  “First round was off to the right, second was way high and right. Try the Taurus.”

  Five minutes later, Morrison felt a sense of profound embarrassment. He had fired ten shots from five guns. Only two of the bullets had hit the cardboard, both of them almost off the target to the right, barely on the edge. Two.

  “Don’t feel bad,” Ventura said. “Trained cops miss at this range. Ever see the video of the state cops who stopped a couple of guys in a truck for an expired license? Guys were guilty of other crimes, so they came out with guns. The truck passenger and one cop faced each other from twelve feet, each fired five or six times, nobody hit anything. If somebody is pointing a gun at you, it’s a lot worse than shooting at a target that won’t shoot back. Adrenaline makes your hand muscles twitch funny.”

  Morrison shook his head.

  “Try this one. Smith and Wesson Model 317, an Air-light.”

  He handed the gun to Morrison.

  “It’s not very heavy.”

  “Aluminum, mostly. Just under ten ounces. Holds eight rounds of .22 caliber.”

  Morrison took another deep breath, indexed the little gun, pulled the trigger, one, two! The revolver jumped a little, but not much, and when he looked at the target, there were two small holes in the center, no more than an inch or two apart. Hey!

  “Again. This time, keep pulling the trigger until the gun stops shooting.”

  Morrison obeyed.

  This time, he was able to see the holes as they appeared in the cardboard. They weren’t very big, but all of them were clustered in the center, except for one, and it was only a few inches above the others. The clicking of the hammer on empty came as a surprise.

  “Very good. This is your weapon,” Ventura said. “It’s light, simple to operate, almost no recoil. It doesn’t have any real stopping power, but a solid hit from a small-caliber round is a lot better than a miss from a hand cannon.”

  Morrison looked at the gun.

  “Here is how to reload it, though I don’t expect you’ll get that far if you need it. If it’s one guy, point and shoot until he falls down or goes away. If it’s more than one, give them two rounds each, then repeat. We’ll practice that, double-taps.”

  But they didn’t get to double-tap practice. The sound of Morrison’s cell phone ringing was clearly audible through the electronic sound suppressors.

  That would be the Chinese calling.

  Morrison removed the earphones and thumbed the receive button on the phone.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hey, Pat! What say we take that car of yours for a test drive? I know just the place.”

  As Morrison listened to Wu, Ventura reloaded the Air-light, then handed it to him. With a cell phone in one hand and a gun in the other, it suddenly seemed to Morrison that the summer evening’s warmth had just turned to winter.

  19

  Sunday, June 12 th

  In the air over northern Idaho

  The helicopter pilot pointed. “Plinck Field!” he yelled over the copter’s racket.

  Ventura nodded. They were two thousand feet up and easing in for the landing. He looked at his watch. Though it wasn’t that far, the hop to the private airfield via chopper had taken forty-five minutes; part of that was for a couple of changes of direction, just in case. And it was farther away from Smith’s compound than the commercial airport at Coeur d’Alene. Ventura had arranged for the helicopter before they’d arrived, knowing they’d need it once the game was fully engaged. Inside the militia’s base, they’d be safe, but once they left, the odds shifted. Even Morrison understood this, once it had been pointed out to him.

  “But why a helicopter?” he’d asked.

  “Because they know you’re leaving. They also know where you are going—unless you can conduct your test by remote control, you have to go back to Alaska to play the tune on your HAARP. I’ve got people in place there, and anybody who shows up for hunting or birdwatching is going to be considered armed and dangerous. But if I were the Chinese and interested in grabbing you, I’d give it a try here, first. There is only one road leading to this place, and a couple of half-wits in camo with binoculars can cover it. Half my people will convoy out in two of the rental cars an hour before the copter arrives, heading for the airport at Coeur d’Alene. That’ll give them something to look at if they are out there. They’ll probably expect some kind of subterfuge, so the third car will leave fifteen minutes after the first two, going the other way. Probably this will draw any fire teams that might have been set up. Forty-five minutes later, we take off. They won’t be able to follow us in the air without us seeing them, and I don’t think they’ll expect that anyhow. Even if they manage to footprint us with one of their spysats, we won’t stay in range long, so they’ll lose us while we’re still heading the wrong way. If they have that much going for them, they’ll probably figure out we’re going to a private airfield, but by the time they can figure out which strip and get people there, we’ll be gone. We have a chartered plane waiting for us when the copter touches down.”

  “What if they’ve anticipated this and already have people at the private airfield?”

  Ventura grinned. The man was beginning to catch on. “If they’re that smart, then I’ll just have to shoot them.”

  He digested that for a moment. “This must be costing a fortune.”

  “Not even a drop in your bucket, if you pull it off. Besides, I haven’t even run out of your retainer yet.”

  Morrison hadn’t spoken to that, but Ventura could see the man was scared. Well he should be, dealing with these kinds of players. But at this level of the game, if Morrison got deleted, it was likely that Ventura would be crossing that bridge with him, and he wasn’t quite ready to do that yet. He only had to keep the Chinese hopping long enough for the deal to get done. Once the money was transferred and the information was in hand, Morrison would have to disappear, go into hiding permanently, though he didn’t know that yet. With enough money, you could vanish completely and live out your life in comfort and security, provided you knew how. Ventura knew the drill and he would advise Morrison, but that wasn’t in his own future.

  Morrison was probably rationalizing that the Chinese would figure he wasn’t going to be telling anybody he’d sold them American secrets, and that once the deal was done, he was no threat. He was only partially right. The Chinese would have the software, but in order to make it work, they’d need the hardware, and that wasn’t something you could hide under a tarp. If the intelligence service of any major country suddenly had citizens run amok, killing one another, it would be cause for no small concern. If they could figure out the cause, finding the smoking gun would be relatively easy, big as the gun would have to be, and a couple of Stealth bombers could clean that clock nicely and be home in time to see the results on CNN.

  The helicopter landed on the pad, the rotorwash kicking up fierce wind. Ventura slapped Morrison on the shoulder. “Stay behind me.”

  They alighted from the craft, and Ventura pulled his cocked-and-locked pistol and held it down along the side of his leg. He moved quickly toward an ancient DC-3 parked a hundred yards away. As they moved, the elderly gooney bird cranked its port engine, a chuff of white exhaust smoke erupting from the engine.

  Ventura smiled. He had fondness for these old planes; he had flown in them all over the world. The DC-3, sometimes called the Dakota, had been around since the mid-thirties. They were noisy, slow, and wouldn’t go all that far without refueling, but they were as dep
endable as sunshine in Hawaii. Ventura, whose piloting skills were emergency-level-only, had always thought that if he ever got around to buying a plane, this was the one he’d get. No bells, no whistles, but it would get you and your cargo there. It was still the best prop plane in the air, for his money.

  The plane’s door opened, the little ramp lowering, and Hack Spalding stood there, grinning his gap-toothed grin. He gave Ventura the finger, which meant things were okay onboard. Ventura turned to motion Morrison up the short ramp while he watched their backs. Nobody around.

  Well, good. Score another one for the round eyes ...

  Washington, D.C.

  The Mall was hot and muggy even this late in the afternoon, no real surprise this time of year, but Toni didn’t really care. It was good to be outside moving, good to be back in the U.S., and especially good to be walking next to Alex. It was almost as if the last couple of months had been a bad dream. As if she had just awakened from a troubled sleep, the memory of it fresh but somehow unreal.

  He wanted her to come back to her job, and the truth was, she wanted to, but that had been a big part of the problem, working for Alex, and she didn’t see how it was going to improve. He couldn’t treat her like an employee in the same way he had before they’d become lovers. It made a difference, and there were all kinds of problems that came from that. He had skipped sending her into a danger zone when she’d come up in the rotation, and while she wanted him to be concerned for her as a man for his woman, she did not want the same concern from a boss to an employee.

  She’d have to do some kind of work, though, and the truth was, she’d already been offered several jobs. A couple of computer companies had approached her to head up their security services, and they’d offered a lot more money than she’d been making at Net Force. There were some nice perks, too: cars, condos, a snazzy title. And she had seriously considered taking one of these. Mostly, she could work from anywhere, though there would be some travel for secure-situation setups. But while she didn’t want to work for Alex, she also didn’t want to get so far away she couldn’t see him.